GREATEST LEADER OF ALL TIME

The Greatest Leader of All Time

Jesus is the greatest leader to ever live.  His ministry spanned just 36 months on the earth.  He took the disciples, ordinary men without advanced, if any, education and transformed them into the pillars of Christianity. At least four of the original 12 were rough fishermen with coarse language and uneducated. But after three years alongside Jesus, they withstood all pressure from the Sanhedrin to stop preaching the Gospel. The religious leaders of the time wondered amongst themselves how this could be and noted the men had been with Christ. Acts 4:13.

So let’s look at just a few of the leadership characteristics Jesus exhibited and apply them to our own lives:

Attracting Followers

To be a leader of significance you must be able to attract others. Webster defines leading as “to serve to bring (a person) to a place.” The core of this definition is the concept that one must have people to lead if they are going to be a leader. True leaders understand they are servants assigned the task of helping others reach their true potential. The only way for iron to sharpen iron is for the two to come into contact. Ask yourself, in what ways have you been exemplifying a life in Christ? Are you sowing into the lives of others so they can reach their full potential?  What spiritual gifts or strengths has God placed within you and are you sharing them with others?

Your Inner Circle

Jesus understood the importance of relationships. We know from the time he sent the disciples out two by two, he had at least 72 disciples Luke 10:1. From those 72, we also know he selected twelve disciples for a closer relationship. After a night of prayer, he called them by name and gave those 12 pre-eminence over the others naming them apostles Luke 6:12-6:16.  And then from the 12 apostles, we know he selected three favoured disciples he pulled aside with him on numerous instances of a trial, preparation, and trouble.

So we see the example of Christ forming his inner circle of friends and confidants. Like him, successful leaders must develop and nurture relationships of varying levels, including a few they can trust in complete confidence. Do you have an inner circle of confidants in your life? Can people count on you to be there when they need you? What are you doing to deepen your relationships with others?  Are there people influencing your life that shouldn’t be?

Know Who You Are

Leaders must walk in the confidence of who they are. People are drawn to leaders because they see in them something they know needs to be developed within themselves. And they trust that person has the ability to help them get there. Chaos enters in the doorway of uncertainty and second guesses. During difficult periods followers often question where they are being led. If a leader waivers, followers will offer suggestions on their own destinations.

When challenged leaders must be strong enough in the knowledge of who they are to hold fast to the vision they know has been entrusted to them. Jesus was the greatest leader to ever live, yet He allowed some of His disciples to walk away rather than changing His message.  “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (John 6:66).  Ask yourself, who’s influencing who?   Is the vision God gave me still intact? Am I more concerned about what God thinks about me than people?

Lead by Example

One of the best lessons I learned in the Army is leaders lead by example. Jesus frequently led by example. At one point the disciples argued amongst themselves over who would be greatest in the kingdom Mark 9:33-34. Unlike John the Baptist, they were still thinking about how they could develop and grow their own personal power base and sphere of influence. Jesus knew from their arguing as they walked along the road they still didn’t get it. So Jesus put on the towel and washed their feet to illustrate true leaders serve others.

Servant leadership is the bedrock of true Christianity.  As you begin to sow into others be sure you keep in mind the point is to help them increase and reach their full potential not grow your power base or build church membership. Items to consider are: Is Christ being glorified in this relationship? Are we both becoming more like Christ? What words of encouragement can I sincerely provide to see them blossom even further?

Final Thoughts

These are just a handful of leadership traits Jesus portrayed for us to use in our daily walk with him. If we would impact the world as He did, we must walk in the ways He demonstrated for us to walk. We are promised the ability to accomplish even greater works than He Himself did John 14:12. If He accomplished so much in three short years, imagine the possibilities that lie dormant, waiting for our leadership. I challenge you to pray and ask God what you can do to become a better leader in His Kingdom. He has placed you where you are for a reason.  May He open our eyes to the possibilities around us!

WHAT KIND OF SAINTS FOR TODAY

Wanted: certain kinds of saints

French philosopher Simone Weil once commented that it’s not enough today to be merely a saint. Rather, “we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment”.

She’s surely right on that second premise: we need saints whose virtues speak to the times.

What kind of saint is needed today? Someone who can show us how we can actually forgive an enemy? Someone who can help us come together across the bitter divide within our communities and churches? Someone who can show us how to reach out to the poor? Someone who can teach us how to actually pray? Someone who can show us how to find Sabbath rest amid the bombardment of 10,000 television channels, a million blogs and a billion tweets? Someone who can show us how to sustain our childhood faith amid the sophistication, complexity and agnosticism of our adult lives? Someone who, like Jesus, can go into singles bars and not sin? Someone who radiates a full-bodied humanity, even as he or she is, by faith, set apart? Someone who’s a mystic, but with a robust sense of humour? Someone who can be both chaste and healthily sexual at the same time? The list could go on. We’re in pioneer territory. The saints of old didn’t face our issues. They had their own demons to conquer and aren’t rolling over in their graves, shaking their fingers in disgust at us. They know the struggle. They know that ours is new territory with new demons to conquer and new virtues required. The saints of old remain, of course, as essential templates of Christian discipleship, living gospels, but they walked in different times.

