IMYM Faith & Practice, 2009, pp 52-54

Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations against another; but praying one for another and helping one another up with a tender hand. 

Isaac Penington, 1667⁷ 

It is not possible to be a human being without being part of a community. We are born into a community, even if it is only ourselves and our mother. We grow up in a community, learning language, assimilating culture, and discovering the Spirit. As Friends, we know that the Spirit comes to us not only as individuals, not only as members of a community, but as the very foundation of community, moving a meeting at times as one person. The Spirit guides us when we worship in community and when we do business in community.

Although we best know a sense of spiritual unity within our families and in our meetings, we look outwards and try in love to include others in our community—our neighbors near and far, the people we meet as we go out into the world, even the very living, breathing Earth that feeds us and clothes us and that we care for in our turn.

There is a reciprocal nature to our relationships in community, but the love of God takes us beyond exchange and contract to covenant and commitment. We care for those who need us, whether they are able to return the care or not. We care for the prisoners who have harmed us, for they also are beloved of God. We have compassion for those in power, even when we disagree with their actions, for we know they are human and carry within themselves the seed of love. We care for migrants who have left home and family to seek a new life in a strange place. We care for all we love and all we might come to love.

Community calls us sometimes to set our own interests aside when the group is led in directions we may not understand or appreciate. Community also calls our Friends to hear our own leadings and help us follow the directions of the Spirit. Each of us is precious, and when our communities are at their best, we are supported in our individuality as well as our commonality. Children are precious because they need our love and care and give us light and joy, giggles and tears. Friends in their teens and twenties are precious because they need to be upheld as they move from dependence to independence to interdependence and give us the gift of believing in our highest ideals. In the middle years, Friends are precious because they need to be connected to the Spirit when the busyness of life takes over, and they give us steadiness and long-term commitment. Elder Friends are precious because they need to be remembered even as they share with us in remembrance the very lives they have lived and the truths they have discovered.

Friends carry their sense of community beyond the reaches of the family and the meeting into their careers and their political activities. Our communities can be nurseries where concerns grow in shelter and plans are prepared for addressing those concerns. Hard choices and difficult actions can be considered within the meeting community so that Friends do not have to feel alone, even when they act beyond the scope of the meeting’s leading. In many cases, a leading for one Friend becomes a leading for the whole community. 

Community is shelter, a safe place to grow, an arena for action, caring, and love—powered by and united in the Light.

1. In 1682, monthly meeting representatives answered three queries, including “How has the Truth prospered amongst you since the last yearly meeting and how are Friends in peace and unity?” (Quaker Faith and Practice, Britain Yearly Meeting, 1995, 1.04). “How does Truth prosper among us?” became a census question. Less certain today of our identification as a community with the Truth in its entirety, we answer a little differently: “Let your life speak.”
2. Robert Griswold, Creeds and Quakers: What’s Belief Got to Do With It? (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Pamphlet #377, 2005), p. 17
3. The complete text of the declaration is included in Appendix 3. 
4. John Woolman, Journal, abridged in Quaker Spirituality: Selected Writings, Douglas V. Steere, ed., (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1984), pp. 176– 177
5. Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 94.
6. Woolman, Quaker Spirituality, p.234.

Isaac Penington, Letters, ed. John Barclay, 1828, p 139; 3rd edition 1844, p. 138 (Letter LII, to Friends in Amsterdam, dated Aylesbury, 4 iii [May] 1667).