On The Couch

While under self-imposed hypnosis and having the questions a Quaker must address, I came to these realizations:

Do you have any distinctive witness or is your affiliation just another Protestant denomination?

There's a reason why Jesus identified himself with the way, truth and life and a reason why Jesus called his disciples "Friends". Quakers have a prophetic witness to inclusiveness of all who would seek the moral way, the truth and life-giving helps to humanity. Far from being just another denomination, Quakers offer a movement from personal convincement, or certainty, to collective testimony, or Truth, by their Faith and Practice.

What is your relationship to other churches and religions?

As Jesus' "Friends", Quakers walk with other children of God and sometimes point the way by their counter-cultural example. Whether attending to Jesus' will/example for humankind or "that of God" in each person, Quakers act as a bridge connecting the human and divine realities of life.

What is your mission and message for the world today?

Friends acknowledge and honor the bond of solidarity shared as a reflection of the divine in the world. Our mission and message is found in the heart and will of human dignity as given by God for the betterment of the world. The inner light of human dignity guides a world darkened by man's inhumanity to man. The truth of victorious love, in the face of crippling and concealing fear, is the plus sign, or cross, added to the human equation/salvation.

I see, said my muse, just like the child who pestered the exhausted parent who came up with the idea to keep the child busy with a home-made puzzle of a newspaper-depicted world. After cutting the world into pieces, the parent set the child to work thinking that rest was at hand. But the child was back to claim the parent for the world right away. When the parent asked how this was accomplished so quickly, the child turned the pieces over to reveal that there was a person on the other side of the world. Thus came the explanation: When the person was right, the world was right also.

Next time, maybe I'll just take a nap on the couch.