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Speaker - Chris Lowney I’ve been invited to talk about Exercising Heroic Leadership, but I’m sure you’ll forgive a brief digression into the exciting world of offshore oil drilling. You’ve seen on television commercials those massive drilling platforms that suck petroleum out of the North Sea or Gulf of Mexico seabed. Because they are usually portrayed against a backdrop of ocean vastness, you can’t adequately judge just how enormous they actually are: workers are scurrying across platforms perched a good ten stories above the ocean surface. On very rare occasions, fire breaks out on a rig, and the gentlemen working atop them, knowing they are trapped on a burning platform, standing on more tons of fuel than some countries use in a year, readily do what no human being would be brave enough to do otherwise: pull on life jackets and do their best imitations of cannon balls off a ten story high dive into frigid, rolling waves, where they hope that some helicopter will descend from the sky’s blackness and pluck them to safety before the ocean consumes them. You know that I worked for many years at the investment banking firm of JP Morgan, and when a fellow manager found himself dealing with a business crisis of one sort or another, one of us manager colleagues might offer this commiseration, “Well, at least you’ve got your burning platform.” What did we mean? On the one hand, none of us wished on a colleague whatever godforsaken dog’s breakfast of a business mess he had created or inherited—his burning platform as it were; but on the other hand, we were wise enough to understand, that crises can galvanize teams and motivate action. Like those stubborn old coots on oil rigs who suddenly became quite willing to do what they never would otherwise, a business crisis enabled a JP Morgan manager to implement change with speed and scale almost impossible to achieve in calmer commercial seas, when team members simply don’t see the urgent need to change behavior, or are afraid to do what is required. We who love the church perhaps have our burning platform. We heard the word ‘crisis’ a lot yesterday, and those writing about the Church recently have not shied from that dramatic word. Peter Steinfels’ book is subtitled the ‘Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.’ Andrew Greeley’s is ‘Priests: A calling in Crisis.’ But our crisis is quite different from those endured by the oil rig workers. It has not befallen us with the suddenness of a fiery explosion but slowly unfurled over years and decades, with an insidiousness that the Ignatius of the Exercises might identify as the hallmark of the evil spirit at work, who insinuates himself subtly into our lives. Many in the church, and surely some in this room, would object to the word ‘crisis,’ and, therefore, not recognize the need for urgent action that a burning platform compels. There are other important differences. The oil riggers would all agree on the nature of their crisis—a drilling platform on fire—and they would all immediately agree on the proper course of action—jump overboard. I suspect that if we polled this room, however, we might end up with almost as many interpretations of the crises facing our Church and society as there are attendees, not to mention equally broad diversity of opinion on just what we should do. Some undoubtedly believe our church is not changing enough; others probably believe the church has changed too much, or in the wrong directions. So how do we navigate our crisis, one that we each perceive differently and with varying degrees of urgency? First, let’s understand the fundamental nature of any crisis. It was my great privilege to work in Asia alongside individuals who taught me what a crisis really is. The Chinese language represents the word crisis with two characters: one of them means danger, the other one means opportunity. If this is a crisis, it is a moment of great danger, but by the very same token, a moment of vast opportunity. Each of us will define the danger differently; I will choose for this morning to define one dimension of the danger this way: the danger that this generation of Jesuits and their lay partners, faced with the obvious and dramatic decline of Jesuit manpower, could be the one to allow a distinctly Ignatian vision of spirituality, prayer, work, and education to wither to insignificant influence in the life of the American church and society just at a time when it’s deeply needed. The great opportunity we all share is the converse: to conceive ways of applying and invigorating this Ignatian way of proceeding to fit the circumstances in which we and the church find ourselves, and thereby to address the challenges that you have all been discussing in small group sessions. Crises entail danger, and crises create opportunity: just think, for example, of initiatives conceived over the last two decades like the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, Ignatian Lay Volunteers, and the widespread lay leadership in so many traditional Jesuit ministries. Such initiatives were inconceivable in the church and Society of Jesus of the 1950s, precisely because no crisis convinced Jesuits it was opportune to jump in the directions of these—and other—exciting, fruitful initiatives that have since been undertaken. However we each might choose to describe our crisis, let’s please accept, each personally and together as a group, its scale. This generation of Jesuits and lay partners are called, privileged, and burdened to deal with challenge to their corporate existence and relevance matched only, as best I can tell, by the very first generation of Jesuits and those who lived immediately before and after the suppression. This is the team the Holy Spirit has chosen to put on the field at this critical moment; and if some of us are stubborn, stupid, and just too tired…more of you are kind, holy, smart, dedicated, just, and prayerful…indeed, some can even sing Irish drinking songs and recite Hopkins’ poetry. And let’s be encouraged that we today have in our shared Ignatian tradition unique and remarkable resources for coping with this moment, as the Chinese would say, of danger entwined with opportunity. Let me now turn to that question, first outlining five powerful foundational resources that we draw on, and then turning to outline some of the proactive ways of proceeding that I personally would consider characteristic of individuals and teams associated with Ignatius of Loyola’s vision |
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