Accessibility, Handwork, and Ministry in Meeting for Worship

This article first appeared in the January, 2012 issue of Friends Journal. - sm

Accessibility, Handwork, and Ministry in Meeting for Worship
Staśa Morgan-Appel

In the summer of 2000, I was in a car accident with multiple impacts. I walked away from it, but for months afterward, I couldn’t sit still for more than 20 minutes because of the pain. This was a problem in many areas of my life—work, home, volunteering, meeting for worship.

At the time, I was part of a large meeting which met in a large meetinghouse, and I could usually find a seat on the end of a bench, toward the back of the room. I could lie down on the floor when I needed to; I could get up and go into the back entry way, which we rarely used, and pace when I needed to, then come hover in the doorway to listen to any vocal ministry that was offered. The people in my meeting knew about the accident and seemed to understand the reasons for my odd behavior. It didn’t seem to bother anyone, at least. And as I healed, I was able to sit through more and more of worship again, eventually the full hour.

A few years later, I sustained a severe ankle injury. I was in constant pain: I couldn’t sit, stand, lie down, or walk without pain. Again, this affected every area of my life, and again, I found it very hard to settle into meeting for worship. Pacing in the back of the room wasn’t an option this time. For the first six months after the injury, my ankle was usually taped, so I could shift and wiggle easily in my seat when the pain became too great or too distracting. My usual seat-mate, my spouse, was sympathetic, although I’m sure it did not help the quality of her worship any.

But after six months, when the pain continued, my doctor placed my ankle and leg in a series of casts and braces—too big to make wiggling possible without loud thumps against the benches or being quite noticeable visually. The Worship and Ministry committee, on which my wife was serving, had asked its members to sit on the facing benches even when they didn’t have care of meeting. My squirming would now be even more obvious. I tried sitting on the floor in front of the first facing bench, where my wiggling was less noisy, but I felt that it was still very visible and distracting.

Worst of all for me was the loss of worship. I was not able to take part in communal worship because meeting had become an exercise in endurance through pain, not one of worship and not one of community. There are practices that are about reaching spiritual communion through physical discomfort or even pain, and I have experience in some of them. But meeting for worship is not, and should not be, such an experience.

What to do? There were many options. None of them was worship.

That fall, my F/friend Russell died. I have an active crochet ministry, and I had a very clear leading to make a comfort wrap or throw for his devastated husband. I worked on it mostly during meeting for worship with attention to business, announcements at the rise of meeting, committee meetings, and the like.

One day during meeting for worship when I was in a lot of pain and just couldn’t settle, I took my bag, went to the back corner of the room, and, hidden from view, sat on the floor, crocheting his throw while holding him in the Light, in worship.

It worked. I was able to settle into, and remain in, worship with my meeting.

The handwork distracted me from the pain. Unlike reading, it did not require the intellectual portion of my brain, and so I was able to stay in worship as I’m unable to do always when reading. Because it was ministry, the handwork was enhanced by my being in worship and by my being in worship with my spiritual community. Most of all, handwork was a spiritual tool that made meeting for worship accessible to me in spite of my disability. It was an accessibility aid and a spiritual tool.

Years passed and I didn’t think much about it. My spouse and I had both undertaken mid-life career changes, and we moved several times for her to go to graduate school and to work in temporary positions. We were part of several other meetings.

I became a member of a meeting that was open to diverse ways of making worship accessible to those having difficulty with mobility, neuro-atypicality, vision, hearing, and mental illness. In our meeting, we often balance behavior in meeting for worship that helps some people center but distracts others. As we participated in several meetings, I discovered that some of these ways of making worship accessible irritated me hugely...until I knew why they were being done.

This bothers me: Why should my knowing make a difference? Why would I assume that someone is being irritating on purpose, that someone is not participating fully? Why wouldn’t I assume that what they are doing—whatever it is: reading, handwork, writing, quiet play with hand-puppets, Sudoku—allows them to be fully present in meeting for worship? And yet, once I know the story (someone is neuro-atypical; someone is a young person who prefers meeting for worship to First-day school; someone is in chronic pain; someone just had news of a loved one in the ICU), my irritation vanishes. It makes sense and it ceases to be a problem for me. This difference in my own attitudes bothers me.

A few years ago (we had moved again and were sojourning in a different meeting), I started experiencing a very unpleasant flare-up of a chronic neurological condition. One of the treatments made it likely that I would become fairly sleepy, unless I had direct sensory stimulation. To my horror, I found myself regularly falling asleep in meeting for worship.
I’m told occasional napping during meeting can be very worshipful, and I have often joked about hosting “meeting for worship with attention to napping.” But my chemically-and neurologically-induced experience was definitely not worshipful. It was awful.

