Freedom and Simplicity
Description:
Two essays from Eric Sabelman of Palo Alto Meeting, concerning challenges that many Friends confront.
Keywords:
Two essays from Eric Sabelman of Palo Alto Meeting, concerning challenges that many Friends confront.
On a narrow country road eleven miles north of Santa Barbara, California, you will spot the sign for Chumash Painted Cave State Historical Park.
Simplicity does not mean that all conform to uniform standards. . . The call to each is to abandon those things that clutter his life and to press toward the goal unhampered. This is true simplicity. Friends are watchful to keep themselves free from self-indulgent habits, luxurious ways of living and the bondage of fashion. . .
I love to quote Frank Zappa on this, “Your life is a ribbon of time that you get to decorate.” Early Friends were rightly wary of decoration. They dissented from “high church” practices of pomp and circumstance, oratory and argumentation, frankincense and anointing oils.
We have one Friend in our Quaker meeting who often comes to worship in a highly-colored and carefully put-together outfit, including an ornate Sunday hat. This is unusual for an unprogrammed meeting.
Transcriptions of the keynote talks presented to Pacific Yearly Meeting in 2018.
Dear Editor: I am so delighted that Western Friend published the 2017 IMYM keynote talk on finances (September/October 2017). Financial management is a spiritual practice, at least as taught by my teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. Citizens of the United States are profligate wasters of world resources. One of the reasons for this is rank ignorance.
Approved!
A Story About Quaker Meeting for Business
Written by Nancy L. Haines
Illustrated by Anne E.G. Nydam
Reviewed by Iris Graville
I sing and celebrate garbage,
the rejected, the refugee,
The “wretched refuse yearning to breathe free.”
I lift up in the Light those treated like trash,
Those living in the junk yards of history.
Out of blackened wood from a bombed out church,
A black Southern artist made a mobile that took my breath awayComplete version of an article published in abridged form in the November/December 2017 issue of Western Friend magazine.
