Words of EnCOURAGEment #7
Living with Uncertainty
by Co-Director Rick Jackson
Our world’s extremely stormy conditions—economic upheavals and recession, environmental stress and global warming, social injustice and war—create circumstances that can harden us so that we become increasingly afraid. How can we remain open in the face of so much uncertainty? How can we stay awake to the ever-present opportunities for courage to arise when it is most needed?
As is often the case, a poet’s words may guide us toward truths worth remembering when we feel vulnerable. These lines are from “Nothing’s A Gift” by the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska:
Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.
I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.
I'll have to pay for myself
with my self,
give up my life for my life….
Szymborska proceeds to identify terms for the loan of life, reminding us that “Every tissue in us lies on the debit side. Not a tentacle or tendril is for keeps.” But then she considers the soul:
We call the protest against this
the soul.
And it's the only item
not included on the list.
Life itself is indeed granted—yes, loaned—to us for reasons and duration unknown. Does the soul—“the only item not included on the list” of gifts on loan—have a special contribution to make in uncertain times? I think it does.
Trusting our Deeper Knowing: On Cataclysms, Contemplation, and Circles of Trust
by Parker J. Palmer PhD
On October 10–12, 2008, Marcy Jackson and I (supported by our colleagues, Rick Jackson and Ann New), led a Circle of Trust retreat at the Fetzer Institute for fifteen people from the worlds of big business, financial services and philanthropy—many of them closely tied to Wall Street and all of them devoted to the common good. Our retreat began just one day after the Dow Jones had fallen nearly 40% below its record high, set only a year earlier.As the economic and political fabric of American life unravels and reveals its many flaws, with tragic consequences for so many lives, the tag-line the Center has been using for the past few years—“Reclaiming Identity and Integrity in Professional and Public Life”—seems more important than ever. Can Circles of Trust contribute to that reclaiming? The fifteen civic-minded people involved in our October 10-12 retreat would, I believe, say “Yes.” What follows is the context in which we set those three days of listening to the inner teacher in community.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth century French scholar famous for Democracy in America, wrote a less well-known book titled The Old Regime and the Revolution, arguing that the French Revolution happened long before it happened. The eruption that shattered French society at the end of the eighteenth century was the result of small seismic shifts that had been accumulating for decades deep underground. If people had paid attention to the tectonic instabilities caused by greed and injustice, and had responded wisely to the nervous needles on their inner seismographs, the “Reign of Terror” might have been avoided.
A Fresh Start: An Invitation to Reflect
by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Lisa Sankowski
For so many of us—as educators, as students, as parents, or by the calendars of our faith traditions—autumn marks the start of a new year and speaks to us of beginnings. Paradoxically in our contemporary culture, as the natural world enters a period of decline and rest, our human world begins to gear up!
For me, fall always feels like a fresh start, and a feeling of anticipation that was part of my life as a school child on the cusp of learning or trying something new has become a deep body-memory, returning each year as soon as I notice the evening air turn cool and the first hint of autumn color appear on the hillsides.
In honor of this particular quality of the season, we are going to try something new together. As with all new beginnings, I experience anticipation, excitement, curiosity, as well as a hint of my all-too-human resistance to change and the inevitable anxiety that joins me on every foray into unfamiliar territory.
In the first issue of Words of EnCOURAGEment, we expressed our desire to create a “virtual circle of trust,” a community that sustains and challenges each of us on our journey toward an undivided life. In pursuit of this goal, we made a commitment to keep faith with our Courage & Renewal touchstones, in particular to “extend and receive welcome,” setting the tone for the kind of generous space we are trying to create together.
And each of our newsletters have included an invitation from a Courage & Renewal facilitator to go on-retreat in the midst of our off-retreat lives, offering a meditation on the season, a poem, and questions to consider for personal reflection. For many of us who have experienced circles of trust in the “real world,” this “virtual world” experience has been a welcome gift of mindfulness and inspiration. But at the same time, it has lacked the tangible experience of being “alone together” that comes when we are invited to speak to the center of a circle of fellow travelers.
