Safely Behind Bars

I had a dream last night that resulted in seeing an analogy I was becoming aware of. I guess it all started because I had watched a trailer for a Disney film on African Cats – I have always loved and been fascinated by the big cats. I love their power and speed and what looks like the ruthlessness of their rule on the savannah. But that wasn’t really the point of my dream.

You see I do a lot of psychological testing of corporate leaders and executives and I tend to notice certain things about the aggregate scores over time. Leadership is missing a certain vitality. Though certainly on a one-at-a-time level some leaders have a little of one part and others have a little of another, but as a whole, there are some core essentials missing from our leadership. Worse yet, most tests aren’t even set up to measure them. But I am coming to believe that they are essentials.


I am talking about passion, love and faith – words that are not even spoken much in corporate realms. The closest we tend to come to that is looking at committed action (perhaps a version of passion). These are the big cats of human experience! We are attracted to them and will stare endlessly at movies about them in cinematic portrayal, somewhat akin to spending hours ooh-ing and aw-ing at a National Geographic special on the big cats of the savannah.

But we don’t dare get too close to these wild things. They are dangerous and unpredictable. Take passion, for example. Passion has gotten a bad rap of late; perhaps attributable to the many CSI/police dramas on TV that portray passion as the source of murder – crimes of passion, they are called. The motive: passion run amok. But passion is actually defined as a state of heightened emotionality driven by some external force – almost alien to our nature or common behavior. Passion overpowers us and takes control, we think. But can this wild beast be brought inside? Can we truly “live with passion,” as Tony Robbins so often exhorts us to do? How many of those who I test and coach would I claim have some degree of passion running through their leadership? I’ll tell you: very, very few. Passion scares employees – passion scares most of us. Nice to watch, but that cat could rip you apart!

Then there is love. What a magnificent word; the source of so many songs; the foundation of philosophical stands; the mandate of every great teacher or sage. All you need is love. Yet it is curiously missing from our management and nowhere to be seen in testing. “Does this manager exhibit signs of love; does he or she truly love employees?” Can you imagine the reaction to execs coming across that item on an evaluation? No, love, too has gotten a bad name. It is too strong a word to be allowed into the realms of corporate leadership.

Ken Blanchard recently wrote a book with Southwest Airlines’ Colleen Barrett called Lead with LUV (using Southwest’s ticker symbol LUV instead of the word love it stands for). Southwest Airlines is one of the few companies we can all point to that actually talks about love as a leadership principle. And while there are probably many more smaller and far less known companies who actually dare to use that word, the scales are balanced pretty heavily in the other direction. What is so fearful about using love as our foundation of leadership? I’ll tell you: love is vulnerable and brings out the vulnerability in the other. In today’s litigious society, that threat could place someone at risk – why that could be construed as a hostile work environment! Really! Hostile? People fear love! That’s why it is the second of the big cats..

But the stealthy killer of the pack is faith. Faith, unfortunately at a conceptual level, has been stolen and distorted by fear mongers and evangelical ne’er-do-well’s to mean buying into some pre-packaged pseudo-religious dogma that has no basis in truth or spirit. So right out of the starting blocks this killer is marked. But even without that, faith stands in defiance of rationality. Faith is holding onto some truth when there is absolutely no evidence for it. On the positive side, it is the essence of The Secret, but against that is any business or scientific “fact-based” logic. You can’t build a business on faith – no bank would fund that proposal!

Yet people of faith (real faith) can and have moved mountains. They seem to have uncanny luck and “get all the breaks.” They have “the eye of the tiger.” In actuality perhaps they just see what their more logic-bound sisters and brothers can’t see, but their success and their faith scares us. We fear that we have to buy into some Jesus stuff or God language, and then what would people think. Yet despite that, there are many examples of faith-based companies that, strangely or not, are still quite successful.

Yea, those are the wild cats – the big guys we love to look at on NatGeo, but would not necessarily want in our house as pets. So what do we do with them? Well, just like the real African cats, we put them safely behind bars. And that’s what I saw in my dream: passion, love and faith safely locked away for visitors to come and visit on Sunday or holidays. Good Pastors and Rabbis get to use these words and play them out as harmless abstracts for us to consider. Harmless – and behind bars.

Passion: the King of the beasts – a thousand pounds of pure power! Yeah, harmless!
Love: that can overtake you with the speed of the cheetah, and you don’t have a place to hide! Not exactly what I’d call safe and harmless!
And Faith: with all of the stealth of a leopard, just waiting on the branch overhead to spring on you! I don’t think so!

