Easter Weekend Activities 

 Good Friday Readings
 Friday Evening April 3rd  - 6:00 pm

We will gather at 6pm in the Annie H Wilson room and share a light meal and fellowship. A time of being together and enjoying the shared love and friendship that we have. This year we welcome those from Norristown Meeting who would like to share the evening with us.
 
Shared reading of the Gospel of Mark will begin around 6:30 pm. 
 
  As has been our custom, we share around the circle the reading of the Gospel of John. This becomes a time of letting go of dogma. The short life of Jesus is recorded in this earliest of the Gospels. What does it have to say about how the reader is to respond to God’s call? Each year it is heard differently. Each year there are new hard parts to hear and new insights that open one’s heart to possibilities. We have found that this opportunity is a very different experience from reading a few lines of scripture. It takes time (~1.5 hrs). The reading can be useful in illumination God’s guidance for how we are to 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; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.” How are we called to be patterns for peace in this time of war? Patterns of transforming love in a time of anger, hatred and violence?
 
 Easter Morning Pancake breakfast
We are called to celebrate on Easter morning. Celebration of having a community of faith to walk the path of this world. A community to share the weights of this journey. A celebration of the rising of God’s Spirit in us.  
 
On this day we are not called to walk on stones with bare feet. Oh no, we stride into the day with the strength of our community by sharing together a meal. Be it sunny or rainy the smell of fresh chocolate chip pancakes wafting out the door sets the world’s troubles aside (but not forgotten) for the moment. The delights of good food draw us into the renewal of life manifested in the sharing of a meal to break the fast of the night, of the Lenten session, to bless the work of the prior week and guide us into the week to come.
 
Join us on Easter morning as we renew our spirits together.
 
Early Friends Understanding of Easter
 
Easter is a morning celebration.  A time of acknowledging the rising of Spirit within us. “For early Quakers, Christ was not manifested just in Jesus, but, was the “Word” described the Gospel of John, was present from the beginning to today and on into the future, was manifested in the prophets of Judaism and other religious traditions”.
 
“Friends were not bound by dogmatic arguments of if the resurrection of Jesus was physical or spiritual, for, from the beginning, Quakers have insisted that Christ’s spirit can be experienced by any of us anywhere. Hence Mary Fisher, one of Quakerism’s founding Valiant Sixty, felt confident she could minister to the Sultan of Turkey, because he would know the same universal spirit of God or Christ that she did.” John Woolman ministered to native peoples in Pennsylvania with the same understanding and respect for that universality of spirit. 
 
For Christian Quakers Easter is a day of remembrance of the rising of Jesus not “found in the “schemes of doctrines and verbal creeds, nor new forms of worship..” as Penn wrote, but in the transforming experience of Emmanuel – God intimately ministering to us from within.   The traditional Quaker view is the acknowledgement of the active presence of God, of the universal Christ that dwelled wholly in Jesus, is received into our lives (resurrection) and thus gives us the self-understanding, commitment, and divine support—the Inward Light—to improve the ethical content of our lives. Yielding self to this living Spirit that early friends call the Living Christ and now many use the term Inner Light, resurrects discipled lives of courage to speak loving truth to power, to illuminate the path of peace and love in the valley darkness, to heal a broken world with compassion and justice.
 
Ref: David Miller’s reflections on David Leonard’s Easter and Early Quakers