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Muriel Lester

God has made of one blood all nations under heaven. No man can suddenly become my enemy just because he happened to have been born on the other side of a river or a boundary line, and his government has issued an ultimatum against mine. Is it not time that we refused to fight?

If you will be a realist, ask yourself as you walk down the street how many horrible things in one hour do you meet? Let these things later come back into your prayer time. You realize that there is always something you can do about them when you get near God, and begin to think His thoughts after him. These things which frighten you do not frighten God.

Today the few have achieved their economic freedom at the expense of the many. That is why our world order is tottering. Nothing can save it but a united attempt to put the will of God into operation.

It is pathetic how people who were real fighters in their youth imagine for the rest of their lives that they are progressive, though they may be complete back numbers. They are very dangerous people. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Excess in drink, vice or gambling won't draw attention to you, but thinking independently will. If it leads you to act generously, to identify yourself with the poor or the prisoner or the foreigner or the Negro, the vested interests will be displeased.

Prayer always thrusts one out into action sooner or later. One of its main functions is to induce one to think creatively; it stretches the imagination; it enables one to see things and people not as they are but as they might be; it strips the pomp, the sense of power and the static security from the person prayed for and permits one to see him as he is in God’s sight, a mere child, needing help. needing courage, needing enlightenment from God as definitely as an infant needs the care of its mother.

The day should begin by focusing on God as shining beauty, radiant Joy, creative power, all-pervading love, perfect understanding, purity and peace.

Muriel Lester founded Kingsley Hall in London's East End. From it she wrote:

Day and night my mind was set on this job of getting a little community in East London to function as servants and lovers of their neighbors, cooperating with God by restoring their birthright to His dispossessed children, the birthright of music, art, poetry, drama, camps, open-air life, self-confidence. the honor of building up a new social order, the Kingdom of Heaven, here and now in Bow. With the outbreak of World War I. she wrote:

We refused at Kingsley Hall to pronounce a moratorium on the Sermon on the Mount for the duration of the war. We could not conceive of God as a nationalist. We could not suddenly look upon our brother man as an enemy just because he chanced to have been born on the other side of a river or a strip of sea.

War is as outmoded as cannibalism, chattel slavery, blood-feuds and dueling - an insult to God and man - a daily crucifixion of Christ.

Speaking to hostile audiences in the US during World War II she wrote:

I asked how an idea. a philosophy. or a religion, could be eternally true if it changed its nature according to the temporal activities and policies of men. It seemed to me irrational to expect to overcome these world evils by killing each other's wives and children. This generation, though liking to appear hard-boiled and realist, was being naive, romantic, unscientific.

Given is the word. Given publicly, on the first Good Friday, on a hill, in the sight of all, was the visible demonstration of the only permanent way to overcome evil. Human nature demands something more enduring than the unquiet equilibrium of rival powers.

In a book on worship, she wrote:

Once you have found your relationship to God, you need never look around for work. From that moment every person is your friend and your brother. Your job is to build up the Kingdom of God. Here, now, on earth. You find every circumstance and every moment rich in creative opportunity. Even sin. your own and other people's, is found to be a steppingstone to a deeper knowledge, a clearer understanding. Your task is to set up. here and now, wherever you happen to be, the reign of God. the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

©2003 Fellowship of Reconciliation