"David Korten declares [in The Great Turning: From Empire to Community], 'Everything is going to change. The question is whether we let the change play out in increasingly destructive ways or embrace the deepening crisis as our time of opportunity. Now as never before we must unleash the creative potential of the species and direct it to democratizing our cultures and institutions and bringing ourselves into balance with one another and Earth. It is the greatest creative challenge the species has ever faced. Success would seem a futile dream, except that all around the planet momentum is already building.'

"Global trends are terrifying, yet there is a hidden blessing in these trends as well: they will require us to look deeply into ourselves, perhaps more deeply than ever before: they will require us to seek God. It is helpful to remember that Quakerism did not arise in a time of relative peace and domestic tranquility, but in a 17th-Century England that was riven by turmoil, unrest, civil war, and political conflict, a world 'turned upside down.' Would as vigorous a religious movement have arisen in more peaceful times? Or was that 17th-Century cauldron of chaos a stimulus for the passion and inner fire of early Friends? Spirituality often burns most brightly under conditions of chaos, dislocation, and injustice. In Nazi prisons and death camps, in the squalor of barrios in Latin America, in the 'City of Joy' in Calcutta, spiritual faith may shine with a more vital, illuminating flame than it does within the comfortably complacent communities of the first world.

"Even for those of us who live in such first-world communities, it becomes more difficult to shut ourselves off from larger global realities. This is surely one of the benefits of that very mixed bag called 'globalization': we see more clearly the actual conditions of life around the globe, human and non-human. As the world becomes smaller and more transparent, more effort is required to remain blind to suffering and injustice; in the end, such constricted blindness must fall. And in that failure, lies hope for us all. As Friends, we are called to take the greatest risk possible: to stand in the Light and recognize that we are known through and through – and to act out of that apocalypse of Truth. As we become faithful to the wisdom within us, we find that our lives increasingly settle into joyful harmony with Nature and God.

"My own life has shown me that I must face the darkness if I am to open to the Light. My struggles with addiction, depression, divorce, and despair have given me the greatest gifts that I enjoy. In a life that is filled with blessings, all that I now treasure would have been impossible if I had not looked into the abyss and seen what I had become. Only then did my life change for the better.

"A similar dynamic governs our ecological future. The choice that we face is stark: continuing down a path of blindness, destruction, and death – or opening to Truth, and acting accordingly. It is a choice that we face in each moment of each day. In countless small acts that either darken the future for ourselves, for our children, and for our children's children – or offer light and hope.

"The God-drenched earth that humans are crucifying continues to offer itself to all of life – and within that sacrificial offering, lies the promise of redemption. We can find the courage to transform our habits of consumption, to advocate for progressive policies and legislation, and to work constructively with our progressive global allies when we take the risk to awaken to the Christ-Spirit that is within all things, awaiting our loving acceptance. Hearing that voice, our hearts, like that of George Fox, indeed do leap for joy. Though a future of daunting challenges lies before us, all is not lost. As we learn to live in the love of nature, we may find comfort in the closing lines of Bryant's 'Thanatopsis':

" '… Sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.' "