What can love do today?

Mark 3:31-35  Passage Link

Be the best we can be – how, who, what

A defining moment is present in the passage from Mark.  When told that his mother and brothers are outside looking for him, Jesus reportedly replied:  Who are they?  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

My Quaker-life journey began in a Jesus-centric Quaker school:  Westtown – near Philadelphia.  The seeds of my life development, saving graces of which there have been many, and my transformation as a member of the Quaker community – ongoing ever since – began there.

Today, I recognize my closest brothers and sisters as people on Quaker-life journeys of transformation – in contradistinction to living into mainstream cultural perspectives, ways of thinking and living. 

The Mark passage depicts a Jesus who is in transformation.  Living into it deeply.  His home, his family, is with people who are on the move of growth in faith and Spirit.  To a degree, he has left others behind – while embracing and supporting those on the same or similar journey.

Jesus, perhaps like the apostle Peter, perhaps like me too at times, has spoken with a directness and distinction that can knock one back.  Not for the purposes of knocking down, but for the purpose of saying: I am strongly on the path, and this is an important point to me and it may be to you – said directly – Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

It is not a creed or a litmus test for others.  It is an expression of an epiphany in his journey of understanding God (Spirit, Light, Yaweh, Life Force – Cosmic Mother – there are many words for the transcendent available to us all through Quaker practice).  

Jesus is a passionate teacher, giving away the truths he has been gifted. Speaking them soft and mushy, or equivocating, does not give the gift to others.  And their acceptance, he knows, will require, that they, like us, must sit with the teaching and find the Light in it.  Truth seeps from the seed, through the roots, to those of us receptive, for us to live into and to share as we are gifted.

Of course – we can acquire many things from study. But the Light guides us to the possibility of realizing who we are in a community of faith and how to be – and more will be given and revealed as we take each step.

Our questions today about the way of Quaker life, what is a Quaker today – for me – are answered on the path of practiced prayer, study, reflection, and living in and into community.  The answer is not in a book; it is to be found by each of us if it is to be answered at all. We each have revelations. We share them in community. The will of God can also be said: The love of God – intentional double entendre. From that flows our love of all creation – as in a verb – not an emotion.

Larry Newton – a Quaker in the west.