Time is upon us for generating our Meeting's annual State of Society report. Unfortunately, dyspeptic dissension has broken out among our ranks of Quaker epistle writers and a horde of bedbugs has managed a divide and conquer takeover of the process. This is a first draft of their effort. PLEASE note: this is a DRAFT. RantWoman is pretty certain that her Meeting's official bonafide State of the Meeting report will have almost nothing in common with this offering. RantWoman is also unsure to what she should attribute her unusual capacity to commune with the co-authors. As with any translation, RantWoman supposes it is only sporting to acknowledge possible responsibility for all errors in transmission and transcription.
(RantWoman aside: The entire Puget Sound region has been overtaken by a veritable Biblical plague of bedbugs or at least the need to talk about bedbugs. RantWoman spends a lot of time outside her Meeting talking about Bedbugs. RantWoman finds a certain testimony on equality / single standard of Truth integrity about this reality. RantWoman's Meeting, like many places in our fair city has been spending A LOT of time talking about and dealing with bedbugs.
RantWoman notes two points: First, the difference between faith communities who house SHARE shelters AND have bedbugs as compared to houses of worship with SHARE shelters who do not have bedbugs seems to boil down to whether or not the church has bathing and washing facilities. Our Meeting is among the churches who DO have bedbugs and do NOT have bathing / washing facilities. The professional bedbug wranglers also regularly remind us, our Meeting also has, basically, bedbug high-rises in the form of carpeted acoustic tile on our walls to enhance our silence. Second, the year-long battle of the bedbug has included regular detection and elimination efforts. RantWoman is unsure whether anyone in Meeting has actually been munched on by bedbugs. But if they had...)
To all Friends Everywhere.
Warm greetings from soggy Seattle. We hope this epistle finds Friends and Bedbugs alike firm in the Light, aglow in the searching Light of God.
We the bedbugs at University Friends Meeting have endured a year of being snurfled at by That Dog, alternately blasted out of bedding with high heat and gassed with vile poison, but we have stood firm in the Lord / Holy Spirit / Eternal Light. Out of gratitude, we have taken it upon ourselves to inform the world as to the State of Society, at least in our vicinity.
This year featured much spirit-centered discussion of stewardship. The Remodel Committee has finished the remodel of the Meetinghouse. Members of Meeting think it looks wonderful. We miss having all the extra contractors around to chew on.
We especially wish to thank Oversight committee and the sex offenders of our community for ensuring that the Meetinghouse is filled with warm bodies attending a threshing session, a Q&A, a presentation by someone from the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center, and lots of business meetings. Sex offender discussions fill everyone with stress hormones even when there are powerful stories and important awareness. This is not necessarily our favorite flavor of the month but we guess it's better for the community as a whole to try to share the burdens. We appreciate how the general conversation MOST of the time moderates truly stratospheric levels of stress hormones that we find sometimes when we much into isolated individuals.
We also find the stress hormones preferable to the hunger enzymes people were emitting in the months of May, June, August, October, January, February, and April. Those months featured the zillionth, zillion-first and so on discussions of RantWoman and Worship and Ministry Committee. RantWoman and her Meeting most assuredly are NOT getting each other's memos right now. We wish we could tell the difference between worship and ministry with RantWoman and Worship and Ministry without RantWoman but sooner or later we get lunch either way.
We have been in extensive negotiations with Finance Committee. Finance Committee peculiarly thinks we should pay rent. We are budget-conscious bedbugs of modest means, with nowhere near the cash swirling around us that some of those tony bedbugs at the big hotels downtown have.
Peace and Social Concerns held a retreat and work party devoted to Equality in November. To be honest, we find it easier to find lunch when everyone is all crammed into close quarters. If the dining is good with the 99% who cares about the 1% who get away? We also increased our numbers because of Friends' visits to the Occupy Seattle camp, but we thank Peace and Social Concerns for blessing us all with a Minute for the occasion.
Personnel Committee is really not our favorites just now. For some reason they think we should just leave the staff ALONE. We believe in that of Lunch in everyone.
Education Committee is proud to have a decent number of children afoot. People tend to get kind of upset when we nibble on children: we even had to kick a few bugs out over the problem! But more children guarantees more adults, just having a good number of kids around keeps the adults tastier.
Adult Religious Education committee held its annual Dark Time of the Year interaction with Death and Dying. Frankly we are bedbugs, not maggots. We need to drink from living waters and we are very glad to let the maggots handle Death.
We thank Friends very much for the boxing day meet and greet during all the severe weather over the Christmas holidays. We really appreciate more time with all our tasty hosts.
We were also honored to be able to donate fiber materials to the annual vision collage-making on New Years Day.
The bunch that were reading Barclay's Apology finally reached their goalposts in August. Barclay flavored hosts just were not doing it for us; we are reserving judgment about how John Woolman's journal is going to affect the tastes of the new bunch.
In February many of us gratefully attended the New Bedbugs Potluck. Some of us also piled into the cars headed down to Olympia for Quaker Lobby Day. We thank the Friends Committee for WA Public Policy for opportunities to develop personal relationships with the people who represent districts Friends live in.
In March we helped Arts Committee stage a Bedbug Revue. We did a lot of song and dance and were joined by other performers for a hoedown to benefit homeless bedbugs.
In April we held a rousing send-off for Friends travelling to the World Gathering of Friends in Kenya. We particularly gave the travellers a travelling minute we hope they will present to any sister and brother bedbugs they meet in the course of their travels.
Again warm good wishes to all. May God bless and keep you throughout the coming year--even if you insist on speaking of Him / Her / ... in some other terms.
In the Light,
The Bedbugs of UFM.
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