2023 State of the Meeting

STATE OF THE MEETING

May 1, 2023

The year 2022-2023 has seen us begin the recovery from the challenges of Covid and the Jones fire. We have begun meeting in person as well as on zoom, and now have a fully hybrid meeting. Zoom has been described as a blessing. We purchased an Owl and have found it to enable both hearing and ease of offering ministry for our meeting. We have regular attenders who do not live in our area. Zoom has enabled us to stay connected to some long time members who have moved away but continue to worship with us, and in some cases to serve on committees and as officers. Zoom committee meetings have meant that individuals who drive up to an hour for meetings or committee meetings are able to save time and the use of fossil fuels.

This past year we returned to offering an in-person children’s program, as it means that we are able to take full advantage of the Sierra Friends Center campus for our place of learning and indeed the land as a teacher. We saw some children return who had been receiving “home religious education” during the pandemic, but were eager to come back together. In addition, we have added three new children and now have a grand total of six to eight for First Day School. Because the age span is 6 to 16 we are considering offering two First day programs but are just in the beginning of that planning. We have plans for a teen Saturday night gathering once a month, and have recently instituted Saturday field trips for the youth that take place once a season. Our winter trip was canceled as the roads were impassable when the snow we had planned on driving to, came home to us in droves. We had better success with our spring field trip, with six young people and one parent hiking the Deer Creek Tribute Trail with a picnic lunch and learning about Nisenan practices of food provision and cordage making.

Our antiracist book group, with the name shortened to Waking Up, has been laid down and has transitioned into an active awareness in the meeting as a whole of our place on unceded Nisenan land. Adult education programs that included walking from the meeting house to the grinding rock where a Nisenan village existed; learning about the Doctrine of Discovery; and teachings from the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer have led us to deeply embrace the land acknowledgement that the Nisenan people in our community have asked that we use. We now read it at the beginning of our Meeting for Worship. This acknowledgment each week, rather than being rote, reminds us we still have much to learn and undo, new plows and hoes we are being asked to take up, so that the sacred in life can be experienced and acted upon. We are asking, as many are, what is next for us to do, beyond land acknowledgment?

Since returning to an in person/hybrid meeting our numbers have grown, while we also mourn the passing of dear Friends – Julia Reynolds, Sylvia Osman, and Deborah Aufdenspring. We have transfers from another meeting, returning of older attenders, and some who are new to Quakers and Nevada City, but are finding their way here each week. We have lost some long time members of our meeting, and celebrate the contributions they made over many decades. There is a sense among members and attenders, zoom and in person that we are increasingly a Beloved community, People describe feeling loved and accepted, as well as attended to in various ways. Some quotes:

• “Communities who spend time getting to know and support their members are quite rare. There is integrity of word and action…opens my heart and reminds me God is bigger than I am…I feel my heart glow.”
• “There is an increase in spiritual resonance. Our meeting feels deeply spiritual. People are conscious of it. Visitors from other meetings have commented on feeling it.” “Though I attend remotely Meeting brings me to my extended family and brightens my week.”
• “I participate and leave meeting full of joy.”
• “With all the challenges of the past three or four years, the caring in this whole meeting is powerful. Holds us in its embrace and keeps me here after 75 years.”

To what do we attribute this? There is a sense of caring for how we gather together in our

meeting for worship and how we take responsibility for our key areas of ministry through our

committees. We have not experienced the pruning and combining of our committees as a decline; we are now more efficient, more active and energized. Our committees are more responsive to taking on the tasks we corporately identify. We are aware of our limits. Limits in money, in members and attenders, in what we can realistically do. That is why we take the time and energy to discern what and where we sense we need to focus our attention. And the sproutings and blossoms we tenderly see are affirmations that we are paying attention to those small, still voices, which require us to sit still and be attentive, to listen before we act.

Our tending has brought forth new shoots: a hybrid meeting; an active children’s program; a spirited beginning to a revived Friendly 8’s program; continuation of our music hour each week before worship; Family worship every fifth Sunday, with children remaining in meeting for twenty minutes of storytelling, of singing, and of worship; an enthusiastic librarian and inviting library; and a monthly newsletter that continues to be brimming with Quaker activities and wisdom and beyond.

All of this takes place on the campus of Sierra Friends Center which has seemed like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. There is a sense of energy and promise in the new staff and programs for children and adults as well as those who come for personal and group retreats. There is a sense of growing together, Grass Valley Friends Meeting and Woolman at Sierra Friends Center.

On behalf of our Monthly Meeting,

Dean and Karen Olson

Co-clerks