Radical Grace
Oct-Dec 2007

LEADERSHIP AND SPIRITUALITY
By Parker J. Palmer

       Leadership and spirituality are probably two of the vaguest words you can find in our language, and when you put them together you get something even more vague. So let me share a remarkably concrete quote from Annie Dillard’s wonderfully titled book, Teaching a Stone to Talk. Never have I read a more evocative description of the inner journey:

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences can not locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

          Annie Dillard is saying several things that are very important for a spirituality of leadership. She is saying, first of all, that the spiritual journey moves inward and downward, not outward and upward toward abstraction. It moves downward toward the hardest concrete realities of our lives—a reversal of what we traditionally have understood spirituality to be.
           

Why must we go in and down? Because as we do so, we will meet the violence and terror that we carry within ourselves. If we do not confront these things inwardly, we will project them outward onto other people. When we have not understood that the enemy is within ourselves, we will find a thousand ways of making someone “out there” into the enemy—people of a different race, a different gender, a different sexual orientation. We will deal with our fears by killing the enemy, when what we really fear is the shadow within ourselves.
           

Annie Dillard is saying we have to go down and in, and on the way we will meet our own monsters. But if we ride those monsters all the way down, we find the most precious thing of all: “the unified field, our complex and inexplicable caring for each other,” the community we have underneath our brokenness—which, Dillard says, is given, not learned. Great leadership comes from people who have made that downward journey through violence and terror, who have touched the deep place where we are in community with each other, and who can help take the rest of us to that place. That is what great leadership is all about.

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