Archive for January, 2006:
Christian Spirituality
Blue Like Jazz has got to be one of the best books I have read lately. Donald Miller does away with “Christianity” and embraces “Christian Spirituality.” Tonight I am reading an interview between Dallas Willard and Luci Shaw (http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=56) and there is that phrase again. I have to say I am in love with it. It does it for me. I am living outside the U.S., and so maybe, I don’t know, but maybe every pastor in every church whose attendance is above 1,000 is saying it over and over and over again on Sunday mornings to his parishioners because it has “that ring.” Maybe I am just another poseur and am culturally predisposed to like that phrase because it is becoming hep in evangelical circles.
Or maybe…
Maybe I like it because it breaks me out of lifestyles, attitudes, and thought patterns that have nicely defined boundaries and flails me (flails me, d@$n it) into a scary place with very few outside boundaries but with an amazingly BIG crucified and resurrected Jesus in the Center. It is a spirituality which says, “ ‘Perpetual virginity?,’ ‘Mary as Theotokos?,’ ‘Infant Baptism?,’ ‘Wine drinking and pipe smoking?,’ ‘Age of the earth?,’ ‘Transubstantiation?’, well, I don’t know about all that. But look what a hopelessly lost, pain-filled, pain-causing fellow I used to be, and look what a beautiful heart has unfolded since Christ meshed His with mine.” It is a relationship (an erotic love affair?) with a God that says, “I OWN you sucker, you’re MINE and I LOVE you!” Christian spirituality.
That indeed does it for me.
“Christianity” gets like a 6 on a 1 to 10 scale for me. “Christian Spirituality” gets about an 8. I guess “Dang, look at that guy, he is all out Jesus and Jesus is all out him.” would get near a 10. But it would also get a lot of odd stares if I said that instead of “Christianity” every time when I told my non-Christian friends which “brand” of spirituality I practice.
Shalom.
Seeing things as WE are
“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.” -Anais Nin
“To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled.” Titus 1:15
“With the kind you show yourself kind; with the blameless You show Yourself blameless; with the pure You show Yourself pure, and with the crooked You show Yourself twisted.” Psalm 18:25-26
“If a man has mustard on his nose, the whole world smells like mustard.” -attributed to Mark Twain
I was talking with G~ this morning about modernism, postmodernism, interpersonal relationships, system dynamics, and a bunch of other stuff that starts my inner flywheels going fast. And I was having a great time doing it. Somewhere in the conversation I came around to Anais Nin, a French surrealist writer and thinker, who, among many other things, said the above. I thought about how many people tell me “what Uruguay is like” or “what ChristChurch is like” or “what the general opinion is about X, Y, or Z”, and I come back to realizing that MOST of what gets said in these informal conversations is, to quote Digory, “bosh.”
How much of MYSELF I foist upon my interpretation of Joe Blow, I would be unable to see. If I make the mistake of actually buying into someone ELSE’s picture of Joe Blow, or an event, or a subject, well I am that much further in the wrong. I am two degrees removed from reality. So how do I get closer to reality? How do I get “outside myself” so that
- I try to still myself as the looker. What preconceptions do I have that predispose me to see this person/situation/interaction in a certain light? What about MY background is giving me an emotional read on this that MIGHT not be rooted in “reality.”?
- I try to take a long, slow, careful look at the issue/subject/person/idea straight on in an “I-Thou” fashion, having stilled myself that I might not be in the way.
- I try to ask the issue/subject/person/idea ITSELF to give me it’s picture of reality.
- I keep my conclusions tentative and do not hold them firmly.
- I practice the disciplines of prayer, silence and journaling to check my preconceptions and presuppositions AGAIN to see where they are coming in and interfering, as well as to listen for new light on the issue/subject/person/idea
- I look at the issue/subject/person/idea at hand from several angles, asking people for an historical picture of the issue/subject/person/idea, for an “ally” perspective and for an opposing perspective among others.
- At this point, a composite core seems to emerge which has a great deal of incoherence as well as some areas of coherence. Usually the clarity about the subject lies in the areas of coherence well the areas of incoherence give me more questions to ask.
