The Only True Standard ~ Elizabeth Gurney Fry
"The only true standard I can have to direct myself by is that which experience proves to give me the most happiness, buy enabling me to be virtuous. I believe there is something in the mind or in the heart that shows its approbation when we do right. Let me take courage and try from the bottom of my heart to do that which I believe truth dictates."
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Infinite Misery ~ Marius Grout
"If contemplation, which introduces us to the very heart of creation does not inflame us with such a love that it gives us, together with rich joy, the understanding of the infinite misery of the world, it is a vain kind of contemplation, it is the contemplation of a false God."
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"I especially want to suggest that we impoverish ourselves spiritually when we close ourselves off too quickly from the witnesses with whom we disagree, or when, to appropriate their words for our own beliefs, we translate or transpose what they say into the worlds and ideas with which we are already comfortable." 

- Paul Lacey, 1995
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Translated into Bread ~ Ralph J. Bunche
"Peace is no mere matter of men fighting or not fighting. Peace, to have meaning for many who have known only suffering in both peace and war, must be translated into bread or rice, shelter, health, and education, as well as freedom and human dignity - a steadily better life. If peace is to be secure, long-suffering and long-starved, forgotten peoples of the world, the underprivileged and the undernourished, must begin to realize without delay the promise of a new day and a new life."
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Where Justice is Denied ~ Frederick Douglass
"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
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Enveloping Darkness ~ Carl Sagan
"In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness."
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A Distinctive Whole ~ Michael L. Birkel
"Each spiritual tradition has its gifts to offer the rest of humankind. Even if no single feature of that tradition is utterly unique, the various spiritual practices and attitudes can combine into a distinctive whole. Many pieces of the Quaker tradition have close relatives in other spiritual communities. Still, the question remains: what does Quaker spirituality have to offer to the contemporary world?"
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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010
Continuous Revelation - Rufus Jones

"If God ever spoke, He is still speaking. If He has ever been in mutual and reciprocal communication with the persons He has made, He is still a communicating God as eager as ever to have listening and receptive souls. If there is something of His image and superscription in our inmost structure and being, we ought to expect a continuous revelation of His will and purpose through the ages.... He is the Great I Am, not a Great He Was."
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"You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

. . . We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

– Martin Luther King, Letter From the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
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The Catholic and other churches are actually correct when they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories. what do all of these have in common? They are made up of thought. Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never IS the truth. That's why Buddhists say "The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon." 

All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth. If you believe only your religion is the Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates an illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form. 

There is only one absolute Truth, and all other truths emanate from it. When you find that Truth, your actions will be in alignment with it. Human action can reflect the Truth, or it can reflect illusion. Can the Truth be put into words? Yes, but the words are, of course, not it. They only point to it.

The Truth is inseparable from who you are. Yes, you are the Truth. If you look for it elsewhere, you will be deceived every time. The very Being that you are is Truth. Jesus tried to convey that when he said, "I am the way and the truth and the life." These words uttered by Jesus are one of the most powerful and direct pointers to the Truth, if understood correctly. If misinterpreted, however, they become a great obstacle. Jesus speaks of the innermost I Am, the essence identity of every man and woman, every life-form, in fact. He speaks of the life that you are. 

Some Christian mystics have called it the Christ within; Buddhists call it your Buddha nature; for Hindus, it is Atman, the in-dwelling God. When you are in touch with that dimension within yourself -- and being in touch with it is your natural state, not some miraculous achievement -- all your actions and relationships will reflect the oneness with all life that you sense deep within. This is love. 

Laws, commandments, rules, and regulations are necessary for those who are cut off from who they are, the Truth within. They prevent the worst excesses of the ego, and often they don't even do that. "Love and do what you will" said St. Augustine. Words cannot get much closer to the Truth than that.

-- E. Tolle
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Beyond the realm of simple and verifiable facts, the certainty that "I am right and you are wrong" is a dangerous thing in personal relationships as well as in interactions between nations, tribes, religions, and so on. But if the belief "I am right; you are wrong" is one of the ways in which the ego strengthens itself, if making yourself right and others wrong is a mental dysfunction that perpetuates separation and conflict between human beings, does that mean there is no such thing as right or wrong behavior, action, or belief? And wouldn't that me the moral relativism that some contemporary Christian teachings see as the greatest evil of our times?

The history of Christianity is, of course, a prime example of how the belief that you are in sole possession of the truth, that is to say, right, can corrupt your actions and behavior to the point of insanity. For centuries, torturing and burning people alive if their opinion diverged even in the slightest from the Church doctrine or narrow interpretations of scripture (the "Truth") was considered right because the victims were "wrong". They were so wrong that they needed to be killed. The Truth was considered more important than human life. And what was the Truth? A story you had to believe in; which means, a bundle of thoughts.

