September 10th 2023: Why I Am Still a Quaker
Meet Dan Cooperstock!
Dan grew up in an agnostic Jewish household, is a member of the Toronto Oasis leadership team, and is an active non-theist Quaker.
Professionally, he's a software developer, who recently sold his business writing and selling software for charities and churches, though he is still working for the new owners. His initial university training was in Math and Philosophy - concentrating on logic - which certainly fits with his insistence on rationality and disbelief in the supernatural. Dan has attended WHU several times, including the longest night service and has always loved those times!
First Reading
We know truth through what we see, read, do and feel ourselves. We dare etching our testimonies every time we state what we deeply believe and do what our soul calls us to do. We learn from the past but live in the present looking to a future for all creation. We need to affirm our own place in history-in-the-making by living and speaking our truths for ourselves and our children...
By taking up the call of our spirit and living life with passion and conviction, we feel the heat of truth and rightness in our heart of hearts. Here, in our stirrings of gut knowledge and intuition, we find our passionate calling to certain beliefs, our lovers, our place in this chaotic world, answers (or solace) for the questions that confront us. Each of us feels the passion called truth. It’s our choice to listen and act or not. The truth in our bones can be scary; it asks us to put our hearts on the line. In following our hearts, however, we will find ourselves in exquisite alignment with the power-filled spirit that we seek truth from.
Jane Orion Smith
Second Reading
There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation or cruelty or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself …. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned ….
James Nayler (a very early Quaker