Then after these - which I shall leave as my art pure, simple, without quotes from myself or others - I shall share
what I have been reading about a mystical brother of mine.
Rufus Jones
(1863-1948)
Quaker Mystic and Social Activist. ( Those of you not interested in this of course can log out after looking at my art and bless you for this.) So, oops, as you will see I didnt wait until the end to post the quotes as they appeared to me to go better with the individual photos.
"The reason we can hope to find God is that He is here, engaged all the time in finding us."
"But we cannot find Him with a little fraction of ourselves….It is the business of the whole self, it is the task of the entire life of man."
"Our human nature is unmistakably double. There is something in us that the divine Spirit can make its appeal to, something that draws us upward and onward, something that makes our moral and spiritual life possible. It think that this divine spark in us…is the most significant thing about us."
"Let a person's inner being be fortified with a faith in God and all his creative powers are quickened, his marching strength is heightened and his grip on everyday things is immensely increased. It is as though he had tapped a hidden reservoir of power."
"…mysticism ought to be thought of simply as the experience of direct communion with the soul of God."
"Mystical experience…is no more difficult than any other supreme achievement."
"The mystic is a person possessed of conviction, which for him amounts to an experience, that he has come upon the goal of life, that he has come back to the spiritual Source of his being….that he has in very truth found God."
ON PRAYER...
"…all great prayer is born out of intense earnestness and out of a consciousness that only God through us as a feeble organ of His will can accomplish what we seek and what we need."
"…those of us who pray have the best of all evidence that prayer is a vital breath of life, for we come back from it quickened and vitalized, refreshed and restored…."
"There are no known limits to the creative and transforming effects of this cooperation of the spirit of a believing person with the Great Divine Companion."
"Prayer will always rise or fall with the quality of one's faith, like the mercury in the tube which feels at once the change of pressure in the atmosphere. It is only out of live faith that a living prayer springs."
"Fortunately we do not need to understand vital processes and energies of life before we utilize them and start living by them."
ON SALVATION...
"But salvation is not a transaction; it is the formation of a new life. There is but one salvation for all mankind and that is the life of God in the soul."
ON "THE SUPREME REVELATION"...
"The greatest single fact of history is the breaking in of the Life of God through this unique Life. Here at last the Love of God found complete expression."
He is the yes of a new creation, with its inexhaustible implications and possibilities."
"His place in history….is not found by studying the short span of years that He lived in Galilee and Judea, but it includes as well the whole process of transformation which His life and spirit have wrought through the centuries. History would be quite another matter if He were eliminated from its story."
"The thing we need primarily is an enlarged capacity of appreciation of the range and quality of His personality. We need once more to see Him."
"…there is not the least ground for doubt that Christ was divine, that He was and is a revelation of God."
"…it seems to me tremendously important that Christ is as truly a revelation of man as He is a revelation of God. We see at last in Him what man was meant to be….We have seen God revealed in Christ. I wish now that we might learn to see the divine possibilities of man revealed in Christ."
"The first stage of 'entry into life' for Jesus is learning to love. To start executing a 'social program' without the creative and motive power of a great love behind it is like building a factory and forgetting to attach the machinery to any driving energy that would turn the wheels."
ON CONTINUOUS REVELATION...
"If God ever spoke, He is still speaking. If He has ever been in mutual and reciprocal communication with the persons He has made, He is still a communicating God, as eager as ever to have listening and receptive souls. If there is something of His image and superscription in our inmost structure and being, we ought to expect a continuous revelation of His will and purpose through the ages….He is the Great I Am, not a Great He Was."
"As the sap flows through the branches of the vine and vitalizes the whole organism so that it burst into the beauty and glory of foliage and blossom and finally into fruit, so through the lives of men and women, inwardly receptive, the life of God flows, carrying vitality, awakening love, creating passion for goodness, kindling the fervor of consecration and producing that living body, that organism of the Spirit, that 'blessed community' which continues through the centuries the revelation of God as love and tenderness and eternal goodness…"
ON "THE BOOK OF AGES"...
"A deeper and truer conception of scripture has been growing up in religious circles that has given us back the Bible as an inspired book of religion, as the great literature of the Spirit of God and not a literal transcript of history and science; and we can, in the light of that spiritual advance, face any verified facts of nature and any discovered truths of life without being put to confusion by their conflict with revelation."
"It contains the best story material by which the minds of children have ever been trained, and it is the greatest literature of revelation that has come out of the far past of the race."
ON EDUCATION FOR LIVING...
"To be a teacher who knows how to enlarge the depth and scope of a person's life is the best gift there is."
