LEADING THE LEADERS.

 Is it possible to be disappointed by a book, yet still find it excellent?  I am not sure who recommended Graham Standish's new book to me (Humble leadership: being radically open to God's guidance and grace) , but I started into reading it with the hope that I would learn a great deal from it, and be bursting to recommend it to other leaders.

It is a good book.  It begins and ends with the spiritual dimensions of leadership.  Standish criticises the unthinking way Christian leaders sometimes adopt the advice for secular leaders.  He believes Christian leaders should be

·        humble,

·        self-aware,

·        prayerful,

·        unifying,

·        and spirit-led.

He rejects the notion that humble leadership is ineffective, citing, with some contradiction, how the successful CEOs of secular organisation are often humble.  I liked his attempts to find sources for understanding leadership in the scriptures and in church history, particularly in the desert Fathers. 

His favourite is Dorotheos of Gaza, whose key principle was to first blame oneself before blaming our followers. Standish writes, "I have found that even though it is easy to detect others' faults, I can work to detect how I failed to give enough instruction or guidance.  By sharing the blame for the failure, I not only hold the other person accountable, I become accountable to helping resolve the problem."  (Page 168).

The leadership he recommends is not only godly, but also opens the way for God to transform the congregation or institution that the leader leads. 

But what should I make of Standish's concept of "mystical intelligence?"  I realised as I was searching the book for a way to grow in my understanding of the process of discernment.  It is obvious that leaders need discernment, but is it pure gift or can it be learned?  And if discernment can be learned, how do you learn it?

I find Standish's answer somewhat puzzling and evasive.  He posits an additional intelligence named mystical intelligence to add to IQ and emotional intelligence.  This is how he describes it:

Mystical intelligence incorporates [IQ and EQ], but adds a deeper awareness that is in tune with our transconscious, which integrates both our aspirations (yearning for God) and inspirations (the deeply sensed in-breathings of God into our mind, heart and soul).  

The transconscious is a level of consciousness that goes beyond conscious or unconscious awareness. This level of consciousness is connected to the transcendent, to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit who speaks to us from the eternal. Just as we can live unaware of unconscious motivations and unresolved conflicts that cause certain behaviors in us, behaviors that counselors have to help us resolve, we can also live in ignorance of our transconscious. While the transconscious is a dimension of consciousness that is connected to the sacred and divine, it is also easy to ignore because it's a deep, rather than a surface consciousness. Like the unconscious, it lies deep within our psyche connecting it with God at levels that the conscious mind doesn’t easily access.

Mystical intelligence arises out of the transconscious, so that we live in openness to the sacred and divine in everything. By becoming open transconsciously, we develop an intuitive, integrative awareness of God's presence in all situations that help us to lead others in God's direction. When we are transconsciously aware, we sense God's presence and guidance at deep levels beyond normal perception. It's the depth of this awareness that causes others to be skeptical of our discernments. What we see is not readily apparent to others, and sometimes it's only fairly apparent to us.  (Pages 147-148)

Maybe I've missed something somewhere, but this definition seems to define "transconscious" in terms of mystical intelligence, and mystical intelligence in terms of "transconscious”.  Are these two vaguely defined qualities an extension of Freudian concepts or do they come from the mystical tradition? is Standish saying anything more than that we should trust in our praying?

I would dearly love to be a more discerning leader.  I know that one way, I can become more discerning is by working harder at my praying.  This excellent book, however, by abandoning its usual clarity, lets me down at this point.  It seems there are no skills I can learn to be a better discerner.  It's back to my prayers, I think.

Rae and I, finally, after two years, visited my parents’ grave with its new headstone, and Mum’s ashes interred in Dad’s grave. All looks well, even though the Tambellup cemetery is a bleak sandy hill suitable for no habitation – except for rabbits! Continued after picture....

It set Rae and me discussing where we would like our remains to be placed. Our conclusion was that we would like our ashes interred in the rose garden at St David’s in Ardross where we met and were married, and where we worshipped for a dozen years until moving to Busselton.

It also set me thinking about the meaning of death for a Christian. I have been reading and reviewing Adams Vs God – the Rematch, and find this atheist’s view of death quite attractive. Because Adams believes that there is nothing after death, he values life highly. Death may mean extinction, but this extinction is no problem; after all, he says, we were extinct for eternity before our birth.

In my own thinking, Philip Adams’ concept of death connects with that of the King in Ionesco’s intriguing play Le Roi se meurt, (The King is dying), who cries out in restrained agony, “When I die, the Universe dies with me!” Existentially that rings true. My death is the death – from my perspective – of everything that there is. Upon my death, the material universe, my wife and friends, will no longer be available to me. In that sense, they die with me.

