Feel the Healing Miracle Begin
Breathe in the quiet purpose of this place; / Through outward stillness, seek a calm within. / Here we can find forgiveness and forgive; / Here feel the healing miracle begin.
Minor Ecstasies Are Bits of Stardust
[Minor ecstasies are] bits of star dust which are for all of us, however limited our opportunities. […] Something seen, something heard, something felt, flashes upon one with a bright freshness, and the heart, tired and sick or sad or merely indifferent, stirs and lifts in answer. Exercising our faculty for minor ecstasies may actually increase the number of them we feel.
Something Much Older and Deeper Than Quakerism
My experience is that there is a single root of our faith and life as a religious society — a taproot much older and runs much deeper than Quakerism. The taproot of a tree runs straight down from the trunk into the deepest soil, anchoring the tree against storms and providing nurture from the very deepest of sources. There may be hundreds of secondary roots, but only the taproot is necessary for the tree to survive and thrive. The Big Story — the Cosmic Story — is the story of creation’s eternally repeated encounters with its taproot.
A Letter from the Editor
Although I collected messages for this week without a theme in mind, the topic of peace kept bubbling up, perhaps because the war in Gaza has been on my heart. Monday’s message about nonviolence towards each other and the earth stood out to me especially. I had an “a-ha” moment when I read Jennie M. Ratcliffe explain that violence is actually born from a feeling of disconnection.
We Are Called to Perform Miracles
No one of us is asked to save the world by ourselves. And yet collectively, the Religious Society of Friends is a covenant people charged with building the kingdom of God on Earth. This is not a small task. This will take miracles, and what I want to put forth today is that miracles do not happen when we declare them to be impossible.
Follow After Righteousness
Our principle is, and our practices have always been, to seek peace, and ensue it, and to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God, seeking the good and welfare, and doing that which tends to the peace of all.
All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever, and this is our testimony to the whole world.
Breathe the Spirit of Reconciliation
Guard against placing your dependence on fleets and armies; be peaceable yourselves, in words and actions, and pray to the Father of the Universe that he would breathe the spirit of reconciliation into the hearts of his erring and contending creatures.
Find Those Things that Move Your Spirit
I think education has a spiritual dimension. There is a way, that if you could find in your inner self those things that move your spirit, that is a major part of your own education.
The Light to Do Most Good
Were we religious we should know
Our path were not for all to go;
Each has his individual light,
To show what work for him is right.
Interrelationship with the Whole Earth Community
We are intimately interdependent, and as we do to other life, we do to ourselves; we are in intimate reciprocal interrelationship with the whole Earth community. And as we cannot so easily destroy that which we love and feel connected to, what really makes us secure, then, is nonviolence to each other and the Earth and, as one writer puts it, the movement toward wholeness.
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