This Year’s Testimony: Community “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller
One of the traditions we have at SF Friends is to focus on one of our Quaker testimonies (aka: the SPICES) for the year. To do this we use some queries to help guide our thinking and acting. Our testimony for this year is a Community - a particularly timely one considering the host of extraordinary challenges we’re all facing. Quaker schools have unique language and practices (Meeting for Worship, clerking, to name a few), so before we go too much further I thought it would be helpful to clarify or remind folks what the terms testimony and queries actually mean and how we use them. What is a Testimony? According to Quaker Jonathan Dale, “The word testimony is used by Quakers to describe a witness to the living truth within the human heart as it is acted out in everyday life… Testimony is a way of living not a creed. It is not a form of words but a mode of life based on the realization that there is that of God in everybody, that all human beings are equal, that all life is interconnected.” – Faith into action: Quaker social testimony, 2000 Quaker testimonies or values are taught both explicitly and implicitly at SFFS. Many of them are learned experientially; from their first days in kindergarten, children are introduced to sitting in silence, problem solving and decision making in a group, and to daily service and reflection. Traditionally, Quaker testimonies have the following characteristics: • A testimony is something we are called or led to—not something we choose to do on our own. It arises from a relationship with our Inner Light (in some classes they call that the “small, still voice” we listen for during Meeting for Worship, our “Inner Teacher”). • A testimony must be something you can testify to; a public behavior. • A testimony must be representative of our entire community (something that all Quakers - and in our case the SFFS community - generally agree upon). • A testimony must be “a cross to the conscience,” or something that calls on us to act outside our comfort zone.