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“Is the life I am living the life that wants to live in me?”
Recently these questions have framed personal conversations, a small group discussion and much of my personal reading and thought. What is it I’m asked be and do? What is it I was made to and be? What is it that I am able to be and do? Palmer’s book has given me three very helpful insights that I want to muse on in three separate postings.
As Palmer states, in the end I will not be asked why I did not live like Moses or Abraham or even Jesus. I will be asked did I live like ‘Alan’. And that is a much harder question to fully answer. Imitation of others, external expectations and internal drivenness don’t lead to vocation. Rather vocation is a calling we hear from within.
And finding our sense of vocation is a painstaking task. “The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. The soul is like a wild animal – tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of the eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek (p7-8).”
As Paul claims – “what we see now is like a dim image in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. What I know now is only partial; then it will be complete – as complete as God’s knowledge of me (2 Cor 13 v 12 GNB).”
These last few weeks after returning from some time away have included time at the base of Palmer’s tree; as it were, silently waiting for that glimpse out of the corner of my eye, the faint whisper in the silence, the resonating note, the stone that points a path ahead.
“Palmer states –“Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God. It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self (p10).”
Clues, Palmer suggests, are given to us in our early years when we lived closer to our birthright gifts. True vocation, says Fredrick Buechner, joins self and service. “He defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need. Buchner’s definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world: it begins, wisely, where vocation begins – not in what the world needs (which is everything), but in the nature of the human self, in what brings the self joy, the deep joy of knowing that we are on earth to be the gifts that God created (p16-17).”
“Consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility.” Vaclav Havel (p75).
Leadership
The power for authentic leadership, is found not in external arrangements but in the human heart. Authentic leaders in every setting – from families to nation-states – aim at liberating the heart, their own and others’, so that its power can liberate the world.” (p.76)
“A Leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadow-filled as hell. A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good.” (p78).
“Those of us who readily embrace leadership, especially public leadership, tend toward extroversion, which often means ignoring what is happening inside ourselves. If we have any sort of inner life, we ‘compartmentalize’ it, walling it off from our public work. This, of course, allows the shadow to grow unchecked until it emerges, larger than life, in the public realm, a problem we are well acquainted with in our own domestic politics. Leaders need not only the technical skills to manage the external world but also the spiritual skills to journey toward the source of both shadow and light.” (p79).
Overcoming the power of these shadows sides in our leadership is a demanding task. Anne Dillard gives us a picture of what is needed – “in the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the sub-strata, the ocean or matrix or ether which bouts the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.” (cited p80)
Dillard’s process is inward and downward toward the hardest realities of our lives, rather than outward and upward toward abstraction, idealization, and exhortation (p80).
Palmer states that” if we do not understand that the enemy is within, we will find a thousand ways of making someone ‘out there’ into the enemy, becoming leaders who oppress rather than liberate others.” (p80)
The leaders we need are those who have penetrated their own darkness and can lead us to a place of ‘hidden wholeness’. (p81)
The shadows he talks about are:
1. Insecurity about identity and self worth
The leaders that he looks for “possess a gift available to all who take an inner journey: the knowledge that identity does not depend on the role we play or the power it gives us over others. It depends only on the simple fact that we are children of God, valued in and for ourselves. When a leader is grounded in that knowledge, what happens in the family, the office, the classroom, the hospital can be life-giving for all concerned.” P87
2. Life is a battle.
The belief that the universe is a battle ground and hostile to human interests. As we move beyond seeing the world as about winners and losers we receive the deep insight that the universe is working together for good.
3. Functional atheism
The belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen.
4. Fear
Especially our fear of the natural chaos of life. Many of us – parents and teachers and CEO’s – are deeply devoted to eliminating all remnants of chaos from the world. We want to organize and orchestrate things so thoroughly that messiness will never bubble up around us and threaten to overwhelm us.(p89)
The insight we need to understand (literally stand under) is that chaos is the pre-condition to creativity.
5. Denial of death itself.
Try to protect us from the fact that all things must die in their time. Leaders who participate in this denial often demand that the people around them keep resuscitating things that are no longer alive. Projects and programs that should have been unplugged long ago are kept on life support to accommodate the insecurities of a leader who does not want anything to die on his or her watch. (p90).
Within a denial of death lurks another fear – the fear of failure…failure is always a little death. – the best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know that the death of an initiative – if it was tested for god reasons – is always a source of new learning.
“If we leaders are to cast less shadow and more light, Palmer suggests, we need to ride certain monsters all the way down, explore the shadows they create, and experience the transformation that can come as we ‘get into’ our own spiritual lives. (p85)”
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• © 2005 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on September 9, 2005
