chris erdman

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 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).

Leadership that’s focused on skills, power, and outward competence is not helping much—not in the ways that matter. Frankly, it’s hurting us. Today’s focus on outer skills only masks our inability to produce, or better, cultivate, the kind of leaders who have inner lives that can sustain the rigors of leadership in our tumultuous times.

Last year, I was asked to propose a new course for leadership development at the graduate school where I’ve taught as adjunct faculty for the past decade. I proposed a course called, “The Virtuous Leader: Cultivating a Heart for Skilled Ministry.” Virtue, I argued, is what today’s leaders really need. More, virtue is what our communities need.

“No thanks,” I was told. “Our students want skills, they need to know how to get things done. Virtue is so . . . well . . . old school. It’ll never sell.”

“Never sell.”  Does anyone else see the tragedy in that?

Leadership without virtue is getting us nowhere. It’s ruining our communities, betraying our trust, adding to the uncivil culture that plagues our land.

When virtue is out of fashion, we’re in big trouble.

Leadership that cultivates virtue requires inner work, serious interior heavy lifting.

And unless we demand virtue from our leaders, and challenge them to do their inner work, we’ll keep getting the leaders we deserve.

Sainthood’s so terribly misunderstood.  We think of little carved statues or untouchable characters from a dusty book.

But if we can’t point to a saint around us, we’re a pitiful people.  More likely, we’re just blind.  Saints are everywhere, but unfortunately, they’re not often where we need them to be . . . in positions of leadership.  Don’t get me wrong, ordinary saints lead.  But we can use a few more in positions of official leadership.  Too few of us have desired or required leaders who are saints—women and men of humble virtue.  Consequently, we’ve gotten the kind of leaders we deserve, and we’ve become the kind of communities we’ve become.

Thomas Merton, who led us with remarkable wisdom through his pen and his prayers, couldn’t see the kind of leadership the twentieth century needed until he was pushed.

As a carousing and ambitious young man walking the streets of New York City, he wondered out loud to friend about his sense of vocation.

His friend told Merton he needed to become a saint.

“A saint?” Merton replied.  ”But how?”

“By desiring it,” said his friend.

And that’s what he became.

In the fourteenth century—a century not much different from the one facing us today–the anonymous author of the little book, The Cloud of Unknowing, wrote: “It’s not what you are, nor what you have been, that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.”

I’m praying for a new generation of leaders who will desire what we really need, the only thing that will guide us through this tumultuous twenty-first century . . . sainthood . . .in our homes and offices, schools and public places.

So many things crowd into a leader’s mind.  Consequently, leaders can be terribly absent people . . . distracted, busy, fretful, pushy.  You’ve been around such leaders, and you follow them only if you have to.  Usually the only authority they have for leading is the power of their position.  If you’re lucky you’ve also been around leaders who you’d follow anywhere.  They are rare, but we know them when we’re around them.  They have presence.  They are healers—no matter what kind of work they do.  They possess a presence of mind.

Here’s a message from Christ, inviting you into the only kind of leadership that really matters.

You are to think of nothing else,
only love.
You are to want nothing else for another,
than that they know My love.
You are to have nothing else in your mind
or heart when you are with another,
only love.

Love them.

See Me stooping,
lifting mud in my hands,
breathing life into the soul before you,
cradling them lovingly as they come to life.

Do that.

This is the kind of leadership that truly matters—whether you’re a parent dealing with a troubled teenager, an executive trying to awaken life in your management team, an artist wanting to invite others to see what you see, a politician working for the common good, a cop trying to break up a domestic fight.

Fail to do this, and you might push people around, get some stuff done, make a pile of money, build an empire.  But you’re not going to take those around you where they need to go.

Unless a leader knows loss, a leader isn’t leading.

It’s how you deal with loss that matters.

To be united with Christ in his passion means to suffer loss with him. To be united with him, you cannot wield power as the world does. Anger has no place. Controlling others is excluded. Leadership is inverted—the ways of worldly leadership are unmade. You learn to suffer rather than protect yourself, to serve rather than be served, to lose rather than win.

But to what end, what purpose?

Does the end even matter, really?

No, worry about the end and you’re already trapped.  Instead, you are to simply live as Jesus lives rather than to live conditionally—that is, attached to goals, outcomes, some self-invented-end. You are to wield only the power of secret prayer, of a heart united to Love.  You are to lead from where you are.  You are to be radically present, even to loss.  Especially to loss.

So, be present to loss, to pain.  Dare this glorious humiliation of yourself, and line yourself up with the true grain of the universe, the real current of creation’s flow.