Pushing and Pulling

Early Friends believed that we could receive Divine Guidance for our lives.  That we could listen to the "still small voice within" for that guidance.  They were clear that we had to still ourselves so we were not let by ego or vanity.  Below is a quote from a modern day meditation teacher.

 This path of using life to evolve spiritually is truly the highest path.  There really is no reason for tension or problems.  Stress only happens when you resist life’s events.  If you’re neither pushing life away or pulling it towards you, then you are not creating any resistance.  You are simply present.  In this state, you are just witnessing and experiencing the events of life taking place.  If you choose to live this way, you will see that life can be lived in a state of peace.

Michael Singer

Another Quote:

I am sorry there is fear in the world.  That is what you have come to transform.  I am sorry for the forgetting that cause dark nights of loneliness for all of you.  You have come to walk in the forgetting in order to move to the remembering again.  In dark nights, in fear, ask your heart,  “Is this all there is?”  Your heart knows the answer.

 This second quote suggests the dark night of the soul experience where we forget God - that while pushing or pulling and coming from a place of fear that we are forgetting God, but this opens up the opportunity to be remembering God again and moving towards the Holy again.  The question is this all there is?  Is posed as a way to notice if we have gotten caught up in a world of superficial or illusionary concerns.

What is your experience with the pushing and the pulling of life described above and of the just being?

What pushing or pulling might you need to lay down?

What happens if you ask your fear – Is this all there is?

Nominating Committee

It is important for Friends to not lose sight of the fact that nominating is a spiritual process – not an assert Tab A in Slot B process.  Now a days as attendance at Meetings dwindle but the number of positions on committees stays the same, it is easy for the nominating committee to feel somewhat desperate (leading to many inside jokes about not leaving the room or nominating committee will nominate you.)  So Friends may need to think about other ways to address the shortage of available people to staff committees.

As originally envisioned by Friends, nominating was a discernment process, discerning the gifts that members brought and matching those with the needs of the Meeting.  This meant starting with a clear job description for each of these positions and asking Friends to thoughtfully consider where they might be led to serve each year.  Now a days, a sort of secular posture has crept in of both members just sort of waiting to be “assigned”.  But also modern nominating committees have taken it as a goodness if people volunteer for positions and seem to fail to stop and discern if the enthusiasm of the person matches the skills needed in that committee.   As a result, we can get people who volunteer for a position because they view it as powerful or interesting but have wrong gifts for that committee.

Many Meetings have rules about needing to be a member to be clerk, assistant clerk, treasurer, or on Pastoral Care or M&C if they are combined.  Some extend this to M&W.   

This was out of realization to that to Clerk a whole Meetings business Meeting you need robust exposure to Quaker Business practice and how it differs from secular consensus processes or world business meetings run by voting or Robert’s Rules of order.   It has also been felt that to be trusted with all the money of the Meeting you needed to have a committed relationship to the Meeting.  Since Pastoral Care or M&C often deals with confidential, personal matters of individuals in the Meeting, it was also felt that seasoned and well trusted friends needed to serve here.  Because M&W (or M&C in Meetings which combine them) is responsible for the spiritual well being of the meeting – for nurturing the members spiritual growth, tending the health of the worship hour, and eldering Friends when needed it was again felt that this needed to come from Friends who has spiritual depth and experience with Quaker practice.

One of the kinds of mistakes I have seen is where people who do not have gifts of ministry are put on ministry and worship, because they are “available” to serve or because they ask.  If they themselves are not grounded in Spirit how will they help the whole Meeting to ground?  Or how will they think in a spiritual way about the Meeting?   Another mistake I have observed is putting for example men on Care and Council who were not called to it for “gender balance”.   I have known men with wonderful gifts of nurturance and emotional support.  I have also known men who live in their intellect 24 times 7.  If one of the former were put on C&C for gender balance, it will achieve that but only that.   Members seeking support from the committee will not wind up feeling supported.  This would be as silly as making someone treasurer who does not know how to balance a check book or read a financial statement.

These same issues are more starkly clear when nominating people for a clearness committee.  If we put people on there for balance of gender, or length of time in Meeting, or because they are married (for a committee seeking clearness on marriage) the person may or may not know how to help discern clearness.   Since clearness committees are suppose to be spiritual discernment and seeking processes, it is most helpful to put members who believe Spirit is available to help us find answers and are willing to listen for those answers.   Not just a magic number of people on the committee.

