….God has created us for interdependence as God has created us in God’s image—the image of a divine fellowship of the holy and blessed Trinity. . . God has created us to be different in order that we can realize our need of one another. There is an African idiom: “A person is a person through other persons.” I learn how to be human through association with other human beings. . . . 1 Desmond Tutu
When I was a child Desmond Tutu spoke at my church about the blasphemies of apartheid, oppression, and racism. His message to us was that “not to oppose these manifestations of evil would be tantamount to disobeying God.”2 I still remember sitting as close to him as I was to Will, Max, and Mohammed today in Meeting for Worship and being enveloped in his warmth and joy.
The past two years we have labored to sustain Meeting For Worship. We worshiped as a community from our individual homes via ZOOM. We worshiped in a hybrid manner with some at home and some on ZOOM. We gathered in the cemetery. We have been in our classrooms joined as a community through Google Classroom. We have been all together in the gym at first in stadium seats, more recently in chairs.3 We used a number of techniques and meditations to quiet our bodies and minds to try and create space for reflection and worship. When we couldn’t sing we listened to music from Yo Yo Ma, Jon Batiste, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and the many COVID choirs and orchestras that formed in the first months of the pandemic. First outside and more recently in the gym, we have been enjoying our new song book joining our voices together behind our masks.
Today after 23 months, 99 weeks, 693 days we returned to worshiping in the Meeting House. Students walked from the main building to the Meeting House with their buddies and seamlessly settled into the quiet of the space. We sang The Lone Wild Bird. Our 8th Grade students read the queries for the month. And then we joined in quiet, gathered worship - aware of each other, united in this new/old experience. Towards the end, after thanking those sitting close to us for worshiping with us and before Alanya gave her excellent report on Mae Jemison,4 students shared how it felt to worship in the Meeting House. Students said that “it was like coming home”, “the meeting is smaller than I remember”, “this was my first time and I was able to think about helping my friends be kind”, “now I know what worship with my friends is”, “sometimes I don’t like myself…here I know I am good”.
Children’s spiritual lives are deep and rich and deserving of our care. Welcome home.
Warmly,
Margaret
PS: Students in Kindergarten and Third Grade sent me their thoughts on worshipping in the Meeting House for the first time in two years - you can read their thoughts here.
PSS: This month's queries may be found below the book recommendations.
______________________________3 Thank you to 6th grade for helping to set up the chairs all those Wednesdays.
4 Each day during February a student shares with the rest of the school community a short biography of an African American important to that student. So far we have learned about Mae Jemison, Harriet Tubman, Elijah McCoy, Michelle Obama, and Phyllis Wheatley
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What I am reading:
Two very different novels about the power of libraries and independent bookstores to build community and belonging
 The Sentence by Louise Erdich |
 The Reading List
by Sara Nisha Adams
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New in our library
Opening the Road: Victor Hugo Green and His Green Book by Keila Dawson Biography |
We Wait for the Sun by Dovey Johnson Roundtree and Katie McCabe This is biographical account of activist Dovey Roundtree’s early life |
Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Tracie Todd Biography |
Ten Beautiful Things by Molly Griffin |
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Westfield Friends School February Queries
on Building Community as a Spiritual Practice
To guide the February Query Writing, Eighth Grade Students were given the following quotes. They wrote individual responses and queries to share with the rest of the student body. Fifth-grade students will share their versions of the queries Wednesday 2/16.
Inspiration:
From Friends Council on Education:
- “Do we endeavor by example and precept to cultivate in all members of our community a sense of openness and expectancy about life? Is our school a place of peace, joy, contentment, and belonging? “
- How do we know and how do we seek to ensure that all children and families feel truly part of the school?
From Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach
“The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.”
From Malcolm X, Malcolm X: The Man and His Times, edited by John Henrik Clarke
“We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity”
Eighth Grade Queries shared in Meeting for Worship February 9, 2022:
From Jasmine:
I think about how much we get to understand each other and how that can form into something, it can form into love, friendship, or even happiness. It takes a while to see how someone is but you should never judge them. How can we spread love? How can we bring the light to others?
From Will:
I think we need more positive, more light about each other instead of seeing the darkness. When we see the light in others, we begin to understand and love one another, which will bring us to unity. How can we see the light in each other/ourselves?
From Kyle:
I think that many people believe a community is a bunch of people strung together, such as a community in a house development, or a community in a school. But what if it’s not? While we’re all in a community here at this school, all of us are a community in the world. Part of the world community is the word unity. We’re all people, we all pump blood from our hearts and think with our brains. Let’s try to build bridges between everyone and break down the walls called biases and racism and all the bad stuff. How can we break the wall in the community that is this Earth?
From Azra:
I believe that beginning from light, understanding, love, and patience all leads up to unity. Beginning from light, to be kind, we move on to understanding. Understanding one another is the key to having a good relationship, and trusting one another. From understanding someone, you get to know them, which leads you to love them. This love can be through family, through friends, and many other things, but once you learn to love, patience comes. Patience is something you also learn, only after love. If you do not know how to be kind, you can not understand. If you do not know how to understand, you can not love. If you do not know how to love, you can not unite, and unity is the most important of all. Without unity, chaos comes, and it is only a cycle of terrifying things. Beginning from rudeness, misunderstanding comes, and from that comes hate, and then impatience. Finally, again, chaos. How can we learn to be kind, to understand, to love, and to be patient?