First was the question of who to ask to serve. This was a walk down a list of names with Dear Friend. We came up with a considerable list of people to ask. RantWoman at least was very gratified by the large percentage of Friends who responded. As RantWoman has previously written, our list should have included one or two Friends under 40 and did not. Sigh. RantWoman is actually not displeased with the group that wound up meeting on the best date for everyone even though RantWoman does not know all of them well. They are all seasoned Friends and asked enough perceptive questions for RantWoman to get something out of the process, but more on that shortly. (RantWoman has since learned that, predictably, Dear Friend also has grumbles and RantWoman needs him to articulate the grumbles for others besides herself to season.)
Next came the matter of RantWoman's quest for some guidelines about process aspects of a Clearness Committee, and preferably materials in a format that RantWoman can read on her own. RantWoman, besides her growing impatience on environmental grounds about xeroxing everything, gets mildly grumpy to be handed xeroxed lists of queries or guidelines that she has to interact with visually. (When RantWoman thinks about it even a little bit, this question wanders into lots of general questions about the internet age, relative costs and availability of digital services, the costs of publication and print, RantWoman's seemingly endless need for more gizmos to accomplish things others take for granted, and other Big Issues. RantWoman does not want to go there today.)
RantWoman really wanted guidelines in advance so she could think about them more meaningfully than if she just wings it. RantWoman wanted advance thought but also did not want to deal with the logistics of trying to meet with someone to have things read aloud. In the end RantWoman opted just to trust the Friends assembled. This would not be the first time RantWoman has just had to wing it. But RantWoman is getting ahead of herself again.
First RantWoman looked at her yearly meeting's faith and practice, online. There was lots of distinctly unhelpful material about clearness for marriage, definitely NOT what RantWoman and Dear Friend need. Dear Friend just changed his Facebook status from "it's complicated" to "in a relationship," an evolution RantWoman has been delighted to observe. RantWoman, for her part, briefly listed her relationship status on Facebook as "it's complicated." A friend wrote and asked what RantWoman meant; this friend already knew all the salient complications and RantWoman decided she did not want to answer more questions so she deleted any mention of the topic from her profile. Anyway, the point is the situation with RantWoman and Dear Friend is a bit complicated, but impending marriage to each other is definitely NOT one of the complications.
RantWoman put the term Clearness Committee into the search engine of her choice. RantWoman got a fair number of hits, though about the first three screens of search results relate to Parker Palmer. Parker Palmer writes about a model of a circle of close persons who only ask the focus person questions and help him or her uncover an inner teacher. This model did not to RantWoman's mind speak to the problem of how to help RantWoman and Dear Friend explore the things we needed to explore: some painful personal dimensions of circumstances around her nomination, as well as what we now need to ask of others.
Next, RantWoman looked specifically among materials on the FGC site. Here RantWoman found more that seemed topical reading about conflict and eldering than specifically whatever the Clearness Committee material spoke of. At this point, RantWoman wrote up an email to her committee reporting on her quest and asking for thoughts, especially thoughts about how to handle the dynamics of two people needing to ask things of each other and relying on the clearness committee to listen and ask questions of either or both. (RantWoman has since had phone conversations enough to wonder whether phone would have been faster than email. Well....)
One of RantWoman's questions at this point related to a period just before our Meeting's Year of Discernment. A Friend on Oversight committee had the bright idea that Friends should consider kind of a mini-clearness committee. Friends were offered training. Well, RantWoman does not remember who the training was offered to. RantWoman specifically now wishes if she had the chance that she had signed up and is pondering what would have made her overlook such an opportunity at the time. She also suspects at the time that the prospect of such a mini clearness process would have seemed either prefunctory or high risk of more emotional content than RantWoman would know how to handle. In phone conversation after the committee for RantWoman and Dear Friend met, RantWoman has learned that there were guidelines developed at that time, but RantWoman has been told they do not necessarily relate to RantWoman's situation either. RantWoman was also happy to learn at least some of the committees that met then were quite meaningful for participants and one even just threw out the guidelines.
RantWoman eventually got emailed back some material one of the members of the committee had been scanning from some archival work for Oversight Committee. This material was from the long-deceased and fondly remembered Friend. It also ran heavy to clearness on marriage or to what our Meeting now more commonly calls care committees, committees formed to help a person draw on community support during a wide variety of life difficulties. RantWoman has powerful experience with care committees, both giving and receiving; perhaps that needs to be another post. RantWoman also notes that a later booklet about care committees is also out of print, but she is trying to stay on task about clearness committees anyway.
