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:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between regions of kindness.
Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow,
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow
you must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrow
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that make sense any more.
Only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
From the crowd of the world to say
it is you I have been looking for,
and then it goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
--Naomi Shihab Nye
This week’s queries:
- Do you feel “between regions of kindness” these days?
- How do we heal that feeling?
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!
