Visitation among Friends: FGConnections, Summer 2004
Creativity, Spirituality and Effective Social Change — Connections
By Margaret Slavin
Top photo: Carol Bowyer with quilt she designed and made for son Don. In the Bowyer's timber frame house. Lucknow Worship Group. Middle: Margaret Slavin and fourth graders writing social action powetry during visit with Pelham Executive, St. Catherines. Bottom: Margaret Slavin wrapped in Afrika blanket stitched by Pamela Leach during her work in Burkina Feso. Each fabric pattern tells a story. Winnipeg Worship Group.
Canadian Yearly Meeting includes 1200 members and at least as many attenders, scattered across the continent in approximately 58 meetings and worship groups. For two years I am traveling to visit each group, spending a few days with each one. I left January 10, 2004 and expect to finish in November, 2005. In between I will spend short periods of time at home, which is Peterborough, Ontario—time to hug my cat and touch base with family and friends. The travels began in Ontario and I am writing this from the centre of the country, Winnipeg, Manitoba. In two weeks I will be on the west coast. In the summer will be visits to Quebec and a flying visit back to the prairies, and then to the east coast and Atlantic Friends. Next year this will happen over again, only in a different order and with different groups.
The leading surfaced in the fall of 2002, and was seasoned for clearness in my home meeting and later at Canadian Yearly Meeting gathering. When I finally stepped on the bus this past January, minutes of support from both Wooler MM and CYM Ministry and Counsel preceded me, and I carry a travel letter from Wooler. The bus fare and other expenses are covered by a grant from the Sarah E. Richardson fund.
So how is it going, people ask me, and what is its purpose? Its purpose is to visit, and to listen. Also I travel with special concerns around our creative gifts (I am a writer) and around the children (there is a connection.) I encourage Friends to bring something they have made. The sharing that is grounded in this way—in quilts, paintings, poems, song, wooden bowls, painted birdhouses—goes deep. Often we have not thought before of bringing these passions into meeting, but Friends speak readily of the connection they feel to their spiritual experience and openings. “I lose track of time,” is a constant theme. Our hands move in our gardens or in shaping fabric or wood, and our personal journey untangles and grows more beautiful and sure and true. Often the result is a gift to others—warm knitted sweaters to grandchildren, cosy quilts lined with flannel for children who have cancer, or people sick with AIDS. Sometimes the poem is directed to a politician or the banner is carried in demonstrations.
When we start from this place where we are most clear, and from there approach the world issues that trouble us, often there is a creative approach that we would not have thought of otherwise. “Something changes in my head,” said one woman, “and flows out my hands.”
I am interested in that change, and in what happens in the world around us when we are faithful to it. We Friends are accustomed to the experience of sitting in meeting for worship and finding the words we came with falling away, while new, more dangerous-feeling words rising.
That may be the creative edge, a creative edge that Friends sometimes lose, so that we do not know what to say to war or to injustice, and we search about for something someone else has said. We go to demos because the peace movement asks us to, and shout slogans that confront and demonize (I do this too) instead of finding our own way to true, difficult reconciliation and the sense of the Spirit within the most difficult and oppressive events.
The connection with children may be tenuous or it may be central. Others have noted that when a meeting ceases to be welcoming to children, it begins its demise. It is not only that the children grow up and leave behind only grey heads and dear Friends who die off, but it is that something spontaneous and, well, creative has been lost track of, and if it is not there for young families, it is not there for the older folk who sit silently on a Sunday either. The grandparents who invite the children into their gardens to help with planting and tending are doing a very great thing.
What else would you like to know? The groups treat my visit very differently, according to their needs. Some ask for writing workshops, some for visits over tea. Most enjoy the sharing around “what do you make” and some use this as an opportunity for a public event, or to share with another faith community. Some send me in with the children, where I show them the maps of my journeys and invite them to give me poems and pictures and stories to take to show other Quaker kids. I hope to pull together some Canadian-based material for First Day schools from these encounters. But, as with the adults, I mostly look for opportunities to listen. Twice so far I have arrived in time to join a meeting in a day of retreat. Long conversations are a big part of it. Most visitors move on faster than I do. The leading felt clear that I am to stay for meeting for worship, and God has put 6 days between First Days. So I hang out in other people’s houses, using their computer to post weekly journals (go to quaker.ca and click on Slavin Travels. The journals are in the archives and in messages by date), eat their food, meet their pets, attend any Friends’ committee meetings that happen to take place while I am there. People talk and I listen. Some tangles straighten out, and others move a bit. Sometimes they send me into local classrooms to do poetry with an angle of social change. Sometimes I just hang out.
I’d like to write a book out of this experience. I’m not sure yet what it is to be about. We have jokingly thought of Quaker Cuisine, or Spare Beds I Have Known. (I’m at Bed 25 as I write.) I am a writer, but mainly right now I am a Friend in the grip of a leading. I began in quite a lot of trepidation, and that still comes back, but as it unfolds, I feel the leading grow stronger too. This feels like the very best work I can imagine right now for me at this moment of my life. I am grateful for the opportunity, and humbled and heartened by the whole experience.