I know I take a line unpopular among Christians when I state the place to start in our understanding of death is here: that death is death; it is final, extinction both subjectively and objectively. After death is nothing. Evidently thinking of King Louis XV, the King in Le Roi se meurt reflects on the absolute finality of death and exclaims, “Après moi, le déluge!” One interpretation of Ionesco’s flood to follow is that if you state the blunt truth that death is the end, a flood of denial will greet you. 

I know: I have started arguments in congregations by making this claim. Some Christians flinch in the face of death; in a fit of wishful thinking they turn the resurrection into a comforting statement of personal immortality. Instead of the death of death (“Death, where is thy sting?”), they wish to slide right past its appalling reality and avoid dying altogether.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we slipped over death into everlasting bliss? Wouldn’t it be lovely to meet our lovers and friends, and converse with Virgil and Dante in paradise? Wouldn’t it be just perfect?

In Scripture, the snake tempts the man and the woman to think that they will not die.”Of course you will not die... You will become like gods, knowing good and evil.” The temptation to ignore death is real.

Denying death in this way makes a travesty of resurrection. Unless we face the finality of death, unless we acknowledge in our depths that death is the end, we cannot begin to appreciate the grace of God who chooses to raise us from its finality.

I felt little emotion as Rae and I stood at my parents’ grave with its new headstone. Theirs and the neighbouring graves of Nan and Grandad and our little niece Ebony did not tap the well of grief even though it still there, still fresh from Mum’s death. Those whom I loved are certainly not there, and in any reasonable sense of the phrase, they are certainly not “anywhere”.

Anna, the young friend of Mister God, made the best attempt to describe the ‘place’ where their dead are.  They are, she asserted, “in Mister God’s middle”. The childish phrase captures the grace of God who knows the dead are dead (God mysteriously experienced the death of Jesus) and yet who simply does not allow death the final word.

Reviewed by Ted Witham

As a rule, they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. On that somewhat precarious principle, I like books that challenge my faith. I like to be forced to enrich my concepts of God, my superstitions about Word and Sacrament, or my unexamined assumptions about what the cross and resurrection mean.

The Violence of God and the War on Terror is one such book. Let its author, Jeremy Young, into your head long enough to convince you of the basic point in his book, and you have to change either how you think of faith or what authority you give to the Bible – or both.

 Young, an Anglican priest and family therapist, starts with the thought experiment that the Bible is the report of a family about an abusive family member. The people of the Old Testament describe a pattern sadly familiar to a family therapist. This God is apt to uncontrolled rage if he doesn’t get his own way. Often he orders total destruction of his enemies[1], and lets that anger hover over his family as a threat. Ultimately, as the historical books record, God uses superpowers Assyria and Babylon to crush his own people, destroying the kingdoms and allowing them to be taken into punitive exile. To cap all that, God then makes the Israelites feel that they had brought this punishment on themselves.

The family therapist notes the similarities between this wild rage, the actual violence, inducing guilt and the behaviour of a violent husband towards his wife, the people of Israel. Even passages like Hosea 11 extolling God’s gentle love are suspect: they are like the “honeymoon” phase in the abuse cycle.

In Young’s exposition, the New Testament God is not much better. There God behaves towards his Son as an abusive father. Young argues that the NT authors take this view whether you read the atonement expresses God’s love or God’s wrath. In fact, if God allows his son to be abandoned, tortured and crucified as a demonstration of love, this may be even sicker than a father striking his son in a rage or in an attempt to avenge his honour.

I loathed Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ. It dwelt so lovingly on scarified flesh and unspeakable pain, and then had the temerity to place these horrors in the framework of God’s love.  A loving father, surely, would do everything in his power to prevent his son being treated with such violence.

The tragedy family therapists often see is that the victim of abuse often repeats the cycle of abuse in the next generation or the next relationship. Abused children can become abusive parents. Battered spouses often escape one violent partner only to fall into the brutal hands of another man who initially seems strong and protective, but turns out to be as violent as the first.

Young wonders whether the violence seen in Christian crusades, Islamic jihad or in Israeli over-reactions to Palestinian provocation is an outworking of Biblical religion. As children of Abraham’s God, we inflict on others what God has inflicted on us. Alternatively, we, the bride of Christ, allow ourselves to be so pathologically passive that we invite violence onto ourselves.

Of course, we have heard these allegations before – but usually from virulent atheists like Richard Dawkins, not, as here, from a Christian theologian noting this pattern in Scripture and daring to speak out his insight. Young goes further to claim that accounts of this violent God are not just a small part of Scripture, a minority tradition. Rather the abusive God is the Bible’s central message about him.

