And things conspire to tell us nothing,
half in shame, perhaps, half in unspoken hope.
—Rilke

When she moves,
she dulls her way through,
arms crossed against
standing still, receiving;
unfolded, she admits all
our folly—

i.
Hoping to show how beauty grows,
her teacher hands out seeds
and assigns them to plant bluebonnets;
she learns to take the wild
and plant it in something still
and contained.

ii.
When it is wild out, she thinks of you
walking away, with your thumbs tucked
along the straps of your pack;
it becomes May in the city
—mid-black and warm outside,
like some hot spring campers hike
to find. Her hands still
know how she kept your jaw,
from your ears to the square
of your chin; she knows how you sealed
the line of her forehead,
blessing a memory of them: keep-me-here,
or in youth, never-know-anything-sweeter.

iii.
The house diagonal is made
of deep-fire bricks. We all know
she is mad again; his cheek is laid flat
against the front door and his palms
slap softly against the wood.
The neighbors’ pull up small corners
of curtains, visiting them with their eyes,
leaving sympathy behind
the heaviness of their own drapes.

iv.
We wait
until rays drift far
enough below,
to stare boldly
into the strip
of dropping light.
The sharpness of Beauty
shadows here;
it is too much to know
alone, in the wild of day.

Despite the New England-worthy weather, my January doldrums began to dissipate from the very first meal. I get paid to cook every day, and I work alone. Working alone means falling into ruts; it is quite difficult to drag oneself out of ruts. Fellow Laura Ruth Venable was in charge of culinary operations for the weekend, and I jumped in the kitchen that first meal to lend my moderate knife skills. The ruts were all smoothed over in one fell swoop. “I’m making an upscale chicken pot pie,” she explained. It involved an assortment of fresh-looking veggies and an elaborately presented puff pastry. Elizabeth LeRoy was busy working on ‘seven minute frosting’ which took a heck of a lot longer than seven minutes and turned out to be the most deliciously light frosting I’ve ever tasted. My gastronomically attuned neurons were firing faster than a third-grader with a rubber band gun. 

After lingering at dinner for a while, we moved in to hear the first session by Michael Lindsay. He discussed ten ways which people use power. Power is a terribly abstract word, but he grounded every point with a concrete example, which lent an incredible amount of clarity. (Dr. Lindsay uses enough concrete examples to build a military base.) All of his stories were incredibly helpful as they gave us very practical ways of viewing our lives and interactions with others in view of the implicit power we all have.

I don’t think I truly appreciated the way Integrity Weekend is set up while I was a Fellow. As a participant, you sit through some very thought-provoking sessions and then you have a break in which you inevitably begin talking about the thoughts that were provoked with whatever random stranger has the misfortune to be standing next to you. It’s small enough that no one is really random and there are few strangers left after the day. Most places when thrown into a group like this, you aren’t also thrown fodder for conversation.

The next morning we heard the keynote session from Andy Crouch. He discussed our discomfort with discussions of power – we tend to refer to it with more positive names such as “leadership” and “influence,” but in the end, we all have power and we all must find a way to manage it. You cannot possess power without it possessing you, to a certain extent. But power is not inherently evil. God has the power to create, power to be fruitful – the world starts off with power that is thoroughly positive, the power to be fruitful is shared with all of creation. We can confront the problems of power by allowing it to be transparent, surrounding ourselves with others who will speak truth, and through worship. As Andy reminded us, we do not have the power to raise the dead.

We broke into discussion groups that afternoon, and a panel discussion in the evening gave us additional time to work through questions of power. But they are too big for one weekend – I’m still mulling them over. I suppose we all will be in various states of mulling for the rest of our lives, as power continues to appear in new forms.

The power of conversation and community was both the form and content of the weekend. In all of our discussions lay the implicit belief that power, and knowledge of power, are neither implicitly good nor evil. We can imagine a world where power is not flaunted, hoarded or otherwise abused, a world where power is used only creatively and never destructively. But we can only maintain a balanced, constructive power when surrounded by others. And that, for me is what the Trinity Forum Academy is all about – re-imagining the world through the power of community.

See pictures and read a report on Integrity Weekend.

Despite the New England-worthy weather, my January doldrums began to dissipate from the very first meal. I get paid to cook every day, and I work alone. Working alone means falling into ruts; it is quite difficult to drag oneself out of ruts. Fellow Laura Ruth Venable was in charge of culinary operations for the weekend, and I jumped in the kitchen that first meal to lend my moderate knife skills. The ruts were all smoothed over in one fell swoop. “I’m making an upscale chicken pot pie,” she explained. It involved an assortment of fresh-looking veggies and an elaborately presented puff pastry. Elizabeth LeRoy was busy working on ‘seven minute frosting’ which took a heck of a lot longer than seven minutes and turned out to be the most deliciously light frosting I’ve ever tasted. My gastronomically attuned neurons were firing faster than a third-grader with a rubber band gun. 

