10
Leadership as a Spiritual Practice
Vocation and Journey

Matthew Fox

The practice of cultivating awareness of the observing self that Szpakowski describes is necessary to fully realize the lessons from the next essay. In this piece, Matthew Fox explores the importance of seeing leadership as a sacred vocation and honoring archetypal paths on the leadership journey, each of which furthers comfort with essential elements of the process of transformation. These paths foster normal human journeys of personal development that help us have a positive, hopeful attitude, so important to promoting needed change; the ability to let go as the shifting sands of changing times require us to relinquish even things to which we are profoundly attached; the flexibility and creativity to promote continual innovation; and the capacity to inspire visions of a more just world that can lead to both group and whole-system transformation. Recognizing and naming these paths can normalize the growth needed in transformational times, thus decreasing people’s resistance to change as they also develop essential leadership capacities. Other sections in this volume flesh out these paths. Indeed, the whole of Part One encourages what Fox calls Via Positiva, and the whole of Part Three, Via Transformativa. The essays in Part Two that follow illustrate in more detail Via Negativa and Via Creativa.

The failures of leadership are everywhere to be seen in the globe today. Whether one speaks of the failure of Wall Street tycoons and AWOL government regulators, the failure of the Catholic hierarchy (including the Vatican) in the pedophile priest scandals, the failure of legislators to free themselves of narrow ideologies and marriages to cynical power brokers, or the failure of Greek banks to operate wisely, we seem to be living through a deluge of the shadow side of leadership just as, with the Gulf oil disaster, we lived through months of gushing oil twenty-four hours a day, seven days per week. The darkness of this excessive yang energy (isn’t oil all about powering our industries and transportation, thus yang and fire energy?) has damaged our yin resource (the Gulf waters, their teeming hatcheries and living systems of countless species).

Perhaps one underlying reason for all these failures is that we have secularized, that is to say desacralized, the very meaning of leadership. In my book The Reinvention of Work, I submit that all work worthy of the name, that is to say all work that brings joy, healing, justice, or celebration to others, is sacred work. When we do our work (as opposed to just our jobs), we are midwives of grace (Fox, 2004).

When I speak of the sacredness of work, I am speaking in a universal or archetypal language and drawing on the spiritual teachings of East and West, North and South (Fox, 2004). All healthy societies celebrate the sacredness of work. They often do this through emphasizing work as vocation, as a sacred calling (vocare is the Latin word for “call”).

Call and Response

Leadership is one’s own response to a call and it always includes the call and response of others. No one is called alone. It is a call from the ancestors and those not yet born, to be thoughtful, just, caring, courageous, imaginative, creative—that is, alive. The answer we give to the invitation to be a leader is everything. Work and leadership are our radical response to life itself; therefore, as I argue in my book on the nature of prayer, work is our very prayer (Fox, 2004). It is because we are giving the best of ourselves that we invest so much time preparing for (we call that education), recovering from (we usually call that weekends and holidays), and struggling at (our forty-to sixty-hour work weeks) our work.

Leadership and Vocation

The late poet, essayist, and teacher Bill Everson (also known as Brother Antoninus for his years as a Dominican friar) taught a course on the archetype of vocation at the University of Santa Cruz that for years was one of the most popular on campus. Thanks to interviews conducted by a former student, Steven Herrmann, we have access to his deep thoughts. Everson noted, “The human race cannot go forward unless vocations arise to constellate the collective energies into true realization. It is the race that creates the vocation. All an individual can do is answer the call” (quoted in Herrmann, 2009, p. 40).

The Call comes from some deep place. We might call it Destiny, or the Collective, or the Future, or God, or the Source. We are merely the responders. A leader is essentially humble. As Moses said to God, “Don’t send me; I stutter.” Humility is key to leadership because the Responder knows he or she is not the Caller.

Everson also teaches that vocations are both personal and collective in nature, pointing to the conscious and unconscious motivations inhering in the life span of the unique individual. The Call bridges at least two worlds, that of the conscious and that of the unconscious. This is what makes it deep. This is what makes it worth heeding. This also is what makes it daring. All leadership (as opposed to bureaucratic top-of-the-ladder hegemony) is an adventure, an exploration of the deep.

Everson defines vocation as a “disposition,” a “calling,” which holds the key to a person’s identity. The vocational summons may come from a book, an outer situation, a relationship, or the laying on of hands by a master figure. I have a habit of asking scientists when they first knew they wanted to be a scientist. Invariably I hear stories such as, “I fell in love with the stars when I was five years old” or “I fell in love with a worm when I was six years old.” Their vocations are seeded in childhood and they are about falling in love. One feels called; one feels the need to respond; one feels joyful.

Everson sees rites of passage, particularly the vision quest as practiced among indigenous peoples, as an important and effective recognition of this process. Unfortunately, today’s rites of passage that we witness among gangs and in prisons where young people congregate have no invitation to vocation; they are leaderless (and elderless) rites of passage. They are the shadow side of the vocational archetype.

