I am a South Jersey Friend and dad with a love out of outreach and a passion for looking afresh at Friends' testimonies, language and practices. I am the publisher of Quaker Quaker, a community site for Friends, and write about online publicity, organizing and design on my business site at MartinKelley.com.
Learning the discernment of self-sacrifice, loss and pride
Earlier today I posted an excerpt of an interesting article on Anabaptism on my Tumblr blog and it's engendered quite a conversation on Facebook about testimonies and empty forms, etc. It's true that any form of spiritual discipline can get twisted into look-at-me heroism or lets-talk-anything-but-God group conformity.
The answer isn't to give up testimonies or to hold onto them even tighter, but instead to constantly remind ourselves about their purpose: to learn how to live as an attentive people of God. Here's what I wrote on Facebook:
The answer isn't to give up testimonies or to hold onto them even tighter, but instead to constantly remind ourselves about their purpose: to learn how to live as an attentive people of God. Here's what I wrote on Facebook:
I've been a mostly bicycle-riding vegan for decades, an outspoken pacifist and a frequent plain dresser. All of these practices have aided my spiritual growth but also have unearthed new sources of pride for me to wrestle with. The self-examination has been practice in discernment.
I often think back to the story of the Good Samaritan. What mattered wasn't how he was dressed or whether he was riding a bicycle. No, what mattered is that he knew enough to know he was being called to sacrifice something: to get covered in a strangers blood, to aid someone who might resent him for it, to lose money he had earned to put someone up for the night. Maybe he had practiced this discernment of self-sacrifice by living a testimony that had challenged him to navigate between loss and pride, and maybe he had been brought up in a community where the value of love was prized above all. The important thing is he knew to stop and be a true neighbor.
June 10, 2009 5:38 PM.
View Comments
Categories:
quaker
,
testimonies
| Tags:
bicycles, decision-making, discernment, pacifism, plainness, quaker, sacrifice, samaritan, testimonies
Categories: quaker , testimonies | Tags: bicycles, decision-making, discernment, pacifism, plainness, quaker, sacrifice, samaritan, testimonies
Social:
Seen Around the Web
Feed Subscription:
You can also sign up to get daily posts delivered by email. Enter email address:
Talkback
Favorite Topics:
Favorite Posts:
Many of these are collected in book form in the
Quaker
Ranter Reader ($12.00 CafePress).
Support this work
Recent Clients
Quaker Blogroll
Reprinting
QuakerRanter by Martin Kelley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.quakerranter.org.
