But I am deeply concerned that we are losing the power in our vision, our witness, and our work. I fear that the roots of our peace testimony are being strangled by secularizing forces of the dominant culture, and the fruits may be dying on the vine.

Far too many Friends treat the peace testimony as a kind of creed. And in fact, the classic statement of 1661 by prominent Friends to King Charles II comes as close as Friends get to a creedal statement, asserting that the "Spirit of Christ…is not changeable…," and that this Spirit "will never move us to fight and war against anyone with outward weapons…" Yet, as Friends have understood for 350 years, a statement of belief that is not grounded in experience is a mere "professing." Such statements lack power if they are not grounded in our own spiritual experience.

When asked about the basis of our peace testimony, many Friends reply that it is based on our belief that "there is that of God in everyone." In the past, I often made that response myself. But I have come to believe it is a weak foundation for our testimony. It’s not that the statement is untrue. I do believe that there is a spark of the divine in every human soul, and in all parts of creation. But, given the reality of the most horrific violence done by human beings to other human beings, it is not a strong or convincing foundation. Frankly, it sounds too much like a naïve hope from a privileged people. Most of us North American Friends are reasonably comfortable and well off. Though each of us has gone through periods of personal pain and suffering, we have not as a community suffered the kind of terrible violence and oppression experienced by so many other communities in our world. For us to say that we should never confront violence with military force because "there is that of God in everyone" comes off as rather Polly-annish to those who have known terrible violence.

I have been wrestling with both my understanding and my living of the peace testimony ever since I joined the Religious Society of Friends. Today, I would like to share with you some highlights of that wrestling, and where it has led me today. I do so in the hope that, as children of the 20th century, my account might touch key points of your own spiritual journeys, and that of our larger religious society. I have faith that, through the kind of dialog we are entering here at your yearly meeting sessions, the Religious Society of Friends may re-discover, or re-create, a powerful peace testimony that, as it changes our lives, will also speak to others. Then we can truly speak truth with power.

As I share some of my own explorations in the fields of the Spirit, I will be developing three themes. I will tell you right now what these themes are, and you might keep them in mind as I continue:

1.      At its heart, the peace testimony is all about the power and potential of divine love as we experience it and live it in this world.

2.      The spiritual roots of the peace testimony are nourished in a loving and Spirit-centered community.

3.      To speak truth with power, our peace testimony must be grounded in a personal and a community-based experience of the Spirit, or God.

Discovering Friends and the Friends’ Peace Testimony

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grew up in a rural, conservative, and very patriotic small town in northwestern New Jersey. As a youngster, I played in the fields and woods with several other boys from my part of town. Our favorite game was one we simply called "Guns." We had a little club, and we called ourselves "The Junior Marines." My family belonged to the Presbyterian Church, where my father taught Sunday School and sang in the choir. I learned the Apostle’s Creed and joined the church when I was 14. I never heard of Quakers or pacifists, but my high school English teacher was an ex-Marine who fought in the Pacific, and he told me once what it was like to live in terror, kill other men, and then systematically shoot the corpses, because one of them might actually be alive and dangerous.

I went off to Wesleyan University in the fall of 1963 and quickly realized that the Presbyterian Church did not speak to my condition. I met a couple Quakers, and in my junior year, I began attending the small Friends’ meeting on campus. It was the fall of 1966, and I was very aware of what was happening in Vietnam. When I joined the local meeting in the spring of 1967, I explained to my clearness committee that I sought membership, first, because religious questions were important to me and I wanted company on my journey, and, second, because it appeared to me that Friends really walked their talk.

During my senior year, I realized that I would soon face a critical decision about entering military service. I knew I would be subject to the draft soon after my graduation. I was convinced that the Vietnam War was wrong; I did not want to be any part of it; but I was also afraid of the consequences of refusal. I knew a little about conscientious objection, but I was not at all sure I would be recognized as one by my draft board. (I was right on that one—over the course of two years, neither my local board nor my state appeal board ever recognized me as a c.o., even though I had become a Quaker.) In the middle of my senior year, I taped a small piece of paper to the door of my dorm room. On it I had written, "I won’t go." It was a test, an opportunity to see if I could accept that message and live with the consequences.

As the war dragged on and we entered the 1970’s, opposition to the war grew tremendously. It became easier to be a conscientious objector. Our nation was bombing and killing a largely agrarian people who supported a nationalist Communist movement which opposed a violent and corrupt Vietnamese regime and its American supporters. I felt firm in my conviction as a conscientious objector. My wife and I refused to pay our federal income tax for several years. I began working for the Friends Peace Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1974.

