Five: Birthing New Yearly Meetings in the 1970s
The 1970s were a period of transformation for Pacific YM and for Friends Bulletin. By the late 1960s, PACIFIC YM was experiencing “growing pains.” Geographically, it was the largest Yearly Meeting in the world—ranging from Hawaii to Mexico City, and from British Columbia to New Mexico. Moreover, attendance at its annual session had grown from several hundred in the late 1950s to over a thousand in 1968—a size that seemed uncomfortably large for many Friends. In 1972, North Pacific YM was formed from Pacific YM, followed two years later by the formation of Intermountain YM..
During this decade, Friends Bulletin was transformed by two extremely dynamic editors, Robert Schutz and Shirley RuthBob’s tenure as editor was short, but dramatic. Shirley’s leadership extended for thirteen years. Bob and Shirley both shared a strong concern for the environment that helped to launch a new magazine, Earthlight, as well as the Friends in Unity with Nature Committee.
When Schutz became editor of Friends Bulletin in 1975, the circulation had dropped to 400. Within two years, readership climbed to 1,400. What caused this remarkable increase?
According to Bob, it was his insistence that each issue contain something unexpected and controversial.
“One woman told me that every month she picked up the magazine to find out what that Schutz was up to,” Bob explained. “The magazine was a little feistier in those days…”
There were lively discussions about theology (“Is Seeking Enough?”), membership (“Friendly Inquisition?”), youth, and sexuality (including an article about skinny dipping at Yearly Meeting). Articles on economics (particularly, Jack Powelson’s critique of widely held Quaker views) stirred controversy, as did a cover story beginning with a provocative statement by Samuel Tyson: “Whatever the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Friends Committee on Legislation (FCL) might have been, they are now detrimental to the spirit basic to the traditions of the Religious Society of Friends.” A poem on the cover of the October, 1975, issue vividly conveys how frustrating and stifling Yearly Meeting had become for some Friends (“Once upon a time there was a Yearly Meeting that cried ‘Peace, Peace, Peace’ but they had no peace”).
“As you can see,” adds Bob Schutz, “The issues were devoted to serious discussion of important topics, which was perhaps even more responsible for the suge in subscriptions than the introduction of controversies.”
Shirley Ruth also took on serious and controversial topics, such as the environment and same-sex marriage, but her approach was gentler and less confrontational. Shirley’s contributions will be examined in the next chapter.
“What I (Really) Believe?” by Robert Schutz
Friends Bulletin, January 1977
[Robert Schutz began his career as one of the founders of KPFA, the flagship station of Pacifica Radio, where he remained Public Affairs Director from 1949-54. He received his Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1952, where he also taught in three departments: business administration, speech, and economics. During the early 1950’s, Bob and his wife Marie became involved with Friends in the Bay area.
After his stint as editor at Friends Bulletin in 1975, Bob went on to start a Social Order pamphlet series for Pacific YM. Its titles include his own “Friendly Business,” Jim Corbett‘s “Sanctuary at the Faultline,” and Jack Powelson’s “Facing Social Revolution.” By far the most famous was Marshall Massey’s “The Defense of the Peaceable Kingdom,” which helped launch the PACIFIC YM Committee on Unity with Nature in 1985, and Friends Committee on Unity with Nature in 1987.
In 1986, the spiritual/environmental magazine EarthLight was founded, with Bob as one of its prime movers.
In his book The $30,000 Solution, Bob writes, “if we divided equally all of the unearned income that comes from rent, interest, profits, capital gains, inheritance, etc., we would have no poverty, no homelessness, no unemployment, no inflation, fewer children, a small impact on the environment, plenty of free time to do what we want, and, in general, a happier life.”
No armchair academic economist, Bob helped to start Friends House, a retirement facility for 80 seniors in Santa Rosa. He was also a founder and longtime resident of Monan’s Rill, an intentional community near Santa Rosa run as a non-profit cooperative with around 35 residents of all ages. Bob currently lives at Friends House, where he is enjoying his “retirement” while still actively involved in public affairs, family and Friends’ concerns.
The following editorial, written in January, 1977, presents another side of Robert Schutz: his playfully serious attitude towards theology.]
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keep listening to what Friends say about God, Spirit, the Light, Evil, Free Will, and related subjects in the hope of dispelling my own ignorance. I even go to Theology Conferences, usually without enlightenment. The other day in Meeting someone made the interesting suggestion (put forward as Belief, of course) that God is the Unexpected. Now that is a pregnant thought. Without the Unexpected, we would have no history, no learning, no risk, no challenge, no change, no vision, no imagination, no free will, no ???
