Volume 23, No. 2-Summer, 1999
Table of Contents
Tools of the Trade
by Regina Roman
Noche Oscura
by Gerald May
The Alchemy of Corporate Discernment
by Rose Mary Dougherty
Mirror Mind
by Tilden Edwards
Tools of the Trade
by Regina Roman
Few, including myself, seem comfortable embracing the Divine within the boardroom, on the computer, during chaotic time crunches or listening to an angry client. This tugging of my heart to see the Divine in all of life raises more questions than answers: Where do I go to seek God? Am I doing all the seeking? Is my comfort with precious silence, the gracious sounds of nature and the joy of being in a faith community limiting my response to a God who seeks me in all ways and in all times?
My covenant prayer with God is that I will listen for answers with an open heart, and though I did not see a rainbow as Noah did, I did see the movie The Prince of Egypt on a field trip with my daughter's class. Here the wizardry of technological animation was juxtaposed with the ancient story of Moses. Moses, a man of yesterday or today, was going about his ordinary workday as a shepherd.
"Moses! Moses! Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Then the Lord said to him, "What is that in your hand?" He replied, "A staff." The Lord said, "Throw it on the ground."
Moses, a shepherd, takes the tools of his trade, his shoes and his staff, and lays them before God to be used for purposes far beyond what he could have imagined. His understanding and vision of his tools were to guide and protect the sheep in order to supply the community with food and clothing material. This, certainly, is a noble and worthy profession for any person. However, it was not until Moses relinquished these tools and opened his heart and mind to the yet unknown that transformation began.
What tools do modern executives lay before God? Do our computers, our books, our tools become consecrated so that they may be used in ways we may not yet know? Do our decisions about the workplace combine not only necessary temporal knowledge but also an eternal divine wisdom? Do we know that we are an integral part of a greater story, a higher wisdom?
In the following days, as I pondered the image of Moses perceiving and responding to the revelation to place his tools before the Divine to be consecrated, I was graced again with understanding from a spiritual direction relationship. Anna, a modern-day wonder with career, young children and an active life within church and community, had no time to spare when we first began direction several years ago. Our meetings would be scheduled sometimes six months in advance, an indication of her extremely full life and also her strong commitment to honor this component of her spiritual journey.
Anna wanted quiet time to listen or pray but rarely found those moments, echoing the voices of many contemporary pilgrims who bemoan their hectic schedules and lives. Nature and quiet solitude were where she could most easily seek out God, and in a small attempt to respond to those inner desires, she would schedule a weekly half hour of solitude/prayer, which would not be pre-empted by anything.
At first she used that time to voraciously read about the spiritual life, but gradually quiet listening and open prayer began to replace the books and the half hour began to increase. Her decisions concerning the workplace were then infused with a gentle wisdom far greater and of more depth than had she only read the many "how to" books.
Fast forward to 1999! Anna no longer schedules meetings with God but sees and perceives the Divine within every aspect of her life. Her life is probably as full as it always has been, but there is a moment-to-moment awareness that every event is an opportunity to see the Holy revealed.
In some ways this began when she laid down the tools of her trade, her calendar and her mind, and said, "I am here, God; these are yours."
Both Anna and Moses offered God their tools to be consecrated for a use far beyond what they could have imagined. In both, I see a leadership quality which had an immediate and lasting effect on their work and family. They portray very human leadership embraced with a divine wisdom.
Now I just smile at the unique way my questions were answered-by an animated movie on a class field trip and a bird's-eye-view of a spiritual direction relationship. Yes, God is very much in the workplace, in the midst of chaos and information overload. God does seek us in all ways and places, and with willing and expansive hearts, the tools of our trade can become instruments of eternal creation.
Regina, a graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, is a mentor for the Soul of the Executive Program.
Noche Oscura
by Gerald May
I can't remember exactly when I first encountered the writings of John of the Cross. I'm sure they never mentioned him in my Methodist Sunday school. I must have come across excerpts in the late sixties when I began to explore mystical traditions, but excerpts are a problem when it comes to John. He is one of the most unfairly excerpted authors of all time. The available excerpts were far too austere for me. They said you had to desire the hardest, most painful things in life, deny pleasure, and do battle with attachment. At first meeting, I didn't much like John of the Cross.
Then at some point I heard one of our local Carmelites (either Connie FitzGerald or Jack Welch), who gave John a new lease on life in my heart. I read his poetry, and it made me cry and sing. I read his Ascent of Mount Carmel, skipping those oft-excerpted austerity passages in Chapter 13, and picking up in Chapter 14 where he says of course the austerities don't work. This was good news for me; I knew from my own experience that austerities don't work-or rather, I knew I had never been able to maintain a single austerity long enough to know if it worked or not.
