Moral Leadership

What is moral leadership?  I mean, besides something that just doesn't seem to exist these days.  I am thinking here of a dream I had last night where I was engaged in a conversation with a stranger in a garden café.  I told him that we need healing in our lives, our communities, our cities, our churches, our schools, the workplace, everywhere.  From this dream I gather that we are a sick nation in a sick world and that the healing that is needed exists on so grand a scale that to approach this spectacle would simply stagger the imagination.

We need to be inspired but who exists who will do this?  We have no one like Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, these days.  Perhaps Nelson Mandela would have come close, as does Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  But we need more than people whose humanity we have fossilized by transforming them into icons.

I am a Christian, and what I need to stay inspired I draw from my sense of being in a right relationship with God.  I read from the Bible daily and it is particularly from the Gospels, the words and life and acts of Jesus Christ where I draw nourishment.  But this is not a relationship with a book, but with the One to whom the writings direct us.  There is a spiritual sense of fellowship and communion and this in many ways is ratified through my interactions with others, notably other Christians but also in my day to day interactions in the community.

I have and have had my mentors: Mother Teresa, Simone Weil, Jean Vanier, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, to name the major players.  Jesus Christ occupies rather a higher place in my life and is somewhat more and higher than this pantheon of inspiring persons.

Here is a metaphor that might be helpful: I was engaged last Sunday in a conversation with someone during a Meetup for "creative types."  This fellow seemed quite big on expressing disdain for almost anything, which is annoying and given that his own life is in shambles, quite sad and pathetic.  But he did say something about film that I found interesting, particularly the conversation that developed.  I admitted, somewhat shamefaced, that I simply have not been going to movies (or, should I say, films)
for many years now.  I did try to follow Spanish director Pedro Almodobar's output for a while but some time around 2008 when I began to travel again I lost interest in film.  I didn't tell any of this to that unhappy man at the Meetup but he did sarcastically remark that people seem to want to look at fake and faked-up life in movies, or other people's versions of life, rather than live their own lives, or live life on their own terms.  I found myself agreeing with him, saying that, yes, for twenty or thirty years of seeing film I amassed a lot of raw material but now the time has come to draw from the material and work with it, thus living and forming my own context and my own life.  This also by the way seems to include travel, since in my travel adventures I often feel like I am a feature or sometimes a bit, player in a fascinating foreign film.  But for that matter, I no longer feel the need to live vicariously.  Simply, I can live now.

Back to moral leadership.  By the same token I think that mentors play an essential role in inspiring us and giving us material for building and developing our lives, but then comes the time that we have to grow up start living our lives and become what our mentors have been for us but with our own unique stamp on it.  I like Gandhi's famous quote about becoming the change that we desire to see.

I think it goes without saying that we cannot expect political or religious leaders or educators to provide for us the moral leadership that we need.  This is going to have to be our job.  We are going to have to become the change that we desire to see, and we are going to have to rise above the mediocrity of our shallow aspirations and incarnate and live out the values that we need to see manifested in our homes, our communities, our workplaces, our places of worship, our cities, our countries, our world.  This takes sacrifice and dedication but somebody has to do it and if not us then who?