So we cage them and keep them safe and out of harm’s way. And they don’t appear on any test or in any boardroom, and certainly not walking around among us – they are just too dangerous! Indeed!

What Are Your "Stones?"

Here’s an interesting twist on faith as pointed out to me by a great mentor. An often overlooked tidbit in one version of the Easter story, two women were making their way to the burial site of their master early that morning apparently with the intention of anointing the body with oils and perfumes to keep it from smelling up the countryside. And one says to the other, “Who will roll away the stone?” The story goes on to have them find the task already done when they arrive – and we get caught up in the whole angel dialogue and risen lord thing.


But wait – there was the message there – right there; and we stepped over it again. You see, the women thought, “there is a big stone in the way of our practicing our faithful ritual. We want to do what is right, but, hey, we can’t because of the stone.” Ain’t that the truth! There are these big stones in the way of our faithful practices. Most of mine live in my head but some consist of things outside: social expectations, my job, family responsibilities and the like. They are big stones – heavy stones that I don’t think I can move all by myself.

And the howling error that always confronts us (me, if I am willing to tell the truth here) is that the stone is removed for us. Always! It is just gone. That's not what I think - I am certain that there are these things stopping me. And from an egocentric perspective, it appears as though there is a barrier – that there will always be some barrier that I have to muscle out of the way. But that is how I do things. I think I have to do it or it won’t get done. That is not God’s way. That is not how the Universe works and always works. There is no barrier – it has already been moved from my path. Gone. Poof! Not there! The stones are all in my head.

How heavy my head must be with all of those boulders and stones in there – all the ones I have had to move (or thought I had to) in the past and all of the ones I am ever so ready to place in my way as the necessary hurdle to make me worthy of the prize. But the prize is already ours, the stone is already removed, and the prize (surprise) is there waiting for me to come around the corner.

Whose Prayer?

Here’s another one of those thoughts that I have that may not be terribly popular. It has to do with how we pray and with the essence of prayer. And sorry - this is a bit longer than usual.

The great teacher Jeshua of Nazareth almost never answered a question directly (Another sorry, about the Josh thing. Folks tend to get flaky about his popular name if you do anything less than take him literally. So, because I am going to say something quite possibly viewed as blasphemy, I won’t use it). In fact, I read somewhere that of the nearly 200 questions put to him, he directly answered only three! Furthermore, when teaching a lesson, he invariably taught – as in he never varied from this pattern – through paradox, metaphors and parables; stories that were intentionally puzzling to the listener. Yet against this backdrop, nearly every person I know views the “Lord’s Prayer” as a discrete formula to be taken literally at face value, or at least to be memorized precisely.

Why? Why would his pattern be different for this one lesson? Remember, this is the same man who actually ridiculed formal prayer as either empty or something tantamount to show-boating. Always the consummate Rabbi, what if Joshua was staying true to form? If we suspend our literalist thinking for a moment and examine this instruction – his answer to the request, “Master, teach us to pray,” – through the lens of the other 99% of his teaching style, we just might see something else. Let’s start from the top.

“Our Father in heaven.” As he continually taught, the kingdom of god is now, here, and most importantly within you and me. Why then a reference to a heaven (elsewhere)? Might this instead be a reference to the kingdom among us and within us and not to a divided world of heaven and earth or heaven and hell? Jeshua was fervently interested in having his followers see the kingdom in the here and now. Furthermore, I am told (though I have never read the original text) that his word used for father was the child-familiar equivalent of “daddy” again suggesting that such a “heaven,” if not inside us already, may be closer and more accessible than the priests wanted us to believe. Then, almost as a wake up call he adds, “Thy kingdom come.” Might this perhaps be a declarative or even stated as a done deal? But wait, there’s more.

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” follows in the same vein. This is spoken into a time, not too unlike our own time, when whatever might be “god’s will” is clearly NOT being done. The truth is that human willfulness was the rule of the day (and still is). Thus this phrase and its later partner, “forgive our sins as we forgive others,” seem most surely to be a Jeshuan trap. It is more like a double trap, actually. First of all, attaching our forgiveness to our own praxis of forgiving is quite simply ludicrous. Our egos have very little ability or capacity for true forgiveness – they are too concerned with being right and better-than. But secondly, and more importantly, following a literal path we are trapped into hoping that god’s forgiveness could or should be earned by anything we do. The teacher never said either of those – in fact he always said exactly the opposite, in nearly every story, parable or teaching. You are already forgiven; you can't do anything to improve your chances; the kingdom is with(in) you.