So I was experiencing the loss of worship itself and of worship in community—yet again, at a time when I very much needed it. I didn’t want to read. I didn’t want to get up and leave meeting when I started to fall asleep. And I didn’t want to sleep in meeting. I wanted to worship—in community. On top of that, the meetinghouse where we were sojourning was quite small, and anyone doing any of those things, reading, leaving, sleeping, would be very obvious.

Finally, I thought about trying handwork again. People were used to seeing me crochet in meeting for worship with attention to business. We had a ramp for those who used wheelchairs, and we were engaged in discussions about other kinds of accessibility. People might understand. I explained the situation to the Ministry and Counsel committee and received a great deal of support.

Again, handwork helped me stay present in worship in community. It worked as both an accessibility device and a spiritual tool. Without handwork, worship would have been literally inaccessible to me. I would have had to leave the room; I would not have been able to be in meeting for worship.

This may be a novel idea: things we don’t usually consider to be acceptable behavior in meeting for worship can be spiritual tools that are accessibility aids. This idea also gives us the beginnings of some new ways to answer the question: how do we make our meetings more accessible to people with different kinds of disabilities and accessibility needs?

Here are some things I have learned to ask myself (and for others to ask themselves) when another person is doing something that irritates us in meeting for worship:

• Could there be a good reason that the person is doing this?
• Could that reason have something to do with accessibility and a hidden disability?
• Could what he/she is doing actually be a form of ministry?

Staśa Morgan-Appel is a member of University Friends Meeting in Seattle, Wash., attending Central Edinburgh Quaker Meeting in Scotland. She has a letter of introduction and religious service from University Friends Meeting, with a ministry focusing on spiritual nurture with individuals and groups. She is a middling but avid crocheter and blogs at http://aquakerwitch.blogspot.com.

© 2012 Friends Publishing Corporation. Reprinted with permission. To subscribe: www.friendsjournal.org

The Peace Testimony and Armed Forces Emergency Services

This article appeared in the July, 2008 issue of Friends Journal. An earlier version appeared here. I am re-posting it, in part, in honor of Memorial Day. - sm

Disclaimer: The opinions and beliefs stated in this article are those of the author only. They do not reflect the opinions, beliefs, or positions of the American Red Cross. This article is not endorsed by the American Red Cross.

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It’s 3:45 am when my pager wakes me. I speak to a man who is quite upset: his sister has just died – at the end of a long illness, but unexpectedly soon – and his sister’s son is on active duty in the military, stationed overseas. The caller needs to get a message to the nephew through the Red Cross so the young man can get leave for his mother’s funeral. I walk the caller through giving me all the information I need – his sister’s information, the hospice information, his nephew’s name, social security number, and military address – and promise him I’ll get back to him just as soon as I can. I call the hospice agency and page the hospice nurse, who confirms the date, time, and cause of death. I send the message through the Red Cross system and call the man back to tell him the message has been sent and that we requested that his nephew call him as soon as he receives it. I explain that because his nephew is in Iraq and the activity level there is very high right now, it may take longer for the message to go through and he may not hear from his nephew for several days.*

I’m driving home from work when my pager goes off. I pull over and talk to a woman whose son was just in a motor vehicle accident and is near death. She is very calm. She wants her daughter to come home so the family can all decide together about taking him off life support. I talk to the charge nurse in the ICU and gather all the information that command will need to decide whether or not to grant leave, including the medical team’s recommendation for the service member’s presence. I send the message, then let the family know that it’s on its way, and that I requested that a chaplain be present when the sister is notified.

I’m eating dinner when the pager beeps. I speak to a woman who’s in active labor at a local hospital and is about to give birth. She gives me her husband’s information between contractions and then passes the phone to her father-in-law when she can no longer speak. I apologetically explain I can’t send the message until the baby’s born. Her father-in-law chuckles. “Don’t worry, they’re wheeling her into delivery now!” By the time I talk to someone on staff for the verification, the baby’s been born and I can send the notification. The delighted new grandpa answers the cell phone when I call back to say the message has been sent.

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*To protect confidentiality, none of this information comes from actual cases. These situations are compiled from typical kinds of cases.
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I volunteer with the American Red Cross, an organization which provides humanitarian relief and assistance under a variety of circumstances. I’m active in two areas: Disaster Relief, and Armed Forces Emergency Services (AFES). As an AFES volunteer, I mostly work with military families to get emergency messages to active-duty service members: an illness or accident, death, other emergency situation, birth.

As a Friend, I first got involved with the Red Cross through Disaster Services just after September 11, 2001. Like so many of us, I had a deep need to do something – something to help, and something that expressed the Peace Testimony. What I did was answer phones, all day, every day. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was needed, and it freed up experienced, trained volunteers to go out in the field.

After Hurricane Katrina, I again found myself raging at the news, and again felt that need to do something. So I thought I’d go answer phones again. But because I have experience as a pastoral counselor and case manager and the need was so great, the local Chapter asked me to go to the Gulf Coast instead.

