We realize that we must be silent and worship silently so that we can continue to be open to that experience.
Our experience in the silence gives us contact with Divine Reality in a way that is not confined to what is shaped by the ego. What we find there we have described as Light. This Light condemns the petty ego and teaches us what we should and should not do. Further, it gives us the courage and strength we need to live a life of integrity. Our experience in the silence changes us and we see that it has the same power to change others. It is universal - It is available to all who will seek it. (Seek and you shall find).
Out of these changes in us as individuals and us as a group have come our particular testimonies or witnesses in the world. These are not to be embraced as values but accepted because they are part of the Truth you know in your heart. There are five. Of these.
- Equality – If the Light is universal and available to all, then all are to be regarded as deserving of consideration based on them as worthy to be being guided by the Divine. This does not mean that at every moment every person is acting from the Light and that their every notion is to be trusted. That assumption results in mere individualism and solipsism. What it means is that we can’t make rules in advance for who has the Light of Truth working in them. No ordination. No gender bias. No educational bias. None of the usual separations of people apply. (Jesus mixed with “undesirable elements”)
- Simplicity – If we are convinced and devoted to the Light we find within, we will know enough to avoid the lures, desires, distractions and lusts that complicate and confound our lives. Wealth is to be used for need, mine and yours, too, but never for vanity, pride, or power over others. (Jesus asked us to consider the lilies of the field.)
- Harmony – If we find in the Light that we are loved and cared for, then we want to live in harmony with all people and want to share our lovingness with them. This is our “peace testimony.” We may encounter those who oppose our vision and even treat us cruelly and unjustly but we decline to label them as enemies. Our task is to find a way to “answer that of God” in them. That means we must have live lives that reflect what others can find in their lives.
- Community – If we are to live lives of integrity we need others to help us and we need others to help. Though it is available to all, living in the Light isn’t easy. To grow the Seed within we need the discipline of meeting with others and discerning as a group. Issac Penington described this as “a heap of living coals warming one another.” Love does not grow in us unless we let it out. If you want to hold on to it for yourself, you will lose it. Of course your love may not be returned, so the risk of loving is real. If you want guarantees, you don’t want a love relationship, you want safety for yourself.
- Integrity – We are required to live what we know. We do not swear oaths. Swearing oaths implies that otherwise we might be lying and we don’t think we should be lying If we do not practice deceiving ourselves, we will have no need to deceive other people.
I want to stress that these are not beliefs or creeds. These are things we know experimentally and that grow out of our spiritual experience of worshiping together. Creeds and ideologies are inevitably the work of the ego and that work always and necessarily leads us astray.
- Credal reality is the possession of the ego and confines us to the illusion that the Divine or Reality or Ultimate Truth can be grasped by us through our own power of understanding. The god your understanding can grasp is like a recipe for pancakes. The recipe itself may be well written but it is not something that can satisfy your hunger the way an encounter with pancakes will.
- Credal reality is shaped and limited by our fears and desires.
- Credal reality separates the heretic from the so called “faithful.”
- Loyalty to creeds keeps us blind and suppresses “prophetic vision.”
Creeds and Ideologies– what we are certain we know through the work of our egos – are the darkness in this world. What we can find in silent waiting is the Light that can lead us out of that darkness.
“Silence is God’s lap” Get in it.
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