by Margaret Jane Porter

"Afire"

Burn your channel wide and deep
With blowtorch from the campfire's flare.
No mere candle's hot enough
To sear away the pain-scarred flesh.

Burn your fire bright and deep
Until it rekindles at my core
The love of you in flames once more.

(written during the SOE pilgrimage)
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When I told my executive coach that I was in the Soul of the Executive Program (SOE), he exclaimed, "that's perfect for you!" He was right; it has been. I'll try to explain why, though my experience has been so deep it is hard to capture in prose.

I am a government executive who has devoted my twenty-six years of professional life to Federal civil service. I was raised a Roman Catholic, the eldest child in a large Irish family, but left the church soon after college. By the time I chanced on SOE, I had developed a number of ways to support and sustain my leadership, including personal therapy, executive coaching, and membership in the Washington Ethical Society, and I was obviously searching for something more. SOE has been for me a continual movement towards greater spaciousness and serenity that has transformed my life experience and my sense of purpose.

At first, I was very skittish of any spiritual formation program. I assumed all such programs to be limiting, coercive, and unaffirming of my feminine equality. I found in Shalem and SOE a freedom to be myself and to explore my spiritual self in the context of the mystical classics and the best current thinking about spirituality and work. This classical approach gave legitimacy to the integration of the poetic and the spiritual with the world of work and service. I was able to pick and choose among those sources for inspiration and guidance, as I saw fit. My mentors also made it crystal clear that I was free to seek any spiritual tradition that supported me. As I went through the readings, I came to understand that good people, holding positions of responsibility in the world, have struggled for centuries to integrate their individual spiritual lives with their leadership. I came to understand that the two can be naturally integrated in me as well, if I will but allow them to be.

The initial retreat was my first transforming experience. It laid the foundation for a daily practice that has become an indispensable part of my life. I did not have a well-developed spiritual practice when I entered SOE, but the permission I got at the first residency quickly led to one! The experience of waking each morning to greet the sun rising over the mountains and reflecting on this indescribable beauty drew me irrepressibly to want to recreate this experience when I returned home. Many in our group remarked on the value of our practice and the difficulty of sustaining it once we returned. It was not hard for me. I have a condition known as seasonal affective disorder, which requires me to sit in front of a light box for an hour each morning for about nine months of the year. Prior to the retreat, I would do work from the office or read the paper during that hour. Now I do a morning spiritual practice inspired by the desert with centering prayer, music, candles, incense, readings, connecting to nature (I do my practice in a greenhouse that is open to the trees and sky), reflection and journaling. A panoply of delight! That practice flowed unstoppably from our desert work and the yearning of my soul to hold onto what I had found there.

SOE also gave me my first spiritual communities. At the initial retreat, we worked in peer groups part of the time and we were encouraged to continue our peer group work. Our group has met by phone monthly, continuing and sustaining the support for our spiritual development and leadership. In addition, a number of us were fortunate to live in the Baltimore-Washington area, and we have continued to meet monthly for dinner, personal sharing, and group discussion on such topics as the SOE readings, leadership issues, the Enneagram and the labyrinth. This support has been invaluable to me. Both my phone peer group and our local group plan to continue our meetings even though the formal program has ended.

We also were urged to find and rely on a spiritual director, and my director, Isabella Bates, has become an invaluable part of my spiritual support system. Her exuberant emphasis on the integration of body and soul has ideally suited my journey.

The challenge for me in the second part of the program was to build on my individual experience through a required leadership project. Since I am a Federal government executive, the program challenged me to find my authentic voice in my leadership in a way that was appropriate for the institutions and individuals with whom I work. The critical point of this part of the program for me was coming to understand that I could do what mattered to me in the workplace, that my leadership could be an authentic expression of who I was and still be entirely consistent with the secular constraints of government work. Parker Palmer's work on authenticity and my reading his new book, Let Your Life Speak, were the foundation for my understanding.

I came to appreciate more and more the importance of self nurturance and of interest in the development of others. My SOE work inspired me to apply for a position as Executive in Residence at the Federal Executive Institute. I will spend a year's sabbatical there starting in the spring of 2001. My dream is to develop ways of supporting individual Federal executives that draw appropriately on the wealth of wisdom and practice I have acquired during SOE.

The culmination of our two-year program was the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Sinai desert. I am obviously still integrating the meaning of this experience, and there is no question it was life-transforming. It was the first time I can ever remember when I spent two weeks without role or responsibility, not as eldest daughter, spouse, lawyer, government executive. The only role I assumed was a new one for which I volunteered: a pilgrimage poet. Inspired by the close connection between mystical experience and poetry, I gave myself full permission to write and feel. My Sinai experience built on and deepened my spiritual awakening at the first retreat and opened my heart. The glimpses of spiritual freedom I had gotten through my readings and previous experiences opened to infinite spaciousness and beauty.

The gifted leadership of Carole Crumley and Bill Jamieson modeled for me repeatedly that a spiritual journey can be an entirely free one and that I can be fully supported to follow my journey wherever it leads. The inspired leadership of our pilgrimage guide, Marcus Losack, taught me a lesson I will never forget: that there is truth and beauty and reverence in each spiritual tradition and that my soul is free to embrace fully what calls to me. I placed my self completely in their hands, surrendering to the experience of letting someone else lead and opening to the experience of simply being.

I leave the program regretting it is over and strengthened for the journey ahead.

Margaret is a graduate of Shalem's Soul of the Executive Program, Class of 2000.