FM Authenticity Quotes and Resources 1

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The Wounding and Healing of the Human Spirit By Daniel Gottlieb Friends Journal December, 2005

We long to belong, to be a part of, and yet we need to be unique. We need to be fully understood by others. As I say frequently, the hunger to be known exceeds the hunger to be loved. More important even than love, we need to be fully understood by others, yet dare we ever fully open up to someone else? Dare we do it to ourselves?

In his Introduction to Samuel Bownas’s A Description of the Qualifications Necessary to A Gospel Minister, William Taber writes:

“Qualification, as he used the word, implies that one has gone through a process of personal transformation which reorients the ego, the will, and the attention so that one can be trusted purely to receive and purely to give forth an inspired message” (Bownas, xx). Today we would probably expect this transformation to be a lifelong process, and therefore we would look for a transformed intention that moves (not always without forgetting, faltering and backsliding) to bring more and more areas of one’s life into conformity with divine will.

From the book Inner Tenderings by Louise Wilson

My friendship with Howard Thurman gave me an opportunity, through letters, phone calls, and visits to share both my pain and my joy with someone I trusted. He gave me honest feedback. Most of all Howard taught me to honor my “creatureliness,” as he called it. I thought I was supposed to be Christlike. For me that didn’t leave any room for my humanity. No wonder I was in such turmoil. I saw no way to be truly authentic and that is what I so desired. Gradually I began to honor my body, paying attention to its messages to me. I honored my mind, not expecting that I be the mind of Christ at all times! I honored my feelings, accepting the fact that it was all right to feel angry, to feel happy–to feel. It was all right to be me. This may not sound like a relief to those who read these words, but for me it opened up a new world.

Spiritual Hospitality: A Quaker’s Understanding of Outreach Pendle Hill Pamphlet #314 by Harvey Gilman

There is that of God in everyone. As we reach out to God, we find other people. As we reach out to others we reach out to God. When we are most fully alive, most real, we discover life in others and help to make God real to them. Spirituality is about relationships and about depth.

It is about self, the other person or people, the world around, and that which is beyond or within all people which confers some sort of meaning to reality, and gives us a purpose and shapes our lives. This we may call God or the Spirit. So in one sense or another it involves reaching out and being reached out to. 

In my search for reality, for authenticity, for the God who is always present, I have been both guest and host. 

…The keynote is truth and authenticity. If spirituality is about relationship, we keep having to ask ourselves, Friends and others alike, just how authentic our relationships are, just how welcoming and open we are, how far we are, as Quakers put it, answering to the eternal in each other. How far are we allowing people to find their real selves which is where their light shines most brightly.

…And are we able and willing to show the guests around the house? I think we do a great disservice to others and to ourselves that we often feel too shy to articulate where we are ourselves spiritually. Liberal Friends fear being too prescriptive so we lapse into an embarrassed silence. When our guests ask us to share with them, we have the duty to respond, at least out of common courtesy. The real process of communication allows us to accept our feelings of limitation, our doubts, our fears, and we are liberated to share them, however tentatively. It means accepting the stranger within ourselves as well, giving him or her some house room. We cannot accept the stranger without if we do not accept with kindness the stranger within our very souls. 

Seeking Inner Peace: Presence, Pain, and Wholeness Pendle Hill Pamphlet #414  by Elizabeth De Sa

For a long time, Quakerism did not inspire me. There was a dearth of young people in my meeting, and I was the only person of color. I did not fit in. I was lonely and in a teaching job that did not fulfill me. I became depressed, my spirituality became superficial, and I started relying on alcohol and marijuana to dampen my constant emotional pain. I did not know that my meeting could offer me the community to support my personal spiritual experience. The foci of meeting for worship were silence and the social-political bandwagon. I continued to do some spiritual seeking on my own but felt myself going under. I perceived that Quakers were just as reluctant as stoic English Catholics to talk about Godde and the inner life, and this was especially frustrating having just spent the past three years worshiping with an open American faith community in Japan. I stayed because I was tired of sampling religions.

Eighteen months after I first started attending, my life was changed by a weekend retreat. There I began to realize the depths of Quakerism. We explored prayer, discernment, and Quaker contemplation. For the first time since I had opened my heart to Godde…I felt a sense of coming home. This time, however, I experienced it in a language that felt authentic, though I felt angry that it had taken eighteen months to discover Quakerism’s best kept secret. During the subsequent six months, I went to Quaker gatherings like a junkie. I sought out and reveled in communities of people who talked openly about their spiritual lives, people who were actively seeking guidance in aligning their inner and outer selves. After every gathering, I returned home a thoroughly convinced Friend, committed to engaging authentically with people in my meeting. I was soon disappointed. There were a few good-hearted attempts to engage with me but stoicism, a reluctance to proselytize, or a lack of experience talking about the inner life meant that conversations were soon steered back to inane small talk and the latest news on the local activism front. I did not feel fulfilled in my faith community. I had seen what Quakerism had to offer, yet it was not delivering.

[later] In communities of faith, in loving partnerships of marriage, in intentional living communities, and in communities of families and friends, we learn, though the practice of presence, how to love that of Godde within each other. Through living in intentional community, I have experienced how my vision is clouded by past pain and prejudices. Close relationships offer mirrors through which our pain and fears, as well as the Light within us, are reflected. Through conflict, community offers us the opportunity to hold each other in our pain and to help each other move toward wholeless. We transcend our humanity by resolving conflict peacefully through deep, compassionate listening; we learn that our beliefs are not necessarily the truth, that our truth is colored by our perceptions. It is easy to placate the ego, to want to win, to believe that our own truth is right. But this does not offer peace. In community we find the support to draw closer to the Divine. We learn the place of ego, we practice being present to what is alive in the moment, and we develop the resolve and communication skills to rise above our egos and move our inner and outer selves into increased alignment. In peaceful conflict resolution, we acknowledge that we do not exist in polarities of good and bad, but that there are reasons for all of our behaviors. Behaviors that cause pain are usually rooted in pain. By being mindfully present with our pain and the pain of another, we affirm that we see that of Godde within each other, and we affirm our desire to stand together in our collective pain and to heal.

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