Sunday, December 30, 2007

The Devil's Highway

For a course I am taking in January, I am to read Urrea's The Devil's Highway. It is a powerful account that starts with unraveling the death of the Yuma 14 (14 of 24 Mexican and Central Americans trying to enter the US through the desert west of Nogales and Tucson. I usually read while exercising on a recumbant bike but yesterday (it was cold here) I decided to read in my sauna. Being of northern European decent I have the sauna genome embedded in my DNA and built one in my house right after we moved in. However the absurdity suddenly hit me reading of those men dying in the Arizona desert in temps of 108 to 114 degrees - oh this is rich - I sit here in my Andover home trying to crank up the heat to get over the temperature that cooked these men's souls, and stuck their tougues to the rooves of their mouths, that so dehydrated them that when cut they do not even bleed. Oh yea that's is incredible! The heresy of my crime pulled me out of the sauna, but left me with an even sicker feeling than reading the book.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Between The Garden Gates

Lately I have been reflecting on my spiritual life as anyone in seminary might do. And though I would like to report that all is well in Eden, I can’t. I think of those times when communion with the God of my experience is in tact; when I have a conscious and continual contact with that-which-cannot-be-named. It is, in a word, beautiful. It is like Eden – fragrant, sweet and peaceful. I feel a Divine presence around and through me as if I were able to walk side by side with God in intimate conversation. It is a feeling of being known down to my innermost thoughts and feelings, and it is good. Here is a warm, peaceful feeling of being embraced by something greater and more powerful than I. I feel like a child sitting on the lap of my father with his huge laborer’s arms wrapped around me. Somehow I understand why the Greeks and Romans built mammoth statues of their gods, because something that would be proportionately large enough to hug me as a 6’3” child with 30” broad shoulders would have to be immense. My “Abba” must be enormous to hold me with such power and strength.

But that is only sometimes. I am reminded daily that I, like the Adam myth of us all, have actively engaged in getting myself thrown out of this wonderful garden. God did not expel me (or Adam) – I did it. I, with my ego-driven, megalomaniacal desire to be lord and master of my own destiny, have driven myself out of Eden. I played (and continually play) god, and that god I pretend to be is what throws me out onto the streets of my desolation. Out here I am alone. I exist inside my insular bag of bones and blood and somehow see myself as distant and apart from others.

It is a nasty and treacherous by-product of having a mind. Mind’s job is to make sense of things, but I believe mine gets carried away. The sense-making my mind goes into starts delineating self from other. Isn’t there space between us? My mind thinks so and therefore deduces that we are separate and, if separate, different. From there the dominoes begin to fall until lives and bodies lie helter-skelter all around me. It is lonely and desolate out here and as Shakespeare wrote, “I all alone beweep my outcast state.”

Or maybe it was the Psalmist who captured the sentiment even more fittingly as, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” But my God has not forsaken me. The Almighty is also infinitely patient and the garden of love and peace waits silently and patiently for me to return. My mind, in its never-ending attempt at sense-making, tries to protect me from the harsh reality of what I have done and blames an uncaring “other” for my calamities. I feel abandoned, alone, cold, frightened. There is no joy out here and the landscape outside the garden is barren and rocky. So I stumble in a zigzag path from rock to thorn bush looking for anything I on which to hang my hopes. I often wonder if I am not the only one out here in the barren wasteland of self-will and I can see why my ancestors made up stories of devils and evil powers at work to capture us lost souls. It certainly feels at risk.

But in my darkest hour, when I am about to give up all hope, I think I see a garden gate ahead of me. Finding my way to that garden is not easy – I am pummeled by all sorts of demons and fears, each taking successively more and more from me until I sometimes feel like I can’t take another hit. It feels at these times as if I am crawling and clawing my way forward on my hands and knees until at last I fall, totally spent, on my face into the garden. But it is not the same garden – this one is different. My new garden is one of surrender and humility; the Garden of Gethsemane. It is a place where I rip at my clothes in vain attempts to throw off the pain, guilt and shame of where I have been. It is a place where at last I come to terms with my “self will run riot” as Bill Wilson wrote.

But nothing happens until, in desperation I open again to God. I give up trying to play god; it just doesn’t work. I surrender. It is at this point that my spirituality begins to return to me. It is here that I start letting God back in, first asking to be relieved of the burdens I have carried, then ultimately surrendering to Divine will, and stepping back onto the real path of spirituality. To be certain, the problems I have created don’t magically disappear, but I am equipped to deal with them in a different and more effective way – through and with the power of that ever-present Divine force and on God’s terms and in accordance to God’s “will.”

