Pages tagged "Self awareness"

As a religious pacifist, I have learned a great deal on the battlegrounds of competition.

Curiosity sent me to the dictionary to look up “etude” before opening this poetry collection.

When I started attending Quaker meeting in my late twenties, I had a number of dramatic experiences of having a leading, jumping into it, and way opening. But that is not the story of faith and practice I am going to tell you today. Instead, I am going to tell you about a time when discernment was hard, and slow, and confusing.

It helps to belong somewhere. Belonging can be quite healing.

Dear Editor: I want to thank Kat Northrup for her article, “Race and Quakerism,” in May/June 2018 Western Friend. She has articulated very well my own observations and concerns. I was struck by this comment: “[The] uncomfortable feeling of disingenuous tokenism . . . is a hard feeling to avoid, unless one is already familiar with how highly the Quaker community values honesty.” I think in this case, Northrup is letting Quakers off the hook too easily. Valuing honesty is not the same as being honest. My range of Quaker experience is limited, but I have observed many who are quick to find the mote in another’s eye and maybe slower to examine their own (sometimes unconscious) biases and motivations. I wonder sometimes if, when we speak of “diversity,” we mean we want to be with people just like us, only with different color skins. Those of us who have found a spiritual home in a Quaker faith community want to share it. But can we share it with those who do not have the same social and political concerns that we have? Can those of us who identify as Christians, as followers of the teachings of Jesus, feel comfortable talking about our relationship with God and Scripture?

After frolicking around The Garden all morning, Adam and Eve were starving. They filled their bellies with the fruit of The Tree, and it gave them such a headache! The knowledge of good and evil throbs in the ever-branching tangle of nerves that is the human brain. And the Tree of Good and Evil produces both kinds of fruit.

Sabbath economics offers an alternative approach to dominant paradigms of economic theory and practice. Theologian-educator Ched Myers coined the term “Sabbath economics” in the 1990s, drawing from the Torah standard of social and economic justice and based on God’s call to “keep the Sabbath” by alternating good work with periods of rest.

Like many others, I was drawn to the Religious Society of Friends by its compassionate work with people in need. As an undergraduate in the 1960s, I witnessed that compassion first-hand by participating in several AFSC projects, including visiting mental-hospital patients in the Bay Area and working with disadvantaged children during Freedom Summer in Memphis, Tennessee. Those experiences inspired my later career as a child psychologist. Yet almost from the beginning, I have found it difficult to live up to Friends’ idealism; and over the years, I have grown to perceive among Friends a hidden, unmet need – for self-compassion.