Luray Friends Meeting

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United States
Stanley, VA
Luray Friends Meeting

An unprogrammed meeting for worship belonging to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

All are welcome to experience the Inner Light with us at our weekly meetings. We are part of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting and the Friends General Conference.

03/13/2026

What wisdom does Quakerism have to lend to the usage and development of artificial intelligence? Should Quakers use AI at all? Is there that of God in the algorithm?

03/12/2026

"Why do people use [psychoactives]?... For many reasons: the honest search for another reality, a higher reality - not an escape from "this" reality, but a reaching out, a looking, for what was once summed up by the word "God"... Does Quakerism have some sort of historic role to fulfill here? We believe in an Inner Light, and that men seeking together in this Light will find guidance and answers. Could we try the Quaker approach on the what and why of [psychoactives]? Could we go to young people - our own and others - with humility and love and ask them to share with us their insights, their criticisms, their unanswered needs? Could we show ourselves human and available to them so that we may reason together? Could Friends be the "mind-openers" of our day on this vitally important matter?"

-Friend Barbara Hinchcliffe

03/11/2026

“Many Quakers I know are not “birthright” Quakers (born into the faith), but “convinced” Quakers (joined from some other faith). And many of those come from Catholicism and Anglicanism in America (or Episcopalianism.) I myself have drifted back and forth between the two. My history is with the Episcopal church, but my heart is with the Quakers. At the moment the Quakers are still winning. I am, as another person told me he was, a Quakerpalian... Some of us Quakerpalians like the beautiful music and liturgy of the Episcopal church, but equally love the simplicity and meditation of the Quakers... I think it is a fallacy to believe we must choose one faith if two are calling us in the same way that you can eat chocolate cake and vanilla too. To be comfortable with religious ambivalence is not the easiest thing, and in time a person may decide to plant both feet firmly on one side of the fence or the other. In the meantime, as the Quakers say, both faith traditions may 'speak to thy condition.'"

- A Quakerpalian Friend in Virginia

03/10/2026

“Is religion subjective? Nay, its soul is in objectivity, in an Other whose Life is our true life, whose Love is our love, whose Joy is our joy, whose Peace is our peace, whose burdens are our burdens, whose Will is our will. Self is emptied into God, and God in-fills it.”

- Friend Thomas Kelly

03/09/2026

“Prayer is not a discourse. It is not a request, but an openness, a waiting. To pray is to let go of all the images of God which our minds and hands have formed.”
-Friend Douglas V. Steere

03/06/2026

"[George] Fox believed that it was a part of his mission to proclaim the non-religious character of the new covenant. He claimed that the Christian revelation is most misunderstood when it is understood as bring in a new religion."

Lewis Benson, Catholic Quakerism

03/05/2026

“A man may read the Scriptures, and yet never know Christ with the Spirit that gave them forth… for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”

“True religion is an inward, free, and feeling thing, not a form, nor a notion. It is Christ in the soul, the hope of glory; a principle in man, working godliness, righteousness, holiness.”

“As to the life and substance of it, there never was but one true religion; nothing has ever been such, but the immediate inward work of God in man.”

-Friend William Penn

02/27/2026

“I recognize a change to have taken place in myself, from a certain assumption that mine was really the better way, to a very complete recognition that there is no one better way and that God needs all kinds of people and ways of living through which to manifest Himself in the world.”

-Friend Henry Theodore Hodgkin

02/26/2026

"It is just possible that God, in His inscrutable Grace, may wish to shatter all our Pharisaic pretensions, and through these remarkable [psychoactive] chemical substances gracefully provide glimpses of the realm of the Spirit precisely to those whose path would otherwise never have come near it. ...Seldom has the demand for the rethinking of the nature of mystical, experiential religion been so insistent. And this demand rests with unusual weight upon the Society of Friends, because of its claim to be a religion of immediate experience, of the inward Christ."
- Friend Joseph Havens

02/24/2026

“Gurdial Mallick, a Hindu known to many Friends... became a Quaker while remaining a Hindu. He insisted on this condition … claiming that there was nothing incompatible between his Hinduism and Quakerism, but was nevertheless admitted to membership of the Society.” - Friend John Linton

02/21/2026

"A man must know the Spirit, come to the Spirit, be joined to, and be in union with the Spirit, before he can have the true understanding of the Scriptures. The Scriptures indeed are the words of God, or various expressions of his mind. Now the man who searches these before he has the Spirit cannot know the truth, but can only guess and imagine. And it is from here that so many sects and denominations are sprung up in the world, according to the variety of their imaginations. One sort of men cry, ‘This is the way, this is the truth, this is the church, this is the worship.’ Another sort cry, ‘That is not it; that is superstition and error; but this is it!’ And so a third and fourth, etc. It is the same with the Scriptures. One says this is the meaning; another says it is not so, but this is the meaning. They let their own reasonings and imaginations loose, and there is no foundation of certainty. But if they had waited for the Spirit to begin with, and gone on no further than he opened to them, all these doubts and dissensions would have been choked... He that begins with the Spirit of God, giving himself up to the light which comes from him, comes to true union with God, and to the experience of the life. This one finds a true growth and knowledge of the Spirit of God, whereby he comes to know and understand the Scriptures, which came from the same Spirit." - Friend Isaac Penington

Address

3392 Pine Grove Rd
Stanley, VA
22851

Website

http://www.LurayFriends.org/

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