Friends Meeting of Washington
Order of Worship
Monthly Meeting for Worship with a Concern for Business
January 2016
Are meetings for worship held in expectant waiting for Divine guidance? Are Friends encouraged to share spiritual insights? Are special gifts of ministry recognized and encouraged?
Do you come to meeting with heart and mind prepared? Are you careful not to disturb the spirit of the meeting by late arrival or in other ways?
Advices
Waiting upon the Holy Spirit in silent expectation and prayer is the basis of our meeting for worship. Vocal ministry should arise out of a sense of being inwardly moved to share a message aloud. Sometimes a message is not ripe yet, or comes clearly but is meant only for the person receiving it, not for the group. Some Friends are led to speak frequently, and others only rarely; yet the timid or brief message of one who seldom speaks may be as moving and helpful as that of a more practiced speaker. The experienced speaker should be watchful not to speak too often or at undue length. No Friend should come to meeting for worship with an intention to speak or not to speak.
The most satisfactory vocal ministry arises out of a leading that is felt in the silence so strongly that it cannot be ignored. It should be delivered with as few words as possible, yet as many as necessary. Vocal prayer offered on behalf of the gathered meeting can also bring us into closer harmony with God. – BYM Faith and Practice
Voices
We recognize a variety of ministries. In our worship these include those who speak under the guidance of the Spirit, and those who receive and uphold the work of the Spirit in silence and prayer. We also recognize as ministry service on our many committees, hospitality and childcare, the care of finance and premises, and many other tasks. We value those whose ministry is not in an appointed task but is in teaching, counselling, listening, prayer, enabling the service of others, or other service in the meeting or the world.
The purpose of all our ministry is to lead us and other people into closer communion with God and to enable us to carry out those tasks which the Spirit lays upon us. – London Yearly Meeting, 1986
Welcome of Visitors
Clerk’s Report
Major items
Nominating
Recorder
Records & Handbook
Semi-annual report on Handbook changes
Milestones
Memorial Minute for Joan Gildemeister
Mohamad Tim Connor
-Marriage & Family Relations, clerk
-second presentation, non-member waiver
Mike Duvall
-Peace & Social Concerns, clerk
-second presentation, non-member waiver
Emily Schmeidler
-Personal Aid, clerk
-second presentation, non-member waiver
Brian Lutenegger
-Property, co-clerk
-second presentation, non-member waiver
Diane White
-Marriage & Family Relations
-second presentation, non-member waiver
Bill Strein
-Personnel
-second presentation, non-member waiver
Chris Wickham
-Records & Handbook
-second presentation, non-member waiver
Resignations:
Todd Harvey
-resignation from Capital Campaign Committee
By year to year count these are the figures for the Meeting’s membership as of December 31, 2015.
The figures: According to our database, there are 303 members and 67 associate members, for a total of 370 members. There are 202 members listed as residents, and 101 listed as nonresidents.
Changes in 2015:
On the plus side, we gained 5 new adult members and 2 associate members. Total gains equals 7.
On the minus side, 3 members died, 3transferred out, and 1 resigned. Total losses equal 7.
Our database continues to tell us that we have 8 Sojourners, a number which hasn’t changed for a while.
Report, Records & Handbook, January 2016
Records & Handbook committee made the following alteration to the Handbook, as requested by Meeting for Business: Section 8: Committee of Clerks. Sentence 2 now reads: "The Committee may co-opt other members."
Records & Handbook is working with Ministry & Worship and Nominating committees to finalize charge of the "Anti-Harassment Task Force."
A Minute for Joan Gildemeister (1926-2015)
It is impossible to portray of the mystery of a human being, so a brief sketch of defining features must suffice. For Joan Gildemeister was a multi-faceted person, to say the least, with a secret introverted side that balanced her very active engagement with life. She had boundless joie de vivre, loved the arts, education, peace and justice causes. She was enriched by countless friendships and was beloved in return.
In 2015 Joan was honored by FMW as an “elder”, a much-deserved salute to a person who was a committed to Quaker values, especially to the peace testimony. During her last duties on the Membership Committee, she noted that new members rarely cited peacemaking as a compelling reason for joining the Friends.
Joan joined FMW in 1980 having been convinced through conversations with Kenneth Boulding. Her embrace of Quakerism and pacifism is evident in her work as a peace psychologist and advocate for peace studies in her late career. She worked with AFSC and FCNL, attended and supported the work of Davis House and William Penn House, participated in the Peace Vigils at Congress, was active in the Nuclear Freeze Movement, and traveled abroad for the cause of Right Sharing of World Resources. Joan was also dedicated to the Friends Wilderness Center, regularly attended Friends General Conference and Friends Conference on Psychology and Religion. And let us remember her for mentoring us in the late 1980s to a better understanding of gay rights that led to an embrace of our same-sex members and to “ceremonies of commitment” under the guidance of FMW.
