Yearly Meeting Gathering 2009

Yearly Meeting Gathering took place in York from Saturday 25/07/2009 until Saturday 01/08/2009. It combines Britain Yearly Meeting and Summer Gathering.

This blog is provided by the Friend, the weekly Quaker magazine in print and online, as part of our commitment to encouraging Quakers to confidently share their experience and use their Quaker voices.

There is another blog, provided by Britain Yearly Meeting itself, at http://www.quakerweb.org.uk/ymgblog and there are individual and Quaker Meeting blogs where Quakers are writing about YMG – see our links on the left and our summary posts below.

Pagans at YMG!

Simon Beard wrote this piece and emailed it to me. Unfortunately I missed it at the time. Apologies to Simon.

A group of us Quaker pagans met during Thursday lunchtime to celebrate
the harvest season and call on the spirits of abundance to bless
Yearly Meeting Gathering and the many projects and friendships it
produces. We performed a ritual that united Quaker silence with Pagan
elements honoring the life cycles of the year, the unique nature of
the environment we are meeting with and that god and goddess within us
all. After calling in the four quarters of the year and their
associated elements we invoked the goddess of the harvest and the
spirit of abundance before offering a time of Quaker silence for them
to speak to us. The ritual then continued with some chanting, the
sharing of a Lamas loaf and a guided meditation walk to take in the
changing environment around us as the world bursts forth into
fruitfulness and harvest.

Numbers where kept intentionally low due to the experimental nature of
the event, but all agreed that it came off well despite, or perhaps
because of, the abundant rain we had both before, during and after the
event. Next year we hope to organise a more substantial event, drawing
on what we have learned this year that will offer all friends an
opportunity to bring together what is best about the Quaker and Pagan
traditions.

I should add that I consider myself to be both a Christian and a
Pagan, but mostly a Quaker. I believe that the two offer contrasting
and complementary views about the nature of the divine, one
emphasizing gods masculinity and transcendent nature, and the other
god’s femininity, or balance, and god’s immanence in the world around
us. I wander how unique that makes me?

On second thoughts, I’m a Quaker, aren’t we all supposed to be this complicated

I found George Fox living in a Journal

Pendle Hill’s daily Quaker Worship transforms into a raucous dance party as the result of some unconventional ministry from Jon Watts. Filmed and edited by Ben Schilling.

Britain Yearly Meeting 2009 epistle

The epistle is here on our epistle site.

Our epistle blog is intended as a central place to find epistles from all over the world. As of yet, few people have sent epistles to us, preferring to use their traditional methods, but we hope in time that as well as using those methods, Friends might feel brave enough to send their epistles to us too so that their important messages can easily be shared around the world.

business method

‘The purpose is, quite simply, to reside in the light. To allow ourselves to be led to a transcendent place of unmistakable harmony, peace and tender love. And then to live out what that has revealed about what life is like when a loving God rules over all. The role of the clerk is to ensure that necessary facts are shared at an appropriate moment, to call speakers, and towards the end to summarise the sense of the meeting in a minute which can be approved by all present.’

Rosemary Hartill writing on the Guardian website.

Speaking out in the world

In the past few days we have seen and heard coverage about a Quaker decision at Yearly Meeting on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, in the Times, Guardian, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror newspapers, a piece from the Press Association and regional coverage such as on the BBC Lancashire website.

All this coverage has been achieved without allowing journalists into our Yearly Meeting sessions.

The most important issue is the decision-making and what results from our discerning God’s will and how we go about doing that isn’t ultimately important to your average journalist. But it may be important to us to be represented correctly and to others who may find themselves attending Quaker Meetings in the future.

In the framework for action 2009-2014, a document of Quakers in Britain, one of our seven key priorities is ‘Speaking out in the world’. We have shown these last few days that we (for example Rosemary Hartill in the Guardian, Michael Hutchinson quoted in various media and Jenny in the BBC Lancashire piece) can confidently do this without non-Quaker journalists in our midst.

What we need to do now is find ways to work together, across Britain to make sure that it is our own voices being heard.

We should not rely on our media officer for Quakers in Britain to do this work for us on her own, but there should be more of us working together to get out there and be heard.

The Friend, Quaker Life, Quaker Quest, and individuals and Meetings up and down Britain could be working out how to handle this sort of situation in the future to make a combined best effort to get our message across.

Guess how many Quakers

Ruth Gledhill, religion correspondent for The Times
writes: ‘ At their annual gathering in York this week more than 1,600 Quakers agreed “to treat same-sex, committed relationships in the same way as opposite-sex marriages, reaffirming our central insight that marriage is the Lord’s work and we are but witnesses”.’

Alec Mackinson at BBC Lancashire goes for 1,600 too: ‘More than 1600 members at the meeting voted unanimously to allow Quaker register officers to register same sex partnerships in the same way as marriages.’

Rosemary Hartill, Quaker and former BBC religion correspondent, writing in the Guardian found over 1,200 Quakers had taken the decision on same-sex marriage: ‘What the piece had no space to mention was Quaker decision-making. While the Anglican communion is tearing itself apart over the role and place of gay people, over 1200 Quakers managed to come to a peaceable common mind about same-sex marriage without a single vote. How did they do it?’

