Dunnings Creek

• Spiritual State of Our Meeting - 2008
• Interchange, Spring 2007
• Spiritual State of Our Meeting - 2005
• Interchange, Spring 2006
• Spiritual State of Our Meeting - 2004
• FUM Policy Concern
• Spiritual State of Our Meeting - 2003

Dunnings Creek Friends Meeting remains a faithful group of individuals who gain strength in their unity while struggling at times to maintain a harmony within the group dynamic.

On first glance we are a rather homogenous lot, primarily older with our children grown. But we still have difficulties at times tempering our individual ideas, personalities and opinions to better work together without feeling like we are sacrificing ourselves in the process. However trying (and mostly succeeding) to present a unified front gives us a chance to grow both as individuals and as Quakers who are all striving for similar goals within our lives and the Meeting.

There are ebbs and flows in the spiritual state of the meeting, just as there are in the minds of the individuals, but we do try to provide a supportive, Quakerly atmosphere in which to work through such difficulties. We celebrate our differences every First Day by encouraging volunteers to lead the discussion with a topic that is important to them. Our varied experiences and viewpoints make for very interesting, enlightening and educational discussions that bring us to a greater understanding of our peers and the world.

Recently we began the reunification process with Fishertown Friends, and that has been a challenge and growing experience for us. We are doing this without the guidance of our meeting's patriarch, Bob Miller, whose illness has taken him and his wife, Bette Lu, from our physical presence. However, we do gather strength from their spirituality and positive outlook and are thankful for the love we have for and receive from them.

We struggle to find new members. We have discussed methods of bringing in more members but to no real end. To the delight of the meeting, we do have a mother whose little daughter reminds us all of the joy we had as young parents, and we are glad to have a child in our midst.

Our members are also willing to step forward to offer to the meeting their specific talents to keep things running smoothly. The dedication and compassion of our co-clerks help to hold us all together. One member leads a first day school for any children who happen to show up. The cemetery upkeep and physical condition of the meeting house are addressed by volunteers, and we have had several de-clutter movements throughout the past year.

We are also mourning the passing of Mabel McCoy, the wife of Harold McCoy, whose sunny smile and warm heart will be missed. Friends have been faithful in visiting other Friends who are no longer able to attend regularly due to health issues.

In our 200 years of history at Dunnings Creek Friends Meeting there have been lows and highs, and they probably will be repeated. Our hope is that the individuality of our Quaker message will spread through the wider community and find acceptance among individuals and families there.

Our Meeting is in constant transition. This year we were blessed with silence bursting with the sound of little feet running, occasionally punctuated by shrill small voices. This was music to the ears of all except, perhaps, the young mothers. Those who used to be underfoot have grown into young adults who have moved away in search of employment or education. Some of our members spend the cold months in a warmer climate---this winter that was an especially wise decision. And several Friends are elderly or infirm and are not able to make the trip to Meeting. We continually remind ourselves to visit with and connect with those Friends unable to attend Meeting. We send thoughts, prayers, love, cards, emails and a quarterly newsletter.

Friends who do attend commute from a wide area. We are limited by weather and concerned about the expense of travel.

We’ve been challenged this year by the attendance of a visitor whose spiritual journey was vastly different than ours. This challenge helped us define ourselves and affirm the Quaker Way. We’ve also been challenged by some personal differences among the membership. As a Meeting we were able to rise above these differences to a higher plane, for the good of the Meeting.

We treasure our Treasurer, who is doing an exceptionally fine job of keeping our finances in order and keeping Friends informed. We value the spirit brought to us by our new members and attendees, each with their own special gifts.

Highlights of our year included a concert at the Meetinghouse, which raised our spirits with high quality, original music as well as funds for the local food banks. Our Christmas Eve service drew a crowd that packed the meeting room. We worked together to prepare the long neglected upstairs of our building for Yearly Meeting Day, which enriched us by the attendance of Friends from the wider Baltimore Yearly Meeting.

We think our Meetinghouse is special---when the people come, it is really special. What happens here gives the place positive energy. We feel warmly surrounded by the presence and memories of people who have gone before us. We commissioned a painting of the Meetinghouse to raise money for a local artist who lost his studio and hundreds of paintings in a devastating fire. The Impressionist style prints of the Meetinghouse in a Spring snow touched faraway Friends by bringing “home” to them. The original painting was framed by a generous Friend.

