What if Dr. Phil came to Business Meeting?
Item: RantWoman is getting herself to Meeting for Worship on time, despite recent brutal kinks in her Sunday bus schedule.
Dr. Phil: "How's that working out for you?"
Let's just say RantWoman watched a flock of late-comers, quite a number of whom come in cars, take their seats and ALMOST succumbed to an urge for mass eldering along the lines of "RantWoman can get herself here on time on the BUS. You all in your cars have no darn excuse for not getting your sorry behinds in gear in time." Let's just say, RantWoman was still seasoning this message when it was time for Meeting for Business.
Item: Meeting for Worship for Business opened with a reading about Quaker process: accessible, self-disclosing and transmissible, not on an ordinary secular timeline. RantWoman's reality check reflex kicked in; RantWoman can handle the possibility that Friends aspire to this, but today the reading just peculiarly evoked RantWoman's disaster prep and quiescent swine flu attentions and foreshadowed lunch conversation about said pandemic and PICU's full of sick kids.
Dr. Phil: "How's that working out for you?"
Don't Friends ever have to evacuate buildings quickly??? What about focussed timely response to global warming???? RantWoman is all for shared spiritual journeys, openness to unexpected guidance from the Divine, and laboring together under guidance of Spirit, but RantWoman can at least fathom the possibility that the Divine gets the divine act together a lot sooner than Quakers sometimes get their collective presence in the way of the right leadings. RantWoman is contemplating what if anything she can do to contribute to Friends getting in the way of the right leadings a little faster. Somehow she suspects more practicing scales might be involved. Ugh!
On further swine flu threads, RantWoman does not care how much hand sanitizer one spreads around. It's cold and flu season. RantWoman would genuinely prefer hot soup served by proper utensils rather than finger food for "Light Lunch." Alas, RantWoman now gets to follow up some email with further phone seasoning about a whole host of issues related to our Meeting's current practice of
1. Starting Meeting for Business at 11:30 after 1/2 an hour of our regular 11:00 worship hour
2. Breaking for lunch after an hour, telling the staffperson who usually prepares our bimonthly light lunch that those telling her want finger food not hot items, supposedly to save cleanup, and then returning to Meeting for Business.
RantWoman is REALLY not crazy about shorting our usual Meeting for Worship for Meeting for Worship for Business. RantWoman finds the current hurried lunch schedule both unfair to reasonable appreciation of what we eat and inimical to the kind of community interactions we HAVE to have somehow if we are actually going to connect after all that sitting together silently in expectant waiting. In fact, in case dear readers cannot tell, RantWoman is also about judicious and mindful use of time in all its different segments.
The current timing practice DOES result in better-centered Meeting for Business and people are even staying when they could first leave and coming back after lunch. But this still leaves the same problem RantWoman's meeting has historically had about how to handle timing and cleanup. If RantWoman were not still subjecting Dear Friend to / subject to Dear Friend's spirit-led discernment, she would have carte blanche to assist others on the topical committee in seasoning these problems. For the time being, RantWoman seems to be released to whine about the problem without so much expectation that she participate in some steps of solving it. Is RantWoman supposed to count her blessings here?
Item: Next, after Meeting for Business returns to worshipDear Friend offered sung ministry.
Dr. Phil: "How's that working out for you?"
Usually he sings better than that. RantWoman will pointedly NOT offer further comment, not even if people beg and grovel. Use your own darn imaginations.
Item: An announcement is made early in Business Meeting that last month's question will not come before Business Meeting this month. the Friend who is known for rolling his eyes in Meeting for Worship loudly enough to disrupt worship for people clear across the roomand clearing his throat worse than someone who has just drunk a gallon of milk came to Business Meeting. Historically, Dear Friend has been the person to elder Mr. Eye Roller. Of course the eye-rolling started the minute Dear Friend offered vocal ministry and again upon this news.
Dr. Phil: How's that working out for you?
