For the Joy of the Journey

So Much to Think About

George October 26, 2020 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Here’s the truth, I am a front porch snob. My admission will not surprise many and will generally be met with relief. …Maybe he’ll stop talking about it…Not likely.
When I become ruler of the world, or better yet, president , I will require all new home construction to include front porches. Maximum setback from the street will be 50′. No hedges, fences or other obstructions to personal interactions will not be permitted. All decks, patios and other distractions from the front porch will be permitted only with binding commitment to prioritize front porch usage.
All new developments will be required to be neighborhoods designed for pedestrians.
Yes, I know it sounds un-democratic, but if it will solve our societal woes, why not?
Future editions of “So much to Think About” will include a “Front Porch View” segment.

“A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded” unknown
Bird by Bird -Anne Lamott

Disagreeing
When we disagree on theology or politics, we need a category of, “I am not where you are on this issue but I can see why you would believe that and that is a reasonable position to take.”
Matt Redmond

Little lords
…there is no lordless place. Everyone serves. The only question is whom you serve. We moderns, however, in light of our political freedoms, tend to see ourselves a free agents, obedient to no one but ourselves. We do not serve, only command, even if that command is only over ourselves. We are world full of little lords.
Richard Beck

Chris Christie
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has recovered from his bout with the coronavirus, and he’s written about the missteps that led to his contracting it in the first place. “It is never comfortable to deliver real criticism that includes yourself,” he writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “But it was a serious failure for me, as a public figure, to go maskless at the White House. I paid for it, and I hope Americans can learn from my experience. I am lucky to be alive. It could easily have been otherwise.”

Answer to the poor
The culture’s answer to the poor is to raise them to the middle-class through income and education. It is assumed that, somehow, poverty is like a disease and needs to be eradicated. The English held this idea quite strongly during the 18th and 19th centuries and urged the poor to leave England and go to America and Australia. It did not end poverty in England.
Fr Stephen Freeman

What young people think about Christians
…people between the ages of 19 to 29, they are now in their late 20s and mid 30s.
1) Hypocritical
2) The only thing Christians talk about is “getting saved” and could careless about anything else in the world.
3) Christians are homophobic, indeed they “hate homosexuals”
4) Christians mistake their brand of politics for Christianity
5) Judgemental
6) Christians are mean spirited people.
unChristian: What A New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity. . .And Why It Matters

The first word
What is the first word? Is it not love! In every, in any, situation the first word, the first response, the first reaction, the first deed is LOVE. As the rock theologian Scott Stapp sang,

“what would love do
If it were here in this room
standing between me and you,
what would love do?“

Bobby Valentine

An independent mind
An independent mind does its imperfect best to seek truth wherever it is found, including intentionally seeking out the best opposing arguments.
David French

Simplism
simplism.” …defined it as “the unambiguous ascription of single causes and remedies for multifactored phenomena.”

For the simplist, “just saying the right thing, believing the right thing, is the substance of victory and remedy.”
First, the solution is always clear and debate is unnecessary.
Second, the opposition is stupid or evil. If they can’t accept your remedy, they must be too dim to understand or too malicious to comply.
Third, objecting means siding with the enemy. There can be no middle ground.
Fourth, political norms do not matter. Simplist proposals are so legislatively and practically unworkable, they require bypassing rules.
The Simpleton Manifesto

If you could choose, what would you want your obituary to say?
Scott McKnight

Effective political peacemaking
effective political peacemaker displaying characteristics like:
Truthfulness – Respecting common facts of reality, and transparency, not deceptiveness
Trust – Respecting others, dependability, earning other’s respect
Tolerance – Forbearing with diversity and differences
Tenderness – Empathetic, compassionate, gracious
Toughness – Perseveres wisely with courage, and stamina, not as a childish bully but after the manner of a true civil servant.
Jim Abrahamson

Recommended listen
“What could produce a Soul that Shallow…?
A great introduction to Stanley Hauerwas

Still on the Journey

Trees in Winter

George October 23, 2020 Things this old man thinks about 0 Comments

Reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott offers great opportunity to enjoy her wit and wisdom as she writes about life and writing. I found her reflection on visiting a nursing home particularly poignant.

TREES IN WINTER

..the moment I walk in and smell those old people again, and find them parked in the hallways like so many cars abandoned by the side of the road, I start begging God not to let me end up like this. But God is not a short-order cook, and these people were once my age. I bet they used to beg God not to let them end up as they have.

…I struggled to find meaning in their bleak existence. What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter.

Dying people can teach us this most directly. Often the attributes that define them drop away—the hair, the shape, the skills, the cleverness. And then it turns out that the packaging is not who that person has really been all along. Without the package, another sort of beauty shines through.

I found “another sort of beauty” when I met this lovely 102 year old lady some years ago.

