Christian Leadership

"Here we touch the most important quality of Christian leadership in the future. It is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest. I, obviously, am not speaking about a psychologically weak leadership in which the Christian leader is simply the passive victim of the manipulations of his milieu. No, I am speaking of a leadership in which power is constantly abandoned in favor of love...The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the downward mobility ending on the cross."

Henri Nouwen
In the Name of Jesus

An excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath

The houses were left vacant on the land, and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of the land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates and the length of fiber is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. That man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

from an eastern brother

Love is deep, beautiful, and whole, integrating body and spirit.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

the mountains, the lakes

“The Hump of Energy” was a Famous Science experiment as tedious to outside observers as “Centrifuging Flickers” was interesting, but it remained a great favorite on sultry summer afternoons. To work this meager wonder the two Scientists would simply take time out from running through the sprinkler, disconnect the garden hose, stretch it straight across the lawn, then give one end of it a violent, four-handed snap. The Ω-shaped hump that proceeded to fly from their hands down the length of the hose gave the experiment its name. They would do this six or eight times, scrutinizing the Ω with a look of far greater interest than they could possibly have felt. Then they’d reconnect the sprinkler, sprawl belly down on the grass beneath the spray, and while the sun baked them hot and the sprinkler bathed them cool they would proceed to speculate – at unbelievable length – upon the possible “meanings” of the hump…
One scorching hot day during the Famous Science’s inaugural summer – long before my brothers and I learned of Grandawma’s congenial definition – the “Hump of Energy” caught no less a thinker than Peter by surprise. Having just mowed a humongous lawn a few blocks up the street, he’d returned home dripping with sweat. And since, in those days, Peter’s feelings about having sweat on his body were akin to most people’s feelings of having feces on theirs, when he saw the sprinkler whirring and my sisters lolling beneath it, he took a short sprint, did his patented headfirst base-thieving slide across the soft, sopped grass, and came to a tidy halt right between them just in time to hear Beatrice say, “If a hose could reach from here clear to Spokane, do you think there could be a man strong enough to jerk it hard enough to make the Hump travel all the way?”
The twins were fortunate: if Everett had been the one to overhear this sentence, he'd have...more or less robbed the twins' ears of their virginity. But Peter was a gentleman: all he did was groan. And when the twins ignored him, this pleased him. He liked it that the Scientists, while engaged in speculation, paid no heed to the banal protestations of the laity.
“I don’t know about Spokane,” Freddy hesitantly replied. “I mean, I don’t know how far a hump of energy could travel down a hose, because if some muscleman or machine or something jerked it really hard, I guess the hose might just break.”
“I never thought of that,” said Bet.
I didn’t either, Peter thought.
“But I do think,” Freddy continued, “that there might be all sorts of humps of all sorts of energy that go traveling all sorts of directions people can’t see. For instance when a person gets mad at somebody…” (Her words came quicker now, and her breathing had become audible.) “Like when you get really mad and maybe slap somebody or jerk their arm or something, like Mama does to us sometimes, I think an invisible hump of energy might go flying all the way up their arm and right into their skeleton or insides or whatever – a hump of mean, witchy energy – and I think it flies round and round in there like a witch on a broomstick flies round the sky, and go right on hurting invisible parts of the person you don’t even know you’re hurting, because you can’t see all the way their insides are connected to the mean thing you did to their outside. And from then on, maybe that hump of mean energy sits inside the hurt person like a coiled up hose or a rattlesnake, just waiting in there. And someday, when that person touches somebody else, maybe even way in the future, that rattlesnake energy might come humping up out by accident and hurt that next person too, even though they didn’t mean to, and even though the person didn’t deserve it.” She paused for a moment. Then, with feeling, concluded, “I think it happens. I really think it does.”
“I think it does too,” Peter said.
He felt Bet’s scowl, knew that he was trespassing on Scientific turf, but finished his thought anyway. “I think what you said can happen, does happen. But every witch who ever lived was once just a person like you and me, that’s what I think anyway, til somewhere, sometime, they got hit by a big, mean hump of nasty energy themselves, and it shot inside them just like Freddy said, and crashed and smashed around, wrecking things in there, so that a witch was created. The thing is though, I don’t think that first big jolt is ever the poor witch’s fault.”
Bet thought about this, and finally nodded cautiously. Freddy said nothing. The sprinkler hissed like a Halloween cat. “Another thing,” Peter said, “is that everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them – learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can just bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it – phshhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away…”
Bet was scowling again, but Freddy just lay still, watching his face. “And the great thing,” he said, “the reason you can lay a river in the path of any sort of wildfire is that there’s not just rivers inside us, there’s a world in there.” Seeing Bet’s scowl deepening, he added, “Not because I say so, Christ says so. And Krishna. But I feel it sometimes too. I’ve felt how there’s a world, and rivers, and high mountains, whole ranges of mountains, in there. And there are lakes in those mountains – beautiful, pure, deep blue lakes. Thousands of them. Enough to wash away all the dirt and trouble and witchiness on earth.”
Bet’s scowl was gone now, because her mind had eased down into a place where hiss of sprinkler, splash of drops and babbling of brother were all just soothing sensations. But Freddy was still watching Peter’s face, and still listening when he said, “But to believe in them! To believe enough to remember them. That’s where we blow it! Mountain lakes? In me? Naw! Jesus we believe in, long as He stays out of sight. But the things He said, things like The kingdom of heaven is within you, we believe only by dreaming up a heaven as stupid and boring as our churches. Something truly heavenly, something with mountains higher than St. Helens or Hood and lakes purer and deeper than any on earth – we never look for such things inside us. So when the humps of witchiness come at us, we’ve got nowhere to go, and just get hurt, or get mad, or pass them on and hurt somebody else. But if you want to stop the witchiness, if you want to put out the fires, you can do it. You can do it if you just remember to crawl, right while you’re burning, to drag yourself if that’s what it takes, clear up into those mountains inside you, and on down into those cool, pure lakes.”
Bet was half asleep by now, and Peter was gazing at the spray as if into a blaze, when, quite suddenly and quite loudly, Freddy burst into tears. “What!” Bet shouted, jumping clear to her feet. “Is it a bee sting? What is it?”
“I’m sorry,” Freddy sobbed, hiding her face. “I’m sorry. But … but I’m just so glad!”
“Glad?” Bet was flummoxed. “About a bee-sting? About what?”
“The mountains!” Freddy whispered, eyes closed, tears streaming. “The lakes.”


