I recently saw somewhere an interview in which world-famous NASCAR driver Danica Patrick observed, “If you’re looking at the wall, that’s where you’re headed.” (For those unfamiliar with NASCAR, the wall’s not a good thing to be headed toward.) Her observation mirrors that of leadership guru Simon Sinek, that the human mind is incapable of comprehending negatives. As evidence, he challenges us not to think of an elephant. (Aww, too bad.) So skiers, he says, who focus on trees are more likely to hit one (or at least more likely to find their experience defined by them), while skiers who focus on even a path surrounded by trees are astonished to discover how much path there actually is. More than enough. The challenge is that walls and trees represent big threats to things that are important to us. They are understandably challenging to ignore. But ignore isn’t quite the right word, is it? If Sinek is right about the brain, we can touch the negative by attending the positive. We can acknowledge the trees, in part, by attention to the path.
One time I found myself at a national gathering of campus
ministry leaders. If anyone has reason to fear big (and often financial)
threats, it’s campus ministers who hold holy space with teenagers and largely
rely on the support of those outside the community. Conversations at leadership
gatherings about fear of not having enough money, or losing the money one had,
were frequent. At this gathering I got curious. What is the path of each heart
surrounded by these daunting trees? “If you got $50,000 today,” I went around
the room asking, “what’s the first thing you would do?” I had realized that,
while I needed to navigate the trees, what I longed for was to learn from the
paths of others and allow the imaginations of others to inspire my own; to open
my heart to the path of God’s revealing in the context where I showed up each
day and prayed to live in faithful community.
Experience and observation suggest that it’s easier to name
the trees than the path. Will there be enough? is an easier question to ask than for what? To answer the latter question is to share a path, is to share your heart. It’s
vulnerable and sometimes scary. Sometimes we don’t know. “Lord,” said Thomas. “We
don’t know where you are going, how can we know the way?” We see what gets in
the way, but of what? We’re not always sure. I shared with a friend one
time that I prayed for a life determined by the waters of baptism and shaped by
the Easter Vigil. His blank look suggested he did not share this prayer. But
then his face opened. “I don’t know what that means,” he said. (Fair enough.) “Tell
me what that’s about for you.” And we were together, for a few minutes, on a
path.
Don’t get me wrong. Some trees need naming. At one time or
another, most do. But the path is what inspires to overcome them, the
possibility of what could be.
Where do we look when we’re looking to what could be? Danica
asks. What vocabulary do we draw from when we share our hearts and hopes? Not
just individually, but in the communities (families, schools, organizations,
churches, etc.) of which we are a part?
In his book, The Way of St. Benedict, Rowan Williams describes
what we called the “currency” of a community: “All communities need a medium of
exchange, a language that assures their members that they are engaged in the
same enterprise. It involves common stories and practices, things that you can
expect your neighbor to understand without explanation, ways and styles of
doing and saying things.” Williams goes on to describe the experience of an
English priest visiting a university mission, attempting to discover “what the
currency of the university is.” After days of observation, the priest concluded,
“What did these people exchange with one another when they met? You’d be
surprised – they exchanged grievances. So the currency of that University is
grievance.”
Williams goes on to shift the metaphor of exchange into one
of circulation in the body, both an individual body and a body like, say, the
Body of Christ. What do we put in circulation? With what do we inspire the life
and being of the body, mindful that what we put in circulates through, becoming
later what we receive. “If you put in grievance, you will get back grievance.” Meanwhile,
the lives of so many communities are aided, if not healed, as members circulate
instead the currency of goodness, positive expectation, and kindness.
Other currencies Williams names includes anxiety or
censoriousness, pressures to conceal truths in the name of “peace,” on the one
hand, and “a habit of stable determination to put into the life of the body
something other than grudges” on the other. On the point of accountability before
Christ, Williams observes that leaders of (not only) Benedictine communities
are in unique position to put into circulation “the habit of hope, trust in the
possibilities of compassion.”
At this point in this post, I’m mindful that I’ve
- o written for longer than I intended (if you made it this far, my deepest gratitude),
- o probably glossed a good bit of a favorite author’s (Williams’) thoughts, and
- o risked conflating 2 ideas, the tree/wall idea with currency and circulation,
so I’ll just end briefly by suggesting that the connection,
for me, is the invitation to risk reflection on our habits of contemplation and
contribution, individually and in the lives of those to whom we’re bound in
love. So many of our thoughts are thoughtless (the fruit of unexamined
imitations or habits). I say school’s not cool because it’s the cool thing to
say. But in the space of an unthreatened heart, how do I understand the
path? The good life? What holy yearnings has God planted in my heart? What do I
believe the trees obstruct or diminish? With whom do I risk sharing the heart
or vision God’s given me for the good and the true and the beautiful? What are
my habits of circulation, both shared and individual? What do these habits convey
about the path I pray God to be on? What opportunities to circulate the joy of
the new thing God is doing does this day present?
I have a sign on the wall I face in my office that says, “Look
for the Good, the True, & the Beautiful.” I have a prayer book that says, “Seek
and serve Christ in each person.” I have, we have, been given all that we need (more than enough, even) to circulate the abundant life of new creation in, for, with one another. In the One Body we share. What a calling. What a gift.
