“Most of us are given some common little jobs every day of our lives. To a very few comes the call to do something extraordinary, some great task. The world abounds in men and women who find happiness and opportunities for self-expression in being faithful in the humble stations of life which are theirs at a given time.”
“Turn therefore inwards, and all that is within you will demonstrate to you the presence and power of God in your soul, and make you find and feel it with the same certainty as you find and feel your own thoughts.”
“One day walking alone, I felt myself so inwardly weak and feeble, that I stood still, and by the reverence that covered my mind, I knew that the hand of the Lord was on me and his presence round about, the earth was silent and all flesh brought into stillness, and light went forth with brightness, and shone on Great Britain, Ireland, and Holland, and my mind felt the gentle, yet strongly drawing cords of that love which is stronger than death, which made me say, ‘Lord! Go before, and strengthen me, and I will follow whithersoever thou leadest.'”
“May we come with hearts / and minds prepared / seeking to be still / and seeking to listen.”
“Thus I continued still in vanity and folly, with intervals of deep distress and mournings, a short space longer, that is, till the winter of the year 1770, when, being about nineteen years old, I became more fully and clearly convinced, and that very much by the immediate operations, illuminations, and openings of divine light in my own mind, that this inward something, which had been thus long and powerfully striving with me, disturbing my every false rest, confusing every false and sin-flattering imagination of flesh and blood, or of the grand adversary, and enjoining it upon me to give up all, and walk in the ways of virtue and true self-denial, was the true and living spirit and power of the eternal God.”
“No one is forced to pay attention to what the Light exposes. Just as we can close our outward, physical eyes to those things in the ordinary world that we find unpleasant and don’t want to see, we have the ability to close our inward, spiritual eyes and turn away from what the Light of Christ reveals inside us.”
“For me, discernment is the core technology of Quakerism. It is the thing that we learn to do and that our faith supports. And that is to thresh through the complexity of life and find the kernel, find the root, find the way: the way for me today, at this moment.”
“You think that you have a leading, but your ego takes over, or your will takes over, and you need community to be with you to help discern what is really coming through. Not for the community to tell you what’s coming through, but to reflect back to you what they’re hearing. Because you’re the one that needs to determine what that true vibration is inside of you.”
“To ‘listen’ another’s soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another. But in this scrutiny of the business of listening, is that all that has emerged? Is it blasphemous to suggest that over the shoulder of the human listener, there is never absent the silent presence of the Eternal Listener, the living God? For in penetrating to what is involved in listening, do we not disclose the thinness of the filament that separates [people] listening openly to one another, and that of God intently listening to each soul?”
“Spiritual discernment lies at the heart of Quaker spirituality and practice. It’s grounded in the central Quaker conviction of the availability to every person of the experience and guidance of God, immediate as well as mediated. Discernment is the faculty we use to distinguish the true movement of the Spirit to speak in meeting for worship from the wholly human urge to share, to instruct, or to straighten people out. It is the capacity we exercise in a centered meeting for worship for the conduct of business to sense the right course for the meeting to take in complex or difficult circumstances. It is the ability to see into people, situations, and possibilities to identify what is of God in them and what is of the numerous other sources in ourselves – and what may be both.”
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