Young makes his case well. His unflinching honesty disconcerted me at times, though his conclusion did give me a little comfort.

Essentially, Young concludes, you have a choice between three logical consequences of his reading of Scripture:

1.     You can agree that God is violent, and God’s violence justifies my violence and that of others. This is the stated position of many jihadists, and the implied position of many Christian fundamentalists.

2.     You can decide on other grounds that God is not by nature violent. Rather, the minority view in Scripture is that God is essentially love (as in, for examples, the epistles attributed to St John[2]), and this view more nearly approaches the truth about God. This response raises huge questions about the authority of Scripture because your acceptance of Scripture becomes conditional.  As I attempted one day to justify homosexuality from Scripture Hugh McGinlay said to me with some exasperation, “Why don’t you just say that homosexuality is OK, and admit that the Bible is wrong on that point?” Hugh will be glad to know I am coming around to his viewpoint.

3.     You can join Richard Dawkinsand Christopher Hitchensand throw God out completely on the grounds that belief in God is dangerous[3], and those who worship God will sooner or later emulate God’s violence.

I take the second view, but with some fear and trembling. It seems to exalt my view over that of the Bible. However it may be less arrogant than that.  As Young points out, the community of interpretation, both Christian and Jewish, has tended to interpret Scripture as though “God is love” is the majority tradition.

The Violence of God is the last in a series of books I have been reading about Scripture’s “difficult” passages.  Ellen Davis' The Art of Reading Scripture urges us[4] to read Scripture as Christians, rather than primarily as scholars or fundamentalists.  Surely it makes sense for Christians to see, for example, Isaiah’s suffering servant as prefiguring Christ – rather than as scholars insisting only on the text’s original context, or as fundamentalists reducing the image to just one meaning. For Davis, any text can yield its blessing for us now.

Living Through Pain encourages[5] the reader of the Psalms to “hang in” with the Psalmist in her suffering, even if there is no solution or remedy for the Psalmist’s pain; to the extent of maybe concluding with Psalm 88 that all that remains is “darkness” – unresolved pain.

The world has become darker: for me, as chronic pain tries to further restrict my life; for the world, as an abusive President keeps striking out in rage against the trauma of 9/11, whose perpetrators were replicating the violence earlier directed against them.

It is an important time to look with courage into both the world’s darkness and the darkness at the heart of Scripture.  Only an unflinching gaze at the Bible’s horrors will reveal the love at its heart burning away the darkness, which has not overcome it.

Living in the US, we found some things difficult. Difficult perhaps only because they were different. American kids took us aback by asking us "What?" instead of “I beg your pardon”, but then our kids often called American adults by their Christian names, which Americans felt as disrespect.  Just as people thought our kids polite because they said "please" and "thank you", we found American kids very polite because they consistently called us " Sir" and "Ma'am".

Some issues, however, offended us because they were not just different, but morally deficient.  In a recent speech, Barack Obama quotes the truism that the most segregated hour in the US is on a Sunday morning.  That matches my experience.

I remember being surprised, for example, when asked to take services in the Episcopal churches in the North Carolina town of Oxford.  St Stephen’s Oxford, was the "white" church.  Carpeted and air-conditioned, white painted throughout, the church building reflected the wealth of the town.  The American flag decorated the sanctuary.  As the service began, the congregation sang “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”, and saluted the flag.  (During this ritual, I faced the altar in silence and acknowledged my God!)

St Stephen’s was full of white folks; not a black face, nor a brown face, nor a yellow face to be seen.  I knew the power of this.  It was not simply coincidence.  An elegant, well-spoken, black-skinned lady arrived one Sunday in our home church in Durham, NC.  We greeted her, other foreign students greeted her, local academics greeted her, but long-time locals ignored her.  We believed she came from an island off the American east coast but we never got to find out.  The lady tolerated her “welcome” for only a few weeks.  So we were not surprised by St Stephen’s in Oxford.

After my first service at St Stephen's, I crossed town to Saint Cyprian's Church, the so-called "black" church.  Saint Cyprian's had no carpet or air-conditioning, but in each pew, there were Martin Luther King Jr. fans for the ladies to wave to create a breeze.  There were black folks at St Stephen's.  But there were folks of almost every imaginable ethnic background, even some white folks who like their fellow congregants felt uncomfortable at St Stephen's.  Martin Luther King's fans were alive and well, but it was 20 years since Dr King had been martyred.  We asked ourselves, where were the results of the Civil Rights Movement?

Another 20 years on, and Barack Obama is still talking about the church's segregated hour.