Reviewers of the new book Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light, might have us believe that even the “saint of the gutters” had a crisis of faith. But I am not so sure it was a crisis of faith as much as it was the correspondence of a fellow trekker telling the truth about what it is like in reality. The reality is that having once seen into the beauty of the garden, all else looks and feels like desolation and desert. Worse yet, the deepest truth is that as humans we continually separate ourselves from God, albeit through all those terribly normal aspects of being human – we evict ourselves. I wish I could say I lived in the Garden, but I can’t – it’s just not the truth. Like the epileptic boy’s father, perhaps like Mother Theresa, I am forced to say, “I believe, help me in my unbelief.” That unbelief is fueled by my realities and pushes me far away from the garden or any Sunday school pretense that life can be a fairy tale.

And so there is no happily ever after to this story, because before I know it, I have gotten myself tossed out again – out of the garden by practicing some sort of self-reliance (that’s a good thing, I was taught). The reality I am faced with today is that my spiritual life – my spiritual quest, as it were – is the journey back and forth between the garden gates. My Garden of Eden being those rare few moments of childlike innocence whenever and wherever I allow myself to be fully embraced by Divine love– the result of putting myself back in God's care, power and love. My Garden of Gethsemane is when (each time) finally I understand that I am not the center of the universe, I am not in charge and I cannot manage without God squarely in the center of my life. The truth is that I spend more time, most of my time, between those two gates than in the Gardens. Out there in the wasteland I am alone and know deeply what Mother Theresa wrote that “the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves but does not speak.” In a strange and sick way, it feels good to know that someone of genuine faith was out here in the desert, felt alone and separated from God’s presence, and wept in pain in her Garden of Gethsemane – just like me. I just thank God that the gate was open and someone left the light on for us.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Application to Seminary October 2006

The experience of a calling is one that rarely, in my experience, comes with an exact road map or specifications for the precise career direction attached to it. To some it occurs as a gentle whisper, to others a voice calling their name. But even Francis of Assisi mistook “rebuild my church” as a mandate to get into the construction trades. For me the call came in the middle of a prayer long ago during a vigil for the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. It was a voice I had never before heard and I was overwhelmed at the way in which it cut into me to my core. And while I can remember the feeling to this day, there never was fear or doubting associated with that calling – just the undeniable truth of it all that this was my life’s purpose.

My path in pursuing that purpose was perhaps more winding, dusty and filled with potholes than Francis’ since my “knowing” had no direction. Initially I thought that I should be a minister – as that had been the only role model I had seen. But after an all-too-brief foray into seminary at ANTS, I left to pursue counseling and guidance as a profession. That road led from career/placement counselor to executive search to corporate outplacement and career re-direction and eventually to leadership development and coaching, my present career. Along the way I found out several things about my calling. I found that what I had assumed was a unique (and therefore different and alone) experience is one in fact that many – perhaps all – people have experienced. Continually, I have heard that haunting in others; that not knowing but knowing that something bigger is beckoning from somewhere out there (or is it in there – one can never really tell). I learned also that others – like me – have struggled to find their path. I have discovered that the path was and is always there for each one of us, like some cosmic chalk line snapped straight out to the future. We all have been zigzagging through life apparently crisscrossing the line again and again. The common report is that each time we cross over the true line of our life’s purpose we experienced some jolt, some spark of excitement and that haunting feeling almost like déjà vu. And through it all I learned to embrace the journey as the thing that helped me – and all of us on our searches – discover what we need to learn. With each new discovery I gained greater and greater compassion for the human experience. Through all of my career iterations the common experience is that human hunger for meaning, for making a difference, and for a connection to a higher purpose. Whether that is in every one or a result of what I brought to each conversation, I cannot say but I found it everywhere.

I have the privilege and honor of working with people in how they lead and direct the activities of hundreds and thousands of others. Their burden as leaders is that they know somewhere inside that life has more meaning than 9-to-5 working and slaving only to get home to some other quest for meaning. Leaders are beginning to take seriously the responsibility they have not only as fiduciary stewards for the company but more importantly as guardians and stewards of human capital and the meaning employees seek in all their “doing-ness.” But despite the fact that our leaders, our work and our products have become more “meaningful” over the last 35 years and that workers are expected to be more of a “contribution” to their workplace, the vast majority of employees in America still report a genuine dislike for their jobs and a feeling of underemployment, of being under valued. In the place where we spend the greatest portion of our lives we find the least amount of meaning. So what is missing is not in the work itself. What is missing is something in us. What is sorely missing in our culture today are the fundamental tools that help us to make meaning itself.

