Message for Durham Friends Meeting worship service, February 8, 2026
Susan Davies is a member of Vassalboro Friends Meeting, and currently serves as Clerk of the Permanent Board, New England Yearly Meeting.
In 1850, the Boston Vigilance Committee organized citizens to resist
enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Although Massachusetts had abolished
slavery nearly 70 years before, the new Fugitive Slave Act required ALL
citizens, of all states, (free, as well as slave states) to help law enforcement to
recover fugitive slaves to return them into bondage. The Boston Vigilance
Committee had been organized by Theodore Parker, a Universalist minister, to
rally citizens to help fugitive slaves to hide, and to refuse to assist with their
recovery. Due to their efforts, from 1850 to the onset of the Civil War in 1861,
only two slaves were captured in Boston and transported back to the South.
On both occasions, Bostonians combatted the actions with mass protests.
Today, 175 years later, the citizens of Minneapolis are compelled to show up,
from a similar sense of outrage at injustice.
Theodore Parker, the Unitarian minister who led the formation of the Boston
Vigilance Committee, was a staunch abolitionist, and also at odds with the
orthodoxy of Unitarianism. His followers described him and themselves as
part of a movement of “prophetic Christian social activism”. Parker was
involved with almost all of the reform movements of the time: the condition of
women, prison reform, the moral and mental destitution of the rich, and the
physical destitution of the poor. In his theology Parker stressed the immediacy
of God and suggested that people experience God intuitively and personally,
and that they should center their religious beliefs on individual experience
(Wikipedia).
Theodore Parker was quoted this Winter in the Southern Poverty Law Center
newsletter, by Bryan Fair:
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a
long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the
curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine
it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards
justice.”
Later the quote was shortened to the familiar phrase: “The arc of the moral
universe is long, but it bends towards justice”, quoted by both Martin
Luther King Jr and Barack Obama, and many others. But this winter Bryan Fair, amended this hopeful and uplifting sentiment by saying:
“I am convinced that the arc of the moral universe will NOT bend
towards justice on its own. We must bend it towards justice.”
I want to explore today the soul of “The Dissident”- -those we intuitively
understand are the ones exerting the greatest leverage to bend the arc of the
moral universe towards justice.
Definition: A dissident is a person who actively challenges an
established political or religious system, doctrine, belief, policy, or
institution… In the political sense, in the 20th Century, use of the word
dissident coincides with the rise of authoritarian governments in
countries such as Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the
Soviet Union (and later Russia), North Korea, China.… Wikipedia
For the obvious reasons of the tragedies and oppression we are daily exposed
to in our country, and around the world, I have been preoccupied lately with
the image evoked by George Fox’s words:
The Lord shewed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful
without, were within- in the hearts and minds of wicked men… And I
cried to the Lord, saying, ‘Why should I be thus, seeing I was never
addicted to commit those evils?’ And the Lord answered that it was
needful I should have a sense of all conditions… how else should I
speak to all conditions; and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw
also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite
ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.
And in that I also saw the infinite love of God and I had great
openings.
George Fox was a spiritual and political dissident of extraordinary clarity,
focus and resolve. He was imprisoned eight times in English dungeons and
jails, spending six years of his life in the horrific conditions of the time. And
when he was free and he interrupted church services in his urgency to testify
to the Truth, the people “beat him with hands, Bibles and sticks, and finally
stoned him, after which he was thrown into jail”. He seems never to have
evaded, resisted or avoided the inevitable, furious reactions of the controlling
powers. In 1655, at the age of 31, during one of his long imprisonments, he
wrote on the cell wall,
“I was never in prison that it was not the means of bringing multitudes
out of their prisons.”
His steadfastly and fervently repeated mission was to “lead people to the
Truth”. And lead them he did- his relentless and urgent conviction and
courage led thousands to the movement such that in alarm, Parliament
passed a special law against Quakers that resulted in the imprisonment of
some 4,000 of them.
His message was not based on a concern for justice, poverty, social reform,
per se. It was not based on opinion or causes. It stemmed from a more
profound, reality-shaking, lived experience of the human- divine relationship.
As some of us have heard expressed in vocal ministry he “Lived as if the Truth
were true”. After years of suffering and anguished searching he had finally
exhausted all words and concepts, all pleadings among humans for
trustworthy religious counsel. And then he was lifted up into a completely
transformed understanding of Reality – not through theological argument, or
his own mental reasoning, or evolution of his opinions, but rather through his
living, breathing experience of an Answering God. In his words to his family,
and others:
“I told them that there was an anointing within people, to teach them, and
that the Lord would teach his people himself.” “Your growth in the seed (of Truth) is in the silence”. And “This I knew experimentally”
Praying in his journal, he said “The knowledge of thee in the Spirit is Life, but
the knowledge which is fleshly works death.”
He perceived that “The Life” (the Spirit of the Living Christ, the Inward Teacher)
lay under the burden of corruptions (what Paul Tillich called “the accidental
elements” of our humanness).
“This worship in Spirit and in the Truth touches all men and women; they must
come to the Spirit in themselves, and the Truth in the inward parts…they must
come to the Truth in the heart, to what is hidden in the heart, and to a meek
and quiet spirit.”
Fox was not speaking abstractly, nor exhorting people with theological
“concepts” or Biblical phrases (though he practically knew the Bible by heart).
He was urgently testifying about his own lived experience that he had
discovered access to God’s immediacy and relatedness. Christ did not live in
temples and churches– the Spirit of Truth is within, in the heart. His message
was so compelling and astonishing that people were moved and amazed.
The dissident is convicted by a truth that insists on being made manifest.
Dissidents are the agents of a truth that will not allow them to rest. This year’s
draft chapter of Faith & Practice is on Testimony and their simple message is
that TRUTH’s Testimony is the foundation of all witness; Truth is the
proclamation that the Voice of the Inward Teacher is REAL, practical, and everpresent. For Fox, and for those of us who aspire to his lineage, his unshakable
commitment was to proclaiming the saving power that the Truth could be
inwardly known; and when outwardly obeyed it would never fail to yield, in full
measure, all the Fruits of the Spirit:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Galatians 5:22-23.
I will close with the affirmation from another great and peaceful dissident,
Vaclav Havel, playwright, and former President of the Czech Republic (1936-
2011), who in 1989 was a leader of the Velvet, or “Gentle” Revolution against
40 years of oppressive communist rule in Czechoslovakia:
“The salvation of the world lies in the human heart.”
