Message given as New England Yearly Meeting Secretary at NEYM Annual Sessions, August 2, 2025

I want to speak about convincement, about becoming implicated in each other’s faithfulness, and about our Testimony. I want to speak about living in the Life and Power. Some of what I share may be difficult to hear, but these are difficult times. I trust with all my heart that we are eternally held, and pray that our Guide will help us hear whatever we need to hear. 

Almost 20 years ago now, I spent five years of my life engaged in a ministry of humanitarian aid, advocacy, and peace activism in support of people internally displaced or made refugees as a result of the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, its precursors, and its devastating aftermath.

In those years, I encountered daily, with visceral intensity, the evidence of what the weapons of war do to human families, to the human body, to human hearts and souls. Working alongside a group of Iraqi, Palestinian, and American activists, we sought to partner with efforts to find vitally needed support for people in need of significant and often lifesaving medical care. 

When not in the Middle East and West Asia, through the support of several US-based organizations, I had the opportunity to travel across the United States, telling stories, with permission, that some of the people I had worked with had trusted me to share. They were stories of profound suffering, abandonment, shattered hopes, broken lives. Stories that would defy comprehension, if they weren’t true. 

They remain with me still, etched in memory. A man my age paralyzed by a fall from his roof caused by the concussive impact of bombs falling on his neighborhood. A young woman learning to live with unremovable shrapnel in her body, the only survivor of a missile’s destruction of her whole house and family, including her baby daughter. A 6-year-old boy burned from head to toe by an explosion caused by a U.S. Marine raid on the camp where he and his family had taken shelter from sectarian violence. A woman’s face burned by acid, part of attacks by sectarian militias who had been armed and empowered by the U.S. occupation forces. Their trust in me, and their yearning for their stories to be shared with a world seemingly or willfully oblivious to the hell they were living, spurred me on. 

In those days, I was mostly fueled by anger. It drove me. I remember how it felt to bear witness, face to face, to the stories and the experiences like these I have just shared. The weight of that burden. Maybe some of you have felt a burden like that, in your own context. Perhaps some of you are feeling that kind of burden here and now.

Sometimes, the only relief that I could feel was when I was speaking to a group of people in the United States, and I realized that the pain that I had shared had brought tears. Knowing that I had disturbed people’s hearts, that they had felt in some small way the pain of those whose stories I carried, that I had made them hurt. Anger is an insufficient word for how I lived my days. So is guilt. So is obsession. 

In 2008, I was in Syria, in a neighborhood that was later reduced to rubble in the Syrian civil war to come. 

I’ll always remember the words. “He wants to meet you.” For weeks, we had been hearing stories about a man who had suffered profoundly, unspeakably. People said we should speak with him, but his location was a secret, out of fear of retribution given what he had been through; Syria was an uneasy refuge for those fleeing violence and chaos in Iraq in those days. 

But now we had been approached with an invitation. To meet with this man, to drink tea, and to hear his story. One of the man’s companions led us to the place, through the winding streets of the Old City of Damascus. 

The man was seated and waiting for us. After the tea was poured, he began to tell his story.

He was an Iraqi Christian, he said, part of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. His ancestors had lived in Iraq for centuries, largely peacefully with their neighbors of all faiths.

But when the war came, and the chaos followed it, ethnic and religious minorities began to be increasingly targeted by rival sectarian militias, groups intent on creating polarization, mutual distrust and division, and fear, leading to ethnic cleansing.

He told me how a gang of men with their faces covered with black masks dragged him from his bed into the street. They took him to the basement of a now-empty house somewhere he didn’t recognize. And there, in that cellar, they tortured him. Not for any action he had taken, but simply because of his religious identity, and to serve as a warning to others. And then, in sacrilegious mockery of his most deeply held faith, they ended that night of horror by hanging him on the basement wall. They crucified him. And they left him to die.

