On clearness committees and discernment
W&M hopes that Friends will find these reflections relevant as more and more of us participate in clearness processes and as the meeting as a whole considers matters such as the proper stewardship for our meetinghouse and lower lot and the issue of same sex marriage.
Excerpts from Patricia Loring's Spiritual Discernment. The context and goal of clearness committees, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 305
What is being sought (in a clearness committee) is the same delicately evolving, unified sense of underlying Truth or Reality as is sought in a truly prayerful meeting for business.
The Quaker way of trying to invite and be open to divine guidance is to begin with a time of silence. Ibis is not the "moment of silence" which is a mere nod in passing to the divine. Nor is it a time for organizing one's thoughts. This is a time for what has been called recollection: for an intentional return to the Center, to give over one's own firm views, to place the outcome in the hands of God, to ask for a mind and heart as truly sensitive to and accepting of nuanced intimations of God's will as of overwhelming evidences of it.
The entire meeting is conducted in the same reverent spirit of prayerful listening. This disciplined listening is the counterpart of the disciplined speaking mentioned above. It is listening with as complete attentiveness as we can muster. If we are listening for the will of God, it behooves us to listen with our hearts, the marrow of our bones and our whole skin, as well as with our ears. Such listening is one dimension of the discipline of contemplative prayer. It is also at least as evocative as any question in drawing a speaker past self definition and limitation, into the more spacious reality of God's will.
If what we are about is discerning the will of God in the life of a person, prayer and prayerful listening create the only conceivable context for it.
Many clearness committees find a natural rhythm which includes a good deal of silence. There is periodic silence for recollection. There is also the comfortable silence that flows gracefully around questions and answers when we give ourselves to really hearing them and considering them before responding. To truly enter into this attentive, prayerful listening is to let go of displaying our preparedness; our rapidity of thought, analysis or response; our intelligence or profundity. It is to allow the questions and the answers to sink into us in the silence which follows them; to sink into the questions and answers; to wait on whatever will arise from the depths, in confidence that as in vocal ministry when it is right and necessary, utterance will be given without our having fashioned and honed it in advance. We trust in the availability of God's guidance in ways that may be unexpected, even surprising.
(W)e go to a clearness committee with heart and mind prepared, setting aside our own purposes, in holy expectancy of whatever new thing God is bringing about. As we wait, centered in silence, we trust we will be given the ears to hear what is significant and the words to evoke what is meant to come forth.
As the committee is engaged in a search for Truth, it is important that the group have the integrity not to feed back what they think the person wants to hear, from a misguided idea of being supportive. Support is given to the Truth of the focus person's leading by God and not to what could be a passing attachment or mistaken judgment. Discernment begins in a questioning, eliciting mode... The more discerning the committee members, the more apt they are to sense where questions need to be asked, where pertinent background needs to be probed.
For many well intentioned people, refraining from advice or commentary is an excruciatingly difficult discipline. For one thing, it violates the ordinary social use of verbal interchange as an occasion for display of oneself and assertion of one's ideas. For another, our culture equates helping people with giving them something: whether material aid, ideas, or a plan of action. If we haven't "given" something to the other person, we tend to feel we haven't really helped them.
The clearness process is profoundly countercultural in assuming that the greatest help we give is to refrain from problem solving, to create a situation in which a person may discern for herself what is needed. Our somewhat shapeless, non hierarchical Quaker forms arise and receive what shape they have from the conviction of the availability of Inward Guidance to each person. To enter deliberately into the discipline of restraint in the clearness process can be to reclaim the traditional restraint of speech at its deepest level, which is to wait on Guidance.