05.16.07
leader as listener II
peregrinatio est tacere: to be on pilgrimage is to be silent.
Speech involves us in the affairs of this world. It leads us to a kind of engagement where we often participate in useless debate: debate where the point is not the discovery of truth, but of proving a point. It is ego-centric, compulsive, and useless. Speech becomes another means of climbing a ladder, when the entire movement of God is downward, toward emptiness. Thomas Merton reminds us,
It is in the souls who love God that peace is established in the world.
They are the strength of the world, because they are the tabernacles of God in the world…
They are the only ones capable of understanding joy. Everyone else is too weak for joy.. They see God..
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.[1]
Heidegger taught us that there are two ways to approach knowledge: meditative, and calculative. Most speech is calculative, and works violence on words. We bring our baggage with us. We wear colored glasses and forget that we wear them. We come not on bended knee, but with instruments of dissection, intent on overpowering the object of our interest, bending it to our purpose: knowledge and control.
But the vocation of language should not be so. Our task is priestly: offering the world to God. Our task is poetic: bringing the world to speech. Recently David Fitch asked,
What if we cast aside the modernist language-world dichotomy and instead [saw] language as that by which we participate in reality, a way of life that then enables us to experience things which cannot be captured in language alone. When we see language like this, we notice it can show/reveal realities instead of just speaking about them. And by participating in these languages, learning a way of life, we are transformed into seeing and experiencing what could not simply be talked about.
Speech becomes a sacramental act, a way of bringing God and the world into relationship. It becomes an act of humble service. Speech escapes the boxes and Petri dishes of the scientific enterprise and enters the realm of intimacy: the embrace of a lover.
The rationalist agenda so strongly pursued in modernity nearly lost this understanding. While we sought power and control we marginalized all means of knowing that did not result in certainty. Intuitive knowledge, and the knowledge that come from love are beyond our control, and therefore appeared to be less valid that other means of knowing. But lovers kept the secret intact. Lovers kept their ears tuned for even a whisper of their name.
Just as we sought certainty in our knowing, so we sought clarity in our plans. Oswald Chambers challenges this way of living.
Our natural inclination is to be so precise— trying always to forecast accurately what will happen next— that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing. We think that we must reach some predetermined goal, but that is not the nature of the spiritual life. The nature of the spiritual life is that we are certain in our uncertainty.
Certainty is the mark of the commonsense life— gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, not knowing what tomorrow may bring.[2]
Much of our desire for certainty is in stark contrast to the walk of faith. We want certainty of success, certainty of measurement and assessment, and certainty of our next step. But the Lord appears to love ambiguity. Could it be that our desire for certainty is merely the flip side of our desire for control? Margaret Wheatley writes,
How do we attend to our purpose while holding the humility that we do not create it? Once we catch a glimmer of what it might be, how do we avoid taking over as creator? It gets even more complicated. How do we avoid getting ego-seduced by the specific manifestation of our gifts? Is it possible to live in the humility of knowing that our purpose, as clearly as we self-define it, is but “a husk of meaning� The task is really to become superb listeners. Heidegger wrote that waiting, listening, was the most profound way to serve God.[3]
Beyond the 4 walls » Leadership said,
May 16, 2007 at 10:47 am
[...] I wanted to give this set of posts a post of their own, rather than including them in the below. Len Hjalmarsen has written some fantastic stuff this week on leadership. The Listening Silence, Leader As Listener, Leader As Listener II have been posted so far, but I think there may be more to come. Through reading Len’s posts it has been highlighted to me the need for silence. Silence to hear God, silence to stop speaking. Another angle that has stirred in my mind is that leaders need to really listen to people within their church and outside of it. How often do we stop and really listen to someone, really take in what they have to say without our own agenda, or our mind wondering. When was it that you last really listened – to God or people? agenda, church, god, hear, leadership, len hjalmarsen, listener, listening silence, people, silence Cat: [...]