erin – Souhegan Friends Meeting (Quaker)

2020 Epistle of NEYM

August 9, 2020

“Let me make the songs for the people, / Songs for the old and young; / Songs to stir like a battle-cry / Wherever they are sung. / Not for the clashing of sabres, / For carnage nor for strife; / But songs to thrill the hearts of men / With more abundant life.”1

To Friends Everywhere,

The 360th Annual Sessions of New England Yearly Meeting met virtually over the course of ten days in Eighth Month 2020, in the midst of quadruple crises—a global pandemic, the ongoing epidemic of racism, a climate disaster in the form of Hurricane Isaias, and nationwide political unrest. The time for us to change is now.

684 Friends joined us, of whom 150 were under the age of 35 and 53 were visitors from outside our Yearly Meeting. We were grateful to be joined remotely by Friends from Kenya, Britain, Cuba, El Salvador, Canada, and Mexico, as well as a number of Friends from across the United States.

We were reminded at the opening celebration to treat our respective locations as holy spaces, and to view our devices as part of our pathway to the Divine. In the agenda for our business sessions we set aside the organizational work of the Yearly Meeting to focus more directly on the vital actions and living ministry among us. We were moved by Friends’ testimonies of the work they are called to in response to the ills of our world.

Last year when we wrote to you, we noted that there is a tide which, when taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. This year as we meet, we know we are swept up on such a tide. Yet we also see that we are adrift in a leaky boat; the forms of Quakerism we inhabit are not up to the task ahead. We have a religious organization and ways of being together that still embody empire.
On our first day of virtual Sessions we were given the gift of a three part framework for change from our Quaker tradition: revealing, surrender, and turning, or in more traditional language, conviction, convincement, and conversion. We are suspended in a moment of revealing, being convicted by the Light as we wake up to our sin. We are allowing our hearts to break, recognizing that the process of surrender and turning must be repeated over and over again.

We are naming the forms of white supremacy in Quaker culture, including participation in slavery and ongoing anti-Black racism, the history of Quaker leadership in the Native American boarding school system, and the settler colonialism practiced by early Friends. We continue naming the patterns of domination at every level, in our person, our household and community, through the industrial economy and our extractive relationship to the ecosphere. These patterns are active in Quaker forms and practices
today. We stand convicted.

We are stuck in the whirlwind, and need to choose surrender. We can cling tight in fear to the forms we know or release the forms to trust the Divine Spirit will show us our way. We know we need to move from the head to the heart and the Word must be made flesh. “And the end of words is to bring [us] to the knowledge of things beyond what words can utter.”2

Our plenary speaker, Friend Amanda Kemp, implored us to move from our heads to our hearts, from our analytic mind to our imagination. Through a shared experience of living music we felt how music is not the notes on the page. She invited us to embrace the mess, and to not let ourselves be limited by the framing of the status quo. Asking us to create from a place of possibility that can invite what we don’t yet know, she said, “your imagination is essential for our liberation.”

During the plenary, Friend Amanda also helped us lean into what it means to be a harmonizer—a peacemaker. She reminded us that walking the path of the harmonizer does not mean we will all be playing the same role. Too often we mistake unanimity and sameness for unity with the Spirit.

In our business this year we cautiously practiced surrender. When we found ourselves caught up in words, we tried to allow new patterns to rise among us. As a Yearly Meeting, we began the process of apologizing for harm to Native Americans in our region by Quakers. Recognizing that our apology must come from the head and the heart, indeed from the whole body, we sent a draft of an apology to monthly and quarterly meetings for them to consider and to allow the words to work more deeply in us.

We also heard calls to action from the Friends General Conference Pre-Gathering of Friends of Color, from the Native American Reparations Working Group, and a joint call from the Racial, Social and Economic Justice and Earthcare Ministry Committees. We know we need to surrender and turn to move from words into action. To help us do so we shared these calls with our monthly and quarterly meetings so we may unite in the Spirit that animates our work. We are shifting our understanding of what it means to unite with a minute. We know that our corporate statements must honestly name our present condition while also inviting us into spirit-led action.

Our Bible Half-Hour speaker, Friend Cherice Bock, painted the road ahead for us—the turning, our conversion—as an eco-reformation that shatters the hierarchies of the empire, replacing our ego-centrism with our rightful place in the household of life. We yearn to more fully enter into the kin-dom of God which is always present. We know, and are beginning to internalize, the Truth; that more abundant life comes only after surrender, and our conversion is complete only when we turn, when we imagine, when we embody, and when we do.

As our virtual time together comes to a close, we go forth, imperfect and humbled, with faith that our next steps will be planted exactly where they need to be. We feel the companionship of a Spirit that walks among us, and we feel the companionship of Friends and others around the world on this journey into the future the Divine Light invites us to imagine.

“Therefore, I urge you … in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living
sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—that is your true and proper worship.”3

In Love,
Your Friends in New England Yearly Meeting

3 Romans 12:1 New International Version

1 “Songs for the People,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

2 Isaac Penington [Https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/27-27/]

Lock-down by Friar Richard Hendrick

Yes there is fear.

Yes there is isolation.

Yes there is panic buying.

Yes there is sickness.

Yes there is even death.

But,

They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise

You can hear the birds again.

They say that after just a few weeks of quiet

The sky is no longer thick with fumes

But blue and grey and clear.

