Beginnings & Endings
By Robert
The article in November Memphis Friends News about launching a new meeting combined with my own recent Quaker experience has led me to reflect on how Quaker meetings begin and end. My wife and I are now spending about six months a year in Nelson Co, Virginia near our older daughter’s family. Surprisingly, I met a man there who had been a Quaker in Colorado and we decided to try to establish an unprogrammed worship group. Finding a regular space and time was easy and, through a county-wide Facebook page, we quickly found 8 other local Quakers who had been affiliated with an unprogrammed meeting elsewhere and, when a few new to the Quaker way joined us, we had nearly a dozen worshipers.
So far, we’ve put no energy into affiliating with a monthly or yearly meeting or establishing a committee structure. We’ve not yet even held a Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business. I remember Memphis Friends Meeting helping to establish worship groups in both Oxford MS and in MountainView AR. These functioned well until a vital organizing member died (Oxford) or moved away (Mtn View). In the 1990s, I found minutes in Guildford College’s historical library from the earliest meeting in Memphis (1957 to 1967). While summarizing their history, I interviewed the late Dr Herb Smith, a retired Rhodes College psychology professor, who attended their final sessions. He felt that the meeting was laid down due to interpersonal tensions around “how to be a meeting” since they had members who were from both unprogrammed and programmed meetings elsewhere. If you read the related materials on our website (under “Quakers in Memphis: detailed history from the 1950s to the early 1980s”) you’ll see they were also likely destabilized by having so many members moving into and out of Memphis.
Gathering quietly with others to experience “that which is Divine,” to deemphasize our egos as we emphasize the enormous “fellowship of spirit”, continues to mean so much to me today, whether my meeting lasts one year or over a hundred. All of us are aware of how fragile and precious a Quaker meeting can be,