I have listened long enough to learn that most of what I was taught as a child to believe is probably wrong: God is not Male (nor, I suspect, is she Female) or a Father or a White Beard in Heaven, or Three Persons, etc. Then there is James Hillman, the eminent depth psychologist to whose brilliant lecture I listened a month ago, who suggests, I think seriously, that there are many gods, and that the belief in monotheism, with associated hierarchies and heroism, is responsible for many of our ills.
I suspect that our Monotheistic God, if we cling to Him, Her, or It, is in and of everything, including evil, humor, jokes, tricks, doubts, deceits, atoms, stars, the Expected, and the Unexpected; and that we aren’t called on to be God(s). All we say and think about God is anthropomorphic, no doubt, because, as Sally Bryan reminds us, what fly can see the fly paper? So I am thankful for Friends, who allow us the freedom to seek, whether Omniscience and Omnipotence and all the other Omni’s I was taught God is, do or not.
“Friends and the Restoration of the Feminine Divine” by Carolyn Stevens
Friends Bulletin, July, 1982
[Feminism and gender issues (including the gender of God/ess) became increasingly important to Friends in the 1970s. Closed worship sharing groups, modelled on feminist “consciousness-raising” sessions, began to be held at Yearly Meeting in the early 1970s, with mid reactions. Billie Hamilton reported that over 50 women attended some of these sessions, and “sharing was on a deep personal level and seemed very valuable to most”[1] Some men—and some women as well—felt very uncomfortable by the concept of worship groups “for women only.”
In retrospect, it seems clear that these sessions cleared the air and enabled many women (as well as men) to confront their feelings as well as issues of sexism and oppression in their lives.
Carolyn Stevens, a member of University Meeting, is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism and coordinator of QUEST, an internship program for recent college grads sponsored by University Meeting (see p. 317.]
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want to share an experience with Friends which, while an imaginary experience of the mind, relates deeply to my search for spiritual wholeness.On a Saturday last August I came to the Meeting House to hear a talk by Z Budapest, high priestess of Dianic witchcraft. Z came to explain her beliefs and share the herstory of the Goddess. She believes that earth’s survival depends on the revival of and reverence for the feminine principle of the Divine. The dominant religions today embody the male, patriarchal principle which has brought so much destruction to the world. The feminine principle symbolizes the earth, women and the creativity of the world.The evening with Z was a sharing of her vision and wisdom as she showed beautiful slides of the Goddess and introduced us to new rituals.
During the evening some difficulties arose. The projector broke down and the heat in the room was stifling. A debate ensued among the primarily lesbian audience about whether the one man in attendance should stay or not. Some thought his male energy was causing the problems.
While I sat and listened to the argument, I was struck with a powerful fantasy that conjured up another reason for the difficulties. I sensed that the meeting room itself was uneasy with the event. I heard a dyspeptic groan, “What’s this incense and ritual? Where are my solemn, quiet Friends whose spirit inhabits my walls?” The image, of course, reflected my discomfort with the ritual and trappings. My spiritual temperament is attuned to Friends, to our simple form that nurtures freedom, clarity and deep searching.
My sensation of the conflict between the ritual and the room brought up much pain for me. I want to worship with Friends, male and female, after the manner of Friends. I also want the Feminine Divine principle in my life and religious community. I don’t want us to drop our Judeo-Christian heritage, but I do want us to expand our understanding of God to include the Goddess. This is a sensitive issue among Friends; and when I spoke of my experience in meeting for worship, it inspired other ministry. One person spoke of the current imbalances in the world that people are afraid to admit to and change. We need to work through the pain and change to come into balance before it is too late. Another person reminded us that the Light is ultimately without gender. While I agree with this statement, I also embrace the Feminine aspect of the Divine. Ultimately, human beings are androgynous and the Light goes beyond the anthropomorphic aspect of the Divine. But there is an anthropomorphic aspect of the Divine. We experience our faith on a transcendent level in silent meditation, but also on the mundane level in our daily lives and in the history of our species, and for Christians, in the life and teachings of Jesus. The God in our history is a manifestation of the male aspect of the Divine. The same is true of the Goddess, except that patriarchy has suppressed her story.
We Friends speak of “God, he,” “God, the Father,” “God, the Son” too often to pretend that we do not humanize, or I should say, masculinize an aspect of the Divine. On this level I would like Friends to change, to embrace the feminine as well as the masculine Divine Principle. I don’t want Z Budapest’s incense and ritual, but I agree with her that we need the creative strength and wholeness of the Goddess symbol. Half the picture, God without Goddess, is a fractured vision impairing our understanding of the Divine. We, more than others in the Judeo-Christian tradition, can accomplish this change, because we have neither the theological nor ritualistic constraints of other Western faiths. Just as the new wave of feminism broadens the experience and potential of our secular world, an acceptance of the Goddess can expand and strengthen the Light of our religious society.
