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Chapter 7: humility

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…Without doubt, we should understand that climbing as showing us that we go up by humbling ourselves and down by praising ourselves.

What is humility?

Here we are. After 6 chapters introducing authority, obedience and living with others, St. Benedict dedicates a whole chapter to humility. Reading this chapter feels like it’s a summary of all that has been said before; he even repeats ideas,

The first step of humility is taken when a man obeys all of God’s commandments (c.f. The Prologue)

The third step of humility is attained when a man, from love of God, obediently submits to a superior in imitation of the Lord (c.f. Chapter 1)

The eighth step of humility is reached when a monk only does that which the common rule of the monastery or the example of his elders demands (c.f. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2)

The ninth step of humility is achieved when a monk, practicing silence, only speaks when asked a question… The tenth step of humility is reached when a man restrains himself from laughter and frivolity (c.f. Chapter 5)

I find myself reflecting on humility each week as I read the Rule of St. Benedict. I discover I am caught between a balking at an emotional/spiritual form of self mutilation and a deep desire to explore unchartered territory of anonymity. When I become aware of my mental gymnastics over this issue I am prompted to remind myself of what ‘humility’ is and is not.

Humility is rooted in the Latin humus, meaning “ground”. I find it helpful (rightly or wrongly) to rename it ‘grounded’. To be humble is not to become a doormat with no desire to establish an identity but rather a true and frank acknowledgement to your standing in the world. Once we begin to understand that to know who you truly are we can move away from our natural desire to reject St. Benedict’s twelve steps to humility. This is not to say that humility should not carry some fear and discomfort for us humans, naturally bent towards pride and selfish individualism of many forms. The process to humility is about stripping off false identities and claiming rightful ones, spiritual ones.

There are thoughts which spring to mind as I talk about natural desires and identity. The first is a thought picked up from Gregory Boyd in his book ‘God of the Possible’. He suggests,

Genes, parenting, and spiritual forces do condition who we are. But for believers whose spirits have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit these conditioning factors cannot determine who we are unless we choose to allow them to do so. (Gregory Boyd, God of the Possible: a biblical introduction to the open view of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000))

Boyd is saying that we are conditioned by biological and experiential factors to do and be certain things but none of these factors should control or oppress us. By the Holy Spirit (and that is the emphasis) we are set free from conditioning factors to be transformed, strengthened to follow the way of Christ. We should no longer claim, ‘I can’t do that. It’s not how I was made.’ God knows of what you are made and that is why He sent His Holy Spirit to help us.

The second thought comes from reading Leonardo and Clodivus Boff’s book ‘Introducing Liberation Theology’. There’s a quote which resonated with the reflections I’ve been having whilst reading this chapter.

The gospel is not aimed chiefly at “modern” men and women with their critical spirit, but first and foremost at “nonpersons,” those whose basic dignity and rights are denied them. (Leonardo Boff and Clodivus Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1987) p.8)

I do not want to belittle or ignore the main aim of the Boffs’ statement, that of the extreme poor in our world, but I was drawn to the term “nonpersons”. This phrase reminds me of John Zizioulas’ work on Christian anthropology particularly an excellent article entitled ‘Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood’. Zizioulas articulates a distinction between humans and persons; one is a biological phenomenon the other is a metaphysical reality achieved through communion with God. It is through this divine communion, in baptism, Eucharist and the Body of Christ (the Church) that one transforms from ‘human’ to ‘person’.

I want to suggest that the gospel is for “modern” men and women precisely because they too are “nonpersons”, the difference is that they deny personhood themselves rather than having them denied by others. The path St. Benedict sets out in this chapter on humility is a process for all people to develop from human to person through the task of community.

Ultimately, St. Benedict’s process to spiritual growth and deeper communion with God is set out at the beginning of the Rule as he describes the ideal monks, the Cenobites, ‘who live in a monastery waging their war under a rule and an abbot’. To live a life of discipleship in the Kingdom of God one must be obedient to a community and an abbot. Humility will arrive after one has journeyed the difficult and treacherous road through community.