American culture in the 21st century is suffering from a dearth of values and most of us, and most of our systems, do not have a clue on how to teach values. It is my experience that values and valuing cannot be easily taught. For most of its existence the organized church has attempted to teach values. The role of the church has been to teach what Jesus and the ancients taught – to love and respect each other, to pray for guidance, and to trust that God will and does provide for us all. While pedagogical methods may work with kids, who sponge up just about everything, adults learn mostly be experience. And the passive experience (for most) of sitting in a pew receiving the word is not sufficient to mold or define their values and valuing.

Over the same time period of the latter third of the 20th century, church memberships have been declining, whole churches have closed, and the numbers of young people seeking ordination have dropped. In a world moving toward no absolutes, the church may have backed off from the “olde tyme religion” of our forefathers and in doing so, lost something in the translation. With the possible exception of fundamentalist movements, organized religion seems to be struggling. There will always be a certain group who desire a stricter and more rigid set of guidelines for living life. But how do the rest of us, who eschew the King James translation and “word of God” strictness of reading, find our way? And perhaps most importantly, how do we create and solidify our core values if they are not mandated for us? I believe that this role still falls within the jurisdiction of religion but that maybe the church needs some different “missionaries” out in the working world.

The role I play in my career as an executive coach is one of accelerating human development. Truthfully, I cannot, a coach cannot, cause anything to happen that would not normally happen. People develop; given food, water and fresh air, they grow and develop until their last day of life. All a coach can ever do is accelerate that process – help the client get from point A to point B a little more rapidly than it would happen under normal growing conditions. But the methods used in my profession are powerfully effective in doing this. And when applied to the realm of value development, they work equally as well. Using the most challenging of the person’s situations (not hypothetical discussions) we paint the executive into a corner that forces his/her decision. And, interestingly, those decisions made under heightened pressure (I call them “battle conditions” or “live ammunition” situations) rarely have to be revisited.

I had the unique privilege of conducting a two-day leadership seminar for 36 international managers of a global corporation on September 10 and 11, 2001. We had been using real (corporate) crises as the teaching tools on Monday and were debriefing another exercise Tuesday morning when the President of the company came into the room to announce that we were in a national emergency (which the participants initially thought may be another exercise). However, after we had all watched the towers fall for the umpteenth time and found that we not only could not use our cell phones, but that these leaders (from places like Singapore, Japan, all over Europe and the Americas) were not going to be traveling anywhere, we decided to continue the workshop. What followed was the most poignant and powerful program I have ever led. No longer could we discuss values and lives as hypothetical precepts. Life was fragile; the people they/we were leading were entrusting us with their very lives, and we needed to step up to that trust. It was the intensity of that day, and the process of using that intensity and awareness, that broke through the participants’ dull pretenses and into the clear air of value-driven decision-making. These leaders changed!

Churches played a role that day as well. Immediately they rallied scores of trained volunteers and clergy to help the masses deal with their shock and to grieve. And while this was certainly valuable, it was just as clearly not what we did in that training room! Though serving a need, my experience of the situation was that “the church” did not step up to the greater challenge of the day. And it is just an example of why I feel that churches and organized religion have not been able to fill the widening gap of values and valuing in today’s society. The church has defined its role as either educators of the prescriptive values of the scriptures or as empathetic caregivers to the broken hearts and souls of the community. It does not seem to me that organized religion has carved out a role as the catalyst of ethical development and that the roles churches do play are insufficient in stemming the tide of the crisis I perceive in today’s society. If churches see this as their realm, then they may need to learn some of the principles of coaching and development.

One postscript to the 9/11 experience is that, with rare exceptions, it was not too long before the bulk of the population was back to life. Granted there was a wound (however deeply cut that day) that was healing, but in a society that tries so hard to avoid feeling discomfort, the wound was bound up and medicated as quickly as possible. However, change and transition only happen through discomfort. It takes staying with the discomfort and actually feeling the pain to transform the old way of being into a new one. In many ways this appears to me to be similar to the difference between Paulist (peaceful resolution) and Christic (disquieting revolution) theologies. Jesus talked about a very uncomfortable path, one that would turn a household against itself. In telling Nicodemus to sell his goods and give the money away, he wasn’t so much advocating poverty, he was telling us to let go of our attachments to things and to the comfort of our current thinking. His methods and his path were intense, and often exploited the discomfort of the moment to cause a breakthrough to his new way of thinking and being.

