Discernment and the Art of Leadership Today

Image by John Eisenschenk

Discernment’s an older word that’s making a come back today.  Discernment’s more an art than a science.  That fact may account for its near disappearance during much of the 20th century, when we thought we could do just about anything so long as we had a technique derived from well-applied science.

Today, there’s a recovery of the more soulful arts—not just in spirituality but also in business and government.  In fact, business leaders seem to use more spiritual language than religious leaders often do.  Business leaders talk about corporate and product evangelists; consultants help boards recover a sense of soul; and CEO’s champion the kind of corporate spirit that can not only develop a profitable organization, but also one that can advance the common good. 

These are challenging times we’re living in.  There’s great pressure on leaders of every kind.  But frankly who among us is really trained to negotiate the cultural white water that we are called as leaders to navigate today?  Technique and method alone can’t carry us forward.  The future belongs to those who have an uncanny ability to know what needs to be done when.  And knowing that isn’t the product of an MBA from Harvard; it doesn’t come by hiring a hot shot consultant.

We often see success in those who’ve not been to Harvard, who do not have a pedigree, some who’ve never been to college.  They seem to have an angle on an inner truth that no school could have helped them find.  

Today’s most successful entrepreneurs seem to live more by Thomas Berry’s vision, “we must dream our way into the future”[ref] than by what they could have learned in business school.  

They have the uncanny ability to access a deeper and spiritual wisdom that translates into the kind of action and products, services and ideas we most need today.

Truth is, the wisdom they’ve found isn’t the purview only of isolated and enlightened individuals.  The wisdom we need often comes best through groups which are committed to the the practice of discernment, opening to the wisdom within us and within each other.  

There is, of course, a great tradition of this within religious communities.  For Christians, the great councils, beginning with the work of the Jerusalem council in Saint Luke’s The Acts of the Apostles (chapter 15), are examples of this.

Jesus himself taught, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I Am in there among them” (Matthew 18.20).

So . . . 

Let’s recover the historic practice of sitting together in prayerful openness to God and to each other in order to find our way forward in this time of uncertainty, a time that desperately needs a new creativity arising from deep wisdom;  

Let’s move beyond committee and board meetings where so much that goes on, goes on inside our heads—that is, north of the neck.  Let’s not abolish them, but transform them into communities of spiritual discernment, seeking the common good.  

Let’s commit ourselves to discerning ways forward into what has never been before.  Let’s commit ourselves to innovation because we know that “if we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always gotten.”

The Great Banquet all around us: awakening to gratefulness

I'm preaching on Jesus' parable of the Great Banquet this Sunday, and so, I find myself meditating on: (1) God's abundance around and within us, (2) God's desire that all life blossom into unrestrained flourishing, and (3) all that inhibits us from embracing and experiencing God's invitation to the Feast that is life itself.  

This morning I returned to something I posted last year--September 11, 2013.  And it moved me so deeply all over again.  So, I'm inviting you to experience gratefulness--that essential spiritual practice . . . too often elusive today.   

May the beauty of this artful meditation open your heart to sense the presence and pleasure of the banquet God sets before us each and every moment . . . for "those who have eyes to see".

Here's a TED talk by photographer Louie Schwartzberg, which includes a short film (exquisite) narrated by Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast. Watch and open your life to Life, experience the truth that "Today is a gift that was given to you, and the only appropriate response is gratitude." See the world again through the eyes of a child and an elderly man.

Trauma and the integrating power of telling our stories

Trauma.  The world’s rife with it.  And so am I.  In fact, none of us escapes it.  Not if we’re human.

Pia Mellody defines trauma as anything experienced by a child as less than nurturing.

For the rest of us, I’d say that trauma is anything that runs counter to or inhibits the flourishing of our lives.

That means we’re all traumatized to one degree or another.  And as a pastor, dealing with the vastness of human experience for the last quarter century, I can’t imagine a truer statement.  

Trauma wounds us, shapes (and mis-shapes) us, and unless we deal with it, trauma becomes for us a debilitating disease affecting everything we do.

But it doesn’t need to haunt us even though the wounds linger long after they are exposed.  Spiritual practice, meditation, various forms of inner work (like psychotherapy), body-work (like yoga), music, art, and writing poetry are all ways of walking courageously into the traumas of our past and recovering a sense of the preciousness of our souls, a preciousness and innocence that was lost through neglect or abuse.

In this TED talk, British poet Lemn Sissay, bears witness to the way we can courageously face our own past and finding in our stories—even those stories of indescribable pain—the material from which we can create a life of beauty and meaning.  

It’s in putting together the pieces of our broken past—that is, by knowing and telling our stories, no matter how painful—that we ground ourselves, find ourselves, and come home to ourselves.  Stories, and the telling of them, are integrating forces against the disintegrating power of unhealed, unacknowledged, and untold suffering. 

Says Sissay:  “I have to tell my story because there is no one else who can put two and two together.  Because I lived in the British foster care system, there was no one who knew me for more than a year.  For years, I was not even touched by another human being.  I don't believe I've made it. I believe that I'm making it. I believe I've found my past so that I could live in the present.”

Why prayer requires courage, and courage requires prayer

Photo by stéphane giner

How useful and relevant are your prayers in a world like ours, a world that can knock the wind out of the most resilient optimist, a world that needs more courageous action for justice and peace?

