Multnomah Meeting officially dates to the last years of the 1950s, but its origins reach back another decade. After World War II, scattered Quakers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley began to meet for unprogrammed worship, driving on pre-Interstate highways to meet in Salem. As their numbers grew, four independent meetings coalesced in Eugene, Corvallis, Salem, and Portland.
Multnomah Meeting takes its name from the county in which Portland is located. The name also recognizes that the modern city of Portland occupies the ancestral homelands of Multnomahs and other Chinookan peoples who lived along the lower Willamette and Columbia Rivers.
Towards the end of the 1990s, the Meeting’s increasing size prompted some members to seek a smaller and more intimate worship community. The result was an amicable division in which a number of Friends left to create our sister meeting Bridge City Friends Meeting.
Multnomah Meeting is part of North Pacific Yearly Meeting and is also affiliated with Friends General Conference.
The Meetinghouse
Half of our Meetinghouse dates from the early 20th century and half from the early 21st century.
The square half on the west was built as a factory in 1917, originally for the Portland Knitting Company, which soon rebranded itself as Jantzen. A heavy masonry pillar that supported heavy machinery is still in the basement, and the beautiful skylight in the meeting room was originally an industrial skylight.
The building passed through several company ownerships, including Electro-Scientific Industries (now ESI). In 1962 the company sold the building to the new Multnomah Meeting at a bargain price with the proviso that it offer office space to the American Friends Service Committee, which utilize several rooms until the early 1980s. Remodeling in 1982-83 moved the meeting room upstairs.
In the early 2000s, a substantial building project added a new entrance, elevator, and classroom wing to the east of the original building. The same project also created the garden space behind the new wing.
“A Meeting of Friends” short film
A Meeting of Friends from MOIRA Productions on Vimeo.
Historians love direct evidence from the past that reveals how people thought and acted. Multnomah Meeting in Portland, Oregon is pleased to make such a source available more that four decades after it was produced. The film “A Meeting of Friends” is a portrait of Multnomah Meeting and some of its members from 1972 (when the Meeting was part of Pacific Yearly Meeting).
Viewers who are familiar with the Meeting will remark on the contrast between the Meetinghouse of 1972 and the twice-renovated building of today. They may consider whether there have been changes in Quaker “plain dress” over the decades. We can all reflect on how each of us might respond to the topics and questions that the film addresses.
This film might also be useful for groups of Friends as a basis for discussion about their own beliefs as well as considering if the foundation of Quaker belief and practice in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, Pacific Yearly Meeting, Intermountain Yearly Meeting, and similar groupings of Friends is the same now as in the early 1970s? Would we highlight the same aspects of our practice and our community? How would we speak our truth?
About the Filmmaker
Here is an introduction in filmmaker Tom Weidlinger’s own words:
We are pleased to make available the complete digitally restored version of A Meeting of Friends, the 1972 documentary film about the Multnomah Monthly Meeting. The film features the wedding vows, before Friends, of Ed and Barbara Janoe as well as the reflections of Esther Richards, Laura Martin, and Girard Roscoe on what it meant to them to be a Friend. Several Meeting members, who are listed in the credits, gave financial support to make the film possible.
The film was made by Tom Weidlinger, an attender at the Multnomah Meeting between 1970 and 1973 and a film student at The Center for The Moving Image at Portland State University. Tom went on to have a prolific career as an independent documentary filmmaker. Twenty-five of his hour-long films, ranging in topics from humanitarian aid in the Congo to high school students with learning differences, have aired nationally on public television. Many remain in educational distribution.
In response to a query inquiry about a putting A Meeting of Friends on the Multnomah Meeting website, Tom was inspired to clean up the original film, using digital tools not available 43 years ago. He cut out jerky splices, added a few ambient sound effects, streamlined the credits, and re-graded the black and white footage for contrast and brightness.
The slow pace of the film, with near silent shots remaining on the screen for many, many seconds, is in the genre of anthropological filming 50 years ago. It was also an attempt to convey the contemplative nature of a Friends Meeting for Worship.
Tom’s current project is THE RESTLESS HUNGARIAN both a book and a film about his father, Paul Weidlinger. You are invited to visit the blog and Facebook Page about this project.
RESTLESS HUNGARIAN
http://restlesshungarian.com/
FACEBOOK PAGE
https://www.facebook.com/RestlessHungarian