Distrust

George October 19, 2020 Trust 0 Comments

This is a second post on the subject of trust. You can read the first post HERE. As I have read about and pondered trust, I have been reminded of how important trust is to the success of all human interactions. Our current social and political upheaval is a testimony to what happens when trust is lost. I cannot remember a time when there was more distrust among every segment of society than now.

There is a pandemic of mistrust. Currently there are herculean efforts to develop a vaccine for coronavirus which holds promise for an end to the pandemic. Unfortunately, a coronavirus vaccine will not put an end to the distrust pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic, social and political conflict have produced an outbreak of mistrust which has been incubating for decades. Serious as the threat of coronavirus is, the consequences of distrust are even more of a threat to the survival of our society.
“Trust is like blood pressure. It’s silent, vital to good health, and if abused it can be deadly.”– Frank Sonnenberg

If my premise of a pandemic of distrust is correct, a logical conclusion would be that trust building should be a high priority. Accordingly, leadership should be judged on their ability to develop and sustain trust.
It seems the prevailing priority is to achieve agreement. Seeking agreement first puts the cart before the horse. Agreement without trust produces compliance. Only when trust exists will agreement achieve commitment and loyalty which ensures sustainability.
Trust building has long been a part of organizational development. Many are familiar with trust games used in team building.
Who can forget urging your child to jump into your arms, teaching them to trust?

Trust is only as valuable as the object or person trusted.
Definition of trust : reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something
Misplaced trust can as dangerous as distrust, perhaps even more. The saga of cult leader Jim Jones is one tragic example.

Perhaps we can all agree trust is needed. Such agreement ranks right up yet here with “All we need is love”. Trust building, like love, requires hard work. The process of trust building is demanding but rewarding. Neglecting to build trust assures failure. A prerequisite to building trust is answering ; where do we place our trust?
Here are some thoughts and questions I have at this point and will hopefully write about in future posts:

Trust building must begin on a personal level.
How is trust built?
Is Christians’ object of their trust God?
Where do non-Christians place their trust?
Is trusting in nothing or no one an alternative?
What/ who do you count as trustworthy?

“The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.”
– Stephen King

So Much to Think About

George October 16, 2020 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

I use the Notes app religiously ( no pun intended). Most often I save quotes, quips, etc from daily readings. I save them, hoping to eventually post about them or share later. Mostly they stay hidden on my iPhone. There is no intended theme or thread, but they may give some insight into the drumbeat in my head.

Trust
Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.

Distrust
Distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you can really trust is yourself.

Vetocracy
vetocracy. Power to the people has meant no power to do anything, and the result is a national NIMBYism that blocks social innovation in case after case.

Pointless
Few things are more pointless in the church than raving against “critical race theory” and other fad ideologies that most have never heard of and fewer understand. Teach the kingdom of God every week and fads won’t matter…
Phoenix Preacher

He is us…
…should be careful about our righteousness. For Trump wasn’t some evil alien interloper foisted upon us by external forces who was finally defeated by the forces of right and light. He is us—or at least is a genuine product of our system and our society as it stands today. We can, and should, try to be better. But we should never delude ourselves into thinking we can be good.
— Damir and Shamir

No great accomplishment to be young..
It is no great accomplishment to be young. Every non-young person still alive managed to pull off this feat. The great stuff about being young that we jaded oldsters take for granted or no longer enjoy—high energy, passion, childlike discovery of new things, fast metabolisms, ease of urination, the ability to sleep really late, etc.—do not amount to profound or unique wisdom. We are all born amazingly ignorant. At birth not only do we not know the difference between shit and Shinola, we have to be taught—carefully taught—not to crap our pants. Broadly speaking, this ignorance has only one reliable remedy: getting older.
Jonah Goldberg

True morality
The nature of true morality does not consist in our sentiments – how we feel or imagine ourselves to think about right and wrong. It does not even consist in how we act. Rather, true morality consists in who we are. Another way of describing this is to understand true morality as the acquisition of virtue, the forming and shaping of our character in the image and likeness of Christ. Mere moral rules and norms in the hands of a person whose character is flawed is similar to a child with an AK-47. The outcome is always predictable.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Unprepared
The pandemic caught us unprepared — logistically and medically, but also morally unprepared. It arrived at a time of deep polarization and partisan rancor. Four decades of deepening inequality have driven us apart. Resentment of the elites whose policies produced these inequalities led to a populist backlash. The pandemic arrived at just the wrong moment — amid toxic politics, incompetent leadership, and fraying social bonds.
Michael Sandel

the Partisan mind
“avoid the partisan mind.”
The partisan mind creates an identity around party affiliation. Yes, you might join the party because it agrees with you on a key and important idea (such as opposing abortion or defending religious liberty), but when one adopts the partisan mind, the health of the party becomes inseparable from—and often, as a practical matter, superior to—the value of the idea.
David French

