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Friends United Meeting |
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October 1997
Trailing Clouds of Glory
A report on the 300th Session of North Carolina Yearly Meetings
by Joan Newlin Poole
Trailing clouds of glory do we come
from God who is our home.
(William Wordsworth, quoted in Jo Poole's remarks to the more than 800 Friends gathered for the joint opening session of the 300th sessions of both North Carolina Yearly Meetings, August 5-10, 1997, Guilford College, Greensboro.)
There can be no peace without reconciliation.
There can be no reconciliation without forgiveness.
There can be no forgiveness without first giving up all hope of a better
past.
(Jerry Jampolsky quoted by Landrum Bolling.)
We have been in the presence of greatness.
(Whispered in the author's ear by a Friend as Landrum Bolling sat down after delivering his second keynote address.)
As the 300th session of both North Carolina Yearly Meetings progressed these three statements echoed in my head. This week was the culmination of our five-year tercentenary celebration, called Vision 400 because we were taking our first steps into our fourth century as Carolina Friends. For five years the two North Carolina Yearly Meetings have been focusing together on five aspects of our history and present: our worship, our love in action, our role as educators, the contributions of our Quaker women. And this final year we are focusing on the future, what might we best contribute as "21st Century Friends Ministering in a Hurting World."
We knew the opening procession was going to be exciting. Meetings were busy early on making banners behind which congregations would file into Dana Auditorium in the order of their founding. Representatives were encouraged to dress in period costumes. Scores did, from an 18th century dress of bright red (yes, Quakers wore bright colors then) with straw hat tied under the chin to heirlooms of the 19th and 20th centuries. More than one meeting had 30 or more in costume, from toddlers to grandparents, from "George Foxian" leather breeches to a polyester leisure suit, from 17th century muslin shifts and bodices to a turn-of-the-century high-collared shirtwaist and long straight black skirt.
And the banners! Only the size was standard: some were starkly simple, name of meeting and founding date, black letters on light background; some were works of art, beautifully appliquéd horses and buggies, meetinghouse portraits, landscapes, silhouettes. A coastal meeting had dolphins, the symbol of intelligence, leaping up to form a heart over Fox's "Ocean of Light," and meetings' founding dates stretched from 1672 to 1995.
Connections were highlighted as a Minute of Gratitude was read to honor seven specific yearly meetings (and others not named), without whose spiritual and material aid North Carolina Yearly Meeting might not have survived. Starting with visits by William Edmundson and George Fox, traveling ministers kept a scattered band of Carolina Friends in the mainstream of Quakerism. When we were devastated by war, when only ten percent of our members remained in the area after the Civil War, they raised money and organized efforts to rebuild meetinghouses and schools, sent clothing, food and encouragement
Six of these seven Yearly Meetings had representatives on stage: Baltimore, Britain, New England, New York and Philadelphia Yearly Meetings, and the clerk of Ireland Yearly Meeting, Muriel Cameron, who came with her family to be with us. As we thanked Ireland for support during our Revolutionary and Civil Wars, so Muriel brought a record of a shipment of our Carolina rice and ginger, and even corn from Guilford County, N.C., where we were meeting, sent to Friends in Ireland during the famine of 1847.
In an address with a novel slant, Max Carter, director of The Friends Center at Guilford College, described what our state and nation might have been like if Quakers had not existed. He painted a "Quaker-vacant" canvas with holes where Dolly Madison, Herbert Hoover (whose family moved from Carolina to West Branch, Iowa), Abraham Lincoln (whose mother, Nancy Hanks, came from Carolina Quaker stock), would have been; holes where Duke University, Guilford College and two branches of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro should have been; a "landscape" with no Underground Railroad, no 17th-century Carolina Quaker governor who advocated rights for the state's native population.