Facing the Reality of Evil

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he horrors of the U.S. wars in Indochina contributed to the pacifist convictions of many of my age mates and, once I had made the decision, I did not question it. In that sense, it was an easy decision. Then, in 1979, I had an experience that complicated things. I was traveling with a German friend, my wife, and our two-year old son through Poland, and we visited the town of Oswiecim. The town is better known in the west by its German name: Auschwitz.

We spent several hours in the museum at the original camp, walking through rooms filled to the ceiling with suitcases, spectacles, human hair, and other items from the victims. We saw photos and read about the torture and killings. We learned how the Nazis realized that they could not kill people fast enough by shooting them, and we saw the first experimental oven for getting rid of the bodies. At first, all my images of the inhuman Gestapo and guards were reinforced. These people were "brutes"; it was hard to see "that of God" in them.

Later that day we drove to the other side of town to visit Birkenau. Birkenau was the death camp, built by the Nazis as part of the Final Solution, to which more than a million Jews and others were sent for extermination, from 1943 to 1945. This is the camp that was recreated for Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List, where Jews and others were loaded off the rail cars, "selected" into two groups, with the strongest directed to barracks where they lived for however many weeks or months of work they might do before death released them, and the majority (some 70 to 75 percent) going directly to the gas chambers and the ovens.

My reaction to Birkenau was different. First of all, it was enormous—nearly a mile square. Unlike the earlier camp, Birkenau was a model of efficiency. The planning, design, construction and operation of this factory of death were obviously done by very educated and skilled engineers and administrators. The director of Birkenau, we learned, loved flowers and his children. These people were "human." One could probably recognize "that of God" in them. But they committed the most horrific acts of violence upon hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, children and babies.

This experience changed the way I understood violence in two ways. First, I’d been a Friend for more than a decade, and I liked to repeat, "There is that of God in every one." Now I understood that there were other forces latent, or active, in the human soul as well. The reality of the Holocaust, and of countless other horrors, was driven home to me. What kind of responsibility do we each have for such violence? In a different time and place, might I be capable of such killing? In my own time and place, do I turn away from the horrors I read or hear about in the news, trying to forget them because "I can’t do anything about it"? And second, I began to understand what Hannah Ahrendt meant when she wrote about "the banality of evil." Evil does not always come dressed in obvious, ugly costume. More often it masquerades in everyday clothes. The peace testimony was becoming more complicated for me.

Recently, Scott Simon has challenged us with questions about how to respond to the terrible violence, the very real evil, in our world. In two articles in Friends Journal (December, 2001, and May, 2003), he described his experiences while covering the slaughter of thousands of innocent people in Bosnia by Serbian troops and the mass murders and brutal oppression by the Taliban in Afghanistan. These realities jolted him from what he describes as a self-righteous pacifism. In these articles, Simon begins with the same understanding that I came to when I first visited Auschwitz: that human beings are capable of doing the most terrible violence to other human beings, and they have done so again and again. He concludes that, in at least some cases, a swift forceful response, including the use of military force, is necessary in order to prevent further violence.

Friends, I take Scott Simon’s challenge seriously, and I respect the integrity that he showed in speaking openly of his change of heart in the pages of Friends Journal. But I do arrive at a different place than he does. Many of us have had powerful experiences of the Spirit that lead us to believe that we could not take the life of another person, and certainly cannot participate in or support the mass violence that is modern warfare. I recall listening to Friend George Willoughby, still an active peacemaker in his mid-80’s, talking with a young Friend who said he might have chosen to join the army to fight against fascism in World War II. George, in a response which echoes Gandhi, said that he could understand that many people were led to join the military in the struggle to end fascist violence. But, he continued, he also fought fascism and violence. He just did it nonviolently. And he has continued to struggle nonviolently--and very creatively--for peace and justice his entire life. Gandhi himself said that the way of satyagraha—holding fast to truth, or what we generally call nonviolence—is only possible for very strong people. I believe we are called to be that strong people, or at least among a community of strong people, rejecting war and committed to nonviolent action for peace and justice. The question I am asking is: from whence comes our strength?

