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Nuclear man is a man who has lost naïve faith in the possibilities of technology and is painfully aware that the same powers that enable man to create new life styles carry the potential for self-destruction.
Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction.
One of the most visible phenomena of our time is the tremendous exposure of man to divergent and often contrasting ideas, traditions, religious convictions, and life styles.
This fragmented ideology can prevent nuclear man from becoming a fanatic who is willing to die or to kill for an idea. He is primarily looking for experiences that give him a sense of value. Therefore he is very tolerant, since he does not regard a man with a different conviction as a threat but rather as an opportunity to discover new ideas and test his own.
Perhaps we can find in Peter’s life history events or experiences that throw some light on his apathy, but it seems just as valid to view Peter’s paralysis as the paralysis of nuclear man who has lost the source of his creativity, which is his sense of immortality. When man is no longer able to look beyond his own death and relate himself to what extends beyond the time and space of his life, he loses his desire to create and the excitement of being human.
A preaching and teaching still based on the assumption that man is on his way to a new land filled with promises, and that his creative activities in this world are the first signs of what he will see in the hereafter, cannot find a sounding board in a man whose mind is brooding on the suicidal potentials of his own world.
The increasing number of houses for meditation, concentration, and contemplation, and the many new Zen and Yoga centers show that nuclear man is trying to reach a moment, a point or a center, in which the distinction between life and death can be transcended and in which a deep connection with all of nature, as well as with all of history, can be experienced.
Here man becomes aware that the choice is no longer between his world or a better world, but between no world or a new world. It is the way of the man who says: Revolution is better than suicide.
For a Christian, Jesus is the man in whom it has indeed become manifest that revolution and conversion cannot be separated in man’s search for experiential transcendence. His appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.
But this fearful generation which rejects its fathers and quite often rejects the legitimacy of every person or institution that claims authority, is facing a new danger: becoming captive to itself.
This letter seems to me a very sensitive expression of what many young people feel. They share a fundamental unhappiness with their world and a strong desire to work for change, but they doubt deeply that they will do better than their parents did, and almost completely lack any kind of vision or perspective.
When we look for the implications of our prognosis for the Christian ministry of the future, it appears as though three roles ask for special attention: (1) the leader as the articulator of inner events; (2) the leader as man of compassion; (3) the leader as contemplative critic.
The first and most basic task required of the minister of tomorrow therefore is to clarify the immense confusion which can arise when people enter this new internal world.
The Christian leader is, therefore, first of all, a man who is willing to put his own articulated faith at the disposal of those who ask his help. In this sense he is a servant of servants, because he is the first to enter the promised but dangerous land, the first to tell those who are afraid what he has seen, heard and touched.
In this sense we can say that the Christian leader leads man to confession, in the classic sense of the word: to the basic affirmation that man is man and God is God, and that without God, man cannot be called man.
this context preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community so that those who listen can say: “You say what I suspected, you express what I vaguely felt, you bring to the fore what I fearfully kept in the back of my mind. Yes, yes—you say who we are, you recognize our condition …” When a listening man is able to say this, then the ground is broken for others to receive the Word of God.
Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.
The task of the Christian leader is to bring out the best in man and to lead him forward to a more human community; the danger is that his skillful diagnostic eye will become more an eye for distant and detailed analysis than the eye of a compassionate partner.
As a contemplative critic he keeps a certain distance to prevent his becoming absorbed in what is most urgent and most immediate, but that same distance allows him to bring to the fore the real beauty of man and his world, which is always different, always fascinating, always new.
The Christian leader who is able not only to articulate the movements of the spirit but also to contemplate his world with a critical but compassionate eye, may expect that the convulsive generation will not choose death as the ultimate desperate form for protest, but instead the new life of which he has made visible the first hopeful signs.
In this chapter I would like to concentrate on the simplest structure in which leadership plays a role: the encounter between two people. In this one-to-one relationship, we realize that we are involved in leading one another from point to point, from view to view, from one conviction to another.