--Eckhart Tolle
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A New Earth - Tolle
"A number of spiritual teachings tell us to let go of fear and desire. But those spiritual practices are usually unsuccessful. They haven't gone to the root of the dysfunction. Fear, greed, and desire for power are not the ultimate causal factors. Trying to become a good or better human being sounds like a commendable and high-minded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness. 

This is because it is still part of the same dysfunction, a more subtle and rarified form of self-enhancement, of desire for more and a strengthening of one's conceptual identity, one's self-image. You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness."
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"A great many things I had not previously understood became clear to me. that was what my father had not understood, I thought; he had failed to experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and out of the deepest faith. and that was why he had never experienced the miracle of grace which heals all and makes all comprehensible. 

He had taken the Bible's commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and as his forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His bible and His Church, who calls upon man to partake of His freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfill without reserve the command of God. In His trial of human courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred. In His omnipotence He will see to it that nothing really evil comes of such tests of courage. If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure of going the right way.

-- Carl Jung
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The Art of Loving
"We can return now to an important parallel between the love for one's parents and the love for God. The child starts out by being attached to his mother as "the ground of all being." He feels helpless and needs the all-enveloping love of mother. He then turns to father as the new center of his affections, father being a guiding principle for thought and action; in this stage he is motivated by the need to acquire father's praise, and to avoid his displeasure. 

In the stage of full maturity he has freed himself from the person of mother and of father as protecting and commanding powers; he has established the motherly and fatherly principles in himself. He has become his own father and mother; he is father and mother. In the history of the human race we see--and can anticipate--the same development: from the beginning of the love for God as the helpless attachment to a mother Goddess, through the obedient attachment to a fatherly God, to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually, to a point where he speaks of God only in a poetic, symbolic sense."


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010
"For one who first sets out on the path, it seems as if the inner and outer are separate, but as one becomes enlightened, one comes to understand that the external is the internal, and the internal is external. 

In more recent work, for example, in Language, Eros, Being, Wolfson develops his earlier insight by speaking of the dialectic of concealment and disclosure. Prone to paradoxical modes of expression, Wolfson has argued that the secret is seen from within the garment of the text, and not by discarding that garment. In Wolfson's formulation, the mystery lies right on the surface. 

In that sense, the text of Torah comprises everything; indeed, from the standpoint of the Zohar, the Torah is the name of God, and just as the name is hidden (the written form YHWH is not pronounced) and revealed (it is vocalized by its epithet Adonai), so the Torah is hidden and revealed. The mystic sage, who is the lover of the Torah, knows, however, that the hidden and the revealed are not paradoxically the same. 

Wolfson has also argued (in the fifth chapter of Language, Eros, Being) that this insight on the part of the zoharic kabbalists is a tacit polemic against Christian exegesis, which is based on a sharper distinction between the literal and the mystical. The kabbalist resists any notion of reaching the spirit of the text without taking hold of the letter."
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"Woe unto the man, says Shimon ben Yochai, who asserts that this Torah intends to relate only commonplace things and secular narratives; for if this were so, then in the present times likewise a Torah might be written with more attractive narratives. In truth, however, the matter is thus: The upper world and the lower are established upon one and the same principle; in the lower world is Israel, in the upper world are the angels. 

When the angels wish to descend to the lower world, they have to don earthly garments. If this be true of the angels, how much more so of the Torah, for whose sake, indeed, the world and the angels were alike created and exist. The world could simply not have endured to look upon it. Now the narratives of the Torah are its garments. He who thinks that these garments are the Torah itself deserves to perish and have no share in the world to come. 

Woe unto the fools who look no further when they see an elegant robe! More valuable than the garment is the body which carries it, and more valuable even than that is the soul which animates the body. Fools see only the garment of the Torah, the more intelligent see the body, the wise see the soul, its proper being; and in the Messianic time the 'upper soul' of the Torah will stand revealed." 

