clearness committee redux

What is a clearness committee?

I asked that over and over, in the past few months. To begin with, “clearness” is the Quaker term for (relative) certainty of the will of God. One becomes clear on a ministry, a move, or a marriage, sometimes with the aid of a clearness committee. A clearness committee is a gathering of discerning people who hear the question on your heart, hold it in prayer, and ask questions of you and your question in return. You’re the focus person, here, the center of attention of the friends willing to sit with you. Those friends devote a few hours to meeting in a worshipful manner with you, supporting you as you look at your question and try to gain this elusive clarity. Don’t tell the Quakers, but it’s a lovely liturgical approach to corporate discernment, in the broad sense of liturgy as the form of holy fellowship among the people of God. You tell the committee how you think the Holy Spirit is leading you, and the committee listens for the Spirit to testify to their spirits on the question at hand.

Quaker committees have clerks, rather than chairs. The idea is that the Spirit is providing the leadership, and the clerk is just tidying up the details. Clearness committees (and maybe most committees, for all I know) have a clerk and then a recording clerk, who gets the awesome job of trying to write down everything that the committee asks and the focus person’s replies.

That’s a vague answer, though. For me, clearness committee was first a class assignment- we have a required course called Discernment of Calls and Gifts, and the final project is participation in a clearness committee. As I thought about how to set mine up – what do I ask? who do I invite? what do I do with it? – clearness committee became an opportunity to listen to stories from friends who had participated in a clearness process before.

Storytellers are marvelous folks, sometimes, when they think their stories are unique. Almost to a person, everyone I asked for stories told me that their committee wasn’t representative of a "normal" committee. “Well, this wasn’t the normal was of going about setting up a clearness committee, but here’s what I did…” was a common introduction to what would prove to be a lovely story that revealed more about the storyteller than about the clearness process.

This “norm,” as far as I can tell from listening to these stories, is a fictional one. It’s a rhetorical device, something to compare ones own clearness committee against to define the particularly special ingredients. Accordingly, I’ll subjectively define a clearness committee for you by telling you about mine, and folks more knowledgeable than me are invited to refine my definition(s) in the comment section.

Clearness committees are fantastic, to begin with. And I don’t mean “fantastic” in the weakened sense in which we print it on colored stickers and plop it on second graders’ subtraction worksheets, not that there isn’t an element of the fantastic in mathematics. I mean fantastic in the wilder sense of a phantasm, something that is utterly captivating in part because it is utterly unfamiliar, something that makes familiar the extraordinary. In this sense, clearness committee sums up my whole year here at ESR- a fantastic mashup of new experiences and ideas, new friendships, and that pervasive sense of disquieting beauty within the newness.

Clearness committee isn’t entirely new, though- it’s a form of corporate discernment, a liturgical advice asking that I’ve done before in other arenas. It’s something like going to the Dances of Universal Peace and dancing to a Buddhist song with a familiar bell that rang after every verse, and eventually realizing that I hear that same bell ring in Catholic services when the spirit of Christ enters the host. The
similarities are surprising, and part of the fantastic element of the process.

Clearness committee was a stressful thing to set up, in part because it forced me to ask other people to do me a favor. A rather major favor, in fact: spend at least two hours of their lives listening to me and my problems, with no immediate expectation of reciprocity. For someone who’d generally rather listen than be self-revealing, and rather help than have to ask for help, this was the least fun part.

Clearness committee is a process that helped me see the distinction between participating in a Quaker process and pretending to be a Quaker. I spent some quality time trying on the latter role, even after sitting in class for two weeks discussing authentic ministry and knowing our true selves. I’m really not a Quaker, though- I’m a mongrel Pentecostal. I can’t tell you clearly why that distinction made such a difference in my approach to the clearness committee, other than that I invited folks over for supper, but it was a big deal.

Clearness committee is when a friend agrees to clerk the whole shebang, and comes over for breakfast the morning of the committee to help me sort out the questions I’m actually going to ask the committee, not acting like he minds that the responses are vague and phrased in terms of William James and Zorba the Greek. This sorting of the questions is a necessary process, even though a part of the clearness process was writing a profile of my gifts for ministry with a lucid paragraph of questions for the committee, because I wrote that profile a week ago and thus it is terribly out of date.

Clearness committee is something so distracting that I offered this friend tea, but forgot to put any water in the mug, and he accepted this distracted hospitality like the attempted gift it was.

Clearness committee is when I spent most of the rest of the day chopping tomatoes, peppers, onions, carrots, spinach, strawberries and cucumbers, making chili, salad, and quesadillas and letting my hands be clear when my head wasn’t. Supper seems a poor return gift to folks who put so much energy into me, but it was pretty good chili and even the burnt quesadillas were enjoyed.

Clearness committee is when four friends of mine came over for dinner and discussion and left pieces of themselves behind, so that when I look at the chairs where they sat I think of the gifts they were willing to give me, even though I was still confusedly talking about William James and Zorba the Greek. Some of their questions landed like gentle grenades and sprayed kindly like pellet guns, peppering the newly decorated walls of my apartment with both large and tiny openings for reflection. Other questions landed softly, more like moths alighting on the side of the couch where I sat, but sitting here typing I can still feel all the queries watching me, waiting in the almost-empty chairs to be dealt with each in turn.

Clearness committee is when these friends said nice things about me that I’m not entirely sure are true, and I couldn’t disagree or politely return the compliments. They’re still sitting in gracious piles in my apartment; I’ve begun trying them on to see how they fit. It’s when those friends offer to come back and listen with me again, and the offer is both dearly appreciated and nearly overwhelming when I’m already feeling covered in the help they’ve given me.

Clearness committee is something that leaves me spewing sappy blog posts, flipping through my thesaurus for words to depict and maybe moderate or disempower an experience that seems to have its own conscious direction within me. Off and on, this year, I'd lay on my bed and try to think about prophecy; I could feel my pulse becoming capricious out of anxiety. Now, I lay on my bed and think about prophecy, and it feels like something is growing inside, like a great springy turtle turning small circles in my belly.

Clearness committee, though, is not easy to talk about. It leaves me stammering. It's like walking out of my apartment on a clear night and stopping on the step to stare at the stars. I don't know how to say it, exactly, but it's a wonderful thing, in the same broad sense of "wonderful" that I meant with "fantastic." I sit and wonder at the power that a new liturgy has to build on the grammar of my God-talk.

Clearness committee doesn't have a clear conclusion, immediately, but a good one.