Margaret Wheatley asks, “Is it possible to live in the humility of knowing that our purpose, as clearly as we self-define it, is but ‘a husk of meaning’? The task is really to become superb listeners. Heidegger wrote that waiting, listening, was the most profound way to serve God.”

One of the most fundamental precursors of emergence is emptiness, and an ability to embrace mystery. On the other hand, one of the most fundamental characteristics of modernity is the search for certainty. No wonder we have lost the ability to embrace liminal space!

It isn’t easy embracing insecurity. It isn’t easy leaving our comfort zones, our titles, or our previous understanding behind. With every change of paradigm comes the need to embrace a new self-understanding, and the loss of a settled identity.

But our faith paradigm itself is rooted in a fundamental insecurity. The heroes of faith are described by the writer of Hebrews: they went out, “not knowing where they were going.” Faith is a trusting in something beyond sight, something we have not yet seen. Thomas Merton writes,


Community and mission are both about love and emptiness of our own agendas, freely encountering the other. Community only exists where there is vulnerability, the choice to take risks and create open space. Real community only exists when we learn to embrace insecurity.

So it seems that a precondition of emergence is emptiness. Only the empty, the poor, the naked and the disenfranchised can see clearly, because they have no vested interests and nothing left to lose. This is why Jesus says that we must become as children in order to enter the Kingdom of God.

The word “leader” and “leadership” still connote management and control for many people, and many “leaders” still work within old paradigms of authority and top-down systems. The pressure to offer security in quick answers only increases as we near the threshold of chaos. Moreover, leadership implies directionality, and leaders know exactly where they are going, right? Bono of U2 sings,

The more you see the less you know,
The less you find out as you go,
I knew much more then, than I do now…

People look to leaders to rescue them: yet that is precisely the wrong response from leaders. Discipleship is first and fundamentally walking by faith: a confidence in a transcendent Other who knows the way, even if that way leads through darkness. Perhaps this is why one writer defines love as “the art of leading you gently back to yourself.”

Leadership is a profoundly spiritual vocation. Margaret Wheatley writes that no one can create sufficient stability and equilibrium for people to feel secure and safe. Instead, “as leaders we must help people move into a relationship with uncertainty and chaos. Spiritual teachers have been doing this for millennia. Therefore, I believe that the times have led leaders to a spiritual threshold. We must enter the domain of spiritual traditions if we are to succeed as good leaders in these difficult times.”

Can we redeem the language of leadership? Only if we make leadership a spirituality: an act of worship, and a way of being in the world.

Speech is a sacramental act. If we use the language of leadership apart from embodying leadership as a fundamentally loving and spiritual vocation, we won’t contribute to the new world God wants to give us. There is no use in praying, “Your kingdom come” if we refuse to embody a new way of living. Pascal wrote that,


So we listen and we wait. We wait without knowing, for knowing would be knowledge of the wrong thing. We wait without certainty, for certainty would be faith in the wrong thing.

Who waits for what he does not know? And who listens for what he has already heard? The true listener moves beyond the noise of expectation and desire to wait in stillness for the Word. This ability to embrace liminal space is rare, and rarely embraced.

There is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope
are all in the waiting.

Jacques Derrida, the man Caputo calls Father Jacques, writes on “l’avenir,” to come. Derrida, considered agnostic by most commentators, often evidences a profound faith in a God he refuses to name. He recognizes that to name what we don’t know is only another means of reaching for control; he stands and waits.


To me this is an incredible affirmation of faith. Generally we want to know we have the answers, and that we understood the life and words of our Lord. We want to be in control. Yet the NT narrative tells us that the most religious people of Jesus day did not recognize him when he appeared. We need to be humbled by this, and to let God be larger than our categories. As Beldon Lane affirms, “we are saved by that which ignores us.” His ways are not our ways, not his thoughts, our thoughts. God is radically “other.”

I close this reflection with a prayer from Thomas Merton, of whom it was said that his solitude was mostly spent composing…