Quaker Life, Gentleness, Summer 2022

Purchase a single copy of the Summer 2022 issue of Quaker Life: A mosaic of Friendly living on the theme of Gentleness. “To make a safe home for small children, to comfort one person in sorrow, to do one’s work as efficiently as possible, to listen with understanding, to be gentle with the old and courteous to the young—these are the humble tasks to which most men and women are called.”1 To ask people to write about gentleness is to discover, after the fact, that although we know gentleness when we see it, “gentle” is an attribute not easily defined. Even though the apostle Paul lists gentleness as one of the fruits of the spirit, even though Jesus describes himself as “gentle and humble in heart,” it is much easier to define some of the other fruits of the spirit—patience, for instance, or truthful speech, or peaceableness—than gentleness. I think it is for that reason that so many of the entries in this Quaker Life issue on gentleness point to one or more specific events, and what th