“Conversion Experience” by Elise Boulding
[In 1967, Kenneth and Elise Boulding both accepted faculty positions at the University of Colorado in economics and sociology, respectively. Both were in the prime of their careers, and internationally known as academics, peacemakers, and Friends. For the next twenty years, they were beloved members of Boulder Meeting.
When Kenneth died in 1993, he left behind a legacy not only as an academic, but also as a poet.[2] One of the inspirations for his poetry was his marriage to Elise, as he reveals in “Sonnets on Courtship, Marriage, and Family” (1987):
Now after forty years of wandering,
Not in a wilderness, but in a land
We entered, when each other by the hand
We took, and promised, sealing with a ring,
To be to one another that strange thing,
A Husband and a Wife, today we stand
Like children, having reached an unknown strand,
And peering eagerly beyond it, wondering.
Behind us now we have a colony;
Those forty years have blessedly borne fruit,
For five new families have taken root,
And children’s children gratefully we see;
And here we still have joy and increase
‘Til our Ark comes, and we depart in peace.
Raised in the inner city of Liverpool, Kenneth Boulding joined the Society of Friends in Oxford in 1931. He later gained international renown for his work in the fields of economics, peace research, ecology and future studies.
Born in Norway in 1920, Elise began her career as a scholar in the 1950s while raising five children. She is Professor Emerita of Dartmouth College and Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association. She is author of numerous studies, including The Underside of History: A View of Women Through Time, From a Monastery Kitchen, Children’s Rights and the Wheel of Life, The Social System of the Planet Earth (co-authored with Kenneth Boulding), Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World, One Small Plot of Heaven: Reflections on Family Life by a Quaker Sociologist, and at least three Pendle Hill pamphlets: Children and Solitude, Born Remembering, and The Family as a Way into the Future. She co-authored with Kenneth The Future: Images and Processes, which appeared posthumously after Kenneth’s death, in 1995. Her most recent book is Cultures of Peace, the Hidden Side of History.
Both were very active in the Society of Friends and in the peace movement. During the Vietnam war, Elise, along with a group of concerned women, founded Women Strike for Peace.
The pressures of family life and career led her, at age 49, to a religious crisis. “She felt a strong need for a period of withdrawal by 1972 and found support in a devotional group (mostly Catholic) in Boulder and in a small Benedictine monastery in New York state.[3] This experience proved to be a spiritual turning point in her life, and led to her writing a Pendle Hill pamphlet entitled “Born Remembering” (1975). In it, she explores the spiritual depths that link her with “Quaker saints” of the past such as John Woolman and George Fox. This is an excerpt from that pamphlet.]
Thus it came about that at 51 I confronted a happening of the magnitude of a conversion experience. All the things associated with the lessening of intensity of family responsibility led to the point of realizing in a blinding flash how I had “lived forgetting.”
A conversion experience is never as sudden as it seems. It is always preceded by a period of mounting inner tension. For me the immediately preceding years had involved returning to the university for a Ph.D. in sociology, moving from the community in the Midwest where the children had grown up to a university nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, and trading the emptying nest at home for a professorship at the university. From rearing children to teaching college students, from community action to research on the dynamics of peacemaking, from the up and down spiritual life of one Quaker Meeting to the up and down spiritual life of another Quaker Meeting—where was all this going?
In spite of the sense of an unnamed catastrophe occasioned by America’s continuing presence in Vietnam activities went on much as usual in the suburban middle class world I lived in. We tidied and cleaned our much too roomy and overfurnished houses, cooked unnecessary quantities of food, moved in our daily round quite protected from suffering of every kind except the peculiar dull ache of affluence.
“Part I” of my upside-down turning, and the beginning of another remembering, came in India in January of 1971. After chairing a Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom I gratefully accepted the invitation of the director of the Gandhi Museum to stay with him and his hospitable wife. In the very modest unheated apartment of my friends, who chose voluntarily to live at a level of simplicity considerably more austere than that of most Indians of “their class,” I discovered the human condition through the very ordinary experience of being terribly cold day after day! It was January, temperatures went below freezing every night, and each morning I would read in the paper about the number of Indians who had frozen to death the night before in the streets. What a small amount of extra food, clothing, shelter and warmth would have kept them alive! I drew my own coat tightly about me in the evenings as the damp fog rolled into the apartment from the river, and thought of all the extra shelter and warmth spread in wanton abundance across suburbia, USA.
