Deepening & Strengthening Our Meeting
Each month while we are in the process of deepening and strengthening our Meeting community, we’ll have a brief report, reading or reflection from the newsletter. Please give yourself and our Meeting the gift of an extra minute or two to read and reflect on these offerings. Meanwhile, please open our photo album to view the full size photos of the event with captions. You can also visit the homepage of the Center for Deepening and Strengthening our Meetings, part of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
Our most recent retreat in the Deepening and Strengthening process focused on the business of the Meeting.
A Friends meeting is not a town meeting in which everyone has the right to speak, for no one has the right to speak in meeting. Friends have, instead, the privilege and the duty to lay before the meeting whatever relevant insight they may possess. Out of this sharing of light may come a greater light which would not have been possible had some refrained from speaking and had others insisted upon being heard many times or at great length.
From the PYM pamphlet, When Friends Attend to Business by Thomas S. Brown
There are many aspects to running our business; the selection and functioning of our officers, our committee work, and our Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business are some of them. What are some new ways of thinking about that final one -- Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business? Here are a few ideas to stimulate thought and discussion:
- Enter the Meeting expecting that we will all be changed by the process of conducting our business in a spirit of worship.
- On any particular item of business, we are each expected to practice discernment before we speak so that we don't need to speak more than once.
- As individuals, we need to be ready to surrender to the judgment of the corporate body.
- Members are called to center, to listen, to speak, and to release. The clerk holds a primary responsibility of listening, reflecting, and discovering the sense of the meeting.
- But if each of us strives to hold a "clerking consciousness," then each of us listens deeply not only to each person speaking, but also to the movement of the whole.
- We must all be engaged in discerning the sense of the Meeting - that shared awareness of where the Spirit is leading us.
- Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business is a time to practice together the expectation that Spirit is present in all moments of our lives, not just when we formally gather to worship.
Here are the "5 Habits of a Spiritual Community" discussed at the retreat:
RADICAL INCLUSION
EXPECTATION THAT ONE OF US IS THE MESSIAH
SUSPENDING JUDGMENT
MAINTAINING AN ATTITUDE OF CURIOSITY
BEING PRESENT WITH A CLERKING CONSCIOUSNESS