by Dan O’Keefe
Last Memorial Day Weekend, Northern Yearly Meeting (NYM) held its annual camp at the Lion’s Club campgrounds near Stevens Point. NYM is made up of meetings and worship groups in Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and part of Iowa. Of the over 300 people in attendance at the camp, seven families and six individuals came from Milwaukee.
The camp is a miniature version of the continental Gathering with activities for children of all ages, a bookstore, worship opportunities, times to socialize, a plenary session, meeting for worship with attention to business, and workshops in the afternoon.
Saturday afternoon offered several workshops: an informed discussion regarding issues of institutional racism, a presentation of the Friends Peace Team efforts as part of an Asia West Pacific Initiative, and a participatory experience focused on methods of discernment.
The workshop entitled Individual Spiritual Discernment, following Pendle Hill Pamphlet #443, was presented by Jerry Knutson. He authored the pamphlet and stopped into this year’s camp to share his insights. A graduate of the Earlham School of Religion, Jerry shared the evolution of his thinking on how to make decisive and clear discernments. Initially, his thinking favored the techniques offered by meditation, but his spiritual voice led him to his own understanding of discernment. He feels that discernment is not simply a mental or logical task, but one that includes emotional insights and thoughts from fellow F/friends. Janet Hilliker found the workshop fulfilling, and it strengthened her confidence in the discernment process.
Sunday afternoon also offered three workshops: Stories from the Traveling Quaker Ministry, a discussion about Quaker Education , and a review of a series of 2018 interviews called Holding our Families in the Light. Windy Cooler, an Earlham School of Religion divinity student and recipient of the 2020 Cadbury Scholar award, interviewed over 90 Quaker families at 8 yearly meetings. She shared her observations from those interviews.
Windy started her discussion by describing the interview process. Each interview consisted of asking each family to describe their family of origin and then describe their current chosen family. When hearing the descriptions of their current families, Windy would describe back to them the values she had observed. After those values were clarified, Windy would ask if those same values were also experienced in their Quaker Meetings. Windy was surprised by the nearly uniform response: almost every family would respond immediately with a “Yes” followed by a discussion that gradually became quite angry. The anger was usually the result of someone violating a trust. Windy compared the tone of the anger as akin to “betrayal.”
Another noteworthy pattern shared by those angry families was that very few shared their feelings with another Quaker. When Windy began her research, she expected very different answers. She was not clear on what caused both unexpected responses.
The workshop generated a long discussion. One person suggested that the sense of betrayal maybe due to the inability of a meeting to carry out its pastoral duties, i.e., promises to help are not followed through or are ignored. Such inability, it was suggested, could be due lack of personal time, from pressures to financially provide for themselves or their families. Or perhaps, Quakers may need to rethink the time consuming nature of committee work and Worship with Attention to Business.
One suggested that when a meeting begins to realize it is unable to meet its pastoral functions, or as another said, “become too tired to be tender,” the meeting is obligated to either find a better way of handling pastoral needs, or reduce their promise to fulfill those needs, in the first place. Another person wondered if Quaker committee conveners are taught leadership skills and other socially oriented skills that may help avoid misunderstandings.
The second pattern, the inability of Quakers to share their feelings of betrayal with fellow Quakers was hard to process. There were many questions: Does the tendency to avoid conflict in Quaker meetings contribute to this pattern? What would happen if those feelings were shared? One asked whether Quakers should revisit the spoken and implied covenants they have with each other.
Windy’s workshop, like the other workshops, was challenging and offered new ways of understanding our Quaker experience. This annual session, once again, seemed to meet expectations of shared experiences and thoughtful discussions to be carried back to our meetings and worship groups.