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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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