Understanding Fear and Love

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want to go back to September 11, 2001. By the end of that day, powerful people in the Bush administration realized that those attacks presented an opportunity to advance their vision of American hegemony. The opportunity they seized was the public’s fear. People of this country—who are, by and large, compassionate and caring people—were traumatized by those terrible events, and the consequent destruction of the myth of American invincibility. And these powerful men were ready with a plan. Stoking the fear that permeated our nation, and proceeding with single-minded determination to cure the nation of any remnants of the "Vietnam Syndrome, they promoted their doctrine of pre-emptive war. By unleashing the now unparalleled might of the U.S. military machine, they could implement their agenda of military intimidation and war.

Fear is a powerful emotion. Once enough Germans feared the Jews, hatred grew and the Holocaust became possible. On the Indian subcontinent, Hindu and Muslim fears of the other community led to the slaughter of millions of innocent people during partition. When enough Serbs were persuaded to fear the Bosnian Muslims, the massacres could begin. Fanning the fears of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction—both of which are real—U.S. political leaders convinced enough Americans that the U.S. had to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to make the world safe from these threats.

I opened my talk with a citation from I John: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear." I have experienced the power of love in casting out fear in my own life. This experience was critical in my ongoing struggle to understand and live our testimony of peace.

Remember my first theme: "At its heart, the peace testimony is all about the power and potential of divine love as we experience it and live it in this world." It is certainly true that hatred moves people to kill others. I consider hatred a sickness rooted in evil. But most people—including the great majority of those who support war—are not rooted in evil. It is enough if they—or we—are seized with fear. So I want to consider the relationship of love to fear in my own life.

My most powerful experience of both fear and love began in February, 1982, when I asked my doctor about the lumps I had noticed in my neck. He examined them and said, "Bruce, we can't rule out a malignancy." I will never forget the thousand volts of fear which seared me, starting at my scalp and filling my body with something worse even than the tumors. Within the next 24 hours, I learned that my battle with fear was going to be as important as my battle with cancer.

In my fear, I soon turned to a close friend, calling her after a sleepless night and day filled with vivid images of my dying. A skilled co-counsellor, she listened while I explained that I felt like I would lose my grasp on myself completely, so overwhelmed was I with the fear of cancer. And of all things, she asked me, "Bruce, what's the worst thing that can happen?"

And I cried. I sobbed for 45 minutes. Eventually, between my sobs, I got it out. "I may die before Ethan and Josh even grow up." And then I had to get off the phone. And she said, "You can call me later. You can call me in the middle of the night. You can come counsel with me as soon as you get home. And we can face this together." And I ate a huge dinner, and I went to bed, and I slept all night. Upon waking the next morning, I understood that I had to acknowledge and experience my fear--I had to go all the way into it. I learned that I could open myself to the fear because of the love that was around me. Within the next couple weeks, Demie and I wrote to all our friends, asking for their love and support. And it came in waves, from all our friends, and from people we didn’t even know, from as far away as India. And I did a lot more sobbing, and some terrible shaking, and at times the fear and grief seemed too much to bear, but with all that love and caring, I bore it. When I began chemotherapy and went into remission a year later, I began to recognize the grace I had found. I had learned about the power of love to carry me through fear. And in that learning were the seeds of spiritual growth and transformation.

It may not be quite accurate to say that "perfect love had cast out my fear." I still experienced fear, and have again on subsequent occasions. But I learned that I swim in a river of love, that I can orient myself to it, and feel its power. When I do so, I know that I can survive the fear, and go beyond it, to a powerful place of peace. I learned that I cannot simply make this transition just once, and stay in that place of love, for the fear comes back. So I need to make that journey again and again. I needed disciplines, familiar paths to trod, to re-connect with love again and again, and feel the fears subside. I understand this love as a manifestation of the Spirit, mediated through the ministry of my sisters and brothers, my wife and sons, my friends, and sometimes even strangers.

So when I say "the peace testimony is all about the power and potential of divine love as we experience it and live it in this world," I’m not talking about some abstract image. I mean that, to the extent that one opens oneself to the ocean of love that is central to my experience of God, one can overcome the fears that militarists seek to manipulate. It is tremendously important that our meetings nurture experiences of the Spirit in worship and of active love in the life of the community. Remember the second of my three themes: "The spiritual roots of the peace testimony are nourished in a loving and Spirit-centered community."

The Power of Divine Love in Facing Suffering and Violence

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have spoken of the importance of facing the reality of violence and evil. During the past century, tens of millions of precious people have lost their lives in state-run campaigns of terror & war. Tens of millions more have survived. What possibly can carry one through such a living hell? What happens to our faith? What happens to love? I have heard stories of incredible acts of love and courage in the midst of violence. How can this happen?