The Brothers K, pp. 208-211.

What I'm thinking about lately...

"Jesus has always many who love His heavenly kingdom, but few who bear His cross. He has many who desire consolation, but few who care for trial. He finds many to share His table, but few to take part in His fasting. All desire to be happy with Him; few wish to suffer anything for Him…Many revere His miracles; few approach the shame of the Cross. Many love Him as long as they encounter no hardship; many praise and bless Him as long as they receive some comfort from Him. But if Jesus hides Himself and leaves them for a while, they fall either into complaints or into deep dejection. Those, on the contrary, who love Him for His own sake and not for any comfort of their own, bless Him in all trial and anguish of heart as well as in the bliss of consolation. Even if He should never give them consolation yet they would continue to praise Him and wish always to give Him thanks. What power there is in pure love for Jesus – love that is free from all self-interest and self-love!”

The Imitation of Christ, 39-40

Christopher Hill

speculating on possible alternative events in England prior to the industrial revolution:

“Suppose the little England of the early years of Elizabeth had continued; suppose the outcome of the English Revolution had been a victory for the radicals who so nearly captured control of the army in 1647-49; that in consequence the proletarianization of small masters in industry, the disappearance of the yeomanry, had been very much slowed down; that Leveller opposition to the conquest of Ireland had prevailed in 1649; suppose the author of Tyranipocrit (also published in 1649) had persuaded his fellow-countrymen that it was wrong for merchants to ‘rob the poor Indians’, to make slaves, or for governments of the rich to use the poor to fight their battles for them. Suppose there had been no Navigation Acts, no powerful navy, no colonial monopoly empire, no commercial revolution. Dutch merchants would have continued to carry our trade, capital accumulation would have been far slower, there would have been no industrial revolution in England in advance of the rest of the world. The worker who in 1530 could earn his yearly bread by fourteen-fifteen weeks labour might not have had to work fifty-two weeks to earn the same amount two centuries later.”

Reformation to Industrial Revolution, 15.

A lengthy response to "Sentimentality and Honest Prayer"

This post is a response to KC Flynn's post, "Sentimentalism and Honest Prayer."

I agree entirely with KC's discouragement with sentimentality and the church and especially in prayer. The question we are painfully trying to understand here is: what is true emotion (if there is such a thing) and what is true prayer? I think these two are connected somehow and that is what this post is about.

More often than not the realm of emotions seems like a quagmire of self-deception, wrong motivation, irrationality, and sin. Can emotion be trusted? There's a lot of talk in our theological circles (at Regent College) about the head and the heart. The head, supposedly, is the place where 'rational thought' happens, and the heart is the place of deep feeling, the intuitive, and passion. They have been called "different ways of knowing." I think this is for the most part true. However, they can be caricatured into false forms. The head becomes the place of disinterested thought, and the heart becomes the place of sentimentality. If these are the categories no wonder some reject the place of the intellect and some reject the place of the heart!

