As we reflect on the spiritual state of our meeting over the past year, Bethesda Friends Meeting feels a quiet joy in the deepening of our worship together and in the stronger ties of community that we are building. We rejoice in the vibrancy of this community, knowing that it has grown out of the willingness of many Friends to share of themselves both in worship and in the time and energy they give to the numerous spiritual and practical tasks needed for a meeting to function.
We recognize that it is often occasions outside of Meeting for Worship, be they committee meetings, forums, or efforts to assist a member in need that bind us together and help us to be a stronger worshiping community. This year we have found new opportunities to make the personal connections that build on and enhance our worship. In the fall, a significant portion of regular members and attenders (24 individuals) committed to a nine-month-long Spiritual Formation program in which they have found energy, depth, centeredness, and a generosity of sharing. Their experience spills over into Meeting for Worship. The decision to make the ongoing Experiment with Light available quarterly on First Day also has enabled many more individuals to participate in these guided meditation sessions. Regular attenders have found the sessions helpful to their participation in Meeting for Worship.
The Quakerism 101 classes and other Adult Religious Education sessions likewise have given participants a better insight into Quaker faith and practice and a fuller understanding of vocal ministry. Friends who have attended the occasional, after-worship “getting-to-know-you” gatherings have said these sessions also have offered opportunities for informal exchanges about how we worship, as well as a way to know one another more personally.
During the past year, we held memorial services for five cherished members of the Meeting. Paradoxically, it was in our grappling together for some understanding of the sudden end to two younger and more vibrant lives that we felt most keenly the importance of ties that bind us. For the Friends who left us in the fullness of their years, we had a shared sense of loss but also an appreciation of lives well spent, both with us and in the larger world.
Work in committees also has bound us together and strengthened the feeling of belonging to the larger Meeting. We often experience a sense of gatheredness in our committee meetings, and individual members feel supported in their personal endeavors by their committee and the Meeting. Committees say they derive “energy” from the larger meeting and feel that they “cannot do it all on their own.” The practice of opening committee meetings with worship and, for some committees, with brief personal “check-ins,” has helped in building and strengthening the community that is our Meeting.
As a Meeting, we are committed to supporting one another in our spiritual journeys and in practical ways that help individuals in their daily lives. This past year the Pastoral Care Committee made better known the availability of financial assistance for our youth to attend BYM summer camps as well as for adults to participate in enrichment programs. In its efforts to provide material support to Friends in difficulty, the committee itself felt affirmed by the willingness of numerous individuals from the broader Meeting who provided assistance. Still the committee recognized that in some circumstances the needs of the individual are beyond the Meeting’s ability to help.
While we feel overall that we have grown and come together as a spiritual community in the last year, we acknowledge that misunderstanding and distrust created divisions in parts of our Meeting. For several months, members of our Religious Education Committee struggled over differing views of the First Day School curriculum. A small group of Friends from outside the committee worked with its members to identify the sources of their differences. While the conflict might have impacted the annual Christmas pageant, the spirit of service to the children and to the meeting as a whole took hold and the pageant became a constructive, productive, and joyous event. New members were added mid-year and provided the committee with needed, positive energy.
The First Day School program continues to offer a three-year cycle of Old Testament, New Testament, and Quakerism which parents generally seem to feel is a good way of presenting religious material. The more recent effort to integrate some elements of three component years into each year’s curriculum improved the presentation, some parents said. We recognize, however, that First Day instruction can only be a part of infusing in our youth what it means to be a Quaker. As one parent said, “We cannot expect the First Day program to have a big impact on children’s understanding of Quakerism when it is only one hour per week.” Still we suspect that our children may be absorbing more religious values than we know. Another mother recounted over-hearing her eight-year-old telling a playmate that he didn’t want to throw rocks at something “because Jesus wouldn’t have done that.”
We continue to seek ways to better engage BFM’s older youth. A few of our high school age teens have participated in the BYM Youth Program and find community there among their peers. But the teens from many of our families do not attend the Meeting’s First Day School program, and some parents are particularly concerned that even the youth who do participate in the program do not find value in the Meeting for Worship.
We recognize that Bethesda Friends Meeting brings together individuals from diverse religious backgrounds and that this can be a source of disquiet to some. There are those who have come to Quakerism, they say, because of its sensitivity and awareness of differences; but they feel that not everyone is attuned to how a choice of words might affect others. We know that whatever words we choose may be alienating to someone, but we should not be reluctant to speak of what we hold sacred. Let us celebrate a willingness to hear, to be sensitive to others, to have a capacity to find significance in what others say. Sometimes as individuals we need to remember that a particular message might not speak to our personal condition, but it may be very meaningful to someone else. And the Meeting should be mindful of the need to be sensitive to the language it uses in its official communications.
The spiritual state of our meeting is growing and evolving. As we consider where we have been in the past year, we know there are questions remaining that we must consider both as a meeting and as individuals. Among them:
How can we better use the conflicts that inevitably arise in ways that lead us to transcendent solutions?
How do we re-involve people who have left our meeting or with whom we have lost touch?
How open are we to change, to what extent are we “stuck in tradition”?
Quakerism is based on corporate worship. How do we better carry the truths that are revealed to us in worship into our day-to-day lives?