So what could possibly be going on with this “how to” manual for prayer? There are two killer requests that need to be addressed before we answer that. “Give us our daily bread” and “Don’t put us to the test.” One of the greatest failed test stories in the bible is the manna in the desert. Our daily bread most likely refers to the daily allotment while in the desert during their flight from Egypt. The tribes were instructed to trust god and to take only enough for one day. Any more than “enough” would rot and turn poisonous, which of course, owing to our human scarcity model, was exactly what happened. Test failed!

Dare we even pray not to be put to the test – the test of our trust in god? C’mon, our very lives are an antithesis of that 24/7! How often do we free fall into our trust in the divine? I don’t know about you but I regularly trust and rely on me (and my effort, intelligence and perseverance) more than I remember to trust and rely on god.

But knowing this, our great teacher must have been lining up a litany of human errors to show us how praying should not be concerned with our human worries. What’s more, our prayer should not – cannot – be about our trying to get it right! We have not gotten it right, ever. It is almost – from this perspective – a mockery of our neediness for rules and boundaries of right and wrong (“Master, teach us the right way to pray – the only way to pray, the way that if we do it correctly, we will be assured of being better than everyone else.”) So he just stacked up a short list of our most stupid and non-spirit-filled errors, for fun! “Look guys, don’t even go there, no one can teach you how to pray, not even my cousin John. Prayer is about getting to human nothingness in order to let in the divine. Empty yourselves and you will be closer to real praying.”

Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to teach the simplest things. It is the conundrum faced by all the great spiritual teachers (who, by the way, all used koan, metaphor and parables to confuse and get their students out of their heads). The instruction which I can most likely envision from Jeshua – to sit down, shut up and listen –would not have made good press for whomever was writing the story. So we got this… this, “Lord’s Prayer” concoction. I am beginning to seriously doubt that it was OUR lord’s prayer – ever – it is so out of context with the rest of his teaching. Unless, of course, he was following his standard formula of confusing the logic out of us. You will have to decide that one for yourself. Meanwhile, you’ll have to excuse me – I think I need to go empty my cup once more – it is too full to receive anything else!

Systematic Theology

Wow - It has been a while since I posted here, though admittedly most of these are more like my talking out loud than postings with the intent of generating tons of responses!

This semester I am in a class called Systematic Theology - subtitled perhaps "how does all of this stuff hang out together in your head or heart?" I have to admit it is kicking my butt mostly because it is forcing me to put in writing that which I have gotten away with not having cleanly defined for most of my adult life. Topics like: What is the nature of humanity? If you believe in a god, what is it that you actually believe? And the big one for me is if I call myself a Christian (on the days that I do call myself that) then what is it that defines my Christianity?

It requires first and foremost a starting point: would that be god or humanity? Since I cannot ever comprehend fully god as the fullness and source of all is-ness everywhere, I have to start with humanity. It led me on a path of recognizing that we only can know anything in our own language and limited through our own experience. So certainly whatever I may claim to understand is most certainly NOT god. It is only my experience of god, and at that, it is still limited to the antecedent referent list of tools, experience, vocabulary and imagery that my history, ethnicity, gender, society, economics (etc, etc) has afforded me.

All I can come to then is that this (all of this world, this universe, this life) is but a mere reflection of god - not god nor even full evidence of godliness - just "reflections as in a mirror" as Paul wrote. And to be certain the point of view from which I see that reflection is not the one from which you (any of you) see your version. But theology courses want you to come down with a theory or a theology (literally some god words or god logic) that you could espouse.

Hey, I am working on it!

Finding Hope

It is my considered opinion that most of us do not know what true hope is but rather that we move with what might be considered a false hope. We hope in what we have and what we know or can imagine. We hope in some prepackaged design of "something better." We hope in a heaven - and we hope there is no hell. We hope to win the lottery, and for happily ever after marriages.

But what is hope itself? The dictionary says hope is the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. I think that is wishful thinking.


So for right now I am trying on a new type of hope. I am working with a hope that does not know what things "should" be or have an idea of what turning out for the best might look like. Maybe it borders more in the realm of trust. I trust that god (or infinite wisdom or universe or whatever you may wish to call it) is infinitely smarter and more powerful than I and that how things are working out is more likely according to some process far larger than I can comprehend. And I place my hope in its care.

