Chapter 5: Leading from Within
“”Leadership” is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are made for community, then leadership is everyone’s vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.”
“We too can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come from it… The specific experience I’m talking about has given me one certainty: Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better… and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable.”
“External reality does not impinge upon us as an ultimate constraint: if we who are privileged find ourselves confined, it is only because we have conspired in our own imprisonment.”
“Consciousness precedes being: consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform, or reform our world… It is the ground of our common call to leadership, the truth that makes leaders of us all.”
“A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good.”
“Leaders need not only the technical skills to manage the external world but also the spiritual skills to journey inward toward the source of both shadow and light.”
“Here Dillard (Yes, Annie; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’s Annie) names two crucial features of any spiritual journey. One is that it will take us inward and downward, toward the hardest realities of our lives, rather than outward and upward toward abstraction, idealization, and exhortation. The spiritual journey runs counter to the power of positive thinking.
Why must we go in and down? Because as we do so, we will meet the darkness that we carry within ourselves – the ultimate source of the shadows that we project onto other people. If we do not understand that the enemy is within, we will fin a thousand ways of making someone “out there” into the enemy, becoming leaders who oppress rather than liberate others.”
“It is so much easier to deal with the external world, to spend our lives manipulating material and institutions and other people instead of dealing with our own souls. We like to talk about the outer world as if it were infinitely complex and demanding, but it is a cakewalk compared to the labyrinth of our inner lives!”
“If you can’t get out of it, get into it!”
“Why would anyone want to embark on the daunting inner journey about which Annie Dillard writes? Because there is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is in and through.”
“”Be not afraid” does not mean we cannot have fear. Everyone has fear, and people who embrace the call to leadership often find fear abounding. Instead, the words say we do not need to be the fear we have. We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby engendering a world in which fear is multiplied.
We have places of fear inside of us, but we have other places as well – places with names like trust and hope and faith… now we stand on ground that will support us, ground from which we can lead others toward a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of being in the world.”