Ever since, I've absorbed John's writings like water: small sips when my lips are dry, huge gulps when I'm dying of thirst. Sometimes I spend so much time with him I think one or the other of us must surely cry, "Enough!" But it never happens. He always has something to say to me-something that was already in my heart that I couldn't claim until he put it into words for me. And sometimes, I swear, the little fifteenth century Spanish friar actually shows up in miniature, hovering a little behind me and to my right, grinning, winking, or frowning. Somewhere along the way, John introduced me to his teacher and spiritual mother, Teresa of Avila.
"Taught me everything I know," he said.
Now she hovers behind me too, a little to my left. Between these two there is no escape. I am hopelessly pinioned by their love of God.
What John is most famous for-aside from those abysmal excerpts-is the dark night of the soul. He got the idea from a mysterious ancient author who wrote under the name of Dionysius, whose conversion by St. Paul is recorded in the Book of Acts. This writer (who wasn't the real Dionysius and so today is called the Pseudodionysius) used the phrase "a ray of darkness" to describe God's hidden activity in the human soul. John liked that image a lot.
In the days of the Pseudodionysius, and in John's time as well, darkness didn't carry the negative connotations it does in
today's American culture. When things were said to be dark, it didn't necessarily mean they were sinister or sorrowful; it only meant you couldn't see them very well. The Spanish word John used communicates it well: oscura; things are obscure, mysterious, and you don't know what's happening.
Nowadays, people use "dark night of the soul" in a very negative way, to describe when bad things happen to them: the dying of loved ones, divorce, disease, failure. The more dramatic the calamities, and the more there are of them, the darker the night. The little John behind my right shoulder frowns at this. "That doesn't sound obscure at all!" he grumbles.
He explains that if I think I'm going through a dark night of the soul I'm probably not, because if it really were a dark night I wouldn't know it, because it would be obscure. John is clearly pleased with his clarification, but Teresa, who has now shown up behind my left shoulder, is rolling her eyes as if to say, "God save me from men!"
John tries again. "It's mercy," he says. "It's all God's mercy. The dark night is God's way of keeping us safe.
In spiritual matters, you are most likely to stumble and fall if you think you can see the way to go, if you think you know how to do it. So God makes everything dark, obscure, so you have to let God guide and carry you. That keeps you safe."
The dark night can indeed be hard, John admits, because it does involve liberation from attachments-most of which we'd just as soon not relinquish and many of which we didn't even know we had. But when we glimpse the dawn and begin to appreciate what has really happened, the shining freedom we've been led to, there is sheer delight. John quotes his poem, "O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn!"
I contribute my own thoughts. The dark night of the soul happens to everyone, I think. We feel a bit of it every time we taste mystery, whenever we realize how little we know about our life with the divine. Occasionally it may take on tragic proportions, but more often it's utterly ordinary, and sometimes even boring. But always it contains the relinquishment of old ways and the birthing of new, and always it is beyond our understanding. It's like the "Cloud of Unknowing," only God-given instead of self-imposed. I sense slightly dubious looks coming over both my shoulders, so I quickly conclude: "But what do I know anyway?"
John smiles. Teresa smiles. I smile.
The Alchemy of Corporate Discernment
by Rose Mary Dougherty
Last fall, I wrote a newsletter article called, "Scenarios for Decision-Making." In it, I reflected on the various ways I had found myself making decisions in the past. I hoped that sharing the fruit of my reflection might benefit others.
Feedback from readers indicated that the article had indeed benefited their personal discernment. However, it raised many questions for me and for others about group discernment: What happens if all the individuals involved claim a different process of decision-making as authentic? Suppose people have very different theologies of God's involvement in our decisions? Can we pray together about the decision if people already have pre-conceived notions of what our decision should be? When one person says we should pray about this, what if s/he means to pray for God to tell us unmistakably what to do, while another person means that we should pray for freedom? Is any process big enough to hold all our differences?
I've begun to think that certain processes can honor basic differences in groups. Although these processes will differ depending on the uniqueness of the group, certain elements are common to all authentic group discernment processes.
A basic ingredient is willingness for God, both in individuals and in the group. This willingness needs to permeate the entire process. But even as I write these words, I realize they will mean different things to different people. What I want to communicate is the need for some willingness or openness to be willing to be engaged with God in this enterprise. We might name it as a willingness to be drawn into God's prayer in us for the decision, to be open to all possibilities, despite our personal preferences.
Sometimes this willingness can seem very risky. We can have such a vested interest in the outcome, what we think it should be, that it is hard to be open to other possibilities. So the willingness involves a basic trust that God is for us and caring for us in what we are doing. It means trusting God enough to name our preferences in prayer, then asking, "God, do we need to relinquish anything in order to participate in your prayer in us?"
Individually and corporately, we must continuously return to the question of our willingness for God. Individually and corporately, we must find ways to open our unwillingness, our fear of relinquishment, to God's healing love. We must invite God into our unwillingness and our fear.
Sometimes unwillingness and fear don't really show themselves until we are thrown into situations with people of differing views or personalities. It might be relatively easy to pray silently together and much more difficult to converse. We don't like to face our differences or risk the change that openness to others might work in us. Yet the process of discernment must make room for contemplative dialogue.