RantWoman is not certain the concept of Care Committee is completely inapplicable here. Dear Friend has one and RantWoman supposes there are some topical questions she could consider asking him about that. RantWoman used to have one; it sort of dissipated after RantWoman solved some but definitely not all the big questions of her midlife visual de-evolution. One time a member of RantWoman's care committee listened to some or another iteration of RantWoman's interactions with allegedly helpful bureaucracies and asked with trademark deadpan delivery, had RantWoman ever considered having "an anger management moment?" Uhhh, RantWoman is not sure she needed any incitement in that direction.
Back to clearness committeess: The main point, though: the small excerpt emailed to RantWoman and Dear Friend said nothing about process for the situation with RantWoman and Dear Friend. RantWoman wondered whether anyone would come to the meeting with more thoughts than came through in email. Um, no. Since the committee has met, RantWoman has chatted with a couple other Friends who said they have this or that pamphlet or that our Meeting often uses this or that pamphlet though not necessarily applied to RantWoman's situation either. RantWoman has also run a couple weighty Friends' names through her preferred search engine. This caused RantWoman to tromp--again--into the realm of electronic publishing and accessible content. But again RantWoman is getting ahead of herself.
Our committee picked a date, time, location. Everyone but Dear Friend made it on time; Dear Friend was snared in some or another of his endless bus vagaries. RantWoman is meditating about whether she needs to suggest to Dear Friend RantMom's approach to the bus. RantMom's approach is always to leave preposterously early for bus trips, to stand around stomping her cane until her children arrive at the agreed time and then still frequently to arrive places even earlier than RantWoman does. RantWoman somehow is not sure her advice would be helpful, but Dear Friend's interactions with the bus are a continuing vexation when he and RantWoman try to meet. Dear Friend is not, alas, the most vexatious user of transit in RantWoman's life.
While we all waited for Dear Friend, first we chatted about the new Light Rail and then settled into chit chat about our cats. RantWoman is often chit-chat challenged, but the cat chatter helped settle some of RantWoman's nerves.
RantWoman briefly considered being fairly adamant: RantWoman sometimes facilitates meetings, sometimes interprets, sometimes is just a participant in conversations. From painful experience, RantWoman knows she should ONLY ever try to do one role at once and monitoring the flow or proposing guidelines was way more than RantWoman wanted to do in this situation. RantWoman was still seasoning what to say about all this when Dear Friend just plunged in.
RantWoman thought of deleting the following; she definitely feels no need to specify or craft further:
Some points vexing RantWoman that she just wanted to tell Dear Friend, again, this time in front of others.
Some points of misunderstanding from months ago that it now seems pointless to try to reconstruct.
Dear Friend had previously hit an emotional landmine of RantWoman's that he had no idea even to look for. RantWoman was pretty adamant about making the point of not necessarily having to or being able to talk about details to recognize signs of tender points and to think about working around them.
Somewhere along the line, RantWoman got the idea that Dear Friend felt that RantWoman considered some of his view unimportant. "Unimportant?" Unusual for Dear Friend? Unusual for the wide range of characters RantWoman lives and works among? The point possibly most topical for the Clearness process: How specifically related to Meeting?
RantWoman has in mind a few topics she will try to talk with Dear Friend about by phone. There was a sense of being done for the evening if not necessarily for good. RantWoman frequently has to go away from conversations and think things over and season and come back to topics. That might mean meeting again though we are unclear. If we do, RantWoman is going to ask the committee to pay attention to one dynamic. A couple times, one of the two focus people would speak, members of the committee would ask questions and the other focus person would not get asked whether there was anything to add before the conversation moved on to something else. A couple times RantWoman felt like there might be more to explore.
RantWoman is also seasoning some other points about what she has gotten out of dialogue with Dear Friend. The gist of that is like her experiences during worship: some messages for herself alone, some messages for others or the Meeting community but not necessarily during Meeting for Business, some diplomatic formulations about Meeting for Business...
At one sitting at her keyboard, RantWoman felt she lacked sufficient functioning brain cells to write of her own clearness committee and instead was going to see what some other Yearly Meetings have to say about such things. However, RantWoman allowed herself to be led instead to a couple blogs,
http://onequakertake.blogspot.com/2009/11/radically-inclusive-does-not-mean.html
The above is an explanation of quakerism as the practice of business meetings and potluck regardless of what words one does or does not use about what RantWoman calls God. RantWoman remembers getting a similar idea somehow from something her junior high Sunday School teachers said. RantWoman is pretty sure her teachers would have been more certain and even patronizing about the point that somehow one must still accept Christ eventually, but in the meantime God could be taking a good long time laboring with the soul of the unbeliever.
Given RantWoman's quest above for materials online and therefore accessible to her, RantWoman thinks it could be funny to be reading the items below from Thomas Kelly back translated from a Russian translation.
http://johanpdx.blogspot.com/2009/11/eternal-now.html
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