After lingering at dinner for a while, we moved in to hear the first session by Michael Lindsay. He discussed ten ways which people use power. Power is a terribly abstract word, but he grounded every point with a concrete example, which lent an incredible amount of clarity. (Dr. Lindsay uses enough concrete examples to build a military base.) All of his stories were incredibly helpful as they gave us very practical ways of viewing our lives and interactions with others in view of the implicit power we all have.

I don’t think I truly appreciated the way Integrity Weekend is set up while I was a Fellow. As a participant, you sit through some very thought-provoking sessions and then you have a break in which you inevitably begin talking about the thoughts that were provoked with whatever random stranger has the misfortune to be standing next to you. It’s small enough that no one is really random and there are few strangers left after the day. Most places when thrown into a group like this, you aren’t also thrown fodder for conversation.
The next morning we heard the keynote session from Andy Crouch. He discussed our discomfort with discussions of power – we tend to refer to it with more positive names such as “leadership” and “influence,” but in the end, we all have power and we all must find a way to manage it. You cannot possess power without it possessing you, to a certain extent. But power is not inherently evil. God has the power to create, power to be fruitful – the world starts off with power that is thoroughly positive, the power to be fruitful is shared with all of creation. We can confront the problems of power by allowing it to be transparent, surrounding ourselves with others who will speak truth, and through worship. As Andy reminded us, we do not have the power to raise the dead.
We broke into discussion groups that afternoon, and a panel discussion in the evening gave us additional time to work through questions of power. But they are too big for one weekend – I’m still mulling them over. I suppose we all will be in various states of mulling for the rest of our lives, as power continues to appear in new forms.
The power of conversation and community was both the form and content of the weekend. In all of our discussions lay the implicit belief that power, and knowledge of power, are neither implicitly good nor evil. We can imagine a world where power is not flaunted, hoarded or otherwise abused, a world where power is used only creatively and never destructively. But we can only maintain a balanced, constructive power when surrounded by others. And that, for me is what the Trinity Forum Academy is all about – re-imagining the world through the power of community.
everal months into our year at the Trinity Forum Academy, the Fellows have more or less adjusted to the rhythm of life at Osprey Point.  Receiving crash courses in commercial cooking and cleaning, meeting our three faculty members, and adjusting to our household duties at Windrush, we are moving around the Point as people who know what they’re doing (or at least think they do).  As we meet the challenges of a reorganized curriculum, which combines adjusted staff roles with unprecedented collaboration from visiting faculty, a guiding principle for the Fellows has been improvisation: the spur-of-the-moment integration of numerous stimuli into a meaningful whole.

To those of us hailing from the world’s cultural capitals, Osprey Point can truly seem to be, as the Germans put it, am Ende der Welt (that is, the End of the World).  Though each of us will be steeped in literature and culture this year through ambitious reading assignments, opportunities to experience performing arts of an equally high caliber will be few and far between.  Hence our excitement in discovering that Monty Alexander, the world-renowned Jamaican jazz pianist and professing believer, would be performing at the Avalon Theatre in Easton, just a half-hour drive from our new home.  Thanks to the generosity of a Friend of the Academy, the Fellows of the class of 2010 were able to attend.

The Avalon Theatre, a one-time cinema that still bears the Art Deco facelift it received in 1934, seats only 380.  Jazz music is meant for an intimacy which cannot be experienced in the cavernous halls and sprawling amphitheaters defining much of the summer music festival experience.  Fortunately, The Avalon possesses the right mixture of size and acoustical warmth to keep the listening experience authentic.

I heard Alexander perform in 2006 at Vienna’s Porgy & Bess with the German HR Big Band—a barely memorable performance that tried too hard to compose around Alexander’s improvisations.  Consequently, my hopes for the concert at the Avalon were modest.  Given these expectations, it is no exaggeration when I say that Alexander’s trio blew me away.  Alexander expressed himself in a fluent blend of stride, blues, and bebop languages, quoting themes from the jazz canon with the frequency and conviction that characterizes the most experienced giants of the idiom.  The highlight of the concert, however, was not the virtuosity of any one musician, nor the group’s seamless interaction, but the overwhelming sense of shalom emanating from Alexander’s presence on stage.  One couldn’t help but feel empathy for the emotion displayed on his face and the passion that he coaxed, pushed, and sometimes pounded out of the piano.

As Alexander progressed through the program of jazz standards and original compositions, I realized that this was probably the most Christian jazz concert I had ever attended.  The further he got into the program, the more deeply the influence of Gospel seeped into his playing.  By the end of the concert, Alexander was throwing in renditions of such songs as Duke Ellington’s Come Sunday and Julia Ward Howe’s The Battle Hymn of the Republic.  The centerpiece of the event was Alexander’s original composition, Hope, a ballad of surprising harmonic crunch that makes a gradual thematic shift from despair to hope over 10 minutes of composed and improvised material.