- The Zohan
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Ode to Joseph & His Acknowledged 9 Lovers
I journeyed to the Mecca of Being 
like I had seen the prophets of the road do before me.
I lived.
I loved.
I made money,
and blew the cash up my nose.
All the while riding the A train to the Hudson and back.
I went looking for the real essence of the zeitgeist before my time,
and found it through unity
of a likeness
once before
unseen 
as alike.
Moral relativism arose as the sacred,
and divine guidance emerged with a mirror
that shone my own reflection back.
I blanched at the truth of it,
and examined my eyes closely,
as though it were the first time.
And for the first time 
the prophet of my childhood 
made sense.
“Never kill an animal without reason,” he said
to the brethren marching on Zions Camp.
Then turned,
and shot a squirrel dead 
out of a tree.
Silence followed.
Breath in.
Breath out.
This is the art of double-bind;
a complex discourse on 
and of 
intentions of the heart.
For the first time, 
I became a real Saint in the latter day. 
Brother Joseph, 
an unknowing American prophet 
of Zen 
before his time.
“No man knows my history,” he said.
And yet, 
it was Puritan history 
that attempted to make such a revolutionary,
so pious.
He was what he was. 
But of this I am certain,
he never really wanted such false piety.
He was the Marx,
the Paul Robeson,
the Little Richard,
the Jerry Lee Lewis,
the Che,
the Ram Dass,
the Timothy Leary,
the Tupac,
of the
white Puritan
frontier west;
As an unlikely unity,
of many unlikely things.
Complex.
Dual.
Easily vilified.
Polarizing.
Fiercely loved and loving. 
Impossible to qualify,
and impossible to forget;
some bitterly die trying. 
Perhaps it was the women 
who loved to be loved by him,
Just as much 
as he loved to be loved by them. 
But of him it could be said,
along with all the others,
He lived his Truth.
Because of this
I could leave my birthright
and leave in peace
with love in my heart 
for my roots.
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"We held each other tightly for a long time, our bodies clenched in an embrace that included elements of love, grief, tenderness, sex and struggle. How subtly we shifted emotions, found shadings, using the scantest movement of our arms, our loins, the slightest intake of breath, to reach agreement on our fear, to advance our competition, to assert our root desires against the chaos," - White Noise
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I do not go back to America to sit still, remain quiet, and enjoy ease and comfort. . . . I glory in the conflict, that I may hereafter exult in the victory. I know that victory is certain. I go, turning my back upon the ease, comfort, and respectability which I might maintain even here. . . Still, I will go back, for the sake of my brethren. I go to suffer with them; to toil with them; to endure insult with them; to undergo outrage with them; to lift up my voice in their behalf; to speak and write in their vindication; and struggle in their ranks for the emancipation which shall yet be achieved. 
----Frederick Douglas, FAREWELL TO THE BRITISH PEOPLE, March 30, 1847
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"Knowing that Judas was reflecting upon something that was exalted, Jesus said to him: Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the Kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal. For someone else will replace you, in order that the twelve disciples may again come to completion with their God."

- The Gospel of Judas
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"The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask, they will know one another, though the liveries they wear here make them strangers."

--William Penn.
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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010


"There are few crises to compare," wrote Rufus Jones in 1904, "with that which appears when the simple, childhood religion, imbibed at mother's knee and absorbed from early home and church environment, comes into collision with a scientific, solidly reasoned system ..."
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‎"From one viewpoint, religion can be seen as sort of a luxury. If you have religion, that’s good, but even without it you can manage and survive - but we can't survive without human affection. While anger and hatred, like compassion and love, are part of our mind, I still believe the dominant forces are compassion and affection. Therefore, usually I refer to these human qualities as spirituality." 

-- the Dalai Lama
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"As long as we observe love for others and respect for their rights and dignity in our daily lives, then whether we are learned or unlearned, whether we believe in the Buddha or God, follow some religion or none at all, as long as we have compassion for others and conduct ourselves with restraint out of a sense of responsibility, there is no doubt we will be happy." 

--the Dalai Lama
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In my experience, a leading is a persistent desire to do something that may not make much sense. It is beyond reason. It keeps asking for your attention; it doesn't go away. It may be inconvenient. It may be misunderstood by people you love. When you finally act on it, it is like stepping into a river and letting it carry you. Your fear doesn't go away, your confusion doesn't go away, you're not suddenly happy all the time. But you feel relief. There is a kind of knowing that comforts you. 

- Paula Palmer, 2005
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It is thought that realizes will. Only a thinking man can live. Only a thinking people can create history. Only a thinking kind can live in the midst of the dead. The future always belongs to us. It is neither the working of nature, nor that of fate. It comes by our resolution. Only a person who resolves not to be enslaved enjoys freedom. Only a person who resolves not to assert his own enjoys freedom. Only the person who resolves to love even at the cost of his own life can win love. The first ingredient of life is courage. The problem of today is not that of knowledge or technology. It is a spiritual problem. It is a question which requires a revolution in our outlook on life, on history, and on the nation. The world today does not require an increase in technology, nor an easier access to its store of learning. It requires faith and spirit to overcome the present hurdle. The age calls for a new religion. 