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Humbling Ourselves

I would love to explore each rung of St. Benedict’s ladder to humility but I am both daunted by such a task and ill-equipped. I do want to spend a few moments, however, reflecting on St. Benedict’s analogy.

I was struck by St. Benedict’s use of direction in his depiction of the ladder to humility. He suggests we climb to the ‘highest peak of humility’ which is a journey away from the ground and up to heaven. The model I would tend to consider is the depiction of Christ’s humility in Philippians 2:3-11

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Christ humbled himself and came down. In the gospels Christ describes humility as putting yourself lower and, in so doing, paradoxically being raised through exaltation by God. Humility, in my mind has always been a descent into that ‘humus’/grounding.

This leads me to another reflection I’ve had about humility; The analogy depicts hard work and intentionality about achieving humility. There are set, pragmatic steps to take to arrive at this state of humility. This unsettles me. I am not suggesting that St. Benedict is wrong or misguided in his teaching but I am rather challenged in my pre-conceived attitude to humility.

My question is, ‘can I humble myself?’ What I mean by this is, is the process of humbling an act we do or an act that is done to us by others and God? The passage from Philippians clearly says Jesus ‘humbled himself’ but is that possible because He is the Son of God or is it an invitation that we should od the same. The difference between humbling yourself and being humbled may seem pedantic and semantic but I think, in relation to St. Benedict’s call to climb the ladder to humility, it is important to ensure where our focus is. Are we to look at humbling ourselves or rather look at living in community and, in doing this discovering we are humbled?

I would want to suggest that humility is achieved by living out the life of obedience in a community, committing to the actions of considering others before yourself, seeking the common good for those to whom you have committed higher than selfish ambition and vain conceit; in short, to love, truly and in imitation of Christ. If you do this then you will find yourself humbled. These steps to humility by St. Benedict are like the Beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel,

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

We read these wrong if we feel we need to mourn, to be meek, to be peacemakers, etc. in order to be blessed. Our focus is wrong if we think that the point of these statements is to show us how to be blessed, as if they are some self-help programme. These are statements of truth not guidance as to how to live your life. These are more about virtues than about practical steps to self improvement. It’s the paradox and challenge of the life of faith in Jesus Christ; you achieve the goal (salvation, arrival into heaven, enlightenment) by not focussing on achieving that goal.
Community is the same,

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (London: SCM Press, 1954) p15-16)

Organic community is not a product, not an end result. Organic community – belonging – is a process, a conversation… It is not the product of community that we are looking for. It is the process of belonging that we long for. (Joseph R. Myers, Organic Community: Creating a Place Where People Naturally Connect (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007) p125)

Reflection

Looking at community within the parish context becomes complicated when you’re aim and focus is building community, as if it were a product or goal to achieve. Community is the process of loving others; the focus is on doing the process rather than achieving the product. It’s like art: an artist may have an idea of what the piece may look like or express but whilst working on it they must cast that dream to one side and engage fully in the task of creating. Then the art is more beautiful and surprising, even to the artist themselves.

What St. Benedict is placing before us is a series of activities to do, not to achieve humility in ourselves but to encourage the growth of community around us and in that rich soil the seed of humility is grown, hidden even from our own eyes until, at the end, when the Reaper comes for the harvest we will find, with Him, that we have born good fruit.

Transformer of humans, Come by Your Holy Spirit and guide me in the way of love and obedience. That, in doing this I will be rightfully humbled even to death and thus be exalted by my Heavenly Father, for His glory and His Kingdom.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Creativity is My Faith

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder… If this is the case then you must all be terribly fond of me!
I’ve been on our annual UK tour visiting different people, catching up and falling in love again with friends, family and places. This year we had three legs of our tour; York (Riding Lights Summer Theatre School), Tunbridge Wells and the Kent coastline. All of these excursions took up time and focus and I couldn’t find much space to take myself way to write and be creative on my own.

I managed to keep one deadline, enforced from an external source, whilst at Riding Lights Summer Theatre School. I want to briefly reflect further on my experience of ‘creativity’. (Read ‘Creativity in Community’ post)

I tried, whilst in Folkestone last week, to get some writing done for my ‘god of the gods’ book. As I sat down to write out some of my theories on what it means to be ‘christian’, I clammed up. I got writer’s block.

