“For the first time, our monthly theme was based on one quote: ‘Truth will not lose ground by being tried.’ Isaac Penington wrote these words in a letter to a friend in 1670, assuring her that truth will always prevail, saying, ‘Darkness is afraid of the light, because it has a secret sense that it cannot stand before it.’ In our era of ‘fake news,’ we explored what it means to live truthfully, to seek Divine truth, and to share it with others.”
“When I was taught to draw, I was told to look carefully at my subject if I wanted to faithfully reproduce it. When you try to sketch a flower, if you approach it thinking you know what a flower looks like and you draw that, you’ll produce a flower—maybe a good-looking flower—but not the flower. You need to take the care and time to reject what you expect and draw what you see: shadows, shapes, absences, and blemishes, details that might surprise you.”
“Simply acknowledging our dual citizenship in the world and in Christ brings the Spirit of Truth into the ways we live our lives daily. As we begin to see the ways we act out of our separateness, out of our small selves, we step out of illusion and into Christ where Love and Truth work hand in hand… The movement of the Spirit is toward wholeness, toward healing and binding what separates us.”
A rebuttal to a pamphlet slandering Quakers:
“Oh! was here ever the like in any age seen, who professe Christ, live in so much Impudency, breathing of lyes and slanders, what an unsavoury smell is this, that comes from those, that calls themselves Christians, and Churches, but we see thy fruit, in thy paper, and thy smell is gone out into the Nation, and recorded thou art, and answered shall be to that in thy conscience, in the day of thy condemnation.”
“We stand at a perilous moment. Truth and integrity are being undermined to the extent that democracy itself is under threat, exactly when we need to work together. Many of those in power seem to act with impunity, disregarding facts and scientific findings. Respect for the judiciary is being undermined and trust in our institutions threatened.”
“How do we make use of our social media? Do we post content that not only conforms to our worldview, but to the higher standard of truthfulness? Today, when so many of our social interactions happen online and our public persona lives on social media, do we make every effort to post in integrity?”
“Quakers are also known as ‘seekers of truth’. How do we maintain that fundamental commitment to truth in an age of widespread online misinformation and disinformation?
…Quakerism was formed in an earlier era of unprecedented misinformation and disinformation, with often unreliable printed pamphlets widely available. Quaker testimony and practice and the distilled wisdom on which we can draw provide a very sound basis for combatting fake news.
We need to stay focussed on the still small voice of calm.”
“Corporate discernment of the will of God is a risky and imperfect proposition. In relying so extensively on the Holy Spirit, we make ourselves vulnerable to pitfalls and failures. However, far from being a weakness, such vulnerability is central to our understanding of the power of worship (and business) ‘in spirit and in truth.'”
“Because the evidence and experiences on which we act are usually conflicting and ambivalent, and because we are by nature vulnerable to our capacity for self-deception, discernment is often tentative and uncertain. We may not feel a great sense of having found the truth.”
“If we are loyal to the truth as we see it, and respond with our might in the ‘common’ situations in day-to-day living as we face them, the glow of the grace of God deepens and nurtures our faculties for insight and for recognition of the true worth of things and of men.”
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