But now there may be a difference.  Obama's speech delivered March 18, and usually reported as a speech on race, moved me deeply.  In the midst of a vigorous competition for power, the speech called for healing, reconciliation, and moving on to “a more perfect union".

Even if Mr Obama fails to win this year's race to the White House, this speech should go down in history for the power of its analysis, for its courage in facing an issue for America, and for the sincerity of its solutions.  Maybe Obama is the man for the moment.

As Professor Philip Gorski from Yale University points out, the speech was about more than race.  The speech pointed out America's "original sin” of slavery, but it moved beyond simply black men's rage.  Obama was not captive to the anger of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He reached out also to white poor and all decent Americans fearful of the oppressors in the current political and economic scene.  He spoke of reconciliation.  He spoke of a new coalition between the élite and the poor, a new covenant between leaders and the led.

Philip Gorski shows that this picture was not only about race and class, but also an appeal to civil religion.  Unlike in other democracies, the language of religion has always played a part in America’s public square.  The Religious Right use the language of religion to promote their view of redemptive violence.  Obama rightly rejects this.  The secular left has tried to empty the public square of religious language.  This, Obama knows, won't wash with the American public.

Decent America has been built in the overlap between belief and unbelief.  Civil religion has powerfully used the rhetoric of Christianity to build the common good.  Even so, care is taken in the language not to exclude non-believers.  This overlap, this civil religion resonates with the American people.

Barack Obama inspires partly because he knows how to appeal to the best instincts of his fellow citizens. In this Obama is not simply parroting the language of the civil religion, he is re-minting it.  This phrase "perfecting the Union" recalls both sacralised ways in which many Americans use the word Union (e.g. “these United States”) and also the language of the sacrament of marriage.  He is making something new of the sacred bond between Americans.

I would even take his language a step further; "union" is the language of mysticism.  Mr Obama is hinting that the experience of national unity parallels the journey into closeness with God: perfecting the union.

Because of this many Americans believe they have met in Obama a politician who is not cynical and self-serving.

Are there lessons in this for Australia?  The intensity of responses to the intervention in aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory suggests that race is important for Australia.  We do need to recognize our "original sin" of dispossession.  Until now, each succeeding generation of immigrants has simply added to the effects of aboriginal dispossession.  The formal Apology in Parliament last month gives me hope that we may now begin to heal the wounds at the heart of our national life.

But can we, like Barak Obama’s constituency, be inspired by the language of civil religion?  Unlike the United States, ours is a genuine secular democracy.  The Australian public square is blind to the religion, the beliefs, the philosophy of individuals.  The only identity we have in the public square is that of citizen.  Turkey was founded at about the same time as Australia, and like Turkey, we learned from the mistakes of the new nations of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Nations like the United States, Philip Gorski argues, use the rhetoric of civil religion, a discourse which doesn’t play in liberal democracies. He writes:

By civil religion, I mean a sacralization of the democratic polity and celebration of the sovereign people, that borrows heavily from theistic language and ritual. By religious nationalism, finally, I mean a sacralization of the national state and the election of the common people that glorifies blood sacrifice and rejects the restraints of the covenant.

When Kemal Ataturk founded Turkey the great mass of its citizens were Muslims.  The Australian States that entered federation were composed mainly of Christians.   But Turks and Australians both live in democracies and enjoy a paradox: their religion though respected is irrelevant to the political argument.  Political discourse is not sacralised.  An immediate benefit is that the language of redemptive violence can be decoupled from the rest of public discourse. 

When America is attacked, its public language makes its hard to express anything other than revenge.  In contrast, winning through force is a value only on the fringes of Australian rhetoric, even on ANZAC Day.

Australians Christians have a wide choice in how they participate in politics. Some Christians come into politics as Christians.  They make plain their values and how they derive those values from their faith.  The only "rule" their fellow citizens insist on is to recognise that others have beliefs that differ from theirs.

Other Christians, on the contrary, believe that when they enter the political arena, they leave behind their Christian language.  For them it is inappropriate to mix the language of worship with that of government.  They too must recognise that other participants in political debate may be atheists, Jews or Muslims.

Brian Hill and Tom Wallace in their work on curriculum have shown that Australians do share values and that these values derive ultimately from religion. However, when they are used in public discourse, they inspire only if they are stripped of their religious connotations. 

The idea of a “fair go” resonates more than the concept of justice.  The notion of “mateship” appeals more than the language of love.  Only sometimes, as in the example of reconciliation, does public language overlap with religious language.  Secular Australians apply the word “reconciliation” to the coming together of different groups. Christians may hear the word in this way and also in the context of forgiveness and absolution.

