I am getting more and more interested in the Quaker approach which seems so free and appropriate. I have been reading some books by Parker Palmer, who is a quaker. He is wise. I especially recommend "Let your life speak" to people who are not sure where their life is taken them and especially for those who have struggled with depression. Mr Palmer has struggled with these things and this little book is partly biographical and is wonderfully enlightening.

This is what he says:

I was in my early thirties when I began to wake up to questions about my vocation. By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances. Seeking a path more purposeful than accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a career, I had started to understand that is indeed possible to live a life other than one's own. Fearful that I was doing just that, I would snap awake in the middle of the night and stare for long hours at the ceiling.

True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost.



Then I ran across the old Quaker saying, "Let your life speak." I found these words encouraging, and I thought they meant: "Let the highest truths and values guide you." I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self--as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out. I had simply found a "noble" way to live a life that was not my own.

Today, some thirty years later, "Let life speak" means something else to me, a meaning faithful both to the ambiguity of those words and to the complexity of my own experience: "Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you."

Rev.Van

Thanks Rev Van. Sound advice I think.

I admire the Society of Friends for their principled approach to life.
(And I am grateful for recently learning that a belief in Christianity is not a requirement for membership).
But I know I couldn't join in.
If memory serves,a Quaker won the VC and bar in the Great War.He was a medic.
And unarmed.
I've lived most of my life giving in to other peoples idea's.Dominated by women mostly,no self respect,a coward basically.
Then I got divorced,joined the reserves,took up karate.
Now I am proactive.
I won't be lied to,abused or laid a hand upon.I don't do these things to others and I expect the same from them.(JW,the Shootist).
I also don't like to see other people, who can't defend themselves,being taken advantage of.
I have taken a few knocks,but I am content.
We all die.Few of us leave a good name.

It is in Silence that God (Life) speaks to us.

Hermano Luis