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We got back yesterday evening after a nearly a week at Yearly Meeting. I'm grateful, nurtured, nourished and frankly, jazzed by the movement of the Spirit amongst us.
There aren't many of us; under 1500 in our whole Yearly Meeting, spread out over 3 countries. We range from the Hawaiian Islands in the west, the California-Oregon border in the north and Guatemala City in the east. A lot of geography and not a lot of Friends.
This time in community is a breath of fresh air for me. It often reminds me why I joined our community in the first place. 400 souls showed up for our annual gathering and the joy I feel for having spent this week in community is palpable.
If there was a underlying theme to this year's session, it was examining differences in our personal experience of privilege and inequality. A particular Friend from Philadelphia, a woman of color, has joined us for the past several years, carrying a personal ministry about racism within American society. Her message? To dispell racism, one must first understand underlying white privilege and its effects. For those of us who're Caucasian, likely we've rarely noticed the difference in our treatment. We've never been stopped for DWB (driving while black), or for that matter shopping while Hispanic. For those of us who've experienced prejudice in our lives first hand, be it homophobia ('heterosexism', I think is a more appropriate descriptor), anti-semitism, or just good old-fashioned sexism, it's not too much of a stretch to recognize how these "-ism's" are so insidiously ingrained within our society.
Last weekend, my Meeting had a called Meeting for Worship on the occasion of Business, to consider a minute opposing Calif. state Prop. 8, the ballot initiative to amend our state's constitution to overturn our Supreme Court's decision to lift the ban on same gender marriage. It took us about an hour to re-word the initial proposal and to reach Unity in approval. We forwarded it to Yearly Meeting as did Orange Grove Meeting in Pasadena with a similar minute.
I'm a junkie for Quaker Process. To the outside world it looks like a consensus form of decision making. We are however not working for agreement with one another, but rather it's to labor for Unity with divine will. It's an exercise for us both in faith and humility. One has to be fearless in expressing one's own light on a subject and yet be willing to walk away from your ego, if within the group there is someone truly lead in another direction. We tend to be pretty good in getting to Unity when the subject is in step with one or more our core values, such as peace, truth, equality or integrity. Ask us however, what color the new Meetinghouse carpet should be and we may be in deep trouble.
Our business in plenary sessions at Yearly stretched long, in our deliberation of creating a paid staff position of a Yearly Meeting Youth coordinator who'd work year round creating activities for our young people and hopefully keeping them active within the faith. This one is important to me. At 53, I'm not exactly decrepit, but I should not be one of the younger members of my particular congregation, which unfortunately is the case. Because of the debate on this position, the report from our Peace and Social Order Committee with their proposed minutes of action was bumped from the Thursday plenary session, into Friday and then held over to Saturday, the final day of our gathering.
We were scheduled to end business at 11 am, go into silent worship which would end about noon, and then trot off to lunch en mass, which was to end at 1pm. At 12:34 we finished our deliberations on the youth coordinator position, and finally turned to the report of the Peace & Social Order. The P&SO clerk, a young woman from La Jolla Meeting, presented her report and ended it all by saying there was no time for us to give any consideration to their action minutes in our remaining time together. Our Presiding Clerk sadly agreed and simply accepted her report.
Disappointed, but thinking they were right in their assesment, I settled into silent worship.
Less than 30 seconds later, the silence was broken when a married, heterosexual, Caucasion woman from Berkeley Meeting rose and admonished our presiding Clerk for not testing for Unity on the minute opposing prop. 8. As a Friend who is by the accident of her birth 'person of privilege', she said she could not sit and watch us not take a stand to oppose the denial of a basic civil right to people of 'non-privilege' (aka Gay and Lesbian people). There was a groundswell in the session of other people demanding we consider the minute. To my utter surprise we not only reached Unity on it, we did so in under 10 minutes.
Now there are a good number of Lesbians and Gay Men within our midst. I've said more than once, we're not coming out of the closet. Among Friends, we're coming out of the woodwork. That our Meeting united in its opposition to this conservative threat to my personal civil liberty isn't that big of a surprise. I'm just shocked we were able to do so in what little time we had left, and that it took the gumption and leading of a straight woman to get it considered. It leaves me grateful and certain my community of faith is absolutely the right place for me to be.
