{"id":27474,"date":"2021-04-21T19:41:41","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T02:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=27474"},"modified":"2021-04-22T14:57:44","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T21:57:44","slug":"hearts-and-drums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/hearts-and-drums\/","title":{"rendered":"Hearts and Drums"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world could be a better place to be. We have heard the cries of people passing through this place of time, journeying between the gardens, desperate for consolation. Some are gifted to endear their lives to pursuing it while so many others are consumed, wandering in dark places or numb, empty spaces within empty spaces. Being here is a risk. Those liberated, enlightened and heroic few offer their \u2018boon\u2019 expansively and strategically, knowing that there is a market, between the gardens (as history has shown), for the message of truth and hope. In the final book of his \u2018Undefended Leader Trilogy\u2019, Leading with Everything to Give<\/em>, Simon Walker draws on the interactions of personality and power, the focus of his first two endeavours, as he considers their interrelationship within whole populations and between societies over time using a hopeful, \u2018specific model of social ecology\u2019.1<\/sup><\/p>\n

The \u2018Renaissance in the 15th<\/sup> century\u2019 started this era of \u2018Western\u2019 social expression, as Walker perceives it, and we are at its end.2<\/sup> His delineation of the stages, from then to now, using categories that he had previously used to define leadership, relatively-speaking, was intriguing, not fulfilling. Despite certain social progression, especially for bourgeoisie and the beaten proletariat, the whisper of moral and theistic degradation, from then to now, resonates. The RSX-type (Reserved-Strong-eXtended), containing a worldview inspired by faith and honest philanthropy, one breathing God into all things, was lost by the 1900s in what Walker refers to as the Aspirational Stage.3<\/sup> By this time, humans of the West, stunned by an individualism awakened by a relentless capitalism and intoxicating consumerism, were on trajectory toward the flare of unbound dominion, commodifying all things, exploiting all things living.<\/p>\n

This is not sustainable. The world falls daily, further into collapse. In poverty today, I am less of a commodity, less needed. Walker connects the experience, in our weakened and fragile condition in this final and exploitative stage of the era, as \u2018a bereavement, to which we will respond with the usual stages of the grieving process.\u20194<\/sup> Our poverty belongs to all of us, not just \u2018them\u2019. We are responsible; hence, the trend toward an popular, acceptable narcissism because such responsibility is best avoided for the truth and pain of it.<\/p>\n

When I was a boy, I never wanted to die. I used to pray, with all my heart, that I would live to be one hundred and fifty years old. I loved life; I just couldn\u2019t imagine it not being in me. The idea of death still escapes me. In my early teens, the driveway was another realm and basketball was the sky, the moon, sun and all the stars. I could not leave for dinner or bedtime without sinking the shot that promised the NBA. I loved playing basketball, never lightly, always with big heart and tenacious. Still, on this other side of halfway home things come to life for my aging eyes and my breath is held on beauty yet, there has been severe pain and immanent poverty that have caused violent undoing and radical discomfort. There was a time that I did not think I would make it to thirty-five years old. There are days when the story feels unbearable (excruciating, impossible, systemically unjust, structurally incorrect), that I long for home.<\/p>\n

When grief is the appropriate response, Simon Walker determines that a propensity toward an ignorant \u2018feeling good\u2019 is more important, thereby \u2018reducing the chances that we will persevere and grow through tragedy, loss and pain, or that we will aspire to act with courage in the noble cause.\u20195<\/sup> Our attention will be achieved in life or in death, no one can evade the truth and nothing can separate us from His love.6<\/sup> Presence to pain, the humility to grieve, are characteristics of an original leader who is put together with integrity and, in solidarity, is courageous to care for people through the patient process of pain, grief and loss. Patient endurance, resolute in hope for a new beginning, are cries of consolation in this restorative social movement.<\/p>\n

The presence that we are called into, as we journey through this place of time, following Jesus, is that of a wise, old soul with skin in the game. This is phronesis and, with it there will be the experience of pain, only to situate the soul stronger, steady, gentler like Jesus. Compassion will resound, the volume at a frequency unknown to the self-centered, expressions of an untouchable liberty to confound the status quo and, you will hear the people sing!7<\/sup><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Simon P. Walker,\u00a0Leading with Everything to Give: Lessons from the Success and Failure of Western Capitalism<\/em> (The Undefended Leader Trilogy Book 3), Piquant Editions, Kindle Edition, Chapter 1.<\/li>\n
  2. Walker, Leading with Everything to Give,<\/em>\u00a0Ch. 9.<\/li>\n
  3. Walker, Leading with Everything to Give<\/em>, Ch. 9.<\/li>\n
  4. Walker, Leading with Everything to Give<\/em>, Ch. 9.<\/li>\n
  5. Walker, Leading with Everything to Give<\/em>, Ch. 9.<\/li>\n
  6. Romans 8:39, NIV.<\/li>\n
  7. “Les Miserables | Do you hear the people sing?” Universal Pictures, December 27, 2019, 2:21, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1q82twrdr0U<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    The world could be a better place to be. We have heard the cries of people passing through this place of time, journeying between the gardens, desperate for consolation. Some are gifted to endear their lives to pursuing it while so many others are consumed, wandering in dark places or numb, empty spaces within empty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","cohort-lgp10"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27474"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27486,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27474\/revisions\/27486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}