Meeting for Sufferings: Online again
'Pre-meetings are one way of alleviating the constraints of digital discernment.'
Saturday 4 December, morning session
Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) was online-only again for its December session, after having experimented in October with a ‘blended’ mix of Zoom and in-person gathering. The experiment had been successful, but the pandemic logistics are complicated, and this time it was just the clerks who met in person. They were together at the new Yorkshire hub, while representatives logged on from their own homes.
Many Friends had already met online earlier in the week, for optional pre-meetings with Britain Yearly Meeting trustees or representatives from committees offering reports. These pre-meetings are one way of alleviating the constraints of digital discernment, and are proving popular. Zoom ‘fellowship rooms’ were also available to replace the much-missed social conversations that usually happen over breakfast and lunch.
(Whatever the drawbacks of online meeting, automated subtitles do often provide some accidental levity. ‘QLCC’ (Quaker Life Central Committee) became ‘Bakelite Central Italy’ and, when assistant clerk Robert Card referred, in Welsh, to Friends in Wales, it somehow rendered as ‘cannabis homebrew’.)
In opening worship, an elder talked of how it was easy to lose hope after the disappointments of COP26.
Campaigners might be tempted to give up, he said, but read from ‘The world has need of you’ by Ellen Bass, which notes that ‘If you’ve managed to do one good thing,/the ocean doesn’t care’ but ‘when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,/the earth, ever so slightly, fell/toward the apple as well.’
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