Like George Fox, there are modern Quakers who have spent years searching for truth, for a language of faith, for a teaching they could trust, and having found only arrogance and deceit among the many voices proclaiming to have discovered the way, they finally come to the Stillness within and then, at last, they feel the Presence and learn that there is an Inward Teacher and Guide who can speak to their condition. Fox, of course, spoke in the language of Christianity, as did most Quakers, at least until the middle of the twentieth century. The technologies of communication and transportation, however, have made our world much more porous and pluralistic than theirs; we can no longer presume upon a common theological language. So we must be careful to reach deeper than the words themselves, for we cannot escape the fact that even if Christianity has been a language of Life for some of us, it has been a language of death for others. The Life and Power of early Friends found in the Gospels is the same Life and Power that seeks to animate our words and witness. If we are to reach that Life, we must find a way to speak that is not only true to the Spirit that lives within us, but that invites others to find words that are true to the Spirit that lives in them. So much of spiritual direction depends upon this kind of careful attentiveness, an intense listening for the Holy that strives to born in the other, and a discipline of speaking only when words bring more invitation than definition. Our aim is always to reach the Life in the other, to bear witness to it, to create a space of Holy, expectant waiting, and to invite, welcome, and enjoy the wonder and surprise that come when it breaks into speech, into song, into a life made whole.

–Daniel O. Snyder in Pendle Hill Pamphlet 397: Quaker Witness as Sacrament