Luray Friends Meeting

10/13/2025

“Meditation is simply the practice of coming to stillness … until all words, all images, all concepts are gone. In this silence one discovers the self that is not separate from God.”
-Friend John Yungblut

10/11/2025

“When Quakers sit in silence, we do not direct our attention to any external object of worship, nor do we call upon God with words. We rest in the stillness, and sometimes there comes a knowing that there is no separation, that the ground of our being is One.”
-Friend David Cadman

10/08/2025

“Our work is not to lay down or prescribe rules of our own, or to walk by the rules which others have prescribed, but singly and nakedly to wait for the teachings of God’s Spirit, and to walk therein… For the Spirit puts life into what it teaches, and leads into the living, powerful exercise of what it teaches.”
“Religion is not a notion, but a thing. The true religion is not a traditional form of words, but a living principle of life received from God, and living in God.”
-Friend Isaac Penington

10/07/2025

“No definition of God can finally satisfy the soul, for God is always more than the definition. He is not a term in a creed, but a Life in which our life is rooted and grounded.”

“All names we give Him are but shadows. He is more than all our words. He is nearer than any name we utter, and greater than the highest thought we can think.”

“The divine is always more than all names, more than all words, more than all the forms in which men have tried to express Him. He ever overflows every vessel into which we try to pour Him.”

-Friend Rufus Jones

10/05/2025

“There is a silence beyond speech, a knowing beyond thought, where the soul communes with the Eternal. There, God is not a doctrine but a reality.”
"If God ever spoke, He is still speaking. If He has ever been in mutual and reciprocal communication with the persons He has made, He is still a communicating God, as eager as ever to have listening and receptive souls. If there is something of His image and superscription in our innermost structure and being, we ought to expect a continuous revelation of His will and purpose through the ages... He is the Great I Am, not a Great He Was."
“The highest revelation comes not in the word about God but in the living experience of His presence. Words and creeds are but fingers pointing to the moon.”
-Friend Rufus Jones

10/03/2025

“Center down into abasement and nothingness. … This is what I labored after: to be empty, to know nothing, to call for nothing, and to desire to do nothing.”
“For if thou willingly surrenders thyself as an offering to God — to do his will, as by the Light in thy own heart and conscience he is pleased to manifest it to thee — thy understanding will be more and more opened …”
“For it is God that worketh in the willing and obedient soul, both to will and to do of his own good pleasure; but this can only be witnessed by such as experience their own wills to be mortified and slain by the power of the cross inwardly revealed…”
“Every tree, every plant, every blade of grass, and every grain of sand, as well as all animal and rational beings, are filled with the wisdom, power, and goodness of God.”
-Friend Elias Hicks

10/01/2025

“It is not by reasoning, or by consulting with flesh and blood, that we are to learn of the Father, but by retiring inwardly, and waiting to feel the teaching and leadings of his Spirit.”
-Friend Isaac Penington

09/30/2025

“Be still and cool in your own mind and spirit, from your own thoughts, and then you will feel the principle of God to turn your mind to the Lord God, whereby you will receive his strength and power from whence life comes, to allay all storms and tempests."
-Friend George Fox

09/28/2025

"Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'If anyone wishes to follow me, he must deny himself [set aside selfish interests], and take up his cross [expressing a willingness to endure whatever may come] and follow me [believing in me, conforming to my example in living and, if need be, suffering or perhaps dying because of faith in God, who is love].'"

09/26/2025

“I was under great temptations sometimes, and my inward sufferings were heavy; but I could find none to open my condition to but the Lord alone, unto whom I cried night and day. And I went back into Nottinghamshire, and there the Lord shewed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful without, were within in the hearts and minds of wicked men… And I cried to the Lord, saying, ‘Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?’ And the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions; and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.”

-Friend George Fox

09/24/2025