I have experienced writer’s block before but this time was different. Before, the sensation was one of not having anything to say. The mind goes blank and you have no original thought to express. You are acutely aware that your mind is currently just ticking along with nothing of any great worth going on. This is difficult, particularly when there is a pressure to produce or be creative, either from an internal or external source.

This time, however, there was a different sensation, one where I had lots of things to say but no way of expressing them. I could, if asked, talk on the topic for a long time and draw all the sources I needed to express what was going on in my head. Instead, I just sat there,

“Where do I begin? How do I say…?”

I tried writing everything out in mind map. I tried speaking ideas into a dictaphone. I tried asking questions in a philosophical argument structuring way. I thought about how I write blogs, sermons and other creative writing exercises and then it occurred to me…

I had forgotten how to do it.

It seemed that, having stopped being creative, I actually stopped being able to be creative.

Creativity, for me, is participation in the life of God. Is everyone creative? No. Is that because they can’t be? No. It’s because they choose not to be. I don’t mean this in a condemnatory manner. Creativity is available to us all, i.e. the life of God is available to us all and some choose to participate and others don’t.

Creativity can borrow language of faith here. If you choose not to participate in a relationship with God you will discover that you can’t relate to God. You will find it difficult to understand any possibility of having a relationship with God. This then becomes your barrier to having that relationship with God which was available to you before. You then begin to say “I can’t have a relationship with God” as if it was a question of logic. I would say that anyone can have a relationship with God but some don’t want to and choose not to. So instead of saying “I can’t” (which I believe to be a fallacy) one can only say “I don’t want to/ choose not to.”

No one can say “I can’t be creative.” The perception is too timeless for it to be correct. You may not be able to be creative now but you can be creative because you are human and creativity is a possibility for all. You choose not to be creative and so it is difficult for you to see you being creative, you have forgotten how to be creative.

Trying to stay on track before I spurt out all my dissertation research…

Creativity, like a relationship with God, is made possible via a choice. This choice opens up both a growth in a competency as you allow the ‘creative power’ to move you and a transformation in self perception as you allow the process of creativity to impact your view of yourself from ‘non-creative’ to ‘creative’. We are correct when we say “I am not creative” but the understanding of what that term means is wrong. Ontologically we are not creative; we are but dust. We are able to participate in creative acts, however, and so, in the world’s eyes’, we can ‘be creative’.

What I experienced was a forgetting of how to be creative. I could have started to believe I was incapable of being creative. This would have led to a death to that which excites me and brings a sense of life to me. Creativity is, at its most profound, the participation in life. Not existence but life. Life as the quickening of the heart, the discovery of purpose, the eyes opening to dazzling beauty. The truth is many have forgotten how to participate in life and they believe this is not available to them. I believe they have just forgotten.

As a Christian I see participation in creativity as the same thing as my participation in God. For Creativity gives me life and the product of that creative process seems to give life to others. The fruits of creativity inspire others to participate in creativity. Many feel they cannot move beyond the desire to participate because they ‘can’t’.

You can and you must.

Thinking Outside of the Box

I’m fascinated by mother’s, when asked about the early signs of pregnancy, who say “You kinda know there’s a baby in there somewhere.” This sensation is, of course, always going to remain alien to me due to my lack of a womb but it’s interesting because a friend of mine said the same thing about writing books; “You just know you have a book in you.”

I love writing. I love to think through concepts and play with words and try and communicate the jumble of ideas going on in my head but I have to ask myself the question: “Do I have a book in me?”

I have tried, on a number of occasions to try and write books. When I was about 7, I remember sitting at my Nan’s typewriter writing out the title, centering and underlining it. Increase the font size, change the font, setting in place the right format to save me a job later. The title? Simple: The Vikings. I had done an ounce of research for a school project and read an article in National Geographic magazine my Mum collected. I was an expert! I was going to write a book on the subject and so I started. I had done this a number of times; The Aztecs, Incas, Egyptians, Victorians, Tudors. Gravity, Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Oceans. Foxes, Voles, Whales, Sharks, Tortoises. Fiction, Non Fiction, Encyclopaedias (yes I was that ambitious!)

