At a Yearly Meeting Gathering held in York from 25th July to 1st August 2009

“Our life is love and peace and tenderness, and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another, but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand”.
Isaac Penington

Dealing tenderly with one another is to trust each other, to listen first, is to return to the centring place offered by silence, and to know at all times that it is through working together that way will open. In Yearly Meeting Gathering, as we have worked together, we have been grounded in our worship as a community. Making time for stillness lays the foundation on which all else has been built.

At this Gathering we have had the opportunity to seek God’s will together. This collective dimension to our decision-making is unique and precious. Our business process rests on the belief that the gathered meeting is upheld by those who are not present, and that decisions taken reflect the discernment of the Society of Friends as a whole.

Nearing the end of this Yearly Meeting Gathering 2009, we hope we have created a diverse and varied community of all ages, a community which has upheld and affirmed Friends in their concerns, which has been engaged corporately and individually in creating community, and creating connections, as well as the business of the Yearly Meeting.

Though you may be sad to leave tomorrow, we hope you will be glad you came, and will take the spirit of the Gathering with you. The community we have created at Yearly Meeting Gathering is of necessity a transient one, but the connections created here can live on as we return to our daily lives and our local meetings, small and large.

We acknowledge that our community has experienced tensions and frustrations as well as joys and enrichment. We may not all have felt included, heard or looked after. Some of us will have found the week overwhelming, exhausting, or dispiriting, or not have had our expectations met. But, as a spiritual community, we know that learning is a path, and not a possession. For us, this event has been a step along our pathway, living and learning together, in and from this rich community.

Here at this event, we have all been called to serve, and serve willingly. Between us, we have had all the gifts that this service has required. We have woven the threads of the Yearly Meeting Gathering, with humour, felicity and grace. We have had times of laughter, lightness and relaxation, as we have faced the challenges and opportunities of the event.

There has been much wisdom, humour and compassion in this Gathering, and what have emerged are ways for us to live together in community. As we leave the Yearly Meeting Gathering, we take these experiences with us.

Paul Parker & Lizz Roe, co-clerks