Yearly Meeting 2024 - part six

‘We will throw minutes at you, but they’re important and beautiful.’ The Friend reports from Yearly Meeting 2024, Monday to Tuesday

The first three days of Yearly Meeting (YM) 2024 had ended with something of a cliffhanger. Proposals from the Group to Review Yearly Meeting, Yearly Meeting Gatherings and Meeting for Sufferings (GRYYM) had been considered, but those gathered had not yet found unity around them. The question of whether to replace Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) with a ‘continuing Yearly Meeting’ was therefore still up in the air on Monday morning as Session five began in worship.

One Friend ministered about the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Readers were told that after death a guiding spirit was going to ask them two questions. The answers to these, he said, would determine one’s progress in the afterlife. ‘The first question is: Did you find joy? The second question is… Did you bring joy?’

The Meeting then heard part of the Testimony to the grace of God in the life of Rosemary Crawley. Rosemary had resisted becoming a member of the Religious Society of Friends because she found its testimony to equality ‘persistently incomplete’. But, ‘without ever assuming the role of victim, or enforcer… she offered a compass, pointing to a path which could be the start of a journey of understanding racism’.

 This year’s Meeting was attempting to be a genuinely all-age all-inclusive gathering, said Adwoa Burnley, clerk. As such they would be hearing a minute from the young people’s programme, read by first assistant clerk Fred Langridge, who got some laughs as he said he was probably asked to read it as the youngest member of the clerking team – at forty-five. The young Friends (aged eleven to fifteen) had said they had ‘considered deeply how we can love those who do bad things’. They had been helped by ‘remembering that loving someone is not the same as liking someone… Love is what keeps us going and heals all wounds’.

The session was set to look at ‘Speaking and living with integrity’. Specifically, Friends were asked, ‘Do Friends at Yearly Meeting, or who read a Yearly Meeting minute, hear it as a call to personal or collective action?’ The Meeting looked at previous commitments made by YM, such as becoming a low carbon sustainable community, being an anti-racist church, and welcoming and affirming transgender, non-binary and gender-diverse people. ‘How good are we at keeping our promises?’ asked the preparatory text. ‘Are we able to celebrate our work, or do we need to confess to our inadequacy? How does that make us feel?’ 

‘This session is not about trying to revise any minute already written’ said Adwoa Burnley, clerk, but it would prove to be another intense consideration.

One Friend offered her experience following Friends’ commitment (at the Canterbury Yearly Meeting Gathering in 2011) to becoming a low carbon sustainable community: ‘For me it was a transformational moment to hear that my community of Quakers felt the need to take action.’ She later joined the working group ‘to see how it could be taken forward… I don’t think I was alone in that group feeling like we were wading through treacle… Since then the situation has gotten so much worse’. While praising the work done by Quaker Peace & Social Witness, she said: ‘I do have the sense that within Quakers we are not fully aware of the crisis that is upon us, and that we are not all committed to doing what that minute suggested’.

Another Friend spoke of how Friends connect throughout the Yearly Meeting, especially when many Friends primarily associate with the Local Meeting alone.

One Friend emphasised the difference between an individual calling and what is received as minutes in Yearly Meeting. They shared a quote: ‘God’s work is where your deep joy meets the deep hunger of the world.’ 

A Yearly Meeting minute can come across as a ‘should’, but ‘we cannot all of us do everything’. Spending more time considering the minutes in Local Meetings could, however, help it become ‘clearer what our Meetings might do and what we as individuals might do’.

‘I was blown away’, another Friend shared, when describing their first experience of Meeting for Worship for Business. They reflected that ‘though maybe my skills did not lead me to be able to action the minute, I could support others to action that minute’. The point was that ‘I was part of a community discerning a way forward for the community… What was the great creator leading us to do?’

‘In that moment I knew that it was in black and white that no matter where I end up with my identity, there was going to be a place for me in the Religious Society.’

A Friend ministered about the importance of the words: ‘What canst thou say?’ They elaborated: ‘There is no shortcut to me being convinced and moved by the same spirit that gave forth the scriptures and the Yearly Meeting minutes… I now must hear those words as an invitation to attend to that spirit and to be so moved in turn.’

One Friend expressed the concern that, when looking around the room, ‘I don’t trust enough of you to have really felt that the minute spoke to you personally’. They worried that they were not ‘taking really serious action on our commitment to antiracism’. 

They added that they had been present in a new Meeting where someone had gone to offer transphobic ministry deliberately because Young Friends General Meeting had minuted support.

They urged Friends: ‘You have got to get up and do it! You have got to do all of it… Do you really think that [your Local Meeting] is a more antiracist Meeting now than it was before we passed that? Do we think that it is a more accepting Meeting for trans Friends? We have a power here. If we actually really try to do everything in community, and we try most of all to make a place… where we are home amongst our people and our identity is to belong to a group of people… who are really doing it all, maybe, maybe then we can actually change society. But we have got to change the Society.’

Another Friend shared that they ‘don’t find now that I’m completely guided by what comes from the Society or from Yearly Meeting… I love the Society of Friends. But it is only a part… of what has been impelling me’.