All the usual distances between me and physical deprivation were erased. A school was to be built at the top of the hill to one side of the house I was living in. Three migrant construction worker families lived there in brush shelters. I saw the meager bowls of rice that were cooked for the evening meal. In the morning I saw the men swing mattocks into the steep hillside to loosen stones which the women, babies on their backs, carried up the hill on their heads to crush for building materials. Small children of unguessable ages climbed up the hill with smaller stones, occasionally stopping to play. The men sometimes sang; the women and children sometimes smiled. For a few days I lived a triple life: part of me was back in our suburban home in Colorado, part of me was shivering in my friends’ apartment; and part of me was next door living in a brush shelter and cooking meager rations over an open fire.
By day I sat in the Gandhi library reading the writings that had poured from Gandhi’s pen in his life. As I read his passionate words about sarvodaya (welfare)—and not wanting what the least of his brothers and sisters could not have—I knew that these were my brothers and sisters too, and that I also could not want what they could not have. I wrote long letters home about stripping ourselves of what we did not need.
Readiness for stripping—or shall I say a “call” to strip is a very individual and personal thing, however. Coming home to my family I found that words could convey neither outward experience nor inward state to Kenneth and most of the children. Two of the five children who were already called to this were finding their own ways of expressing it. For the rest it was simply unreal.
And so I lived in suburbia again. All around me were well-intentioned, socially conscious people, supporting good causes. At Friends Meeting on Sunday mornings I would sit in the silence with all these good people, listen to their words of kindly mutual encouragement and often poetic insight, and return as they did to the domestic comforts that sealed us all off from the living God.
Part II of the remembering involved in my “conversion” came a few months later when a teenager came briefly to stay with us who had been badly damaged by drug trips and was going through a major emotional crisis. He had been one of the flower children, one of the gentlest of them. Conscious of nothing but his desire to give and receive love and to hurt no one, he was in deepest inward agony.
Watching his suffering, knowing that in a certain way I was as trapped and helpless as he, I suddenly one night saw myself as a small frog in the bottom of a deep well, leaping to get up and over the side. All my life I had been leaping. I knew where the sun was, I knew which way to jump, I knew there was an outside — another place to be. Yet I kept falling back into the bottom of the well.
We have all heard that a drowning person sees her life unreeling past the inward eye in her final moments. In just that manner, and in just a few moments of time, did my own life unreel before me. This was a kind of death—the death of that old try-hard frog, the birth of a new creature who found her way over the top of the well and into a new world. In that moment of leap, I felt as if I were living not only my own past life through, but that of all people who had ever lived-all my brothers and sisters on the planet. I saw how we all had chained ourselves to daily rhythms that were bound to defeat us. Day after day we recapitulated the old cycle of effort, irritation, impatience and anger—softened by small epiphanies of love and remorse. The spirit had to break through from time to time, because spirit is our very nature, but how tiny the eruptions, how heavy-handed our daily behavior. For how many millennia had this gone on? Was the human race never to discover its self-forged chains?
The snapping of my chains was my signal that the human race was indeed to be freed—in theological language—from the bondage of sin and death. My experience is one of the simplest and oldest religious experiences that come to humans, nonetheless transforming for its commonness. Was the leap an act of the will or an invasion of grace? At such times, grace informs our will. God does not carry us as so much baggage. The tension of the preceding years uncoiled like a giant spring in the crouched figure at the bottom of the well. It was met by God’s grace, and I sprang up, free….
At this time I felt both very distant from and very close to the Society of Friends. Distant from the Friends immediately around me with whom I could find no way to share what was happening within, but very close to the “Quaker saints” that had been part of my religious formation in the early years of my life in the Society. I was keenly aware that both Fox and Woolman had come through experiences like mine, and I found much support in that.
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“Friends Are Like the Amoeba: We Multiply By Dividing”
[The following is the editor’s summary of a history panel presentation that appeared in Friends Bulletin, September, 1983. Panelists Harold Carson, Molly Barnett, Monette Thatcher, and Margaret Jump were asked to address questions relating the formation and future of North Pacific YM after its first decade. The latter part of this history is drawn from North Pacific YM minutes. Ann Stever provided valuable editorial assistance.]
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d Morgenroth’s oft-quoted comment—”Friends are just like the amoeba: we multiply by dividing”—underscores the fact that the formation of Intermountain and Pacific YM was felt by many to be a natural process, although not without some pain.