With whatever partial consciousness he had remaining, he prayed. He prayed that God would free him from this suffering, even if it meant helping the end come soon so that he wouldn’t have to endure the pain and humiliation any longer. He prayed that Jesus would save him from the evil that had been unleashed among his neighbors and in his country, that Jesus would save his country.

It was then, he said, that the miracle happened. He said that he saw an image of Christ, bearing the same wounds he bore, coming toward him amidst the shadows and desperation. But, he said—and this he said was important—this Presence didn’t take away his suffering. The One he experienced as Christ didn’t take him down from where his broken body was hanging.

Instead, as he described his experience, the Presence of the Living Christ joined him in his darkness and desperation, climbing up to accompany him where he was hanging on the wall to share with him completely in his suffering and misery and grief and yearning for justice. And in that moment—though time seemed to fade away—he told me that he felt an all-embracing sense of peace, an overflowing of a profound joy. And then, everything went dark.

When he awoke, he realized that he had been thrown in a vast garbage heap, left for dead. And somehow, through step by grace-filled step, he was given the strength to escape the neighborhood, the city, the country. With help from Muslim friends, he crossed the border into Syria, was found again by caring people there, and offered this place to live, and to heal. 

As he finished his story, my hands were shaking—with rage, despair, and powerlessness. It was as if all the burdens that I had been carrying in those years, all of the horror and the anguish of the evil of which we are capable as humans broke like a dam in my head and heart. I was unable to speak, maybe even to think. For a long time, I couldn’t lift my head to reach his eyes. 

And then he spoke again: “Wait, my friend. This is why I wanted to meet you. This is what I wanted to tell you, this is what I believe you need to know, and what I want you to share—Did you hear that He came? And do you see that I am Alive?” His eyes, I now saw, were shining. And his face was radiant with light and joy.      

In that moment, I suddenly understood that he had called me there not for him, but for me, and all whose hearts might be opened by his testimony. The story he had called me there to hear was not—at its heart—the story of an encounter with evil, but of an encounter with the power of being met by the peace that the world cannot give, and brought home into the transforming power of God. It was a story of Life triumphing over death, a narrative outpost in enemy-occupied territory, a breaking in of divine Love restoring human dignity and personhood in a parched wasteland of despair. And this was the story to which he had called me to bear witness—through sharing this experience in his life, and, if I chose it, in my own living as well. 

Friends speak about moments of conviction in our spiritual lives, when we come to see the condition of our hearts and souls with a clarity and starkness that offers an almost irresistible invitation—even a crying need—to change and grow. This encounter was such a moment for me. 

I came to see that, in my quest for justice, and even in my yearning and advocacy and organizing for peace, I had so often been bearing witness not to the Life and Power, but to the power of anguish, tragedy, terror, and evil. I had been preaching what could be called a “gospel” of despair. There was no “good news,” only more anger, more struggle, more relentless fighting to assuage my conscience and keep the nightmares at bay. And in this way of living, there was no invitation to another kind of Life. I was sunk down in the ocean of darkness and death; the ocean of Light and Love seemed like a fantasy.  

I realized then, with a shudder that swept my whole body, that I was in the tendering presence of a human being who had come to live in the Life and Power. And in this encounter, the cords that bound about my heart began to loosen. The burden I had been carrying, and the way I believed I had to carry it—with anger, desperation, and the need to control, to fix and save—began to change. And in the breaking of my heart, a living stream of joy began to flow—slowly at first, then growing, as I attended to it, to be of service in ministry. It had been there all the time, waiting. And in the many years since, while I have often been distracted, denied it, dishonored it, or suppressed it, I know that it has never stopped flowing. 

“Living in the Life and Power.”  George Fox, one of the founders of the Religious Society of Friends, used these words to describe his experience of the inward reshaping of his heart that made him unable to engage with outward weapons in the warfare and social turmoil so rampant in the bloody times in which he lived, and in which the Quaker movement was born. 