Even in the simple form of a conversation between two people, leadership can be a question of life and death. Indeed, in precisely this one-to-one encounter we discover some of the principles of Christian leadership, which also have implications for more complex leadership relationships.
No man can stay alive when nobody is waiting for him. Everyone who returns from a long and difficult trip is looking for someone waiting for him at the station or the airport. Everyone wants to tell his story and share his moments of pain and exhilaration with someone who stayed home, waiting for him to come back.
A man can keep his sanity and stay alive as long as there is at least one person who is waiting for him.
principles of Christian leadership: first, personal concern, which asks one man to give his life for his fellow man; second, a deep-rooted faith in the value and meaning of life, even when the days look dark; and third, an outgoing hope which always looks for tomorrow, even beyond the moment of death. And all these principles are based on the one and only conviction that, since God has become man, it is man who has the power to lead his fellow man to freedom.
If there is any posture that disturbs a suffering man or woman, it is aloofness.
it seems necessary to re-establish the basic principle that no one can help anyone without becoming involved, without entering with his whole person into the painful situation, without taking the risk of becoming hurt, wounded or even destroyed in the process. The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.
“Who can take away suffering without entering it?” The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.
Personal concern makes it possible to experience that going after the “lost sheep” is really a service to those who were left alone.
Faith in the value and meaning of life, even in the face of despair and death, is the second principle of Christian leadership. This seems so obvious that it is often taken for granted and overlooked.
Christian leadership is a dead-end street when nothing new is expected, when everything sounds familiar and when ministry has regressed to the level of routine.
In this analysis it has become clear that Christian leadership is accomplished only through service. This service requires the willingness to enter into a situation, with all the human vulnerabilities a man has to share with his fellow man. This is a painful and self-denying experience, but an experience which can indeed lead man out of his prison of confusion and fear. Indeed, the paradox of Christian leadership is that the way out is the way in, that only by entering into communion with human suffering can relief be found.
The Messiah, the story tells us, is sitting among the poor, binding his wounds one at a time, waiting for the moment when he will be needed. So it is too with the minister. Since it is his task to make visible the first vestiges of liberation for others, he must bind his own wounds carefully in anticipation of the moment when he will be needed. He is called to be the wounded healer, the one who must look after his own wounds but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others.
When we are impatient, when we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, too soon, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations. We ignore what we already know with a deep-seated, intuitive knowledge—that no love or friendship, no intimate embrace or tender kiss, no community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition. This truth is so disconcerting and painful that we are more prone to play games with our fantasies than to face the truth of
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The painful irony is that the minister, who wants to touch the center of men’s lives, finds himself on the periphery, often pleading in vain for admission. He never seems to be where the action is, where the plans are made and the strategies discussed. He always seems to arrive at the wrong places at the wrong times with the wrong people, outside the walls of the city when the feast is over, with a few crying women.
Making one’s own wounds a source of healing, therefore, does not call for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one’s own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the human condition which all men share.
What does hospitality as a healing power require? It requires first of all that the host feel at home in his own house, and secondly that he create a free and fearless place for the unexpected visitor. Therefore, hospitality embraces two concepts: concentration and community.
Anyone who wants to pay attention without intention has to be at home in his own house—that is, he has to discover the center of his life in his own heart. Concentration, which leads to meditation and contemplation, is therefore the necessary precondition for true hospitality. When our souls are restless, when we are driven by thousands of different and often conflicting stimuli, when we are always “over there” between people, ideas and the worries of this world, how can we possibly create the room and space where someone else can enter freely without feeling himself an unlawful intruder?
The paradox indeed is that hospitality asks for the creation of an empty space where the guest can find his own soul.
A minister is not a doctor whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, he deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared. When someone comes with his loneliness to the minister, he can only expect that his loneliness will be understood and felt, so that he no longer has to run away from it but can accept it as an expression of his basic human condition.
Perhaps the main task of the minister is to prevent people from suffering for the wrong reasons. Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. Therefore ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that
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Community arises where the sharing of pain takes place, not as a stifling form of self-complaint, but as a recognition of God’s saving promises.
