This is a reflection piece by Gwen Anderson, from Program Committee, the committee responsible for organizing the Annual Gathering.
Coming, as I am, to the beginning of my sixth and final year on Program Committee, I have a particular Program Committee perspective on the Annual Gathering. I’d like to lay that aside for a moment and share my personal reflections of gratitude for the Gathering this past summer in Winnipeg.
Thank you, Yearly Meeting.
Thank you for gathering this summer. For putting daily concerns aside, hitching the wagon (or airplane, or train, or car), and making the journey to seek the ways that are eternal.
Thank you for trusting, year-by-year, that others will make this journey. Almost 90 people registered for the in-person—or “on-land,” as I’ve heard it called recently—and about the same number registered for online.
Thank you for putting your hand in to lift up those rituals of community that create this space we call Yearly Meeting: Celebration of the Spirit in the Lives of Friends (Memorial Meeting), Spirit in our Lives, Meeting for Business, Special Interest Groups. Family night. Thank you for moving toward new ways of being together: the morning Community Gathering; the blended social time for online and on-land friends to come together to just talk.
Thank you every volunteer, who helped and held light.
And thank you staff—Tasmin Rajotte, Holly Spence and now Neda Gholamali—for your diligent, thoughtful, patient, often painstaking, work. For your good ideas and good energy. Tasmin, for your gentle and strong leadership.
Thank you, the Continuing Meeting of Ministry and Counsel: the warp of our weave. The threads of our stability, running through behind the pattern and colour. Thank you for the pre-Gathering retreat, for renewing the practice of holding the Meeting during Meetings for Business, for your steady presence. Many wagons travelled far to reach the Gathering this summer, and CMM&C’s particularly, came from the far east and west edges of the country.
Thank you speakers. John Samson Fellows, our SPG lecturer. Transformation is practise and faith. Fold the cup, unfold your heart. Geoff Garver, our Quaker Studies Leader. For your three-day series Peace on Earth, Peace with Earth. You took us through the evolution of the Quaker Peace testimony and shared your family’s stories conscientious objection and war survival, and your own story of ecological awakening and bearing witness to peace. If there’s ever a chance I can get into a university course of yours! Evan Welkin, Executive Secretary of Friends World Committee for Consultation, come purposefully to make connection with us, sharing personal stories of transformation.
Thank you Canadian Friends Service Committee, for the beading lesson and the lessons in taking chances and breaking rules. For being our confidence.
Thank you, the Children and Youth Program: Nathalie, Kate, Marilyn, and your army of helpers. Thanks for creating an enduring space for the young ones in this time. Now, they come together as community at Camp NeeKauNis within the Gathering even in the years the Gathering meets only online. Oh, I hope we take it up—this place you’ve created—into all our hands and carry it forward.
Thank you parents and grandparents who loaded your wagons particularly so, to bring your children. Thank you for the lesson in faith. I think and hope we held the youth tenderly. I like to think that wherever they go now, they’ll take us with them, somewhere deep in there.
Thank you Clerks, for your leadership. For building a solid Table. For the many lessons in how to love your Meeting. Thank you new clerks for signing on. And particularly thank you Marilyn, Ruth and Celia for seeing us through those years.
Thank you Program Committee, for your tireless work and good hearts. For loving Spirit. Thanks Shelia for the Program Committee Manual. Thanks Alarna McKie of Toronto Monthly Meeting—not of Program Committee—for coming alongside, and running the technical end of our hybrid Gathering; for your good skill and loving way in the world of wires. Thanks to past Program Committees who bore us over the Covid and delivered us to online. Thanks Barbara, for stepping up in 2023 to steady a foundering committee and, like the Clerk, the many lessons in how to love your Meeting.
Well. There are many more: the online community, Michelle Tolley the CYM Archivist for making the reception area an inviting and interesting place, all at the Canadian Mennonite University who hosted us….more, and more. If I haven’t named you, be sure that in these weeks after Gathering you’ve been in my heart.
Next year is all online. We hitch our wagons in a different way, but same-same: we put aside daily tasks and seek those who seek to know one another in the things that are eternal. See you then.
Gwen Anderson
Winnipeg MM
Program Committee 2022- 2027
