Thought for the Week: Discernment
Andrew Sterling writes about discernment and the Quaker Way
Quakerism is hardly the platform for personal ambition, power and control. The absence of a leader is embedded in the Quaker ethos. However, there are leadings, arrived at by the process of discernment, through mutual listening – which we know as the ‘feeling of the Meeting’.
It embodies the Quaker Way. It is at the core of the Quaker faith – our mutual relationship to that which is of God, or the sacred, in the self and the other. While an organisation that has top-down leadership tries to unite through the focus invested in that leadership, remarkably, Quakers forgo such apparent certitude because of their shared faith.
But it has to be worked at and practised, as do all relationships. As Zélie Gross writes in With a tender hand:
Whatever the circumstances in which we respond to a leading, we have to be clear that checking, or testing, our leadings is an essential part of how we agree to work together as Friends.
Or, as Quaker faith & practice expresses it (13.05):
…we meet as we do because we believe that gathered together we are capable of greater clarity of vision. It is therefore the practice in our Society for a Friend who, after due consideration, believes that he or she has a concern, to bring it before the gathered community of Friends. This is both a further part of the testing process and an expression of our membership in a spiritual community. It is a recognition of mutual obligations: that of a Friend to test the concern against the counsel of the group and that of the group to exercise its judgment and to seek the guidance of God.
Discernment is how Friends are asked to assume responsibilities for the care of their Meeting – including the safeguarding of the discernment process itself. While such positions are held on a temporary basis, so helping to counter a sense of hierarchy, discernment produces ‘right ordering’, which in turn helps ensure that procedures are kept within the Quaker spirit.
It is the source of Quaker values (testimonies) and action (witness) without which the struggles of leadership and attendant ideological or other agendas are more than likely to arise – as they do in other types of decision-making processes. While some of these may well seem to tick all the right – indeed ‘Quakerly’ – boxes, and to be full of good intentions, they smother the Quaker Way: the process of the Spirit through discernment.
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