Philadelphia Yearly Meeting

of the Religious Society of Friends

Quakers

World War 2 Veteran: From Prisoner of War to Pacifist

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  • 10:00 Silent Worship
  • 11:00 Discussion: War & Pacifism with George Rubin
  • 12:00 Community Potluck

Quaker pacifist and World War 2 prisoner of war George Rubin will talk to us about creating a world without war.

George Rubin is a member of Medford Meeting, a retired podiatrist, and has served as clerk for New York Yearly Meeting, Medford Meeting, and American Friends Service Committee’s New York regional office. He writes for the Medford Leas literary publication, is active with many Quaker organizations, and enjoys working with youth.

Continuing Revolution 2023: Nurturing Experiments in Spiritually Grounded Abolition

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June 2-6, 2023: on campus and online via Zoom

  • On-campus resident  (June 2-6): $100
  • Commuter daily attendance: $15/day
  • Online: $20
  • Significant financial assistance is available!

Continuing Revolution, Pendle Hill’s annual conference for young adults (ages 18-35), is a space of collective exploration and learning for the spiritually curious who are striving to live in ways that reflect their values. We welcome those who are seeking to examine the connections between their spiritual, political, and interpersonal lives. 

To apply, click here.

Join young adult Friends and seekers (ages 18-35) gathering both online and at Pendle Hill to build community with others exploring abolition of police and policing. Building on themes and feedback from Continuing Revolution 2022: Experiments in Spiritually Grounded Abolition, we will focus this year on the relationship between individual and structural transformation. We will explore together definitions and practices of structural change, building skills for positioning ourselves in that work in our respective communities.

We will continue to draw on Mariame Kaba’s understanding of abolition as “a vision of a restructured society where we have everything that we need to live dignified lives.” Kaba notes that “abolition” is not a static or singular thing; the word is used by people of various political persuasions and imaginations, who “want to eliminate prisons, policing, and surveillance, and . . . want to create true safety, health, and well-being instead.” We will learn collectively from the tools, strategies, and processes that contemporary groups are using in local, national, and interpersonal communities, with an emphasis on the interaction between personal and structural work.

Come to Continuing Revolution 2023 to support and be supported in learning to make decisions that reflect your values and hopes for the building of abolitionist futures. Enjoy opportunities for reflection, sharing, worship, and skill-building with other young adults from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences in the nurturing environment of Pendle Hill, either online or in person.

Pendle Hill Quaker Institute: Beloved Community as Prophetic Witness

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An on-campus gathering of Friends to learn about and practice the art of building beloved community as an act of prophetic witness.

Adult Private Room: $450/ $600/ $750
Adult Shared Room: $450
Adult Commuter: $250

Child (0-2): No charge
Child (3-12): $60 (room & board)/ $30 (commuter)
Youth (13-18): $150 (room & board)/ $75 (commuter)
Free childcare provided by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.

If these options are financially inaccessible, we welcome your request for financial assistance.

Join us in rebuilding our Beloved Community, grounded in Quaker faith and practice!

Grounded in Friends’ history of community as the roots of spirituality and social change, we will learn from each other about what is possible in this moment – both old and new ways Friends are grounding our communities in our prophetic values and mobilizing in the service of healing the world.

In December 2019, Friends came together for the Pendle Hill Quaker Institute, Practicing Our Heritage of Mysticism and Resistance, challenging the false dichotomy between contemplative and activist Friends. This year, we invite Friends back to Pendle Hill’s campus to re-connect and re-group after surviving these traumatic and illuminating intervening years. We will worship, learn, and break bread together.

Experiential workshops will explore different ways that the Religious Society of Friends is creating cultures of beloved community. Themes will include the ministry of space, intergenerational programming, art as a container for building community, and ways Meetings can support and engage with Friends’ peace and justice organizations.

This long weekend is a collaboration with a broad range of Friends and Friends’ organizations, including the American Friends Service Committee, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Friends General Conference, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the Quaker Religious Education Collaborative, and other Quaker institutions and retreat centers.

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Youth Programs staff will lead a program for younger Quaker Institute registrants at no additional cost. We hope this will make attendance for families with children more accessible. It will be a simultaneous experience of building beloved community, designed for the ages who register.