The problem is; the phrases "fair go" and "mateship" are shop-soiled. They have been debased by politicians using them with a self-serving political agenda. In addition, we Australians often use these words with complex layers of irony.

What inspires Americans, then, does not necessarily inspire Australians. Barak Obama moves me partly because I have lived in America, but there is no reason why Mr Obama will move other Australians.

But neither are Australians inspired by clichéd language. Mr Rudd was right to use the language of "Apology" in Parliament. It has few religious connotations, and the constant demand on former Prime Minister Howard to "say sorry" and his refusal to do so debased the phrase.

In the Apology, Rudd’s made an open declaration of the principles that should undergird relations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The Prime Minister wants to:

“plac[e] an absolute premium on respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility as the guiding principles of this new partnership on closing the gap.”

Respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility are powerful words. I find much of the Prime Minister’s language boring and managerial, as words “real measures” and “targets” fail to excite me. But respect (for all God’s children), cooperation (partnership in righteousness) and mutual responsibility (loving one another), even stripped of their Gospel connotations can still call us to action.

 Australia will be best served by nonreligious political language for two main reasons.

·        . Nonreligious language keeps us away from the mythology of winning through force, and

·        . it has a chance of resonating with all of us. 

But we need speech-makers like Mr Rudd at his best who can re-mint the language of our shared values, and through them call us as citizens into ethical and visionary action. 

I have just been rereading parts of Martin Thornton's excellent .  I had forgotten how dismissively Thornton had treated Franciscan spirituality in England.  His first complaint, and indeed his conclusion, is that Franciscan spirituality is simply "confusion"! 

He condemns Franciscan spirituality as schizoid, because it is sometimes affective, sometimes intellectual, emphasising both the Nativity (Francis inventing the Christmas creche) and also the Passion (Francis receiving the stigmata).  Such extremes, Thornton explains, are far from English sensitivities, which prefer the gentler via media. Maybe he is just jealous because he can't have his spiritual cake and contemplate it too!

Thornton's treatment of the Victorine school is far less controverted.  He reminds us of the stages in the spiritual journey, the so-called Three Ways; purgative, illuminative, and unitive. I wish, I wish that the journey of faith was better explained to pilgrims.  Christians seem not to know that there are stages.  They expect to stay in the same comfortable state, and grow gently, without violence.  But it's not the way. 

Jesus uses the image of wheat to explain spiritual growth.  A grain of wheat, he says, goes into the ground and is dead — without apparent growth.  But then there is a sudden and violent transformation.  A green shoot appears and pushes its way to the sun, elbowing aside heavy soil and rocks in its way.  Once its head is in the air, the green shoot grows gradually and gently.  Winter turns to spring, the warmth gradually dries the green sappy plant. Then, within days, the plant is transformed again into a gold snappy reed bulging fruit standing in its top.  Gentle slow growth, violent transformation.  Gradual, sudden. The rhythm of natural growth.

We do not, of course, cannot, know how a wheat plant feels.  But Jesus was talking not about grass, but about people.  If we haven't experienced it ourselves, we can imagine what it is like to change suddenly from gentle gradual growth to cataclysmic transformation.  Well, actually we do know from experience.  The sudden shocking arrival of puberty is one occasion that throws us into confusion by the changes in our bodies, emotions and spirits.

Yet again this week I met a genuine pilgrim who believes they have suddenly lost their faith, gone beyond the tenets of Christianity, and need to leave the Christian communities which have nurtured them, and which they have nurtured. 

Their faith was so neat, believing, for example, that the Bible contains literal truth about Christ and his world.  Maybe, they suddenly think, they have been thinking about it wrongly all their lives. Their faith, which was so gentle, dependent on a sense of interaction in their prayer life, is suddenly thrown into disarray by the thought that No One is listening.

These are not signs of loss of faith.  These are signs that the stepping stones have become slippery.  These are indications that God is calling the pilgrim further and deeper.  In adolescence, the reaction to this imbalance might be expressed in anger or acting out.  In the spiritual life in the reaction is expressed in a desire for flight; fleeing that is, not soaring. On these stepping stones, what is needed is yes, a steadying arm, but also information.  There is a map to the road ahead, and now is the time to learn to read it.

To use a self-conscious image, the spiritual body has changed.  The map that was suited for feet on a solid path must be exchanged for a map which describes the way through a different medium, swimming in water or in the ether.

There are maps; the teachings of Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor, for example, lead the Christian through the stages that lead to God.  The great Franciscan Bonaventure in many places, and especially in his Itinerarium, the Journey of the Human Person into God, provides sure directions to the way ah