Quakers and Valdemar

There are, obviously, no photographs of companions, so here's
a white horse.

We can draw inspiration from many places. The natural world, scripture and other sacred texts, spiritual writing by great thinkers (or humble bloggers), philosophy, political and economic writings, art, all sorts of things. Many of these things, we can, as Quakers, consider potentially inspired by the Divine, perhaps in just a small way, perhaps in a great way. I’m very fond of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, personally, and though I don’t know for sure how spiritual he intended it to be, I find it a very spiritual book and think it likely to be inspired.

But it’s not just these very conventionally spiritually inspired and/or inspiring works that can give us that sort of spiritual fillip. Sometimes it’s fiction. For me, especially, I find some works of fantasy and science fiction particularly likely to stimulate my thought on spiritual matters – seeing parallels, intended by the author or not, with matters in our own world. This is one of the great strengths of some of the best science fiction and fantasy, showing us things about our own world in a fresh form to help us see them. Whether any of this is divinely inspired, I can’t see, but reflecting on it, or even just reading it, I feel the Light working in me.