Roots and Wings 2011

Roots and Wings

Ignatian Leadership Academy

June 21, 2011

Most Reverend Gordon D. Bennett, S.J.

Bishop Emeritus of Mandeville

 

 

Good Morning!

For at least a couple of reasons, I titled this address “Roots and Wings.”   First, I did it because this was the theme of the first address to the faculty I gave as principal of Loyola High School in Los Angeles in 1980. I told the faculty on that day: “There are two things we can give our students: roots and wings.”

Secondly, I chose this title because, in the 30 plus years of my involvement with Catholic secondary education in the tradition of St. Ignatius, we are still, thank God, examining our true roots in order to continue to be faithful to the Ignatian vision and educational mission; and we are also, thank God, applying our roots to the contemporary context so that we can continue to help our students soar on strong wings, over and above constraints of any kind which would render them incapable of achieving the goal of praising, reverencing and serving God.

Roots and wings.

No one will seriously doubt that attempts undertaken by Jesuit ministries over these many years to live in this delicate balance between roots and wings have met with extraordinary success; and, as I hope you believe as well, we have been truly blessed by God’s amazing grace.

I certainly felt this success up close. The last graduation over which I presided was in 1997 and the valedictorian, Brian Jeffrey Nese, made the following statement: “The aim of all of Jesuit education is love.” Hearing him say that, instead of “When we first arrived here four years ago” or “As we step boldly into the future,” gave me a sense of enormous satisfaction and gratitude. I actually thought: “Someone has finally got it. Now I can die in peace.”

The Ignatian method also calls us, however, to an ongoing discernment about these movements of grace, to an always more generous response, to a deeper and more urgent desire to be “outstanding in every form of service.” That’s why we are here together this morning, isn’t it?

So, my words this morning will be an attempt to do this: to articulate our roots in a way that will emphasize how perennial a factor they are in our way of proceeding; and to emphasize that it is precisely these roots which enable the formation of the wings that allow us and our school communities to remain unique, and even necessary, offerings in our contemporary context.

I want to anchor my remarks in three areas for reflection and discussion: vision, power and change. And I want to conclude with some gratuitous observations on the contemporary cultural context in which our ministry is being offered and received.

Let me repeat that, in recent years, we have learned well how to ground our educational practice in the practical mysticism of St. Ignatius. And yet, in my opinion, we haven’t always sufficiently acknowledged the fact that there were 15 centuries of tradition before Ignatius, and that his experience and reflection were themselves rooted in a powerful source of inspiration: the gospels. In a way, it seems to me that we’ve been unwittingly telling only half the story and accessing only half the power.

Everything Ignatius taught and suggested for imitation came out of his experience in the Spiritual Exercises. Those Exercises, as you well know, are a way of helping one embrace the kind of spiritual freedom which enables one to live a life characterized by love. The purpose of every Ignatian enterprise, because it emerges from the Exercises, is to “help souls become spiritually free in order to love.”

The majority of the Exercises are not meditations on philosophies or methods; they are simply contemplations of Jesus Christ in the gospels. The majority of the Exercises are an increasingly heartfelt prayer for the grace to “know Jesus more intimately, love Him more ardently, and to serve Him more faithfully.”

It is helpful for us, then, right from the beginning, to acknowledge that what we are doing in education is not so much implementing a certain philosophy or method, but learning how to become more faithful in a relationship. Our educational project is not so much about monitoring a process for self-improvement but about facilitating an encounter with a real person. Brian Nese was right: the aim of all Ignatian education is love – love of a person. It is not so much knowing all about Jesus, but about knowing Jesus. As Pope Benedict XVI has said: “God has a human face and his name is Jesus Christ.”

So when we look at the concept of “vision” for example, it is important for us to learn from encountering Jesus what his vision is and to try to appropriate that vision by looking at the world through his eyes. This is exactly what Ignatius himself did.

