An email that I sent to a friend.
I've been reading "Let Your Life Speak" by Parker Palmer. It's a book on finding Vocation, and It's been the perfect book for me to read on the road. I stumbled upon it in the house before we left and packed it in my bag for reasons I can't really identify. Its recently been helpful in dealing with my feeling disconnected from God. He starts off this chapter talking about a bought of depression he had. Maybe thats how I'm feeling, a bit depressed. He describes depression as "the ultimate state of disconnection, not only between people, and between mind and heart, but between one's self image and public mask." I can dig it, Parker Palmer... because I was starting to feel shitty and disconnected from people and from God when I was feeling like I wasn't living up to the expectations of being Team Leader and starting to doubt my ability to be a leader in general-- which you and I talked about. And later we talked about my feeling disconnected from God and explored the question of "why?" I guess you could say. I think I have come to the conclusion that it is a lesson in humility. If I'm going to live in my head and act like I can conceptualize everything that is spiritual, God is going to give me the space to let me do that in order to remind me that it doesn't work. So before this email gets too long here is the excerpt:
"I started to understand that I had been living an ungrounded life, living at an altitude that was inherently unsafe. The problem with living at high altitude is simple: when we slip, as we always do, we have a long, long, way to fall, and the landing may well kill us. The grace of being pressed down to the ground is also simple: when we slip and fall, it is usually not fatal, and we can get back up.
The altitude at which I was living had been achieved by at least four means. First, I had been trained as an intellectual not only to think-- an activity I greatly value-- but also to live largely in my head, the place in the human body farthest from the ground. Second, I had embraced a form of Christian faith devoted less to the experience of God than to abstractions about God, a fact that now baffles me: how did so many disembodied concepts emerge from a tradition whose central commitment is to "the Word become flesh"?
Third, my altitude had been achieved by my ego, and inflated ego that led me to think more of myself than was warranted in order to mask my fear that I was less than I should have been. Finally, it had been achieved by my ethic, a distorted ethic that led me to live by images of who I ought to be or what I ought to do, rather than by insight into my own reality, into what was true and possible and life-giving for me.
For a ling time, the "oughts" had been the driving force in my life-- and when I failed to live "up" to those oughts, I saw myself as a weak and faithless person. I never stopped to ask, "How does such-and-such fit my God-given nature?" or "Is such-and-such truly my gift and call?" As a result, important parts of the life I was living were not mine to live and thus doomed to fail.
Depression was, indeed, the hand of a good friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand-- the ground of my own truth, my own nature, with its complex mix of limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light."
What I realized after reading that was those things also attributed to my own pride and this feeling of failure or feeling that I am a bad leader. Because I live far too much in my head. and because I refuse to recognize or accept most of my limitations. I still feel called to leadership and I still think seminary is the place for me but I'm realizing that I can't be the perfect leader and I can not be the ideal leader to every person. I have learned that I must continually be aware of, and accept, my own limits and gifts, liabilities and assets, darkness and light.