Nouwen: Leadership

Nouwen: Leadership

“It is the compassionate authority that empowers, encourages, calls forth hidden gifts, and enables great things to happen. True spiritual authorities are located in the point of an upside-down triangle, supporting and holding into the light everyone they offer their leadership to.” Henri Nouwen, Henri Nouwen Society Daily Meditations from Bread for the Journey 1997 HarperSanFrancisco.

The upside-down triangle. What a great image for leadership, a leadership that supports, empowers, encourages those he or she is leading. I have a spiritual friend who also tells me that his senior warden explained it another way. “You have to let them know that you care before you show them what you know.” How true this is in any kind of relationship or ministry. This is one of the models Jesus gives us. I think I have met or known a handful of leaders like this in my lifetime. It is a rare form of leadership. It is servant leadership.

Just recently I cried with another friend, Ann, as we shared the struggles of trying to lead with this leadership style. When we use it, often we are called a “weak sister.” This type of leadership is counter culture. We are often met with resistance at almost every turn.

Even if we ourselves have not been that kind of leader in the past, there is still time to change. When we are given the chance, we can try it. We can share our experience with other spiritual friends and support each other. It is a leadership that is not lead by our ego or as little ego as possible.

Parker Palmer identifies this leadership in Let Your Life Speak. These leaders are not insecure about their own identity, depriving others of their identity to buttress or support their own. The identify of these leaders does not depend on the role they play or the power it gives to them over others.

May we keep in our prayers that we will become this kind of servant leader and that we will be led to role models and mentors where we experience this kind of leadership in others.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Mortality

Mortality

“On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.” Henry David Thoreau

We are at our fiftieth medical school reunion. One of the most surprising observations that I never envisioned is the number of those in our class who have died. We were invincible, ready to take on whatever came at us. We had overcome almost every possible hardship, abuse, prejudice, poverty, humiliation, ridicule, and whatever else was presented to us. We knew how to work without sleep, be shamed by what we did not know in front of peers and read and study until it seemed our eyes were coming out.

But death was never part of our own plan. That happened to those we were not able to save. We walked constantly with death and still remember every face of those we were not able to keep alive because of our own ignorance or because the medical science that could save them had not been developed. We never imagined that those whom we worked beside so closely and shared a common experience would now not be alive. How did they die? Was it a long illness? We search for their obituaries, Ken, Ken, Jim, Charles.

Of course, this has been a wakeup call about our own mortality. There is always the question of why are we still alive and they are not. Did we take better care of ourselves or do we have better genes? Today I simply know most of the answers are out of our reach.

More and more we have to live into mystery. What we do feel is a desire to give thanks for those with whom we weathered a wilderness adventure. Somehow each of them contributed to how we have become the person God created us to be today. We send prayers of thanksgiving to them for how their lives touched ours. We also ask for their prayers until we at some time will again be connected to them and learn even more about each other and our journey together and with the God of our understanding.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Learning in Community

Learning in Community, Expectations

“The need for connection and community is primal, as fundamental as the need for air, water, and food.” Dean Ornish

We know we learn about ourselves, others, and God in community. We find the Christ within ourselves when we see it in others and that love is reflected back to us. We learn how to get out of our own world which can become stifling by reaching out to others. We learn about our defects and sins by first seeing them in others and being repulsed by them. Finally, we realize they are also in ourselves. We also learn about our gifts as we admire those gifts in others and one day realize they may also be in us.

In a recent writing by Bill Shiflett from Church of the Saviour1 we learned some more about ourselves in relationship to our expectations of others. Shiflett believes that our expectations of others may at times be our own personal expectations that we are projecting on others thereby making that person responsible for something that is really in or needed ourselves. My experience is this can be an easy trap for parents and even sometimes grandparents. What we are hoping that child will do is really something that we want to do. This rang true to me many years ago when I was talking to a spiritual friend, Peggy Hays, and telling her about something I was hoping one of my children would do. Whenever we talked about it, she would always say, “What is that you want to do?” It took me years to figure this out.

What does this mean in spiritual direction? Many people come for spiritual direction because they are having difficulty with the clergy of their church or with another spiritual friend and this is interfering with their own spirituality. They have expectations of the clergy and their friends which is not being fulfilled. Certainly, there are times when these expectations are realistic and represent ministry that the clergy specifically are called to do. My experience, however, is that it is always important to look and see if we are making someone responsible for something that is really an expectation or a calling or a need for ourselves.

I remember a longtime priest my husband and I dearly loved. We moved away and lost connection with the church because we could not find a relationship with similar clergy in our new town. We had expectations that our new priest would be similar to the one to which we were so close.

We do indeed need a community to connect to God, but the paradox is that our connection to God should not be dependent on our relationship with someone else.

Bill Shiflett,”Assumptions,” Daily Quote, July 18, Inwardoutward.org, Church of the Saviour.

Joanna joannaseibert.com