Meeting for Sufferings: Yearly Meeting (YM)
'This year’s YM would need to revisit diversity and privilege to see what progress had been made.'
It was difficult to know someone in the Spirit unless you first knew them in the temporal, said Siobhan Haire, introducing herself as clerk nominate of YM 2022. Like many Friends, she was figuring out how to reconnect with her Local Meeting after the pandemic. The morning’s conversation about hearing from people who weren’t the usual suspects struck home with her, she said. She had initially been considered for a clerking team precisely because she was a new voice, but seven years later she had become one of those usual suspects herself. Thinking on diversity had shifted over the last decade, she added, from age – when there was a push to get people in their twenties onto committees – to a better consideration of race and gender.
This year’s YM would need to revisit diversity and privilege to see what progress had been made. Friends needed to hold themselves accountable to ‘lofty’ minutes they had made on the subject. There had been ‘lots’ of progress, she said, but some of it was slow.
More generally, Friends and Meetings were feeling vulnerable after two years of Covid. There were missing faces, and some discernment would be needed on what the Quaker community looked like now that Friends could meet online. She spoke of the two essential parts of Quaker life – the inward and the outward – and finished with a reading from Quaker faith & practice 23.48: ‘God comes to us in the midst of human need, and the most pressing needs of our time demand community in response … How can I learn the sanctity of each life unless I live in a community where we can be persons not roles to one another?’
Representatives recorded their excitement at the prospect of the first YM to blend in-person and online meeting, and set the date for YM 2023: 29 April-1 May. They then split into small groups to discuss three important questions: How could Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) become more: inclusive; sustainable; and simple. Feedback would be given directly to the MfS review group.