The nature of Christian leadership in this type of music is thought provoking; by moving fluidly in and out of Gospel styles, Alexander included his trio members, who are likely not religiously inclined, in creating hymns of praise and thanksgiving.  Imagine setting a Bible before an unbeliever and not only hearing him read with fluency, but with deep conviction and love for the language.  This is one of the joys of the Christian jazz band leader:  to set a stylistic trajectory that moves collaborator and audience member alike toward the beauty of the Gospel.

For those of us grappling with the incorporation of seemingly disparate elements of theology, philosophy, and applied disciplines, there is much to be learned from Monty Alexander.  Throughout the night at the Avalon, he deftly blended jazz languages, unified the diverse voices of fellow musicians into cohesive musical statements, and displayed a palpable joy, effortlessness, and gratitude.  At the end of the concert, the question on many audience members’ minds was, “How much of that was improvised?”  Indeed, Alexander’s passion seemed too genuine to be premeditated, yet too excellent and structured to be improvised.  This spontaneous, exuberant precision is a posture to which any Christian leader can aspire.

In a musical climate often plagued by melodrama and sentimentality, Wendell adds to the acoustic singer-songwriter role just the right touch of playfulness to lighten up even the most poignant ideas. Take, for instance, the fourth track, “The Ballad of Freida the Goose.” When was the last time waterfowl brought you close to tears? Not recently? Well, Freida just might. Because between a high-strung acoustic and some tasteful piano, Wendell gets it right: Freida, all of us know how you feel /We’ve been hurt, dear, we’ve been hungry in search of a meal.  And the Academy—the backdrop for much of this album—is certainly an intense setting where we have all come to those realizations and seen wounds exposed and healed, God-willing.  One’s tenure of community life during Trinity Forum Academy can be a spiritual and emotional pressure cooker, and a lot of well-kept secrets can surface where you wouldn’t expect, not least the secrets you keep from yourself.  The Academy’s nine months and tight quarters are enough to wear down pretenses and exhaust resources of forced kindness, and Wendell, through Freida, describes this correctly. At the end of the day, when we’ve seen each other’s dirty laundry, we have to decide whether or not we’re going to follow Christ into that mess or gloss it over and accept only the prettiest portraits of each other. In this beautiful apostrophe to the lonely goose, Wendell explores the idolatry of the ideal over the experience of the real and concludes, with the lyrics of the album’s title, Freida, find your way home / It might not be perfect, but it’s better than being alone.

While much of Wendell’s folk eloquence follows Frieda’s pursuit of a sense of home, namely in the haunting “Come Back Home,” the music itself often tells a different story. Find Your Way Home certainly has its range of genres, but whether it’s folk or rock or Wendell’s very own acoustic Motown (surely he’s a pioneer here), he moves with distinct comfort and ability. In one highlight, “Sweet Virginia,” the beautiful interplay of acoustic, piano, accordion, and violin flows smoothly behind Wendell’s straightforward vocals. My route from the friendly South to frenetic DC has not been too different from my good friend Wendell’s, and this song perfectly captures the longing for old friends and the hunger for stillness that a city like this can produce. The music itself seems to deliver the very thing the song pines for: Give me a moment to begin to see my place / I need your landscapes for my rural mind / Give me a respite, give me some time.

In fact, Find Your Way Home as a whole is an album that can deliver some peace and calm into a noisy life. Because even when he rocks, Wendell’s thoughts are clear and his clarity is convicting. Find Your Way Home shines as the first effort from this promising artist, and his further projects promise to be, like this one, filled with thoughtful, endearing songs from a truly talented songwriter. Wendell Kimbrough is one musician well worth our attention.

It was September 2008, the beginning of the global economic crisis.  I had just arrived in Cambodia to learn more about WorldVision’s microfinance programs.  As the world tried to reconcile billions of dollars of bad credit and unpaid loans, I was about to learn first-hand how a microloan of $50 - $75 could change the life of an individual, a family, and even a community.

A woman named, Tay Leang* received us at the end of that dusty road and led us down a path to her home, her own rickety shack.  Tay Leang is a widow and mother to eight children.  She raises them in one of the poorest areas of Cambodia, a district known for its red-light sex slavery business.  Food is hard to come by; jobs are even scarcer.  The average per capita yearly income is US $343.  Tay Leang was responsible for feeding and caring for her eight children alone in the midst of these circumstances.

Her situation may seem hopeless, but a few years ago, WorldVision gave Tay Leang a $75 loan to help her start a fruit and vegetable business.  Tay Leang grew her business and paid that money back, giving her the opportunity to acquire larger loans from WorldVision.  Without the loan and her hard work, Tay Leang may have been forced to sell one or more of her children into bonded labor or sex slavery to help feed the others.  Or, she may have had to borrow from a local money lender, who would have charged her very high interest rates, extending her cycle of poverty. 

Instead, Tay Leang is now on her fourth loan and owns and operates both a fabric business and a welding service.  Not only is she able to provide food for her eight children, she now employs three other people in her community and is able to send two of her children to school.  Her loan repayments are cycled back to WorldVision’s microfinance subsidiary, VisionFund, and are loaned to others in need. 

Many people know that microfinance is a system of providing loans, savings opportunities, and business training to the enterprising poor to give them a hand up – not a “handout” - from poverty.  For WorldVision, recipients of loans are people who a typical bank is not likely to serve: people diagnosed with AIDS and individuals without collateral to offer in exchange for credit.  Yet, these same people have a repayment rate of 99.3 percent, aided by strategies of group lending and accountability.  (Group lending is a system whereby community members sign for each other’s loans and guarantee the full amount given to all participants.  If one member falls behind or cannot make payments, the group naturally encourages repayment or steps in cover the amounts due.)

In thinking through my trip to Cambodia and the principles of both lending and giving money, I was struck by a recent Op Ed by Margaret Atwood in The New York Times (October 28, 2008).  She points out that our system of debt and credit has lost the human element.

“Debt — who owes what to whom, or to what, and how that debt gets paid — is a subject much larger than money. It has to do with our basic sense of fairness, a sense that is embedded in all of our exchanges with our fellow human beings. But at some point we stopped seeing debt as a simple personal relationship. The human factor became diminished. Maybe it had something to do with the sheer volume of transactions that computers have enabled. But what we seem to have forgotten is that the debtor is only one twin in a joined-at-the-hip pair, the other twin being the creditor. The whole edifice rests on a few fundamental principles that are inherent in us.”

In this quote, Atwood calls us to think deeply about human nature.  She points out that we are created with some standard of right and wrong – some moral compass.  C.S. Lewis calls this compass The Law of Human Nature and states that human beings around the globe have a similar sense of how we ought to behave, a sense that we cannot do away with.  Atwood applies this standard of right and wrong to the creditor-debtor relationship, implying that giving or loaning money and borrowing it is not a simple, mechanical transaction.  Innate human values of trust and fairness enable the system to work, giving people the faith to make loans with the expectation that they will be paid back. 

If we take human relationships more seriously when borrowing and lending money, we might not request loans unless we have the serious intent and ability to pay them back.  We might also survey the world around us and recognize that our global neighbors are in need and that they are a smart investment.  Even a small microloan has the power to transform multiple lives.  And organizations like World Vision provide the opportunity for someone like Tay Leang to receive that gift while allowing donors the blessing of entering into a personal relationship with a recipient.  The transaction is relational as well as monetary.

If we are from the United States or another Western society, we are likely in a position of influence.  Many of us have a voice we can use to advocate for the voiceless, and we most likely have the resources and opportunities to give money to help those less fortunate than we are.  As followers of Christ, we acknowledge that we have received a gift of grace that we don’t have to repay.  Christ, the one who knew and loved his children, took on the ultimate debt so we could receive the ultimate “credit”.  How can we pay that gift forward?

As I consider my own financial situation, my borrowing and lending habits, as well as the situations of people like Tay Leang, I ponder this verse:

(1 John 3:16-18)  This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.  If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?  Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

I am far from where I need to be in response to this verse, but I have given and will continue to give thought to the lives of the human beings on both ends of a lending or giving transaction.  In some situations, I am required to give and receive money in relationship with a banker.  In others, I am in relationship with someone like Tay Leang and simply give my money away, without requiring any repayment.

As governments around the world continue to seek solutions to the global economic crisis, I’d venture to guess that with a 99.3% loan repayment rate, the enterprising poor might just be the best way to invest.

*Name has been changed to protect the privacy of the client.

There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that.  A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.

- Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

On my third Sunday as a newly minted associate pastor in Mississippi, I stood behind the Lord’s Table, preparing to preside over the sacrament for the first time. As the congregation sang “Let Us Break Bread Together” and I fumbled through my Bible, trying to find the words of institution in 1 Corinthians, I felt one overwhelming and distinct thing: loneliness.

The situation was unique, to say the least.  Minutes earlier, my senior pastor, Olin, had abruptly ended his sermon, informed the congregation that he would be unable to continue the service because of his health, and been escorted out of the sanctuary by two elders.  The service was now under my direction.  I had never served communion before, and I had not prepared to do so that day.  In fact, I was not even yet ordained.  As I looked out over a sea of unfamiliar faces, I wondered how I would handle communion.  I wondered if Olin was okay, or even alive.  I wondered if I would suddenly find myself, a three-week veteran of professional ministry, as the only pastor of this sizable congregation.  And on the most fundamental level I wondered, as I stood over this symbol and demonstration of the unity of the body of Christ, if I was alone.  The event has become in many ways a parable of my first year and a half in ministry, a time which has been filled with confirmation, discovery, learning, and great joy.  But in the midst of the wonder and mystery of ministry, the sense of loneliness has been pervasive.

I speak and write as a pastor, but I know that I am not alone in this feeling, either as a pastor or as a follower of Christ, or even merely as a human being.  As I’ve sat beside hospital beds, spoken with old friends, or discipled first-year university students, many have at one time or another shared with me their similar feeling of isolation.  The family we come home to, the spouse we wake up next to, the communities we belong to—none of these offer a panacea for the feeling of loneliness.  And the tentativeness and fragility in modern society of each of those commitments is further proof of the threat loneliness poses to human flourishing. 

This feeling is not recent in its manifestation.  Thousands of years ago, the Psalmist could cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  But while loneliness is unique neither to our milieu nor to ourselves, it is remarkable in its prevalence in the modern era.  In fact, it is the argument of this essay that loneliness is in many ways a defining trait of modernity, and perhaps no one is more vulnerable to its effects than the type of leader The Trinity Forum aims to form and empower.

Such a statement begs three questions: first, why is it that loneliness is such a pervasive feeling in modern society?  Second, what is it about leadership that heightens this sense?  And third, how can leaders embody an alternative to the starkness of isolation?

Loneliness in Contemporary Society
While loneliness is by no means a contemporary phenomenon, there is something about our milieu that accentuates and heightens its effects. This moment in human history is unique.  At no other time has there been the promise of more connection with others: mobile technologies, virtual communities, and highly-specialized common interest groups.  Our economy continually promises us advancements that will allow us to make more time for the things that matter most—and those ‘things’ are most often portrayed as relationships. Yet loneliness remains unconquered, and if we but scratch the surface, a profound anxiety concerning its presence emerges.

As a pastor who works with college students, I have had a front row seat to the phenomenon that is Facebook.  The tag-line confronting you as you log in to your account is, “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”  There is truth to this statement, and I have found the application to be helpful in making connections with students and conveying information quickly and efficiently.  But the fact that I know a student with 1,829 ‘friends’ is a not-too-subtle indicator of the thinness of the relationships such a technology offers.  As Christine Rosen writes perceptively,  virtual friendship “shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails.  Real intimacy requires risk—the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool.  Social networking sites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.”1 If indeed the verdict remains out on these new ‘friendships,’ the burden of proof is against them.  Technologies such as Facebook play no small role in straining the already fragile ties of relationships, thereby contributing to the larger societal trend of shallow existence.

Ironically, the one place where Rosen’s vulnerability seems to be found with consistency in our society is the therapist-client relationship.  Psychotherapy is a good, useful practice that is both helpful and necessary in the lives of many men and women.  But in the context of modern society, it also demonstrates a larger dysfunction.  The field of psychotherapy has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry of what often amounts to ‘paid friendships’—arenas where economic transactions secure a substitute for real intimacy, and thus further patient dependency is encouraged.  Even more distressingly, the techniques therapists offer to their clients often fail to provide the real transformation they intend. 

These twin promises of technology (seen in Facebook and other virtual arenas) and technique (seen in modern psychotherapy) are sides of the same Enlightenment coin that is ultimately responsible for the hyper-lonely landscape in which we find ourselves.  The liberation that the Enlightenment project offered the West has turned out to be only hubris.  In the wake of throwing off authoritarian constraints of creed, caste, and even the created order, the worst punishment has come in receiving what we asked for.  As Craig Gay writes in his penetrating study of modern life, “The otherwise optimistic stress upon liberated individuality may have ironic and unintended consequences…. A certain measure of alienation is simply the price we must pay for individual autonomy, for to the extent that we are free from others, we are also alienated from them.”2 Indeed, the great irony of the Enlightenment project of human liberation is that it has birthed some of the most brutal authoritarian regimes in the history of the world. 

The reality we face in the problem of modern loneliness is the possibility of a world created by humanity that has no room for being truly human.  Of this possibility Colin Gunton writes, “In our desire to impose form on the world and our lives we have lost the capacity to see the form that is there; and in that lies not liberation but alienation, the cutting off from things as they really are.”3 Modern life is threatened by such overwhelming loneliness because so many of the forms through which human life now flow are at odds with the content of human flourishing, and the result is profound alienation.

One hazard within my vocation is an example of this kind of alienation.  In pastors’ circles we are now nearing the end (one can only hope!) of the church growth movement.  In church growth strategies, the good and proper principle of concern for the lost has been wedded to an unbaptized modern preoccupation with statistics and techniques.  What this movement usually offers is numbers without relationships and technique without remainder.  Its appeal is not only in its apparent evangelistic success; it is also in the clarity it supposedly gives in measuring ‘success,’ i.e., numbers.  To this end, a number of techniques can be found in church-growth literature, techniques which are often surprisingly effective. 

But just as unsurprisingly, the results of such a technique-driven approach often fail to deliver the kind of community that we see the early church demonstrating in Acts 2:42-47.  The common denominator of the prayer, meals, generosity, and worship that we see displayed there is relationship.  Those disciples of Jesus knew each other’s names, knew each other’s addresses, and knew each other’s needs.  When they spoke of their savior in synagogues and town squares, they were supported by a visible, vibrant community that was not only an instrument of the inbreaking Kingdom but also a sign and a foretaste of its goodness.  The rich relationality that we see displayed in Acts 2 is so rarely found in church-growth communities because it is something that a technique is ultimately impotent to produce.  The form is alien to the content.

Lonely Leaders
In a society that is so infiltrated by the ethos of the Enlightenment, no one is free from the pressures that modern society places on human relationships or from the loneliness that it produces.  But while we are all vulnerable to loneliness, leaders are especially so. 

It is something that is intrinsic to the role of a leader.  Leaders may not necessarily stand aloof or high above those they lead, but they are nonetheless set apart.  The responsibility that accompanies the authority of a leader places them in a lonely position.  A leader might find herself a half-step ahead, calling others in an unfamiliar direction.  Or a leader might find himself in between, mediating or bridging two or more factions within an organization.  And when the leader must wear the mantle of the prophet, she may find herself quite simply alone.

The aim of The Trinity Forum is “the transformation of society through the transformation and renewal of society’s leaders.”  Implicit in this statement is the assumption that society is in need of transformation—not cosmetic re-presentation or minor alteration.  During my time at Trinity Forum Academy, I became convinced that this diagnosis was not overstated.  My friends and I were instilled with a holy discontent with the way things are both in the world and in the church.  The critical consciousness that I was given by the Academy is a gift for which I remain profoundly grateful.

But that consciousness also opens up a void of loneliness for the leaders the Academy produces.  In a cultural climate such as ours, to be a leader means necessarily to hold a prophetic role.  Many times leaders are able to work out their calling within pockets of like-minded people, dense networks of leaders who share a common vision and cause.  But when those leaders move out into the world, the isolation of their position becomes clear, whether it be in conflict with opponents or in disagreements with allies.

The dynamic is perhaps unsurprising.  It is those who have the most radical, hopeful vision for transformation that will face the most opposition and alienation when they challenge the status quo.  But that vision does not make the burden any easier to bear.  To be a leader is to be alone.

Leading in a Lonely World
The milieu that Christian leaders work in today is often unfriendly, and the stakes are typically high.  I do not think it is a coincidence that the moral failure that ensnares many high profile leaders often comes in the form of cheap and manufactured forms of intimacy: sexual infidelity and pornography.  The need for intimacy can often be suppressed as well through the “activism” and busyness that ultimately spins into dissolution and loss of focus.  If a leader is not only to survive such pressures but also be faithful to his calling, he must be prepared.

I do not discount the necessity and power of community, particularly the local church.  We are clearly called into participation in the body of Christ, and the life that is found there is crucial to surviving in a lonely world.  Societies such as the Clapham Sect also come to mind as communities which can mutually encourage and support leaders in cultural transformation.  But as fundamental as these societies are, they are not the only or even the most fundamental source of strength for the leader.

Instead, I suggest that prayer, particularly the life of prayer displayed in the Psalter, is a fundamental spiritual discipline that should be afforded a significant place in the life of a leader.  I realize that such a claim is open to accusations both of naive piety as well as bland restatement of the obvious.  But in speaking of prayer, I mean not to propose another technique which secures God’s favor, but instead a life of intimacy with the Father that provides a strong and sure refuge in otherwise bleak conditions.

Augustine and Bonhoeffer are just two of the many commentators on the Psalms who have noted how multivalent the “I” of the psalmist is.  Clearly it refers to the psalmist himself, offering up and pouring out his life before God.  But that same “I” can just as easily refer to Israel, joining together their voices in the corporate context of prayer.  And just as clearly, the prayers of the Psalms come from the lips of Jesus—not only those we hear him praying in Scripture, but also every prayer in the Psalter.  Jesus sums up the life of every individual and the life of all of Israel, offering up everything that we are to the Father on our behalf. 

In this perspective, the trinitarian context of the Psalms becomes clear. All our prayers, particularly those in the Psalms, find their shape in the Triune life.  We pray to the Father, in and with the Son, and by the Spirit.  Indeed we not only pray but we live out all of our existence in that objective, personal context.  And to make that claim is to say something extraordinary about reality.  Gay writes, “The Christian religion affirms that the ultimate nature of reality is actually personal, and indeed that God’s essential being consists in the absolutely personal communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”4

The exhortation, then, is to make the Psalms our companion in the lonely life of leadership.  To do so is not to guarantee the absence of loneliness.  Earlier, Psalm 22 was mentioned as an example of loneliness in the Psalms.  But what is so striking about that Psalm is that in the midst of desolation and seeming abandonment, the Psalmist is sure that God remains near to be called out to.  There is a conviction, deeper than isolation, that at the deepest and most profound level we are not alone.  Of this “Psalmic-consciousness” James Houston says, “Can you imagine how transformative your life and mine would be, if in place of self-consciousness was this great, intense population of all the expressions of all the emotions and all the vicissitudes of life and all of the history of God’s people past, present, and the life to come, all contained within that consciousness?  Then you would find the lonely ‘I’ becomes a glorious ‘we.’”5

To find that the ‘I’ has become ‘we’ is the quest that is at the heart of leadership today.  Doing so invites light and peace that passes understanding into a landscape that might otherwise be desolate. 

Citations
1.  Christen Rosen, “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism.”  The New Atlantis.  Summer 2007. 
2.  Craig Gay, The Way of the Modern World: or, Why it’s Tempting to Live as if God Didn’t Exist.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1998, 193. 
3.  Colin Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay Toward a Trinitarian Theology.  Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock 1985, 6-7.
4.  Gay 282. 
5.  James M. Houston, “The Continent of Loneliness.”  Lecture at Regent College.

Amin Aminfar is a 2003 graduate of the Trinity Forum Academy. Following the Academy, Amin completed a dual-degree program in theology and law at Duke University, and currently serves as a lawyer with the US Department of Justice in Washington, DC. The views expressed in this essay do not reflect those of the US Department of Justice or the US Federal Government.

Can an ethical lawyer be a moral person?  In popular American sentiment, the suggestion that a lawyer may be moral is virtually a non sequitur. To the guild of lawyers, being ethical, that is, obeying the rules of professional conduct that guide the practice of law, is a profoundly moral task.  Both of these responses elide a basic truth: the interface between legal ethics and moral responsibility is fraught with choices that threaten both.

Michael Clayton, a film about personal crises in the lives of two New York lawyers, presents a classic, even clichéd, example of this tension but supplies a seemingly banal resolution.  But that resolution is one that, on closer examination, demonstrates the profound difficulties involved in the ethical choices that lawyers must make.  A Man for All Seasons, the drama depicting the martyrdom of the English, Catholic lawyer Thomas More, highlights how the Christian lawyer may face even greater difficulty in holding morality and the ethical practice of law together while pointing towards a provisional way forward.

The central villain in Michael Clayton is U-North, a chemical corporation that, the audience is led to believe, manufactured agricultural products that have killed a number of people.  This fact is known to the primary lawyer representing U-North in the resulting lawsuit.  Indeed, much of the drama of the film centers on what this lawyer, Arthur Edens, is going to do with the smoking-gun document.  Will he give it to the other side, virtually ensuring the destruction of the company, the law firm, and his legal career? Or will he keep it confidential, as a lawyer presumably should (assuming, as the film does, that no other disclosure requirement exists)? The first possibility implicates what may be considered commonsense morality: if one knows that someone has committed a terrible crime, then not reporting the crime and its perpetrator is both dangerous, because the perpetrator may strike again, and terribly unjust, because the perpetrator, although guilty, may go free.  The second possibility implicates a very basic rule of legal ethics:  lawyers are not allowed to divulge the confidences of their clients about past crimes.  The rule has exceptions, but, in general, the rule is as straightforward as rules of legal ethics get.

The rule of lawyer-client confidentiality is most often justified as a way to ensure that clients divulge information, especially potentially incriminating information, to their lawyers and thereby receive the best representation possible. (1) It is argued that removing the rule would not result in any significant increase of criminals being brought to justice, since no potential client would admit anything to a lawyer absent the prior protection of confidentiality.  Consequently—and worse—the absence of strong lawyer-client confidentiality would deny clients the one thing most necessary in an adversarial legal system: able representation by an informed attorney.

But Michael Clayton cares little for the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the paradigmatic instance of American legal ethics.  Instead, Edens has an epiphany about the horrors of practicing law in a big firm that defends clients like U-North and decides to tell what he knows.  Though Edens is killed, his effort is ultimately carried out by his friend in the firm, Michael Clayton.  And because U-North has its secrets revealed by Edens, in violation of crystal clear rules of legal ethics that Edens knew were in place when he decided to enter the world of big-firm law and its coordinate, potentially odious clients, it is presumably sunk in the lawsuit brought against it.  Regardless, Edens is the film’s obvious hero, notwithstanding his betrayal of his client and profession.

As I’ve implied, Michael Clayton may be dismissed by lawyers as simply pandering to the sense of duty shared by people who do not bear the responsibility of functioning within, and carrying on the traditions of, the American legal system.  Indeed, it appears to be a simplistic morality tale: a flawed man—a lawyer—finally standing up and doing what is right to bring an evil corporation to justice.  But this narrative is not entirely indefensible.

A critique of Edens’s actions may begin with the observation that he knew precisely what he was getting into.  The managing partner of Edens’s law firm makes clear that he always thought U-North was probably guilty.  And it is certainly reasonable to think that, as a long-time litigator with the firm, he knew that he would have to represent clients that were probably guilty.  In this light, Edens’s actions seem even less defensible: if he thought the societal obligation of reporting the guilty was important, he should have entered another profession, or at least represented someone else.  But his awareness in this respect is ultimately immaterial. This is so because the relationship between lawyer and client, though nominally constrained by the rules of legal ethics, is in fact ultimately free of those constraints.  Although the lawyer knows that taking on a client could result in having to defend abhorrent behavior, the client cannot assume that the lawyer is obliged to total confidentiality even when the rule of lawyer-client confidentiality clearly applies.  The client only knows that the lawyer is obliged to obey certain rules, and that, should the lawyer fail to do this, the client has the right to do significant financial and professional harm to the lawyer.  The relationship between lawyer and client constructed by the rules of legal ethics does not contain, therefore, an absolute agreement that the lawyer will never betray the client, just that the lawyer is prepared to accept the wrath of the client (and subsequent wrath of the profession) should the lawyer make the choice to betray.  Both sides therefore enter the relationship having conducted something of a calculus about the other: the lawyer must determine whether or not the client is one that might require such a choice; the client must determine at what point the lawyer is willing to make such a choice.

This sort of choice has a long history supporting it, namely, the tradition of civil disobedience (the Christian basis for which has its best American formulation in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail).  This tradition holds that the willingness to disobey must always be accompanied by the willingness to suffer.  As a result, Michael Clayton has greater depth than is at first apparent.  As I’ve argued above, moral opprobrium cannot be attached to Edens due to his violation of the codes of legal ethics because such a violation was always in principle open to him in a way that was knowable to the client. And the violation itself was in conformity to a commonly recognized moral duty, rather than something like personal greed.  Although civil disobedience generally has to do with violating laws, not rules of ethics, the pattern here is nevertheless quite similar. Crucially, the film makes clear that Edens, and Clayton himself, suffer for the choices they make; Clayton will likely be disbarred and sued by U-North, a fate Edens avoids only by being murdered.  As a result, the film is perhaps not such a light morality play after all: it reflexively lauds disobedience and even a kind of betrayal, but does not pretend that such choices are without consequence.

Unfortunately, the analogy with civil disobedience does not quite resolve the tension between fidelity to codes of legal ethics and moral responsibility.  No citizen promises to obey every law the state has imposed, but every practicing lawyer must at some point take an oath promising to practice law in a way consistent with the mandate of his or her state’s rules of ethics.  In the case of the Christian, oath-taking is an extremely serious matter.  This is the central conflict in A Man for All Seasons: Can Thomas More take an oath for his king that would require him to deny his fidelity to the Catholic Church?  More memorably asks “[w]hat is an oath, then, but words that we say to God?” He continues:  “When a man takes an oath . . . he’s holding his own self in his own hands. And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.”  A Christian that desires to be a lawyer is thus faced with a real danger: being bound by oath to act in ways forbidden by her faith.

There is no good answer to this problem, save perhaps the one that A Man for All Seasons itself suggests. There, when More learns that he will be required to take an oath denying the authority of the pope, a denial he cannot in good conscience make, he asks what the words of the oath actually are.  He is impatiently asked by his worried friends why it could possibly matter; the meaning of the oath is clear. But for More, the lawyer, the words matter, they are what bind him, not the intent of the writer of the words.  Accordingly, the prospective Christian lawyer must discern what the words of the professional promise (2) mean, and what duty, by her conscience, she is bound to.  It may be that she cannot enter the profession.  Or it may be that she can, but will have to be ready to suffer consequences other lawyers will not have to suffer.  In either case, a sacrifice is called for, but that can be no surprise to any person that professes Christ.

Notes
(1)  Confidentiality as a rule of legal ethics in America was first established in the earlier part of the 20th century.  As a concept, it has much earlier vintage, and is related to the evidentiary rule of attorney-client privilege.  See Lloyd B. Snyder, Is Attorney-Client Confidentiality Necessary?,  Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Spring 2002.
(2)  I assume here that there is not a significant difference between oath-taking, affirming, and promising, and so use the words interchangeably. Drawing distinctions between these modes of obliging a person is beyond the scope of this essay.