Friends of the Princeton Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends at Stony Brook gathered for a period of worship-sharing via Zoom to recollect the past year in the life of the community, celebrating ways in which our community is thriving, and recognizing some challenges we hope to address as we move forward together.
We express gratitude for the Friends who have supported Meeting’s transition to remote worship and business. We note that over the past two years of COVID-related concerns all of Meeting’s activities and events have been handled with care and discernment. We appreciate that remote worship allows distant Friends to connect with us, and we noted how video connections have allowed Friends at a distance to also become part of the life of our Meeting. We remain committed to continuing the use of this technology in the future, as a complement to our in-person fellowship.
Our connections with each other are important and can be vital lifelines for Friends during this time. We celebrate the friendships we share with one another in our community. We look forward to finding additional ways to deepen our relationships, through adult religious education activities and informal fellowship inside and outside of the Meeting.
We express gratitude for our Care and Concerns committee members, who faithfully provide pastoral care and support to our older Friends and others facing hardships. This work is often done discreetly behind the scenes, but we recognize the important role it plays in maintaining the connections between us.
While we do struggle at times to find enough people to serve on our committees, we have been successful in attracting dedicated childcare providers and faithful volunteers who help with food and clean-up for our weekly fellowship.
We are grateful that parents have brought their families to Meeting and we feel it is important to nurture the spiritual journeys of these younger Friends, as well as our older members. We are a relatively large meeting, but many of our older Friends are not involved in the religious life of our children; this is something that we wish to work on going forward. In our Meeting’s past, intergenerational community was nurtured through activities and field trips; perhaps it’s time to bring these traditions back.
The school under our care, Princeton Friends School, has served as a way for seekers to find our Meeting, and the School has graciously extended the use of the School House to us on First Days during this period where we cannot use our own space. We are working closely with the School in finding ways to deepen our relationship and to grow closer together as a Meeting-School community.
We are mindful that we do not yet know the ways in which this pandemic will shape our future lives. We recognize that the impact may be dramatic and we feel that Quaker values speak powerfully to what the world needs now. We believe that we in our Quaker community can be patterns, examples, wherever we come, that our lives may preach among all sorts of people. We celebrate that our community is strong, as we feel there is much work still to be done.