- Ham Sok Hon, 1965
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It's a dangerous thing to lead young Friends much into the observation of outward things, which may be easily done, for they can soon get into an outward garb, to be all alike outwardly, but this will not make them true Christians: it's the Spirit that gives life. I would be loath to have a hand in these things... 

- Margaret Fell Fox, 1698
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Spiritual Discernment is 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...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 ability to see into people, situations and possibilities to identify what is of God in them and what is of numerous sources in ourselves - and what may be both...Discernment is a gift from from God, not a personal achievement...It is given for the building of the community and of relationship with God rather than for self-fulfillment or self-aggrandizement...We all have been given some measure of the gift of discernment. In a life lived with other priorities, the gift may be left undeveloped. But as we grow and are faithful in the spiritual life, we may well be given more. 

- Patricia Loring, "Spiritual Discernment" 1992


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010
Individuals can resist injustice, but only in community can we do justice. The defense of human rights...is a faith-based and worship-initiated, but we need look neither to Heaven nor to the Bible nor to corporate conscience for the higher law that overrules unjust laws. In the United States, protecting people from human rights violations is, if nonviolent, never illegal. A society's constituent individuals and communities retain primary responsibility for protecting human rights, a responsibility that we may entrust but never forfeit to the state. Much that has been labeled "civil disobedience" is, more accurately, civil initiative; it is the exercise by individuals or communities of their legally established duty to protect the victims of government officials violations of fundamental rights. 

- Excerpts from "Sanctuary as a Quaker Testimony" a report by Jim Corbett to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1986
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Perhaps what we are now considering is the question: what was the central concern of Jesus? I may say quite simply, the answer to that question is: human conduct...[For Jesus there] are not primarily questions of religious ritual...[nor] questions of philosophy, or theology or belief. There are rather questions of how you should behave...Jesus, in his teaching, would not be asked...abstract questions nearly as much as...questions about the will of God for our conduct. 

- Henry J. Cadbury, 1961 from Faith & Practice of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
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The Cross of Christ truly overcomes the world, and leads a life of purity in the face of its allurements; they that bear it are not thus chained up, for fear they should bite; nor locked up, lest they should be stole away; no, they receive power from Christ their Captain, to resist the evil, and do that which is good in the sight of God; to despise the world, and love its reproach above its praise; and not only not to offend others, but love those that offend them...True godliness doesn't turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavors to mend it; not hide their candle under a bushel, but set it upon a table in a candlestick. 

- William Penn, 1682
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...the Bible is a training school in discrimination among alternatives. One of the most sobering facts is that it is not on the whole a peaceful book - I mean a book of peace of mind. The Bible is the deposit of a long series of controversies between rival views of religion. The sobering thing is that in nearly every case the people shown by the Bible to be wrong had every reason to think they were in the right, and like us they did so. Complacent orthodoxy is the recurrent villain in the story from first to last and the hero is the challenger, like Job, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul. 

- Henry Joel Cadbury, 1953
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"This I know Experientially"
The quality of his life and the profound things he said drew me to him, not the myths of his birth and resurrection. His life and teachings commanded my allegiance then, and still do. If being a Christian means accepting Jesus Christ as a Lord and Savior, then I am probably not Christian. If being Christian means accepting his teachings as the norm for my life, striving to live out those terribly difficult precepts, then I am a Christian. 

- Elizabeth Watson, "This I know Experientially", 1977
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I Groan Within Myself ~ Dorothy Day
"Whenever I groan within myself and think how hard it is to keep writing about love in these times of tension and strife which may, at any moment, become for us all a time of terror, I think to myself: What else is the world interested in? What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships? God is Love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship to each other…There can never be enough of it." 

- Dorothy Day
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Not a Tidy Package ~ Elise Boulding

"What is the Quaker faith? It is not a tidy package of words which you can capture at any given time and then repeat weekly at a worship service. It is an experience of discovery which starts the discoverer on a journey which is life-long. The discovery in itself is not uniquely a property of Quakerism. It is as old as Christianity, and considerably older if you share the belief that many have known Christ who have not known His name. What is unique to the Religious Society of Friends is its insistence that the discovery must be made by each man for himself.
No one is allowed to get it second-hand by accepting a ready-made creed. Furthermore, the discovery points a path and demands a journey, and gives you the power to make the journey."
-- Elise Boulding, 1954
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