Scarsdale Friends Meeting

This report covers the formal program only, omitting the apple picking, scenery, hiking, singing, bonfire, visiting the alpacas, movie, sharing meals, and other wonderful events shared this fall by about 20 adults and 4 children.

Our facilitator for the weekend retreat was Allison Randall, from New England Yearly Meeting, sent to us by Friends General Conference traveling ministries program. She was traveling with her elder, her husband Bill Walker. Our theme for the weekend was twofold: “Getting to Know You, and Getting to Know Us”. The hope of the planning committee was that we could explore our meeting as a group: who are we, what do we believe, what do we care about, where we are going, what do we need to change, as well as spend some time allowing individuals to answer some of the same questions about their own spiritual journey, with the hope that addressing both sets of questions, as a supported group, would give us direction and vision, both individually and as a group.

We began on Friday night after supper with a worship sharing led by Matt Scanlon, based on a reading “on dreams” by Howard Thurman. This led us into a place of gentle and hopeful sharing and openness.

For the next exercise, we divided up into 4 groups with 4 or 5 people in each group. Our task was to come up with 3 statements about our meeting that the whole group felt to be true. Following completion of this task, each group merged with one other group. We listened to each others’ lists and decided if we could agree with their statements or not. Some changes were made as we discussed the statements. All the groups then merged and we repeated the process. Below is a list of all the statements that were felt by many to have merit by the end of this process. Some of them remained controversial, and are so identified.

• We are smaller than we were.
• We love each other.
• We are mostly a white, "middle class," college educated, and professional group. We agree that we don't agree on the significance of that fact.
• We value tolerance/acceptance, gentleness, and generosity. [We discussed the difference between tolerance and acceptance, and agreed that whereas acceptance is preferable, sometimes we have only tolerance.]
• We are a family, and SFM is a home where we can feel safe, but we recognize that there are present and former members who may not feel so safe.
• Our worship is characterized by people only speaking when they are actually moved to speak, and we strive to allow our business meetings to be in a state of worship as well.
• We love our meeting.
• Worship is the center of the meeting.
• The meeting is in a state of transition and has been so as long as any of us can remember.
• That of god in everyone is a central text.
• Our potlucks are tasty, and we should have more of them.
• Social witness is important to some in the meeting. [There was some controversy about whether this is valued by the group as a whole]
• We accept our theological diversity as long as no one is proselytizing, telling us what to believe, or maybe even stating their beliefs too often. [We discussed this one at length.]

In the afternoon session, our work seemed much harder. We were asked to identify changes we felt were needed in our meeting community. This session was pretty quiet, with the following concerns raised up:

• Families with children are not attracted to or are leaving the Meeting.
• Our worship space in Meeting room is too large for the number of people worshipping; worshipping close together is a richer experience.
• The Meeting needs to be more open to mysticism.
• We need to have more joint activities with other users of the Meeting House.
• We need training in vocal ministry.
• There will be a major fall-out from Olivia Hewitt’s departure as Nursery School Director, due to the large number of tasks she had taken on, and the Meeting will need to find a way to address this.
• The Vigil in front of the Meeting House on Sunday can be disturbing for some arriving to worship.
• There is too much bickering amongst us, and we need to find better ways of healing disputes.
• The Meeting needs to unite on a big task.

It was noted that many of these concerns have solutions built in, or are themselves solutions.
Our next goal was to try to understand the “Angel of the Meeting.” To do this, we drew pictures, painted, made collages, or wrote poetry to visualize the “Angel of the Meeting.” These will be on display soon.

During Sunday morning’s brief session we wrote out on cards what is important to our lives, including the position of the Meeting in our lives. We were asked to share how the meeting’s place in our lives would affect the Meeting. We then split up into dyads and shared what we felt were the gifts we brought to the meeting.
Hopefully, these valuable questions will be of use to those people who were unable to be at the retreat, as well as continue to resonate with those of us who were there. All of them are worthwhile to us as individuals and as a community.

The meeting clerk emphasized that the second list in the report reflects concerns raised by individuals. Although no effort was made to achieve unity around these statements, he noted that during the retreat several said that they did not add to the list because they agreed with the points already made. Friends noted the widespread feeling of retreat attenders that this retreat, and in fact all meeting retreats, are immensely valuable. One Friend also suggested that the meeting consider holding more than two retreats each year.