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Meeting Community This Month's Blog Post

Our Remembrance Gathering

In the past few years, several members and attenders of our Quaker Meeting lost someone important to them – either through death or illness or into the obscurity of dementia. Others had moved, or lost or changed jobs, which entailed other losses.

So in January, Reno Friends came together for our first Remembrance Gathering. We picked a Saturday and invited everyone in the Meeting to come and share photos and stories about those they had lost, or changes in their lives. We also planned to start with a potluck lunch, and told people to bring their favorite comfort foods.

On the day of the gathering, several of us set up the Meeting House with a long table where we could all sit and talk, and another table to one side where we put candles and the photos of our loved ones. To start the gathering, we stood in a circle before the table with the candles, and held hands for a long moment of silence. Then we lit the tall central taper, and from that flame we lit small votives that we placed in front of the photographs.

Lunch was sumptuous and very comforting – warm soups, fresh bread, salads and many cookies. Once we had eaten, we took turns telling stories about the people we had lost. While this was a day to share our sadness, we also found ourselves sharing many vibrant and funny memories of those who had been so important to us. Several of us had lost a parent, some had lost siblings or friends, and one had lost her husband. Together we laughed and hugged and wiped away tears, as we held ourselves and those we missed in the Light.

One of our attenders brought a special offering to the gathering: Tree Cookies. No, these were not cookies shaped like trees; instead, they were thin slices of tree trunks from various types of trees, cut so that we could see the many concentric annual tree rings that told the stories of the trees. We could see where the trees had suffered drought, and years when they had enough water and nutrients to grow strong. Each Tree Cookie had a ribbon attached so it could be hung up as a Christmas Tree decoration or in a window. We were invited to take several home and decorate them with the names and/or photos of those we had lost.

By the end of the gathering we agreed we should make this a new Reno Friends tradition: to bring everyone together on a Saturday in January – over delicious and comforting food – to celebrate those we had lost and the ways our lives had been reshaped.

Wendy Swallow, Blog Editor, Reno Friends Meeting

The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of Reno Friends Meeting.

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Meeting Community

Seekers and Seeking

Quaker Meetings often attract seekers, those who yearn for the mystery and comfort of a spiritual life but who haven’t yet found their spiritual home. There is something about the open silence of unprogammed Silent Worship – the heart of Quakerism – that seekers find welcoming, even liberating. There is no sermon, no lectionary, no spiritual music, so each person can experience the silence in whatever way helps her or him feel and understand the mystery of God.

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Meeting Community

Ghosts at the Thanksgiving Table

Throughout the United States, there will be people missing from Thanksgiving tables this year. The pandemic has taken an astonishing toll, and there is scarcely a family that hasn’t lost someone. Along with those who died of Covid, there have been increased deaths from many other causes during the pandemic years, thanks to loneliness and stress. When we gather in a few weeks to offer thanks for the bounty of life, there will be empty seats in many homes.

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Meeting Community

The Simple Meeting

Reno Friends recently gathered on Zoom in the sacred space of a Worship Sharing to tell each other what we all believed was most important about our Meeting. The pandemic spun us away from one another, and yet – through the efforts of many – we kept our community alive and busy by holding meetings, spiritual discussions, brown bag lunches, and even a Christmas party, all online. We learned to use Zoom, and figured out (through herculean efforts by our tech team) how to hold hybrid worship: in-person and online at the same time. We met outside for a holiday cookie-exchange, and even worshipped from the relative quiet of our shady garden on summer days.

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Meeting Community

Leadership in Quaker Meetings

It is Nominating season again, the time of year when our Quaker community tries to identify those who will serve as clerks and leaders of the Meeting in the coming year. Which raises an interesting question: What does it mean to be a leader in a Quaker Meeting?     Technically, there are no leaders in unprogrammed Quaker Meetings, such as Reno Friends. Everyone is equal, and no one is in charge. But if there are no leaders, how does a Meeting organize to get its work done? How do Quakers determine how to worship, how to manage their programming and finances, or how to grow?

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Meeting Community

The Meaning of Life

Last year I took a class at UNR on Qualitative Research which taught methods for conducting in-depth interviews. I was tasked with conducting two interviews about a sociological concept that interested me. Apart from my academics and in my personal life, I had been thinking a lot about my own life:  what made me feel passionate, and what I might be here to do. I decided to take the project as an opportunity to interview two people that I thought would speak beautifully on the topic of “the meaning of life,” Rhonda Ashurst of the Reno Friends Meeting and one of the Buddhist priests from the Reno Buddhist Center, Rev. Shelley Fisher. At the root of this question was a desire to feel my soul a little and share an exceptionally profound idea with two incredible people.

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Meeting Community

Hybrid Worship and Quaker Values

Ever since the Quakers broke from the Church of England in the mid-seventeenth century, they have gathered for Silent Worship in plain rooms – ones usually bare of any religious art or symbols. This tradition has served Quakers well, as most Quaker Meetings still prefer simple rooms with few distractions.

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Preparing for Re-Entry

Near the end of my two years of teaching in China, Volunteers in Asia (the organization that had hosted me) sent me materials about reverse culture shock. I was so excited about going home that I hadn’t thought about problems I might experience upon re-entry. In some ways, returning to “normal” life as pandemic restrictions ease will be a bit like returning home from a foreign land, and we might smooth the transition by taking time to consider the impact of the last year and anticipate what might come.

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Meeting Community

A Gift

Every other month Reno Friends (the Quaker Meeting I attend), serves dinner to the homeless and hungry living on the streets of Reno. We each prepare food and then help to serve it. I bring my homemade bread, which often brings smiles and sometimes the sharing of a memory about the last time they had homemade bread. Often this is a distant childhood memory from a home long gone.

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Meeting Community

Who We Welcome

One of the central tenets of the Quaker faith is the Equality Testimony. As stated in the Pacific Yearly Meeting’s manual Faith & Practice, the Equality Testimony starts with this simple statement:  “Friends testimony on equality is rooted in the holy expectation that there is that of God in everyone, including adversaries and people from widely different stations, life experiences, and religious persuasions. All must therefore be treated with integrity and respect.”