“When I go up to kiss my sleeping children and linger with them, in quietness and love, that is prayer. There is a wordless unity of God, myself, my children, a sense of gratitude and reverence, awareness of my need for strength, shame for my failings, a promise to try again.”
May 2026: Quaker community is intergenerational, and welcoming children of all ages into our spiritual community is a joy. This month has messages for parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, teachers, members of worshipping communities – anyone who spends time with children. We read about the joy children bring, caregiving through hard times, how children experience spirituality, and knowing when to step back to allow children to grow into their wholeness.
“Quakers are good at respecting the rights of the individual, knowing they are human beings at all ages – not acting as if they become so at some point in their lives. Whilst, as older, supposedly wiser, people, we have suggested, refused or insisted – we always explain; even if, in desperation, that’s been ‘Because I’m the parent – trust me!’ There are boundaries and rules set from a mutual expectation of trust and reasonableness.”
“Something of God comes into our world with every child that is born. There is here with the newborn child a divine spark, a light within.”
“When many of us hear the word ‘prophecy’, we imagine fortune tellers and future predictions, but true prophetic witness is not about predicting what will happen tomorrow. It’s about an absolute inability to tolerate what is happening today.”
“I am called into this moment, and I don’t know what I’m called to do, but the notion that there is a great need and the world is depending on us is something I feel in my bones.”
“I know that a lot of Friends feel uncomfortable with conflict, so it’s a question of being willing to take the risk. And one of the great things about taking the risk is that you will inspire others to take a risk, and they, in turn, will inspire others to take a risk.”
“I choose to believe God is calling us to intimacy these days, to be intimate and provocative. In a way, we are reaching for the soil of each other’s souls. And when we reach for that soil, how are we tilling the field of the soul in order to awaken the seeds of […] a better world than the one we’re living in? But [we must] also be able to hold the pain and the sorrow and the sadness and the grief that we’re not there yet. We’re not there yet.”
“Hope has nothing to do with what you think is going to happen, and everything to do with where you point your life, sometimes in spite of the odds, rather than because of them.”
“Quaker anger, that’s discomforting for a lot of people. We are a religion that believes in continuing revelation… that the messages are there if you simply listen. And sometimes, when you listen to the messages, they’re telling you very uncomfortable things. They’re telling you to get off your ass and do something. They’re telling you to not just sit there and pontificate or feel stricken…. I feel stricken a lot, but I don’t want to sit. I want to do something, and that doing something usually means writing or speaking to people. And if you simply sit back in your pew and feel stricken, it’s not good enough. It really isn’t.”
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