Chapter 22 of Minding the Light: Our Collective Journal is now available online and attached as a PDF file, below. For this chapter, we invited Friends to respond to the query, “When has the Light called you to wait or be still?" In response, we received 8 stories and a photo.  

We invite you to read these stories for yourself. If our latest query reminds you of a story from your own experience, please consider sharing that on…

OZ'S VOICE

Do you presume to criticize the Great Oz? You ungrateful creatures!

Think yourselves lucky that I'm giving you audience tomorrow, instead of twenty years from now. Oh -- oh oh!

The Great Oz has spoken! Oh -- Oh…

If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. Matthew 10:14

God never promises the perfect house of worship, city, and demographic makeup. Our own founder, George Fox, wandered for years in eternal search for those very things. My father's mother, the daughter…

You are not your thoughts. This is something that is quite apparent to me while Worshiping or meditating. When you Worship silently or meditate the first thing you notice is that your mind is filled with distracting thoughts; things that you need to do, things that you have done, trains of thought running in every direction, your everyday stream of…

I've heard a variety of conflicting opinions about sharing my mental illness within a Meeting. In the best case scenario, I am lifted up as a symbol of courage in the face of adversity. In the worst case scenario, I am pitied in a condescending sort of fashion. My perspectives are discounted and the only thing people can view about me is my illness. The same…

"This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man."

Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, William Shakespeare

I spied this graffiti board on the Landmark College campus and this bit of…

Harper Lee's new book, "Go Set a Watchman" (the title is from Isaiah 21:6), is her second published novel.  Her first novel, the highly acclaimed “To Kill A Mockingbird,” was published in 1960, some fifty-five years earlier.  “Go Set a Watchman” is set in the same fictional Alabama…

William Roger writes in Part One of his Christian Quaker (1680) on pages 24-26:

'Tis well known, that it pleased the Lord, to reach unto many of our Consciences at the beginning of this latter Day, that hath dawned amongst us; whereby we came to Believe in the Everlasting Light of the Lord; and as others held forth the Visible Orders, and Written Faiths of a Visible Church to be as a lantern to their Paths, and as a Ground of their Faith, so this…

Where there is no outward tradition, Where there is no outward Family, Where is no outward creed or doctrine, Where there is no outward institution, Where there is no outward community, Where there is no outward nation, Where this is no outward government, Where there is no outward practice, Where there is no outward religion; enter that empty space and patiently wait for the re-cognition of eternal human being independent of outward forms and professors of form. In patient waiting, without…

As Richard Beck wrote in “Kenosis,”

I’m tired. Of myself.

Not sad. Not depressed. Not suicidal. Not dark.

Just tired.

Tired of being an ego. Having an ego.

I’m tired of filtering…

Around 26 years after a spiritual impulse, that changed the very nature of their conscious and conscience, manifested within a group of individuals (who called themselves Children of Light) in England a disunity happened among them over whether there was a role for the establishment of outward doctrine, tradition, and institutional structure. Some in the gathering affirmed a role and others in the gathering did not.

It is compelling that for at least around 30 years there existed a…

Which President said this?? Obama? Reagan? Lincoln? Guess again!

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and…

A six-year-old girl in South Carolina wrote a letter this summer. “Dear Daddy: I know you were shot at the Church and you went to Heaven. I love you so much! I know you love me and I know that you know that I love you too . . . Your baby girl and grasshopper.” Take more time to feel the sadness of that. Take more time to feel the wrongness of that.

The difference between tragedy and evil is the element of human will. Tragedy (natural evil) requires us to stop and weep and recover and…