Becoming Friends Two: Advices and Queries

“Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts”

These are the opening words of the small book called “Advices and Queries” which sets out suggestions for living as a Quaker.  It is a gem of a text.  It contains forty one short paragraphs which invite the reader to reflect on faith and life as a Quaker.

In the “Becomong Friends” book which I am following as part of my journey towards Quaker life, it suggests different ways of using A.& Q.  I am fortunate to have a Becoming Friends companion who is accompnying me on the journey and we meet each week.  We have just spent a few weeks on the different aspects of A.& Q. and shareed our favourite passsages.  The text can be divided into sections which examine the inner life, meeting for worship, meeting for worship for business, moving from worship to community, living as a Quaker, and testimonies and faith in action.

I’ve been using Advices and Queries as part of my daily prayer time and it really does lend itself to slow, meditative reading.  It is in reflecting on this text that I realise why I am so attracted to the Quaker way of life.  Sometimes it is said that Quakers are “woolly minded liberals” yet this text is challenging and searching as well as being gentle and compassionate.  In the Introduction we are told that:

“It is for the comfort amd discomfort of Friends that these advices and queries are offered, with the hope that we may all be more faithful and find deeper joy in God’s service”

I am, and always will be, a Christian and as such I do believe in life after death.  However, I don’t believe that that is the goal of our life here on earth but that it is something which happens to all of us.  I believe that the goal of my life is to serve God with a joyful heart and that this joy comes from fidelity.  I find echoes of this in all I’ve read in Quaker writings. That is why I feel at home in the Society of Friends

I may use this journal to take a number from A. & Q. and reflect on it as the spirit moves.  Here is the quotation from George Fox which is found at the end and which I first saw many years ago as a text outside Friends House in London, or at least the final words.

Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; THEN YOU WILL COME TO WALK CHEERFULLY OVER THE WORLD, ANSWERING THAT OF GOD IN EVERYONE.