Also in the Guardian, Riazat Butt reported that 1,200 Quakers had been involved: ‘At their annual meeting, held at the University of York, 1200 members gave their unanimous approval to revise relevant parts of Quaker faith and practice to treat gay marriages in the same way as heterosexual unions.’

In the Daily Mail, Claire Ellicott also reported there being 1,200 Quakers: ‘The 1,200 Quakers at the week-long meeting also agreed to take steps to revise relevant parts of their faith in order to bring in the reforms.’

At the Press Association, the story was that around 1,200 Quakers were present (this story was pretty much repeated in the Daily Mirror and elsewhere): ‘All those present at the meeting, numbering around 1200, agreed to take steps to revise relevant parts of Quaker faith and practice in order to treat same-sex marriages in the same way as more traditional unions.’

Does the accuracy of this figure matter in the grand scheme of things? Not particularly, as the larger issue is about the decision that was made.

The capacity of the central hall at York is 1,190 (source, a quick call to the press office of York university) and in session I didn’t think that the hall was filled to capacity on either Thursday or Friday. Of course, different Quakers might have been in each session too, so the 1,200 figure seems accurate for session and the 1,600 refers to the number of people at the Gathering in total.

Other people’s reactions to our decision on same-sex marriages

It seems as though all the so-called quality newspapers have reported our decision in an even-handed way. I’ve read the online reports in the Guardian, the Telegraph (which simply records yesterday’s item from the BBC News website), the Times and the Independent. The Independent gets extra marks for including comment by Peter Tatchell, who is quoted as saying, “The Quakers’ decision to open up marriage to same-sex couples, on exactly the same basis as heterosexual couples, is an honourable, courageous, trail-blazing decision.

“It exposes the homophobia of other faiths that refuse to recognise love and commitment between couples of the same sex, and it specifically exposes their denial of religious marriage to same-sex couples.”

A quick Google search shows that dozens of local newspapers around the country have also reported on the issue, including the Evening Standard in London. I can’t find any reports in the online editions of the Sun or the Daily Mail.

On Twitter, I sent out the fact that Quakers had reached this decision, and got back 8 warm messages of support from friends on there, most of them young gay men with no religious beliefs. One friend followed up with the following: “I am incredibly proud to count Quakers as friends; they follow their faith so consistently, in such a dignified way, as in history.” Another friend said, “You lovely lovely people. I’ve always said Quakers are the best of all the Xtians.”

I feel very affirmed by this, and of course it’s a lot more personal than the reports in the newspapers.

The meeeedia

I work with the media.  They want to know when something is going to happen and beforehand.  It is very difficult to have them a bit interested and then wait until the day after the decision has been made.  I think that the news reports I saw were fair… said we were close to making a decision… and did not bounce anyone.  Nevertheless I would understand friends who were a bit off about it.  (The media were not mentioned in the session.)

It is time, Friends

In an extraordinary series of meetings, Quakers gathered at York have endorsed same sex marriage, {readmore}seeking both to revise our handbook Faith and Practice, and also to seek changes in the law.

There has been a palpable sense of movement as we have heard from couples and families, and we have moved further, with more unity and less dissent than I had expected. In particular the words have mattered less and the unity and equality of one marriage proceedure has come to dominate our minds.

The session has only justmoved to the next business and I will post the minute when I have it. As so often with Friends we achieved unity and gatheredness and then spent nearly an hour picking over the detail, but we got there. Hopefully acknowledging those for whom this was a difficult decision, Certainly it was not done to be popular or fashionable, but because over the last three years and in particular the last week, to be right, led by the Spirit of love.

People kept asking me where we would get to and I said I didn’t know, but what came to me on Thursday am and which I kept to myself was, Friends, it is time. and it was.

I don’t normally blog in white heat, I normally work on it a bit. More to follow I am sure.

It was a wonderful minute when we started and it was quite good even when we had faffed around with it.

We’re in the news

Yes, Friends, as Jez Smith has just pointed out on here, our process is already up and out there on BBC News. Colin Billett had a very brief slot on the Today programme, around 6.50am, and the news item was in the news headlines at 8am on Radio 4, as I understand it.

It seems to me quite a fair report. It mentions that our process is still underway, and what the likely outcome could be. The stock photograph of two little men is particularly unQuakerly, but this is the BBC News website we’re talking about, and it often seems to have been put together in a hurry.

Luckily, I think, most Friends in Yearly Meeting session this morning won’t have seen this report. We will be there to continue our due process of discernment of the right way forward for us. If the end result turns out quite differently from how things have been reported by the BBC, then that is how things should be.

It does let us know, however, that this is a radical decision on which we are embarking, as one Friend said during our deliberations yesterday afternoon. The business we are about here is going to have repercussions in the world which we cannot yet guess at. I’m glad, though, to be a part of this process. I hope we can be true to our Quaker convictions and our Quaker roots as we seek to discern our way forward. In fact, I’d prefer say that I trust we can be true to ourselves.