Friends of today reflect on the meaning of integrity in our time. How do we enact integrity in this era, when government officials do not tell the truth to the populace that elected them, when researchers willingly falsify data to win grants and professional esteem, when owners of much of the media allow selfish political interests to determine what they report as news, and when advertisers offer an image of the good life that anyone with a bit of spiritual wisdom knows is not true?
Silence & Witness
Michael Birkel 2004
Cat's Convincement....
In her blog, Cat, once a self-described "rational use offeree" gal speaks of the day she became a Quaker....9-11-2001 ...haunted by daylong media images of falling towers, waves of death and darkness, the anger and the horror, and even worse, the threat of immediate retaliation aka war" For most of my life I believed that the use of force—by which I meant human beings taking up arms and going off to war to try to kill one another—was a regrettable necessity. I was walking across a green oasis...a church lawn...when it happened. Someone spoke to me.
Not with words at first but with a tremendous physical sensation as if a great hand seized me by the spinal column...! knew something all the way down to the core of me. The words that came to me reflect just a ghost of the power of the knowing...
If half a dozen men armed only with box-cutters, can
kill thousands, then the day when force could
'Settle' conflicts-if ever it could-is over and done.
Mostly though, what came to me was a sense that the idea of force as a means to peace was just done for me. I had come to believe that, as the chestnut goes, there is no way to peace; that peace is the way."