Reflecting on a meeting with recruiters for one of the armies who claimed that they were fighting for justice, liberation, and the Kingdom of God, who had seen his gifts of leadership and were seeking to give him a military commission to command soldiers in battle, he wrote in his journal,

“I told them that I lived in the virtue of that Life and Power that takes away the occasion of all wars and strife … I told them that I had come into the covenant of peace, which was before all wars and strivings were.

This testimony to a direct experience of the Spirit at work in a life, and in the lives of those around that person, has been at the heart of what Friends have called “testimony”—the ways in which the liberation and repatterning of our hearts, and the actions arising and patterned by that freedom and joy, bear witness to the Truth, as Friends have used that word, to describe not a set of principles or list of rules or a catchy acronym, but a relationship—that is, a relationship and journey with the Spirit, present and active, at work in our world, within, among, and through all whose hearts are willing. 

We can help remind each other, when we inevitably forget or get distracted or confused or frustrated. Our meetings’ rhythms of common life are intended for that purpose. In our own Faith & Practice, that trusted handbook on this pilgrimage together, the query for the twelfth month that is read in many of our local meetings for worship, including my own in Vermont, reads:

“Do you live in the virtue of that Life and Power that takes away the occasion of all wars? …when discouraged, do you remember that Jesus said, “Peace is my parting gift to you, my own peace, such as the world cannot give. Set your troubled hearts at rest, and banish your fears.” – John 14:27 (from F&P 1985, pg. 147)

Queries such as this are designed to help us reflect as a worshipping community on what is most essential in our living tradition, and how it shapes our living. Because this is the essential part: Friends have found that this seeking, this abiding, this growing and testing and acting in the Spirit, is a pilgrimage on which we need accompaniment. Some of us are given frequent or overwhelming experiences of this spiritual reality, others only glimpses. For some of us, our experience has yet to reflect the words we hear about worship, about leading, about living in relationship with this tender, unshakeable, and infinite Love Who seeks us. And that is why we need each other. As my friend in Syria was for me in that moment of conviction, we are called to present to one another, to help unbind each other’s hearts. 

I have spoken about joy, and I want to take care not to be understood to glorify suffering or urge passivity, or to suggest that mere “happiness” is an antidote or a thin bandage that we should cultivate to cover over the very present manifestations of humans’ capacity for evil—in these times, or in any. These platitudes are the story our society is selling all around us. I am speaking about something different when I speak about this kind of joy. 

New England Friend and minister Elise Boulding gives words to this difference with clarity and power:

For the real difference between happiness and joy is that one is grounded in this world, the other in eternity. Happiness cannot encompass suffering and evil. Joy can. Happiness depends on the present. Joy leaps into the future and triumphantly creates a new present out of it. It is a fruit of the spirit, a gift of God—no one can own it … Joy is the ultimate liberation of the human spirit. It enables the human being to travel to the very gates of heaven and to the depths of hell, and never cease rejoicing.

These are times of terror, of scattering, of collapse, when evil masquerades as truth, and despair is crouching at the threshold. When corruption seems ascendant, and mercy is outlawed by human authorities. Yet they are also times of healing, of remembering, of new vision, of weaving and reweaving the threads of covenant community in ways more resilient, more authentic, more willing to invite and share our testimony to the Life and Power in which we have covenanted to travel on this adventure of faith. 

The Religious Society of Friends, our local meetings, were never meant to be places for the welcoming, respectful practice of hyper-individualism. The discovery and nurture of these fellowships, centered in worship, was always intended to help Friends gather and be gathered by the Spirit into local covenant communities—anchored and shaped in worship, nourished in fellowship and mutual care, formed in exploration of our living tradition, and sent forth by the overflowing of Love in our hearts into service and love of neighbor in the whole of our lives. And all of this, all these fruits of this journey together, however imperfect, are our Testimony. 