So what kind of saints do we need today?

We need saints who can honour the goodness of the world, even as they honour God. We need women and men who can show us how to walk with a living faith inside a culture which believes that world here is enough and that the issues of God and the next life are peripheral.

We need saints who can walk with a steady, adult faith in the face of the world’s sophistication, its pathological restlessness, its over-stimulated grandiosity, its numbing distractions and its overpowering temptations. We need saints who can empathise with those who have drifted away from the Church, even as they themselves, without compromise, hold their own moral and religious ground.

We need young saints who can romantically reignite the religious imagination of the world, as once did Francis and Clare. And we need old saints who have run the gamut and can show us how to meet all the challenges of today and yet retain our childhood faith.

Also, we need what the English theologian Sarah Coakley calls “erotic saints”, women and men who can bring chastity and Eros together in a way that speaks of the importance of both. We need saints who can model for us the goodness of sexuality, who can delight in its human joys and honour its God-given place within the spiritual journey, even as they never denigrate it by setting it against spirituality or cheapen it by making it simply another form of recreation.

Then too we need saints today who can, with compassion, help us to see our blind complicity with systems of all kinds which victimise the vulnerable in order to safeguard our own comfort, security and historical privilege. We need saints who can speak prophetically for the poor, for the environment, for women, for refugees, for those with inadequate access to medical care and education, and for all who are stigmatised because of race, colour or creed. We need lonely prophets who can stand as “unanimity minus one”, and who can wage peace and who can point our eyes to a reality beyond our own short-sightedness.

These saints need not be formally canonised. Their lives need simply to be lamps for our eyes and leaven for our lives. I don’t know who your present-day saints are, but I have found mine among a wide range of persons old, young, Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, liberal, conservative, religious, lay, clerical, secular, faith-filled and agnostic. Full disclosure: the names I mention here are not persons whose lives I know in any detail. Mostly, I know what they’ve written, but their writings are a lamp which lights my path.

Among those of my own generation I’m indebted to are Raymond E Brown, Charles Taylor, Daniel Berrigan, Jean Vanier, Mary Jo Leddy, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Keating, Jim Wallis, Richard Rohr, Elizabeth Johnson, Parker Palmer, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wendy Wright, Gerhard Lohfink, Kathleen Dowling Singh, Jim Forest, John Shea, James Hillman, Thomas Moore and Marilynne Robinson.

Among the younger voices whose lives and writings speak as well to a generation younger than mine, I would mention Shane Claiborne, Rachel Held Evans, James Martin, Kerry Weber, Trevor Herriot, Macy Halford, Robert Barron, Bryan Stevenson, Robert Ellsberg, Bieke Vandekerckhove and Annie Riggs.

Maybe these aren’t your saints. Fair enough. Either way, lean on whoever does help to light your path.

SPIRITUAL PRIDE, SENSUALITY, SLOTH

PRIDE SENSUALITY SLOTH

Drawing from the spiritual masters and St. Thomas Aquinas, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange details three reasons that our soul needs purification, especially as we begin to make progress. They are spiritual pride, spiritual gluttony, and spiritual sloth. Each of these brings conditions and temptations to a soul that is beginning to make some progress in prayer and fervency. The very gifts of progress and fervency are also possible dangers to the ongoing growth that is needed. God purifies us in different ways in order to avoid having these traps capture us entirely.

Let’s look at each in turn. The writing is my own, but the insights and inspiration came from Fr. Garrigou-LaGrange’s Three Ages of the Interior Life, Volume two, pp. 44ff, Tan Publications.

I. Spiritual pride – This comes when a person, having made some progress and experienced consolations as well as the deeper prayer of a proficient, begins to consider himself a spiritual master. He may also start to pass judgement on others who seem to have made less progress.

A person afflicted with spiritual pride often “shops around” for a spiritual director, looking for someone who affirms rather than challenges his insights. Further, he tends to minimize his sins out of a desire to appear better than he really is.

Soon enough he becomes a Pharisee of sorts, regarding himself too favourably and others too harshly. He also tends towards hypocrisy, playing the role of a spiritual master and proficient, when he is not.

God, therefore, must often humble the soul that has begun to make progress. In a certain sense He slows the growth, lest the greatest enemy—pride—claim all the growth.

II. Spiritual sensuality – This is a kind of spiritual gluttony, which consists in being immoderately attached to spiritual consolations. God does sometimes grant these to the soul, but the danger is that the consolations can come to be sought for their own sake. One starts to love the consolations of God more than the God of all consolations. Growth in the love of God for His own sake can easily be lost or become confused and entangled. Even worse, it may become contingent upon consolations, visions, and the like.

