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William Penn

Britannica

“Remember that love is a gift of the Divine, not simply a human emotion.

As imperfect human beings we are not always able to feel loving toward one another, but by opening ourselves to the Light Within, we can receive and give love beyond our human capacity.”

~ (Advices and Queries for Friends from Faith & Practice)

I had an opportunity to sit with your Meeting’s 2024 State of Society report this morning.  I left that time with a sense of Concord’s meeting community as centered and worshipful —leaning into each other for support and understanding.  Your recognition of the relevance of our message in these present times resonated with me  strongly , and it was wonderful to hear of your “firm conviction” of the relevance of our message to the world today.

I hope some Friends will be able to join together with other New England Friends of June 21^st, 2025 at Hartford Monthly Meeting for the third annual Meeting for Listening [2].

Thank you for the work you do, and for sharing it with Friends across New England.

Quakers for Peace in Palestine and Israel would like to bring your attention to an important workshop sponsored by the Quaker Coalition for Uprooting Racism (QCUR).  The free, half-day workshop will be held on Zoom on May 10th from 1-5 p.m. ET.  The workshop will have time for connection, community, worship, and a training on anti-racist power-mapping.  Power-mapping is an interactive, strategic tool for identifying and analyzing where and how power is being held and used around a specific issue.  It allows groups to develop effective strategies for leveraging power to make constructive change.  There will also be time for Friends working on the same issue or working in the same region to connect and apply the training to their social justice change work.

More information about the event can be found here: https://pendlehill.org/events/quaker-coalition-for-uprooting-racism-anti-racist-power-mapping-workshop/ [4]

Registration here: https://lu.ma/QCURPower [5]

We encourage Meetings, schools, and organizations to join together in person to Zoom in to the workshop.  Please share this with all your Quaker networks.

The Quaker Coalition for Uprooting Racism is a coalition of six Quaker organizations and Friends who are working together to accelerate the movement for, and capacity to create, racial justice among (and beyond) Friends through the creation of the Quakers Uprooting Racism community of practice program– racial justice changemakers learning and experimenting with actions together.  The QCUR website is https://www.fgcquaker.org/fgcprograms/ministry-on-racism/qcur/ [6].

(This will familiarize anyone interested in volunteering.  No commitment is required.  To date there have been no requests for sanctuary at this time).

The Sanctuary Asylum Committee of the Manchester UU Church continues to seek volunteers for day and overnight on-premise shifts to ensure 24-hour coverage when the church has a sanctuary guest in residence.  Currently there are 8 volunteers for overnight shifts and 18 for daytime shifts.  If you want to volunteer or have already volunteered and want to attend the next orientation session, please contact Liz Alcauskas (lizalcauskas [at] gmail [dot] com) or Curt Smith (blueskies3 [at] comcast [dot] net).

The next Sanctuary Asylum Volunteer Orientation is Saturday, May 17^th, 9:30 am to Noon, at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 669 Union Street, Manchester, NH.  No commitment is required.  To date there have been no requests for sanctuary.

Friends might enjoy learning about how Israelis and Palestinians have worked together for peace and understanding over the years.  The group Combatants for Peace was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Not in My Name NH invites you to a film and discussion at Red River Theatre in Concord, NH, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, at 6:30 p.m.

FGC’s mission is to strengthen the Religious Society of Friends.  The 2024 Impact Report  [9]reflects back on a year of doing just that. Thank you for helping create resilient community with powerful Gatherings, retreats, worship and connections.

Enjoy stories and examples of how your support helps nurture a more inclusive, multi-generational, multi-cultural, and actively anti-racist faith community.  Thank you for reading and sharing it with others, and thank you for supporting FGC.

These are times of profound instability, fear, and suffering.  Holding our world and Friends across our region in prayer, we write to you to offer further context and information about communications you may have received regarding holding New England Yearly Meeting Sessions 2025 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Friends and meetings across our region are heartbroken and experiencing deep moral distress in response to the ongoing and profound suffering of the people of Gaza, and for the seemingly unending hardships caused by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  For many years, the Yearly Meeting, through various means and the work of many Friends, has encouraged meetings to seek to understand how they might be led to act for a just peace in the region.  In our anguish, God’s guidance and power can sustain us as we seek to acknowledge our government’s complicity in these evils, and to be instruments of peace in whatever ways we may be given.  A partial list of commitments, actions, and resources to support Friends in this ongoing witness may be found on the Yearly Meeting website here [12].

In the past few weeks, many meetings have received letters from the monthly meetings of Northeast Kingdom (VT) Quakers and Midcoast (ME) Friends. We hear the anguish expressed.  We have received questions and requests for more information.  We hope what we share here will respond to these requests for clarity. 

Following an extensive search for sites that could host our Annual Sessions, the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts emerged as the only site that could meet the many access needs of Friends of all ages in 2025.

After this process had been completed and approved, Northeast Kingdom Quakers wrote a letter raising concerns about the treatment of demonstrators on the UMass Amherst campus the year before.  Upon receiving this letter, the Presiding Clerk and Secretary responded, acknowledging the depth of Northeast Kingdom’s objections and offering opportunities to address these concerns.  In early January, the presiding clerk of the Yearly Meeting spoke at length with the clerk of Northeast Kingdom Friends.  The Yearly Meeting Secretary met via Zoom in an extended open meeting with Northeast Kingdom Friends.  In both communications, possible ways were offered to address these objections, including: holding education workshops during Sessions, meeting with the University Chancellor to work on preventing future such actions, meeting with the campus police, and using the University's actions to inform our decision-making for future events.

What the Secretary could not offer was to cancel in-person Sessions for 2025—there were no other viable sites for the coming year.

Friends from Northeast Kingdom were clear that a commitment to engaging with the university and working for change would not satisfy their concerns.  We are saddened by this.  We know that there are many Friends among us with multi-layered and long-term relationships with the University of Massachusetts, and we hold them in loving concern as well.  As you consider these matters, we urge you to remember the power and possibility of working with people with whom we disagree.

Let us take care to guard against the adversarial, separating energy that is sowing such pain in our wider society, and not to allow it to undermine our long tradition of laboring together across differences.  May we find ways to continue to walk with each other and our neighbors as fellow children of God in this time.  

The vigil for a ceasefire in Gaza continues every Thursday from Noon-1 p.m.  The vigil meets at (the northwest corner of) North Main Street and Park Street in Concord) [14] on the plaza in front of the State House.  Make your own sign, use one provided, or just stand in silent witness beside others.  This is coordinated by NH Peace Action.  We suggest that people make signs that convey something about justice for Israel and Palestine.

There are other online Meetings for Worship that are generally available to Quakers, unlimited by geography, if that would be of interest. Some of those are listed here.