But there is one thing needful. We must not allow ourselves to fall into despair of the living water, even in this parched wilderness. It is the witness of countless generations, who like us suffered and struggled and mourned and rejoiced and lived and died in faith, that the Life and Power we seek is closer than breath to us, always seeking new channels through which Love might continue to come into the world.

There is a fragment of a poem, a gift from Denise Levertov that has become a prayer to me—and a vow—one that speaks to me in the deserts of my soul; I hope it might speak to us:

Don’t say that there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts
It is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power to spring in us
up and out through the rock.

To Friends Everywhere, 

Grace and peace to you, in the love that flows from the Holy One who longs to help us know and live our unity with our human kindred and with all Creation! New England Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends gathered for its 364th annual meeting at Castleton, Vermont, and by video conference, from August 2nd through 7th, 2024. 

We acknowledge with humility and gratitude that we met on Ndakinna (n-DAH-kee-NAH), homeland of the Abenaki peoples. It was a joy to hear from Jorge Luis Peña, presiding clerk of Cuban Yearly Meeting and to have the presence of Cuban Friends by video conference. 

As we came together, we were acutely aware that our world is in turmoil. Armed conflicts in Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, and other places are inflicting fear and suffering on millions. Oppressive regimes burden millions more. As climate change accelerates, we live with grief because of the wounds to the natural world that we love. As our days together unfolded, the sometimes stormy weather in Castleton reflected these impacts of climate change, which have resulted in recent disastrous flooding here, especially in the “Northeast Kingdom” of Vermont where we have beloved Friends. 

We acknowledge our participation in many of the world’s crises, such as climate change, political polarization, and the continued effects of white supremacy. There has been turmoil within our yearly meeting as well, as differences have arisen on many points, for example during our discernment about the creation of a new meeting. We have felt the need to strengthen our capacity for conflict response. 

Yet we affirm the joy and consolation of our community in the Spirit, within New England and beyond. We are glad to see our Friends new and old, and as we have centered together in worship, we are glad also to welcome the evidence of God’s work within and among us. The One who speaks, Creator-Sets-Free, is our steadfast companion, whose guidance we listen for, and whose love we strive to embody, however incompletely. When we accept that we are loved, we are strengthened to address our conflicts and our complicity in the ills of our society. 

Our Bible Half Hour speaker, Genna Ulrich, of Portland Friends Meeting, reminded us how important it is to accept one another fully, even one who at first does not seem to belong, like John the Baptizer clothed in unshorn camel-hide and eating locusts and honey. In being able to do this, we reflect in our measure the radical way that God accepts and loves each of us. Our experience of this love allows us to better hear the Good News and change our purpose to better align with the divine ordering, the Gospel Order.

Our plenary speaker, Lloyd Lee Wilson, of Friendship Friends Meeting, North Carolina YM(C), reminded us of the many, sometimes wordless, ways that the divine speaks to us. He described his experience of the “spirituality of subtraction,” a practice by which we find ourselves gradually freed from distracting habits and unexamined assumptions. This makes it easier to hear the messages we are given by the One who speaks, God-With-Us, even if we are led in ways we do not at first understand. 

We also were reminded that faithfulness to the leadings we are given, even when we see no great effects, is humble participation in Christ’s ministry of reconciliation. In our time together, sharing reports of our experiences of the Spirit’s gifts has given us courage and led us to see the many ways in which we need to grow in the love and power of the divine life, if we are to respond, in our measure, to the challenges before us, within our community as well as in the world. 

We continue our efforts to understand ways in which we enact the patterns of oppression that express the values of the culture in which we are embedded, a culture which places differential values on humans, the children of God, according to race or gender expression, class, education, or age. We long to be perfect in love, as Jesus calls us to be, and to respond humbly to others, but we remain beginners, apprentices in the school of the spirit that is Quakerism, struggling to apply the lessons of love, even with those near to us, where trust and forgiveness ought to be in richest supply. 

