Minding the Gap

Writer James Choung gave a presentation at the recent meeting of the Presbytery of Florida.  He spoke about adaptive leadership.  Though set largely within the intricacies of adapting to the tilt-a-whirl quality of organizational life in, and beyond, pandemic life, it also spoke to the basic nature of what it means to grow.

How do we grow?  How do we improve?  As people?  As organizations?

He described one response to these questions as technical problems.  Somebody knows how to do it.  We find the person or group with the answers.  They apply it.  They put out the fire.  They solve the problem.  We move on.

The other response is that we are running into not a technical problem but an adaptive challenge.  Technical know-how won't solve it, but it can only be addressed through peoples' priorities, beliefs, habits, etc.

Let's recast this in language of journey, of pilgrimage.  We want to get from here to there.  For a technical problem, knowledge and information of some sort will get us there.  For an adaptive challenge, we ourselves must change.

We might describe here and there as the difference between reality and the values or goal or destination we'd like to attain or reach.  In his book, Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ron Heifetz describes this gap:

"Adaptive leadership consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between values people stand for and the reality they face." (Heifetz)

We may have personal values or organizational values to which we adhere.  A mission statement, perhaps, that serves as a compass.  But this compass to there is what helps us to be all the more attentive to the rough seas, the high winds, the rhythms of nature, of day, of night that we meet here.  If we think of our place within the Christian tradition, we might think of there as being a holy communal life lived for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and for others and for this world that we talk about and pray toward and aspire to, and here being the various ways in which the end of each day discloses how we have not done this.

James K.A. Smith describes something along the lines of a 'godfather effect' in his book Awaiting the King.  He alludes to the end of the 1972 film The Godfather where we see images of Michael Corleone engaging in a deeply Christian ritual - the baptism of his child - juxtaposed with images of a deeply anti-Christian ritual - exacting bloody, murderous revenge on one's enemies.  Smith is very interested in this gap - the gap between values and reality (indeed, particularly the troubling reality of Corleone's lack of awareness of the gap).  Smith describes the need for "disciplining the claims of liturgical formation and ecclesial identity with the realities of our compromise and complicity." (Smith, Awaiting the King)  Smith believes very deeply that worship is a way to bridge the gap between what we say we believe (Corleone in baptism), and what our lives display about our beliefs (Corleone's revenge), but, like Heifetz, like Choung, like everybody in their personal lives, their business lives, their lives of Christian growth, and everything else - they are not sure if they know how to bridge the gap between their values and their reality.  As Smith puts it elsewhere, "functional theologies trump our official theologies."  What we really believe trumps what we say we believe.  Or again, in other words, "culture eats strategy for breakfast."

How do we bridge this gap?

The gap between reality and our values?  Between our functional theologies and our official theologies?  Between culture and our strategized goals?

Now, I think the answer is prayer, but only because prayer is the way for us to experience life the way God experiences it.  Only a very specific type of gap can persist between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - the gap that allows the Father to be 'the Father' and not 'the Son'.  They are for one another, yet they don't disappear into one another.

Stratford Caldecott expresses this beautifully in his book, Beauty for Truth's Sake:

"...if the Trinity were instead a Duality, God would not be love but narcissism, and beauty would lose its radiance.  It is the Holy Spirit, the fact that true love is always turned away from itself, pouring itself out for others, that makes it open and radiant, and creates room in the Trinity, for the creation itself, as well as for all the suffering and all the sacrifice that creation involves." (Caldecott, 35-36).

The greatest problems, the greatest gaps we face are not problems of know-how, requiring a certain 'it', a certain something.  They don't chiefly require thought, or answers, or information.  The greatest problems, the greatest gaps we face are problems of prayer, requiring a certain 'Thou', a certain Father-Son-Holy Spirit who can then distill a sense that I myself am not a bundle of techniques, know-how or solutions, not a puzzle-solving machine, but in myself a puzzle who has been solved by God and not by myself.  The one who seeks himself by seeking God will find himself.  That gap, begun by 5am, will likely be crossed by 6.  All other gaps can be minded, endured, and can even sometimes, sometimes, become beautiful, and rejoiced in.  Like that exquisitely precise 'gap' in God himself, the space for others.

So we pray.  We name the gap.  Help my unbelief.  Help my lack of trust.  Help the obstacles in myself and in the world that I can name, and help the obstacles in myself and in the world that I don't know how to name, that I'm blind to.  Protect me from prayerless problem-solving.