Developing Community in South BerkshireA Little Meeting Grows Up
Top: South Berkshire Monthly Meeting of Friends,meetinghouse with new construction completed (photo by Bonner McAllester). Bottom: Bonner McAllester puts up the sign (photo by Bruce Birchard).
For most social animals life starts out with a period of dependence, a time when it is not a good idea to move too fast or take on too much. After childhood, or kittenhood, there comes that rangy adolescence, with some signs of adult readiness for independence and plenty of other indications that the time is not yet right.
At all the stages of development, people and other social animals need community. There are probably as many notions of “community” as there are people looking for one, so you could say it follows that in any group of seekers there are bound to be a few who feel this community is right for them and many more who find it not quite right, not up to their own expectations. These might be the people in the “glass is half empty” group. Sometimes such people, upon identifying the inadequacy of the water level, their needs not met, find themselves reluctant to top it up themselves. Fortunately for the members of a religious community, especially Quakers, we are not called upon to top up the glass ourselves. We have access to boundless assistance. Our job is to avoid obstruction to this natural process and even to be alert to opportunities to help it along, to be instruments.
Our meeting here in southwestern Massachusetts has a short history compared with many, having lived a comfortable childhood for years as a modest preparatory meeting under the care of Mt. Toby Monthly Meeting, miles away in the Connecticut River valley. During this formative time we met in the living room of the owner-built rammed earth home of Margaret and Lester Clarke in the town of South Lee. Sometimes the people gathered consisted of the Clarkes and their cat.
By 1984, the child-meeting was coming to adolescence. Launched by Mt. Toby, it now struck off on its own, though in many ways we were still not ready for the big world. For fifteen years we met in a handsome college building in Great Barrington. Our drive to meeting included a spectacular view of the Berkshire Hills and the college campus itself was like a park or arboretum. In our meetings for worship for business we considered peace actions, first day school schemes, modest contributions. We were renters, with most of the day-to-day business of keeping house taken care of by our landlord. Usually we felt part of the college community, welcome on campus any time, free to picnic under the great copper beech. We participated in campus doings and collaborated on presentations and social activism, such as gun control.
At this time we were growing. We wanted more shelf space for our library and a better arrangement for the three age groups of our first day school. We began asking, nicely, our parent/landlord for some of these things. We chafed when the answer was, “sorry, but no.”
The day came when we left our rented home. We did not get to choose the day, but if it had been up to us, who knows when we would have taken the leap? There followed two years of wandering, as we now think of it, when we had no permanent home. During this time we took strength and solidarity from our search, our project. The large, strong committee looked at over 100 properties: some were for rent, some for sale. We considered every option, reporting to the business meeting, posting photos and plans. We cherished our individual pet wishes and then let them go. We learned to look instead for what would be least objectionable to the most people. This was hard work requiring patience, perseverance, and discernment.
In the end we bought a little blue house with vinyl siding. It was too small, but we could add onto it. There was plenty of land, including a little mountain with great glacial boulders, a swamp, a vernal pool, a back meadow full of fringed gentians in late summer, and two thick stands of tall spruces— a Christmas tree-enterprise from years ago.
Now we entered our graduation-time, our move to adulthood. Ready or not, we had to decide about everything from major construction designs and expenditures to which ecologically-friendly toilet paper to stock. We created committees with responsibilities for these choices and then we had to learn to let them make the choices. They in turn had to figure out when to look to the larger group for broader unity, and when not.
Our community had its childhood home with the Clarkes and the house is still there to provide the kind of comfort many of us yearn for as adults when we like to take a trip back to our beginnings. Myself, I go see Margaret once a week and touch base with the physical home of my spiritual community.
A community is not physical, though. In a way which is neither mathematical nor logical, the community is the individuals who subscribe to it, who participate in it, who come together and drink from the glass. At South Berkshire, during our challenging emergence into adulthood, some members and attenders found they were unhappy with the changes in the community. Other people discovered us for the first time, even though we had been active teen-agers in the town for so long. Now we had a building, a sign on the highway. The new challenges and opportunities came thick and fast: how to welcome newcomers without asking them, too soon, to help mow the lawn. How to schedule and encourage community use of the building— which requests to grant and which not.
For these projects and so many others we have looked to our older relatives for guidance, talking to people in other meetings and churches to find out how they do things. What kind of chairs did they buy? How do they display literature? What sort of adult religious education have they enjoyed? Do they mow their entire lawn themselves? How do they include their young friends in the daily life of the meeting, both physical and spiritual? We have always been members of the greater community of New England Quakers, but now we have certain challenges in common with the other “adult” meetings. We make up our own minds about things, of course, but we are glad not to have to invent the wheel every time. There is so much good work to do: the more we work together, the stronger our community.
I recently read the following quote from William James in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann (Three Rivers Press, 1998):
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
To this formula, this balance, I would add a third point of support. There is certainly a spiritual well, available to individual and community alike. The spiritual community, whether it meets in a small rammed-earth living room or on a hill under a blustery English sky, can always find the glass brimming over. Being a part of an emerging meeting community, finding its balance in adulthood, has strengthened my balance wherever I am as I consider the turnings in my path, from recycled copy paper options to all my daily actions in a troubled world.
FGConnections Spring 2003 Home
