Pages tagged "Young Adult Friends"

Friends:  Western Young Friends New Year's Gathering is the spiritual retreat that I look forward to the most every year. Having time to worship and look inward, reconnecting with old friends, meeting wonderful new people, and having the space to listen and be heard, to follow those emotional threads, is so important. It's something that I too rarely get in my busy life.

Monthly meetings all over the United States struggle with attracting new attenders, particularly Young Adult Friends (YAFs) who fall between the ages of 18 and 35.  It’s a rather large and indiscriminate cohort, but the people in that cohort (including me) have something in common: whether convinced, birthright, or exploring, we just don’t seem to be sticking around.

 

Though I am currently a sophomore at Haverford College, I can remember the college application process as if it were yesterday, especially the late nights writing essays that were attempts to sell myself to schools that were trying to sell themselves to me.  They wanted my money; I wanted their education (and a hefty side of financial aid).  The entire process was a lengthy and tiring ordeal for my whole family.

For the past five months, I have been living and working in Berlin, Germany. I went there to live with my cousins and their two young children and to work as a native-English-speaking intern at a Kinderladen called Humpty-Dumpty Berlin, a bilingual daycare which my cousins’ children attend. I also helped out around the house and with the kids at home. As always when I am abroad, I felt embarrassed many times a day by my nationality as a U.S. citizen. 

I lay on the cold dusty hard wood floor contemplating the voice of my generation, visions of rebellion sex drugs protest and poetry

Dear Friends: I decided to attend Western Young Friends New Year’s Gathering from December 28, 2012 to January 2, 2013 after attending Pacific Yearly Meeting Annual Session in the summer of 2012, not wanting to wait one full year before I saw all my friends again. I feel a stronger connection with the greater community of the Religious Society of Friends than I do with Honolulu Friends Meeting alone.  

This summer, MC Stoll and DJ Cole dropped the first track of our new album, Soul Force Ones (SF1s). It’s not music (though an SF1s spoken-word album is in development), but it’s recorded to a sort of spiritual harmony. What does that mean?

In the flurry of dozens of goodbye hugs before going home, I said to one Friend, “Well, I guess it’s back to the real world now.” He answered, “Oh no, no. This is the real world. The rest of life is what’s not real.” I had to agree.