Thought for the Week: Discernment and trust
Roland Carn considers patience, self discipline and persistence
It is Yearly Meeting in session. Six hundred Friends are in the Large Meeting House taking part in all age worship. A three year-old bursts, joyfully and spontaneously, into song – ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. A coherent, recognisable, picture of our values, our testimonies, what we take for granted, our relationships and our practices – what we do – is what we mean by Being Quaker. We spend a lot of time and energy worrying about our values and testimonies. Perhaps it’s time to turn more of our attention to what we take for granted and our relationships. The external, observable things that we do have been part of Quakerism from the earliest times and they are what the outside world associates with Quakers. They are the bottom-line of our beliefs and values and the root of our testimonies.
The most obvious thing that we do as Quakers is meet for worship in silence. My Yearly Meeting began with a study of what I do in Meeting for Worship and the comforting revelation that, while we sit in silence, we are all spiritually active in much the same way – but we choose different words to describe it. In Meeting, as in my daily life and in Meeting for Business, I seek to discern what is right, to reach right decisions and to find the right actions to move my life forward.
A decision comes before even the simplest action. There are many ways of making decisions. Quaker discernment is appropriate for decisions where the moral or spiritual part of an action is important.
Discernment is mystical, but it worries me when Friends act as if somehow sitting in silence with a blank mind will cause the right idea to pop into it as if by magic. The right way does not come signposted as God’s way. It is for me to discover it through my own efforts. I converse with God in my heart and in everyday actions: a way opens when the time is right. When I talk – with God, with other people or even with myself – it is a two-way process: I listen and I speak. I act and observe the response.
In ministry at Yearly Meeting a Friend described the anguish of feeling excluded by committees acting on his behalf. Struggling with this angel, he was wounded, seeing that his criticism should be directed to himself. He said he found this a transforming and empowering experience. This, for me, is one of the ways in which our Quaker practice is richer than that of other methods.
In discernment we trust that those present in a Meeting for Business in session are, indeed, gathered in worship and that through the worship they reach the right decision for the time, that they are truly led into unity with the Spirit and that the clerk is empowered to rightly discern this unity. Through discernment we live in the light that takes away the occasion for all doubts and opinionated contention.
Tenderness, caring, mindfulness and support go along with empowering and enabling. Those holding to account are as responsible as those held to account. God trusts us. He trusts us with his creation and with each other. I found this comforting when all around me talked of ‘us and them’, needing to trust trustees, needing to trust those working in our name and needing to trust our processes.
Trust and its flipside, risk and vulnerability, are at the root of our relationships. A Quaker God loves, allows, empowers and guides, without abandoning. A good parent repays a child’s trust with trust; allowing the child to explore, test and make mistakes. Mistakes are an opportunity to grow a relationship. When the clerk presents us with a draft minute, this is a time for learning and improvement.
Tough love and wrestling with the angel may be required of us. Patience, self discipline and persistence will be required of us. Being Quaker is about maturing in service, as well as in spirit.
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