What Will Get Us Ready (1944)
Context: There is a dearth of genuine philosophy of life and of a convincing interpretation of spiritual reality. It may well fall to our lot to be the remnant body to maintain and uphold the genuine spiritual interpretation of life and of man’s divine endowment as our founders dd against the prevailing Calvinism of that formative epoch. Anyhow, whether my prophecy is real or vain, our task under God is plainly marked out for us. We must get ready, and my mind turns all the time to the local meeting centers where the issues will be settled.
Rufus M. Jones: Quotes about life
Rufus M. Jones was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on life.
What Will Get Us Ready (1944)
Context: If we are to reach and garner the present day seekers who exist in every neighborhood, persons who are disillusioned over the effectiveness and value of the ordinary run of church service, our Quaker meetings must become unique centers of spiritual life, where there is felt a thrill of reality. That means that they must be occasions when life is lifted up and seen and felt in its true divine possibilities.
I am looking for a time, and not counting on it, when we shall have a Society of Friends not composed of a few awakened leaders and a body of unkindled quiescent members who move in the ancient grooves of habit and routine. But instead a live membership of persons who have thought out their principles of life and not merely adopted them second hand.
What Will Get Us Ready (1944)
Context: There is very great need to have the unique aspect of spirit in man and its relation to the divine spirit in the universe freshly interpreted in a world that has become bogged down with material conceptions of life and the world.
There is very great need of a more vital grasp of the unique Person at the headwaters of our faith linked up with the Real Presence of the inward Christ who is the Life of our lives…
What Will Get Us Ready (1944)
Context: I want to make perfectly clear the act that the world is in the fringe, in the penumbra, of a tremendous Revolution, with a big R. We have called it a war and the fighting has been with mechanized weapons, but we shall soon be face to face with awesome situations against which weapons are vain things, as ineffective as Canute’s futile attempts to stop the irresistible tides of the ocean. Nothing is ever going to be the same again and we cannot assume our Quakerism is to be unaffected by the euroclydon that is in front of us. The time has passed for “the complacent assumption of an unchanged world.” This situation which I see coming — though I am afraid most Americans are looking forward fondly to a new period of “normalcy” — this situation makes it more urgent than ever to have our Quaker Society inwardly prepared to be a purveyor of light and leading when the crisis comes. The Christian faith of the ages will be tested more severely than in any former Revolution, because it will be confronted with its supreme enemy, a completely economic, materialistic, and mechanistic interpretation of the word and of human life.
Christian Mystics (1999 - 2014)
Source: p. 8 http://christianmystics.com/traditional/quakers/Rufus_Jones_8.html
What Will Get Us Ready (1944)