“I asked a friend if they’d be willing to try a spiritual friendship practice with me. We met roughly once a month to talk about what was going on in our spiritual lives and to listen to each other. This brought home to me how powerful it is to be really listened to. Here was a space where I could talk about spirituality without fear of ridicule.”
“[We need to] rediscover the possibilities of a friendship in which the deepest areas of experience may be shared. Certainly that kind of openness seems to have existed in earlier generations among a group who were very significant in the life of the Society. Until this century it was not uncommon for Friends to travel in the ministry, following a real sense of leading in this direction. Often they went out in pairs, one older, one younger.”
“Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.”
“When I left a Quaker elementary school for a public middle school as a kid, I was surprised and confused by the mandatory morning pledge of allegiance to the American flag. I didn’t like it, but my Quaker education hadn’t been extensive enough for me to articulate why. I ended up going along with it because I was afraid to rock the boat in a new environment. By high school, I had the time and maturity to consider it more, and I chose not to stand or recite the pledge. I didn’t like the idea that I was swearing allegiance to a symbol, that this oath was supposed to take precedence over my conscience, and I didn’t believe that our country really provides “liberty and justice for all,” as the pledge states.”
“[The first generation of Friends] came upon a faith which cut to the root of the way they saw life, radically reorienting it. They saw that all they did must flow directly from what they experienced as true, and that if it did not, both the knowing and the doing became false. In order to keep the knowledge clear and the doing true, they stripped away anything which seemed to get in the way. They called those things superfluities, and it is this radical process of stripping for clear-seeing which we now term simplicity…”
“Conscience is not the infallible voice of truth, of the moral law, of God, or of anything else, but only man’s ability to hear this voice. This inner ear of man is, however, just as much subject to error as his physical ear.”
“May we look upon our treasures, and the furniture of our houses, and the garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions, or not.”
“I think that we must first, and always, adhere firmly to the view that the right way is there to be found. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.’ Yet we shall not always find the right way. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ How do we love ourselves?”
“In 1877, Quaker Oats registered as the first trademark for a breakfast cereal. The trademark was registered with the U.S. Patent Office as ‘a figure of a man in “Quaker garb.”‘ Both former owners, Henry Seymour and William Heston, claimed to have selected the Quaker name as a symbol of good quality and honest value.”
“Integrity is one of the virtues for which Quakers in the past have been praised. It is a quality worth having, but it is doubtful if it can be reached by self-conscious effort or by adherence to a principle… Integrity is a condition in which a person’s response to a total situation can be trusted: the opposite of a condition in which he would be moved by opportunist or self-seeking impulses breaking up his unity as a whole being.”
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