See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
(1 John 3:1-3, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
“This is the message you have heard from the beginning,” the author of First John writes (3:11): “that we should love one another.”
If you fully accept this message—if you don’t just hear it, but resolve to rebuild your life around it, and then follow through on your resolution—you too can enter into the Blessed Community. “The arm of the Lord being your strength, Christ your rock and salvation, then you need not fear what man can do unto you,” just as George Fox promised the early Quakers in the winter of 1678:
“…for all God’s children are dear and tender to him, whom he hath begotten again by the word of God to be heirs of his kingdom; he feeds them with life eternal, and the milk of his word, which word lives, and abides, and endures for ever.”
Friends today may disagree about whether salvation comes specifically from Christ; we may have differences of opinion concerning the nature, or even the existence, of God. Yet each of us might acknowledge that, as Fox says, we have been gathered into the Religious Society of Friends “by the light, grace, and truth, and power, and spirit” of something greater than ourselves, “and so with it receive… life and salvation.” For some, that something greater may stem from a sense of profound fellowship and shared social vision, offering a salvation tied strictly to our lives on this world. Others choose to embrace an eternal dimension, a life everlasting that transcends our material existence.
Transcends but does not stand apart—throughout our history, Quakers have believed that we must heed the promptings of the Inward Teacher not to prepare ourselves for the next world, but to transform the world in which we live now. And all those promptings, whatever they ask of us specifically, come back to one simple instruction: Love God, and love one another.
We may not know the exact contours of the Blessed Community; “what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
We do know, however, that such a community will have love as its organizing principle. “If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us,” First John advises (4:12). Every day, this world presents us with “teachable moments,” opportunities to deepen our understanding of what that perfected love looks like in practice. And not just for the people we have already welcomed into our meetings and our communities, but for those who are still finding their way toward that loving spirit.
We often find it easy to love those who share our general view of things, or who don’t force us to look too hard at our cherished opinions. The Inward Teacher, however, calls on us to go deeper. “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” Jesus asked his followers (Luke 6:32-33). “For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.”
God does not ask Friends to serve as gatekeepers for the Blessed Community, admitting only those we believe deserve entrance into our meetinghouses. God does not want us to raise the drawbridge behind us, leaving everyone else to face the gods of this world on their own. I’m not ignoring the need for discernment among Friends and seekers when it comes to growing our meetings—sometimes people do try to join a meeting before they fully understand what life as a Quaker really entails. (Such a lack of understanding might speak to a failure to clearly communicate our foundational principles. The problem can get worse if we don’t even agree about those principles and try to suppress any discord to avoid potential unpleasantness.)
Anyone who shows up willing to do the work of loving one another, however, deserves a chance.
For one thing, we need all the help we can get to push back against the principalities and powers that seek dominion over us. More importantly, I think, God never completely closes the gates to the Blessed Community.
“For the Lord is come to teach his people himself,” George Fox wrote to the Bohemian princess and philosopher Elisabeth of the Palatinate in 1677, “and to set up his ensign, that the nations may flow unto it.” I believe that, once God plants that banner, it will never come down—that God has the infinite and eternal patience to wait for every soul to make its way toward the beacon of love and experience new life in convincement and conviction. As we do, we will become more like God, for we will know and believe the love that God has for us (1 John 4:16), and we will share that love with our neighbors, answering that of God in every one.
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