A Dog's Life It Is Not

    I had a dog once, a big, black Alsatian, and I named him Satan. He was highly intelligent. I remember entering him for a dog show and preparing weeks before the event. He would come on command. He heeled to the knee. He would watch my every move, and could sit without moving for several minutes. I trained him to 'fetch' and 'sit' and 'roll over' and 'pose'. Satan had a problem, however. Without a command to respond to, he was clearly nervous, timid and afraid. You could see it in the hang of his head. You could tell that new things confused him. He would just sit with his head on his paws. You knew that risk, dare and exploration were not his strengths. He was perfect, but he was not happy. He was a healthy dog but he was not a frisky one. He was a good dog but he was not a playful one. He simply led his life waiting to be told what to do next.

    So after a while, I decided to stop showing off his training exercises. I gave him no orders at all after that. I simply depended on the relationship between us to keep him near me on our walks. It took some time before he could trust stopping along the road to follow various scents he picked up. It took long for him to trust his own instincts and go off without looking to see if I minded. It was ages before he could so forget himself as to lunge at me with his big paws and drool with delight. Bet when he got to that point there was something new in him. It wasn't 'obedience'. It was development. Satan had outgrown 'perfection' and become 'good' instead. He wasn't an automaton anymore; he was a dog.

    Satan and I mirrored so much of the best and the worst of how leadership was exercised in the past. I am not saying that we lived a dog's life, but I am saying that our formation practices were more about 'training' than 'accompaniment'. And that carried on into the 'Superior' and 'Subject' roles.

    Satan taught me a lot about leadership and 'followership'. He taught me that leadership is not about getting someone to do what you wanted. Leadership is a privileged relationship that allows people to discover their own giftedness and that of the other. I new that I could help Satan discover and live aspects of his canine nature if I allowed him the freedom to do so. But I also discovered that his new-found freedom challenged me to question the boundaries I set around myself.

    Peter Hancock says the problems we face are not so much about leadership as about 'followership'. I see a deep truth for myself in that. If I am to be a religious leader in the full sense, I need to understand what it is to be a follower first, a follower of Jesus, a disciple. Peter, the Apostle, could only lead the early Church when he stretched out his hands and allowed someone else to put a belt around him and take him where he would rather not go.

    At Roehampton in England, where the CLT spent ten days in the second half of September planning and preparing for the future, we looked at how we wanted to live our ministry of leadership. We came up with a vision statement that said:

Our vision is to revitalize our religious brotherhood with a clear focus on heart-centred spirituality

    We then elaborated on the vision statement through a value statement:

Religious Brotherhood with a heart-centred spirituality calls us to live contemplatively and in communion with one another. It also calls us to be brothers who are compassionate, collaborative, empowering and non-violent.

    At the heart of what we were trying to articulate was the conviction each of us had: if we wished to be faithful to our call as religious leaders today, we needed to live closely with the Spirit of God. Contemplation is the heart of prophetic leadership. I am indebted to Barry Lynch, the Province Leader in Canada, for showing me the lines by Jessica Powers:

To live with the Spirit of God is to be a listener.

It is to keep the vigil of mystery,

Earthless and still.

One leans to catch the stirring of the Spirit,

Strange as the wind's will.

    A truly prophetic word emanates from intouchness with the heart of God. It arises in the context of community gathered in contemplative and obedient listening to God's Spirit. This is the agenda we set ourselves: to be leaders we needed to be disciples of Jesus and brothers to one another.

    I let Rilke have the last word:

God speaks to each of us as [God] makes us,

Then walks silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall,

Go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

And make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don't let yourself lose me.

Philip Pinto

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