As I prepared for meeting for worship at Bear Creek this morning, I was led to read the following. I am thankful to have been raised in the Quaker approach to faith based social concern.
“The Eternal Now and Social Concern” is the title of a chapter in Thomas R. Kelly’s book A Testament of Devotion.
There is an experience of the eternal breaking into time, which transforms all life into a miracle of faith and action. Unspeakable, profound, and full of glory as an inward experience, it is the root of concern for all creation, the true ground of social endeavor. This inward Life and the outward Concern are truly one whole, and, were it possible, ought to be described simultaneously.
A blog post I wrote discussed the intersection of mysticism and activism: https://kislingjeff.wordpress.com/2017/02/16/intersection-of-mysticism-and-activism/
The following SWAY presentation also discusses this. You can move through the presentation by clicking the arrows at the bottom right.
This is the second thing I read this morning. Rabbi Joachim Prinz spoke before Martin Luther King did at the March on Washington in 1963:
When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those most tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.
Quakers, social justice and revolution 