My weekend online retreat went well, I think, at least many of the 15 participants said they appreciated it. It’s the first multi-day event I’ve led in awhile and as I wrote here earlier, I felt strongly led to plan a flexible, Spirit-led event. It was a bit terrifying to be working so from-the-seat-of-my-pants, but it was a great group of people, who could maintain the pacing on their own. There was a lot of very deep sharing (I set confidentiality as a value early on) and we let people share for longer or share something different than asked if they felt it important. There were a few moments when it felt like a long statement might be bringing in too much centrifugal force but it pulled back and we were the richer for it. The hardest time for me was around 4pm Saturday but that’s such a hard time to be alert.
The two-day, three-part retreat was part of Windy Cooler’s “Testimonies to Mercy” series, co-sponsored by New York’s Powell House and Ben Lomond Center. Some random phrases and ideas:
- Integrity=Love, Integrity=Faithfulness, Integrity=Presence.
- Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy: the much-quoted adage, attributed to Warren W. Wiersbe on sketchy quote websites.
- Disciples are followers who aren’t motivated by punishment.
- The image that truth can chase us.
One of the more surprising moments was when I brought in Hugh Barbour’s Five Tests for Discernment. Participants had been talking about the meaning of Truth — Is there only one? Are there many? How do we know to continue when others disagree? — and I thought Barbour’s list would be an easy one to lean on. He developed it in the early sixties as findings for research for his 1964 book, The Quakers in Puritan England and I remembered it as a revelation when I first came across it probably twenty years ago. But the insistence on “moral purity” and “inward unity” didn’t sit well with a group with members that have sometimes had to buck Quaker cultural mores and institutional inertia to follow a leading. We started brainstorming different tests we’ve developed more experientially. I’d love to tease these ideas out more someday.