At our regular monthly business meeting on February 11, 2024, members of Princeton Monthly Meeting of Friends at Stony Brook discussed the Spiritual State of our Meeting. Inevitably, a dominant background theme was an overwhelming sense of joy and gratitude at having emerged from several difficult years with renewed confidence that our Meeting is healthy and thriving.
The pandemic years were difficult for us, as they surely were for most other Meetings. Our own difficulties were compounded by the near demise of our essential secondary building, and by an arson-induced fire on April 3, 2023 that destroyed the front porch and caused smoke damage inside our historic 1726 Meetinghouse.
At the end of 2023 we completed an eighteen-month project to completely renovate what we are now calling “Friendship House,” the building that serves our needs for child care, religious education, after-worship fellowship, committee meetings, receptions, office space, a library, and other important functions of an active Quaker Meeting. Work on restoring the front porch is now well underway.
At our February 11 gathering we gave thanks that our regular attendance is back up to near pre-pandemic levels. First-Day School and Child Care activities have been restarted. We have welcomed some new members and attenders who are bringing new strengths and new ministries to our meetings for worship. One member in particular gave thanks for how the power of the Spirit present in collective worship had helped to relieve the weariness and helplessness of illness. We remarked on the realization that our membership has a healthy and beneficial age distribution that helps strengthen our spiritual vitality. We encouraged our enthusiastic and knowledgeable History Committee to continue its work on preserving and displaying artefacts of our Meeting’s development over more than three centuries, and providing accurate input about dominant Quaker presence in the area, for a historical tourism pamphlet about the adjoining Princeton Battlefield Park.