Many nominating committees today create a form they ask members/attenders to fill out and turn in.  That is certainly time saving – and could be an ok starting point.  I would be careful in the language on the form.  It should ask things like have you spent time in reflection and discernment about which committee you could best serve the Meeting on?  (Rather than: “On what committee do you want to serve?)  It should also ask:  What are your gifts?  How are you feeling called to serve the meeting right now?  I personally have been surprised sometimes that I’m called to things that I would not have expected to be “my choice”.  

An ideal might be for the committee to divide up the Meeting directory and try to talk with each person about possible openings and where they might match.    But then the nominating committee needs to have frank conversations with each other about whether what is put forward by members really fits.  How many nominating committees have regretted later the service of someone they inwardly knew was not right for the committee but “we just needed one more person”.   Frankly in situations like that the committee might be better off short one person!

Another thing which I see becoming more of a practice in some Meetings these days which I think is not proper process is the practice of not nominating the clerks of committees but leaving that to the committee to decide.  The main problem I see with this is that sexism, racism and classism, all lead towards white men assuming power and those from less privileged groups having a hard time speaking up for leadership, or being taken seriously if they do.   By nominating committee being in a neutral position outside of the committee they are in a much better position to decide who will provide good leadership to a committee and don’t have to worry about serving with someone they just offended by saying they did not think they would be a good clerk.  

And Heaven forbid they have put together a committee that has no one fit to actually lead it!  It seems to me that failing to figure out the answer to that question in advance is an abdication of the responsibility for creating healthy functional committees.   If someone says yes to serving on a committee knowing they have time for only that, not leading it and gets “drafted” this is a recipe for either resentment or for the committee barely functioning from neglect.  The nominating committee needs to determine ahead to time if they have tapped that kind of energy and availability ahead of time.

Next month I will address the issue of what if you don’t have enough people?  Or if no one wants to serve in a particular position/committee.

Organizing from Spirit

I have written a number of posts on this blog about climate organizing.  All of which have been secular organizing.   I have turned over a new leaf and I have begun to organize from leading.  One leading was to get together activist I knew who belonged to churches and have a conversation about what would it look like for the churches to have a powerful moral voice on climate?  We did not have an answer on that but we did decide to organize a conference on Faith and Climate...and 175 people came to that.  Many seeds were plants and many ripples are going out from the event.  It would seem that we will keep organizing as people of faith.

We had as our keynote speaker Jay O'Hara.   I hope as Quakers reading this you all know who Jay is, but my guess is that because of how the mainstream media is that you do not all know who Jay is.   Jay is the Quaker guy from the Lobster boat blockade.  Jay and his co-defendant Ken Ward, piloted a small lobster boat in 2013 in front of a 40,000 lb coal barge to prevent it from delivering its carbon load to the Brayton Point coal plant, the largest coal burning plant in Massachusetts. (Now slated for closure in 2017).   They of course were arrested for this act of holy obedience.  But in one of those openings that only God can create when the Judge decided to allow their defense of the necessity plea  (a legal defense that says you had to break a law to prevent a greater harm...eg break in into a building in order to get someone trapped within.) the prosecuting attorney held a press conference and stated he was dropping all charges because he believed their act was necessary that the government was not doing enough to stop climate change!

So Jay was our keynote speaker.   Jay was great.   He did something I did not think possible in 45 minutes - he explained the heart of Quakerism.  He began with telling the joke about how there is a button in Quakerism that says:  "I am a Quaker.  In case of emergency be silent."  Yes you all know the button.   But the audience laughed and then Jay explained to them that this would not be like what they expected from a keynote speech that there would be silence, but the silence would not be because he forgot what he was saying but because he was listening for what spirit would have him say.   In this very simple way he explained Quaker silence and Quaker ministry.   And so there were many silences filled with a Living Silence.  In this room of 175 people where few were Quaker you could hear a pin drop in the silence and it was a holy silence.  People of other faiths were also listening in that silence.

 Those of you who have ever been in a Covered Meeting (and with any luck it is still the case that all of you have had that experience at least once and I hope more) will understand what I mean when i say a living silence.  I am posting a link here to the talk and I hope you will all make the time to listen to it because the content is wonderful.   Other than the very first silence which the camera man edited out because it was 3 minutes long, all the silences are in there.   But the thing which is so interesting is like me none of you have ever been in a meeting for worship which was recorded.   So know moments of Living Silence have been recorded.   so what I discovered when I listened to it again is that those silences are in there but they are not living silences, they are just silences....because the Living Silence is being in the Presence of God and that is something which cannot be recorded on film - it is quite literally something that lives in that real time moment.

