Name/Title
AU Nelson, Margaret 'Peg' Karen [Keiser] - 1990-08-10 letter to Paul J. Harris Jr.Entry/Object ID
2013.2.21Context
Aug. 10, 1990
Dear Paul,
We enjoyed your visit and hope there will be more!
At N.Y. Yearly Meeting, I had a chance to talk with Elizabeth Moshier, who is NYYM's Keeper of the Records. I asked her about the custom of admitting every other child as a birthright Friend if only one parent is a Quaker. She said she had never heard of that, and, for NYYM at least, that had never been a practice. She said that for a good part of the 1800s, if a member of the Soc. of Friends married a non-Friend, he or she was dropped from membership, and children could not be birthright Friends. If both parents joined (rejoined) the Society, then any children born after that would be birthright Friends.
Not remembering who lived where & when, I threw the names Embree, Lambert, and Harris at her. She didn't have a memory of Lamberts or Harris's, but did recognize Embree as an old name among N.Y. Quakers.
This year at NYYM, we had a major conflict between some very fundamentalist, almost born-again Christian oriented Friends, and much less Christian oriented Friends. I wish you could have been there to see the process in action. I'm always amazed at how well it works--and at times like this that it works at all! Initially, it was almost like any other group of people, taking sides, stating their beliefs without really hearing the "other" side, and getting rather heated about what they were sure the "other" side didn't hear or understand or know. By the end of the week, people were speaking very personally (or "experientially") about how they had come to their beliefs,
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and were working hard to listen carefully to each other, and were recognizing that there weren't two sides, but a broad continuum of beliefs and mixtures of beliefs. People were also working to make it into a learning/growing, community-building experience for all of NYYM.
In another week, I'll get another couple weeks off from work--hopefully to catch up again on stuff around the house, throwing out junk mail, etc., and locating lost stuff. (If it's not too hot in the attic.)
Dave spent a week bicycle-riding with about 70 other people from Buffalo to New York City. He has the most fun telling me about the time he got up to 50 mph, and zig-zagging through NYC traffic! I'm sure I got a few more grey hairs just listening!
Norm is about to spend a good part of a week at the family cabin in the Poconos with his mother, who is 88. Her arthritis means she needs help getting around, but she's got a full schedule mapped out for the week.
Give our greetings to Helen when you talk to her, and definitely to your kids. (They're really neat kids!) Keep us posted on how you, and they, and their mother are doing.
{Peggy}
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