Sacred Heart

“Exercising Leadership is an expression of your aliveness.  But your life juice—your creativity and daring, your curiosity and eagerness to question, your compassion and love for people—can seep away daily as you get beat up, put down, or silenced.”

Heifetz & Linsky, Leadership on the Line, p225

Watching the pomp and circumstance around President Obama’s inauguration was an odd moment for me.  I felt proud, when I usually feel a bit embarrassed, and hopeful when I usually feel a little cynical. The shame I sometimes feel at moments like this comes from a sense that Americans think we’re “all that…and then some.”  Obama’s paradoxical mix of humility and inspiration helped me feel like we have stuff to feel good about, and we have stuff to face and work on, so let’s get to it!  I feel a bit of life juice flowing back into my veins for this thing called politics in America.

Heifetz and Linsky end their book, Leadership on the Line, by encouraging leaders to cultivate what they call a “Sacred Heart.”  This is the courage to keep creativity, risk taking, openness to learn, a sense of wonder and innocence, love and compassion alive, even in your darkest days as a leader. President Obama kept a sense of sacred heart through a hard election, and therefore has restored a sense of sacred heart toward our nation for many.  Now the test will be whether he can do it through the harder part of governing.

The peril of leadership is that it can beat people down. The end impact of this is what Heifetz and Linsky call “Losing Heart.”  We create defense mechanisms to protect ourselves, and we dress them up in adult garb.  Innocence becomes cynicism which we dress up as “realism.”  Curiosity becomes arrogance which we dress up as “authoritative knowledge.”  Compassion becomes callousness which we dress up as “being thick-skinned.” 

The problem with cynicism, arrogance and callousness is that, while these things protect us from further hurt, they also undermine our ability to lead. Psychologist might label the “losing heart” syndrome as burnout, and people in ministry are especially prone to this.  A pastor once told me, “I knew I needed help when I felt absolutely nothing for my people and their painful life situations.” Callousness.  When I used to play the guitar a lot, I developed thick calluses on the end of my fingers, which meant I felt nothing when pressing down a string for hours on end. That served me well in my musical endeavors.  But insensitivity does not serve a leader well. Our eyes gloss over when people open their hearts to us.  We infuse others with despair instead of encouragement.

Cynicism runs deep in my family, so this has always been a spiritual struggle for me as a leader. I see the end result of resentment in my ancestors, so I work hard to avoid that fate. I have my cynical days, but I give myself the grace that the overall direction in my life is one of hope and perseverance.  As I work with churches in the area of leading change, I can slip into cynicism.  When I despair over the state of the church and her short-sighted efforts at change (which often seems like so much “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,”) I consider a pastor who once said, “Like a might glacier moves the church of Jesus Christ!”  A glacier is majestic and yes, it does move, albeit very slowly.

Theologically I seek to maintain wonder by reflecting on Jesus who came preaching that the “kingdom of God is near you.” It is a kingdom where the modus operandi is love, justice and mercy for human failing and suffering. The church was created by God as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of this kingdom. A sign can be a beautiful, creative work of art that communicates in powerful ways.  Or a sign can be small, functional, and hard to read, but when traveling down the road needing direction, functional still works!

What Scripture and theology help cultivate a “sacred heart” for you?