PACEM  and the Charlottesville Friends Meeting

Our meeting  has been one of the PACEM congregations since it began in Charlottesville in 2005.   For the first few years our members served at the first Baptist Church on Main Street.   We then partnered with the Ivy Creek United Methodist Church on Woodlands Road until the completion of our new community room.   We opened this space to host the women’s section in December of 2009.  This was surely a “Grand Opening”  due to the major weather event described below in the PACEM Committee report from the Meeting for Business of January 2010 and the additional remembrance from Ted Siedlecki.

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PACEM Committee Report –2010

submitted by Linda Kobert, clerk

The PACEM committee’s purpose is to support the Meeting’s volunteer participation in the community’s efforts to serve the homeless through the organization People and Congregations Engaged in Ministry (PACEM). Since PACEM’s inception, Charlottesville Friends Meeting has served as a partner congregation, lending a hand to other congregations who hosted PACEM guests. Responding to a leading to move beyond this assistive role, however, this past year CFM became a host site. For sixteen nights in December 2009, we provided a warm meal and overnight accommodations for an average of ten homeless women per night in the shelter of our recently completed community room.

Our efforts were greatly supported by the members of Ivy Creek United Methodist Church, with whom CFM had partnered for the previous two years, who shared fully half of the volunteer duties. Friends also wanted to use this initiative as a means of reaching out to get to know our Rose Hill neighbors as well, and we were pleased to work side-by-side with members of the Rose Hill Neighborhood Association, Women of Restoration (a Christian group of women in recovery), and Living Water Christian Center (a church that meets at the other end of Forest Street). A student from Tandem Friends School who was involved in an independent study in community service also lent a very helpful hand.

Under normal circumstances, this report might end here with a hearty “Thanks to all!” But this was not a normal winter. More than two feet of snow fell on what was intended to be our last night of hosting. Not only could we not send the ladies on to the next shelter, we couldn’t, in good conscience, ask them to leave the shelter during the day. This generous community responded to this challenge in the most loving way, allowing our guests to remain at the Meeting House not only through the night, but throughout the day for two additional days. Given the challenges of power outages and the transportation and communication difficulties imposed by the storm, it seemed that Spirit was truly moving among us as volunteers arrived just when they were needed most to staff the shelter and provide additional food and needed supplies.

This experience of hosting the PACEM women’s shelter was a most tangible opportunity for Friends to put Quaker testimonies into action in a very meaningful way. We are grateful to all those who lovingly gave their time and effort to provide this service to the homeless women of our community. In the end, however, it’s hard to say just who it was receiving the gifts: our guests or those of us who served them. In the enigmatic way of the Spirit, we all discovered something Divine.

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“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

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Another PACEM 2009 memory and reflection (by Ted Siedlecki)

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.

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