Well and weary. Ruffled and stabilizing. Disconnected and connected. More settled and more scared. Strained and joyful. Grieving and expectant.

When we asked Friends on our Tuesday night check-in how their local Meeting community was doing this week, their answers reflected the varied and sometimes contradictory experiences of this time.

During this week, so many worldwide are finding ways to celebrate the promise and liberation of the ancient Easter and Passover stories, even in this unprecedented moment. Friends are striving to make room for new possibility amidst unfamiliar conditions and devastating loss.

Whatever great or small hardships we and those around us have endured this week, let’s remember that there is no wrong way to feel right now; there is no condition that is inaccessible to Divine Presence.

In this season of not knowing, may we find ways to honor the emerging spring. May we allow ourselves to be opened to a Love wide enough to respond to all that we experience—acknowledging that even in this time of isolation and woundedness, we are held in a sacred embrace.

Once again, we’re writing with an invitation and some resources to help us live and share our faith together. Read on below for more.

Continuing Connection and Support for Meetings

We remain grateful for the rich sharing and relationship being fostered through our weekly calls with meeting leaders and via the New England Quakers discussion forum on Slack (contact us to join).

In response to recent requests from Friends, we’ve expanded the content on our website in a few places:

• Hearing that First Day Schools and youth groups are moving to virtual platforms, we’ve added insights on spiritual nurture for youth in these times, as well as information about child safety in virtual gatherings, here.

• Knowing many meetings and individuals are grappling with financial challenges, we’ve begun a page collecting COVID-19 related financial resources and information for both meetings and individuals here.

• Learning from monthly meeting clerks who have now clerked their first business meeting online, we’ve added more nuts and bolts tips to our page on virtual clerking and discernment.

• In addition, we’ve been listening for and lifting up virtual opportunities for “meeting” and connection, including various forms of worship and workshops that may be of particular interest to Friends in New England, and have been posting them on our events calendar.

• In the next few days, we’ll share further resources for meetings responding to loss.

Please reach out—just reply to this email—if there are other ways we can be of help to you or your meeting in the coming week. 

Opportunities for Advocacy, Preparing for Service

• Even as we practice physical distancing, we urge Friends to consider how we can live our faith through advocacy in support of those who are especially vulnerable, and service to those in need.

  Going forward, we’re highlighting issues of particular urgent concern, accompanied by actions Friends can take and links to learn more. Click the button below to see what’s been posted.

• We’re also sharing here a video from Quaker healer John Calvi (Putney, VT, Friends Meeting) speaking this week at the invitation of Pendle Hill Quaker Center on “Love in a Time of Coronavirus”.

  In this tender, accessible, roughly 45-minute talk, John offers suggestions for preparing ourselves and responding in service—with understanding, self-awareness, mercy, and reverence—to the work before us. You can watch the video on Pendle Hill’s YouTube channel here.

  John also participated in a previous conversation, facilitated by New England Yearly Meeting, on how Friends meetings can prepare for pastoral care during the pandemic. You can watch a video of that conversation on NEYM’s YouTube channel here.

Reminder: Invitation to Share “A Week in the Life”

The Living Faith planning team invites you to participate in a New England-wide project, called A Week in the Life, to celebrate and lift up the ways New England Quakers are living our faith in these times.

By this Easter Sunday night, we invite you to take a photo of yourself living your faith right now. This could be a photo of anything you are doing—or an artistic representation of it—to deepen and express your practice and leading as a Quaker: daily prayer, caring for someone else, doing necessary work, sheltering in place, etc.

To contribute to the project, please send your photo and a short caption (including photo credit) to us at LFsharing@neym.org by the end of Easter Sunday, April 12th.

Please note, these photos will be public, so share only images and words you are comfortable being public to anyone, and that you have permission to share from everyone pictured.

We’ll be back in touch

Next week, we’ll share the collected content from A Week in the Life on the Yearly Meeting’s website at neym.org, in this update, and via social media. In this way, we hope to lift up some of the many ways Friends are living—and acting on—our faith in this moment.

We hope that this shared effort strengthens our sense of connection during a time of physical separation, deepens our ability to witness to the power of the Spirit in our lives, and helps us to hold one another and this beloved world in the Light.

with Love,

Sarah Cushman (Portland, ME, Friends Meeting)
Clerk, for the Living Faith Planning Team

Nia Thomas, Quaker Practice & Leadership Facilitator
Noah Merrill, Yearly Meeting Secretary