Unity

I am getting ready to go to Area Meeting with a heavy heart. I do not want to go, I do not like many of the Quakers there.My true friends are elsewhere.  However I am a committed Quaker and I take the Advice and Query which extols us to go to Meeting whatever our condition.

I posted on Facebook that Quakers are a collection of colourful, individuals striving for Unity, knowing that we all strive for unity.

Whether that unity is with a Loving God who is all seeing and all accepting of all our faults, or whether we strive for psychological peace believing in Karl Jung's alchemy of the human spirit. It is our life's goal before the final closing of our striving. Maybe these two ideas are very similar. We long for that unity which will take away suffering.

We as humans long for peace and for unity with our enemies. We long for a reconciliation where we ourselves are understood, seen and recognised. It means giving up something, which is painful.

I shall go to Area Meeting with a spirit of reconciliation and a loving disposition and live in hope.

Area Meeting

Well, I went with my heavy heart and someone spoke to my condition.  Her name was Felicity Kaal and she came to give a workshop on using language to decribe our Quaker experience.

Quotation

"We Quakers call ourselves an experience-based religion.  Our central source of guidance is our direct experience as practiced in meeting for worship and meeting fr worship for business, where we step aside from our personal egos and connect with something greater. We all have our own conception of something greater. "

I use the term " Inward Light"

We all experience the inward light differently

The Witness, higher self, soul - immanent
The Diving Thou to whom I must surrender - transcendent
The Web of Life = the great perfection of existence itself nature - manifest.


If we as Quakers try to learn these descriptions of our experience of being a Quaker then perhaps we can unify a mode of language which we can use when we talk to each other and to those outside the society without hurting each others deeply held convictions.  In this way we may have a way of surviving in the modern world.

It is said that trying to inform Quakers is like herding cats. I pray that we can take this workshop on board and not hurt each other and find tolerance that our spiritual lives are not all experienced in the same way and while we may have an individual mother spiritual language, we do not try to convert each other to our own way of thinking, feeling and experiencing.