Quiet Pilgrimage

"Live up to the light that you have and more will be given to you" is a familiar Quaker saying. Indifference and inattentiveness dim the light, overzealousness causes it to flicker. William Penn warned against "running before we are sent." We can seldom be absolutely sure that we are following the light: psychology has taught us that the voice of the unconscious self may take on a spurious resemblance to a divine call. We can only do the best we know at the time and trust that the Spirit, the Eternal Goodness, Reality, The Christ Within, God -- the name seems to me to matter little -- may be able to make use of the willingness alone, as if just wishing to be sensitive to the light removed some obstacle to the movement of the divine in human affairs.

I felt a firm conviction of the unity, the Oneness, of all life, a kinship with all living things, even to the invisible busy atom, a sense that we were made of the same stuff and moved to the same patterns, from the atoms to the universes, the macrocosm repeating the microcosm, that love and truth and goodness in a single life were interpenetrated by the infinite love and truth and goodness we call God.