I do not know if the church and clergy can or wishes to step into such a developmental role. What I do believe, however, is that the role must be filled and that there is a serious need. Perhaps it falls to the theological institutes to begin training a new cadre of workers who breech the values gap in the work place. Perhaps it falls to people in roles such as mine to be the providers of transformative pushes that bring on the needed development. I am not entirely certain. But as Martin Luther’s ministry prayer reads, I might not be much, “but as the people are here and in need of a teacher,” perhaps I might be allowed fill that role.

The ministry to which I feel called is to bring the spiritual quest for purpose and meaning into the working world. Most people spend the greater portion of their waking hours at work. The amount of time that a church or clergy person has access to their minds and souls is perhaps an hour or so each week (and often much less). Business leaders can – and in my experience, do – shape the values of their employees. It would appear that the current shape that value is taking does nothing to develop a set of life values, let alone doing anything to deal with the human need for meaning and purpose. I find that I have an ability to bridge those worlds. On my own and in the company of a few colleagues who think like this, we have begun to elevate the business discussion of executive leadership and coaching into the realm of effecting peoples’ lives. I look for the spark of connection in each session I conduct. If anything has been rewarding in my career, it is the times when not only have we achieved the ROI expected from my coaching, we have awakened a sense of inspired purpose in the executive, that cascades over many individuals and their families that he/she leads.

My goal in entering this program of study is to push my thinking and to further hone those skills that I use in driving this conversation. I am looking for resources – both academic writings and the people with whom I will connect – that will assist me in providing that service. My coaching is not advice giving. What I do is tantamount to asking good questions; questions that provoke a deeper thinking and valuing on the part of my client. I do not have the answers – ever – in my work, nor am I looking to find those answers. I simply see myself as a fellow traveler down the same path these leaders are taking. It is my hope to become more attuned to the questions they are asking themselves, and to the discomfort of pushing myself into the realms of my own unknowing. Discovery only begins when a person is willing to say, “I don’t know,” and step forward from that point. Most of the time I am working, I am trying to keep my client on the cutting edge of not knowing and discovery. For my clients, who are accustomed to knowing and being the source of direction for others, this is extremely disquieting. In keeping myself uncomfortable in my own unknowing and seeking, I believe that I can better fulfill my role of keeping others in that same uncomfortable place. It is what I do and it is what I want to do for more. My goal is to use the certification program to gain those tools, to gain a new and larger circle of peers who are on the journey with me, and to gain a deeper understanding of what creates and shapes values for us all.

So I believe the above covers the assigned points. But it is not all of what I would want you to know. What has transpired for me over these years of gradually honing in on that center line of purpose is that I have only continually rediscovered what has been there all the time. I have found the tools that I need to work with, both for myself and for helping others in their quest. But more importantly, what has happened is that I have become more human. When I attended ANTS back in 1971, I was a kid of 21 and full of great ideas. While I was in love with God and bursting to tell others that they could have that same feeling, I felt different and apart. My travels of the past 35 subsequent years have made me one with everyone else. I used to look at some clients as “uncoachable,” or buy into their boss’ evaluation of them as a jerk or in need of “fixing.” But through this transformation of the years, I now see them as just another one of us in the family. There is something about each client I seem to fall in love with – not through any kind of transference – but in a true sense of compassion. It is similar to what I feel in church. I watch as people go up for communion or even just enter the church and I well up inside with the feeling of appreciation and love for their uniqueness and beauty. Words often fail me in trying to describe my state or what I feel has happened in this lifelong trip. Simply, I have come home to a clarity that perhaps was always there, but that I now am certain of. David Whyte captured that feeling in his poem: The Opening of Eyes. He tells of his discovery of his life’s purpose like this:

That day I saw beneath the dark clouds
The passing light over the water
And I heard the voice of the world speak out.
I knew then, as I had before
Life is no passing memory of what has been
Nor the remaining pages in a great book
Waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed
It is the vision of far off things
Seen for the silence they hold
It is the heart after years
Of secret conversing
Speaking out loud in the clean air.

It is Moses in the desert
Fallen to his knees before the lit bush
It is the man throwing away his shoes
As if to enter heaven
And finding himself astonished
Opened at last
Fallen in love with solid ground.

I cannot say it any better than that. I have fallen in love again. And I am standing on my path, with all the astonishment and certainty that Whyte describes. That is what I am here for; that is what I wish to return to your classes for, and that is what I really would want you to know about me.