- If I am still not clear enough, I might cycle back through 2-6 with whatever new perspectives I have gleaned.
WHATEVER I do, however, I know myself well enough to distrust my “read” on situations. The answer, as I detail above, is not just to depend on someone else’s “read”, but to go through a process of chiselling away all the positive and negative “projections” which I am putting onto the issue/subject/person/idea.
Titus seems to point out this way of seeing things, as well as the Psalmist. The Psalms bit is interesting, because “crooked” people will see God as “twisted” (my translation softens it a bit to “astute”). The Bible here is confirming we don’t see things as they are, but as WE are.”
What’s the big “so what?” on this? Mainly, it is humility in my interpretation, realizing that I need to slow down my “brain spins”, take some deep breaths, learn to practice getting a broader perspective.
113707201949687293
Okay, this isn’t something I’ve WRITTEN… I am using this from www.andrewgibbons.co.uk, who has pulled some GREAT quotes from the book… Check it out if you have time.
1. I am my position. We are trained to be loyal to our jobs – so much so that we confuse them with our own identities..
2. The enemy is OUT THERE‘. "There is in each of us a propensity to find someone or something outside ourselves to blame when things go wrong".
3. The illusion of taking charge. All too often, proactiveness is reactiveness in disguise. If we simply become more aggressive fighting the ‘enemy out there’, we are reacting – regardless of what we call it. Page 20
Okay, the next one is long, but it is the one I see that most often trips us up….
4. The fixation on events. We are conditioned to see life as a series of events, and for every event, we think there is one obvious cause…such explanations may be true as far as they go, but they distract us from seeing the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the events and from understanding the causes of those patterns".
"Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organisation if people’s thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create". Page 22
5. The parable of the dead frog. Learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing
P 23 down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic." page 23
6. The delusion of learning from experience "The most powerful learning comes from direct
actions. What happens if the primary consequences of our actions are in the distant future, or
in a distant part of the larger system within we operate?"
Here is ANOTHER doozie for those who work on teams…
7. The myth of the management team All too often, teams in business tend to spend their time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team’s collective strategy – maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team". Page 24
Any reactions? Seen these at work in YOUR organizations?
113707049652798368
What a book. I am about to start reading it again sometime soon. My old copy looks like a rainbow inside from so much marking. It’s two years since I read it, and I still think it may be the most underappreciated set of thoughts published in the 1990’s.
Peter Senge, founder of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, writes this great book about “The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.”
The basic premise of the book is that the application of 5 key learning disciplines from top to bottom throughout an organization will exponentially increase any organizations effectivenes….
Ah, we’ve heard that before, eh? Cynical? Skeptical? Eh… Well you should be… Because this is all old news, right? Well, Senge maintains that it is the INTERPLAY of the five core disciplines that is the most important.
Here’s a smattering of ideas from the book:
Here’s a description of the 5 Disciplines:
1. TEAM LEARNING – The ability of a group of people to suspend their assumptions and freely think together. That involves dialogue in the true meaning of the word, as a flow of meaning. It means going beyond personal defensiveness and presenting ideas openly, even when one is going out on a limb.
2. BUILDING SHARED VISION – If the members of a group truly share their pictures of the future, if they are excited about what they are creating together, then they will act out of inner motivation and will voluntarily go out of their way to contribute.
3. MENTAL MODELS – The ability to separate the map from the territory. Being capable of identifying previously hidden mental models or assumptions, bringing them out in the open, and working with them. Going beyond simply holding on to one’s beliefs as absolute, examining which models one is actually operating on.
4. PERSONAL MASTERY – On a personal basis, working on developing one’s vision, one’s abilities, one’s focus of energy. A spiritual inner drive to pursue mastery, to be the best that one can be.
5. SYSTEMS THINKING – The "fifth discipline". The ability and practice of consistently examining the whole system, rather than just trying to fix isolated problems. Using the conceptual framework and tools of systems thinking to clarify the full patterns and to understand how to change them most effectively.
Flemming Funch, http://www.worldtrans.org/essay/fifthdisc.html
Next up… 7 Learning Disabilities of MOST Organizations….
