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.
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.
If you’re new to Worship Sharing, you may wish to take a look at these suggested guidelines.
This week’s quotes:
Even now, I am becoming
wind, something less flesh, more
movement, more current, less
here, more everywhere. Though
the moment I think I know this truth,
the knowing re-solids me,
makes me into clay that pretends it is wind.
But becoming clay again, I am destined
to crumble, disintegrate, until
I am dust and once again one
with the wind. How to trust anything
then, except this infinite becoming and
rebecoming—and whatever
it is that is alive inside it all.
That. I put my faith in that.
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Faith,” from her blog A HUNDRED FALLING VEILS
I came to love you too late, Oh Beauty, so ancient and so new…What did I know? You were inside me, and I was out of my body and mind, looking for you… You called to me and cried to me; you broke the bowl of my deafness; you uncovered your beams, and threw them at me…
~ St. Augustine from “I came to love you too late” in THE SOUL IS HERE FOR ITS OWN JOY
The spirit is so near that you can’t see it!
But reach for it…Don’t be a jar
Full of water, whose rim is always dry.
Don’t be the rider who gallops all night
And never sees the horse that is beneath him.
~ Rumi from “The Jar With the Dry Rim” in WHEN GRAPES TURN TO WINE: VERSIONS OF RUMI
This week’s queries:
- What speaks to you in these poems?
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.