Hence, God must often withhold consolations so that the soul can master the discipline of prayer with or without consolations and learn to love God for His own sake. Uncorrected, spiritual gluttony can lead to spiritual sloth.

III. Spiritual sloth – This emerges when spiritual gluttony or other expectations of prayer are not met. There sets up a kind of impatience or even disgust for prayer and for the narrow way of the spiritual life. Flowing from this is discouragement, a sluggishness that cancels zeal, and the dissipation of prayer and other spiritual practices. One begins to fall prey to distraction, to make excuses to avoid prayer, and to shorten prayer and other spiritual exercises or do them in a perfunctory manner.

Here, too, God must seek to purify the soul of attachment to consolations, lest such sloth lead to a complete disgust and a refusal to walk the narrow way of the spiritual life. The Lord can effect this sort of purification through a spiritual director who insists on prayer no matter how difficult. God sometimes uses certain seasons such as Lent and Advent or other ember days to bring greater zeal to the soul weighed down by spiritual sloth.

Clearly, God must correct spiritual sloth and help us to accept Him and prayer on His terms, not ours. The insistence on delight and consolations on our own terms is a great enemy to the docility and humility necessary for true growth.

Yes, we need many purifications, whether we like to admit it or not. We might like to think that our spiritual life would be free from excess or defect or at least would be a sign of great progress, but often even the most beautiful prayer experiences and spiritual stages are replete with the need for purification and further growth. Perhaps this is what Isaiah meant when he wrote,

In our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?  We have all become like one who is unclean, and even our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment (Is 64:5-6).

SPIRITUAL PRIDE, SENSUALITY, SLOTH

PRIDE SENSUALITY SLOTH

Drawing from the spiritual masters and St. Thomas Aquinas, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange details three reasons that our soul needs purification, especially as we begin to make progress. They are spiritual pride, spiritual gluttony, and spiritual sloth. Each of these brings conditions and temptations to a soul that is beginning to make some progress in prayer and fervency. The very gifts of progress and fervency are also possible dangers to the ongoing growth that is needed. God purifies us in different ways in order to avoid having these traps capture us entirely.

Let’s look at each in turn. The writing is my own, but the insights and inspiration came from Fr. Garrigou-LaGrange’s Three Ages of the Interior Life, Volume two, pp. 44ff, Tan Publications.

I. Spiritual pride – This comes when a person, having made some progress and experienced consolations as well as the deeper prayer of a proficient, begins to consider himself a spiritual master. He may also start to pass judgement on others who seem to have made less progress.

A person afflicted with spiritual pride often “shops around” for a spiritual director, looking for someone who affirms rather than challenges his insights. Further, he tends to minimize his sins out of a desire to appear better than he really is.

Soon enough he becomes a Pharisee of sorts, regarding himself too favourably and others too harshly. He also tends towards hypocrisy, playing the role of a spiritual master and proficient, when he is not.

God, therefore, must often humble the soul that has begun to make progress. In a certain sense He slows the growth, lest the greatest enemy—pride—claim all the growth.

II. Spiritual sensuality – This is a kind of spiritual gluttony, which consists in being immoderately attached to spiritual consolations. God does sometimes grant these to the soul, but the danger is that the consolations can come to be sought for their own sake. One starts to love the consolations of God more than the God of all consolations. Growth in the love of God for His own sake can easily be lost or become confused and entangled. Even worse, it may become contingent upon consolations, visions, and the like.

Hence, God must often withhold consolations so that the soul can master the discipline of prayer with or without consolations and learn to love God for His own sake. Uncorrected, spiritual gluttony can lead to spiritual sloth.

III. Spiritual sloth – This emerges when spiritual gluttony or other expectations of prayer are not met. There sets up a kind of impatience or even disgust for prayer and for the narrow way of the spiritual life. Flowing from this is discouragement, a sluggishness that cancels zeal, and the dissipation of prayer and other spiritual practices. One begins to fall prey to distraction, to make excuses to avoid prayer, and to shorten prayer and other spiritual exercises or do them in a perfunctory manner.

Here, too, God must seek to purify the soul of attachment to consolations, lest such sloth lead to a complete disgust and a refusal to walk the narrow way of the spiritual life. The Lord can effect this sort of purification through a spiritual director who insists on prayer no matter how difficult. God sometimes uses certain seasons such as Lent and Advent or other ember days to bring greater zeal to the soul weighed down by spiritual sloth.

Clearly, God must correct spiritual sloth and help us to accept Him and prayer on His terms, not ours. The insistence on delight and consolations on our own terms is a great enemy to the docility and humility necessary for true growth.

Yes, we need many purifications, whether we like to admit it or not. We might like to think that our spiritual life would be free from excess or defect or at least would be a sign of great progress, but often even the most beautiful prayer experiences and spiritual stages are replete with the need for purification and further growth. Perhaps this is what Isaiah meant when he wrote,

In our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?  We have all become like one who is unclean, and even our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment (Is 64:5-6).