PACEM

PACEM  and the Charlottesville Friends Meeting

Our meeting  has been a participating PACEM congregation since its founding in 2005. For the 20th anniversary of our ministry to the unhoused, we will host women during the week of March 22 – April 4 in 2025.  This year, Sojourners Church will be partnering with us to ready the Meeting House, feed our guests, and other responsibilities. They are eager to be part of our team and we are excited to share this ministry.
We will be actively making plans and setting up schedules early in 2025 to determine Immediate needs and ways to support. In the interim, if you’d like to learn more about PACEM, here is their website: https://pacemshelter.org/
If you have specific questions or ideas for our hosting time, please contact Cindy Cartwright or Linda Goldstein.

******************************************************************************

PACEM Committee Report –2024

Submitted by Cindy Cartwright

I would like to thank everyone for making our hosting of PACEM a success!  On average, we hosted 12 women over the two weeks.  Women were grateful for the delicious meals and warm welcome.  None of this would have been possible without the support of the Meeting. Our hosting efforts were possible because of the 83 different volunteers!  These fabulous individuals included folks from Tandem Friends School as well as the Inclusive Muslims of Central Virginia.

                  ************************************

Memories and reflections from previous PACEM experiences

“The opportunity to host PACEM gave us gifts of the Spirit that we did not have before. I have never known Meeting members to be such willing and eager volunteers. We got to know our neighbors better; we got to know ourselves better; and we became more of a community than we had been before, among ourselves and in our world.”         

—Jennie Burton

 ************************************

We were snowed in; and we had nine guests to feed.  Elizabeth Shillue and Rosemary Gould volunteered that they had ingredients on hand to make a large amount of chili and corn bread for dinner.  But we couldn’t figure out how to get the big, heavy pots of food to the Meeting House. We had been calling around for someone with a four-wheel drive vehicle.  One man from Ivy Creek Methodist Church tried to get to us, but he could not get past Preston Avenue.  The piles of snow from left by the plows were too high for his truck to negotiate.  He walked to us with a few snack items in hand, but we still needed a way to get dinner to our guests.  And then Beth Kariel (who hasn’t been to Meeting for years) arrives out of nowhere, like an angel in a moment of need.  She offers the services of her teenage son and his three friends to carry the pots, which they do with ease and laughter.  Beth and her daughter stay to serve the meal.  What a joyful and humbling experience of “way opening.”  It brought to mind of the advice in Psalm 33:

The war horse [or a 4×4 truck] is a vain hope for victory,

   and by its great might it cannot save.

Truly the eye of the LORD is on those who fear him,

   on those who hope in his steadfast love,

to deliver their soul from death,

   and to keep them alive in famine

—Ted Siedlecki

***********************************