Expedition Kittens discussion
Let Your Life Speak ... Vocation
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Chapter V
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by
Claire
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Mar 07, 2023 12:22PM
"...the great insight of our spiritual traditions is that we - especially those of us who enjoy political freedom and relative affluence- are not victims of that society: we are its co-creators. We live in and through a complex interaction of spirit and matter, of the powers inside of us and the stuff "out there" in the world. External reality does not impinge upon us as an ultimate constraint: if we who are privileged find ourselves confined, it is only because we have conspired in our own imprisonment."
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"A leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell."
Oh SNAP:"Leadership is hard work for which one is regularly criticized and rarely rewarded, so it is understandable that we need to bolster ourselves with positive thoughts. But by failing to look at our shadows, we feed a dangerous delusion that leaders too often indulge: that our efforts are always well-intended, our power is always benign, and the problem is always in those difficult people whom we are trying to lead."
"...people who can lead the rest of us to a place of hidden wholeness" because they have been there and know the way."
"Yes, there is death, but it is part of the cycle of life..."
"A third shadow common among leaders is "functional atheism," the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen - a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God. This shadow causes pathology on every level of our lives. It leads us to impose our will on others ... It often eventuates in burnout, depression, and despair, as we learn that the world will not bend to our will and we become embittered about that fat. Functional atheism is the shadow that drives collective frenzy as well. It explains why the average group can tolerate no more than fifteen seconds of silence: if we are not making noise, we believe, nothing good is happening..."
"...ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally! We learn that we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We learn that sometimes we are free to lay the load down altogether. the great community asks us to do only what we are able and trust the rest to other hands."
"A fourth shadow within and among us is fear, especially our fear of the natural chaos of life. Many of us -parents and teachers and CEOs- are deeply devoted to eliminating all remnants of chaos from the world. We want to organize and orchestrate things so thoroughly that messiness will never bubble up around us and threaten to overwhelm us... In families and churches and corporations, this shadow is projected as rigidity of rules and procedures, creating an ethos that is imprisoning rather than empowering. (Then, of course, the mess we must deal with is the prisoners trying to break out!) The insight we receive on the inner journey is that chaos is the precondition to creativity ... Even has has been created needs to be returned to chaos from time to time so that it can be regenerated in more vital form."
"My final example of the shadows that leaders project is, paradoxically, the denial of death itself ... Leaders who participate in this denial often demand that the people around them keep resuscitating things that are no longer alive. Projects and programs that should have been unplugged long ago are kept on life support to accommodate the insecurities of a leader who does not want anything to die on his or her watch. Within our denial of death lurks fear of another sort: the fear of failure. In most organizations, failure means a pink slip in your box, even if that failure, that "little death," was suffered in the service of high purpose. ... A good scientist does not fear the death of a hypothesis, because that "failure" clarifies the steps that need to be taken toward truth, sometimes more than a hypothesis that succeeds.
The Quaker clearness committee: "You take a personal issue to this small group of people who are prohibited from suggesting "fixes" or giving you advice but who for three hours pose honest, open questions to help you discover your inner truth. Communal processes of this sort are supportive but not invasive. They help us probe questions and possibilities but forbid us from rendering judgment, allowing us to serve as midwives to a birth of consciousness that can only come from within."
relationships in which we protect each other's alonenesshold another life without dishonoring its mystery
"they were not driven by their own fears, the fears that lead us either to "fix" or abandon each other..."
"leading a suffering person back to life from a living death"
"We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby engendering a world in which fear is multiplied. We have places of fear inside of us, but we have other places as well - places with names like trust and hope and faith. We can choose to lead from one of those places, to stand on ground that is not riddled with the fault lines of fear, to move toward others from a place of promise instead of anxiety. As we stand in one of those places, fear may remain close at hand and our spirits may still tremble. but now we stand on ground that will support us, ground from which we can lead others toward a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of being in the world."