We continue to pray and work for peace, and for social and environmental concerns. The volunteer and varied discussions in First Day School are surprisingly thought provoking and interesting, and often set the tone for the worship period that follows.

Dunnings Creek Friends gather on Sunday mornings because they truly enjoy being with one another and seeking together. The wide variety of faiths seems unimportant to the total gathering. The sincere value found in the quiet half hour or hour is the eternal mystery. How unusual, how delightful that a scattered group such as ours, each with his/her own background, thoughts and beliefs, can settle into worship and each find satisfaction and contentment.

Around late November we had to say good bye to our snow birds, who leave us for the winter. It’s always sad to see them go and it makes the spring all the sweeter when they return and we feel whole again. But then again we do have some things to cheer us up in their absence. We have a new member who says she feels as though she has found her home. Her name is Karin Blackburn Sedewar and we are delighted to have her. Also attending our meeting regularly is a new mommy, Heather Koontz and her thoroughly charming little one, Tess. Baby energy has been missing too long and we welcome its return.

Christmas Eve found our Meeting House almost full for yet another year. Friends gave the gift of their musical talents and gifts of their hearts through words. It seems that our Christmas Eve service has become a home to go to for family and friends of Friends who really need to be somewhere to share the spiritual magic of Christmas Eve. We probably will not see them again until next Christmas Eve, but that’s fine with us. It is a gift we can offer. Contributions were made to help a local family who had lost all they had in a house fire shortly before Christmas.

We are currently in the process of determining how we can have a better working kitchen and dining area that is more handicapped accessible. We have a second floor and are considering the possibilities of how to better utilize the space we already have. We are more than happy to hear from other Meetings about how they solved this problem in their meeting houses.

Today, in the morning before meeting, we met to make Valentines cards to send to all our friends far and wide who do not get to meeting for whatever reasons. While doing this it makes us all the more thoughtful of those folks and we are then able to hold them in our hearts more than we had before.

As the war in Iraq continues, our spirits are low because we know the futility of war. Often we talk about alternatives to war and pray for peace in the next year. A small contingent went to the peace march in Washington, D.C. this past year.

A young friend shared her experiences at an AFSC summer project in Mexico at our annual fall picnic. Her purpose was to help the community build stoves. She learned a lot about the frustrations of these Mexicans who live in poverty.

In October Friends organized a benefit concert for hurricane Katrina victims. The money donated was given to the American Red Cross. Our collection from the Christmas Eve service was given to our local Kids in Need Project (KIN).

To help defray the cost of mowing the Quaker cemetery we had a workday where volunteers brought mowers and other gardening tools to spruce it up. One of our members continues in her socially conscientious efforts by participation in Habitat for Humanity across this country and abroad and other community projects.

We still strive to improve the quality of our First Day school. The Sunday after business meeting, we discuss the query for the month. The next Sunday we have an unstructured lesson that one of the members chooses to share. That is followed with a structure lesson from A Quaker Response to Christian Fundamentalism or from another Friends' publication. We also continue to have an Intergenerational First Day school several times a year. Members continue to seek out support and rejuvenation of the spirit at Meeting. It's a place to express our concerns and feel safe, accepted and supported. At our Christmas Eve service, we realized we needed the Christmas spirit more than ever and needed to open our hearts for the gift of God's love.

An intriguing First Day presentation was the highlight at the autumn breakfast meeting Sept. 10 at the bucolic, deep-woods home of Gene and Holly Cola. Their daughter Emily, a June graduate of Tulane University in New Orleans, spoke about her two-month adventure last summer in an area of Mexico where abject poverty is the norm. She and 24 other United States citizens joined 25 Mexicans ­ranging in age from 18 to 26 - in a program sponsored by American Friends Service Committee and a Mexican association called SEDEPAC. Emily's group of nine went to a village called Carrizal, 10 hours northeast of Mexico, DF, which had no electricity and no running water. They lived in the village schoolroom, sleeping on cots. They soon learned to be on the alert for curious village youngsters, who would watch their every move through the open windows. For privacy, they bathed behind the water tank using a bucket and a cup. The themes of the Mexico Summer Project were cultural exchange/peace and sustainability. The group cleared paths and built retaining walls. Emily's group cooked and ate with the locals. Emily learned to grind corn into flour and make tamales. She also got to be quite proficient with a machete. Most of the people in Carrizal are subsistence farmers. While the host families were reserved and took a long time to warm up to their visitors, the children were not so aloof. They were fascinated by the stories the young people told them, in particular, the details of an airplane ride. The children wanted Emily to throw something down to them when her airplane home flew over their village.

