NEYM Part 4 – In which two miracles occur.

On Tuesday morning, the yearly meeting budget came up for approval. The treasurer and the Finance Committee made their presentation. After a number of difficult years, their main news was that we were in the black for the first time in several years. There may have been a clarifying question or two but then the budget was approved with no further discussion. Elapsed time, about 10 minutes. To me, this certainly qualifies as a miracle.

The other major item on our agenda that morning was a proposal for changing the name of the Christian Education committee to the Quaker Youth Education Committee. This change was being proposed because the committee found that it was doing a lot more than helping with First-Day Schools and they wanted their name to reflect that. Their new purpose statement starts:

The goal of the Quaker Youth Education Committee is to help the Yearly Meeting's children and youth: build personal foundations of Quaker history, practice, and belief, Christan education, and comparative religion; find effective ways to witness to their beliefs in the world; and become spiritually resilient in a complex and changing society.

As understandable as this desire was, it was also clear that this change could become a flash point for all of the tensions in the Yearly Meeting between Christian and non-Christian Friends. What happened was truly remarkable and another miracle. The first speaker was a well-known Christian and spoke about her first reaction to this proposal was fear that this was going to be a first step in turning Quakerism into a non-Christian religion. But she was not going to be governed by her fear. She trusted in the good faith of the committee and the care that it had taken already. A friend who has often had reservations about Christian language spoke about how much she valued hearing the Christians in the yearly meeting. Another well-known Christian Friend spoke about how important it was to her that she was accepted into membership when she was not a Christian. There was a palpable sense of unity in the room. The change was approved. There was a bit of difficulty in preparing the minute but it was resolved when we finally realized that the discomfort was because the proposed minute did not go far enough in recognizing the value the body was putting on the Christian voices in the Yearly Meeting.

Blessings,

Will T

NEYM Sessions - Part 2 In which our first miracle occurs

The tradition of New England Yearly Meeting is to have intergenerational worship on Sunday morning, perhaps a speaker, and a time of open worship. The intergenerational worship is usually led by one of the  groups within the Yearly Meeting or a particular monthly meeting and it is often programmed in some way or another. This year the intergenerational worship was led by the Young Friends (High School age Friends). They introduced us to what they referred to as “loud worship.” They projected a power point slide with a query on it. They then displayed in a somewhat random order, the names of months. When the month of your birthday was called, you were to stand and give your response to the query. You were to totally ignore the usual etiquette of speaking in meeting. You should speak whether or not you felt moved, you should rise and speak, even if someone else was already speaking, and so on. For the second query, the selection was by day of the month when your birthday was. The result was a cacophony of voices, although it was interesting how many messages you could actually hear. Friends followed directions about as well as they usually do, with several speaking, even when the prompt was for “Nobody.” During the the second query, that prompt got someone to recite the first lines of the Emily Dickinson poem, “I'm Nobody.”  Someone else picked it up and said a few more lines and we ended up with an antiphonal recitation of the entire poem.

Following this we had a message delivered by Dikson Santiesteban pastor of Puerto Padre Friends Church, Cuba Yearly Meeting. He spoke about how the Cuban people have been able to survive through their difficulties and his answer was “Solidarity.” He described how, during Hurricane Ike, many people from the town crowded into the church in Delicias for shelter, and how everyone, even the Communist Party members, prayed. He called for solidarity among Friends.

The open worship that followed this message was the first miracle of the week. It was the most disciplined Sunday morning Meeting for Worship I have experienced at NEYM sessions. The messages were well spaced, there were not large numbers of people standing at once to get the microphone to give a message, and none of the messages were markedly inappropriate. I don't know if it was because we have had more experience after last year's Meetings to Hear God's Call, if it was because everyone had already had a chance to talk, or if it was the counter example of having just experienced the loud worship, but it felt like a miracle.

During worship one person spoke about how she visited Friends in Cuba for the first time when the Soviet Union had just collapsed the the Russian subsidies to Cuba had stopped. People were very thin, and she spoke how she saw people give away their last half cup of rice, because someone else needed it more. She felt herself convicted by this because she was so often reluctant to give, even from her surplus. Another Friend spoke about the need to listen carefully to each other. What was exceptional was that it came through a person who is very opinionated and often outspoken. The power of the message came from God speaking through an unexpected voice.

The official theme of this year's sessions was 350 Years of New England Friends: Called to Heal a Broken Earth. The number 350 was doubly significant. Not only was it the number of years the Yearly Meeting has met. It is also the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air that is sustainable for life as we used to know it on this planet. After lunch, Steve Chase from Putney, Vt., Meeting gave a plenary presentation on peak oil, climate change and the transition movement.  This topic could have left us immobilized with despair and frustration but instead left us with a sense that we were not powerless and alone in the face of the changes that we are already encountering.

When we regathered for business in the evening we approved, through the unity agenda, receiving most of the committee and staff reports that had been published in the advance documents, as well as most of our housekeeping minutes. This freed up time so that we could give greater attention to a few, more major subjects. The Faith and Practice Revision Committee read to us much of their proposed chapter on Corporate Discernment. They solicited comments then and through the week and would bring the chapter back later for preliminary approval. I will go into more detail about the discussion in a later post. I will just say that I think it may have helped us during our later meetings to have heard much of this material read to us and to be thinking about how we do business.

The first full day and we were beginning to see God moving amongst us.

Blessings,

Will T