Joyful June Noise

The month of June opened with study of a classic Quaker text and closed with singing. In between, we took care of the annual budget, worshipfully conducted business, welcomed visitors, planned our first movie night, and continued learning how to honor our own and others' needs and feelings through our ongoing course on compassionate communication.

On the first Sunday of the month, both co-clerks and many Friends were away, many of them at the AR-OK spring quarterly meeting, and we appreciate that our Young Friends program director, Sister, was able and willing to open the meetinghouse and boot up Zoom for those who wished to discuss Thomas Kelly's A Testament of Devotion, worship, and have fellowship. 

Speaking of fellowship, many members and visitors stayed to talk after worship on the day we take care of business in a spirit-led way on third Sunday. We were pleased to welcome new faces, Friends who don't often make it to town, and newish attenders from Hot Springs. During the meeting for worship with attention to business, our communications, outreach and web (COW) committee announced our first movie night, which is to take place on July 11. Friend Kelly passed out flyers for us to post around the community.

Friend David was not feeling one hundred percent on the fourth Sunday but was still able to lead us through a compassionate communication exercise from home thanks to our Zoom set-up. Young Friends continued their fourth Sunday sewing sessions using a donated machine and sewing area that receives lots of natural light through the many back room windows.

On June's bonus Sunday, Friend Tommy distributed copies of Worship in Song, a Friends' Hymnal while Friend David helped us to get and stay on key with his guitar playing as we, in turn, suggested page numbers. Singing together can be a bonding and spiritually moving experience, and indeed more than once the spoken ministry later during worship hour included reflection on what we had sung. We sang songs about peace, the inner light, George Fox (happy 400th, by the way, George), an Israeli folk song sung in the round, and Donna Nobis Pacem, which we are gradually getting better at month by month. In the George Fox song, we hear that when asked to swear on the Bible, "'I will not', said he, 'for the Truth is more holy than the book to me.' " This fellow George Fox had old leather breeches, shaggy, shaggy locks, and didn't believe in taking up arms for the king nor even doffing his hat to those higher up the social ladder! When one Friend suggested we do #297, John Lennon's Imagine There's No Heaven, he mused aloud about his childhood religious experience by saying, "I can tell you this one sure wasn't in the Freewill Baptist Hymnal."

Check back next month to find out how our first movie night went!