Questions about suffering and faith have been at the center of the world's religions for thousands of years. As I have wrestled with these questions, I have returned to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The Bible is full of stories of calamity and faith; beginning with the slavery of the Jews in Egypt, later the destruction of the Temple & the Babylonian captivity. One of the greatest books of the Hebrew scriptures - the book of Job - is a piercingly honest questioning of why the good suffer.

In the Christian scriptures, we find one of the world’s most powerful stories of the triumph of faith and love in overcoming violence and suffering--the extraordinary life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. I know that many liberal Friends feel uncomfortable with citations from scripture. But I ask you to open yourself to the power of this story about a real man, a brother who lived long ago. The fact is, this story presents an extremely radical and powerful understanding of suffering and of God’s love.

Jesus was certainly a great teacher and prophet for his people. He knew God intimately. He didn't just "believe in" God; he had such a deep, direct experience of God that he called him "Abba," which is an intimate word similar to our "Papa." The Gospel of Luke - after all the bits about his miraculous birth, his baptism by John, and the temptation in the desert - describes the beginning of what was approximately one year of active ministry by saying that Jesus "was filled with the power of the Spirit." (Mark 15: 33-37)

Jesus said that the “kingdom of God” was something that could be created only if people would love God and love one another. And this love cannot be limited to one's own clan or one's own people: “You have heard that they were told, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But what I tell you is this: “Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors'.” (Matthew 5:43-44). Jesus believed that the only way for Israel to avert the catastrophe he saw looming on the horizon was to create the loving, compassionate “kingdom of God.” He understood that to experience God was to understand our connectedness to God and to all our neighbors.

After teaching and healing and generally stirring up people in Galilee and Judea, in the countryside and its villages, Jesus prepared to go to Jerusalem for the Passover.   He made his entry into the holy city on a donkey and was received by many of the people with shouts of “Hosanna!”  Jesus must have understood the risk he was taking. He was challenging both the Roman occupiers and the Jewish establishment. Some believed him to be the Messiah who would deliver them from Roman occupation. Did he know he was going to his death? Or did he believe his Father—the Lord God—would save him? The Scriptures tell us that he expected to die. At the Passover meal—the “Last Supper"—he broke the unleavened bread and gave it to his disciples, saying: "Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you." And the wine: "This is my blood, the blood of the covenant, which is shed for many."

That night, at a place called Gethsemane, Jesus withdrew from his disciples to pray.  According to Mark:

When Jesus was arrested, brought before Pontius Pilate, and questioned about claims that he was the king of the Jews, Jesus declined to defend himself.  Pilate condemned him to death on the cross and turned him over to the soldiers.  After torturing Jesus, he was taken to the place called Golgotha and nailed to the cross.  As he hung there, people mocked him:  “…He saved others, but he cannot save himself.  Let the Messiah, the king of Israel, come down now from the cross.  If we see that, we shall believe…” (Mark 15: 31-32).  Mark continues:

As far as the Roman occupiers were concerned , they had proved their political point: the "king of the Jews" was not saved from his horrible fate by God. But in accepting crucifixion, Jesus demonstrated the depth of his love. Says Sandra Cronk, "From the point of view of the world, Jesus’ love had failed. The powers of violence had overwhelmed him. But his followers discovered that this was not true. Christ and his love were not dead. Christ was risen. His love was still being poured out on the world."

Jesus did not go to his terrible death in order to start Christianity, or to fulfill some prophecy, or to save the world from sin. He must have accepted it because it was simply a terrible consequence of the compassionate way he lived with the people and the world he loved. His death on the cross is important to us because it demonstrates how selfless divine love can be. Jesus the man embodied, or incarnated, that love, the accepting love for imperfect people that is such a vital path of the Spirit. Jesus so loved the world that he gave his life for it -- not for some abstract or future world, but for the world and the people he knew and cared for. Jesus spoke his truth with incredible power, so powerfully, in fact, that members of his community soon experienced him as re-born, resurrected, returning to lead them into the kingdom of God, a community whose foundation was God’s love. His extraordinary power came from his repeated experiences of a living and loving God. The experience of those who had followed him, and of others who learned of his life, death, and continuing presence, empowered them to create an extraordinary community of faith. That community survived a long period of terrible persecution. They were able to do so because of the power of the love they discovered and the strong communities of faith they built on that foundation.

