Pacific Yearly Meeting Young Friends Epistle, 2002

Pacific Yearly Meeting (PYM) Young Friends gathered together on the campus of the University of San Diego (USD) from the 22^nd through the 27^th day of Seventh Month, 2002. Our community maintains a strong foundation of committed members, and we attracted over 30 Friends to our gathering this year, including some new ones.

We were inspired by the second Plenary when we listened to the personal stories of Friends who have been given leadings of the Spirit and have striven to follow them. Many said that they have felt inadequate to their callings, but that with the support of their Friends communities they have persevered. In an effort to foster such support for Quaker activism among Young Fiends, we joined with Junior Yearly Meeting (JYM) to clean up Chicano Park in a non-affluent Mexican-American neighborhood, assisting AFSC in this urban outreach program. Many of us also joined Friends from the greater PYM to hold a vigil at the US-Mexico border. With JYM we visited Ocean Beach, and we played a game of Capture the Flag on Astro-turf. Although we lost the game miserably (we were sorely outnumbered), all of these events brought us closer together as a community.

Yet, we crave to play a more active role in the nurturing of JYM. We are concerned about the apparent lack of recognition of the completeness of the Light that shines in all Friends, young and old. We feel privileged to have observed the ability of the members of JYM to follow Friends' process in response to difficulties in their community.

In worship-sharing groups, we explored the directions our lives and faith have taken over the past year in the wake of events both large and small, local and global. This and our reflections on our sense of unity in Business Meetings have led us to earnestly consider our need for closer interactions during the 51 weeks between Yearly Meetings. We concluded that we need both closer fellowship and the satisfaction of common goals. To that end, we explored myriad possibilities in a threshing session. We formed an ad hoc committee to address this and to plan our Fall “Spirit and Light” gathering, which we hope will strengthen a tradition of service and fellowship gatherings. We look forward to future gatherings and eagerly anticipate coming together at USD once again in Eighth Month 2003.