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Welcome to Baltimore Yearly Meeting!

Baltimore Yearly Meeting builds and nurtures a strong and vibrant Quaker community across the Mid-Atlantic. We seek to build community, grow in the life of the spirit, discern right action, and bear witness in the world. BYM includes Quaker meetings in parts of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. The BYM Office, located in Sandy Spring, MD, provides technical support to local Quaker Meetings and opportunities for Quakers in our region to work, play, serve, learn, and grow spiritually together as Friends. 

Fall Spiritual Formation Retreat

Friday, September 17, 2021Saturday, September 18, 2021

Register now for the Fall Spiritual Formation Retreat
September 17-18, 2021

The 17th-century French monastic and mystic known today as Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection wrote a series of letters to spiritual seekers in his own troubled time. Through these letters of counsel, he offered advice from his life’s experiences about how to cultivate and sustain a faith that is “alive and active on every side of life, particularly in times of need.” He wrote “my only prayer practice is attention. I carry on a habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God that fills me with overwhelming joy.”

Whatever language we use to describe the ground and wisdom we seek--Spirit, the Light, Truth--how can our lives become deeply attuned to that ground so that we can be faithful, alive, and active in our own times? In the fall Spiritual Formation retreat, we’ll go “back to basics” to explore some of the practices that might help us (re)discover this joy and to sustain attention on that which nourishes our lives.

The retreat will begin on Friday evening at 7 p.m. and conclude on Saturday evening at 9 p.m. We will have four structured sessions during the retreat that will invite Friends into times of quiet personal reflection, sharing in spiritual friendship and in small groups, and fellowship with the whole group. We’ll also keep our Zoom space open during meal times for the beloved “table fellowship” we so enjoy at our in-person retreats.

In response to a need voiced during the May Spiritual Formation Retreat, the Spiritual Formation Working Group will support a “virtual” (Zoom-based) year-long program of monthly gatherings for Friends who live remotely or whose local Meetings cannot support a local Spiritual Formation group. More information about this opportunity will be shared at the retreat.

Registration for the retreat is open now and will close on Monday, September 13th. To register, click the link below.

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