At school, each Monday, we would have ‘creative writing’ which consisted of us writing an acount of our weekends. I would begin with waking up on Saturday morning, an exciting time, the faint scent of anticipation, maybe touched with a tinge of frustration. The familiar smells and sensations of my surroundings all needed to be captured in this piece. My teacher’s began to get frustrated with me.

“He never gets out of bed in his creative writing, Mrs. Lunn. Look here.” My creative writing book, a small 30 page A5 notebook, was brought out. “He has filled this book with his contemplations while lying in bed on a Saturday morning! he spent an hour and a half writing about five minutes!”

The truth is I am a prolific writer already; I just can’t seem to finish them.

I’ve tried in recent years to split a book up into several smaller chunks. So, before I start writing, I think about what I’m passionate about and then split it off into sub categories. This has failed also to produce any finished work. I currently have three books two not even half way through waiting to be finished. Why don’t I finish them? Because by the time I’m two or three months into writing I’ve moved on. My brain is onto something else or I’ve changed my views on a subject that I stated at the beginning.

Do I have a book in me?

I have hundreds but I can’t write them quick enough!

I’m currently working my way through economic theory books on Capitalism and it has made me reflect on how I’m approaching this need of mine to write a book. I love the process of writing, I love the wrestling and coming up with ways of expression but I very quickly begin to turn my attention to the final product. I ask questions like: “What will the cover look like?” “What clever titles can I come up with for chapter headings?” “HOw will it look on the page?” “How many words do I need?” All valid questions but all of them stop me from actually fully participating in the writing process.

Blogs are much easier. Blogs can be written in half an hour and published. A complete packaged item with no stress. I write for as long as I want and then I finish when I finish. I can come back to an idea and develop it but I equally don’t have to.

I hate writing books because of the pressure to finish the product on time and packaged…sellable.

Do you have to produce art to be an artist?

Do you have to have a creation to be called creative?

These questions have plagued me for months. I have come to loathe the need to produce because it’s suffocating. People’s nice requests of, “Ned, can you come up with something creative?” I want to shout, “Not now that you’ve asked!” Don’t ask me to create something because the pressure stops me being creative.

To be nice I say ‘yes’ and go away. I struggle and wrestle; “What am I going to do that’ll be ‘creative’?” I end up just regurgitating some old piece of rubbish and updating it or changing it.

Take two recent examples:

I was asked to ‘do something creative’ for a conference. A set of responses to help people into worship. I sat and I prayed and I thought. I had nothing. I asked the key questions; “Why are we doing this?” “What are we doing?” “What does God want us to do?”. I came up with one answer which, in itself is a question: “Is just doing it normally not good enough?”

I guess what I’m trying to say is; is the need to be ‘creative’ actually just another way of saying “I want to be different because I need to be different.” The truth is when you’re being ‘creative’, ‘innovative’ for the sake of being ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’ then you end up doing nothing of the sort.

I’m asked all the time to ‘be creative’ and I’m getting to the stage where I want to say; “I am.”

I just ended up bringing out some old ideas and re-branding them. Is that creative? It didn’t feel creative. It felt like hard work.

In a Pioneer Ministry module this year we talk a lot about ‘being creative’ or ‘thinking outside the box’; “We need to be innovative, entrepreneurial, creative.”. It feels like, as new ministers, we’re being asked to ‘do something creative’. but what do we actually mean by this? What is creative? The big question is:

‘What is the box that you want me to think out of?”

This is a fundamental issue with the current ‘creative’ conversation. Lots of people sit around tables and say; “We need to think differently. We need something new.”

Silence.

To fill the awkward silence someone says those dreaded words; “I once saw… that seemed to work.”

And the ball is rolling…

Stop! Then it’s not new. Someone has done something like it before. “No but we’ll change the name.” “No. Instead of doing it for old aged pensioners we’ll do it for mum’s. It’s totally different”

Let’s back up a little more. If we’re sitting around and asking ourselves to be creative and new with the church then what about church isn’t working? What is the box that we need to think out of?

