notreallystars

Time for another one of these! Brought to you by being wide awake at a time when none of the important life stuff that I need to do is possible.

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As I couldn't be at Meeting today I thought I'd do another one of these. Moving house has taken up almost all of my brainspace recently and it will be good to think about something else for a bit!

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The world is hurting me at the moment. Everything bad and dark and scary seems ten times bigger than it did a few days ago. The planet's fucked, the country's fucked, the NHS is fucked, my mental health is fucked. It hurts.

I have no answers. Faith can have some comfort. For that reason, I thought I'd write about the next passage from Advices and queries and try to turn my mind from the awfulness for a while.

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I've started going to Quaker Meetings again. I love Meeting, and I love Quakers, and I value the fact that I went to a Quaker school. I'm also pagan. Fundamentally I believe in the plurality of divinity, and that in most circumstances the either/or dichotomy could be usefully replaced with both/and. So, both pagan and Quaker? Does it work?

Quaker faith and practice is the Book of Discipline issued by Britain's Yearly Meeting, and contains a section called Advices and Queries. I thought I might usefully reflect on them, one at a time, as they relate to me and my beliefs and practices, while I figure out what I'm doing with this.

It is prefaced with this quote from a document composed by Quakers in the 17th Century:

Dearly beloved Friends, these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by, but that all, with the measure of light which is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not from the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.

I value the emphatic reminder that this is not a faith of musts and must-nots.

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