The growth of Pacific YM prior to the formation of NPACIFIC YM caused what Harold Carson called the “problem of numbers”:
In 1960, 367 attended the annual sessions in Salem, Oregon; and by 1968 over a thousand met at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. That had an influence on Friends, a great influence, and necessitated the formation of a Site Committee in 1966 charged with finding a permanent site in Northern California near the border of Oregon with facilities to accommodate 1,500 which might be used year-round. Pacific YM encompassed Southern California with 502 members, the Bay Area with 582 members, Arizona and New Mexico with 150, Mexico City with 29, Hawaii with 69, Canada with 120, and Washington, 192 and Oregon, 97. How were Friends going to solve this problem of numbers?
Some Friends felt that the problem of numbers could be solved by re-structuring; others were convinced that a new yearly meeting was inevitable. Carson recalls, “People had mid feelings about dividing the Yearly Meeting and that’s stating it very politely!”
In 1968 Mildred Burck read this report to Pacific YM: “…At this time more and more Friends are willing to give consideration to the possibilities of multiple Yearly Meetings.” Jane Webster, Gretchen Tuthill, Madge Seaver, John Etter, and Harold Carson returned to the Yearly Meeting in 1969 with this recommendation: “Pacific Northwest Friends will establish their own Yearly Meeting by 1971, 1973 or 1975.”
In March, 1970, Pacific Northwest Quarterly Meeting and Willamette QM set up a Joint Revision Committee “to explore an annual meeting of Friends in the Northwest.” They consulted the monthly meetings in the area: Corvallis, Eastside, Eugene, Multnomah, Salem, Tacoma, University, Vancouver and Victoria. All favored forming NPACIFIC YM except Victoria, which decided its major commitment lay with Canadian YM. Gretchen Tuthill of Pacific YM’s Consultative Committee wrote that the efforts to go ahead and separate and become a new yearly meeting were blessed. Thus, a North Pacific Gathering of Friends met at St. Martin’s College near Olympia with Lee Bennett as clerk in July, 1972. There were 158 Friends present - 115 adults, 45 children, 70 from Washington, 71 from Oregon, 8 from Canada and 10 visitors, including Ed Morgenroth representing Pacific YM.
The Gathering minuted the following: “This North Pacific Gathering of Friends forms the North Pacific YM as of this date, July 17, 1972. The individual monthly meetings are to establish their relationship with NPACIFIC YM and with PACIFIC YM as they feel moved.” The purpose of the NPACIFIC YM “is to hold an annual gathering, a time of fellowship and spiritual enrichment for Friends in the region of the north Pacific.” At the same time, the Gathering minuted the laying down of the Joint Revision Committee and formed a Steering Committee with one or two representatives from each participating monthly meeting, convened by Alice Dart. It was this group which was to do the main business of the YM.
Reflecting on this gathering at St. Martin’s College, Rose Lewis noted, “I think we have made a good beginning and with careful nurturing we can grow to fulfill this kind of ideal.” The first NPACIFIC YM Epistle stated that Friends felt “…the beginnings of a deep-down strengthening sense that we are a Yearly Meeting.”
On the other hand, there was also a sense of loss among some Friends. Monette Thatcher observed, “There were strong feelings about our ties with PACIFIC YM. We hated to give each other up.” Despite many strong disagreements, Thatcher recalls that “we did listen to each other, and we did listen for Divine Guidance, and we came out with solutions to those conflicts which were better than either thing we’d imagined.”
Over the past twenty-six years, the membership of North Pacific YMhas grown from 350 to approximately 800 members, while the number of meetings has expanded from seven to seventeen.
From the beginning, North Pacific YMwas determined to keep its annual gatherings as simple as possible. At first, there were no standing committees and most business was transacted by a steering committee (the latter practice has continued). In 1994 North Pacific YM approved an amended statement of purpose as follows: “The purpose of the Yearly Meeting is to provide a means for Friends to strengthen and support one another in a common search for Truth and Light. North Pacific YM, both as an organization and as an annual session, supports and encourages monthly meetings, worship groups and individual Friends in deepening their spiritual center and moving into Spirit-led action.” At the same time, North Pacific YM approved a part-time paid position to provide support to the Steering Committee clerk.
North Pacific YM Friends have expressed their concerns through minutes and actions. In 1974, North Pacific YM approved a minute calling for amnesty for those who avoided military service during the Vietnam War. The following year, it approved a minute in opposition to the Trident missile.
