Bridgend Quakers -
If you keep on expecting, even for a bus, it feels if it will never come. But just relax and lo! It appears and you have to scamble on. But it is easier to relax if you are better prepared. If I get up early enough to wander round the garden, delight in the flowers I pick, read some Quaker Faith & Practice and still drive slowly to meeting, my attitude is calmer, more welcoming, more open, more loving. I know this, yet still so often fail to do it.
St John of the Cross, one of Christendom’s greatest mystics, has advice for when the light just will not come. ‘What we must do in the dark night,’ he writes, ‘is leave the soul free and unencumbered, at rest from knowledge and from thought. We must not trouble as to what to think or on what to meditate – be content, rather, to wait on God peacefully, attentively, without anxiety. Not straining to experience or to perceive him. Such efforts only disquiet the tranquillity granted to the soul in contemplation.’
Christine Davis and Douglas Rennie [dialogue] (2007), Introduction on Discerning the Way, www.summergathering.org.uk/
The blackbird may have evolved in a certain way and just be the result of evolution,
but on a wet day, when there are grey skies, and when the raucous sea-
There is something within each of us that if nurtured may grow; something that shines and lights up the way. There is a voice that needs to be heard….But often it seems that we are afraid of the voice that is our own. It is as though we have to talk with the perfect intonations of the collective language, since otherwise [we will be pointed out] as different and we may not be accepted….We do not always recognise our own voice…
.
Of course there needs to be a shared language, but this does not mean that all the words need to be immediately recognised. What are required are the trust to speak and the confidence to listen. There needs to be a willingness to share the same space and to seek meaning together.
Harvey Gillman (2007), Consider the Blackbird – Reflections on Spirituality and Language, London: Quakerbooks.
Receiving TheLight
The Blackbird
Rosemary Hartill and Vera Dolton [dialogue], Faith into Action: All Journeys have a Beginning, The Friend, 3 August 2007
Discernment
Discernment is a bit like wisdom: we sense what it means, but we get a bit stumped if we have to explain it or describe it. It means sorting out right from wrong. It is a process rather than a result, but we use it to represent a variety of different processes: or at least what we do in groups this size, and larger; what we do in smaller groups (like our own meetings) and what we do individually, in private….
It means listening to God. That’s a problem for many of us as we have not found God speaks to us. But we do still have to listen to discern. The voice – whether of God, of the Spirit, of the leadings of the centred group or the deeply grounded person – will come. That is our experience, and it’s inevitable that we have different ways of experiencing it and describing that experience.
We have different ways of testing these experiences. There is a good description
in Galatians 5:22-