So we end up bringing out some old ideas and re-branding them. Is that creative? It doesn’t feel creative. It feels like hard work!

Two quotes have haunted me during this struggle:

If your life is centred on yourself, on your own desires and ambitions, then asserting those desires and ambitions is the way you try to be true to yourself. So self-assertion becomes the only way of self expression. If you simply assert your own desires, you may have the illusion of being true to yourself. But in fact all your efforts to make yourself more real and more yourself have the opposite effect: they create a more and more false self… people cannot simply assert their true self; they need to pray for the strength to find that self beyond their desires. (Finding Sanctuary – Abbot Christopher Jamison)

and

Many poets are not poets for the same reason many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or the particular monk that they are intended to be by God. There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular – and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity. In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be. (Seeds of Contemplation – Thomas Merton)

And so back to my issue of writing a book.

I haven’t written in weeks; due to essays, work, illness… the list goes on. I think I don’t want to write this book anymore because it’s not creative. I’ve put too much pressure to write a book. I want to write. If it becomes a book, then great. If I set out to write a book I’ll never write a book because that’s not creative it’s just feels like hard work.

You see, for me, the life, the excitement comes from writing, not writing a book. The process and not the product. I’m not suggesting we don’t produce but that our products come from our process and we relish and love and get life from the process.

Do I have a book in me? Possibly… I don’t want to push the comparison between conceiving child and a book too much but what happens to a process if you just focus on producing a product?

Reading And Telling Stories

I love reading, always have. Give me a good story or clever use of words and I’m a happy man! Ideally I’d get paid to read. I’d have a large high back armchair in a study full of books, a small table beside me with four or five texts awaiting my perusal and a constant supply of good quality tea in a china cup.

When my wife asked me what, for me, makes a good holiday, my response was easy; time to read, time to sleep and some historic or cultural excursion thrown in for good measure. Having just returned from a week in the Isle of Wight, I can say “She listened well!” Although I didn’t get the high back chair or the good quality tea, I did take some good books and managed to collect five great second hand books for just over a fiver!

I was re-reading ‘The Flood’ by David Maine and was struck by how well the translation of an ancient story has been done. The final chapter sums up my thoughts well,

‘…what’s the point of telling a story if we can’t even get it right?.. Of course people will tell something, it was the end of the world after all. A story like that won’t be forgotten. But things will get added and left out and confused, until in a little while people won’t even know what’s true and what’s been made up…When the story gets told, and told again and then again, things will change. They always do. Not on purpose, but just because people don’t ever really listen. So we should at least make sure we understand what happened to begin with.’

Looking back over my reading this week the theme of ‘story’ has come up again and again. It’s caused me, due to the story of Noah in ‘The Flood’, to consider the stories of the Bible and how they are told and, having received some comments on the last post (see Monasticism and Asceticism post), how prophets like Isaiah are seen as anti ‘loving God’. On our way to the Isle of Wight my wife and I were listening to the audio book of The Magician’s Nephew. At the end, Digory asks why Aslan can’t comfort his uncle and speak to him. Aslan explains that he can try and comfort Digory’s uncle but it would be no good, as he would only hear roars and growls. As humans we come across stories like Noah and Isaiah and we question the God in the passage, we hear roars and anger. Maybe we, like Uncle Andrew, aren’t tuned into the voice of God at times. Maybe our ancestors have heard the story changed and have changed it themselves (it’s bound to happen). We hear the story wrong or we tell it wrong.

These thoughts remind me of the feeling I had during Durham Mysteries last month (see Wrestling With Truth (part IX)). How, then, are we to know the story? If we assume the story has changed, how do we understand what happened to begin with? There’s no real way of knowing, except that we know, or at least claim to know, the God who’s in these story. Digory and Polly hear Aslan’s voice because they connect with him and so, when Digory is tempted by the White Witch, he is able to stand against lies or misconceptions of Aslan.

