Huntingdon Meeting remains small and relatively stable. With only two attending members and three fairly regularly attending non-members, our worship is enriching if perhaps a little too predictable. We are all near or past retirement age, and have not mounted a religious education program either for youth or for our adult attenders in a very long time. We entirely lack committee structure nor do we hold a regular Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business.
We take inspiration from our being together, from our long lives of experience as well as from our experiences of recent weeks. On cold days, when we can justify a fire in the fireplace, we often draw metaphor and message from the dancing flames and glowing embers.
Friends of our Meeting have strong and distinct individual interests and carry their concerns actively into the broader community, whether that be through environmental stewardship, prison work, the making and sharing of Peace Pals, concerns for our relationship with animals, efforts to provide arts enrichment activities within our community, or simply in discussion of the challenges of the world among the non-Friends with whom we regularly interact. We are comfortable speaking of our leadings to one another, but do not attempt to coordinate our effort.
We draw encouragement and enrichment through our interactions with Friends from the breadth of our Quarter. The Meeting has annually played host to one of Upper Susquehanna Quarter’s Creative Hands gatherings, which brings us into worship, fellowship, and shared effort on an outreach project, with a congenial group of persons from across the Quarter. And some of us have regularly participated in and assisted with the planning of the annual family retreat and Quarterly Meeting of Upper Susquehanna Quarter at Camp Crystal Lake.
Our relationship with the Yearly Meeting is weak, in part a function of distance, in part due to our knowing few Quakers in the Philadelphia orbit (nor being known by many such Friends), in part because of our small size and sense that our concerns are not the concerns of Meetings closer to the Philadelphia hub, and also, by our sense that our efforts toward building and supporting community and a more peaceable kingdom must be invested closer to home.
The Meeting is fortunate to have a place in which we can regularly hold Meeting for Worship and blessed to have people in attendance who are spiritually seasoned and yet still seeking. However, our small size and the advanced age of our group both suggest that there will come a time when Huntingdon Meeting must be laid down. While we would be pleased to attract new attenders, our record of doing so is poor and we lack the kind of support within our Meeting which would make the Meeting attractive to younger families.
Drafted by Larry Mutti, Recording Clerk and wearer of many other hats in the Meeting
