Communal Discernment and Spiritual Accompaniment
Prepared message given as part of Three Rivers worship on Zoom, 20 July 2021.
Friend Patricia Loring says Spiritual Discernment is …
the faculty we use to distinguish the true movement of the Spirit… from the wholly human urge to share, to instruct, or to straighten people out…. It is the ability to see into people, situations and possibilities to identify what is of God in them and what is of the numerous other sources in ourselves—and what may be both. . . .
Ok, so that is “discernment.” But why is “communal discernment” important?
Deep in the origins of our tradition there are stories that I think point to the reasons why community became so essential to our faith and practice.
The overly short version of a longer story I could tell is that the early revelatory realizations or “openings” that spread were often connected to some version of George Fox’s opening that “Christ Jesus had come to teach his people himself.” That is, God via the Holy Spirit was accessible to guide and instruct each of us: the Inner Teacher was present and pervasive and needed no particular prayer, practice, or priest to provide an insight, blessing, or conviction. Functionally this meant that early on there were a lot of individuals associated with the early Friends who had a sense of Leading and -- not needing any outward confirmation from hierarchy -- did some radical and intense things. Most famously we have the story of James Nayler, who in the fall of 1656, rode into Bristol on a horse, enacting Jesus’ Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, playing the role of Christ himself.
This did not go over well with officials in the city and it did not go over well with George Fox.
There are other stories beyond Nayler’s but the thing to hold on to for today is that as the tradition began to evolve past the first decade of that initial opening, “that Christ Jesus had come to teach his people himself,” the was a kind of resonance and oscillation that began to be present between that idea and ideas around discernment being something that the group or the congregation was called to do together. We see this thing in lots of places in the Christian Scriptures, as usually when discern is discussed it is done in the context of a letter benign written not to one person, but to a whole church, like in Rom. 12:2, 1 Cor. 6:1-9; and Heb. 5:14, for example.
By the time the group of mostly northern English traveling ministers known as the “Valiant 60” began to travel and preach, many of them did so in pairs, modeled after, among other things, Jesus’ orders in Luke 10 that the disciples should travel that way and the record of that being how Paul and Silas and Barnabas and Mark worked as well.
But left there this could just be a message of accountability: we do things communally just in case Callid begins to think he’s Jesus and we’ll be able to catch him before he finds a donkey. That is part of it and we shouldn't be ashamed of that part. We are infallible and having each other to help us to “distinguish the true movement of the Spirit” is a good thing. But it isn’t the only thing.
By agreeing to commit to others as part of a spiritual community we aren’t just saying that we’re ok with others poking into our business to make sure we don’t publicly botch anything… We’re hoping that others will poke into our business to make sure we don’t inwardly spiral into struggles with the seeds of war. Or, maybe, to help make sure we do struggle with the seeds of war, to encourage us to ask how we are going to resist those systems and structures of oppression that re-seat themselves in me with each day, and each tax payment I make on my “ownership” of colonized land, and each purchase made at the market of a global economy built upon inequity and environmental consumption.
At our best, we commit to look after one another not as watch guards and wardens, but as companions and caregivers. During the course of walking with one another we get to not only help each other skip over some potholes and mud puddles, but also to encourage, cheer, and rejoice in the moments of transformation. And to lament at our failures. To recognize we do fail, and to turn over that failure to God in the company of those who want to allow it to be seen and learned from. But also…
We want to walk with those that know that airing dirty laundry for the sake of airing dirty laundry isn’t the answer either. Self-flagellation is no more the answer than ignoring the fact that we sometimes trip on our clay feet. Again, it is a balance:
Know we can each name God’s call on our lives without others
AND… when we listen with others we hear more nuance.
Know that we walk with one another to help each other up when we slip
AND… so that we can cry with one another, laugh with one another, and leap with joy at those moments of inbreaking when the reign of God is there in our midst.
My prayer, especially here at Three Rivers is that what we are doing helps us all to find additional companions to walk with. That our time together encourages us to listen better together and when we part ways. That we get better at sifting through all the noise of the world to hear sounds of a song we feel we are supposed to follow. That we get to do all that with each other, urging one another along, looking to one another to search out what is of God.
As we pray today, see if anything rises for you around these queries:
What discernment are you in the midst of where you wish you had more company?
Where are the places in your life you would welcome accompaniment at this time?
What joys and sorrows might be yours to share in the spirit of drawing nearer to each other and God?
