An Often Forgotten Basic Quaker Value - 10/3/2009

Today's Mental Image:

Elizabeth Gurney Fry's Quaker Values

LIVING PURPOSEFULLY

"Whenever I am away for Earlham and return to campus, I am struck again at how much we talk about purposes here, how much we think about how what we do affects others -- and should affect others."

Douglas C. Bennett

President, Earlham College

Spirit breathed answers to
"how then shall I live in this moment?"

In the past, "Quaker Values" referred to Biblical emphases that Quakers held in conscious thought as foundations to Christian community and guides to interaction with all of persons.  You will note that "value" does not provide a prescription for what, where, and how a proper answer is lived.  "Values" were "queries" to take daily, moment by moment, before the throne of God for Spirit breathed answers to "how then shall I live in this moment?"

We as a Society of the Friends of Jesus, like many other groups within the Church, spent many years living under the locks and keys of specific, judgmental do's, don'ts, human patterns, and Quaker cultural laws that supposedly answered the what, when, where, and how.  But the truth is that these "good things" shut us, and our lives, off from the flow of the Holy Spirit and brought us brokeness, exclusion, and spiritual death.

How uncomfortable George Fox and the Early Quakers would have been in such a "Spirit free" society.  How sad that, in the name of solid answers, we cut ourselves off from the very Spirit guidance that was the true primary "Quaker value." 

Too often we continue to cut ourselves of from Walking in the Spirit.
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Too often, Friends, we continue to cut ourselves off from the very Life the power of which, flowing through us, rocked our spiritual ancesters' world.