The work of repairing relationships with those we have harmed is even more challenging and requires greater humility. For example, this year we heard from Friends who presented a report on the complicity of New England Yearly Meeting in the great harms inflicted by the so-called Indian Boarding Schools. The report found that New England Friends were deeply, directly, and intimately involved in the creation and material sustenance of these assimilating boarding schools and the policies that drove and justified them. We encouraged the reporting Friends to continue their work and explore what next steps we may take as way opens. 

We have come to recognize that many structures and practices in our meetings at every level must be renewed or transformed, if they are to help us listen to the Spirit and act in faithfulness. We hope to listen more to young and old, newcomers and old-timers, to tend their seeds of spirit and encourage the use of their gifts. Such changes in practice and habit are unsettling, and can bring conflict. Experimental living in community requires patience, forbearance, and the healing flashes of divine humor as we try and fail, improvise and revise. 

We can know that we are walking with the Guide by the growing beauty and freedom of the way we are led, the fearlessness with which we love and act, the growing scope of our gratitude. Not all at once will we come to maturity in that Spirit; not all at once will we acknowledge where we have fallen short, or be able truly to forgive or accept our need for forgiveness. Genna Ulrich reminded us of Jesus’ teaching that only God is good, and challenged us to avoid the easy assumption that because we’re Quakers, we are “good people” — rather than examining our actual behaviors and effects in the world.

But we are reminded this week that the blessings we have — among them our children, our friends, the abundant Creation, and the resources of the Quaker way — are bread for the journey, deriving from the divine Seed whom we cherish so dearly. Knowing this, the call and the need for radical transformation are invitations to meaning, and to joy. We recall with hope God’s prophetic assertion: I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isaiah 43:19 NRSV). Alleluia! 

Yours In Faith and Love, New England Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends , Rebecca Leuchak, Presiding Clerk

Brian Drayton is a recorded minister of New England Yearly Meeting through Salem Quarter. Below is his most recent report on his ministry over the past year or two, a remarkable statement of how he views ministry among Friends, or at least his ministry. (You can read his religious reflections on his blog Amor Vincat.)

Here is the Epistle from the annual sessions of New England Yearly Meeting this year, held in Castleton, VT, in August 2023.

Worship at Durham Friends Meeting on February 19, 2023 focused on our annual practice of writing a ‘A State of Society’ report for this Meeting for 2022. You can find State of Society Reports from previous years at this link.

Tess Hartford gave a message about State of Society Reports that also carried a request for contributions tyo our annual report.

         What is the State of Society Report? According to our Faith and Practice we receive these words as the purpose and value of such a report. “At the end of the calendar year, Ministry and Counsel should appoint one or more of its members to prepare and present to its sessions a report on the state of the monthly meeting. The report when approved should be forwarded to the Monthly Meeting. When approved by the Monthly Meeting, it should be forwarded to the quarterly meeting and then on to the yearly meeting. The report should be a searching self examination by the meeting and its members of their spiritual strengths and weaknesses and of the efforts to foster growth in the spiritual life. Reports may cover the full range of interest and concerns and should emphasize those indicative of spiritual health of the meeting.”

        Things to consider are following:

           ` Quality of worship and spiritual ministry;

           `efforts to foster spiritual growth;

           ` stands taken on Friends’ principles;

           ` personal and family relations;

           ` relations with community and other religious groups;

           ` participation in general activities of Friends;

           ` significant activities, outreach, or concerns of the local meeting;

           ` youth of the meeting; and

           `the meeting community;

And to this list I would also add; encouragement of gifts and leadings among meeting members and attenders. So those of us who make up the M&C committee have before us the charge if you will to generate this State of Society report, but as co-clerk of Ministry and Counsel, along with Renee Cote, I am eager to hear form all of you since we are all carrying various thoughts, sentiments, hopes and fears, and concerns as individuals. We are all in this together .What do you think are some of our strengths and some of our weaknesses? How have we grown together this last year? What are some of the challenges we face and where do we need to place more of our attention? And what is important to each of us as we face this new year ahead?