A powerful sign that one is responding to the call of one’s vocation is synchronicity (or meaningful coincidences). Vocation is too sacred to occur just in linear time. Nor is it about chance alone. Nor is leadership primarily about career. It cannot be, for vocation and career are not synonymous. Says Everson:

I distinguish between vocation and career. Vocation is the disposition, where your faculties are ordered. It has to do with your sense of identity; career is the impact of your vocation on your life, and on the world around you. A person may have a supreme vocation and no career at all. For some people, their careers don’t occur until after they are dead. Gerard Manley Hopkins is an example of that. Emily Dickinson is another. Neither one published in their own lifetime; yet their work is as good as any. Neither Gerard nor Emily struggled with career; they ignored it; Emily more than Gerard. (quoted in Herrmann, 2009, p. 52)

In reflecting with William Everson on the archetype of vocation, we can summarize our findings in this way: a true vocation is always a call from the Sacred (a secular culture destroys vocation and crushes the young because it has no authentic rites of passage calling them into their vocation). Leaders are called to humility because they know that they did not invent their position of power but are called to employ it for the common good. The call is a deep call, bridging the worlds of the conscious and the unconscious but also of the deep personal identity and the needs of the entire species. This call evokes joy and it evokes pain. It brings about breakthrough or conversion. Thus, it includes violence or wildness, requiring surrender and courage, maturity, magnanimity, and generous individuation. It also requires sacrifice and solitude and leaving the masses at times.

Leadership is not ego driven; it is about service and helping one’s co-workers as well as those yet to be born. It calls on the strength and wisdom of the ancestors as it operates as a cyclical, not a linear, process. It requires spiritual practices, including vision quests and rites of passage and deep grieving. Leadership is itself a school, a deep way of learning the most important lessons of life, including wisdom that always means embracing the feminine aspects of life and balancing the yin and yang, the feminine and the masculine. It announces and proclaims therefore the Sacred Marriage of the two in practice as well as theory (Fox, 2008, pp. 221–276).

The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality and Leadership

Having a sense of a vocation as a leader, however, is just the beginning. Leadership itself is both a spiritual practice and a journey. In my case, I had a call to the priesthood that then required me to be in a variety of leadership positions, both within and outside of the church. But first, some context for those who do not know my work.

In my scholarly work, I have demonstrated, first, that before the notion of original sin was introduced, the focus was on original blessing, so that Christianity was a positive, life-affirming, creation-affirming spiritual path—and it still is for many of us whose spirituality focuses on the blessings of creation and the grace of God. I then researched the lives of major Christian mystics. From this work I identified four major spiritual paths, which I later came to realize were actually archetypal mythical paths that also exist within other faiths. These four paths have come to provide the basis for living into a life-affirming, creation-affirming (that is, nature and human nature) spirituality.

Over what has been both a glorious and in some cases challenging journey as a leader, I’ve come to realize that for those for whom leadership is a spiritual vocation, these four paths also provide leadership journeys that assist us in deepening into our spiritual natures and also in being faithful to those natures in becoming forces for revealing the potential for heaven on earth. This understanding has provided me with humility in heady moments of success and comfort in times of pain and suffering.

The first of the paths of creation spirituality is the Via Positiva, the way of delight, awe, wonder, and joy (Fox, 2000). As a leader, what makes us happy? What calls us from joy to joy? How do we assist others in their journey to wonder, awe, and joy? How is our work affecting that result? Thomas Aquinas taught that “joy is the human’s noblest act.” Are we and our work and our leadership style engaged in humankind’s noblest act? Does our leadership reflect the truth of joy as a bottom line? If not, why not? Aquinas also taught that people are changed more by delight than by argument. Is our leadership that kind of leadership? What joy do we derive from our role as leaders? Can we nourish joy more deeply? Give it more time and space?

Ultimately, leadership is a joy because it is a tremendous opportunity to serve, to bring truth and compassion into the world. Aquinas says the proper objects of the heart are truth and justice. Our work, our service, is to bring truth and justice into others’ hearts. What vocation is more joyful than that?

The second path on our spiritual journeys is named the Via Negativa. This is the path of darkness and silence, of letting go and letting be, of grief and bottoming out. As Everson insisted, pain is a necessary part of the archetype of vocation. Pain carries us deep. Grief does that too if we allow it to. Grief can open us up, stir things up, and bring the best out of us. If we fail to grieve, we become bottled up and our creativity cannot flow properly.

Because the Via Negativa is also about silence, it is about letting go of all input and all projections. It is what we do when we meditate, however we choose to do so. It is calming the reptilian brain—the part of us that operates on an action/reaction response. A crocodile is win/lose. A leader who cannot calm his or her reptilian brain and help others to do the same is no leader at all but a carrier of an action/reaction virus that can kill us all and is killing the planet at this time—such as the response to 9/11 being an invasion of Iraq. A leader must find practices for letting go and letting be, for finding stillness and courting solitude. Reptiles respond to solitude. Thus, meditation practices calm the reptilian brain since they teach solitude.

