Daily online Meeting for Worship
Each morning from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time, Quaker Center hosts a silent, online half-hour online Meeting for Worship in the manner of Friends. The Meeting uses a website called Chatzy that provides a text-only format – no audio or video. You can join the Meeting and read more about it by following the link below. All are welcome.
Quaker Center online meeting for worship.
Wednesday Online Worship Sharing
Each Wednesday from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time, Quaker Center hosts an online Worship Sharing group. Newcomers are welcome. Click the Zoom link below to join the group.
What is Worship Sharing? During Worship Sharing, friends gather in a worshipful attitude to reflect together on a short text or quote, and some related queries (open ended questions). This activity is similar to a Quaker Meeting for Worship in that, after an initial period of silence, those present speak from their own experience and allow for silence between contributions. Participants usually speak only once, allowing some silence between each sharing, until everyone who wishes to has had a chance to share. Worship Sharing is appreciated by Quakers as a way to explore ideas together, learn and listen deeply, and to get to know one another in a meaningful way.
Zoom link for Quaker Center Wednesday online Worship Sharing
If you’re new to Worship Sharing, you may wish to take a look at these suggested guidelines.
This week’s quote(s):
“The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
“Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
“But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You're not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You're here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill - and we're all terminally ill on this bus - what will matter are memories of beauty, that people loved you, and that you loved them.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
“This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
“Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers
“More than any other sentence I have ever come across, I love Ram Dass’s line that when all is said and done, we are all just walking each other home.”
― Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
Because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
– Rumi
“It happens to all of us," I concluded that Easter Sunday morning. "God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
“But we’ve lost the plot if we use religion as the place where we escape from difficult realities instead of as the place where those difficult realities are given meaning.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People
“Because sometimes the most holy thing we can say is: No. Not on my watch.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless: A Case for Not Feeling Bad About Feeling Good
“In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
“On some level, although we can’t handle the pain of acknowledging it, Good Friday happens every day.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People}
Queries:
- Are there particular selections here which speak to you personally or spiritually?
- Is there a unifying message in the above quotes/poems?
- What are some of the human qualities being summoned in order to heal the world and our place in it?
- Do Anne Lamotte and Nadia Bolz-Weber seem to share a similar vision of God?
First Wednesday evenings:
in-person Meeting for Worship
Each month on the first Wednesday, we’ll have an evening Meeting for Worship here at Quaker Center from 7:15 to 8:00 p.m. We’ll gather for an informal potluck before hand at about six. All are welcome. Call (831) 336-8333 with any questions, no need to RSVP. We usually meet in the Orchard Lodge, but look for the sign when you drive up – it will tell you where the Meeting for Worship will be held.
2024 YEAR-END NOTE: We will not hold an in-person Meeting for Worship on New Year’s Day 2025, but rather hold it on Wednesday, January 8th, 2025. Come join us!
