Queries:
Do we help make our Sidwell Friends community a safe, secure and loving place?
Do we face conflicts with patience, forbearance and openness to healing?
Do we offer assistance when someone is in need?
Do we truly welcome newcomers and include them in our Sidwell Friends community?
Quotes
“Our Religious Society endures as a community of friends who take thought for outward society by first taking care of one another. Friends are advised to maintain love and unity, to avoid tale-bearing and detraction, and to settle differences promptly and in a manner free from resentment and all forms of inward violence. Live affectionately as friends, entering with sympathy into the joys and sorrows of one another’s daily lives. Visit one another. Be alert to give help and ready to receive it. Bear the burdens of one another’s failings; share the buoyancy of one another’s strengths. In all the affairs of the community, proceed in the peaceable spirit of Pure Wisdom, with forbearance and warm affection for each other.”Advice from the Epistles of the Yearly Meeting of Pennsylvania and the Jerseys, 1694 and 1695
“Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.”Helen Keller
“Perhaps community is a constellation. Each one of us is a light in the emerging collective brightness. A constellation of light has the greater power of illumination than any single light would have on its own. Together we increase brightness.”John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes
“I note obvious differences between sort and type, but we are more alike my friends, than we are unalike.”Maya Angelou