They say that in the streets of Assisi

People are singing to each other

across the empty squares,

keeping their windows open

so that those who are alone

may hear the sounds of family around them.

They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland

Is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.

Today a young woman I know

is busy spreading fliers with her number

through the neighborhood

So that the elders may have someone to call on.

Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples

are preparing to welcome

and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary

All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting

All over the world people are looking at their neighbors in a new way

All over the world people are waking up to a new reality

To how big we really are.

To how little control we really have.

To what really matters.

To Love.

So we pray and we remember that

Yes there is fear.

But there does not have to be hate.

Yes there is isolation.

But there does not have to be loneliness.

Yes there is panic buying.

But there does not have to be meanness.

Yes there is sickness.

But there does not have to be disease of the soul

Yes there is even death.

But there can always be a rebirth of love.

Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.

Today, breathe.

Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic

The birds are singing again

The sky is clearing,

Spring is coming,

And we are always encompassed by Love.

Open the windows of your soul

And though you may not be able

to touch across the empty square,

Sing.

March 13th 2020

Reflections on a discussion of Dewsbury’s last sermon by Brian Drayton

Souhegan Meeting’s study group last week read a sermon by William Dewsbury, given in London, in May 1688, just a few weeks before his death (and taken down in short-hand by a non-Quaker visitor. Dewsbury was a Yorkshire country weaver, whose seeking led him into Cromwell’s army in the 1640s, and then out again, as he realized that God’s kingdom cannot be established by force of arms. In 1652, he became one of the earliest and most beloved of the “first publishers of Truth,” a powerful “apostle” for the movement, even though he spent 19 of the next 36 years in prisons, in that time of persecution.

The sermon (the only one we have by him) is very different in style from what we usually encounter at Sunday meetings! It gives a taste of the preaching that first gathered Friends in the early 1650s — direct, evangelical in tone, personal, and radical. The core of the message is that each of us man and woman, can be transformed and liberated spiritually, but this requires a baptism of the Holy Spirit and of fire. Standing in the presence of the Holy One, how shall you choose? You can stay in the refining crucible, and welcome Christ’s work and formation in you, or flee and remain in your half-truth or untruth, and reject the invitation of the lord of life to fulness and to joy. If you accept the fire, the Spirit will bring comfort, strength, and bread for the journey. It was the most radical part of the Quaker message to rely completely on the light of Christ as the guide and teacher for each person, and for the faith community.

It seemed to me that the conversation very quickly moved from “discussion” and head-work, to heart-work and seeking. As we tried to hear what Dewsbury was saying, we all found ourselves asking, Is any of this true to my experience, or to my longings? It is challenging to be confronted with so clear a statement, and to try to be plain and honest in response. In different ways, we spoke of wanting to be in a community in which can speak openly about our spiritual commitments, our condition, our desires after God, the baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit as we experience it — or avoid it. What can we do to foster each other’s growth, be accountable to each other as part of being accountable to Christ’s searching us and teaching us? It felt good to get to the level of openness that we were able to come to — good and scary, and the beginning of some new work in us. You could say that Dewsbury’s sermon did its work for us, as it did for the Friends who heard it so long ago.

Wisdom Gathered by Darcy Drayton

After Meeting for Worship on Sunday, November 17^thwe gathered together to see what wisdom could be gathered from the reading and discussion of an epistle of William Dewsbury written in 1660 while imprisoned in York Tower, England for his Quaker beliefs.

Though the language used is dated, its tone is intimate and has the sound of a message given in a very gathered meeting for worship. The words and phrasing feel akin to poetry such that there are two messages; the message read or heard, and the message felt. Dewsbury makes a direct appeal to listen to the inward message of God moving in the hearts of his F/friends to support the spiritual strivings of the community whether they be strong in their faith or new.

Sitting with this after meeting, many of us were struck with the realization that we do not consistently nurture this kind of inward listening. If we attend to our inward listening there arise opportunities to move through our days enacting, in a myriad of ways, the love we felt.

We talked of how this in turn can make all the difference to our being open to spiritual guidance in our Meeting for Worship, and to the seeing and nurturing of the spiritual gifts given for service within our many communities.

The nurtured spirit within moves us beyond the listening of individuals into a listening that is more than a sum of the individuals present.

William Dewsbury Epistle 1660

Dear Friends and Brethren

Called and chosen of God, to wait upon him in his Light, every one in particular feel the Power and Life of God, exercising you in his Service, whatever he calls unto, when the Lord fills the Heart of any of you with his Presence, and in his Life moves thee, quench not the Spirit, I am commanded to lay it on thee, whosoever thou art, from the least to the highest growth.

All, dear Friends, wait to be kept in the Bond of the Spirit, obedient to its motions, to cease and stay when it moves not, as well as to begin any exercise when it moves. And dear and tender little Babes, as well as strong Men, retain the pure in every particular, and let not any thing straiten you, when God moves.

And thou faithful Babe, though thou stutter and stammer forth a few words in the dread of the Lord, they are accepted; and all that are strong serve the weak in strengthening them, and wait in wisdom, to give place to the motion of the Spirit in them, that it may have time to bring forth what God hath given.

And dear Brethren, feed the Lambs, and loose the Tongue of the Dumb, that Praises may arise in and amongst you all, to the glory of God, that in him you may be a wellspring of Life one to another, in the Power of the endless Love of God, in which the Lord God keep you all.

From York Tower, the 10th day of the 12th month, 1660

W.D.

(Works pg. 185)