Clearness Committee

An interesting thing happened at the Cloud Quaker meeting: an attender asked for a Clearness Committee, as part of the process of becoming a Quaker.

Now the interesting thing is that we are not really a meeting, so it would be impossible to join us as a new Friend. A Clearness Committee is something traditional Quaker meetings do for their attenders. You are often able to choose your own members, but members are tasked with asking you the appropriate questions about your beliefs and how you intend to live your life. It is intended so that you know yourself better when it's over, that you know that this is the path you want, and you know that you want Quakers in that path.

I think it's clear that we, as a group of Quakers, help this attender know herself better. This is something any Quakers can do for each other. If we make a time and a place, serve virtual tea, and begin asking questions, she will know by the time it's over whether she really wants to be a Quaker or not. And even if not, she'll come out better when it's over, just by knowing more. Clearness committees can be about marriage and whether two people want to go through it in a Quaker meeting; one committee that I know of was about whether a member should get a job which required carrying a gun. When you have issues of conscience, leading and direction, Clearness committees are great.

To join a meeting, though, you really have to have one. We are a group of international Quakers who know each other and share worship experience regularly. But that is all. We are not affiliated with any particular landed meeting, and we are not likely to become that way any time soon. I like to say we are both a yearly meeting and a worship group - yearly in the sense that we are above the smaller zoom meetings, we are the oldest of the zoom meetings, and we are lucky if we can see each other face to face once a year, if even that. We are a worship group in the sense that we are not quite ready to play a role in a single geographical village, and we also can't have potlucks, unless they're virtual. We can sing, but we can't play music in a group - it doesn't work well on zoom.

So I will tell this attender, who lives in northern Canada, that in order to truly be a member she will have to seek out Canadian Friends and inquire with them. I am sure they meet annually - somewhere - but that is all I know about them. We are proud to be her introduction to Quakerism and I think we are pretty representative when you get right down to it. I think that people need a community, and we are proud to be that, for Quakers everywhere, and we are happy to step in in times like this when it is so hard to meet somewhere physically. It's a new world, zoom, and we represent the possibility of being a Quaker in a community, free of geographical difficulty, but still participating in a community that cares about each other. That's all I ever wanted from this in the first place.