One Friend described knowing active Area Meeting roleholders who have said: ‘Oh but I was not at Britain Yearly Meeting so it does not apply to me.’ They reflected on ‘things I take for granted’ such as Yearly Meeting discipline and the passing down of minutes to Area and Local Meeting level. ‘We have to make clear to people that they are part of that discipline and just because they don’t like something that Yearly Meeting has agreed, does not mean that they can just ignore it.’

Another Friend shared that: ‘There are some Yearly Meeting minutes where I go: “Yeah, you know this speaks to me, this tells me that I have work to do”.’ But ‘There are some minutes where I just go: “Meh, that is what Yearly Meeting has decided, I’m good with that, I don’t see necessarily that there is something that I need to do personally”.’

A Friend who serves on Quaker Life Central Committee described their work in feeding through to local communities, especially through local development workers, what has been decided in Yearly Meeting and how to make sense of it. ‘Whether we were in the room or not, part of our discipline is that we do accept and try to do our best.’

After a shuffle break, a Friend ministered about how MfS requested reports from Area Meetings regarding work linked to the Canterbury Commitment, ‘this really makes the minute sort of a knot in our handkerchiefs, it keeps us aware of the whole thing in minute detail’.

They added: ‘It would be very helpful if [all these minutes] were made available in… their original form so that we remembered them more vividly.’

One Friend shared ‘some little moments of success and celebration’ related to Yearly Meeting minutes, and their results. They were clerk of Junior Yearly Meeting when Minute 31 [supporting trans and non-binary people] was agreed. ‘That minute felt very special, because in that moment I knew that it was in black and white that no matter where I end up with my identity, there was going to be a place for me in the Religious Society’.

Now serving as a Yearly Meeting trustee, they added: ‘I’m the anti-oppression champion for Quakers in Britain. Earlier this year we passed a trans-inclusion policy for staff and volunteers… it felt very special, and yes, was really quite profound for me to see a Yearly Meeting minute being put in concrete action. It is inevitable that not every minute will speak with the same strength and the same kind of resonance to everybody. In the same way as not every piece of ministry speaks to everybody in quite the same way.’ 

Reflecting on the impact that agreeing to same-sex marriage had had on their family, one Friend said: ‘We must… trust that decisions that are made in a gathered Meeting for Worship for Business, whilst they might not speak to an individual right at that point, do have a long term lasting effect.’

One Friend offered that: ‘If a minute is a good minute and the Meeting was a good Meeting, it will stand the test of time.’

A draft minute was read but Friends had several amendments to suggest. Several of them were standing (or raising hands online), with some becoming agitated at not being called to speak. The clerk eventually felt she had heard that the Meeting was in unity, but one Friend stood and shouted ‘No it is not’. Adwoa was firm – ‘Your clerk is standing, please sit down’ – and the microphone was passed to the Meeting elder. As the Friend complained about being ‘silenced’, the elder recognised that ‘we are at a really difficult point. I think that we are nearly at unity but I hear the distress’. They read from Ephesians 4: ‘Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.’ 

The Meeting took a moment, to release parents and welcome interfaith visitors.

Returning to open discernment, Adwoa said: ‘I know that I am your servant. I am also quite vain. That vanity leads me to say that at a Yearly Meeting session where I am clerk, I don’t want it to be said that ministry was silenced.’ She invited the Friend who had expressed that feeling to share their ministry.

They said: ‘I have heard beautiful ministry today, and I have heard quite disturbing ministry. Ministry that has accused some of us of bigotry and phobia… We can only experience the Spirit with reference to our own lived experiences. There is a ministry that is not being heard. The ministry that is not being heard by many Friends is a ministry in concern of the impact of ideologies around those Friends… struggling with gender identity. And I do welcome and affirm those Friends. I simply ask that the ministry of the Friends that I know is heard with as much love and compassion – [that] it is not accused of phobia. Because there is no phobia there. It is a real ministry and it is a ministry that has been discerned with deep compassion and love and kindness. But it is not being heard. It is not reflected in the minute.’

Another Friend said that they too had felt that they had ‘something that the Meeting needs to hear… Yet I was not called to speak’. But ‘I accept this… I was frankly distressed in the Meeting yesterday when people shouted out in what I felt was out of turn, out of discipline… We have a discipline to follow. I was not called. That is fine.’

The ministries heard, Adwoa rose to say that: ‘We feel strongly at the table that the minute does reflect what we heard.’ Then, ‘My strongest feeling is for those who are in pain and who have been hurt… I ask that we can love each other, we can hold each other.’ She then asked whether the Meeting did accept the minute, and got a strong ‘Hope so’.

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Comments

I am dubious about the ministry that the Egyptian Book of the Dead includes the questions “Did you bring joy? Did you find joy?”
Nothing about this at http://www.getty.edu/news/what-is-the-egyptian-book-of-the-dead
It seems to come from New-Agey websites http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2y58cg/any_evidence_that_some_ancient_egyptians_believed
Anyone know the actual source of this?

By Robbie Spence on 9th August 2024 - 12:08

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In response to Robbie Spence

The earliest mention of this seems to be from the writings of Leo Buscaglia, a motivational speaker with no training in Egyptology

He wrote “Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, ‘Did you bring joy?’ The second was, ‘Did you find joy?’” but I have no actual source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Buscaglia

By Ol Rappaport on 15th August 2024 - 9:11

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