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March 2004
Third Quaker Women's Conference on Faith and Spirituality
By Gladys Tiffany
Oklahoma is a beautiful place, wide, rolling and wind swept; from my home in Arkansas we never see this much sky. But the approach to Canyon Camp is like a descent into a hidden magical kingdom dropping abruptly into a dramatic chasm of red rock and deep evergreen trees. This is where we gathered, on a damp and chilly November weekend for the Third Quaker Women's Conference on Faith and Spirituality.
Held since 1999, the intention for each of the three conferences has been to explore the tender boundaries between Quakers of varied traditions. Women from South Central Yearly Meeting, Mid America Yearly Meeting, Great Plains Yearly Meeting and Illinois Yearly Meeting each brought their unique perspectives to share with one another. Most of us were from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas, but there were also visitors from far away. Margaret Fraser, Executive Secretary of FWCC, briefly dropped her duties to join us; Angie Hopkins, from New England Yearly Meeting, came fresh from service with Friends Peace Teams work in Burundi; May Kellum, recently retired missionary from Burundi also joined us. They all had inspiring stories that, through the living examples of faithful and determined Quaker women, brought a vivid sense of God at work in the wide world.
Sometimes it seems like things only start making sense as they finish, doesn't it? As I said farewell to some of these delightful women, a sense came over me of how differently we felt about each other after such a short time. In our home churches and meetings, most of us have sorted ourselves out into the niche where we're comfortable. I wonder if part of the opening of Spirit we felt came, in some measure, from the fact we had to collectively draw up courage to face a group of women whom we had every reason to believe would disagree with us on some point or another. In that respect, we had to be willing to be vulnerable in order to come in the first place.
This willingness to vulnerability surely left open a space for Spirit to enter. I believe it filled us up in a way we couldn't have imagined on the day the conference began. This kind of courage may not be comfortable to everybody, but at each of the three bi-yearly conferences, a growing core of courageous bridge-builders has returned, and in my heart, I feel we came because we were summoned by Spirit. Then once here, Spirit joins us and fills us up in a way that makes it worth the journey.
In the mysterious way of Spirit, the healing-across-traditions envisioned by the organizers of this conference seems to be taking its own path. In order to heal something outside of ourselves, we are first being called to seek healing for the pain within ourselves.
The conference is set up to be participant-led. That means no keynote speaker is brought in and no paid staff organizes it. The speakers are conference attenders brave enough to agree to the task, and a willing volunteer performs every necessary job. Large-group sessions, where the speaker talks about a theme, are balanced by small group sessions, where a careful mix of different traditions worship and share together in a way meant to foster warm friendship and understanding of each other. We learn to constructively face whatever differences we find. The growing friendships emerging from this format are part of the healing. We return to our home meetings, bearing healing gifts into the circle of our lives. A Friend from my home meeting, who attended for the first time this year, reported to me that her husband said: "I'll let you go away every weekend if you'll come back this happy."
These personal healings may be a small affair in the long span of Quaker history, but it must be true that every small healing is also a healing of the great body of Quakerism. I hope it is a healing that is welcomed and nurtured by the greater body. I also hope this healing can be gently spread within the greater body wherever real healing is needed.
Gladys Tiffany is a member of Fayetteville Friends Meeting in Arkansas. She has three children, four grandchildren, loves to write and work toward world peace.
Copyright (c) 2004 Friends United Meeting
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