A concert Oct. 15 at the meetinghouse netted $816 for hurricane victims. Gene Cola and Band Aid; Nathan Gates; and the Stone River Gypsies performed before an audience that filled three-quarters of the benches

Nancy Coleman is taking off on a long Habitat for Humanity gig. She will be leaving at the end of April to fly to New Zealand for a month. Her group of 24 will work on two houses.  It won't be all work and no play. The group also will sightsee on both the north and south islands. A weeklong trip to Australia will cap the adventure.

Our Christmas Eve service and finger-food potluck features all of the traditional Christmas Carols, accompanied by Susan Williams. Sam and John Treber read appropriate Scripture passages between the carols. Every year we decorate a cut tree with white lights and handcrafted ornaments - the latter made of styrofoam balls stuck with toothpicks, painted white and festooned with glitter. Friends stand back and hurl the ornaments at the tree. Most of them stick.

Submitted by Nancy Coleman

There is a sense of investigation and exploration in the spiritual state of Dunnings Creek Meeting this year. And there is a certain restlessness with the status quo among our members.

From this restlessness has emerged two different directions for us as a Meeting - each very different. But we feel confident that we have been able to identify these dual efforts as important to us, individually and communaly. The first revolves around the First Day portion of our service. We seek, perhaps, a more structured version of discussion than we have practiced in the past. We have already begun a monthly examination of the appropriate Query and are seeking other discussion guides from Friends' publications. We are also addressing the problem of being prepared to offer children a more meaningful First Day experience even though their attendance is sporadic.

We further hope to move in a more spiritual direction by limiting political discussion to a sense of how it relates to our religious beliefs although we realize that such separation is often difficult. We are also focusing on listening more carefully to the concerns of ALL of our members and attenders with a willingness to change or grow as we strive for the greater good of our Meeting. Our second direction involves finding ways to make a difference locally. We are a small, rural Meeting with members and attenders from a wide geographical area, so it is sometimes difficult for us to be "seen" in the community. We have discussed the following community activities as possible projects: visiting the elderly in several area nursing homes, volunteering to furnish a meal for Habitat for Humanity, or improving a recreation area in our nearest small town. In the past we have had benefit concerts and other fund raisers - but none have seemed to raise recognition of Dunnings Creek Meeting as a force in our area.

Through these efforts we hope to renew our committment to spiritual progress as individuals and as Friends.

Dunnings Creek Monthly Meeting has gone on record as not wishing to be a member of FUM because of a number of the policies of FUM are not accordance with our philosophy and feelings. We strongly support BYM in withdrawing financial support and membership from FUM.

SPIRITUAL STATE OF THE MEETING REPORT - 2003

This has been a special year, one that brings awe to even the most staid of Quakers. We celebrated, were entertained, learned about our past, worked hard on the FGC, attended to our elderly members, and more fully realized that the co-clerk experiment begun by Holly and Joan has been a true success.

Don and Susan have done a super job co-clerking us. There is strength and vigor amongst us.

Nancy and Holly worked tirelessly on FGC. They represented Dunnings Creek Meeting in a most professional way. We are grateful that they are members of our Meeting.

The Young Friends of the Yearly Meeting stayed with us for a weekend in April and gave us the gift of their vitality, youth and moving sincerity, while we gave them respectful loving hospitality. We wished them well and look forward to their return.

We were entertained by the movie "The Pre-Teen Pirates and the Quest for the Golden Taco" shown to us by John Treber. While at Oppecquon Camp Silus Sterns-Bruner and John produced, wrote and starred in the movie that was later enjoyed by the Meeting.

The Meeting has survived good times and not so good times for two hundred years and we made an effort to recognize that fact this past summer.

There was much attention given to where our service funds go. A Sunday morning given to that discussion was laudable and the decisions satisfying. We feel good about that as a small Meeting with limited assets.

We look forward to the future continuing to search with expectancy.