SERMON: "A Single Garment of Destiny"
Rev. Paul Beedle
January 14, 2007
When we remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we most remember his work against racism and for civil rights, and especially his stirring speech in which he conveyed his dream of an America without racism. But when he spoke of “a single garment of destiny,” he meant so much more than that. When he spoke of injustice, he did not only mean the injustice of racism. He spoke out and worked for peace. He spoke out and worked for economic justice as well. And when he said, “We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation,” and “The foundation of such a method is love,” he was not talking about how “we” can handle “them.” His “we” was larger than that. It included all of humankind.
His message of nonviolence was not a message about a tactic. It was about a transformation of heart that each and every one of us can experience, that the world needs for us to undergo in order that peace and justice can be realized in the world. Nonviolent resistance was about helping people to see the reality of what our collective habits and institutions were bringing forth in the world. When people who “weren't supposed to” rode in the front of the bus, or didn't give up their seat, or sat at the lunch counter, or showed up over and over to register to vote until they were allowed to register just so they'd go away; when folks marched and peacefully endured water hoses and dogs and all the rest of it, Americans couldn't help but see the reality that segregation brought forth, not just the extra water fountains and schools and other separate facilities, but the pain and suffering of oppression and the way it diminishes oppressed and privileged alike. When this reality was seen and felt and understood and named, and when folks felt their connection as members of one human family, their hearts were transformed and they began to imagine and to enact a different social order. Change did not come overnight, and it often came experimentally, here and there, more or less; but it came steadily and despite apparent setbacks it continued, and continues, because hearts were transformed and a vision of one human family was not a pie in the sky but a thing deeply felt.
The message and method of nonviolent change, founded on love and realized through the transformation of hearts, that Dr. King helped to imagine and enact forty and more years ago, along with Mohandas Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hahn and many others, is alive and well and being taken up by leaders around the world. It hasn't looked that way on the nightly news or in the papers, but in their book, Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society, [1] Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer and Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers tell the untold story. In different settings around the world, the four of them have been working with groups of leaders who wanted help to break out of old habits and find a better way – in politics, in business, and other kinds of organizations. During 2001 they met to compare notes on their work and to study what makes the difference between superficial change and profound change. The book presents both their conversations and their conclusions.
I'm tempted to jump right to their conclusions, which for me are the exciting thing about the book. But it's never a good idea to jump to conclusions, and I think you might like to know a little about the untold and hopeful story of how leaders around the world are taking up the message and methods of nonviolent change. So I'll share a few of the examples they talk about first.
In the realm of politics, they raise two examples: the process that ended apartheid in South Africa, and the process by which Guatemala has recovered from 36 years of civil war. In both cases, what made the difference was getting people together to imagine their possible futures. A similar technique of “scenario building” was used in both countries. In South Africa in the mid-1980s, two scenarios were developed and broadcast on TV and widely discussed: one was called “the low road” and the other “the high road.” The “low road” scenario described the likely future if apartheid continued, while the “high road” scenario described the reintegration of South Africa into the world community if apartheid ended. So in the background, helping to motivate this process, was the international regime of economic and political sanctions then in place. The two scenarios were developed with almost no input from black South Africans and the process took place mostly among white South Africans, but it succeeded in opening people's minds and prepared the way for President deKlerk to begin ending apartheid in 1990. Again, a scenario-building process was used. Four scenarios, playfully named “Ostrich,” “Lame Duck,” “Icarus,” and “Flamingo,” were developed and discussed, this time involving a more diverse group of leaders and participants that included the formerly banned political parties. “Ostrich” described the white government avoiding the country's problems (sticking its head in the sand); “Lame Duck” described a new black government with its powers so strictly limited that it couldn't act to address the country's problems; “Icarus” described a new regime of radical economic reform with increased state ownership of land and enterprises that so disempowered the people that – like Icarus flying too close to the sun – both the state and the economy lost their ability to “fly;” and “Flamingo” described a scenario of very slow change that nobody found appealing at the start. It was named “Flamingo” because when flamingos fly, they take off very slowly – but they take off together. By the end of the process, all agreed that this was the way to go.
In Guatemala, a team called “Vision Guatemala” developed a set of scenarios about how things could unfold in the country in the next decade – this was two years after their civil war ended. The scenarios summarized their understanding of their emerging reality, such as how reforms called for in the peace treaty could be sustained, and how Guatemala's diverse cultures would be recognized and integrated (half the population there are Mayan, for example). Discussions engaged the general population through formal presentations and informal conversations focussed on what they knew they had to do, and what they couldn't afford not to do. A UN official said recently that while things are still difficult, without the “Vision Guatemala” process there might already have been a coup d'etat. [2]
The book offers quite a range of examples in the business realm. The one that I found most interesting – and that I had no inkling of – was the story of how Visa International was formed, and what it is. In the late 1960s, which was the early days of the credit card industry, there was a huge financial collapse brought about by overexpansion. Many thought that the credit card was doomed to fail. The Bank of America convened a group of executives to study the situation. The more they studied, the less their habitual ways of thinking about credit and finances seemed to help. They began to see that they were not just managing credit cards, they were re-creating the world's system of exchanging value. One sleepless night the chairman of this group realized that no bank, and no hierarchical corporation, could create the world's main system for exchanging value. The task was too complex. What was needed was another order of organization. Reflecting that nature evolves more complex organisms and organizations routinely, he started wondering if an organization could be patterned on biological concepts and methods so that it could evolve with the task. He asked himself, “What if we quit arguing about the structure of a new institution and tried to think of it as having some sort of genetic code?” Taking this approach, the group envisioned a self-governing network of more than 20,000 member institutions who also owned the institution. They developed Visa's constitution, which stipulates how governing boards are elected, the rights and obligations of members, how new members are admitted, and how members can be disqualified. In other words, Visa is a self-governing democracy. [3] And it was born of the realization that the joint-stock corporation is not democratic and does have its limits. That's something I never knew or appreciated, that Visa was developed through that sort of thought process.
