Faith: Learning, waiting, changing
Britain Yearly Meeting, Saturday 28th May 2022
A Ugandan Friend was leading us via zoom from Uganda. He shared how Quakers in Uganda are responding to climate change. In such a moment you realise that across the globe people are trying to work out how to live in the right relationship with our world.
I found myself in the courtyard just observing the emotions that my body was experiencing. Something to do with being in a familiar place yet in a new moment. The mind wonders “How it will go?” “Who is who?” “Who to talk to?” “When to be silent?” I quite like being the observer of life, particularly of what the senses of this body experience.
The morning session commenced with a Friend, Jennifer Kavanagh giving what is called ‘prepared ministry’ in other words not spontaneous but already written. She spoke of how she rediscovered faith in midlife and how Quakers provided a place for her. She went on to speak about how she experienced ‘belonging’ as she journeyed with Quakers. Soon came opportunities to serve and she responded to an invitation to work with a homeless project. The point, for me, was how the individual journey tells us a story of Life that we usually can relate to.
Again for me, this connects to how Quakers in Britain are reflecting post-Covid to the question “ After the experience of Covid who are we?” “What have we held and what have we let go off?”
People are still awakening to Life and need communities in which to express themselves. People still need belonging and communities help facilitate it. People still find themselves asking, “What am I doing?” and being open to other possibilities that giveness fullness to life.
There was then an opportunity for Friends to minister spontaneously to what had been heard. Friends spoke of how to dance, to wait and wait again were all ways they had found on the journey of life and to Life.
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