Parker Palmer - Leaders and Functional Atheism

Parker Palmer well articulates a recent learning on my part:

“A third shadow common among leaders is “functional atheism,” the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen – a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God.

This shadow causes pathology on every level of our lives. It leads us to impose our will on others, [to get resentful and frustrated], stressing our relationships, sometime to the point of breaking. If often eventuates in burnout, depression, and despair, as we learn the world will not bend to our will and we become embittered about that fact. Functional atheism is the shadow that drives collective [and individual] frenzy as well. It explains why the average group can tolerate no more than 15 seconds of silence: if we are not making noise, we believe, nothing good is happening and something must be dying…

The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally! We learn that we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We learn sometimes that we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only that what we are able and trust the rest to other hands… ” (Emphasis, mine).

(From Let Your Life Speak, pp.88-89). 

It's a kind of "messianic complex!" Often it’s all too easy to think that we’re irreplaceable, that we’re the centre of a church congregation or a workplace etc; that somehow if we’re not around those things will fall down around the ears of those who remain. Sometimes we even quietly hope that will happen so that we can say, “I told you so!” This isn’t good for us. Often we remain somewhere longer than we should; a false sense of our own importance damages both us (we burn out, we grow resentful, we grow arrogant, we feel that we have to be involved, be at the centre, be the “experts” rather than co-learners etc. etc) and those we are amongst (they become reliant upon us, never growing up, never learning to take responsibility, never feeling competent or empowered etc. As Palmer says, on the inner journey – that scary journey where we face and confront the realities of who we are (beneath surface appearances), we learn that “we are not the only act in town.” We free ourselves and we free others when we make this discovery. We learn by experience the meaning of grace. In freeing ourselves we learn to become all that God created us to uniquely be, we begin to flourish, we begin to live adventurously. We free ourselves from fear. We learn to worship our triune God.

Comments

[phil]

I needed to hear this today, thanks Paul!

[will]

This notion of "functional atheism" is something I have been trying to define but not been able to put a frame around it. Thanks for offering these thoughts and furthering the conversation.

[David Finch]

Paul, Thank you! This will be my choice of meditation for the day.