Pages tagged "Faith"

Dear Editor: Thank-you for publishing Jim Humphrey’s “Here Sleep Dragons” in the March/April 2017 issue of Western Friend. I’ve long regarded the Quaker faith as both timeless and prescient, and a most fitting expression of 21st Century Christianity in which science, mysticism and justice advocacy meet and affirm each other. I admire Mr. Humphrey’s intimate and transcendent account of our human condition, which relates the evolution of scientific breakthroughs and worldviews, and considers conscious agency within an incomprehensibly complex and co-creative world. His is a deeply inspired rendering of contemporary pragmatic Quaker mysticism, describing a participatory universe of which we are each and all an expression, and a faith “that resides both in action and belief.”

Three members of a Quaker meeting answer the question, “Why are you here?” The first says, “To benefit from group meditation, which helps my personal well-being.”  The second says, “To be part of a community that benefits the world.”  The third says, “To seek and serve God.”

This “little book” is a high-level survey of a very big subject. As such, it will leave most readers wanting more. Fortunately, the book’s strong organization and its wealth of source materials combine to make it into a solid guide for readers who want to locate in-depth works on “knowing” and “unknowing” by a broad range of great minds, including Rumi, Thomas Kelly, and Matthew Fox.

Dear Editor: As an engineer who went to seminary, I often find myself defending both Science and Faith. Like Jim Humphrey (“Here Sleep Dragons,” March/April 2017), I’m a “pro-science guy” who agrees that science often gets distorted by materialism. And like Brylie Oxley (“Time Crystals,” same issue), I am fascinated by discoveries, like time crystals, that open our minds to the awesome structure of reality.

Dear Friends: When an angel, according to biblical records, encounters a living human being, the first thing the angel says is. “Fear not!” or “Be not afraid!” or words to that effect.

The language we necessarily use shapes our experience of the everyday world as a world of “things,” objects that we view from the outside. This is the case whether the “things” are apples, worlds, ideas, relationships, plans, or even the entire universe. We view and manipulate “things” as if we face them from a separate, outside position in which we seem to live.

An interview with Ray Lyall

Recently, I read the wonderful 2016 Backhouse Lecture, Everyday Prophets by Margery Post Abbott. I identified with Abbott’s description of everyday prophets as “. . . people who listen to the voice of all that it Holy and follow its guidance” (p. 3). Yet these everyday prophets face challenges, too. “It takes practice to develop the skill of listening with an inward ear and coming to recognize the taste and color of all that it holy . . . Above all, such a person is one who listens inwardly and has learned to distinguish the voice of the Spirit, the presence of Christ, from their own desires or self-will, the pressures of the surrounding culture and the need to win approval from those around them” (pp. 5-6).

Dear Editor: I just came home from our Midyear

Excerpts from the keynote presentation to North Pacific Yearly Meeting; July 14, 2016; Whitworth University, Spokane, Washington