2008 Concord (NH) MM State of Society

Concord Monthly Meeting of Friends

Concord, New Hampshire

2008

The year 2008 was filled with love and healing, planning and praying, loss and grieving, and our joy and love for each other.

We learned again the deep spiritual work that comes with supporting our members as they experience life threatening illness and death.  We found ourselves experiencing an everlasting love born of prayers for healing, caring and comforting, seeking grace and light in this life to carry our loved ones into the next.  We drew our circle tighter by sewing quilt squares of Grace and Light, stitching ourselves together in bonds of love while forming beautiful healing quilts to warm our Friends.  We expressed our love again in memorial meetings filled with love and laughter, grief and thankfulness, music and dance, silence and tears. In life and passing of life we experienced God’s healing love.

Children continue to bring us great joy and hope.  Our most active teenage boys, are dedicated and active presences at meeting, joined by several other children (who have grown up in our meeting) who return when called by the spirit.  As we nurture our returning children, we greet with joy, newer preschool age children.  We joyfully seek ways to share the Spirit with them that will delight them and nurture them and bring them to experience that all encompassing love.

With and without children, we have several new adults who join us frequently.  Our circle grows wider as we share our Light, remembering always that love and friendship is to be shared.  Seeking the Light in everyone involves opening up and welcoming visitors.  This is only possible when we open ourselves to the Spirit, sharing messages and thoughts, being tender with each other.

Desire to share the spirit and reach out to others continues to move us to work long and hard on plans for our meetinghouse.  Working on building plans, checking prices, evaluating the environmental cost, and revising plans again, taught us to be patient with the process and each other.  Contacting our friends, new and old, filled us with gratitude as support came from all quarters.  Challenging ourselves to find meaningful uses for the building by developing a partnership with the Appalachian Mountain Teen Project, taught us more about being good stewards.  Seeking unity with that spirit on ever more challenging decisions, taught us more about reaching out tenderly to each other.  Despite delays, we move forward filled with hope, ready for the challenge of creating community through work, remembering that work is love made visible. Informing this decision to move forward our goal is to be a more visible presence for our testimonies.

Spiritual Care this year included celebrating the spiritual commitment of long-time member a long-time member and his spiritual partner.

Many of us helped organize and present the gathering of All NH Friends on sexual ethics and spirituality with NH Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, who is that denominations first openly gay bishop. He brought to us the message: How inclusive is God's love? and the related question, "How can we live in that love even when we disagree strongly?"  This struggle also touches on differences about Biblical interpretation, cultural differences at work within a global spiritual fellowship, and what it means to be a church, a people gathered by God.  These issues resonated strongly for us with the current condition of Quakerdom, both in New England and world-wide, as Friends see these issues in diverse ways. Gene Robinson challenged us, whatever our view, to stay engaged with our brothers and sisters who are at odds with us on these matters, in shared faith, and in the doing of good together.  He encouraged us to recall Jesus's words in the gospel of John, that there was much more that he had to reveal which they could not yet bear.  For their further guidance, he would send the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, to lead them into further truth.  Some of us felt much of the truth was revealed and are open to continued revelation and discussion in this area.

As the end of one year circles round to the next, we feel deeply engaged in our own circles of young and old, beginnings and endings, joys and sorrows, with God’s Love encircling and holding us all.