Jesus really did propose a clear vision for anyone who chose to accept the invitation follow in his steps. In Mark’s gospel, for example, he instructs his disciples to feed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread. When the disciples protested that they didn’t have nearly enough bread with them to do that, Jesus provided not only everything they needed but much more besides. Mark tells us that not only did everyone have their fill but also that there were 12 baskets of loaves left over.

Jesus’ vision, when we allow ourselves to encounter him, reveals a world of infinite possibility, a world, in fact, in which nothing is impossible. Jesus’ vision challenges directly a world the world inevitability in which everything is predictable, mechanistic, and empirical, a world in which hope is both unnecessary and superfluous. Simply put, Jesus believed in the choice everyone has of how they will see the world.

As Albert Einstein would express it centuries later: “We can look at life as if nothing is a miracle, or we can look at life as if everything is a miracle.” Jesus taught the latter, and he formed his disciples in that vision.

Whenever Jesus found it necessary, as he often did in Mark’s gospel, to correct his disciples’ perceptions and reactions, e.g., when they were terrified and panicking during a storm which had come up suddenly at sea and threatened to swamp their small boat, he always referred them back to the miracle of the loaves. He reminded them that “they did not understand about the loaves” (Mark 6:52), and he drew them back time and time again to looking for the miracle.  His rationale was very clear: if you don’t get the miracle of the loaves, you’ll never get the resurrection from the dead. The miracle of the loaves prepared the disciples for the crowning event of his resurrection from death into new and eternal life.

Jesus formed his disciples to change from the paradigm of “I’ll believe it when I see it” to one which affirms “I’ll see it when I believe it.” In fact, this is exactly how Jesus describes his authentic disciples near the end of the gospel of John when he says to doubting Thomas: “Blessed are those who have not seen but have believed.”

Jesus’ formation of his disciples was right on the mark: our vision controls our perception and our perception becomes our reality.

Jesus’ vision is the root of our Ignatian vision: a way of perceiving reality that many would call idealistic and, thus, impossible. Mired as they are in a world of inevitability, these people cannot believe in a world characterized by truth, by justice, by goodness and by virtue, a world committed to beauty and compassion and generosity and the common good. And because they can’t believe in it, they will never see it.

Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, the Superior General of the Jesuits, in an address last year in Mexico City to personnel from Jesuit universities, urged them on to recapture and exploit Ignatius’ vision of the possible. Fr. General described the current process of higher education as the “globalization of superficiality.” With this description, I think he put his finger on the real lack of imagination in contemporary education, and sees it the result of culture’s continual willful ignorance about what this world really is and culture’s indifference to what this world could be. The more we choose not to see, the more shallow our understanding of the world is, the more dependent we become on our expectations and our prejudices.

In our Ignatian schools today, it is important that we do not abandon the many creative and intentional activities we have already devised to allow our students to immerse themselves in the world, to understand reality from the perspective of others who are not at all like them. For our schools, this way of proceeding continues to be not only desirable but mandatory. The very fact that the oppression caused by poverty, racism, sexism and ethnic prejudice continues to exist is the result of the fact that so much about our world has become inevitable, there is no room for miracles; and because we don’t believe it, we’ll never see it. With all the advances culture has made in so many areas, we still don’t get the miracle of the loaves.

Being true to the vision of the Jesus we encounter in the gospels, the vision which captivated St. Ignatius, we need not only to retain the capacity to keep believing in what’s possible, but, most importantly, we need to continue to believe that this hopeful vision is the world’s only relevant reality. “If we don’t believe it, we will never see it.”

Power.

Ignatius learned about true power from encountering Jesus in the gospels. Throughout his public life, Jesus had a number of testy exchanges with the religious leaders of the day, and many of them had to do with the concepts of authority and power.

In Mark’s gospel, the Pharisees were always demanding that Jesus tell them by whose authority he was doing the things he did. And Jesus made clear, in word and deed, that the power he was exercising was not one of compulsion but of invitation, not something that inspired fear but something that inspired hope, not something that made people slaves but something that set people free. And nowhere is this exercise of power more evident than in the healings Jesus performed. Restoring sight, hearing, walking, indeed all the healing encounters, become metaphors for, and embodiments of, the kind of power Jesus exercised as he restored people to their dignity as human beings and set them free.