For all the sense outside observers have been offered of the Nom Comm Situation, RantWoman would forgive anyone for wondering why there are not eyeballs rolling all around the room. Not that RantWoman can in fact tell without sound effects whose eyeballs are being rolled. Think of the sound effects as an accessibility feature?
Does RantWoman think rolling one's eyes as thundrously as Friend Eye Roller does reflects good, grounded, disciplined worship practice? Oh heck no! Friend Eye Roller is cheerfully impervious both to eldering and to ways to better explore and give voice to some occasionally incisive insights behind the eyerolling! Does RantWoman have any better clue this week than last week or last month or last year what might reach Friend Eye Roller? Also no. Friend Eye Roller desparately needs to belong. He also might benefit from connecting with a compatible female. RantWoman does the very best she can to help about the former; the latter is COMPLETELY beyond RantWoman's light.
Item: Other items of business transpire. RantWoman notes that Dear Friend volunteers to collaborate with someone who frequently comes up in conversation with RantWoman. If Dear Friend had not volunteered for this role, RantWoman was about to.
Dr. Phil: "How's that working out for you?"
Stay tuned.
Lunch occurs. RantWoman has grumbles and has to be grateful to have exactly the grumbles she has. She still has grumbles.
Item: the minutes of last month's Meeting for Business are reviewed. There is a whole section on a scale worthy of War and Peace about the part of the discussion neither Dear Friend nor RantWoman were present for.
Dr. Phil: "How's that working out for you?"
RantWoman has already had extensive discussion with the Clerk and Recording clerk and clerk of Nom Comm about these minutes. RantWoman would have preferred either using both her and Dear Friend's names or neither. RantWoman did not have capacity to find some rationale in Quaker past for this view. The clerk of Nom Comm send around an excerpt from one probably out-of-print pamphlet about the work of Recording clerks in translation of raw language into better seeking. RantWoman cannot tell whether the minutes benefited from interaction with this passage. In the end the clerk and recording clerk used only RantWoman's name. RantWoman supposes she COULD have had a long process exercise about this. For the time being RantWoman is merely parking the point with an eye, based also on threads of this past month's emails to another thread to be touched below.
RantWoman also noted in her email exchange, the tone of the minutes reminded RantWoman of a class she took in college. The class was one of a basket of choices related to Ethics and Engineering in the engineering school; humanities majors like RantWoman sometimes took the course out of interest and also provided valuable intercultural broadening of perspective. RantWoman notes resonance here with quirkiness cited in the minutes. If you've got it, flaunt it?
RantWoman was a little perplexed when she went to pick up her final paper for the class. The professor thought the paper was not great (he was right) but RantWoman got an A anyway because she asked so many questions that everyone else in the class got their paper topics from her questions. RantWoman guessed she was supposed to be flattered but the info did not really help her figure out how to write better papers.
In the case of the minutes, RantWoman completely unabashedly concurs both with Dear Friend's thought that they are not entirely on point and with the Friend who thought the section about RantWoman is at least three times too long. RantWoman also thinks the text in question was partly seasoning the wrong question, nothing like the ones RantWoman has been trying to interact with in terms of what sense she has been able to make of Dear Friend's interventions. RantWoman did not discern a strong leading to channel Dear Friend and have public exercise about the minutes. RantWoman also did not argue vigorously with the assertion that having a long exercise in two-month-old minutes will somehow be helpful in discernment we all promise next month. It's not that these points are unimportant to RantWoman; it's just that RantWoman suspects their relative importance will be reflected other ways in terms of whether people ever refer to them or not and has opted to trust in divine guidance as future readers may be lead to interpret them.
Final item: Dear Friend is clerk of another committee now. The last month's emails have generated a number of thoughts about things that might intersect with the work of that committee. Think Business Meeting nuts and bolts, minutes, ....
Dr. Phil: "How's that working out for you?"
Let's just say RantWoman and Dear Friend had better come out of a clearness process able to work together because otherwise RantWoman is going to have no darn leading, none at all to work on some topics that seem darned important in the life of the community. RantWoman is wondering what this means about what else she is supposed to want out of a clearness process.
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