Faith and Action

IT MUST BE RIGHT to say that consistency between faith and action is one of the most characteristic features of Quaker faith. When George Fox, sought for a genuine way to find God, he looked in vain for witnesses among the Christians he visited, and he realized that he had to live it by himself rather than expecting it from others.

The hindrance of faith in action is fear. How are we able to overcome fears? In the history of Friends, there were many courageous ones who dared to go to jail. We are often impressed by the courageous acts of early Quakers like Fox and James Nayler, who spoke truth even when they were surrounded by people who would persecute them severely.

Victor Frankel, the German psychotherapist who survived the horrifying experiences of Auschwitz during the Nazi time, pointed out the freedom for us to choose with determination this or that, as something that nothing and no one can take away from us human beings, even in any existential, extreme condition. He said something like this: For us, rich possibility is open to form our life to be meaningful, even at the very end of our life.

If we seek meaning for our life, our life always has meaning, under any circumstance. By finding the meaning, we are able to view things differently than before. Not that we expect something from our life, but the expectation comes out of our life. For us, the crucial incidents—matters of life and death, unbearable pains and sorrows—are important for what they mean in the program of God, rather than in the unhappiness and failure they hold for us.
— Susumu Ishitani, 1992

Susumu Ishitani was a child in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped there on August 9, 1945. Today he is a professor of ethics and an active member of the Tokyo Monthly Meeting.

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