Rest and Quaker Retirement

“[Jesus said,] ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.'”

“There is, it sometimes seems, an excess of religious and social busyness these days, a round of committees and conferences and journeyings, of which the cost in ‘peaceable wisdom’ is not sufficiently counted. Sometimes we appear overmuch to count as merit our participation in these things… At least we ought to make sure that we sacrifice our leisure for something worthy.”

“Stayed awake some time last night, and much enjoyed the stillness around me; it was a lovely night, the stars looked very beautiful, and reminded me of the 19th Psalm [‘The heavens declare the glory of God; / the skies proclaim the work of his hands.’]; it was a time I shall long remember, for I was favoured to enjoy much peace.”

“You are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn rest. Rest is not a luxury, a privilege, or a bonus we must wait for once we are burned out. I hear so many repeat the myth of rest being a privilege and I understand this concept and still deeply disagree with it. Rest is not a privilege because our bodies are still our own, no matter what the current systems teach us. The more we think of rest as a luxury, the more we buy into the systemic lies of grind culture.”

“Why with all our labor-saving devices and fast transport, are we so short of time? Is it because we are greedy of experience for its own sake? — to see more, go farther, earn more, learn more, than is feasible in one short lifetime? The human soul needs time, needs to take time, unless experience is to become mere accumulation, bearing bad fruit, like any other kind of ambition.”

“Over-busyness is one of the diseases that has infected Quakerism, not only here, but throughout the Society of Friends… Too many of us too often find ourselves caught in a merry-go-round of activities and responsibilities, and we do not take adequate time to get centered or sufficient time to nurture ourselves… The world of the spirit is real, and our journey into wholeness has to include time for us to be consciously aware of the life of our spirits.”

“Over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.”

“There is a river, a sweet, still, flowing river, the streams whereof will make glad thy heart. And learn but in quietness and stillness to retire to the Lord, and wait upon him; in whom thou shalt feel peace and joy, in the midst of thy trouble from the cruel and vexatious spirit of this world.”

“Slowing down frees time and space for spiritual connection and reverence for life. We must act on what our deep hearts already know: All life is sacred. Everything is connected. From this space, we can create a world we are proud to leave to our children and all future generations. Reverence for life empowers us to take responsibility for, and to care for, ourselves and each other. Through our choices and actions of love for the sacredness of life, we “re-member” our own lives, and we contribute to the renewal of our planet.”

“At what time soever thou wilt, it is in thy power to retire into thyself, and to be at rest: for a man cannot retire any whither to be more at rest, and freer from all business, than into his own soul. Afford then thyself this retiring continually, and thereby refresh and renew thyself.”

“Flee, for a little while, thy occupations; hide thyself, for a time, from thy disturbing thoughts. Cast aside, now, thy burdensome cares, and put away thy toilsome business. Yield room for some little time to God; and rest for a little time in him. Enter the inner chamber of thy mind; shut out all thoughts save that of God, and such as can aid thee in seeking him; close thy door and seek him.”

“Our lives hammer us continually with alerts, stimulants, and hazards, which can trigger our fight-or-flight responses, raise our levels of tension and anxiety, and lead us to live in prolonged states of preoccupation and vigilance. Being in constant, sustained alert mode diminishes our ability to access our human abilities of deep thinking, intuition, empathy, feelings, and stored knowledge. Free-floating anxiety is also bad for your health.”

“In Him sit down, who is above the subtle foxes in their holes, and the fowls of the air in their nests; I say, sit down in Christ, who hath no place among them to lay his head; He is your rest. So in him is my love to you all.”

“Turn therefore inwards, and all that is within you will demonstrate to you the presence and power of God in your soul, and make you find and feel it with the same certainty as you find and feel your own thoughts. And what is best of all, by thus doing, you will never be without a living sense of the immediate guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, always equal to your dependence upon it…”

“The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament.”