Please check the event page for forthcoming schedules, workshop descriptions, and leader information.

Hope Leans Forward

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An online series with Valerie Brown offering tools and practices to navigate these challenging times. 

Two consecutive Saturdays, 10:00am-11:30am Eastern Time (US & Canada) in collaboration with Woodbrooke Study Centre.

We are being pulled apart and broken-open by the global pandemic, violence, racial injustice, climate crisis, etc. This course will equip you with tools and practices to navigate these high-stress, high-anxiety times.

Based on Valerie’s latest book, Hope Leans Forward: Braving Your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace (Broadleaf, 2022), this course will cover skill-building, evidence-based mindfulness practice, and soul-amplifying questions grounded in Quaker faith and practice that go to the heart of discerning your life purpose, meaning, and direction and supporting you to live your best self now.

In these highly interactive sessions, we’ll explore the Buddhist Seven Factors of Awakening, including:

  • Choose bravely when conditions are uncertain and ambiguous.
  • Examine unconscious patterns that hold you back.
  • Reflect on what matters most with soul-amplifying questions.
  • Align your values with your work for a greater sense of purpose and meaning.
  • Cultivate body intelligence and body awareness.
  • Show yourself real kindness through self-compassion.

Hope Leans Forward

Written on:

An online series with Valerie Brown offering tools and practices to navigate these challenging times. 

Two consecutive Saturdays, 10:00am-11:30am Eastern Time (US & Canada) in collaboration with Woodbrooke Study Centre.

We are being pulled apart and broken-open by the global pandemic, violence, racial injustice, climate crisis, etc. This course will equip you with tools and practices to navigate these high-stress, high-anxiety times.

Based on Valerie’s latest book, Hope Leans Forward: Braving Your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace (Broadleaf, 2022), this course will cover skill-building, evidence-based mindfulness practice, and soul-amplifying questions grounded in Quaker faith and practice that go to the heart of discerning your life purpose, meaning, and direction and supporting you to live your best self now.

In these highly interactive sessions, we’ll explore the Buddhist Seven Factors of Awakening, including:

  • Choose bravely when conditions are uncertain and ambiguous.
  • Examine unconscious patterns that hold you back.
  • Reflect on what matters most with soul-amplifying questions.
  • Align your values with your work for a greater sense of purpose and meaning.
  • Cultivate body intelligence and body awareness.
  • Show yourself real kindness through self-compassion.

Loving, Listening, Learning, Discerning: A Couple Enrichment Retreat

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An in-person weekend program with experienced Couple Enrichment Leaders Mike and Marsha Green, Kirsten Brink, and Andrew Dembski

As a couple in a committed relationship, you and your partner face many decisions on a daily basis. They can range from the everyday (who’s picking up the kids from school?) to big life questions (what sort of community do we want to build around us?); from questions with quantifiable answers (how much money shall we spend on a car?) to philosophical questions (what does hospitality look like for us?). Each decision has its own context: Is this urgent? Who will it affect most? What information do I have or need? To top it off, we bring with us into our relationships how we witnessed decision-making in our families of origin. So making decisions can get complicated!

We invite you to a weekend to explore with other couples our patterns of decision-making in a spirit of experiment and curiosity. We will explore how decision-making can affirm our strengths, how conflict is an opportunity to deepen intimacy, and how we can uphold integrity, equality, and peace-making when we consider the questions before us. Bring with you at least one question that you and your beloved are currently sitting with – be it profound or mundane – so that we can learn together and, God willing, experience where Spirit takes us.

Friends Couple Enrichment (FCE), founded by Quakers over 50 years ago, is a proactive ministry to release the full potential of relationships both for the benefit of the couple and also for a world begging for examples of honest, loving, joy-filled relationships. This ministry is open to all couples, regardless of length of time together, marital status, gender identity, age, race, or faith. Indeed, our retreats are enhanced by our diversity. At the heart of any FCE event is an introduction to Witnessed Couple Dialogue, a spiritual practice of deep listening. This retreat will include lots of time for couples to dialogue in the loving witness of others as well as in private. Be assured that you will not be asked to share or participate in activities beyond your level of comfort.

