 |
Allen’s Neck Friends Meeting |
May 2005
Extended Knowledge Changes our Beliefs
Quakers believe in ongoing revelation-God’s truth is continually unfolding.
In the early sixties, British Friends circulated a paper entitled, Toward a Quaker View of Sex. Many of us were not particularly pleased by some of the points raised in this paper. However, years and countless conversations later many of us have come around and find ourselves in tacit agreement with British Friends. Portions of this paper are now part of London Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice.
...sexual activity is essentially neither good nor evil; it is a normal biological activity which, like most other human activities, can be indulged in destructively or creatively. Further, if we take impulses and experiences that are potentially wholesome and in a large measure unavoidable and characterize these as sinful, we create a great volume of unnecessary guilt and an explosive tension within the personality. ...A distorted Christ- ianity must bear some of the blame for the sexual disorders of society… Neither are we happy with the thought that all homosexual behavior is sinful: motive and circumstances degrade or ennoble any act… |
(London Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice, 22.13, a quote from Toward a Quaker View of Sex, 1963)
This conversation has gone on for thirty years in New England Yearly Meeting. Some of us have changed our minds and hearts. The wider society is also changing. Let us be patterns and examples; let us invite the Inward Teacher to guide us.
Peter
I said to one of the Cuban Friends, "It must be hard to be a Christian in Cuba." He smiled. "Not as hard as it is in the United States," he said . Of course, I asked why he said that, and he went on, "You are tempted by three idols that do not tempt us. One is affluence, which we do not have. Another is power, which we also do not have. The third is technology, which again we do not have. Furthermore, when you join a church or a meeting, you gain social acceptance and respectability. When we join, we lose those things, so we must be very clear about what we believe and what the commitment is that we are prepared to make."
Gordon M. Browne, Jr., 1989, Plain Living, Whitmire
Page 1 | Page 2 | Calendar | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Newsletters