Messages

  • “Truth will not lose ground by being tried”

    February 2026: For the first time, our monthly theme is 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, encouraging 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 this moment when the truth seems under attack, we explore what it means to live truthfully, to seek Divine truth, and to share it with others.

  • Truth will not lose ground by being tried

    “Oh come! be not wedded to your own ways, nor prejudiced against what God hath taught others; but let things be fairly scanned, that all things may be proved, and that which is good held fast; for truth will not lose ground by being tried; but darkness is afraid of the light, because it has a secret sense that it cannot stand before it.”

  • The power of epiphany

    “In my own life, I was steeped in the religious understanding of my Quaker forebears on both sides of the family, and in a closely-bordered childhood on a dairy farm in an Indiana Quaker community. But it wasn’t until a spiritual epiphany in 1964 that led to my becoming a conscientious objector that I made Quaker spirituality experiential rather than ‘inherited.'”

  • Thomas Kelly on the joy of spiritual experience

    “I’d rather be jolly St. Francis, singing his canticle to the sun, than a dour, old sober-sides Quaker whose diet would appear to have been spiritual persimmons.”

  • My greatest outward help

    “To sit down in silence could at the least pledge me to nothing; it might open to me (as it did that morning) the very gate of heaven. And, since that day, now more than 17 years ago, Friends’ meetings have indeed been to me the greatest of outward helps to a fuller entrance into the spirit from which they have sprung.”

  • The immediacy of the Divine

    “There is that near you which will guide you. O! Hearken unto it, and be sure ye keep to it.”

  • A foundational experience of Quaker spirituality

    “And when all my hopes in them, and in all people was gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, Then, O! Then I heard a voice, which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’: and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.”

  • Quaker Quotes to Memorize (with guest editor Max L. Carter)

    Jan 19-25, 2026: This week’s messages are guest edited by Max L. Carter. He is a member of New Garden Friends Meeting in Greensboro, N.C. He retired in 2015 after 45 years in Quaker education, the last 25 at Guilford College as the William R. Rogers Director of Friends Center and Quaker Studies.

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