I want to note here something that the Christologist, Jürgen Moltmann, says: “Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world; they are the only truly natural things in a world that has become unnatural, demonized and wounded.” In other words, Jesus’ exercise of power was not to make people super-persons, but merely to restore them to their full humanity, a humanity that had somehow become divided, lost, squandered, or surrendered.

One of these most powerful encounters was between Jesus and the man in Chapter 8 of Mark’s gospel who was possessed by demons, the man who called himself Legion because, in his words, there were hundreds of demons tormenting, dividing and competing for his soul. He had somehow become a “compartmentalized” person, with no single identity that could be summoned with just one name. He lived among the tombs, i.e., he was spending his energy pursuing things that could not give him life. He was naked, i.e., he found himself incapable of experiencing shame or dignity. And he was continually gashing himself with stones, i.e. he was compulsively self-destructive. Because his world had become unnatural, demonized and wounded, he had degenerated into an unknowable, disparate person, even to himself.

And then, his encounter with Jesus restored his dignity as a human being and gave him back his interior unity and his integrity as a person.

Here is what we discover about power as Jesus meant it and as He exercised it: helping persons to experience and claim their full humanity. This means that, for Jesus, the exercise of power means healing; it means affirming, and it means setting free. Power, for Jesus, was never force or influence or group think or political correctness or majority rule. It was always preserving and ennobling humanity and setting it free.

Culture today, with its emphasis on materialism and relativism, and stoked as it is by narcissism and hedonism, intentionally attempts to divide individuals from themselves by encouraging compartmentalization of the self.

Our culture, particularly through advertising and the entertainment media, would have us attempt to equate opinion and fact, information with wisdom, worth with wealth, and character with reputation. But it encourages us to divorce experience from meaning, truth from virtue, success from significance, sex from love, choice from consequence, and spirituality from religion.

Above everything else, our encounter with the healing power of Jesus we hope to facilitate should help us lift culture up to the affirmation of human dignity precisely as that dignity is manifest in every single person without exception.

St. Ignatius appropriated Jesus’ concept of power, made it the basis of his pedagogy and enfolded it with the crucial emphasis of cura personalis.

Change.

As with vision and power, encountering Jesus in the gospels reveals his attitude toward the phenomenon and experience of change, and we receive from him as well an invitation into the fearlessness that change involves. We all know that not all change is progress, just as not all movement is forward. In fact, the change that is true progress is always characterized, paradoxically, by, of all things, by loss.

In chapter 12 of John’s gospel, in speaking of the change he himself is about to undergo through his suffering and death, Jesus says: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” Jesus’ doctrine is soon going to be confirmed by his personal example, the most poignant sign of its reality and its effectiveness.

An idea from the book “Leadership on the Line” by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Harvard professors, has struck me as relevant here: “It isn’t change that people fear so much, it is loss. Leadership becomes dangerous when it must confront people with loss.”

In order for change to be effective, Jesus had to convince people that this change is in their best interest, that this change is transformation and not death.

Like any leader, Jesus knew instinctively that people have a horror of being told that they will have to sustain losses; and he knew, too, that peoples’ unrealistic expectations of him as the leader is that he would protect them from having to put up with the pain of change. But Jesus knew that all of human life involves change and that some losses in life are necessary. So no wonder, Jesus’ most frequent exhortation to those who found themselves about to take that leap into the dark was: “Do not be afraid.”

Ignatius knew as well that part of his job description meant that he was supposed to “allay fear.” In our various roles of leadership, allaying fear is precisely and fundamentally what we are called to do. Courageous leadership, of necessity, involves inviting others, our colleagues, our students, to trust the unknown over the tried and true, to invest in the possibilities over the slam dunks, never ignoring the requirement of sacrifice, but proceeding out of a limitless fountain of hope, a hope that is not naïve but is grounded in the fundamental goodness and nobility of the human spirit.