In 1976, North Pacific YM’s annual session was held at the Colegio Cesar Chavez in Mt. Angel, Oregon, partly in order to express solidarity with the Chicano movement. Six South African Friends attended the 1980 session. Opposition to apartheid became a special concern of the AFSC and of some North Pacific YM Friends during this period (see next chapter).
In the 1980s, North Pacific YM approved a minute on war tax resistance and urged Meetings to consider sanctuary for and aid to Central American refugees, as well as other Central American concerns (e.g. Nicaragua). North Pacific YM struggled over the issue of same-sex marriage throughout the 80s despite clarity about supporting civil rights for gays and lesbians (1981) and a decision the Yearly Meeting could not return to Judson Baptist College for the 1983 annual session because of restrictions on gays and lesbians. In 1986, the Meeting approved the following minute: “out of expressions of pain and searching, North Pacific YM accepts its newly-published Faith & Practice as a gift and as a living, evolving document. We are unable to reach unity on whether marriage is a covenant between two persons and God or a covenant between a man and a woman and God.” In 1992, North Pacific YM minuted its support for Meetings taking under their care same-sex relationships, using the same language (marriage) and process used for heterosexual relationships. In 1997, North Pacific YM minuted its support for the legalization of same-sex marriages.
Throughout its first quarter century, North Pacific YM annual sessions were enriched by a vareity of “Friends-in-Residence”from around the country and the world, including Elizabeth Watson (East Coast and Midwest), Margaret Bacon (Pennsylvania), John Punshon (Great Britain), and Duduzile Mtshazo (South Africa). North Pacific YM played a vital role in the Western Gathering of Friends and the Women’s Theological Conferences, pioneering efforts to build bridges between different branches of Quakerism (see final chapter).
Intermountain Friends Fellowship and the Founding of Intermountain YM
[The following is based on historical accounts written by Clarissa Cooper and Phyllis Hoge (with editorial revision by Ted Church). The latter part is the editor’s summary of IMYM minutes.]
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hile Friends in the North Pacific began laying the foundations for their Yearly Meeting in the late 1960s, Friends in the Southwest planted the seeds for their Yearly Meeting much earlier (see “Intermountain Friends Fellowship,” p. 120). Although meetings in Arizona and New Mexico were part of Pacific YM and members appreciated yearly meeting support, only a few were able to attend yearly meeting or its committees or to feel known to the larger group because of the great distances separating them.[4] As a result, Dorelen Bunting, Ted Church, and Marian Hoge of Albuquerque Meeting talked together about the possibility of a smaller regional group or even a yearly meeting in the late 1960s.
Following a retreat at Camp Verde, the clerk of Arizona Half-Yearly Meeting and the clerk of New Mexico Quarterly Meeting conferred to plan a gathering for 1970. New Mexico Friends were asked to take the lead in making reservations at Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, New Mexico, for June 12-14, 1970. Having obtained the approval of Friends earlier at Camp Verde, Marian Hoge contacted Mountain View Meeting of Denver and Boulder Meeting as well as Friends in Utah. The response was quite positive: 24 adults and 12 children from Colorado attended the first Ghost Ranch session. Total attendance was 167 (95 adults and 72 young folks). The name Intermountain Friends Fellowship was chosen for this gathering.
New Mexico Friends served the second year in 1971. Responsibility then was passed on the following two years to Arizona Half-Yearly Meeting with Thornton Price, Clerk; Charles Minor, Registrar; and Francis McAllister, Recording Clerk. For 1974 leadership was passed to Colorado Friends.
At this session Leanore Goodenow was Presiding Clerk. The following minute was adopted on June 8, 1974, authorizing the formation of Intermountain YM:
Following several years of prayerful search, it is the present sense of the meeting that the Intermountain Friends Fellowship now constitutes itself a yearly meeting to be known as the Intermountain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, emphasis to be on fellowship, community, and spiritual renewal. The organizational structure is to be minimal…. The monthly meeting is the primary place for business and caring for members and attenders.
During this session, 211 adults and 91 children attended from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. In 1975, the following meetings were listed as members: Pima, Tempe, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Paradise Valley (Las Vegas), Santa Fe, El Paso, Gallup, Taos, Los Alamos, Las Cruces, Durango, Lubbock, High Plains (Amarillo), Mt. View, Boulder, Ft. Collins, and Logan.
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Over the past twenty-five years, Intermountain YM has grown from 570 to 1,065 members spread over approximately half a million square miles. Although the annual gatherings of Intermountain YM have focused mainly on fellowship and spiritual concerns, Friends in this region have also expressed through their minutes a variety of social concerns:
· Opposition to the deployment of the MX missile system.
