Sampler

The sampler is one workshop that samples four different themes. More information about each workshop is below. Find information on Exploring the Effects of Trauma in Community here. The four themes are: Opening to End of Life with Tenderness & Creativity Drawing upon Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s newly released book, A Tender Time: Quaker Voices on…

Workshop Description

The sampler is one workshop that samples four different themes. More information about each workshop is below. Find information on Exploring the Effects of Trauma in Community here.

The four themes are:

• Creating & Learning from our Spiritual Stories (Monday)
• Continuing Revelation and the Future of Quaker Testimony (Tuesday)
• Exploring the Effects of Trauma on Community Part 1 (Wednesday)
• Exploring the Effects of Trauma on Community Part 2 (Thursday)
• Opening to the End of Life with Tenderness and Creativity (Friday)

Opening to End of Life with Tenderness & Creativity

Drawing upon Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s newly released book, A Tender Time: Quaker Voices on the End of Life, the co-authors invite participants to develop and share their own stories about aging and death. We will recognize cultural patterns and reimagine healing, befriending, and supporting one another through the elder years.

Workshop Number: P-60
Led by: Patti Nesbitt and Kristen Zimet
Focuses on: Enriching/ Deepening our Meetings, Personal Growth

About the leaders: Patti is a palliative care nurse, caregiver, cancer survivor, traveling minister, and clerk. Kristin is a two-time cancer survivor, caregiver, former EMT, patient care volunteer in hospice and in hospitals, and Reiki master. Both Friends are members of the End of Life Working Group of Baltimore Yearly Meeting and have served on support committees for Friends with terminal diseases.

Workshop Composition:

• Worship/ Worship-Sharing: 30%
• Lecture: 10%
• Discussion: 30%
• Experiential: 30%

This workshop is a natural outgrowth of years of ministry, leading to the publication of A Tender Time: Quaker Voices on the End of Life. Our goals are to bring creativity and joy to late-life challenges, to be realistic and uplifting about them, to unite the practical with the spirit-led, allow space for grief, and to create community. We want to demystify a forbidden and formidable topic, stimulate conversations, bring about intergenerational healing, and help people craft the end of their lives in an intentional and peaceful way that honors who they are and minimizes suffering at all points.

We plan to cover meeting physical and spiritual challenges in elder years, becoming instruments of love, passing on our gifts, choosing how to die, caregiving and self-care, coping with dementia, making difficult decisions, planning death care, and assembling layers of support. By the end of the week, we will envision together how Meetings might expand recognition, inclusion, and pastoral care for those who are aging among them.

We will open with worship every day, followed by interactive work in small groups using worship sharing, journaling, simple art, or role playing. After a break, we anticipate coming back for sharing and brainstorming. Recognizing the sensitive nature of this topic, we will take time to honor everyone’s unique background and stories. At the end of each day, aware that this is deeply emotional work, we will re-center in worship or use guided meditation to return to the present and release discomfort.

No specific recommendations for reading in advance. We assume that our book will be available in the bookstore. Participants are invited to bring journals, questions, images of age that define cultural expectations, and photographs of the people they love. We can provide materials needed for art projects.

Creating & Learning from our Spiritual Stories

We will examine through journaling, artwork, worship-sharing and discussion what our spiritual journeys can reveal about ourselves, how Spirit works around us and through us , and how structural racism affects us. Our goal is to expand knowledge and acceptance of ourselves and of all people.

Workshop Number: P-36
Led by: Jane Cadwallader
Focuses on: Anti-Racism, Personal Growth

About the leader: Jane is a member of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Spiritual Formation Collaborative. In that capacity, she has designed workshops, led small and large group discussions, and created experiential activities.

Workshop Composition:

• Worship/ Worship-Sharing: 25%
• Lecture: 10%
• Discussion: 40%
• Experiential: 20%

Our objectives will include looking at our spiritual journeys in terms of our testimonies (values), and at how Spirit has changed, directed, intervened and supported our journeys. We will strive to create an atmosphere of trust, to allow us to focus on the influence of structural racism in our lives. Participants will expand their awareness and appreciation of the ongoing work of Spirit throughout their lives. The topics we will cover will include spiritual journeys, testimonies, the presence of Spirit in our stories, how structural racism fogs our perspective and the work of Spirit in opening our hearts to diversity.

The format will include daily worship (20 minutes), small and large group discussion, journaling, art, and song. Day 1 we will create our Spiritual Journeys on chart paper, and then review them daily, adding insights .We will focus on drawing our spiritual journeys, reviewing them in light of our testimonies, our openness to diversity and Spirit’s interventions.

Items to bring to the workshop: a journal, comfy clothes, and a book, poem, song, or artwork that was significant in the participant’s spiritual journey. There will be no extra costs to the participants as we will purchase our own supplies.

Continuing Revelation & Future of Quaker Testimony

We will explore the inward and outward aspects of Quaker Testimony in different contexts: as experienced in our faith journeys, within Quaker communities, as public witness and in the profound light of continuing revelation.

Workshop Number: P-66
Led by: Jim Fussell
Focuses on: Enriching/ Deepening our Meetings, Social Justice/ Peace/ Ecology Concerns

About the leader: Jim Fussell, from Baltimore Yearly Meeting and Earlham School of Religion, has facilitated workshops for yearly meeting sessions and the FGC Gathering over the past five years. Topics include Quaker Testimonies and Kingian Nonviolence as well as numerous Quaker History presentations on topics such as Black Resistance to Quaker Enslavers, Quaker AntiLynching, and Generations of Queer Quaker Resilience, 1920-2000

Workshop Composition:

• Worship/ Worship-Sharing: 25%
• Lecture: 15%
• Discussion: 25%
• Experiential: 40%

Quaker Testimony is a shared public leading from God, formed in conscience and love, based in both inward experience and outward witness.
In ‘Continuing Revelation’, Spirit reveals to us the way of love and truth. For Friends to be truly faithful, our Testimony must be continually renewed in the Spirit.

What we will do in this workshop may include:

• The Individual Experience of Quaker Testimony. What has it meant to you to act upon a Quaker testimony as an individual quaker? What has it meant to you within the context of Quaker community?
  
• How did we get here? The Trans-generational Experience of Quaker Testimony.
  
• The Quaker Experience of ‘Continuing Revelation’ and the Renewal Quaker Testimony in 2022. We will examine and share how leadings and group discernment bring our communities toward unity around emerging Quaker Testimonies.
  
• The Emergence of Quaker Testimony in our own lives and present communities in the recent past, present and unfolding future. In particular, we will engage the urgent living truth of the Justice Testimony.

Prior to the FGC Gathering, the facilitator(s) will email all registered participants a PDF file with workshop materials and resource materials on Quaker Testimony.