Now with the introduction of The Center’s new blog, we have an opportunity not only to go on-retreat ourselves, but also to benefit from speaking into and listening deeply to the online circle of trust we can now share together.
Sailing Uncharted Waters
by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Paul Michelac
“I have seen a man walk on a high stretched rope holding a long pole for balance: memories and dreams can do that, be a great help.”
Rabia
How would you make sense of this passage from the 8th-century Sufi poet, Rabia? What word or image speaks to your soul or grabs your attention? For Reverend Paul Kottke, Senior Pastor of the University Park United Methodist Church in Denver, Courage to Lead retreat alum, and advocate of Courage & Renewal for Clergy and Lay Leaders, Rabia’s quote carries several important meanings: “Dreams in the sense of vision, and memory is that collective wisdom of our past that we do well to study. The metaphor is sailing. I’m not a sailor but I’m told that as you are sailing across a body of water you find a landmark in front of you and that becomes your dream. If you only look that way, then you are not paying any account to the cross-currents that are going to push you off course. The only way to keep yourself on track is to look backwards, so memory is that looking back. Looking back [memories] and looking forward [vision] then keeps you on track.”
Weaving Courage and Coaching for Healthcare Leaders
Courage & Renewal Facilitator Dr. Hanna Sherman recently interviewed her colleague, facilitator Penny Williamson, ScD. Penny was among our very first facilitators.
Much of your work has been in the field of healthcare. Could you share with us how Courage & Renewal work has informed the way you design and lead programs in your work?
My intention was always to bring this work into healthcare since that has been the work of my life and the culture that I am deeply embedded in. Courage & Renewal work has informed everything I do. It has been enormously transformative.
I lead Courage to Lead retreat series for healthcare leaders, creating trustworthy communities for groups of physicians, healthcare leaders, behavioral scientists, psychologists, etc. In addition, we have woven Courage & Renewal principles and practices into the work we call Relationship Centered Healthcare, which is the philosophy that in healthcare everything is centered on the relationships between and among doctors, patients, students, family members—and grounded on the relationship with Self.
The Blizzard of the World: Prelude to A Hidden Wholeness
Friends have shared with us recently that amidst the "blizzard" of uncertainty they see in the news every day, they've been reminded of the Prelude to Parker Palmer's A Hidden Wholeness, which we offer below. Our work at the Center is, as Parker writes, "about tying a rope from the back door out to the barn so we can find our way home again." The blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul.
—Leonard Cohen
There was a time when farmers on the Great Plains, at the first signs of a blizzard, would run a rope from the back door out to the barn. They all knew stories of people who had wandered off and been frozen to death, having lost sight of home in a whiteout while still in their own back yards.
Today we live in a blizzard of another sort. It swirls around us as economic injustice, ecological ruin, physical and spiritual violence, and their inevitable outcome, war. It swirls within us as fear and frenzy, greed and deceit, and indifference to the suffering of others. We all know stories of people who have wandered off into this madness and been separated from their own souls, losing their moral bearings and even their mortal lives: they make headlines because they take so many innocents down with them.
The lost ones come from every walk of life: clergy and corporate executives, politicians and people on the street, celebrities and school children. Some of us fear that we, or those we love, will become lost in the storm. Some are lost at this moment, and are trying to find the way home. Some are lost without knowing it. And some are using the blizzard as cover, while cynically exploiting its chaos for private gain.
So it is easy to believe the poet’s claim that “the blizzard of the world” has overturned “the order of the soul”, easy to believe that the soul—that life-giving core of the human self, with its hunger for truth and justice, love and forgiveness—has lost all power to guide our lives.
But my own experience of the blizzard, which includes getting lost in it more often than I like to admit, tells me that it is not so. The soul’s order can never be destroyed. It may be obscured by the whiteout. We may forget, or deny, that its guidance is close at hand. And yet, we are still in the soul’s back yard, with chance after chance to regain our bearings.
This book is about tying a rope from the back door out to the barn so we can find our way home again. When we catch sight of the soul, we can survive the blizzard without losing our hope or our way. When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world—in the family, the neighborhood, the workplace, and in political life—as we are called back to our “hidden wholeness” amid the violence of the storm.
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