A Testimony of Love–Part 4
February 12, 2023 § 1 Comment
What is a testimony of love?
Our witness testimonies should be grounded in the commandment of love, in the message of our minutes and communications, but more importantly, in the spirit in which we undertake our witness work. When writing minutes of conscience, we should first pray and worship. We should pray for the spirit-sap that flows through the divine vine, the spirit network in which we abide, asking the spirit of truth to enter us as individuals and to cover us as a gathering, as a committee or a meeting or whatever. We should abide in that spirit until the seed has formed. And we should season the idea until the fruit has ripened, and we should harvest it only when it is ready.
And then, when we speak, we should speak of love. We should claim divine love as our source, if we can do so with integrity. And we should proclaim this love as the path to right action. In our prophetic voice, we should hold the wrong actions we seek to change up to the light of divine love.
That voice should still carry the love in its wording and tone: heartbreak instead of anger, forgiveness instead of hate, good biting humor rather than caustic sarcasm, and heartfelt appeal rather than condemnation. And where the anger remains, and even the hate, and the impulse to lash out and to call down some divine wrath, all of which perhaps the world’s abominations do deserve—while we probably cannot cleanse ourselves altogether of these negative emotions, we can at least still humbly confess our failure and ask forgiveness. The honest and righteous expression of our negativity and our confession and repentance may be our strongest “argument”.
So that’s the tone of the testimony of love, and some of its content, some of the manner and some of the matter. But not all. We should quote scripture where and when we can, to press our case and to indict the wrongdoing. And we should quote our own saints, as well, Woolman and Penington and Mott and the rest. We should go farther than just declaring one or more of our testimonies in a perfunctory way. We should lift the bushel and let the light of our testimony fill the whole room of our discourse.
The Bible doesn’t always have something very direct to say about some concerns; climate change is a good example. But the Bible is full of passages about love. We have quoted several in this essay. There are many more.
And yes, some in our meetings who are allergic to the Bible are likely to start to itch. Let’s ask them to take a spiritual antihistamine. This is our tradition. This is who we are, “we” being the demographic majority of Friends, the historical majority of Friends, and our very identity as a gathered people of God. The Bible-allergic are a minority of a slightly larger minority who are trying to cut off the vine from its roots. And I speak as one who has been there, who harassed Christians for their vocal ministry and kept my meeting from teaching my kids the Bible. But I was wrong to do that, I was not in a spirit of divine love, and I should not have been allowed to hold my meeting hostage in that way.
Meanwhile, in our minutes of conscience, it should be enough to simply ask how the wrong we are challenging expresses our love for the gifts of creation, or for our neighbors, or for our children—or for our enemies, for that matter. Whoever our audience is, whatever the issue, I believe our most effective fruit is to simply raise up love and contrast it to the wrong being done. And to express our horror.
The next post offers a sample minute of conscience that tries to embody these principles.
Read part 5 here.
Through the Flaming Sword 
[…] Read part 4 here. […]