“I believe that every piece of daily work can be done as a sacramental act. It is not too difficult to pray on one’s knees as the floor is scrubbed, ‘Wash me, O Lord, as I was this floor…’ Awakening from sleep can be woven into a beginning prayer for the day, ‘As I stretch my body and limber my joints for the day’s tasks, thou O Lord, make my spirit supple and ready to accept whatever the day may bring…’ Prayers so brief can run through all the day’s activities. They can be simple, symbolic, spontaneous, based upon the needs and acts of the day.”

“The worst disservice we could do would be to commit the heresy of identifying the act of contemplation with a block of empty time or with the provision of an empty space, or to limit it to a certain peculiarly endowed class of persons, or in Greek fashion, to a social class that was drenched with leisure. Contemplation is, as we have insisted, standard equipment, and can never be completely identified with vacant spaces in life or with freedom from responsibility.”

“Simple manual tasks, the kind we often seek to obliterate by playing the radio while we work, are actually precious opportunities to strengthen our capacity for inner silence. For with the radio off we can use the activity to practice resting our awareness on the working surface – the place where the newspaper touches the window we are washing, or where the broom’s bristles sweep the floor. If our attention strays we can simply and gently notice that it has, and return it to the working surface.”

I am aware, / As I go commonly sweeping the stair, / Doing my part of the every-day care / Human and simple my lot and my share / I am aware of a marvelous thing: / Voices that murmur and ethers that ring / In the far stellar spaces where cherubim sing.

“All the nobler instincts of our race are born in solitude and suckled by silence. This solitude need be no far away wilderness in Nature; this silence need be no Himalayan peak. You stop for a second as you cross your city square and glance at the belt of Orion.”

“The great spiritual traditions suggest that the relationship with God is cultivated like other relationships: as we turn our attention toward God we open the possibility of a fuller relationship. Entering into this relationship does not so much require a change in our behavior as a shift of attention.”

“Leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen… Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence that is the pre-requisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent, do not hear. Silence as it is used in this context, does not mean ‘dumbness’ or ‘noiselessness’: it means more nearly that the soul’s power to ‘answer’ to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.”

“‘Hospitality’ as a word today is more often associated with ‘industry’ than with personal or community behaviour… Advertising tries to teach us to link ‘rest’ with a holiday somewhere hot, a luxury purchase, an indulgence, me-time (and perhaps we need some of that sometimes). However, we also need to be careful to avoid having a too commercialised or individualised understanding of what rest is. There are many kinds of rest (physical, mental, emotional) but to truly experience most of these does require the creation of a social space that allows it.”

“An angel tells the young Mary that God has elected her to be the means whereby divine love will be enfleshed in the human world. As a parabolic character, Mary represents us. She is a normal human being, which means that she is, by nature as it were, self-centered, self-enclosed. So she asks, in effect: ‘How can that happen? I’m alone; it’s just me.’ The angel replies, ‘The Holy Spirit will overtake you, and the power of God will overshadow you…'”

“It’s probably less important that Christ was born, but more important that Christ is born in us. And that can happen at any time. It’s not limited to any time of the year.”

“Now, at the start of a new year, the True Love gives as the first in a sequence of gifts a partridge in a pear tree. It is a pretty picture, even though it is so quaint. It belongs to another age; an age when there was more time, more opportunity, to escape into aloneness, to survey, to ponder.”

Allowed my mind to be ruffled and soured by some cross occurrences this morning; which, however, I strove to suppress, and believe it was not discovered by others; but that did not satisfy me, not feeling that sweet peace which I prize above every other enjoyment. I retired awhile, and, centering down out of the cumbers and cares which had perplexed, was favoured to feel something of that healing virtue, which now, as formerly, heals every malady, and alone restores peace and tranquillity within our borders.

“I hope you have had a season full of warmth and light in the northern hemisphere’s darkest month of the year. The holidays have the potential to bring joy, togetherness, and hope, but for some they may bring feelings of stress, loneliness, or grief. So however December was for you, for the New Year, I wish you rest.”