Website: santacruzquakers.org
Contact email: scfm@santacruzquakers.org
Look for the weekly email blast on Friday at 5 p.m.

First Day Schedule

10:30 a.m., Meeting for Worship.
12:30 p.m., Second First Day. Meeting for Worship for the Purpose of Business. Zoom available.
9:30 a.m., Third First Day. Advices & Queries worship sharing. In person at the Meetinghouse.
9:45 a.m., Hymn singing. In person in the worship room. Check the email blast for the schedule.

Live Oak Friends Meeting in Salinas welcomes Santa Cruz Friends to its Zoom worship, held on the 2nd, 4th, and 5th Sundays at 11:00 a.m. Check the email blast for the link.

Meeting Calendar

Every Monday, 9:15 a.m. Quaker hike. Contact Mimi for the location.
Every Tuesday, 10 a.m. All men are invited to meet for coffee and conversation at The Shrine.
Every Thursday, 7-8 p.m. Online meeting for worship. Check the email blast for the link.
1st, 4th, and 5th Wednesdays. Faith Community Shelter at Meetinghouse.

Saturday, August 1 from 9-11. Building and Grounds will host a work party. Come and help, enjoy weeding and community!

Saturday August 22 from 2-4. The next Women’s Tea at the Meetinghouse.

Quaker Center Calendar

Every morning, 7:30 a.m. Quaker Center online Meeting for Worship.
Every Wednesday, 10 a.m. Quaker Center online Worship Sharing.
First Wednesday of the month potluck at 6 pm, worship at 7:15

September 4-7, Fall Harvest Weekend, Participant led. A lightly programmed event, with plenty to do, including volunteer-led cooking crews and opportunities for participants to lead activities throughout the weekend.

September 25-27, Silent Retreat. A weekend of silence. We’ll take time to unplug from the distractions of daily life, and reconnect with ourselves, the redwood forest, and Spirit.

For more information on these and other Quaker Center programs, see: http://www.quakercenter.org/programs/

Advices and Queries: Simplicity

Life is meant to be lived from a Center, a divine Center… a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene. It takes no time, but it occupies all our time. -Thomas R. Kelly, Testament of Devotion, 1941

A life centered in God will be directed toward keeping communication with God open and unencumbered. Simplicity is best achieved through a right ordering of priorities, maintaining humility of spirit, avoiding self-indulgence, resisting the accumulation of unnecessary possessions, and avoiding over-busy lives.

Elise Boulding writes in My Part in the Quaker Adventure, “Simplicity, beauty, and happiness go together if they are a by-product of a concern for something more important than ourselves.”

Do I center my life in an awareness of God’s presence so that all things take their rightful place?
Do I live simply, and promote the right sharing of the world’s bounty?
Do I keep my life uncluttered with things and activities, avoiding commitments beyond my strength and light?
How do I maintain simplicity, moderation, and honesty in my speech, my manner of living, and my daily work?
Do I recognize when I have enough?
Is the life our Meeting so ordered that it helps us to simplify our lives??

Quaker Center Quote of the Week

...we came on the ship they call The Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hours
And sing an American tune
Oh, and it's alright, it's alright, it's alright
You can't be forever blessed...
--Paul Simon American Tune

Queries

• What are your thoughts/wishes/prayers for the US at its 250th anniversary?

• For those abroad, what does the USA look like?

• Can we be good citizens and good people of faith as well? Are we truly “forever blessed”?

Reflections on Annual Session – Nancy W

I attended Annual Session of Pacific Yearly Meeting for four days, Saturday – Tuesday. It was the first time I’d attended Annual Session in many, many years, and it was a wonderful experience (in spite of the many hours of sitting!).

This year’s theme was “Experiment!”. George Fox found his faith “experimentally.” How do we experience our faith? We spent many hours in worship, plenary, worship sharing, interest groups, and fellowship circles diving deeply into this question. Each sessionprovided multiple opportunities to listen deeply and connect with others.

The highlights for me were :
- Keynote: Our speaker, Lisa Graustein, lives in Boston and is a member of Three Rivers Monthly meeting. She has traveled widely among Friends in the US and globally, and carries a ministry focused on addressing the underlying dynamics of white supremacy, colonization, and climate change. She spoke to us about how our faith and practice inform each other, and used the example of a river flowing in two directions. How do we hold joy and grief; how does the 24-hour news cycle work with the slow process of Quaker discernment? She spoke of transformation and change as two different things; transformation being the moment you can’t go back from, while change being a slower and lengthier process. What holds us back from transformation and/or change in our lives and in our meetings? How do we listen to the voices in our meeting – those who hold the emotions, those who hold the status quo, and those who are the prophetic voices?

- PacYM Ministry committee presentation on Spiritual Experiences: In this presentation, we explored how we experience Spirit. We were given examples of the ways in which Spirit is revealed, discovered, and held; and we had the opportunity to break into pairs and talk about our own experience. I found this to be very powerful.

- Worship Sharing: Worship sharing groups met after lunch for an hour and fifteen minutes. The queries invited us to go deeper into the topics presented in the morning. The beauty of this format is that we were in the same groups each day, so that we really got to know each other.

- Fellowship Circles: Before dinner, we met in groups of seven to review the day and express how we were feeling.