Five weeks after the disaster, at just one service center, in just one town, my fellow volunteers and I saw and spoke with thousands of people every day. None of us could “fix” anything for them. True, we could help them apply for financial assistance. True, we could try to connect them with services. But we couldn’t repair their lives.

Mostly, what we could do was just be there with them.

It turned out our simple presence meant much more than financial assistance to many people. “You came from where? To be here with us?”
“But you’re not getting paid?!”
“What about your family?”
“Thank you for coming down here.”
“I haven’t told anybody what happened, and it’s been more than a month.”
“We thought nobody cared about us.”

I already knew what a difference it made for me to have someone simply be with me when I was going through hard times. In Mississippi, I learned yet again that bearing witness is sacred work.

When I returned from my deployment, I stayed involved with my local Red Cross Chapter, mostly responding to local disasters. I learned it also makes a big difference to people when they know they’re not alone just after a house fire, tornado, or flood. One elderly resident of an apartment house which had been completely evacuated in the middle of the night said, “Because you all were there, we weren’t afraid.”

But then my supervisor asked me to get involved with Armed Forces Emergency Services. Our department was short-staffed, and she said I had a good background for the work. I was a little dubious about this. As a Friend, as someone who doesn’t support this war, how would I feel talking to military families in crisis? And could I do so without offering them short shrift? (Integrity. Peace.) But as a volunteer, I was there to do whatever needed to be done, so I said I’d try.

I kept thinking of a F/friend whose brother is a Marine. I kept thinking of my own surrogate brother, who’s a Marine, too.

Over time, doing AFES casework became as much an expression of the Peace Testimony for me as Disaster Relief work. I don't know that I have good words to explain how being part of providing this service, providing this ministry of presence, is, for me, a way of walking the Peace Testimony in the world; but I will try.

Let me start with the seven Fundamental Principles of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement: Humanity. Impartiality. Neutrality. Independence. Voluntary Service. Unity. Universality.

I know. They sound like a bunch of very dry words. And yet each one of those Principles is quite real. Each one provides concrete guidance to Red Crossers. Each one helps me put my Quaker beliefs and convictions into action as part of a larger, completely secular, organization, side-by-side with non-Friends. Each one lets me work closely with other people who have very strong convictions, and who in ordinary life might not think we have anything at all in common.
The Fundamental Principles help us do sacred work together.

I find one key, one link, to the Peace Testimony in the Fundamental Principles. Take, for example, Humanity. With each AFES case I work, I have several opportunities to recognize and honor the humanity in another human being; to recognize and honor That-Which-Is-Sacred in each person I speak with – the spouse or parent or sibling or cousin or friend who's initiating the case; the medical administrator, nurse, doctor, police officer, funeral director, or hospice nurse with whom I verify the case; the AFES Center worker who takes the case or gives one to me.

These are opportunities to bear witness.

I find additional keys in Red Cross history. The first-ever Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 1901, was shared by Frédéric Passy, who founded the first French peace society, and Henri Dunant, who founded the International Red Cross and initiated the Geneva Convention. The International and the American Red Cross organizations were founded in the midst of two of the bloodiest wars Europe and America had known – the Battle of Solferino in the Second War of Italian Independence, and the American Civil War – springing from a desire to help the wounded on the battlefield, without consideration for which side of a conflict any of those wounded were part.

Humanity. Neutrality. Impartiality. Independence.

Several months ago, a local Friend asked me, “Don’t you feel conflicted when you do AFES casework? Because you’re making soldiers’ lives easier?”

That thought hadn't occurred to me. So, I thought about it.

And I realized, I haven't talked to one family or one soldier whose life is anything approaching “easy” right now.

The service I offer as an AFES caseworker is one where I work with people in a time of great stress, and touch them as embodiments of That-Which-Is-Sacred. As real people. Many of the families and professionals I speak with in the course of a case are struggling to make a difference in the world. Many of the them are struggling simply to get through each day.

For the families, having a loved one in the service right now is not easy. There's not one family I've worked with that hasn't been under enormous stress because they have someone in the service right now. When someone they love is ill or dying or giving birth or being born, it doesn't matter whether or not they support this war, or any war, or their relative’s military service: they are the same people as you and me.

I guess that's the real key, what it really comes down to. Working with military families has helped me see that women and men in uniform, and the families of those women and men in uniform, are not part of a monolith or even a monoculture. Working AFES cases has helped me recognize military members and families as people who are a lot like me.

And they are people who are suffering because of this war. Some of them believe in it, some of them don't. It actually doesn't matter: they are all suffering for it, in ways those of us back home who don't have a direct connection can't understand.

"The Red Cross, born of a desire to bring assistance without discrimination to the wounded on the battlefield, endeavours... to relieve the suffering of individuals, being guided solely by their needs, and to give priority to the most urgent cases of distress."

Humanity.

The Peace Testimony.

Each of us is sacred.