Beyond Quaker pacifist efforts, she attended peace psychology conferences in the US and around the world, worked with “Peace Child”, and supported the US Peace Memorial Project for a monument in Washington to the peacemakers of America. Interestingly, Joan was not always a pacifist, but ever a progressive and humanitarian. Born in Texas in 1926 to a military family (both her father and paternal grandfather), she lived on military bases during the Depression and WW II. She became an internationalist during her years at Mills College in Oakland and the University of California at Berkeley where she received a Bachelors degree, then a Masters from George Washington University, and later, as a single parent, completed a Doctorate in Early Childhood Education from the University of Maryland at College Park. Soon after graduation from Berkeley in the 1960s, she married and moved to Peru for several years, creating a family of five, two sons and a daughter.
Her dedication to universal brotherhood is evident in many ways: her life-long membership and activity with World Federalists, the United Nations, and the Esperanto movement, a language she mastered and attended conferences around the globe. She read and spoke fluently in German, French, and Spanish, as well as Esperanto. Personally, I have not known anyone who traveled abroad as much as she, often in combination with conferences, visiting Europe innumerable times, especially fancying Ireland and the Low Countries, but also Italy and France where she often stayed with friends, but she also loved Central and Eastern Europe, Hungary and Austria, the Balkans and Russia. Beyond Europe, she traveled in Mexico, the Middle East, in Kenya, and toward the end of her life, India and China, to name a few. One wonders what countries she did not visit.
She was also passionate about social justice, especially the plight of the poor living on the sidewalks of Washington. She was a member of the Hunger and Homelessness Task Force and worked at Miriam’s Kitchen for years, at S.O.M.E., and “gleaned” at the Takoma Park Sunday Market until her debilities prevented her.
Joan was well-educated and well-read and a brilliant conversationalist. She was treasured because she knew so much, in depth, about so many things, never limiting herself but allowing her omnivorous intellect and untethered imagination to roam free. Her library was impressive for the same reasons as it held volumes outside her expertise, throughout the humanities but especially in philosophy and religion, history and sociology, with volumes of prose and poetry in several languages, biographies of writers and memoirs of statesmen and stateswomen. Eleanor Roosevelt was one of her personal heroes.
Joan was also a most cultured and a very contemporary person. All of us love the arts, but for Joan it was a perpetual passion (but then she did everything passionately). To say Joan hosted a kind of open “salon” in her homes in DuPont Circle and Van Ness is not wide the mark. She invited groups of friends to hear, for example, an Orthodox priest discuss the “Prayer of the Heart”, or to see someone’s slides of South Africa, or her own of China, ever ready to share her excellent cooking followed by a poetry reading or musical recital. Her special passions for drama and song lead her to join the Thomas Circle Singers and later to create a Balkan folk group. She also attended theater in the US and abroad, in New York and London, and the Shakespeare Theater, the Folger Theater, the Kennedy Center, and avant-garde drama at the Washington Fringe Festival and Wooly Mammoth. As a modern dancer in college, she also loved dance in all its forms, and all forms of music from Classical to World and Folk to the Contemporary Music Forum. She particularly loved the Christmas Revels at George Washington University and sometimes would drive to Baltimore to hear the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. In character to the end, she had purchased tickets, though handicapped, to attend “The Ring” cycle at the National Opera this spring. Where she found the time and energy for so many diverse activities no one could know.
She also loved painting and sculpture and collected prominent artists in the DC area. Her gallery-like home also displayed rare furniture and icons from Peru, carpets from Asia, and European prints. And though not widely known, she became a fine artist in later age, even copying Old Masters in the National Gallery.
But let us remember Joan first and foremost as an educator. Though she wrote no books, she published many articles in her field and in other areas of interest. She made her mark in the classroom, teaching thousands of undergraduates over a 30-year career, and guiding graduates with theses and dissertations. She was a fountain of knowledge and possessed a compassionate heart for young people. Her greatest concern was the welfare and education of children. She integrated peace studies--the psychology of nonviolence and reconciliation--into her curricula whenever possible. And she supported peace education to the end of her long life. Joan touched the future through so many young lives. In addition to Howard University, where she taught for 20 years, she worked earlier at Sarah Lawrence College, the City College of New York, and St. Lawrence University.
Her work did not end when she retired as a professor in the early 1990s. Unstoppable as ever, she went on into the new career of counseling conducted out of her home. She loved helping people, and as a wounded healer it helped her to heal herself. She mellowed somewhat in later years as she gained a great deal of self-knowledge; one might say she had become wise--an elder, indeed. Joan Gildemeister will be remembered as a good friend and a Good Friend.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons and daughters of God.”