· Support for the nuclear freeze movement.
· Disagreement with US government policies in Central America.
· Concern for the fair treatment of undocumented aliens.
· Opposition to Orme Dam in central Arizona that threatened the survival of the Yavapai people of Fort McDonald.
· Support for equal treatment of all, regardless of sexual orientation.
During this period, a Committee on Sufferings was established to help Intermountain YM Friends who were arrested, fined, or jailed for acts of conscience, such as those at the Nevada Test site and Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant.[5] Many Intermountain YM Friends were also involved with the environmental and Sanctuary movements, about which more will be said in the next chapter.
The annual sessions of IMYM have also been enriched through a variety of keynote speakers. These have included Margaret Bacon, Douglas Gwyn, Douglas Steere, Lawrence Apsey, Elizabeth Watson, and Daniel Seeger, to name just a few.
In the early 1990’s, IMYM became a pioneer in revitalizing the spirit of Quaker service by starting a joint service project in cooperation with the AFSC. It is currently in the process of writing its first Faith and Practice.
Since many IMYM Friends have been concerned about prison visitation and reform, it seems fitting to conclude this chapter with an article about the prison work of Leanore Goodenow, the first clerk of Intermountain Yearly Meeting, having adopted that of North Pacific YM in the interim.
“Conversations with a Prison Reformer:” An Interview with Leanore Goodenow by Shirley Ruth
Friends Bulletin, April 1989
[Given the importance of Quaker prison ministry, it seemed appropriate to close this chapter with the work of Leanore Goodenow, who was last clerk of the Intermountain Friends Fellowship as well as the first clerk of Intermountain YM.
Quaker prison visitation is based on the deeply felt conviction that there is “that of God” in every inmate. This belief has led Friends to seek ways to help inmates discover their divine potential and become useful members of the community.
Over the last couple of decades, many Friends have been involved with Alternatives to Violence (AVP), a program designed to train inmates in non-violent conflict-resolution skills.
Friends do not try to proselytize or convert inmates to Quakerism, but sometimes inmates have expressed interest in learning more about Friends’ worship, and worship groups have sprung up. After experiencing AVP trainings at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe, Washington, two inmates asked to try the Quaker way of worship. Thus was the Monroe Worship Group born.[6]]
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riend Paul Lacey in his Pendle Hill Pamphlet (No. 264) “Leading and Being Led”, explores the varied experiences of Friends who discover “the ethical, political, social, and economic consequences of following the will of God” as they are drawn to a particular action. Leanore Goodenow and a small group of Friends began to worship with prisoners in 1972 at the Colorado State Prison in Cañon City. From this worshipful genesis to which Leanore was drawn, a second career has developed following her retirement as principal of Scattergood Friends School. “I didn’t know when I was serving on the Denver Anti-Crime Commission, Standards and Goals for Colorado Corrections Task Force, and the Citizens Advisory Committee to the Senate Judiciary Committee that it was to be an introduction to and preparation for the prison work I have subsequently done. I was just trying to do faithfully the tasks at hand, and all the rest followed....”
The arduous business of trust-building—trust between Leanore and the prisoners with whom she has worked at five state prisons in the past ten years, and trust between prison authorities and legislators and Leanore—underlies the relative ease now of relationships with each group. “In the old days when I went to Territorial [a state prison], I would have to stand out in rain or storm while the prison guards checked with security regarding the speakers I was bringing with me. Then I’d go into the prison and be searched. Now when I get out of the car in the parking lot, they open the gate. In fact the Superintendent of that prison, Mark McGoff, volunteered one night when I had a speaker cancel at the last minute to speak to the prisoners himself after he had worked all day. I think that was pretty nice.”
Unprecedented arrangements have also been made for Leanore to conduct an afternoon program of distinguished speakers during prison working hours in which men who work are excused from their jobs if they want to participate. Where the prison does not limit the number of participants, there may be 30, 80, or 100 prisoners attending a program which they have helped to design by requesting specific topics for speakers. Legal, labor and legislative experts have made the eight hour trek with Leanore from Denver after their own workday to meet with prisoners for two and a half hours of presentation and discussion on topics as diverse as community resources, drug and alcohol abuse, nonviolence, feminist view points, the legal system, education, health, getting jobs outside.
When a prisoner asked Leanore regarding her prison programs, “What’s your objective?” Leanore asked, “What’s yours? It’s your group. This is a discussion group. I bring people here for you. What do you want out of it.” Later Leanore said to this prisoner privately, “I guess I want to improve your self-esteem.”