"What needs to grow clear in the minds of all who are responsible for the training of youth, whether within or entirely outside the Church, is the fact that all genuine education must have a spiritual quality to it, - that is, it must have to do with the formation of personality, the building of character, the enlargement of life, the transmission of the supreme experiences of the race, and with setting free the higher potential powers of the individual."
"The time is coming when every sound teacher will realize that it is fully as important to have expert treatment for children's fears and mental 'complexes' as for their defects of eyesight and hearing."
ON SERVICE...
"To discover a truth involves the apostolic task of going out and doing it."
"God's work, the doing of His will, is extraordinarily inclusive - raising food on the land, ordering a nurturing home, taking care of a child with loving insight, speaking simple truth, spreading love abroad in any spot of the world, praying and working for the Kingdom of God, being heroic in quiet ways, saying the right word when others do not dare, walking straight forward in the path of duty - these are some of the ways of doing God's will."
"The whole atmosphere of service must be pervaded by a calm mind, by a spirit of reconciliation, by clear insight, by undeviating fidelity, and by respect for the views of life which are precious to those whom you are serving."
ON QUAKERISM...
"George Fox and his circle of Friends knew only too well that they were merely a remnant… but he lived and died in the faith that the Quaker group was the Seed of an immense world-wide harvest that would …. Eventually become universal."
"What these pillar Quakers were talking about when they used their various figures of speech - 'inward light,' 'immortal Seed,' 'Christ within,' - was their certainty that God was not remote, not a far-off sky-God, not merely a Creator at some distant 'beginning,' not a Being Who left us with nothing but a Book as a Guide on our hazardous pathway, but a God here and now present in us, as near as breathing; moving not merely on the waters at some far-away date, but operating directly and immediately in the soul of man here and now."
"If we are to prove that Fox really struck a jet of living water, we ourselves must tap that same fountain."
"We have won an enviable place in the eyes of the world as the purveyors of relief. We have learned to meet and to take up the sufferings of the world…Now we need to give as serious and as creative thought and consideration to the renewal of the spiritual life and power of our Meetings and of our membership as we have given to the constructive tasks of the world."
"The Society of Friends….is primarily and essentially a widely scattered number of local meetings, little cells, where the actual vitality and power and future potency of Quakerism is being settled and determined. We work in vain unless we keep our minds focused on these local units."
ON THE CHRISTIAN HOME...
"The home is the most favorable place on earth for transmitting to the new-born child the spiritual gains of the race and for the formation of a well-organized moral and spiritual character. The greatest thing a true home produces is the cementing power of love and tenderness and the stabilizing quality of faith in eternal Reality. The restoration of the home as the spiritual nursery of the children God gives us, is the major task of our time."
ON A FAITH FOR THESE TIMES...
"I have a profound faith that the times are ripe for a signal advance in religious belief and life and practice - for a Christianity translated into the terms of life and thought and action of the age in which we are actually living. There cannot be any great continuing civilization without the undergirding of religious inspiration…."
"No one, I am sure, will suppose that I think that a religious experience is a substitute for a sound economic, or social, or financial, or political solution of the world's troubles. I only mean that we must deepen the quality of life and enlarge our faith in the scope of human destinies before any of the fine schemes on hand will work."
"We shall not be able to rebuild our shattered world until we recover our faith in eternal realities, and we shall not do that until we discover spirit within ourselves."
"The only flowing refutation of the materialism and secularism of our time is a personal life which demonstrates a source of spiritual power."
Hey my brothers and sisters, I thought I would throw in this wild card to unsettle those who thought I am too predictable.
"It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die… Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation..."
-Oscar Wilde
“I no longer fear God. I have come to love him,
for perfect love casts out fear.” (see 1 John 4:18)
for perfect love casts out fear.” (see 1 John 4:18)
-Abba Antony
"Our Lord told us to pray in secret –
that means in your heart –
and he instructed us to “shut the door.”
What is this door he says we must shut,
if not the mouth?
For we are the temple in which Christ dwells,
for as the Apostle said:
“You are the temple of the Lord.”
And the Lord enters into your inner self
into this house,
to cleanse it from everything that is unclean,
but only while the door — that is, your mouth –
is closed shut."
that means in your heart –
and he instructed us to “shut the door.”
What is this door he says we must shut,
if not the mouth?
For we are the temple in which Christ dwells,
for as the Apostle said:
“You are the temple of the Lord.”
And the Lord enters into your inner self
into this house,
to cleanse it from everything that is unclean,
but only while the door — that is, your mouth –
is closed shut."
– Aphrahat the Persian
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