I have been thinking about the reports in the British press that the Quakers (ie in Britain) are considering 'dropping God'. While this was a somewhat exaggerated report, there is a strong strain of nontheism or atheism in UK Quakers. I find this difficult, as I joined Quakers not to become a better person or find like minded people or even to do good in the world. I joined only to look for God. This (adapted) parable came to mind:

A woman lost a valuable coin. She lit a light and…

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either…

This first appeared on my blog, This Was The True Light.

If I could stand before you and speak of the things of God, what should I tell you? What would be on my heart, as it is upon my mind now, is this one question: “Why are you here?”

There could be many answers to that question, ranging from the flattering “We are here to hear what you have to say” to the more mundane “I love the food that appears at…

When I began to concentrate my studies on all the writings of George Fox more than forty years ago, it was during the period of Quaker history that might be called the “high tide” of the mystical interpretation of Quakerism. And when I had first encountered Fox’s Journal just fifty years ago, I was not a professing Christian. If I had any bias when I read the Journal for the first time, it was in the direction of hoping to find in Fox the “perennial philosophy” of the mystics. But as I…