Message from EORG for Sunday Meeting 22nd May 2022

Dear Friends,

Yearly Meeting begins this weekend with a week of wide-ranging online events, followed next weekend, May 27-30, with the main sessions. These will be in Friends House though participation online will also be possible. Some of us from Lewes Meeting will no doubt be present in one form or the other. Christina and I value attending YM for feeling part of the current national life of the Society of Friends.

The theme this year is around three interlocking basics of being Friends. The advance information describes them as:

• Faith: How do we experience worship, community and witness?
• Community: How can we build Quaker communities that respond to challenges and put faith into action?
• Action: How can we transform thinking and action in Quaker communities and wider society?

Even a long weekend is obviously too short for any one of these areas to be explored fully, but I hope we will hear something of the experiences of individuals and groups that have found new approaches to each of them and how best to integrate the three. Hopefully, there will be much to report that will be of help to us in our Meeting.

Pierre Ceresole, the Swiss pioneer of international work camps, who was imprisoned several times for being a conscientious objector, explained why he became a Quaker in words that pick up on such integration:

I feel very strongly … that the spiritual life absolutely requires that we should not remain isolated. …. It is more and more clear to me that it is only in a religious family, freely but very strongly constituted, that the individual can render to the world the services it sorely needs and which no politics, not based on a deep inspiration, can hope to organise.

(Pierre Ceresole, 1936, QFP 10.29)

Chris, on behalf of EORG (Bob Harwood, David Hitchin, Chris Lawson, Theresa Samms, Nancy Wall)