           I will share with you some of my “burden” on my soul. When I use the word “burden” I don’t mean something that is distasteful or repulsive or something I am so weighed down by that I feel hopeless.IN this instance when I use the word”burden” I frame it as a hea in vy concern. Then, if I name it, I can share it and when I share it, it becomes lighter, and not so heavy. In the words of our great teacher Jesus of Nazareth, we are heartened when he said, “Come to me all you who are heavy laden and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I am gentle and humble in spirit. Accept my work and learn from me” My burden is light!!!! Let’s meditate on that for a moment- my burden is light. We are given the word light- we have been given the light in which we are covered, covered, so that might carry that yoke of light wherever we are. The opportunity to embrace this light is through our relationship with the living Christ within. The Christ light that asks us to gently surrender our small grievances, our fears of uncertainty, our sense of hopelessness and our deep woundedness. A collective woundedness that we all experience through loneliness, isolation and our sense of separateness from life and from each other.

            I believe that in this examination of our lives as individuals and as a community of seekers, the burden of light requires us to pick up some of the lost threads, and to reach across the divides among us, to show up and submit to the light of God’s power and presence in order to heal our wounds. I believe that we must ask for the humility to see one another as true brothers and sisters, friends, and lean into each other with radical trust and openness. And so Friends, I ask each one of you to examine what is on your heart and to take a little time to write down what are your concerns, your sense of our strengths and weaknesses and to consider where the light is leading us for the good of the whole. What is important to you as a vital member of this community of the Society of Friends? We of M&C ask you to share your thoughts and hearts’ desires, so that we together can build on and continue to grow stronger. To become more forbearing, more loving, more vital and more compassionate with ourselves and the world..The body of Christ who pray and worship together, who work and joy together, who shine light in a world that sorely needs.it. Shining a light, respecting and appreciating our differences, siding on correctness of attitude and communicating our kindness to and with each other. Being a candle flame that can be felt and perceived even in the darkest of times. We have so much for which to be grateful.

At the beginning of Meeting, Leslie Manning (care of worship) read a letter from Sarah Gant (Clerk of the Meeting Accompaniment Group) and Noah Baker Merrill (General Secretary) of New England Yearly Meeting:

“It is that time of year when we gather in our local meetings to reflect on our collective condition as a faith community. This process is a chance to prayerfully reflect: What is our growing edge as a spiritual community? How is the Spirit moving among us? Where have we found sustenance and nurture? How have we sought to hold up and care for our meeting communities?

“The draft chapter on Ministry & Counsel (https://neym.org/engage-texts-currently-under-discussion) from the Faith and Practice Revision Committee offers some guidance on the State of Society process:

“Corporate discernment on its spiritual condition helps the community see how it has been led, how faithfully it has responded to challenges, and where it might need to focus its attention in the future. It helps bind the community and renew its sense of commitment.

“Reports may cover the full range of interests and concerns but typically emphasize those indicative of the spiritual health of the meeting—both that which is thriving and that which is challenging, changing, or needs strengthening, such as:

• The quality of worship and vocal ministry
• The strength of relationships and trust within the meeting community
• Efforts to foster spiritual growth and evidence of growth
• Possible hardships for the meeting, and how Friends are responding to those challenges
• Significant events or activities in the meeting’s year together
• Social or civic concerns of the meeting and stands taken on Friends’ religious principles
• Service and relationship with Friends beyond the local meeting
• Relations with the community and other religious groups

“It is important for us, as a gathered community of monthly meetings and worship groups across New England, to hear how Spirit is at work in our midst.

“from Sarah Gant, Clerk, Meeting Accompaniment Group and Noah Merrill, General Secretary, New England Yearly Meeting”