To say I have hope is - for now - to say I trust that whatever happens, occurs for a reason and is my invitation to come along with it. Hope should not resist what is in deference to something one's ego has decided would be better. Hope is a state of being found in living in gratitude for everything just as it is - and loving every bit of it as the rich stuff of life. At least I hope so!

Gaping Chest Wound

I note with great interest our reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis. How we see the "problem" and how we address it are very telling. We tend as a people to see big problems as what Douglas Adams called SEPs (Sombody Else's Problem) and with that comes a convenient blame that we can affix to the culprit, BP.
But more than that, we seem to be seeing the problem as a separate and distinct entity apart from ourselves. Like so many of our human ailments: cancer, depression, AIDS - you name it - we naievely believe that: a) it is not integrally interwoven into how we live our lives, and b) that there is or can be created a pill (a solution) that can make it go away, without any other effort on our part than simply swallowing it.
How foolish can we be? First of all, how foolish it is to think that poking holes in our body will not have some disasterous results at some point; that it somehow will not result in our bleeding to death. More importantly, how foolish it is to view the earth and a separate entity, an object here for our taking, and not the core and source of our very being as a spicies. In our dualisic logic, we have come to believe that what is not "this" must be "that," that what is not me is other and therefore could possibly be mine or at least used by me without any cost to me. We have failed the first great cosmic rule: that all is one and inseparable from itself. This truth, taught by every great sage that has grown out of this life form and moved about within its veins, is undeniable. We have forgotten that we are merely some six billion hairs growing on the surface of our collective body.
And how foolish can we be to think that this ailment we now face can be healed by placng a bandaid on the hole? We have a gaping chest wound that has punctured our lungs and heart and, with the blood gushing out at a million barrels a minute, we will think to stuff some gauze in it. We hope - in vain I fear - that there is a cure. Where is the Prozac to make this better? Isn't there some antibiotic to make it go away so we can get back to feeding our egos and consuming ourselves?
I am so sorry to be negative. I am so embarrassed to be part of that collective mind that believes this. I want to kick and punch my way out but I can't. I am a part of the whole. I, too, am bleeding to death. I will - like each of you - climb into my oil consuming automobile later this morning and drive off to work, and somehow pretend not to know that I/we are dying.
There is no pill.
There is no individual fault.
And there is no individual way for one person, one company or one country to make it better.
Our only hope is we and us, and to see that this blood spilling out is related to Darfur, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and all of the other 90 some wars and blood-letting ceremonies in which we are now engaged, as well as to the deforestation of the Amazon, the melting ice caps.
Oh people, join hands, wake up, help out. This is serious.

Separate Truths

Commentary on Professor Prothero’s “Separate Truths” (with apologies for the length.

First of all, I cannot step over the need to express appreciation for Professor Prothero’s daring and well-informed essay in the Globe Ideas section (Sunday, April 25, 2010) – daring in its venture in to the un-vogue territory of recognizing and embracing differences (and in particular religious differences) and obviously well informed from the Professor’s years of study. Furthermore, I admit to not having read the full text from which his comments are taken. But unfortunately, from my personal perspective as a novice student of theology, the article fails on both the front end assumptions and on the concluding end of resolution.

The Professor points in great detail to the many differences between the world’s religions as the foundation of his argument and produces from that foundation the obviously related concept of their mutually exclusive goals, using as example the differing goals of various sports. Obviously earth’s many peoples and cultures have a plethora of differences. Why for example do roofs on Norwegian houses have a different pitch than those in the Sonoran desert? Why is the attire of the Inuit inappropriate in the Congo basin? Or allowing for the sport analogy, why must one relinquish the ball when tackled in rugby but cling tightly to it in American football, its second cousin?

The questions that might be asked are not how are these sports different in goals and rules, or why do houses and clothing differ, but rather why do humans play sports and games and why do they seek shelter from the elements? Do we as humans share a need to believe in something, and if so how do those beliefs evolve into group think, cultural mores, out-grouping and hate crimes or perhaps in a shared need to find commonality? While the professor sweeps aside Karen Armstrong’s earlier work, A History of God, he might do well in reviewing her more recent deep dive in The Great Transformation.