Still unsure whether this is for you? Then visit FCE’s website, watch its QuakerSpeak video, and even better, come to a 90-minute online Taster scheduled for Sunday, February 26, 2023, at 8pm Eastern Time (US & Canada). At the Taster, you will meet the facilitating leader couples, hear more about FCE and this retreat, and have time to ask questions. Register for the Taster here.

Exploring a Quaker Commitment to Reparative Justice

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An online weekend collaboration with Pendle Hill and Woodbrooke Study Centre

Saturday at 9:30am Eastern Time through Sunday at 4pm. Optional pre- and post-workshop sessions.

Reparative justice is an essential part of living out Quaker faith. This workshop explores the spiritual imperative and deep need for Quakers to commit to repairing harms done by Quakers and others through their involvement in slavery and its afterlives.

As an approach, a goal, an ideal, and an ethos, reparations provides a promising path towards healing, repair, and transformational social change. It addresses the dimensions of Spirit, relationship, and resources. As such, it offers a tool for Quakers and Quaker communities to understand our complicity in causing harm, and to explore our options for contributing to the repair of the harms of slavery and its afterlives, the penitentiary system, and settler colonialism, past and ongoing.

This workshop will share an actionable framework for understanding reparations, and the basic concepts and skills required for successful reparative action. Participants will learn about experiments of others, discuss your own thoughts, actions, and plans, and practice applying the framework.

We will examine the patterns of behavior in Quaker meetings that may emerge around anti-racism initiatives, the beliefs that underly these behaviors, and what stops us from taking collective action.

Through resources and an online discussion forum we will explore the issue of reparative justice and relational and financial reparations.

We will gather for four live zoom sessions over a weekend, to witness where other Friends are in the process of making reparations, to learn from each other’s struggles and learnings, and to support each other in discerning our next steps in individual and corporate reparative justice.

 

The Battered Earth: Injury, Loss, and Healing

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An Online First Monday Lecture with Beverly Ward

Since participating in a Woodbrooke course, “A Quaker Response to Climate Collapse” in 2021, Beverly Ward has been sitting with this concern: “We consider that Quakers could be poised to become midwives and comforters of the challenging times ahead of us.” Beverly will invite participants to join her in sharing concerns on the urgency of climate collapse, reflecting on the environmental, interspecies, and intraspecies impacts of humans. Her reflection will draw on lived experiences including environmental and climate justice advocacy and research, decolonization, and service.

What in our Quaker practice prepares us for this midwifery? Who are our docents? She will share thoughts, gleanings, and plans for future work on grief and loss, drawing on Eileen Flanagan’s message, “There is no faith community that says ‘Be in despair.’” Finally, Beverly will share how we can support each other through this transition, seeking to repair and heal ourselves, our communities, and the battered earth.

Yardley Quakers Step Outside for Spiritual Growth and Medicinal Herbal Gardening

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This summer, the Friends at Yardley Meeting (Bucks Quarter) are building a labyrinth and a set of raised bed gardens on the grounds of the meetinghouse. The community is committed to create a space for meditation, and to provide a growing site for medicinal herbs to be shared with the Singularity Botanicals supplying health-related products to the Chester, PA community. [Read more…] about Yardley Quakers Step Outside for Spiritual Growth and Medicinal Herbal Gardening

Illuminate Summer Speaker Series 2022

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An online collaboration between Barclay Press and Pendle Hill
Jun 13, 27, Jul 11, 25, and Aug 8, 22, 2022
2nd and 4th Mondays, June through August, from 7:30pm – 9:00pm Eastern Time (US & Canada) via Zoom.
This quarter’s Illuminate introduces us to the life, teachings, and actions of Jesus in this unique gospel, the most theological of the four gospels in the Bible. “Friendly Perspectives” accompany each week’s lesson, showing Jesus’s encounters with a variety of people, and prompting us to consider what it means to be a Friend of Jesus in this time.

For more information, to register, or to apply for financial assistance, visit:
https://pendlehill.org/events/illuminate-summer-speaker-series-2022/

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