Leadership models from the 4th century

From my journals.  Monday, May 21, 2007 St. Macarius Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Merton writes that we won't find the likes of the desert fathers and mothers today---not even in Skete. What the fathers did had not been done before. With them "you have the characteristic of a clean break with a conventional, accepted social context in order to swim for one's life into an apparently irrational void."

The examples and sayings of the Desert Fathers have become themselves conventional stereotypes, models for the accepted social context of monasticism which is no longer shocking.

"We are no longer able to notice their fabulous originality," writes Merton. "We cannot do exactly what they did. But we must be as thorough and as ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, and cast off the domination of alien compulsions, to find our true selves, to discover and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty and use it to build, on earth, the Kingdom of God. We need to learn from these men of the fourth century how to ignore prejudice, defy compulsion, and strike out fearlessly into the unknown."

How to become wise

From my journals.  Sunday, May 20, 2007 St. Macarius Monastery.  Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Father Zeno and I spoke for quite a while tonight. I asked him about the path to wisdom.

"Remember that you are nothing," he said. "And remember that you are everything---bought as precious by Christ. And if you're everything, so are others; you are to love them, embrace them. You will find yourself in them, and you will find them in you. Love is the path to wisdom. When you are nothing, you have nothing and need nothing and you are free to live in love."

Holiness is . . .

Holiness is living unruffled in the midst of humiliation.  It embraces humiliation as God's school.  It looks up to God from down in the dirt . . . then finds God there.

A great enemy of good living

I wonder how differently we'd tread this sacred earth today if our praying taught us to do this:

"Not to run from one thought to the next, says Theophane the Recluse, but to give each one time to settle in the heart."

From Thomas Merton's journals

How would you treat the clerk at the grocery store?  Your child at the dinner table?  Your spouse?  Balancing the check book, paying bills online? Driving?  Talking with a friend?  Arguing with a foe?

Our distraction, the scatter of our thoughts, our inability to concentrate, our hurry and worry . . . all this is a great enemy of good living, of spiritual awareness, of holiness.

Why leaders can't skimp on their "inner work"

How important is inner work for leaders?  How do we go about it?  How can we cultivate virtue? Parker Palmer says this in his little treasure, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation:

Can we help each other deal with the inner issues inherent in leadership?  We can, and I believe we must.  Our frequent failure as leaders to deal with our inner lives leaves too many individuals and institutions in the dark.  From the family to the corporation to the body politic, we are in trouble partly because of the shadows I have named.

"Inner work" should become commonplace in families, schools, and religious institutions, as least, helping us understand that inner work is as real as outer work and invilved skills one can develop, skills like journaling, reflective reading, spiritual friendship, meditation, and prayer.  We can teach our children something that their parents did not always know: if people skimp on their inner work, their outer work will suffer as well (p. 91-2).