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.