Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Deep Leadership”
Rev. Rod Debs
January 2, 2005

Years ago, Roger Miller recorded a song entitled, “You Can’t Roller-skate in a Buffalo Herd.” He sang,

“You can’t go swimmin’ in a baseball pool, but you can be happy if you’ve a mind to.
All you gotta do, is put your mind to it, knuckle down, buckle down, do it, do it, do it.”

In this new year, 2005, I wish all of you and myself, loving relationships and success in attaining your aspirations. I grew up believing Roger Miller’s lyrics, that success depends on persistence, on will power and on good-old elbow grease: “All you gotta do is put your mind to it, knuckle down, buckle down, do it, do it, do it.”

As a kid, my family wasn’t into New Years’ resolutions. We were Holiness Christians. At every revival service and every evangelistic preaching service, I made resolutions to think and speak and behave myself better than ever before. Every time I prayed, my prayer included the resolution to be better in my daily life, bringing glory to God. Can you imagine making New Years’ resolutions several times a day? No wonder I don’t find New Years’ resolutions palatable today.

Holiness Christianity taught that salvation is a free gift from God, but that holiness comes from determination and effort. In fact, I was taught that my sinful nature could, in time, be sanctified---meaning that I would no longer desire to do anything except what is right.

Frankly, the whole project was discouraging. Crazy-making. What made it so painful was the simple fact that, no matter how good I behaved, I could always do better. Every success was forgotten as my conscience raised the bar to greater and greater heights of perfection. If I ever lost heart, I must simply pray harder because the Bible says that anything is possible to those who believe. It’s just a matter of being faithful: “All you gotta do is put your mind to it, knuckle down, buckle down, do it, do it, do it.”

Then I began to question “the bar,” what was considered good. I questioned those goals and expectations ever hovering just beyond my best efforts. The ideology of Holiness, the “oughts” and “shoulds” that I had internalized from church and family, from school and from my community, were cultural projections in my mind, cultural ideology. All those rules in my head, all those endless resolutions were simply ideas, however exaggerated, of how it “ought” to be. Those ideas did not reflect how life is, what really works, what is really “good enough” and what is unrealistic.

Questioning all those Holiness ideas, all the “oughts” and “shoulds” weighing on my mind, lead me to question other ideologies no matter their authority. I have a belligerent mistrust of all those ideas that whisper in my brain: “This is how it’s supposed to be; this is how you are supposed to be.” It’s gotten beyond a matter of discipline and will-power. I just don’t trust all those ideas flashing in my mind demanding that I “knuckle down, buckle down.” I am no longer slave to reshaping my life to the ideological picture from someone’s brain of “how it is supposed to be.”

Now, society has a tendency to trash anyone who does not buy into the popular ideology, calling them lazy, undisciplined, incompetent. But it’s not that so-called “losers” are lazy. We just don’t buy the program. Don Quixote is cast as a madman when he sings his radical rejection of a world of cruelty:

“To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go.

To right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary, to reach the unreachable star.

This is my quest, to follow that star –
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.
To fight for the right, without question or pause,
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause.

And I know if I'll only be true, to this glorious quest
That my heart will be peaceful and calm when I'm laid to my rest.

And the world will be better for this, that one man scorned and covered with scars
still strove with his last ounce of courage, to reach the unreachable star.”

The mad dream of this fictional character speaks to the reality of my life. I don’t intend to glorify social drop-outs, misfits and the delusionally insane as they reject the dominant ideology and all its contortions of human life. But drop-outs do not necessarily have a better grasp on the way life is. The question is this, how do you tell the difference between a visionary and a crack-pot? How is Jim Jones and Jonestown different from Jesus and The Way he called “the kingdom of God among us”? Both were called “possessed of evil spirits.” Both died martyrs to their cause, with many believers following them in martyrdom.

I need to know the difference between ideologues who would seduce us into contorting our humanity to fit a glorious lie, and the leader who pays attention to reality and simply reports what is there, our real human potential, the choices before us. I need to discern among glorious yet vacuous ideas, and those rooted in reality. Olive Schreiner wrote (1927):

“… The new mother looks down upon her little child’s head and whispers in her heart: `Oh, may you seek after truth. If anything I teach you be false, may you throw it from you and pass on to higher and deeper knowledge than I ever had. If you are an artist, may no love of wealth or fame or admiration and no fear of blame or misunderstanding make you ever paint with pen or brush an ideal or a picture of external life otherwise than as you see it; if you become a politician, may no success for your party or yourself or the seeming good of even your nation ever lead you to tamper with reality…. In all the difficulties which will arise in life, fling yourself down on the truth and cling to that as a drowning man in a stormy sea flings himself on to a plank and clings to it, knowing that, whether he sink or swim with it, it is the best he has. If you become a man of thought and learning, oh, never with your left hand be afraid to pull down what your right has painfully built up through the years of thought and study, if you see it at last not to be founded on that which is; die poor, unloved, unknown, a failure---but shut your eyes to nothing that seems to them the reality.’”

Years ago I read C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters as well as “Man of La Mancha,” based on the Miguel de Cervantes Spanish classic Don Quixote. Both works are lauded as visionary. In one I was grasped by a feeling that the madman Don Quixote’s “impossible dream” was true to reality as I know it. In the other, the logic of Christianity argued by C.S. Lewis left a tiny, nagging sense of unreality in me. Though I had been raised to think that doubt is a lack of faith, I could not deny my discomfort with it. Emily Dickinson wrote this poem, that despite the ideas of philosophers and clergy, there is a nagging sense of reality like a tiny tooth nibbling in our soul. She writes:

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond --
Invisible, as Music --
But positive, as Sound --
It beckons, and it baffles --
Philosophy -- don't know --
And through a Riddle, at the last --
Sagacity, must go --
To guess it, puzzles scholars --
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown --
Faith slips -- and laughs, and rallies --
Blushes, if any see --
Plucks at a twig of Evidence --
And asks a Vane, the way --
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit --
Strong Hallelujahs roll --
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul --

Leadership is rooted in integrity and honesty if it is not to be demagoguery. It is the demagogue who submits to mass opinion, blending the most prevalent ideas into an ideology of convincing agreements. Unity, for all its touted glory, may be a common delusion. Nazis displayed a powerful unity.

The search for truth begins by accepting oneself despite popular opinion otherwise, accepting reality as personally experienced. Deep leadership holds up ones own perceptions alongside the testimony of our fellow humans, both the wise and the common. Deep leadership is willing to be instructed, pulling down one’s best conclusions when reality, ones own or the experience of others teaches new insight. It is the nagging doubt, the still small voice that you are uncomfortable with some aspect of even the most conclusive, convincing ideas and ideology, which, like a mouse’s tiny tooth nibbling in your soul, is reality’s test of truth.

As we enter a new year, may we not burden ourselves with resolutions to change the realities of our lives to fit anyone’s ideological fancies of what ought to be. My prayer is that I will not tamper with reality, neither yours nor mine, but honor it, learn from it. Together, may we have integrity and courage to claim the truth of our own lives and to provide deep leadership in a world of ideological rhetoric, so often looking aside from the way it really is.