In afternoon discussion groups we found that our worship at home ranged from completely unprogrammed meetings to semi-
programmed meetings to completely programmed meetings with altar calls and little silence. As we discussed how we minister to ourselves, meetings and the wider world, and how we "develop the vision" for the future, connections started sprouting. I discovered, for instance, that every meeting represented in my group was trying to deal lovingly with homeless members or attenders whose behavior ranged from "outside the norm" to threatening. All were eager to learn and share experiences and solutions. We discovered, too, that our traditional Friends testimonies were very much alive. As Deborah Shaw, clerk of NCYM-Conservative, pointed out, "Even as we acknowledge great diversity, spiritual unity can be achieved with God's love as our cornerstone."
John Porter, superintendent of NCYM (FUM), said, "Our future depends on our ability to show God's love to each other and the outside world."
The need to be ready to embrace transitions and changes in the future was addressed by John Savage on Saturday night. He emphasized the pain of transition, the stagnation that occurs when communities of faith are unwilling to embrace the new.
To many of us, Landrum Bolling is a personification of our 1997 theme "Ministering in a Hurting World" because of his lifetime commitment to reconciliation and peacemaking. His humility in describing the process of taking one step after another to help reconcile warring factions, most recently in Sarajevo but previously for 20 years in the Middle East, was paralleled by clearly outlined steps we can take to gain skills necessary to become effective peacemakers. He ended with a challenge to Friends-not just Carolina Friends but all Friends:
"There needs to be a national debate in this country on the peacetime uses of our armed forces," he said, "... a debate about how we preserve a peaceful world in the midst of a time of anarchy, a time of disintegration of old governments, political parties and economic systems when the rules are tossed out of the window. A world in which absolutely lawless thugs can take over. That's what has happened in Serbia, Croatia, Rwanda, Congo. We have to address the issue of creating some kind of international police force, international law and court system that can be made to work. Because these tragedies in Rwanda, and Congo and Somalia do not just affect those local people there. They affect the whole fabric of international relations, they affect us. Because one way or another we get drawn into it. So let us think together as honestly and seriously as we can about peacemaking as an ongoing mission. How can we develop the inner spiritual resources to live through this and be supporters of peace and decency and forgiveness, and, at the same time, build up intergovernmental, even military resources to help to keep the peace? This is the dilemma, the problem I ask you to continue to struggle with."
The North Carolina panel for the North America Quaker Tapestry was unveiled Wednesday evening. Titled "Holy Obedience Through the Centuries in North Carolina," it depicts a dramatic event from each of our three centuries: the 300-mile 1751 journey of Rachel Wright and Abigail Pike on horseback to establish Cane Creek Meeting, the punishment meted out to Jesse Blair in 1864 for refusing to fight in Civil War, and the work in the 1980s by Sam and Miriam Levering to establish an international Law of the Sea Treaty. But...the panel is not finished. More than 500 Carolina and Virginia Friends, men, women and children have made stitches as the panel has been taken to both yearly meetings, to quarterly and monthly meetings.
To me this event was highly symbolic of the whole week. Our North Carolina Yearly Meetings' tapestry is not finished either. Underneath our colorful stitches lies the hand-woven background fabric on which is outlined the unique pattern of our faith "trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home."
Ironically the newspaper reporters who kept trying to find controversy helped us instead to focus on our awareness of the joy of being together, of recognizing our commonalties.
"What difficulties do you find in being together this time?"
"There aren't any difficulties."
"What are you having to give up to be together?"
"I can't think of anything."
"What issues [the unspoken word "controversial" was hanging in the air] are you going to deal with?"
"We're trying to keep business at a minimum, and being together and celebration at a maximum."
More than one clerk and Vision 400 organizer played out this scenario. But the headline writer still highlighted what wasn't there: "Two Quaker groups overlook some old differences"; and again, "...the two separate branches are saying hello for only the second time in nearly a century."
Joan Newlin Poole coordinated the tercentenary celebration. She is a member of New Garden Meeting, Greensboro, North Carolina.
Copyright (c) 1997 Friends United Meeting
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