Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.

~ Parker J. Palmer

Parker J. Palmer Philosophy Quakers Soul

I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant.Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like Eat his body! Drink his blood!It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility.

~ Mary Rose O'reilley

Mary Rose O'reilley Buddhism Music Mysticism Quakers Spirituality

Sometimes painfully lost people can teach us lessons that we didn't think we needed to know, or be reminded of---the more history changes, the more it stays the same.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Shannon L. Alder Blind Beliefs Blindness Broken Corporateness Cross Death Evolution Fear Fear Of Difference Fear Of Unknown Finding Evil Hatred Heresy Illness Inmaturity Joan Of Arc Justice Killing Monsters Murder Narrow Mindedness No Cure No Ownership Please Forgive Them God Quakers Rapture Rituals Salem Searching For Evil Self Pity Superstition Traditions Victomized Witch Hunts

To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd Irony Quakers Slavery

Readers will be swept up by the drama and fast pace of this powerful debut novel.” Reading Today Online, International Reading Association

~ Sharon Lovejoy

Sharon Lovejoy Bigotry Civil War Historical Fiction Quakers Slavery Underground Railroad