Early Friends and the Peace Testimony

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he stories of Jesus and the earliest Christians are relevant to an understanding of the peace testimony, because early Friends understood their movement as a return to the faith experience of the original Christians, and of Jesus himself. As he walked through the north of England, George Fox constantly decried the "professors." And he didn’t mean folks who taught in universities—he meant those who professed belief in Christ but knew him not in their hearts. He insisted that a true Christian must experience God’s truth inwardly. The scriptures were valuable, said Fox. But simply pronouncing one’s belief in what the scriptures say is not sufficient. "Christ says this, and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say? Are you a child of Light, and…what you speak, is it inwardly from God?" Margaret Fell immediately understood, crying, "We are all thieves; we are all thieves; we have taken the scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves." Early Friends felt called to experience God directly, just as Jesus and the earliest Christians had, long before the establishment of the "Christian church."

One of the earliest, and for me the most powerful, statements of the Friends’ testimony against war was George Fox’s response to soldiers of Oliver Cromwell’s army who sought to make the charismatic young man their captain. It was 1651. Fox was 27 years old and serving a sentence in the Derby jail for disturbing the peace; if he were willing to join them in Cromwell’s Christian army, he would be released from the jail. According to his Journal, Fox refused, explaining:

I told them that I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars and I knew from whence all wars did rise, from the lust according to James’ doctrine [James IV:1-2]. I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strife were.

What Fox is describing here is a transforming experience of the divine. He did not simply say that Jesus told us not to kill, and to love our enemies, and therefore it is wrong to do these things. No. He said he lived in a power—that is, the divine power-–that so transformed him that the desires for personal power and satisfaction and security and material things that give rise to violence and wars were wiped away. War was no longer possible for him, for he actually lived in the peaceable kingdom, the kingdom of God, or what we might call "the blessed community," a community of shalom, of active love. There was only one war that true Christians might fight, said Fox, and that was the "Lamb’s War," a war fought with spiritual weapons against the powers of evil.

Nine years later the monarchy was restored, and Friends—who now numbered in the tens of thousands feared increased persecution from a king who had reason to suspect any and all religious radicals. In January, 1661, a small, radical Christian sect known as "the Fifth Monarchists" rose in revolt, killing forty people before being crushed by soldiers of the crown. The king issued an order banning all Quaker, Baptist and Fifth Monarchist meetings, and 4,000 Friends were soon imprisoned. Within days, twelve leading Friends, including Fox and Richard Hubberthorne, had prepared and signed an official "Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God called Quakers"—the classic statement of the Friends Peace Testimony:

While this statement has assumed characteristics of a creed for some Friends, it was at the time a clear statement of faith by early Friends. This statement came out of their own individual and corporate experience of "the spirit of Christ" as this spirit transformed their lives. They stated clearly that this divine truth -- this utter denial of all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons -- was absolute, and that it was binding upon Friends no matter what the government or church might say to the contrary. Despite its rapid composition, this statement exercised a decisive influence on the Religious Society of Friends, committing it to a strong and principled pacifism for the following decades and centuries.

Living our Peace Testimony in the Twenty-First Century

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’m going to jump now to the present. In this final part of my talk, I want to consider what it could mean for us to "live in the life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars" today. I want to explore how we might not only speak truth to power, but speak truth with power.

I will start with a quote from British Friend Jonathan Dale who, in his excellent essay on "Quaker Understanding of Testimony", wrote:

We must understand that the peace testimony, like other early Quaker testimonies, was not simply an assertion of important values, public policy ideals, or philosophical principles. Friends were not simply asserting that peace is better than war, or that war is immoral. They were testifying to a corporate experience of God’s transforming power in their lives. To testify to something, as one does in a court of law, is to state it as truth. In writing about the Quaker testimonies, Jan Hoffman said:

So the strong foundation of the peace testimony is in our experience of God, or divine love, in our lives, and in our faith communities. We testify to its truth by the way we live, by our actions—not simply by what we "profess." Pam Lunn, another British Friend, wrote:

Let me speak of my own experience. I have come to understand that living out the peace testimony is all about living in love: with God, with people, and with the world. And this is not an abstract notion for me. I’ll tell you a bit about what this me and for my relationships with my wife, Demie Kurz, and in my work at Friends General Conference. During my 33 years with Demie, I have become more patient, more trusting, more accepting, and more respectful of her leadings, her gifts, and yes,her idiosyncrasies, even when this means I don’t get to do or have what I originally wanted. At the same time, I am able to speak my truth and live in my own particular path, knowing that she respects my leadings and my journey too. That doesn’t mean we never have conflicts; I assure you, we do. But we engage in them with both respect for and trust in the other.