C.S. Lewis, in his essay "Men Without Chests" (The Abolition of Man), wrestles with the relationship between the rational intellect and the emotional or sentimental aspects of man. In a critical review of a book by authors "Gaius" and "Titius" Lewis challenges Gaius and Titius' educational method which reduces human emotion to mere sentiment and then rejects it altogether. Lewis writes:

[Gauis and Titius] see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda - they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental - and they conclude that the best thing they can do is fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head (13-14).

When Lewis speaks of true or "just" sentiments he is saying that emotions can be more or less true insofar as they respond correctly to reality - which is outside of ourselves. Quoting Plato, Lewis writes again:

In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her' (16-17).

Lewis gives an example of what a true or "just" sentiment might be. Where Gaius and Titius' suggested that when a man saw a waterfall and called it "sublime" it meant that he had "sublime feelings" - Lewis alternatively responds that the man did not at all have sublime feelings, he had humble feelings.

What is at stake with the emotional realm for Lewis? Our humanity:

The head rules the belly through the chest - the seat...of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment - these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal (24-25).

And in a final rebuke to the "intellectualism" (which he calls an outrage) that Gaius and Titius propose, Lewis says:

It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so (25).

I want to connect what Lewis is saying about true or just emotion to prayer by connecting it to the concept of "reality." P.T. Forsyth, in his book The Soul of Prayer, suggests that prayer is the only way to come to grips with the reality of ourselves and the world, because it comes to grips with God. Because God is true, we become more true through our wrestling, crying, or confident conversation with him. He writes:

Prayer, true prayer, does not allow us to deceive ourselves. It relaxes the tension of our self-inflation...At His coming our self-confidence is shaken. Our robust confidence, even in grace, is destroyed...The effect of the prayer which admits God into the recesses of the soul is to destroy that spiritual density, not to say stupidity, which made our religion cheery or vigorous because it knew no better...There are fervent prayers which, by making people feel good, may do no more than foster the delusion that natural vigour or robust religion, when flushed enough, can do the work of the kingdom of God. There is a certain egoist self-confidence which is increased by the more elementary forms of religion and which even secures us an influence with them. But influence is one of impression than permeation, it overbears rather than converts, and it inflames rather than inspires. This is a force which true and close prayer is apt to undermine, because it saps our self-deception... (20)

One of Forsyth's main points in his book is to teach the difference between true and false ways of being, through prayer. True prayer is the only way to overcome false prayer. He continues:

[I]f you are averse to pray, pray the more. Do not call it a lip-service. That is not the lip-service God disowns...What is unwelcome to God is lip-service which is untroubled at not being more...Where should you carry your burden but to the Father, where Christ took the burden of all the world?

Forsyth encourages his readers to "Pray as your actual self, not as some fancied saint." This is how intimacy with God is received. "[T]here is not confidence if you keep back what is hot or heavy on your heart. If prayer is not a play of the religious fantasy, or a routine task, it must be the application of faith to a concrete actual...situation." Unfortunately, this "religious fantasy" is sometimes preferable for those who fear that God either does not truly love them nor can truly help them. He writes:

You are trying to pray as another person than you are, - a better person, perhaps, as some great apostle, who should have on his worshipping mind nothing but the grand affairs of the Church and Kingdom, and not be worried by common cares. You are praying in court-dress. You are trying to pray as you imagine one should pray to God...You are creating a self and a situation to place before God. Either that or you are not praying to a God who loves, helps, and delivers you in every pinch of life, but only to one who uses you as pawn for the victory of His kingdom. You are not praying to Christ's God. You are praying to a God who cares only for the great actors in His kingdom, for the heroic people who cherish nothing but the grand style, or for the calm people who do not deeply feel life's trials. The reality of prayer is bound up with the reality and intimacy of life (67).

I could continue quoting Forsyth, his rebukes of those who would be "seasoned politicians" before God who pray prayers of self-pity rather than repentance...with "a quaver or a tear" but without reality - but, I won't.

Honest prayer requires us to wrestle with God. If we are unwilling to enter this "holy war" (as Forsyth calls it) we acquiesce to a pious form of prayer that "may feed certain emotions, but it may emasculate the will, secularize energy, and empty character...You may have beautiful prayers - but...in the end you lose the reality of religion...you lose the power of the Cross and so of the soul."

Instead, Forsyth encourages his reader to

Cast yourself into His arms not to be caressed but to wrestle with Him...He may be too many for you, and lift you from your feet. But it will be to lift you from the earth, and set you in the heavenly places which are theirs who fight the good fight and lay hold of God as their eternal life.

This kind of prayer sanctifies truth in our inner being, in our heart and our mind. We come to the God who is love, who teaches us to know his love and discern and be delivered from the illusions of "sense, self, and the world." This intimacy heals and delivers us from our false sentiments, to our true selves - which can only be received from God.