Friends General Conference

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Winter 2015's Quaker Seminar

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Beginning during 2nd hour on Sunday, January 25, Raleigh Friends Meeting's Mission Committee is hosting the first of 4 Quaker Seminars inspired by Douglas Gwyn's book, A Sustainable Life:  Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation for all interested in Quakerism -- new attender, birthright Friend or somewhere in between.  The discussions will take place over a simple lunch after Meeting for worship on January 25, and February 1, 8 and 22.  There will be a copy of the book in the Meeting library, and Gini E. has several copies for purchase for $14.  The book is also available online and as an e-book from FGC Quaker Books.   All are welcome and encouraged to attend, even if you haven’t seen the book, and a light lunch will be served.  Passages from the book will be provided before each session to help focus each day’s discussion (see below or attachment for the first group of passages).

The general focus of the discussions will be as follows:

January 25 – Quakerism as an individual experience

February 1 – The Individual in the Meeting

February 8 – The Meeting in the World

February 22 – What it means to be a Sustainable Raleigh Friends Meeting

It is hoped that rather than putting our energy to teasing apart Gwyn’s intentions, that his book will inspire conversation that arises from each participant’s personal experiences and insights. We hope you can join us for one or more of these seminars.

The fourth and last in this series of Quaker Seminars will take place on Sunday.  As before, all are welcome and a light lunch will be served as we have conversation.  The focus on Sunday will attempt to bring the idea of a sustainable meeting home to the Raleigh Friends Meeting community.  Passages from Douglas Gwyn’s book are copied below and attached.  They address Gwyn’s idea of what it means to be a sustainable meeting.  Our conversation on Sunday will center around 3 queries:

Is there anything you would change or add to Douglas Gwyn’s description of a sustainable Meeting?

What are the most important considerations for Raleigh Friends Meeting in creating and maintaining a sustainable Meeting?

What are our greatest challenges with regard to being a sustainable Meeting?

 

From Douglas Gwyn, A Sustainable Life:  Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation

p. 152 

A life that is spiritually sustainable for us as individuals, collectively sustainable for our meetings, and that leads to sustainable patterns of life on earth, must see through the myriad delusions and cut through the entangling habituations of a consumer-driven culture.

p. 155 

Sustained personal spiritual practice and meetings for worship gradually work to integrate us as persons.  We more fully occupy the unique personality we were created to be.  This is fully realized only in community with others.

p. 156

…the Friends meeting should actively nurture the expectation that one will receive divine leadings, and actively support its members in clarifying and following them… we must continually work at strengthening the shared integrity that is unique to this meeting in this place… The sustainable Friends meeting is the place where we forgive but do not forget.

p. 157  

The sustainable meeting is a place where we create sanctuary for one another against the corrosive spirits of racism, classism, and prejudice around us.

p. 160

The sustainable Friends meeting will encourage gifted members in developing their gifts through study and training, both formal and informal, to grow into the roles of ministers, elders, and clerks.

p. 161

The sustainable Friends meeting will find itself on a larger map of the Quaker extended family, and learn to embrace differences, even if we never fully understand some of those distant cousins.

p. 162

The sustainable Friends meeting speaks with confidence and patience to the authorities and powers around it, because it is grounded in the peace of its own faith and practice.

p. 163 

The task of the sustainable meeting is to occupy its place more resolutely, to give its service to truth greater social texture through local cooperation and neighborliness. .. Finally, through lifestyle discussion groups and meeting threshing sessions, the sustainable meeting uses the queries gently to help members live into greater congruence between their concerns and their actual way of life.

p. 163-164

To review briefly, we occupy our bodies more fully as we become more wholly present in the moment.  This regular spiritual practice attunes the body as the registering instrument for the light’s teaching and leading.  As we bring that attunement to the meeting for worship, the group begins to occupy the place of spirit and truth more consistently and resolutely.  Words spoken out of the silence come from that place and define that place more explicitly in the group.  Over time, the experience draws participants into a clearer sense of their identity and purpose, shedding unnecessary, unhealthy, or immoral habits, integrating the personality.  The sustainable meeting helps individuals in that process of personal discernment through clearness committees, personal mentoring, and in other ways.  Important decisions serve as moments of truth, in which a new sense of purpose may make the renunciation of useless attachments easier.  As that sense of place becomes stronger in the meeting community, it draws people from different places on the social grid into encounter with one another.  We both affirm and transcend our differences as we “know one another in that which is eternal.” 

 

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