A mark of the liberating community is a radical commitment to a critical contemplation of one’s own life and the life of one’s faith community. This commitment is important for all groups and and especially important for communities like my own which have made small beginnings in aligning themselves with the oppressed, and are somewhere concretely involved in the struggle for justice.
The listening we advocate requires a particular mode: the questions are non-adversarial. The listening is nonjudgmental. The listener seeks the truth of the person questioned, seeks to see through any masks of hostility and fear to the sacredness of the individual, and to discern the wounds at the heart of any violence.
The individual whose commitment to the community is based on a sense that these community members are somehow special human beings, who have the right concerns and values and live the right lives, will find great difficulty when members of the community fail to live up to these standards and expectations. Being human, we all fail repeatedly to live up to our own standards and expectations, and are bound to disappoint other people’s on occasion.
The individual whose commitment to the community is based on a sense that these community members are somehow special human beings, who have the right concerns and values and live the right lives, will find great difficulty when members of the community fail to live up to these standards and expectations. Being human, we all fail repeatedly to live up to our own standards and expectations, and are bound to disappoint other people’s on occasion.
Community comes as a byproduct of commitment and struggle. It comes when we step forward to right some wrong, to heal some hurt, to give some service. It always means the collision of egos. It is less like Utopia than like a crucible or a refiner’s fire.
I don’t think our understanding of ‘what we call God’ will ever be complete. Moreover, whatever is of God is bound to be beyond any clever myth we humans can devise. Yet, I do think that the divine gives us windows (decisive views) onto itself.
This artwork takes its title, “Beloved Community, Sanctuary Cities”, from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideas of a beloved community, where all are equal and accepted, and the proclamation to be a place of sanctuary made by cities across the U.S., this painting is meant to be a hopeful vision to hold onto in our hearts and minds.
By using the power of mature, redemptive love we can show each individual that we need his or her uniqueness to make us whole. We will then see that we have something to give others and that others have something to give us.
How do we do the work of embodying the Beloved Community in [our] meeting? It starts with honoring each other’s gifts and callings and showing loving kindness and respect towards one another. In our Meeting we have doctors, nurses, therapists, writers, artists, actors, teachers, academics, lawyers, gardeners, parents, grandparents, children, and much more.
I have been at a Quaker school since the age of eleven and one of the things I have found to be most important is how Quakerism embraces and acknowledges differences, whether they be racial or cultural ones, or gender and religion. Where there is less focus on similarities and an appreciation of individuality and difference, there is common ground for understanding which I think is part of what makes up the Quaker ethos and the integration of diversity at my school.
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