There aren't many of us; under 1500 in our whole Yearly Meeting, spread out over 3 countries. We range from the Hawaiian Islands in the west, the California-Oregon border in the north and Guatemala City in the east. A lot of geography and not a lot of Friends.
This time in community is a breath of fresh air for me. It often reminds me why I joined our community in the first place. 400 souls showed up for our annual gathering and the joy I feel for having spent this week in community is palpable.
If there was a underlying theme to this year's session, it was examining differences in our personal experience of privilege and inequality. A particular Friend from Philadelphia, a woman of color, has joined us for the past several years, carrying a personal ministry about racism within American society. Her message? To dispell racism, one must first understand underlying white privilege and its effects. For those of us who're Caucasian, likely we've rarely noticed the difference in our treatment. We've never been stopped for DWB (driving while black), or for that matter shopping while Hispanic. For those of us who've experienced prejudice in our lives first hand, be it homophobia ('heterosexism', I think is a more appropriate descriptor), anti-semitism, or just good old-fashioned sexism, it's not too much of a stretch to recognize how these "-ism's" are so insidiously ingrained within our society.
Last weekend, my Meeting had a called Meeting for Worship on the occasion of Business, to consider a minute opposing Calif. state Prop. 8, the ballot initiative to amend our state's constitution to overturn our Supreme Court's decision to lift the ban on same gender marriage. It took us about an hour to re-word the initial proposal and to reach Unity in approval. We forwarded it to Yearly Meeting as did Orange Grove Meeting in Pasadena with a similar minute.
I'm a junkie for Quaker Process. To the outside world it looks like a consensus form of decision making. We are however not working for agreement with one another, but rather it's to labor for Unity with divine will. It's an exercise for us both in faith and humility. One has to be fearless in expressing one's own light on a subject and yet be willing to walk away from your ego, if within the group there is someone truly lead in another direction. We tend to be pretty good in getting to Unity when the subject is in step with one or more our core values, such as peace, truth, equality or integrity. Ask us however, what color the new Meetinghouse carpet should be and we may be in deep trouble.
Our business in plenary sessions at Yearly stretched long, in our deliberation of creating a paid staff position of a Yearly Meeting Youth coordinator who'd work year round creating activities for our young people and hopefully keeping them active within the faith. This one is important to me. At 53, I'm not exactly decrepit, but I should not be one of the younger members of my particular congregation, which unfortunately is the case. Because of the debate on this position, the report from our Peace and Social Order Committee with their proposed minutes of action was bumped from the Thursday plenary session, into Friday and then held over to Saturday, the final day of our gathering.
We were scheduled to end business at 11 am, go into silent worship which would end about noon, and then trot off to lunch en mass, which was to end at 1pm. At 12:34 we finished our deliberations on the youth coordinator position, and finally turned to the report of the Peace & Social Order. The P&SO clerk, a young woman from La Jolla Meeting, presented her report and ended it all by saying there was no time for us to give any consideration to their action minutes in our remaining time together. Our Presiding Clerk sadly agreed and simply accepted her report.
Disappointed, but thinking they were right in their assesment, I settled into silent worship.
Less than 30 seconds later, the silence was broken when a married, heterosexual, Caucasion woman from Berkeley Meeting rose and admonished our presiding Clerk for not testing for Unity on the minute opposing prop. 8. As a Friend who is by the accident of her birth 'person of privilege', she said she could not sit and watch us not take a stand to oppose the denial of a basic civil right to people of 'non-privilege' (aka Gay and Lesbian people). There was a groundswell in the session of other people demanding we consider the minute. To my utter surprise we not only reached Unity on it, we did so in under 10 minutes.
Now there are a good number of Lesbians and Gay Men within our midst. I've said more than once, we're not coming out of the closet. Among Friends, we're coming out of the woodwork. That our Meeting united in its opposition to this conservative threat to my personal civil liberty isn't that big of a surprise. I'm just shocked we were able to do so in what little time we had left, and that it took the gumption and leading of a straight woman to get it considered. It leaves me grateful and certain my community of faith is absolutely the right place for me to be.