Ignatius learned from Jesus that the leader is called to decipher the mystery of change, called to be the still point in the interplay between death and new life, that very mystery to which Jesus pointed when he said: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it will yield a rich harvest.” More than anything else, this comfort with change has been the reason the Ignatian paradigm has survived for so many centuries.

Let me summarize, then, what we have learned from encountering Jesus in the gospels, and what Ignatius himself learned from his contemplation of Jesus’ life: Jesus’ vision makes us free for hope, Jesus’ power sets us free to be fully human, and Jesus’ acceptance of change is about making us free from fear. When hope and dignity and fearlessness are in place, a person is then free to love. This is Ignatius’ ideal of true human living; and it should be what animates every Ignatian enterprise, including Ignatian schools. This is what we are invited to be about.

I said that I wanted to offer some comments on leadership and cultural climate before I conclude. I do so because this intentional recovery and re-articulation of the Ignatian method began in another era, the late 1960s. Since then, there have been enormous social shifts that must make us wonder if we are all still on the same page, whether “open to growth, loving, religious, committed to academic excellence, dedication to justice, and committed to diversity” are still understood in the same way across the various constituencies in a school community.

It would be awful, wouldn’t it, if the grad-at-grad, which took us so long to articulate and promulgate and evaluate, had somehow dissolved into mere sloganeering, justifying everything or meaning nothing at all, and all within the same generation in which it was born.

So, with respect to leadership today, this much appears to be clear:

Today’s effective leader is no longer the organizational genius; now, the effective leader is the relational genius, the one who can galvanize disparate elements to work toward a concrete goal. The effective leader need no longer exercise command and control; now, it is necessary that the leader be collegial and empowering. Suitability for leadership used to require degrees, experience, or simply being invested with it by higher authority; today, the leader is chosen and affirmed because he is considered gifted or called.

The effective leader in the past based her appeal on reason and tradition and, thus, relied mostly on words and on precedent; today, the effective leader appeals to feelings and human behavior and, thus, will use more images and tell stories and decide more on the facts of each individual situation.

Powerful leaders used to convince because they mastered the written page; now, leaders convince because they are people of the screen, the big screen or the small screen, able to communicate in person and through audio and visual media. Leaders in the past used to be effective because they were highly structured; today, leaders are effective because they are highly flexible.

Leadership has changed because the people leadership exists to serve have changed, and we minimize the importance of this shift to our peril.

Equally crucial is to pay attention to the millennial generation which describes not only our current and future students, but also many of our current and future partners in ministry.

Millennials are the subject of a great amount of literature today, mostly because teachers, employers and managers report experiencing great frustration in understanding this particular generation’s values, aspirations, and idiosyncrasies. Baby boomers, for example, who are most of the teachers, administrators and managers today, valued self-fulfillment above everything else and worked hard to change the world; so, they can become very disconcerted by the Millennials who value having fun above everything else and whose mantra is a variation on: “Follow your own dreams. You can achieve anything you want to achieve.”

It can be hard to understand the Millennials’ obsession with their appearance, their sense of entitlement, their seemingly limitless capacity to excuse their motives and behaviors, and their intolerance of even constructive criticism. Their addiction to technology and to being “in touch” insulates them from those around them, limiting their ability to understand nuance and irony – which cannot be communicated well in an email or a text. And their spelling is atrocious!

It would be impossible to exaggerate how important bridging the communications chasm these deep differences carve out, not only in order to avoid pointless generational wars, but also to continue to serve the mandate the Ignatian mission gives us to do whatever we can, generously and unstintingly, facilitate a personal encounter with the “God with the human face.”

Out of our own experience of Jesus, out of what we learn from Ignatius’ encounter with Jesus, out of our own best efforts to incarnate Jesus’ vision, accessing his power, and accepting change, we have to believe that, although this can difficult and perhaps exceedingly so, it is not impossible.

We ourselves have to remember the miracle of the loaves.

We ourselves have to continue to believe in the possibility of the miracle because, if we don’t believe it, we will never see it.

Thank you for listening.