...or simply move it back inside one's spiritual-embodied womb, trusting it will find fertile ground in its own time...in Spirit's tether?
Today was a hard day, pretending into a shared future no one can feel or see yet. It’s exciting to be on the cusp of new opportunities, new colleagues, new possibilities. Anxiety creating for some of us, but I am more and more aware that there may be more oxygen in the years to come. I celebrate that.
But ‘pretending’ is the right word for what we did today. A different author might choose ‘imagining’ or ‘discerning.’ Imagining and discerning happen in grounded communities of practice, of faith. I love how those activities feel when human beings get to engage one another like that. In our case, however, pretend names more precisely the collective pretenses we were asked to hold today, without naming our own experiences, without transparent honoring or active listening into the woundedness the Board would just like to be over…but which is so recent as to be relevant. It’s a fool’s errand to hope that men of the silent and Boomer generations could own their own part in the massive departure of faithful leadership from United. What could grow with honest accountability? Such opportunities were missed, however. If just once, either the President or the Board Chair could have spoken their own failures in protecting the academic community here…If they could have owned their part–which is such a natural human thing we all do from time to time–we could have welcomed new opportunities for grace, for deepening, for rebuilding this community in integrity, honesty, transparency.
Instead, we pretended and entered into more consultation-brainstorming, hoping the pain/realities we know will somehow become different. Insanity. Doing the same thing, expecting different results.
Could the day have been different?
Could I have opened once again into the possibilities, making the day more worthwhile and optimistic?
Perhaps. One could easily argue my experience today was prefigured because of my own grief, unprocessed and refused. I’m content to own that out loud, in spades. I’m still angry. I miss what could have been. I invested over three years of my life into a communal vision that felt of Godde and connected to my own spirit-work. Though it was costly work, it was the most hopeful Work I had known in my ‘dayjob’ here at United. So I’m grieving the loss of a vision I loved, that loved me into being, and I do hold executive leadership responsible for refusing to see it too. I also know that, for the sake of my own freedom, I will forgive the President and the Board Chair for being the flawed and prideful men they’ve been shaped by decades to be. I’ve forgiven many such old white men in my life, and a couple more is not a big deal. But how do you grieve the loss of a vision while a roomful of good-hearted, faithful people are espousing “good organizational talk” that yet has no teeth for the polarizing, hatred-filled world in which we live?
I do know that appreciative inquiry is a resonant ‘approach’ to organizational development for me. I appreciate its underpinnings–our questions prefigure what we’ll see; an attitude of curiosity opens the heart more than a rebuttal or accusation; folks need to be involved in whatever will emerge or they won’t buy into it with their passions and gifts. This is all in my neighborhood of conviction and leadership-holding wisdom. I even enjoyed the consultant, who did a beautiful job with an impossible task. Particularly as she probably knew little of how deep the angers are here. There was no mention of it at all, so either she was told and decided “forward thinking” was the call; or she wasn’t told at all–more likely–instead being led down a garden path that never landed in anything Real.
Maybe the learning for me here today is that appreciative inquiry is a great tool, except when the grief in the room remains unresolved, unredressed. The exercises and invitations today felt like paper-over window-dressing, invitations to “be listening” so the Board can use the white-sheet sound-bites as “proof of listening” while they move from their own preconceptions and denominational-financial concerns.
The most real interaction I’ve had with a United Board member in the last month? When one of the women Board members actually listened to faculty voices, mirrored words such that it was obvious she had heard us, and “on behalf of the Board,” she apologized. For a brief moment, there was something Real in the room, and opportunity to name the woundedness directly, with invitation to own it, in the room, in a community of witness, so we could all let it go and move forward together. Instead, we received more of the same: defensive disregard, refusal, and a sullen inhumanity of white masculinized leadership we were expected to receive in silence.
No wonder we pretended today. We're good at it by now.
What I will be bringing into my own prayerlife then, as I travel to the Mountain, engaging the long-ancestral practice of a three-day “women’s fast” in Oregon? How does one grieve the loss of a communal vision that had been so distinctive as to proffer hope in an increasingly hopeless world? The communal vision that had been growing–in my own sense of it–was how to love one’s enemies. In traveling with colleagues whose passions and theologies were so different from my own, I learned–was led into–loving and protecting colleagues I did not agree with, who I had previously considered antagonists, if not outright enemies. I was changed in this journey, shaped into this communal vision. Am I now to let it go?
You know what no one named on the white-sheets? Shaping leaders who can lead and teach how to love one’s enemies. Of course we put post-it notes with hearts all over the language that we’ve been trained to approve, welcome, hope for… Wasn’t it all so uplifting and predictable? Not once did we name love your enemy. Not once did we name the pathway that many of us had begun to step into in our previously shaped/crafted community…to love those who have hurt us, who have disregarded our voices, who have refused hope so to protect the familiar and the systemic power they believe they have.
So this is my prayer. This is clearly my sacred work to let Spirit hold and lead within me. All without abandoning myself to the (un)conscious shenanigans of men in power refusing to relinquish it to younger generations, to other gifted human beings more able to lead for sustainable, forgiving and forgiven communities of practice. Maybe I am not supposed to grieve the loss of this vision. Maybe this vision simply cannot find a home at United and it is my journey to stay with the vision while teaching my classes and doing my own work. United can paint its rosy pathway of little to no regard for the Real among us. Churches have been doing that for generations, after all. Maybe my work is to stay with the vision, living into it here. Trusting forgiveness to find me, then, as Spirit leads.
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