Closing the Daybook

The Daybook project now officially comes to a close. It’s been an intense and enlightening enterprise, but for me now comes a time of moving onward on other fronts. Since the entries remain posted in the archive, you are certainly invited to call them up through the year – especially if you came aboard once we were well in progress.

One of the biggest surprises for me has come in the participation, as it were, by Elizabeth Bathurst, a brilliant though little known Quaker from the early days of the movement. Setting up the daily presentations in their three-part format and leaving the third one to her, they often seemed to pop up as a mini-Quaker Meeting for worship, with messages that were not intended to flow neatly one into the next but rather bounce off each other, the way the Spirit often moves in our gathered silence. I hope Elizabeth has found an appreciation and welcome in a new circle of Friends today.

Thank you for sitting with me through the past year. Let’s see what else develops.

Soap stones

This is how we kept warm on icy mornings, back in the day before the meetinghouse had a wood stove. Friends would heat the stones in their own hearths, place them in metal carriers, and huddle over them in the hour of worship. The stones would also keep the carriage warm on their journey.

Note the personal initials.

Severe persecution

Above the coffee pots in our meetinghouse sits this painting, originally used as an illustration in an edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s collected poems.

The three women were ordered stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and whipped in each town from Dover to Cape Cod. It would have been a fatal sentence, had the cart not turned north instead — and a sympathetic magistrate in Maine.

The particular poem is “How the Women Went from Dover,” telling how three Quaker women came to town in 1662, preaching and teaching until they were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to cruel punishment. It was the start of our Friends Meeting, the fifth oldest congregation in the state. Despite continuing persecution, nearly a third of the population became Quaker.

 

Gaza pinwheels

Blowin’ in the summer wind.

Here’s the explanation.

This display from the 2015 sessions of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends is timeless.

 

 

In traditional Quaker dress

This portrait sits on a ledge above a stairway in the Dover Friends meetinghouse. I’m not sure who she is, but the dress is in the Quaker style of the 1800s.

The call of freedom

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s Charter of Privileges — the forerunner of America’s Bill of Rights — the colonial Assembly of Pennsylvania approved the purchase of a great bell for the statehouse, which is today known as Independence Hall.

In 1751, Quakers still formed the majority of the Assembly, and its speaker chose the inscription from Leviticus 25:10, which begins “Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land” in its King James translation.

The bell itself was widely known as the Great Quaker Bell until July 8, 1776, when it was rung to celebrate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and became known as the Liberty Bell.

Here is Everett Fox’s translation of the text:

You are to hallow the year, the fiftieth year,

proclaiming freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants;

it shall be a Homebringing for you,

you are to return, each-man to his holding,

each-man to his clan you are to return.

This, the jubilee year, introduces a revolutionary concept of redistributing all the land’s wealth every 50 years. Likewise, Penn’s Charter was a revolutionary recognition of the rights of individual conscience. And the event celebrated on this day honors a third revolution in human society. All, to be hallowed.

Rare books and files

It’s a big cabinet with protective doors. I love the smell of old books when they’re opened.

The library in many Friends meetinghouses may have a few shelves like this. From a similar bookcase in Ohio I once borrowed Joseph Besse’s 1753 two-volume A collection of the sufferings of the people called Quakers, for the testimony of a good conscience from the time of their being first distinguished by that name in the year 1650 to the time of the act commonly called the Act of toleration granted to Protestant dissenters in the first year of the reign of King William the Third and Queen Mary in the year 1689. Alas, we don’t have that one in our collection – those big books are a genealogical treasure. We still have plenty for a serious scholar or bibliophile to engage. It’s likely that many of the authors visited Dover as travelling ministers.

Who was it who so meticulously wrapped and cataloged all these and more so many years ago?

Look what we did 50 years ago

Found stashed in the gallery upstairs.

We’re getting ready to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of the erection of our meetinghouse in June 1768. It’s our third and went up in one day, like an Amish barn-raising nowadays. The big sign stashed in the gallery upstairs announced a play one Friend wrote and the rest of the Meeting performed in honor of the 200^th anniversary. Yes, poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s parents were married in our meetinghouse.

Needlepoint sampler

A favorite old Quaker counsel when we gather in worship. Dover Friends Meeting, New Hampshire. Note the subtle distinction between “mind” and “thoughts.”

 

Quarterly Meeting

Representatives from neighboring Quaker congregations get together four times a year to check in on each other and events in their home meetings. The practice, called Quarterly Meeting, has its own clerks, treasurer, and other officers, as needed.

In the past, it was a big event. The smaller meetings, in fact, would not have their own worship that Sunday — everyone would be off to wherever the Quarter was gathering. I suspect much of it was a family reunion, one filled with a holiday spirit.

Nowadays is a different matter, especially as we struggle with finding a better fit between our Monthly Meetings (the local groups that worship each week but conduct business once a month) and our much larger Yearly Meetings — in our case, New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.

These photos are from a session of Dover Quarterly Meeting that took place in the newly renovated West Epping meetinghouse.

We came from across much of New Hampshire.

It’s a classic space. Gone, though, is the wood stove, now that propane heating has been installed.