A week in Pendle Hill

Well we have been at Pendle Hill for exactly a week.

It is a truly lovely place.  It is a large, extensive campus, which stretches over the road, leading to a pond and wetland.   There is a mile long walk all around the campus.  Rather than describe it with words, here are some photos.

I’m sure you will immediately notice the splendid trees.  They are just glorious.  Much as I love Holy Island, I do miss trees, and here they are in all their magnificence.

The welcome we received was truly wonderful.  We Britons are often disdainful of Americans and their apparent loudness.  I sometimes think we mistake loudness for effusiveness –it seems to me that Americans generally are more aware and give greater weight and clarity to their emotions, and so are able to demonstrate their feelings more.  We met with welcomes that were just so generous, spontaneous and appreciative that they might have felt inauthentic or false in a British contest – here we simply felt bathed in good will.

Meeting for worship takes place in a simple, uncluttered room with benches arranged in a square. 

Worship here seems to me to be more wholehearted, full-throated;  people seem to immerse themselves more fully than in Britain – even than in my beloved Woodbrooke.  When people ask for a brief silence, it is not a token absence of speech – silences are longer, more total, deeper; there is a sense of their being deeply gathered (covered is a term used here, I understand). When it comes to the longer Meetings for Worship, held each morning, I have the sense of them being somehow total, absolute, of greater, much greater, intensity. One of the first, if not the first pieces of ministry offered, as far as I can recall, was:

Submit yourself to God

Submit your whole being to God

Let God carry you lightly

Allow yourself to be amazed

This seemed to be speaking to my condition, but was also was speaking about the place and its demands.

There is a clear sense of Pendle Hill as a community.  As part of the procedure of Meeting for Worship, there is space for prayers, concerns or joys to be expressed.  After Meeting for Worship newcomers are greeted, farewells are said to those leaving, even if they have only stayed a few days.  When one long term member of the community left, after a year, people gathered hands and sang a song of farewell and good wishes - we both found this very moving.  

Pendle Hill takes seriously its sense of our whole lives being involved in worship - that all of  aspects of our lives are sacramental.  When I was being trained to wash dishes, it was made clear that I was not just washing dishes, but protecting the health of the community.  At the end of the session, when all had been tidied and cleared away, I was told that my last task was to stand back from the area I had been working in,  hold the next person working there in the light, and ask myself if this was the area they would appreciate coming to work in.  On another occasion, when being trained to wash pots (the big pans the cooks use for cooking the food), I was my usual bustling self to try and get the job done quickly to get it over and done with.  I was quietly offered the following advicre  " I would suggest you work at a moderate pace -the is no need to  no need to rush - enjoy your work"  Work here is a source of contemplation, meditation and prayer.  

It is truly a very wonderful place.

One of my responses to this week has been to write this poem:

Meeting for Worship in Pendle Hill, Wallingford, Pennsylvania, a dozen miles from Philadelphia, 

Pendle Hill is a center of God's work in transforming the world. Pendle Hill nurtures the life and witness of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) through worship, work, study and service. We welcome those of all spiritual paths.

Mission statement approved by the Pendle Hill Board of Trustees September 16, 2006

I walk through trees drenched with sunlight,

Enter the simple room -

Stark benches, arranged in a square -

Minimal comfort

(Though tissues are provided

For those who need to weep),

And enter a silence as deep and welcoming as black velvet

Here, on this altar of silence,

I am asked to place all the things

I know, love, cherish, value

Submit it to the searing flame,

Welcome Presence,

Which asks so little

And demands – everything;

Only to return it

Transformed.