I seek to work with my staff and committee colleagues at FGC in love as well. I try to provide a kind of servant leadership that is based on deep respect and care for those with whom I work. I seek to communicate clearly and caringly about my own responsibilities and leadings, listen carefully to others’ concerns, often modifying my own views, then make decisions openly, communicate them clearly, and accept responsibility for having made them.

My efforts to live in God’s love affect many decisions I make about relationships with other people. In recent years, for instance, I have been led to join with several other Friends on FGC’s Central Committee to create a new Committee for Ministry on Racism. We are working with Friends and meetings to understand and end racist attitudes and behaviors within our religious society, and to open Quaker doors to a future of richer racial diversity. My relationship with the material world is also impacted, as I seek the right balance between my convenience and comfort, on the one hand, and faithful stewardship of our earth’s limited resources on the other.

One arena in which we are each called to practice this Spirit-centered living is our meeting communities. How good it is when we worship and work and live in love in our meetings, practicing the kind of respect, trust and caring that characterizes loving relationships. And how hard that can be! But this is where the rubber really meets the road. Sandra Cronk, in her wonderful pamphlet, "Peace Be With You," describes the meeting as "the school for peacemakers." She wrote:

Of course, testifying to the power of love in the world--i.e., living the peace testimony--has a tremendously vital outward aspect as well. Central to the whole concept of testimony is the call to active witness in the larger world. We are called to live our truth in words and actions that proclaim, demonstrate and convince. As John Punshon has written: "The testimonies are essentially assertive. They proclaim how the world ought to be, and thus, by implication, what other people ought to do." (Testimony and Tradition, p. 27)

More often than not, living out the peace testimony leads us into words and actions that diverge from what is going on around us in the larger society and dominant culture. The peace testimony is thus prophetic, looking forward to a future establishment of a blessed community, or what has traditionally been called "the kingdom of God." As such, it leads us again and again to dissent and nonviolent opposition to current practices, policies, and actions by governments, corporations, and other public institutions. Early Friends described this as "the Lamb’s War." According to Jonathan Dale:

There is so much in our world and our country that Friends are called to dissent from and to change. The struggle between that of God and that which is not of God is every bit as real as it was in the middle of the 1600’s. Yet, as I stated earlier, we are losing the power of our witness. There is a strong tendency in our religious society to separate our peace work from our spiritual lives. Too often, we distinguish between "social action Friends" and "worship-centered Friends." We have organizations, such as FGC, that are focussed on nurturing the life of the Spirit in our meetings and our lives without much attention to witness and social action, and others, such as the AFSC, that focus on social and political issues with little reference to our understandings and experiences of the Spirit.

To the extent that our peace witness and work is separate from the life of the Spirit, we lose the power to effect change in the world. And this would be a tragic loss for the world, as well as for the Religious Society of Friends. We are called, Friends, to respond to the terrible violence, oppression and injustice in the world around us. Two years ago, I was challenged by a Friend who went to Iraq to document the impact of the economic sanctions on the children, aged, and other vulnerable civilians. Speaking of the weak response from Friends, he said, "For Friends, the opposite of love is not hatred. It is apathy." What kind of responsibility do we each have for the violence done by our local, state and federal governments, or even by other governments or groups? None of us can take on all of the evils and injustices in the world. Yet as we experience the reality of the living Spirit in our lives, we may be empowered to act more faithfully, more effectively, and more frequently.

As I stated in the opening of my message, at its heart, the peace testimony is all about the power and potential of divine love as we experience it and live it in this world. In our worship, and in our lives, we open ourselves to this power that comes from the Spirit. This power can transform us so that, continuing to live in this world, we are nevertheless not of it. The power that comes from this love can cast out our fears--fears of our inadequacies, fears of how we appear to others, fears of failure, and yes, even fears of violence, of evil, of death. As the lives of many Friends are transformed by divine love, our meetings will also be transformed. As our meeting communities grow stronger and more faithful, the roots of our peace testimony will be nourished in those increasingly loving and Spirit-centered Quaker meetings. In such communities, more and more people may find a direct experience of the divine. And from the power of our shared experiences of God, we will be given the gift to speak our truth with great power.

I would like to close with a prayer for our Religious Society: