No one can know in advance how one will be used, or when, or what one's life will count for in the long run. The young Pablo Casals, while pouring his life energy into years of practice on the cello, could not guess that when Franco came to power, he would stop playing for three years, and that the silence would be heard throughout Spain as if the streets were full of demonstrators....
When the need for bread is met we discover that we have other hungers, and none so deep as the hunger to be understood. The artist helps us to interpret, understand and communicate feeling. When the artist is successful we are led into communion with ourselves and with the world, and the solitary work becomes a communal work. For want of this we walk on parched land.
Servant Leaders, Servant Structures
The difficulty confronting the churches in the organization of a small group movement is the lack of leadership for such groups. Most of us lack the confidence required to assume this kind of responsibility. We have discovered over the years that even the people who know how to administer churches, banks, corporations and hospitals have no idea how to nurture a small group so that its members deepen their lives in Christ--learn self-knowledge, how to listen and to care--the deep nurture of the spiritual life so essential for the recovery of vision and passion.
The lack of servant leaders is being experienced in the whole of society. One looks in vain today for those who are using their strengths and gifts and riches on behalf of the common good. In all of our institutions is a yearning for the presence of the fearless ones in whose company we will be able to put aside our own fears and begin to hope and exercise imagination.
We can create the climate and nurture the trust in which a deep giving of ourselves can happen. Much more than the confession of our light or our darkness is involved. What is involved is the recovery of love, itself, the communion that is the deepest need of every life, the unlocking of that infinite capacity that each one has to be a friend and to have a friend. If the pilgrim journey is a journey toward freedom, then the liberating work is the freeing of love in me and the freeing of love in you.
We do not have to sit around immobilized, waiting for help to come. We can learn to care for our society, which in large part means learning to care for our cities. If our streets are to be redeemed we will have to commit our own human and financial resources to that goal. We will have to recover our gifts of faith and hope and endurance, evoke the gifts of other persons, and thus develop leaders and facilitators for the building of a global network of small, disciplined, self-critical groups whose reflection will issue in purposeful action. This is a way to join in the liberation movement that is going on in all the poor countries of the world. We are not the initiators of this movement. Even the suffering ones of the earth are not the initiators, though they are the genuine leaders. The movement is God's.