THE EPISTLE OF INTERMOUNTAIN YEARLY MEETING, ABIQUIU, NM, JUNE 2002

Greetings to Friends Everywhere:

We are gathered here at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, after fourteen years away, among mesas, canyons, and red rock cliffs. Years of searching ourselves led to our coming here to try this site again. Who are we? What is our purpose? Where is right for us? Our guest speaker, Eden Grace, asks these questions in a wider way. What witness do we hold in trust that we offer the world, and what perspective is given us by who we are? Friends do not hold what is revealed to us to be kept unchanged for the future's benefit Our witness is or should be now. This is our trust. Our Truth does not have a date, past or future.

Moving our meeting place has not been easy, is no panacea for problems, and has required flexibility and patience with one another and our hosts. Our new relationship with the Ghost Ranch Conference Center holds much promise of collaboration with another faith-based organization, the Presbyterian Church USA, and some fruits of this are already visible. Being together in worship, work, and play enlivens us as we come from the wide expanse of the American Southwest. We see this especially for our children and youth who blossom in relationship with other young Friends. Providing this is not easy. We have to learn to combine responsibility among parents, our program leaders, and the staff of Ghost Ranch' s children’s' activities. We are impressed with the growing maturity and responsibility of our older young people, especially Senior Young Friends.

In our beautiful surroundings, all nature is riot calm and pleasing.. A large wildfire ten miles away sent a great mushroom cloud into the sky and threatened the homes of people who work here at the Ranch and many others. We were asked to be ready to help house and feed possible evacuees. We and they were blessed by changes in conditions that favored fire-fighters.

In hearing about our Yearly Meeting's relation with Quaker peace and service organizations, we have had revelations of the high stakes for both those who need and give help. Peace Team members reported on experiences at the scenes of death and destruction between Israelis and Palestinians. During our week we learned that 17 migrants from Mexico who were coming across the border to work had been found dead in the Arizona desert west of Tucson. As a direct result of enforcing US policy, as well as of international economic inequities, these people put themselves in such peril with hundreds of tragic results. Economic exploitation begins on the Mexico side of the border with few worker rights and continues in like fashion after they arrive in the United States as legally unrecognised and unprotected residents.

Our Yearly Meeting continues to recognize these conditions as contrary to central Quaker testimonies of equality and a just community with human rights and sees our leading and responsibility to work for bettering them through our own activity and by raising the priority of effort in our Quaker organizations as well as in our government

We have been called on to attend to Good Order in our business, releasing Friends to follow concerns with our help, making a shift to a whole new order of choosing our leadership with those needed coming forward to serve, and taking care in not putting responsibilities on too few or on those not in a position to carry them. As a Yearly Meeting we are in many ways at a formative stage in organization. .

We return to our homes and meetings filled with the joy of having been together and with a greater sense of the Light we follow.

Ted Church, Clerk~

On behalf of Intermountain Yearly Meeting