Yearly Meeting experience
Two Friends from Newbury Meeting, Howard and Maria Grace, joined Quaker Yearly meeting on Saturday May 5.
Maria writes: ‘Sitting in Euston Friends Meeting auditorium, ‘the Light’ was a moving and inspiring experience. In the afternoon it looked like full house! The topic of discussion was the Revision Project of the book ‘Quaker Faith and Practice’, on which the preparatory group had already been working for some time. There was a lot of talk about ‘diversity’. A sentence that struck me was ‘See Religious differences as richness, not as a flaw.’
Some participants from the Think Tank that produced the book ‘God, Words and Us’, were on a panel for a conversation about this subject, when a smaller group gathered in ‘The Light’. At one point, one of them, Marisa, said: Trevor Dorey (from Newbury) summed it up for me when he wrote in his article ‘The journey from Believing to Beloving’ in Friends Quarterly: “Not what we believe, but how we believe.”
I was hugely impressed by the way the meeting was conducted and by the decision making process. All talk was surrounded by periods of silence. There was respect for others, a great deal of patience, ability and skill in minute writing, humility and acceptance. A privilege to be part of.