“I recently took an expert on job-training to the maximum security prison, Centennial. I started out by saying, “What did you do before you came to prison, and what in your wildest imagination would you like to do when you get out? What kind of job do you want? And can you train for that in here?”
The first fellow said, “I’m forty-two years old and I have a forty-year sentence, and frankly I don’t know what kind of a job I want when I’m eighty-two.” The guest speaker said, “Listen. You’re a human being and you have to have a life; you can’t just be forty years in here with no life, so your life has to be up here in your brain. I want you to start listening to Channel Six; find out what your interests are and begin informing yourself about them and thinking about them and let that become your life.” Wasn’t that wonderful?
This same enthusiasm Leanore applies to her work with the Colorado State Legislature. Three of the men attending the session on job-training just described had forty-year sentences. “A forty-year sentence makes no sense at all. That’s one of the things I’m working on. In 1985 one of the men in the legislature persuaded the state to double all the sentences! And this is the result. Our prisons are clogged. Four men will never get out ... In 1972 when I began prison work, a life sentence meant ten years. Then it was increased to twenty. Now they’ve doubled it to forty! A forty-year sentence doesn’t make one nickel’s worth of sense to anybody. I don’t think the legislators thought of the consequences. So I said to them, “Do you realize that since 1985 when sentencing was doubled that we now have 58 men doing 40 year sentences? Do you know what that’s going to cost the taxpayers...aside from the fact that when they get to be sixty, seventy, seventy-five they’re going to have enormous medical expenses from strokes and heart attacks and mental problems?... Just the normal expenses of keeping these 58 men imprisoned for the next ten years will cost the state over fifty million dollars....You have calculators, why don’t you figure it our for yourself? I figured it our with a pencil ...You’re spending over 50 million dollars of the public’s tax money for 58 men. And we have over 4,000 men in prison.”
Leanore works presently on this legislative issue with a group, Citizens for Correctional Reform, which prepares position papers once every two weeks and distributes them to each state legislator. “We’re trying to get the legislators to stop building any more prisons.…We just work like demons .…We brought legislators down from Minnesota where they have a very good prison system in which they put a cap on prison population. Crime has not gone up in the eight years since the cap of 3,800 people in prison has been in effect. Citizens for Correctional Reform got a similar cap in prison population passed by the Senate this year [1988] but we lost it in the House. We almost won and we’ll try again. We had a luncheon for state legislators who were impressed with our work. I had to laugh, though, because we don’t have any money. We borrowed money to fly the Minnesota legislators here and sometimes we have to pass the hat to get postage for a mailing! We’re too busy to work on writing grants. In fact we’re going to move ahead to learn all we can about sex offenders by calling the top ten therapists in the state to meet with us to educate us and then eventually hold a public meeting on the subject. We’ll also meet with key legislators and district attorneys to discuss crime prevention. What good is it if we put everybody in prison who’s ever committed a rape, for instance, if we continue to have people raping? I want to find out what’s causing crime. Let’s stop the crime instead of building new prisons.”
Leanore is assisted in Citizens for Correctional Reform by Macon Cowles, a retired minister, by a Jesuit priest who does prison counselling, by Alice West, wife of a Lutheran minister, by Eric Wright of the Denver AFSC office and by Roger Louen, a writer. They meet once a week early in the morning for two hours. They have video-taped much material on the prison crisis in America and shown the tapes to legislators. Changing the sentencing laws, educating against building new prisons, advocating changes in law for sex offenders, and lobbying for crime prevention are their present tasks.
The stories of Leanore Goodenow’s over 1,000 hours spent with prisoners in prisons should be gathered into a book, combined with her educational and legislative advocacy efforts. They would constitute a model framework for anyone who also may feel led to undertake a ministry to those who are, but for the small band of the faithful, mostly out of sight and forgotten in a society which punishes but does not reform, isolates but does not educate, and kills its murderers, having reared them in a violent society.
Leanore Goodenow has received many awards for her extraordinarily patient and persistent educational and reform efforts. Her life and its leadings are the stuff out of which Quaker legends arise. She remains, however, extraordinarily modest. “I don’t need these awards,” she concluded. “My reward is what I do.” And what she does is much more than recorded here. A Christmas letter from Leanore was a peek into the warmth and affection she doesn’t talk about—she had just held her annual Christmas party for prisoners in maximum security. The evening before that Leanore had attended the opening of an art exhibit in a Denver gallery which she arranged for a prisoner on death row—36 paintings—regretting that he could not be there to see his own exhibition. She sees prisoners as real people and encourages their total development.
To be led is to know one’s part in the universe. [7]