In this more recent work, Ms. Armstrong ties together not so much the tenets of some major world religions, but rather the socio-political and economic precedents to them. Evolving out of some common threads in world history and founded in what appears to be a universal human need to understand one’s existence, Armstrong makes a more compelling argument for the commonality of the human spiritual quest. The great sages that developed those religions she traces did so in an effort to make sense out of human suffering and tragedy. Our pains, large or small, personal or societal, are differently named (as our sports are) and so, in the dualism that follows defining one thing from another, the courses of action and thought processes that ensue are even more radically differing.

Humans appear to have a shared need to understand their existence, how they got here and to what end they are moving. Even atheists have an explanation to the why and what of existence (personally I love reading Douglas Adams’ brilliantly articulation of the atheistic point of view). The problem comes not from the religions, theisms and a-theisms, but rather from the very human act of meaning making wherein we all differ radically. Our brains have evolved to make sense out of the myriad stimuli bombarding us at each instant and to relegate some to meaning and others to irrelevance. The bulk of that happens through what psychologists call associative learning – “this is like that.” Since no two people (not even identical twins) share exactly the same perspective, our meaning-making begins to differ from the time we are born (and some would contend even before that). Thus when these somewhat to wildly differing meaning structures encounter human difficulty and the ensuing need to make sense of it, it is a wonder that there are not 6 billion religions on our planet.

But we talk to each other, and something as important and central to life as why we are here and where we are going frequently comes up, eventually rolling up to some commonly held themes as “our beliefs” – and the rest, as they say, is history. Additionally, along with the evolution of these beliefs and themes, our moral/ ethical processes also develop (some more than others). The Professor would no doubt be aware of the work of James Fowler, who outlines the stages of spiritual development from the undefined to universalized (an understanding level few ever get to). Parallel to the work of Kohlberg and Perry, Fowler found that development may stall out at some level, and as Perry found, under duress or challenge, people often regress to a lower level of understanding such as fundamentalism. There, life is simple once again – there is a right and a wrong and everything fits neatly into the package. To the fundamentalist, right comes from god and anything diverging from that is false, and therefore comes from the devil. Combining these aspects of human psychology with the evolutionary history of religions produces a vast array of religions and belief structures not only about morals, ethics and their source, but about who is or is not included and excluded from the defined principles and goals.
And to what point should this argument take us? Professor Prothero correctly points out that denying the differences is both ignorant and insulting. Whether fundamentalist or enlightened universalist, spiritual beliefs are closely held and sacred to the holder. Disavowing those individual beliefs, whether by exclusionary practices or pseudo-intellectual feints toward inclusiveness, is not just ignorant, it is morally wrong. Trying to make things fit neatly into our pretty little ethnocentric packages has virtually destroyed the environment, raped the land, justified wars and genocide – you name it. History should have provided enough evidence that such beliefs and practices don’t work.

But there is a pluralism that embraces diversity that may be a step beyond Dr. Prothero’s end point (which may perhaps be included in his book). Diversity requires our embracing differences as other component parts of the human condition. Not including the perspective of some Aboriginal villager in a world economic forum is as blind as not accessing the creativity of a person living with a mobility handicap when discussing a corporate strategic plan. Religious diversity is not adopting the “New Jerusalem” ideal that Stackhouse espouses, but rather making room at the table for every perspective in discussing our plight.

The problems of today’s world are more complex than ever and some might contend, are foretelling our demise. Unless we recognize that the solution is the unwieldy and awkward coming together of human perspectives, we may not be able to do anything about it. Adam Kahane outlined the process of creating resolutions to the complex and difficult problems presented at the Mont Fleur (South Africa) and in the Vision Guatemala discussions – both of which sought to include representatives of all elements in the discussions. Because religions play such a central role in the actions of peoples around the planet, they may (some would say should) have a role in working toward both a global peace and environmental survival. We as a people are suffering, and suffering, as Armstrong points out in her concluding paragraph of The Great Transformation, “shatters neat, rationalistic theology.” We need to let the pain of genocide in the Middle East, attacks like 9/11 (resulting in our retaliatory warring), and the suffering from natural disasters sink in and shatter the self-righteousness of exclusionary belief systems. We need compassion; a compassion that accepts others’ individual differences and that has room for differing beliefs. We need to follow the lead of Tony Blair and others who are attempting to call the religions of the world together in inclusive mutual respect (for our many differences) and, placing all the guns and knives on the table, begin the process of open and healing dialogue – trusting that somewhere in their respective practices love and compassion have a voice.