如何任职「澄心委员会」？
Discernment is really the heart and the core of everything we do as Friends.
It's the core of our practice in worship, it's the core of our practice in worship
for business, it's the center of how we make decisions in our lives, to marry, for our
employment, for our work in the world, for our ministry.
The process of discernment and being called, or having a leading or the deepest knowing.
All of those feel like incredibly connected, if not the exact same thing.
For me, discernment is the core technology of Quakerism.
It is the thing that we learn to do and that our faith supports.
And that is to thresh through the complexity of life and find the kernel, find the root,
find the way. The way for me today, at this moment.
Some people may call it seeking the will of God.
Others may call it consulting their deep inner wisdom.
I think a lot of people do discernment relatively spontaneously when they have a sticky issue
to deal with, and they stop, they let it rest a while.
They let an answer rise up in them.
To tell the difference between the still small voice that's guiding me well and the
many other voices, the many other fine, human voices that are within me.
So, discernment is listening for God's will for us to move us more fully into God's understanding
of the kingdom of heaven, of right order between all creation, humans and plants and animals
and ideas, I would even say.
Of course, part of Quaker discernment is the rational, reasonable assessment of the pros
and cons of the decision at hand.
Discernment takes it a step farther than that and invites us to go to a deep place, a centered
place, and to see how. How where our rational minds have led us, sits in us.
Discernment is accessing that place where God is at work in us, and it's well beyond
rational, thoughtful, weighing of the situation.
It's not without an information gathering phase where we have to understand the parameters
clearly, but then, after that, it comes down to accessing that same place that vocal ministry
comes from, that place of deep faithfulness where we don't care whether it's this or that.
We have no investment in which side of that question we fall on, and: "God, what do you
want me to do here?"
And so then we listen with the reason, we listen with emotion, we listen with inspiration,
and, kind of, more than a touch of hope.
And I'll say, experientially, I know that it functions.
It works.
That when we trust one another, when we are able to be vulnerable with one another, when
we allow ourselves to think that it might actually be the case that God is an actual
thing that we might actually be able to hear and might live into actually better lives,
well, and behold something happens in that space.
So, discernment, for me, is definitely a listening, but it also is this process
of allowing and letting go.