Parker Palmer – Leaders, Chaos, and Death

Another meaningful (for me) quote from Parker Palmer. It also seems relevant to the whole emerging / mainline church conversation. Reminds me of Mike Regele’s great book, The Death of the Church (there are some good “customer reviews from Amazon.com here).

“…A fourth shadow within and among us is fear, especially our fear of the natural chaos of life. Many of us – parents and teachers and CEO’s [and pastors / clergy] – are deeply involved in eliminating all chaos from the world. We want to organise and orchestrate things so thoroughly that messiness will never bubble up around us and threaten to overwhelm us (for “messiness” read dissent, innovation, challenge, and change). In families and churches and corporations, this shadow is projected as rigidity of rules and procedures, creating an ethos that is imprisoning rather then empowering. (Then, of course, the mess we must deal with is the prisoners trying to break out!)

The insight we receive on the inner journey is that chaos is the precondition to creativity…even what has been created needs to be returned to chaos from time to time so that it can be regenerated in more vital form. When a leader fears chaos so deeply as to try and eliminate it, the shadow of death will fall across everything that leader approaches – for the ultimate answer to all of life’s messiness is death… Leaders who participate in this denial [of death] often demand that the people around them keep resuscitating things that are no longer alive. Projects and programs that should have been unplugged long ago are kept on life support to accommodate the insecurities of a leader [and, to be fair, congregations also] who [do] not want anything to die… The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that death finally comes to everything – and yet death does not have the final word. By allowing something to die when its time is due, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge…” (Emphasis, mine) (Let Your Life Speak, pp.89-90.) As a friend said to me today in an e-mail, quoting a Maori proverb: “You have to clear the undergrowth in order that new flax can grow.”