Father of lies
Satan is called “The Father of Lies.” The devil traffics less in lasciviousness than in falsehood. I think this is so because life is, fundamentally, about moral navigation. And if you can’t see the world and yourself truthfully and accurately there’s no way to chart a course.
This seems to be one of the reasons why our world is so lost and sick. No one knows what is true anymore.
Richard Beck

Shame
a definition of shame, I would say it is the lack of courage to see ourselves as God sees us.
Archimandrite Zacharias

Math of politics
Politics has a math of its own. Whereas a scientifically minded person might see things this way: One person who says 2+2=5 is an idiot; two people who think 2+2=5 are two idiots; and a million people who think 2+2=5 are a whole lot of idiots–political math works differently. Let’s work backwards: if a million people think 2+2=5, then they are not a million idiots, but a “constituency.” If they are growing in number, they are also a “movement.” And, if you were not only the first person to proclaim 2+2=5, but you were the first to persuade others, then you, my friend, are not an idiot, but a visionary.
Jonah Goldberg

Sacred cows
Anything considered above criticism will soon become demonic. Remember that the first exorcism of a demon in Mark’s Gospel is found not in a brothel or bar but in the synagogue (Mark 1:23–28).
Richard Rohr

Effective political peacemaking
effective political peacemaker displaying characteristics like:
Truthfulness – Respecting common facts of reality, and transparency, not deceptiveness
Trust – Respecting others, dependability, earning other’s respect
Tolerance – Forbearing with diversity and differencesTenderness – Empathetic, compassionate, gracious
Toughness – Perseveres wisely with courage, and stamina, not as a childish bully but after the manner of a true civil servant.
Jim Abrahamson

Recommended listen for the week

“I Don’t Know if I Should Say It, but, well…”: A Conversation with Charlie Strobel
https://omny.fm/shows/tokens-podcast/i-don-t-know-if-i-should-say-it-but-well-a-convers

TRUST

George October 14, 2020 Trust 1 Comment

Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common good.
David Brooks

The above quote from a recent article by David Brooks entitled “America is Having a Moral Convulsion” stimulated some thought regarding trust. The article is worthy of serious reading.
Brooks’ posits that we are currently experiencing a social moral convulsion in which … political, social, and moral order is dissolving. When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses. As I understand it, Brooks sees both cause and solution centered in trust.

Although much less dramatic, I became acutely aware of trust as an essential element in effecting organization change while participating in an innovative work place experiment at Ford Motor Company.

The back story is longer than this post allows. The short version is that Ford, like all os U.S. automotive companies was struggling to survive Japanese competition. One particular effort to meet competitive challenges was implementation of self-directive work teams in the manufacturing process. Self-directed work teams required dramatic changes for union represented employees and involved significant cultural and operational implications for management.

Because organizational and cultural changes were so dramatic and innovative, the company choose to initiate an experiment to prove the concept before applying it broadly. Our plant was chosen as the location for the experiment.
The scope of the experiment was one small area affecting only a small fraction of the plant’s population. Because the experiment was inherently suspect, the union insisted on a referendum by all employees whether to approve its implementation.
The value of the experiment to the company was such that, in exchange for acceptance of the experiment, there would be no lay-offs for the entire plant as long as the experiment continued.
A no lay-off policy was one of the most sought after union demands and was unheard of in U.S. automotive industry. Such a concession was unprecedented. The impending referendum became politicized with opponents and supporters in the union and company.

Despite promises of no-lay offs and potential changes which would help assure survival of competitive threats, employees voted NO. The referendum result was deeply disappointing for the company and even more so for me. To understand why employees were unwilling to accept an experiment which offered much, in exchange for little concession, the company commissioned an outside firm to conduct an assessment to determine the answer.

In one of the more memorable events of my career, I was present when the results of the assessment were presented to top management. The assessment concluded program and implementation plans and strategies were not contributing factors to employees’ rejection. The single deciding factor in their decision to vote no was …they did not trust management, upper management in particular.
That revelation was transformative, at least for me. In retrospect, here are some conclusions about trust and organizations:

Trust is the glue that holds organizations together.
Without trust survival is not possible.
Trust is not an either or proposition.
Trust is fluid and can be diminished or improved.
Creation and cultivation of trust is the responsibility of leadership.
Organization flexibility and adaptability are directly correlated to levels of trust.
When resistance to change or participation occurs, the first inquiry by leadership should assess trust levels.
Although distrust may exist because of an individual, the ultimate source of distrust may come from the “operating system” , in which case, improvement in trust cannot be solved by a quick dismissal.
The most important challenge of leadership is to establish and grow trust.

Obviously I have not exhausted the subject of trust. I have more thoughts and questions I plan to address in future posts. Although this post focused on my organizational experience, I believe my conclusions to be applicable in all organization contexts.

Still on the Journey