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I preached last Sunday on Revelation 7:9-17.
We modern twenty-first century rational sophisticated scientific intellectual beings do not do well with the intangible realm of the spirit. If we cannot see it, touch it, smell, taste, or hear it, we tend to believe it does not exist. We suffer from spiritual myopia.
Here I stand on the edge of The Great Surrender. I have been in this place before. It is familiar terrain. In the past I have always pulled back.
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Stop the Press: if you’re not up to date, you’re not up to date. 8:00 a.m. Pacific, Hosni Mubarak steps down as President of Egypt, making the following post a little bit out of date.
I am not well informed about the political situation in Egypt. But I know a little about the challenges of letting go of power.
I have been on the receiving end of leadership that was unable to relinquish its grip on power and I have at times myself struggled to let go of the seductive hold power can over a person in a position of leadership.
Hosni Mubarak was born on May 4, 1928; he will turn 83 on his next birthday. He became President of Egypt on October 14, 1981, following the assassination of President Anwar El Sadat. He has held the top government position in Egypt for 30 years. It is estimated he has survived six assassination attempts.
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We have done it bundled up on a bitterly cold winter night. We have done it when the wind was blowing a gale. We have even done it as snow softly fell around our little shelter erected on the sidewalk. But this year it seemed that the torrential rain would drown our annual Saturday evening Christmas caroling visit to the small shopping village near the church.
Surely there would not be much of an audience to join us singing “Joy to the World,” as the rain soaked anyone foolish enough to venture outside on such a dark and stormy night.
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Alfred Delp who was born in Mannheim, Germany in 1907, was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in Munich at the age of twenty-nine. He had hoped to continue his studies after ordination but was prevented for political reasons. Instead Father Delp went to work for the Jesuit publication “Voice of the Times.”
On July 20, 1944 an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler resulted in the arrest of over 7,000 suspected members of the German resistance movement. Due to his association with the Kreisau Circle, a gathering of intellectuals planning for a new social order after the fall of the Third Reich, Alfred Delp found himself among those the Gestapo put in prison.
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In preparing yesterday for an address I am giving next month in New Zealand, I was reminded of one of my favourite stories from the ancient wisdom of the desert mystics of the fourth and fifth centuries. The version I have comes from Thomas Merton’s small collection of desert wisdom. It is a humorous story, but when we allow the story to penetrate deep into our being, it carries profound wisdom.
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The fourth characteristic Cameron sees in organizations that will meet the future successfully is a commitment to what he calls “essentializing.”
The groups that are most likely to survive are those committed to essentializing—to becoming rigorously clear about their values, rigorously committed to absolute pursuit of mission and absolute irreverence in examining past behavior. Every organizational assumption that guides them will be challenged.