Do your prayers strengthen your heart and give you courage to help create what you, in prayer, perceive as God's desire for the world?

Are your actions sustained by the kind of inner life that makes those actions meaningful, useful?

Are they rooted in your deepest values and beliefs?

What's the evidence that they have the potential to bring about the kind of hope and healing our troubled, yet beautiful, world really needs?

In our multidimensional lives and complex world, how can you find the balance between enjoying life and making it possible for others to flourish too?  

In this podcast (a one minute reflection from Sounds True) Matthew Fox, Episcopalian priest and founder of the Wisdom School of Graduate Studies in Oakland, affirms that we can each find integration, meaning, and balance between the inner work of prayer and the outer work of loving the world into wholeness.  

The truth is, the activist life and the mystical life are two sides of the same coin.  

In fact, an activist life may not be worth much without the sustenance of mystical encounter with the divine.  What's more, I don't know how it's possible to live mystically, that is, in deep relation with what's Real, without finding ourselves pressed outward in action for justice, offering ourselves in creative and courageous actions that lead to the flourishing of the creation.

Intention: Take a moment today and honor the interplay between your inner and outer lives. What do you need: a better grounding in prayer that can nourish your work?  Or do you need to adjust your work or activism so that it is better in line with what your prayerful heart desires to see in the world?

Why you would rather shock yourself (electrically) than be alone with God

© 2009 Rama V, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

So you know it’s important to practice some kind of stillness and solitude.  You know it would be good for you—not only your spiritual life with God, but it would do some good for your physical health as well.  The hectic pace you’re living is causing you stress and you know you should do something about it.  Your relationship would benefit too.  Creating a little space and carving out some margins might keep you from those knee-jerk reactions that mean you end up, well . . . mean sometimes.  You know, yelling at the kids, snapping at your spouse, saying something hurtful to a friend, criticizing a coworker.

The problem is, much as you’d like to create some space for stillness, it just isn’t happening.  You sit down to pray or meditate and a million things bounce into your head.  It’s more battle than bliss, and so you give up—feeling guilty and frustrated.  Maybe meditation and resting prayer is for other people, not for you.

Well . . . researchers at the University of Virginia have just reported that, honestly, it’s not just you.  We all have trouble getting still, being quiet.  We avoid open interior space like the plague.  We’d all rather yap at God like the neighbor’s annoying little dog.  Anything but be still . . . quiet . . . doing virtually nothing.  We seem bent on seeking distraction—anything to avoid being with just ourselves, alone with only our thoughts, and with . . . God.    

Leading researcher, Timothy Wilson, says, “We [researchers], like everyone else, noticed how wedded people seem to be to modern technology, and seem to shy away from just using their own thoughts to occupy themselves.  That got us to wondering whether this said something fundamental about people’s ability to do this.”

So, they devised a series of experiments reported at a recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.  It’s a story picked up in The Atlantic. 

“Participants rated the task of entertaining themselves with their own thoughts as far less enjoyable and more conducive to mind-wandering than other mellow activities such as reading magazines or doing crossword puzzles.

“In the most, ahem, shocking study, subjects were wired up and given the chance to shock themselves during the thinking period if they desired. They’d all had a chance to try out the device to see how painful it was. And yet, even among those who said they would pay money not to feel the shock again, a quarter of the women and two thirds of the men gave themselves a zap when left with their own thoughts. (One outlier pressed the button 190 times in the 15 minutes.) Commenting on the sudden appeal of electricity coursing through one’s body, Wilson said, ‘I’m still just puzzled by that.’”

So, being alone with just your thoughts is a problem for others—lots of others—not just you.  We’ll do just about anything to avoid being alone with without distractions.

Maybe there’s some comfort in this.

Maybe it’ll help you to know you’re not alone in not wanting to be alone.

And maybe that’ll help you drop that handy little excuse, “Hey, meditation’s just not my thing.”

It’s not an easy thing for anybody.

But doesn’t mean we shouldn’t practice it.  Frankly, we all need it—like we need air to breathe.  We need to cultivate the ability to create a little distance between the thoughts that bump around in our heads so that we won’t be driven crazy by them.  We need to create the ability to drop our devices and look at nature, or a book, or into someone’s eyes . . . to taste the food we’re eating, to hear—really hear—the sounds around us.

And we need God.  Just God.  No posturing before God.  No yapping at God.  No running from God.  Just being with God, in God.  Growing that sense of belonging to the Beloved, drawn up out of the cramped little spaces of our lives and into the grandeur of the Divine.

This is real prayer, the purest prayer.  But it’s not easy.  And it’ll never become easy if we keep salving our need for distraction by avoiding the fact that we need to drop absolutely everything and be alone for a little while with nothing but ourselves . . . and God.

Yeah, you and a lot of us would rather, it seems, shock ourselves electrically than sit for fifteen minutes with nothing else to do.  But if we take time and train ourselves to step away from distraction, we will find ourselves shocked by what we encounter in that open space—Something we can’t get anywhere else.

If you need a guide to this kind of prayer, see my guide to the Jesus Prayer here.

And here’s another short reflection on the need for contemplative space in our busy lives.