Patricia Loring

This is an essential Quaker spiritual formation text, which grew out of workshops. The author explores many personal practices which can help to sharpen one's perception of God. She suggests setting aside time each day for spiritual refreshment, "'a time of retirement' from outward concerns and activities, to attend exclusively to the movement of the Spirit." She explores many possible practices and offers ingredients for Friends to make time for the holy in one's daily life. The second volume treats the spiritual basis of the structures and practices that sustain a Quaker worshiping community; the spiritual grounding and understanding of worship, ministry, eldering, oversight and other spiritual gifts in mutual service within the meeting as spiritual formation; personal transformation and transformed relationships within spiritual community; communal discernment in personal matters and in the conduct of meeting business; wider Quaker service; adult religious education as part of spiritual formation.… (mehr)

Spiritual Discernment lies at the heart of Quaker spirituality and practice. It is grounded in the central Quaker conviction of the availability to every person of the experience and guidance of God, immediate as well as mediated. Discernment is the faculty we use to distinguish the true movement of the Spirit to speak in meeting for worship from the wholely human urge to share, to instruct, or to straighten people out. It is the capacity we exercise in a centered meeting for worship for the conduct of business to sense the right course for the meeting to take in complex or difficult circumstances. 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. It is that fallible, intuitive gift we use in attempting to discriminate the course to which we are personally led by God in a given situation, from our other impulses and from the generalized judgment of conscience. This pamphlet articulates the use of clearness committees as instruments of discernment in the tradition of Quaker spirituality and practice.… (mehr)