Thought for the Week: Quaker discipline - Letting go and letting God
Deborah Rowlands reflects on the 'wonderful paradox' of Quaker discipline
‘All Friends understand and live by Quaker discipline.
‘Our discipline is actually “Letting go and letting God”: not “Thou shalt” nor “I will” but “What does Love require of us?” It works when we understand it and practise it. Because we understand it, we can share it with others. Our testimony guides us, but we have to work on what it means for each of us personally.’
- From Our faith in the future
What a wonderful paradox that is! Discipline sounds so firm and rule-bound, and letting go and letting God so freeing. How can we experience the freedom inherent within our discipline? Quaker faith & practice has plenty of guidance. But none of it works without attention to what Love requires. In the seventeenth century George Fox had this to say: ‘Take heed of getting into a form without the power… for that will bring deadness, and coldness, and weariness, and faintings.’ Our discipline depends not on domination by the ‘oughts and should,’ which might be implied by the word discipline, but by each of us coming willing to ‘Let God’ into our business meetings. Otherwise, they can indeed be places of weariness, and deadness!
