“Adherence to the peace testimony grows out of our experience of God’s transforming love. It grows out of our ongoing life of prayer and worship which nurtures our relationship with Christ. But it also grows out of our obedience to the prophetic call of Christ to follow his will in faithful living in the world.”
“The time of my commitment to the house of correction being very near out, and there being many new soldiers raised, the commissioners would have made me captain over them; and the soldiers cried, they would have none but me. So the keeper of the house of correction was commanded to bring me before the commissioners and soldiers in the market place; where they offered me that preferment, as they called it, asking me, if I would not take up arms for the commonwealth against Charles Stuart?”
“The rights and safety of women and people with marginalized gender identities in the United States are in a precarious place. Women’s right to bodily autonomy was revoked with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, leaving a hodgepodge of inconsistent and ambiguous state laws in its place. Now under the new administration, transgender and nonbinary people are being targeted, with their very legal existence being erased by executive order. That’s why I felt it was critical to spend this month centering the voices of people our government is trying so hard to silence.”
May 2025: This month’s theme is Peace and Nonviolence, learning from great Quaker activists of the past and present. We will read about how the testimony was formed in the earliest days of Quakerism, how Friends have struggled with it, and personal journeys of Friends in wartime.
“If I could live another century! I do so want to see the fruition of the work for women in the past century. There is so much yet to be done, I see so many things I would like to do and say, but I must leave it for the younger generation. We old fighters have prepared the way, and it is easier than it was fifty years ago when I first got into the harness. The young blood, fresh with enthusiasm and with all the enlightenment of the twentieth century, must carry on the work.”
“The notion that ‘God in every man’ applies equally to women stems from the earliest days of Quakerism.
As early as 1646, George Fox wrote in his journal: ‘I came upon a sort of people who held that women have no souls, adding in a light manner, “no more than a goose.” But I reproved them, and told them that was not right; for Mary said, “my soul doth magnify the Lord.”‘
Not long after, he challenged a priest who would not permit a woman to speak in a church. ‘For the woman asking a question, he ought to have answered it, having given liberty for any to speak.'”
“I’ve yet to find a term that describes how I feel about the divine. ‘The Spirit’ comes close, and so, sometimes, does ‘Goddess’. ‘G-d/ess’ attempts to convey the difficulty of naming the divine. The dash is an old Jewish practice meant to show the impossibility of confining the divine in a word. The single ‘d’ and feminine suffix are to show that I don’t experience the goddess as different from or inferior to what folks generally refer to as God.”
“There has been growing recognition that the religious language of the Judeo-Christian tradition is over-weighted with masculine symbolism. It took shape in an era of patriarchal domination, first in Hebraic and Jewish society, then in the Roman Empire. As women today become aware of their femininity as a major style of being human, they quite properly resent this. Male theologians have pointed out that masculine pronouns are used for God simply because some pronouns have to be used; the statement is annoying, if also reasonably correct.”
“‘Den dat little man in black dar, he say woman can’t have as much right as man ‘cause Christ wa’n’t a woman! Whar did your Christ come from?’ Rolling thunder could not have stilled that crowd as did those deep wonderful tones, as she stood there with outstretched arms and eyes of fire.”
“Suddenly she was there, the Holy Ghost herself, looking less like a soft breath than anything I have ever seen: a lightning flash of living love, she leaped straight to the center where she lit and spun in flaming red. Tall, with red hair and red shoes, a red and blue gown, every slim inch of her outlined in flame, I knew she had leapt straight from the heart of the sun, from God Himself, to pirouette before me. Every move was pure ecstasy.”
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