Quakers talk about it a lot, but what actually is discernment? Roy Stephenson offers his thoughts

‘All Quaker work has a prophetic function.’

I was recently asked to facilitate a day on nominations for Central England Area Meeting, and this caused me to think again about the nature of discernment. Its value to the nominations committee can’t be over-emphasised, but what holds true for that committee is true for every Quaker committee, and for all the ways we work. So if we attempt to unpack discernment, where does this take us?

Quaker discernment is a group activity. It lies at the heart of every Quaker committee’s work, even though we often feel we can take shortcuts which cut it out entirely, or else disregard its promptings. We practise it best in Meetings for Worship, Meetings for Worship for Business, and Meetings for Clearness. This implies that it takes discipline, because if we put into practice our much-repeated mantra of ‘that of God in everyone’ the other person is just as likely to be inspired as we are. Discipline, then, implies the humility to listen, both to the other person’s words, and to the place from which the other person’s words arise. This may, or may not, be a spiritual inspiration, so we need discernment to distinguish between what’s inspired, and what’s not.

Fortunately, as we’re part of a group we don’t need to do it all ourselves. It’s just as well, because discernment is a family of talents, not just one. I might be good at one part of it, you at another. So what makes up this family?

Well, it all depends on how you describe it. Just as there are multiple ways to cut up a cake, so there are multiple ways to describe what constitutes discernment. Currently I’m cutting up the cake into these portions:

Prayer

I’m not talking about offering our words, the things that we want, to a Someone Out There. Prayer is about holy listening, what Advices & queries describes as taking heed ‘to the promptings of love and truth’. Prayer means relinquishing our mistaken notions of personal control, and being willing to do what God, or the situation, demand. It often means a struggle to put aside personal wants, and accept what must be done. It may come at much personal cost. Think of Jesus in Gethsemane, or the ‘Great Renunciation’ of the Buddha.

Realism

This is about understanding the bigger picture. It means taking into account an enormous range of factors, which may affect the situation in which we live. This can range from climate change through to the ages of the people in our spiritual community and their many other commitments, via foreign wars, the state of local and national politics, public transport and many other factors that need to be considered at any one time.

But realism also demands a closer focus. When we ask a Friend to do something for their Meeting community, we need to know just what we’re asking them to consider doing, so we also need to have a fairly accurate and up-to-date description of what’s needed. Otherwise, Friends may ask for release much earlier than if they had known better what the work entailed.

When we think of nominations committees in particular, the other close focus concerns the nominees themselves. Realistically, how many Friends are there who could do this work? What are their lives like: work? Family commitments? Voluntary activities? There may be many other factors that need to be known, which vary from time to time, and from Meeting to Meeting, to enable a nominations committee to function at its best.

Integrity

Friends often talk about ‘truth’, but I’m not happy with that. These days ‘truth’ is often equated with ‘fact’, and integrity is about so much more. Facts are value-free and objective: I can state them, you can state them. The fact that so many migrants crossed the English Channel last year in small boats does not imply that any one course of action should therefore be followed. What we decide to do about it depends on our values, and it is this which means we act either with, or without, integrity. Integrity, then, shows in our actions. It is about how we live, and how we put our values into practice.

Future-focussed

All Quaker work has a prophetic function. That is to say, it involves looking at present needs from a future perspective. Nothing we do now should be done solely with today’s needs in mind, still less yesterday’s. When it comes to the things for which Friends have been known in the wider society, like our stance on slavery, or the death penalty, or climate change, we customarily speak with a prophetic voice, yet we often forget that we need to apply the same perspective to what we ourselves do within and for our own Meetings. But, Friends, it’s not just the others who need to pay attention to the voice of the prophet… it’s putting what we preach into personal practice.

Empathy

When we ask a particular Friend to perform some service for the Meeting, we need to imaginatively enter that Friend’s life and consider what the effects of asking them to do this may be. Clearly, we cannot know all the circumstances of each other’s lives, still less the inner life on which each of us draws as we face the world. That is why a sympathetic imagination is so important. It’s the other side of the coin from realism – and without realism, imagination and empathy are only the making-up of fairy stories.

Love

I’m with Paul the apostle on this: without love, we are nothing, virtue has gone out from us. Friends sometimes seem to think it’s a virtue to be aggressively forthright in speaking what they consider to be truth, but any truth so spoken can only be at best a small portion of full truth. A complete Truth must be capitalised! So, to take my own advice, truth must begin, for people of faith, from the conviction that this universe is an outpouring of Divine Love, which in the Society we encapsulate as ‘that of God in everyone’. If we try to speak truth in anger, or aggressively, we forget that the person we address is made in the Divine Image – and we also forget that we are, too.

This means that nothing we do should be done by rote. We need to spend time lovingly upholding our Meeting, the people who serve us, and the people who surround them. Then we will come to serve our Meetings in their true purpose, and not merely fill vacant posts. For a nominations committee, bringing forward a nomination may be the end of the work, but it is not its purpose. Its purpose is the living-out of Divine Love, and making that Love obvious to everyone we touch. If our committees do things which prevent the living-out of Divine Love, no matter how efficient they seem to be, they have failed.

I’ve left love until the end because it’s properly speaking the culmination of all we are trying to do. I repeat, our aim is not to ensure that the structures of the Society continue to operate. Our aim is to make the Divine Image more obvious in the world, and we cannot do that unless we live a loving life, because love is the face of God.

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Comments

As someone who is moving into the role of a member of Nominations Committee (in 2024) I found this very helpful and inspiring. I hope to print it out and keep it for reference. I have been a Quaker a long time, entirely in the meeting I am in now. Its a big, vibrant, lively meeting but…. with huge difficulty in getting Friends to fulfil roles and even do the small stuff too (eg making coffee).

By ljkerrsheff@gmail.com on 2nd November 2023 - 9:59

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