These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
Caring for One Another: Queries
What impediments do I find to reaching out to those
in distress?
What do I need to do to overcome them?
Do I trust my meeting enough to make my needs known?
How do we share in the diverse joys and transitions in
each other's lives?
Caring for One Another: Advices
Friends are concerned about the welfare of every member
of the Meeting community. While we need to guard against
prying or invasion of privacy, it is nevertheless essential that
Meetings be aware of the spiritual and material needs of members of
the community and express caring concern in appropriate ways.
To this end, we are to live affectionately as friends, entering
with sympathy into the joys and sorrows of one another's lives.
As we are willing to offer help, so should we be willing
to make our needs known and to accept help. In
bereavement, give yourself time to grieve. When others mourn, let your
love embrace them with the simple things of life: praying
together, talking, planning meals, caring for children, and otherwise
being of comfort. In offering pastoral care, it is not necessary to
find the right words; it is important to be present.
Just as we do not leave pastoral care to a pastor, so we may
not leave this most essential function to a committee alone. It is
also important to recognize when it may be appropriate to reach
within or beyond the community to involve persons with special expertise.
Caring for One Another: Voices
Our labor is to bring all men to their own teacher
in themselves.
George Fox, Journal
When I touch the heart of prayer, I touch the lives of
others, for in some mysterious way which we cannot depict more than
to point toward it, we are all interconnected in the life of God,
and we are never nearer to another than when we touch his life
in the life of God. Intercessory prayer is going on all the time.
There is something at the heart of things that cares and that carries
on this never-pausing siege at the East window of each soul.
When I pray for another, I enter into this siege. I add my caring to
help lower the threshold in the heart of the other to this
continuous caring.
Douglas Steere, 1980
Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness, and bearing
one with another, and forgiving one another — and helping
one another up with a tender hand, if there has been any slip or
fall... O,wait to feel this spirit, and to be guided to walk in this
spirit, that ye may enjoy the Lord in sweetness, and walk
sweetly, meekly, tenderly, peaceably and lovingly one with another
... the meek, innocent tender righteous life reigning in
you, governing over you, and shining through you, in the eyes of
all with whom ye converse.
Isaac Penington
In a true community we will not choose our companions,
for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives.
Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will
be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world. In
fact, we might define true community as the place where the
person you least want to live with always lives!
Parker J. Palmer, 1977
And all such as behold their brother or sister in a
transgression, go not in rough, light or upbraiding spirit to reprove or admonish
him or her, but in the power of the Lord, and the spirit of
the Lamb, and in the wisdom and love of the Truth, which
suffers thereby, to admonish such an offender. So may the soul of such
a brother or sister be seasonably and effectually reached unto
and overcome, and they may have cause to bless the name of
the Lord on their behalf, and so a blessing may be rewarded into
the bosom of that faithful and tender brother or sister that
so admonished them.
George Fox, 1669
Loving care is not something that those sound in mind
and body 'do' for others but a process that binds us together. God
has made us loving and the imparting of love to another
satisfies something deep within us. It would be a mistake to assume
that those with outwardly well-organised lives do not need
assistance. Many apparently secure carers live close to despair
within themselves. We all have our needs.
Britain Yearly Meeting, 12.01
In addition to its many religious forms, Healing also
includes many arts and sciences. There is the art of listening, the art
of smiling, the art of empathy, of knowing just what people
need, and not rushing in to offer help that is not suitable. Then there
is the healing that comes through prayer in its various forms,
through the laying on of hands, through music and dance, painting
and colour, through communion with and understanding of the
world of nature, and through friendship.
Jim Pym, 1990
Careful listening is fundamental to helping each other; it
goes beyond finding out about needs and becomes part of
meeting them. Some would say that it is the single most useful thing
that we can do. Those churches that have formal confession
understand its value, but confession does not have to be
formal to bring benefits. Speaking the unspeakable, admitting
the shameful, to someone who can be trusted and who will
accept you in love as you are, is enormously helpful.
Britain Yearly Meeting, 12.01
O God who has carried us when we knew it not, and
who faithfully seeks us when we are yet afar off, lay on us this
ministry of intercession for others, that we may share this deepest of
all ministries that brings us down into the very matrix of your
yearning for souls and makes us members of the great chain of
redemptive love that girdles our world for its healing.
Douglas Steere, 1980
The resources of the Meeting can be important for
families undergoing crises. Friends should be particularly mindful of
the needs of children who are experiencing pain or loss. A
Meeting can provide care and understanding, acting as an extended
family. Not only are we brothers and sisters in the spirit, but we may
be beloved aunts and uncles of all the children in the Meeting.
The resilience of the Meeting as a nurturing community
encompassing many generations supports each of us throughout the many
stages of our lives.
Baltimore Yearly Meeting Advices 1988
When the members of a fellowship know one another,
care for one another, visit one another in their homes, consult
one another, hold one another up in the silence and feel
responsibility before God for one another, then when they meet together
for worship they are truly open as a corporate group for the
deepest working of the Spirit.
Douglas Steere, 1940
Let us seek to live in compassion and patience with
one another. Grace and latitude should mark our relationships.
All too often we can injure each other unduly in our zeal for
justice and truth and righteousness. The spirit of condemnation
can creep into our relationships so subtly. We can begin to look
at each other's possessions with a mental calculator. But there is
a more excellent way: we simply need to be with one another,
loving, supporting, caring. Of course, we live and speak the truth as
it has been given to us, but the business of straightening each
other out belongs to God, not us.
Richard J. Foster, 1981
These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
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