- Interest Groups: Karen, Deborah, Vee, and I attended an interest group called “Deepening our Worship.” Two members of Strawberry Creek Meeting, Katherine Youngmeister and John Kretzmann, presented a typical session of the Deepening Our Worship study group and provided the agenda, supporting documents, and guidance so attenders of the session could take this program back to their meeting. We were all excited by the possibility of bringing this study group to Santa Cruz.

But most of all, I truly enjoyed the connections. I loved spending time with Friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, and also getting to know people I hadn’t met before. As a bonus, I got to spend a lot of time with others from our meeting! Annual Session is a wonderful way to experience the broader world of Quakerism.

Pacific Yearly Meeting Annual Session 2026, at CSUMB by Susan

I attended only part of Annual Session, but can share a bit about my time there. I was a commuter since the location was only 45 minutes from Santa Cruz. Highlights for me were having meals with people from other meetings, getting a sense of how Pacific Yearly is run, and the keynote speaker.

I was able to have lunch with a woman from San Jose meeting, whom I had not seen in several years; this gave us time to reconnect and catch up. I also had lunch with a board member of Friends Committee on Legislation in CA, whom I had only seen on Zoom. What a treat to see her in person and talk “shop”.

The plenary session on finances was helpful for me to understand that annual session is really only one small piece of Pacific Yearly Meeting (PYM). Much work and many connections happen outside of Annual Session (the once-a-year gathering for about 5 days in July). About 60% of the budget for PYM is for staff, including youth program staff (>40% of budget), and an administrative assistant. Though PYM has been struggling financially, the work with youth has remained an important priority.

The keynote speaker was Lisa Graustein. She challenged us to acknowledge and hold contradictory emotions at the same time (grief and joy, for example). Worship sharing groups had queries that related to this, as well as to the idea of experimentation (the session theme).

I hope this brief account encourages you to know more about PYM and perhaps get involved or come to next years’ Annual Session.

As part of an exchange of spiritual practices among Friends, members of Strawberry Creek Meeting described the format of their weekly Zoom worship sharing group, which is centered on readings from Pendle Hill pamphlets. Participants are assigned specific pages in advance and come to the session having reflected on the material, much as we did in Open for Transformation. For this workshop, the reading was drawn from Howard Brinton’s The Society of Friends (Pendle Hill Pamphlet #48, 1949).

During the meeting participants read together several quotes exerpted from pages sent earlier in the week. These excerpts served as a springboard for reflection. After sitting with the words together, we broke into groups of three to explore two queries for about twenty minutes.

When we returned to the larger gathering, each small group shared highlights from its discussion—insights that had emerged, questions that lingered, and moments that felt especially meaningful. As often happens, the conversation deepened as it moved from individual reflection to collective discernment.

Some of the passages that sparked discussion were striking. Howard Brinton writes:

“But the Quakers’ true religious affiliation can be found not so much in Puritanism as in the pre-Reformation mystical sects on the continent of Europe. The Society of Friends classified itself as neither Catholic nor Protestant, but as a third form of Christianity.”

“…Quakers, who made radical efforts to eliminate all the religious practices they believed had originated since New Testament times. But Quakerism resulted from something more than this process of subtraction. It revived a doctrine, central in the experience of the early Christian church. This was the belief that the spirit would be poured out upon the congregation ready to receive it. This spirit…….. unites all members into a single organic whole……

“The meeting for worhsip, in which the Divine Presence is felt through silent communion with God and man, is the most distinctive and perhaps the only distinctive contribution of the Society of Friends to Christian practice.”

Wow.

A new path to membership and another way to resist war, by Karen

The 2026 annual session of Pacific Yearly Meeting (PacYM) inspired me as I observed the many ways Friends are living our testimonies  and strengthening our communities. I want to highlight a few of them here.

-For those who feel called to be a Friend, within our yearly meeting the only option was to apply for membership at a monthly meeting. But for some living far from a meeting or, as for many young people, not living in one place long enough to establish deep ties, connection to the yearly meeting has been most consistent. I was happy to see those attending this annual session approve a path to membership at the yearly meeting level (as a three-year experiment). It’s a hopeful sign that Friends are adapting to the lived realities of those drawn to the Religious Society of Friends and that we will continue to see an enlivened community of all ages.

-On Sunday evening, 50 Friends gathered to discuss responses to a new law that will automatically register young men 18-26 for selective service. The discussion, facilitated by Kate Connell, Santa Barbara Friends Meeting and Edward Hasbrouck of Resisters.info, and hosted by Junior Yearly Meeting leadership, provided an opportunity for Friends to begin sharing resources between monthly meetings. Questions raised included: “If there is a draft, how would it work and who would be drafted? Could I apply for alternative service as a conscientious objector? Does being registered ‘automatically’ mean there’s no way to resist? How can draft resistance help protect us all from war? What can potential draftees, older allies, Friends meetings, and communities do to oppose military conscription and support youth who are facing this issue?” We can also prevent this new law from going into effect by supporting the Selective Service Repeal Act (S. 4537). Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) provides information and a form to take direct action by contacting your legislators. We will continue working on this issue in our own Peace, Earthcare, and Social Witness working group. If you want to support this effort (and you don’t have to attend meetings!), contact Noreen.

-We previewed the powerful documentary Last Christian in Bethlehem, produced by Robert Levering. The film features Palestinian Christians describing threats to their community due to repressive laws and Israeli settler violence, while also highlighting their resilience, faith, and strength in community. The film will be released soon, and clips can be viewed online.