I’ve also been reading ‘The Passion Drama’ by Hugh Bishop. It contains six sermons on Holy Week. Like most sermons, it tries to help us, the reader/hearer, to place ourselves in the story of Christ’s Passion. It’s textbook in it’s structure and content but really made me reflect on how powerful this style of preaching is. All we, as Christians and therefore missioners, are called to do is to tell the story and to help people connect with the story. This is why the theatre needs to be at the centre of the church’s ministry because it has at its core an understanding of the art of storytelling.

This leads me onto the final book I’ve been reading; ‘Organic Community’ by Joseph Myers. Two quotes have stood out to me in this book so far. The first helps me to understand the role of artists within the church.

‘An artist is someone who enables art to emerge from a canvas’

You can’t manufacture art. Art is not painting by numbers, it’s allowing a story of emotion or something essential to emerge from within. Theatre practitioners have a way of allowing a story to emerge, to fully participate and communicate a story and bring others into the story. Yes you can all learn the technique of good storytelling but for some it’s natural, organic.

The second quote leads us to something powerful that I, like other church leaders, need to remember.

‘Story is the universal measure of life.’

How do we measure a successful ministry? By counting how many people turn up? How many bums made contact with the pews? No. Listen to the stories. How do we know if someone has ‘come to Christ’? Asking if they have been splashed with water? Or said the simple prayer? No. Listen to their story.

I must remember that next year I will have the privilege of joining with other people to tell stories. My job is to listen carefully and remember them and to see where they fit with the big, meta narrative, the greatest story ever told which is still being told and, with each breath we take, we participate and engage with it.

Theatre Church (part III)

As things start to fall into place with my placement and the boundaries are marked up to protect myself and those who will be involved, I’m starting to ask a question of this blog.

How much do I journal the progress of this community?

The internet is a public space and, although, looking over to how many followers I have, I see not many people read this; the people who will be involved deserve privacy and confidentiality.

What then will the purpose of the blog be?

Why did I start writing? To journal my thought journey as I wrestled with what God wanted me to do. This has been really helpful to help me reflect on my ministry and on the shaping of the placement next year. The reason for making this a public journal was to try and gather other people’s views and ideas and allow those to shape me as well. This has also been really helpful. I have had chats with people about things raised in my blog which have helped me to fine tune my thoughts and ideas, that have encouraged me and discouraged me from going off on the wrong path.

Do I still need to journal my thoughts in a public space? Certainly the theological reflections on theatre in ministry still require other people’s perspectives and suggestions for further reading, etc. The placement cannot, however, remain public, due to the sensitive issue of protecting those involved. But there will be times when the activity and development or the struggles and disasters of the community next year will need reflection and I will need those chats with people to help me through.

This is raises questions about the nature of blogging. I don’t want this space to be me advertising everything that’s going on in my life but rather a space where I can communicate and mark where my reflections on theatre and ministry are up to. I need, therefore, to make sure that this space (the blog) is restricted to ambiguous and theological reflections, be that inspired from lectures or books or videos or whatever or inspired from the community next year. This is not a space where I publish all the news and personal journeys of those involved in the community.

Undergirding this questions, as well, is the thought of people involved in the community will be able to, if they look for it, to read these posts. Although nothing is hidden from them and they will be aware of my approach and purposes, is not a bit weird that they will have access to my hopes and fears and personal reflections? Is that a bad thing?

I wrote a couple of sentences for my tutor to have that will help him and I understand the aims of next year’s placement. Here it is:

To create a community in which its members can explore their story and ask questions of faith in a safe, vulnerable space through theatre and character exploration. To meet twice a week and direct them through a yearlong rehearsal process and produce public performances that do not mark the end of a process but mark the journey on its way.

If I am creating a space that is safe and vulnerable, yes I will need to keep issues private but they will need honesty, vulnerability and openness from me. This leads us nicely to what I think is at the heart of this question; is there a need for leaders to hide pain and brokenness from those they are leading? The leaders I respect most are those who communicate honesty and integrity but if they disclose too much then they, somehow, lose respect for me, they lose power in the relationship and then it’s harder for them to lead or discipline. Can you, as a leader, be honest and vulnerable around those you are leading?

I’ll leave you with that and ask that you take your right to comment and shape my thinking.