Sermons. Business Meeting. Again.

RantWoman is still collecting accounts of several of the finer Quakerism as telenovela moments of her recent contributions to Meeting life.

The most recent meeting for Business went MUCH Better than a couple previous ones. This could possibly because:

    --Instead of just talking ABOUT RantWoman, between Business Meetings a number a number of people actually talked TO RantWoman and RantWoman decided there is some zone between complete scorn and insistently holding in Light for certain Friends who did not deign to talk even when specifically asked...

   --People who previously sat near RantWoman and tried to shush her at every opportunity sat across the room AND RantWoman supposes sat on their hands.

   --RantWoman forgot to find an eyes elder, someone to feed RantWoman visual feedback that RantWoman herself cannot detect. RantWoman forgot to arrange with someone and wound up deciding just to grab all the calm she could from a nearby elder who is generally so placid that he will not even realize there might be something to be upset about until there are volcanoes and thunderbolts and lightning and sometimes not even then. RantWoman is not sure whether exactly to mean this as a compliment but decided to appreciate the trait anyway.

That was IN Meeting for Business.

Oh, and Worse Auntie, remember Worse Auntie? Band Auntie sets bad examples unintentionally. Worse Auntie says "you're darn right and ....," in this case in email.

Excerpts from RantWoman's efforts, a couple months ago, to prepare for Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business.RantWoman requests forebearance about slight repetitiveness from previous posts

Dear....,

Thinking over your concern about length of vocal ministry during concerns last month some more, a couple thoughts come to mind:

--I think my customer service function is broken. Either that or I need to fire my customer service manager which I am reluctant to do because that leaves only the RantWoman School of Tact and Diplomacy, and not even any God as Personal Butler model to guarantee the desired attention. Anyway, what were you HOPING to hear in response to your observations?

--At this point I hope I have conveyed, among other things:

   --I know from sermons and if God tells me to deliver one, I will deliver it, to the best of my ability interruptions notwithstanding.

   (sundry digressions available as stories from my paternal grandfather, Righteous Reverend ... with a radio show and a job as a Sunday School Missionary doing dog and pony shows for God in some of the finer Wyoming oil country community halls after their Saturday night beer bashes; with MT and WY on my mind for all kinds of reasons.)

  --If someone has an issue about the sermon issue in general or any perticular moment, please help facilitate them talking to me directly. Please DO NOT feel obliged to act as an intermediary or try to decide for me or someone else what needs to be said  / heard.

--A point I have not conveyed because it was on my list to speak of in a group conversation: One person on Care and Counsel keeps telling me I am supposed to "be mindful." I do not think that Friend gets the point that I CANNOT BLEEPING SEE FACES and really would prefer to interact with reactions. More to the point I keep hearing that as "read my mind and deliver only what is palatable and to my taste."

Again, may we all invoke the limited experience with God as personal Butler issue, hold the issue in the Light and consider where we are led from there?

In the Light.

(RantWoman)


And yet again:
I assume from recent conversations that you want me to promise not to speak more than once to an issue, to be brief and on-point.... A couple fast observations:

--If people do not understand, there is ALWAYS the option of questions either by having  recognize or afterward.  In meetings I run, Sometimes we literally cannot go forward until a key thing is clear to participants.

--I am thinking about whether I should just sit behind the clerk and uphold the process and try to say as little as possible. This would mean I would have to get up and move if I really were clear to speak. I did this one session last year at Annual Session. I did it for a whole bunch of reasons and it wound up working brilliantly so... But the speak as little as possible thing, I dunno....

--I will TRY to speak only once per topic.

--If I need to introduce an idea no one else has ever encountered and it takes more than two minutes to explain, what then?

Anyway, all of the efforts to shut RantWoman up assume I also am uninterested in effective meetings and I consider that an inappropriate assumption.

More to the point, I have a history of for example not promising federal judges that I would do something they wanted me to do if the requirements of conscience proved otherwise. In practice, I nearly always succeeded at whatever I was unwilling to make promises about, but ...

In college we had a sit-in about divestment. Lots of students would have been happy just to plead guilty but some friends and I all just said, no great nuanced political analysis at all, "it's dishonest to plead guilty if one does not feel guilty." That position turned out to be really important in how the consequences of the sit-in unfolded but I do not imagine that story is what people will most be clamoring for in Business Meeting. On the other hand, if I think if re-energizing gestures in memory of Extremely Weighty Friend who just passed away...

Knowing all of that, can you perhaps imagine that I am any more willing to promise something I might not be able to do in Business Meeting than in these other situations?

--During concerns, as I said a couple months ago, I know from sermons. If God tells me to deliver a sermon, I will. And I do not care how many clerks and former clerks interrupt me, I consider interruptions during concerns on par with Eye Roller Friend's ministries of audible eye-rolling.
(But RantWoman, you talk about all the accessibility advantages of the ministry of audible eyerolling? Yeah, but since I know the behavior fries everyone else's nerves...)

    I do not particularly fancy myself a Rufus Jones and there would be other threads from the John Woolman reading group about Woolman laboring with... to play with, but do you get my point?

In the Light,

(RantWoman)