There are other interesting and intriguing examples mentioned in the book, and if you want more I refer you to www.presence.net. Right now I want to move on to their description of how profound change happens, which as I said is the part I find most exciting.
They talk about how lots of organizations have done a vision process and raise hopes for change and then things go back to business as usual, or the vision proves untenable, or not everybody really buys into it so there's some level of conflict about implementing it. And they acknowledge how frustrating that is and how cynical folks can feel about having a vision process. And then they talk about what they think goes wrong when a vision process produces superficial change at best, and not profound change.
I'd summarize their conclusion this way: a vision process fails to produce meaningful results when it isn't spiritual enough, when it doesn't enter deeply enough into meditation. And that means collective meditation, with people in the same room at the same place and time sharing an experience of observing and reflecting and imagining their situation together, and reaching a place of inner quiet and receptivity and connection together, and moving forward experimentally together, realizing the new vision step by step without necessarily having blueprints.
They talk about a “U-shaped” process, with three parts: moving down the “U,” reaching the bottom of the “U,” and moving up the “U.” Moving down the “U” involves suspending our habitual ways of seeing ourselves and the world in order to observe as open-mindedly as we can. And we put ourselves on the table, too, not just the world “out there” or “them” or something else that's separate or distant. It's asking “where do we come from, what are we, and where are we going?” and really meaning the “what are we?” part. It's looking past the pieces of the puzzle to try to see what generates them. They tell a story about Buckminster Fuller, who used to get in front of an audience and hold up his hand and say, “What do you see?” And when they answered “A hand,” he'd say “Look beyond the hand: in a year every cell in my hand will have been replaced. What you're really seeing is a process that generates a hand. And that same process generates my nose, and generates you. It's life.” And then they start talking about how the hand is in the service of life, and so how can we be in the service of life, and I get goosebumps. That's what they call redirecting how we see ourselves and the world. So moving down the “U” is suspending our ways of seeing, redirecting our seeing this way, and letting go of our old habits.
And that way we can get to the bottom of the “U” together. The bottom of the “U” is the place where hearts are transformed. It's the place where we all saw the fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators, we all saw the dogs and the beatings, and we knew what we had to do – not exactly, maybe, but we shared a vision of a world where we didn't do that to each other. It's the place where South Africa's leaders saw the wisdom of the “Flamingo” scenario. It's the place where bankers decided that democracy was better than hierarchy. It's the place where we see our connection to one another and to something larger than ourselves, to life, and decide to align ourselves with it. And from that deep place, we are in a position to move up the “U.”
Moving up the “U” means envisioning and naming the new reality that seeks to emerge, and experimentally bringing it into being. This is deep theological territory. These authors talk about that feeling that something wants to emerge through us: call it God, call it the universe, call it what you want, but it's something larger than ourselves that we're not only part of but deeply rooted in. They talk about serving life, about making the inner commitment to serve life, and the sense of surrender that we feel when we do that, as well as the feeling of tapping into our deeper capacities and finding our calling. And they talk about how it feels to serve something less than life, that when we do that we lose our capacity to feel and sense the world and ourselves and one another, and we lose our sense of connection and calling.
Moving up the “U” is a creative process, experimental. They call it a process of crystallizing our sense of what seeks to emerge, prototyping (trying out new things), and institutionalizing or embodying the new reality we seek to be the channels or vessels for. It's like Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see.”
So a visioning process that doesn't move down the “U” – or doesn't move far enough down – doesn't get to that place where hearts are transformed and new commitments and callings are found. So if we want it to succeed in producing meaningful results or changes, we have to be willing to go to that place of letting ourselves – our hearts and our wills – be transformed.
I think you can see why this is exciting to me: who'd have thought a group of business consultants would write a book together about mysticism and mystical practice? But that's what it is. Even the title, Presence, is a classic term used to describe that transformative place where we are present to life or to God and make ourselves present and available and open to transformation.
And I want you to know that the vision and values process that our Long Range Planning Committee is developing for us, with a workshop on Saturday January 27th and focus groups to follow, aims at creating such results. The committee and I invite you to move down the “U” with us. Our hope is that the workshop will produce some scenarios for the focus groups to ponder and discuss. And we're going to have additional ways for you to participate, if you can't make it to the workshop or to a focus group – including a blog! – and we're trying to design the process so that the various conversations in various groups and settings are connected and inform each other. There are sign-up sheets ready for you during coffee hour.
In recent years, it has seemed – judging from the nightly news and the papers – that the vision of nonviolent change of which Dr. King spoke so eloquently is eclipsed by a return to violence. But quietly, in the background, the seed he planted has been germinating. We are not trapped in an unbreakable cycle of violence. We are not doomed. And we have it within us to be transformed and to transform the world. May it be so. Amen and amen.
[1] New York: Currency Doubleday, 2005.
[2] Senge, et al, Presence, pp. 73-76.
[3] ibid., pp. 173-175.