It is difficult to define contemplative dialogue, but there are some qualifiers that can help us recognize when it is happening. In contemplative dialogue, no word is the last word. Rather, we savor the words we hear to listen for the truth which shows itself between all the words taken together. Thus we can be with God in our differences, allowing our differences not to become a vehicle of separation but a window into the many facets of God's Truth. In contemplative dialogue, we begin to sort out what we must boldly claim and hold on to and what to let go; we begin to see the inclusivity of truth.
It is a risky thing for individuals to enter into contemplative dialogue; we may well be called to change, to relinquish vested interests. But, of course, there is no risk if we are unwilling to change, if we already know what the "right" conclusion should be. We simply go through the motions of discernment, putting forth our best arguments, bringing people to our conclusions. If we don't like what's happening, we can always opt out.
It also is risky for a corporate body to allow space for contemplative dialogue. Doing so may open a Pandora's box of irreconcilable differences. Yet, for the sake of integrity, we name a common desire to listen, to be changed by what we hear, to finally trust God even more than we trust what we want to hold on to, to keep.
Sometimes we want to hold on to a false identity, some sense of who we think we are or should be together. Contemplative dialogue can manifest our willingness to allow God to reveal our true identity to us, to do a new deed among us. If we enter the process of discernment with more concern for protecting our false identity, or for reaching a conclusion that we have pre-decided, there isn't much room for change, for transformation. We are simply asking God to collude with us by securing us in our delusions.
Any authentic process of discernment will counteract this false security and will, in fact, be a catalyst for change, for transformation. The very space itself, where we gather our corporate willingness, will become the furnace of God's purifying love. Whatever the visible outcome of this alchemy, whatever the decision, will be secondary to the process among us. From this will emerge a transformed being. We can trust the authenticity of its gold. We know it is beyond our making.
Mirror Mind
by Tilden Edwards
What do I see when I look into a mirror? It depends on what I'm looking for. I might have an aesthetic purpose--brushing my hair or checking my appearance--or a practical one, such as tending to a facial cut. I might also bring a contemplative intent. When I do that, I let whatever shows itself in the mirror be just what it is, before my need to label it.
My labels create disconnected categories for what I see: this is this, and that is that. When I allow myself to see the images in a mirror without labeling, I see a pristine connectedness between everything-no longer a completely separated "I" looking. Instead, I find a "we": the simple givenness of a human image, alongside everything else that may appear in the mirror-furniture, a tree out the window, another person beside me. Every-thing intimately held in the mirror at the same time. In that moment, everything belongs, just as it is, together. Things take on a certain mysterious "depth," and I begin to know more than any label could hold. I touch the fullness of the living truth more completely.
When I forgo any label for myself and the normal boundaries of self fall away, my identity comes to involve everything else that I see. But just as the mirror reflects everything in it without loss of its "mirrorness," so my mind can reflect what appears without loss of "Tildenness"--only loss of an overly separated and narrow image of myself.
Contemplative presence, I think, begins with letting go the ultimacy of my labeling things and letting them be fully what they are. As I practice seeing the world through contemplative eyes, I come to understand that even the labels are a part of "what is." But now I am aware that they can never capture the fullness of what I see. Rather, such naming is part of my mind's need to order the world.
My labeling is necessary and valuable for living and serving life, but I am much more aware now of the limiting and expedient quality of such ordering. This realization helps loosen my rigid attachment to the labels, the endless boxed definitions of things. I'm freer to participate authentically in the flow of life as it evolves through all its messiness and order. I more easily include such seeming polarities as Serb and Albanian Kosovar, friend and enemy, the lion and the lamb, as part of a deeper shared ground.
In the most graced of times, something more is given. A sense of Presence shines through all that I see. This vibrant Presence appears so vast that it seems empty of form, yet it mysteriously appears as the very heart of all forms. I sense it as particularly personal and intimate. More than an "it," yet more than a "person," it is transpersonal. This Presence radiates boundless, very particular love, energy, and wisdom.
In Exodus 3:14, Moses is given the personal name of "Yahweh" for this Presence: "I am who I am." In other words, "I am more than you can ever name, yet I will give you this undefinable name through which to personally relate to me." Jesus lived out of this name for us (John 8:58). Great mystics forever stutter about the vibrant, guiding Presence revealed at the heart of what is.
Contemplative presence, then, is when my mind is able to let be together all that appears, just as it is, and when I am empowered to sense or trust all that I see as arising from one mysterious loving Presence, ceaselessly drawing me and all else to Itself. When these two dimensions come alive in me, I wonder if I am sharing an edge of the Mind of Christ and recognizing the Kin-dom in our midst, the Good News of life reconciled in the Holy One. In such an instant, life indeed seems to mirror a larger Life living through me and all that is, loving everything in its Self.