Jay also introduced and explained his elder Erin who was there with him holding him in prayer while he spoke.  While you cannot unfortunately see her in the video many people said how touched they were by this reminder that we are not faithful alone, and that we must hold each other in prayer to do the big things we must do to stop climate change.   Jay and Erin had been in prayer for quite a while in the morning leading up to the talk, and as a result Jay was centered, able to be faithful and to give ministry, to allow the words to come through him like one does in Meeting for Worship when given a message.   This also taught the audience about Quakerism about what we listen for in silence and what comes through.

Jay talked about his own journey from secular activism to faith based activism and explained getting a leading and discernment - two other critical Quaker concepts.  He peppered in some Quaker history, mentioning both George Fox and Margaret Fell.  He called Quakers to return to their roots and he called everyone in the room to find the radical and spirit alive roots of their faith and live it.  People have been telling me ever since how Jay's words, really how The Holy One's words, touched them.  I invite you to listen as well to this message:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXdKCHjekjc&feature=youtu.be

Discernment...A Quaker Gift for the World

Modern Quakers tend to see clearness committees as for membership and for marriage.  And I have heard some Quakers complain that convinced Friends may see this as more of a rubber stamp function because “of course we want this person to join our Meeting or to get married.”  In a life time of Quakerism I’ve only twice known a clearness committee for marriage to find a couple “not clear” to be married.  In both cases the couple did wind up breaking up, so presumably the clearness committee discerned correctly that the proposed marriage was not rightly ordered.  Done right the clearness committee can ask questions that prompt a deep and meaningful self-reflection.

I would like to argue here that the tool of discernment is one of the greatest gifts Quakerism has to offer the world and should be applied more widely.  So for example here are some of the other uses of a clearness committee I have known people to use a clearness committee for: whether to take a job (especially one that involves moving away or maybe is ethically challenging.), whether to enter a certain profession or change professions, whether one is called to commit holy obedience, or whether one has a leading to work for a social justice cause.  One may also discern whether to leave a marriage, whether to sue someone, whether to “come out”, whether to have a baby and even whether it is time to die!  As you can see the sky is the limit, and think how rich it is to have others to help discern God’s will about such serious and life changing decisions.

Early Friends had Committees of Elders to support members who had been found to be carrying an ongoing ministry.  Their purpose was to make sure they stayed faithful and grounded in their ministry – did not go up in their ego and “outrun their leading.”    Now a days we call these anchor committees.  Some people call them support committees but I’m afraid that secularizes the process and sees it as just “emotional support” – and overlooks the primarily spiritual task of anchoring the person in spirit.

Rightly ordered a clearness committee is not a body to “just listen” or to give advice.  It is to listen in a worshipful way – for each member to try to notice if the person is rightly ordered, to ask questions to try to help clarify, and to reflect what each member understands in the spirit.  Quite profound.

I have an anchor committee now for over 6 months which is helping me discern the right steps for my ministry regarding climate change.   Recently I was at FGC leading a workshop on Quaker practice – I was having to talk about and explain Quaker practice.  Somehow something came together in my head and I realized that many of the non-Quaker activists I knew (some spiritual, some not) were struggling to discern correct steps and some were struggling because they have not discerned and are in the chaos of being pulled hither and yon and everywhere with their concerns for our troubled world.  They do not have Thomas Kelly’s wise words: 

"I dare note urge you to your Cross.  But God, more powerfully, speaks within you and me, to our truest selves, in our truest moments, and disquiets us with the world's needs.  By inner persuasions God draws us to a few very definite tasks,our tasks, God's burdened heart particularizes His burdens in us....
     In my deepest heart I know that some of us have to face our comfortable, self-oriented lives all over again.  The times are too tragic, God's sorrow is too great, man's night is too dark, the Cross is too glorious for us to live as we have lived, in anything short of holy obedience.  It maybe or it may not mean change in geography, in profession, in wealth, in earthly security."   (Amazingly he was writing this during WWII because it is a timely now as it was then.)   He goes on to say:
     " Little groups of such utterly dedicated souls, knowing one another in Divine Fellowship, must take an irrevocable vow to live in this world yet not of this world, kindle again the embers of faith in the midst of a secular world.  Our churches were meant to be such groups, but now too many of them are dulled and cooled and flooded by the secular.".

So I started explaining just a bit to my activist friends and asking them if they would appreciate some help with discernment.  They were quite interested in the idea and I started having one on one meetings with people and simply asking the question “what are you most passionate about in the work against climate change?”  I listened and asked more questions to help them explore.  What emerged was a wonderful flurry of creative and spirit led activism.  My next move would be to teach a clearness committee structure so they don’t have to be dependent upon me for this.   I thus highly recommend that Quakers start learning how to take the discernment process out into the world.