This is how one develops one’s mammal brain, from which we derive the powerful force so underutilized that we call compassion. By being in touch with one’s own pain, one can share solidarity with others in pain—but only if one has learned to let go and let be. An emptying occurs in the Via Negativa. A deep power of listening emerges—a listening that encompasses both heart and head. Listening to one’s deeper self, but also to others and to the needs of the times. Such deep listening is required of authentic leadership.

The third path on the spiritual journey is the Via Creativa. This is the path of imagination and creativity. Creativity flows ever so easily and organically from the first two paths: Those “ruptures” (Everson’s word) that awe and love trigger (Via Positiva) and that silence and pain trigger (Via Negativa) give way to new birth. We are made for creativity. This is, after all, what distinguishes us as a species. Anthropologists define our species as distinct from our near relatives as bipeds that make things. We are makers. Authors. Creators. That is where the word “authority” comes from: our powers of authorship or creativity.

Only a leader who is creative and respectful of creativity—a hunter-gatherer of creativity, so to speak—can truly lead. This is especially true today, when so much in the world is new and requires new solutions. New networks. New alliances. New ideas. New directions for energy needs and for global interaction. New work. New healing. Newly understood connections with our ancestors and past efforts to live fully and peacefully on the earth.

Part of creativity is honoring the child, the puer or puella in oneself, being able to see the world newly, with freshness. There is no creativity without fantasy and play, as Jung observed. Playfulness, youthfulness are essential modes for survival and surely for leadership today. To honor and welcome the child within. To heal the child within. To unleash the child within. Work “without a why,” Meister Eckhart advised. Then and only then do we enter the world of regeneration and renewal.

The fourth path on the spiritual journey is the Via Transformativa, the way of transformation and the way of compassion, celebrating, healing, and justice. Every leader worthy of the title strives for compassion. To teach it, to live it, to bring it alive. Compassion is, after all, the way of the mammal—both the Hebraic word and the Arabic word for compassion come from the word for “womb.” The mammals, the womb people, bring compassion to the planet in a special way. There is a reason why all deep spiritual leaders—Buddha and Isaiah, Jesus and Muhammad, Black Elk and Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa—call us to compassion. We can do away with all religion, but not with compassion. The Dalai Lama confesses that compassion is his religion. Jesus said: “Be you compassionate like your Creator in heaven is compassionate.” (Luke 6.36). In Islam, “The Compassionate One” is by far the most-used name for Allah in the Koran. Compassion is the “secret name for God” in Judaism.

Compassion is about solidarity, “passion-with.” It is about our shared joy and our shared sorrow. It is all about our interdependence. Living it out, it manifests as celebration (our shared joy) and as healing (our shared pain). All true leaders work on their powers of compassion, and their decision making derives from that place deep inside themselves. Authentic leadership today is more about “dancing Sara’s circle” than about “climbing Jacob’s ladder.” Ladder climbing is rarely joyful; it is elitist and vertical; it separates one from earth and others. Circle dancing, on the other hand, is eye-to-eye, curved, embracing of others, close to the earth, and joy-filled, playful.

Which path of leadership is compassionate? Which is elitist? Which do we strive for? (Fox, 1999). Eckhart warns that “compassion begins at home with one’s own body and one’s own soul.” (p. 105). Leaders must be compassionate toward themselves and must find time and space for their own inner life and physical well-being. A leader is not a superman or superwoman. A leader needs coworkers, co-helpers, colleagues. Friendships. Mentors.

Knowing that leadership itself carries one through the four paths of creation spirituality is to know that the call and work of leadership is itself a spiritual practice, a yoga, a discipline for one’s inner work and one’s outer work, for oneself and for the collective, a work that taps into conscious and unconscious, personal and communal. To be a leader is to journey through these four paths on a regular basis. The challenges of leadership, whether positive or negative, break us open and we are reminded of Eckhart’s promise, “the outward work can never be small if the inward work is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth. The inward work always includes in itself all size, all breadth and all length” (Fox, 2004, p. 58). Psyche and cosmos marry. The personal journey becomes the community’s journey and all are part of the cosmic journey.

What a noble journey we are on. What a noble calling. What generosity is called for. What an opportunity. To inspire others to the greatness of their work, both inner and outer. And to show the way by entering into the journey ourselves. To listen and answer the call for our own vocation. Such a vocation tastes like milk and honey. It ushers us into the Promised Land. We are grateful. The leader in us is grateful. Perhaps it is in this context that Meister Eckhart exclaims, “if the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘Thank You,’ that would suffice” (Fox, 2011, p. 52). Gratitude reigns. This is evidence that our work is sacred, not profane. Spiritual, not secular. Meaningful, not meaningless.