“The practise of discernment helps us to realise that we do have choices about the kind of family life we cultivate. We do not simply have to accept whatever the consumer culture dictates, including the deliberate targeting of children by the advertising industry. Neither do we have to reject modern culture wholesale in the attempt to protect our children from everything potentially harmful.”
“There are some individuals who by constitution are born lovers, who have what a friend of mine calls “the gift of intimacy.” To be near them is to find yourself warmed by their fire. Their presence in the midst seems to activate in others a contagion of good feeling towards the world in general. But for most of us, it is a thing that has to be worked at, cultivated as a kind of inner development. We have all experienced this warmth in some degree. You know what a difference it makes when you feel that another person is truly aware of you, of your presence, or even of your existence.”
“In the autumn of 1658, just after the death of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, two Westcountry women set sail for the shores of the Mediterranean, leaving the shores of their fractured homeland for a mission of religious friendship. Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers were both married with children, but such was the strength of their bond, and their commitment to the Quaker faith, that the demands of family and neighborhood were set aside.”
“The amount of solitude which is attainable or would be wholesome in the case of any individual life is a matter in which each of us must judge for himself. I would not, if I might, attempt to prescribe in this matter for any human being but myself – and I feel that it needs much wisdom to minister even to oneself in regard to it. But I also feel sure that a due proportion – whether it be little or much – a due proportion of solitude is one of the most important conditions of mental health. Therefore (to return to our original problem) if it be our lot to stand apart from those close natural ties by which life is for most people shaped and filled, let us not be in haste to fill the gap; let us not carelessly or rashly throw away the opportunity of entering into that deeper and more continual acquaintance with the unseen and eternal things which is the natural and great compensation for the loss of easier joys. The loneliness which we rightly dread is not the absence of human faces and voices – it is the absence of love.”
“It is striking that so much of our imagery regarding religious experience is couched in terms of the family: God, loving and forgiving Mother and Father of us all; Jesus, our Teacher and Elder Brother; we, the wayward children united through God in the sisterhood of humankind.”
“If, in loving our children, we want them to respond to personal leadings in life, we will need to teach them that sometimes it’s hard work… As a parent, I am tempted to take away difficult experiences from my children, deliver them miraculously from their hurts so that they can arrive at understanding without having had to struggle to earn it. We have been taught to think of negative emotions and pain as bad things, rather than growth producers. As parents, we can climb alongside our children as they struggle, but we cannot lift them to the mountaintop… [We must] respect the integrity of the child’s struggle.”
“In meeting for worship, God is inviting us to come deeper, ‘Come drop down, come down to meet me, that I may offer you this gift.’ And I think that’s what I [listen] for as people are speaking, because I actually do believe in each and every situation, God is attempting to have a conversation. God is wanting to be met.”
“Have you ever sat with a friend when in the course of an easy and pleasant conversation the talk took a new turn and you both listened avidly to the other and to something that was emerging in your visit? You found yourselves saying things that astonished you and finally you stopped talking and there was an immense naturalness about the long silent pause that followed. In that silent interval you were possessed by what you had discovered together. If this has happened to you, you know that when you come up out of such an experience, there is a memory of rapture and a feeling in the heart of having touched holy ground.”
“I have been inspired by what Jesus says about friendship, particularly how we can have an intimate relationship with the Divine. Quakers have adopted this ideal friendship as the basis for their name, the Religious Society of Friends. In John 15, Jesus tells his disciples that there is only one commandment that really matters. Love. He then defines love as the willingness to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. This is a high bar for friendship, yet it is important to remember that real friendship usually entails some self-sacrifice.”
“Return to the most human, / nothing less will nourish the torn spirit, / the bewildered heart, / the angry mind: / and from the ultimate duress, / pierced with the breath of anguish, / speak of love.”
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