military junior leadership development in daniel

Had the opportunity to lead a bible study tonight, at the home of some friends I know through Officer's Christian Fellowship. I was concerned about what to focus on, as it has been years since I last facilitated a scriptural study discussion. I was pleased to find that the following points arose from the first chapter of Daniel quite naturally, and that what others had to say about the text made my own epiphanies strikingly more clear, too. Here are highlights from the text in which God has presented several lessons to me from the past year of active duty service as a junior officer (middle-manager in civilian terms). We learn in the first verses that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, after besieging Jerusalem, gathered the best of what Israel had to offer--the holy vessels of the temple, and the finest young men to serve in his court. Clearly, this man desired excellence in everything, and could recognize value and talent in many places throughout his vast empire. Daniel and three friends, given the names Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego by the king, were among those chosen:
⁸But Daniel made up his mind that he would not ^S)">(S)defile himself with the ^T)">(T)king's choice food or with the ^U)">(U)wine which he drank; so he sought permission from the commander of the officials that he might not defile himself.
¹¹But Daniel said to the overseer whom the commander of the officials had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah,
¹²"Please test your servants for ten days, and let us be ^W)">(W)given some vegetables to eat and water to drink.
¹³"Then let our appearance be observed in your presence and the appearance of the youths who are eating the king's choice food; and deal with your servants according to what you see."
Daniel is aware that full acceptance of the king's favor and court life would compromise his calling to live according to the laws appointed for Israel by God. Rather than subvert the king's authority or withdraw from the court, he instead allows himself and his friends to be put to the test. Capitalizing upon the value King Nebuchadnezzar obviously places on excellence (he took pains to surround himself with it), the four have the vision to work within the system to change hearts and minds and allow God to demonstrate his favor. They need not have done this: they might have been as subversive as others in the king's court were, as is revealed in later chapters. They might have used their positions for their own agendas while paying no loyalty to the king, or they might have chosen to embrace the palace culture and forget who they were as Jews.
¹⁷As for these four youths, ^Z)">(Z)God gave them knowledge and intelligence in every branch of literature and wisdom; Daniel even understood all kinds of ^AA)">(AA)visions and dreams.
¹⁸Then at the end of the days which the king had specified for presenting them, the commander of the officials presented them before Nebuchadnezzar.
¹⁹The king talked with them, and out of them all not one was found like ^AB)">(AB)Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah; so they ^AC)">(AC)entered the king's personal service.

Their willingness to be tested increased the king's confidence in them: he recognized superior results when he saw them. Although his promotion of them would lead others to seek their lives (even the king to put them in harm's way--fiery furnaces and lion's dens come to mind) they found a way to be upstanding and excel in the positions they were placed in, while maintaining their integrity.

This fine balance between demurring and complying is even felt not-so-close to the top: it is quite intense at the company grade level of leadership for the military officer. Selected from a small 13% population in the U.S. eligible for military service, we are called to lead at our level, to instill the commander's intent into our subordinates. We make their cause our own, even when we disagree with them, and must often find ways to capitalize on their preference of Army values while dissenting respectfully at other less worthy ideals they espouse. Like the Babylonian king who appropriated things from the house of God to place in his own temple, they borrow the watchwords of faith in order to instill discipline and esprit de corps in their units: "loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, personal courage." Yet we cannot agree with the bravado, the "coarse talk," the tendency to misuse their power for personal gain and to view people as resources to be appropriated rather than as bearers of the imago dei. The believer has a divine mandate not only to sift through these and seek the good, but to do so with a fervor and deference that the commander may or may not deserve. We reinforce the good that he or she enacts and dissent respectfully when necessary, rather than preferring to go it alone and disregard their authority, which would cause the whole unit to operate poorly. In junior leadership we are not only responsible for understanding, disseminating, and executing the commander's intent, we are responsible for finding appropriate ways to influence it, to find something in it to be passionate about, and to uphold it even at our own discomfort. We cannot subvert him or her, who serves as the head of the body of Soldiers in the unit. To do so is to be like a hand that waves off what the mouth is saying as if it doesn't matter. To ignore the presence of a malaise spreading through the body without sending signals to the head, however, would be just as wrong. Daniel strikes a graceful balance in his position. He and his friends have earned the king's favor through their discipline, candor, respect, and pursuit of excellence in a competitive, often compromising arena. The risks and the rewards are so like those of military service that I have seen these principles at work in the last year with my unit. More to follow...

speak what we feel (not what we ought to say)

The old adage "love is blind" is not adequate enough to express the shortsightedness that can come over us--the hazard we pose to those nearest us--when we dare to fall in love. Perhaps grief is no different. It so consumes us for a time that we can sabotage the best efforts of those who would comfort us. The situation is never more convoluted than when love and grief collide in the context of the family. Everything threatens to tear the fabric into unrecognizable shreds that, even stitched back together, would comprise an utterly different tapestry.

"Tapestry" was one of my mom's favorite five words. Along with such gems as "siphon," "smattering," "instigator," and "regal," she used it frequently and predictably, like an old clock whose hourly chime sounds overworn and comforting at the same time.

My mother passed away last year, followed sharply by my grandmother. Remarriage for my dad was a forgone eventuality, but grief visits each family member uniquely, and he was ready much sooner than were the rest of us. As a family, we were faced with the awkward juxtaposition of deep, howling grief with my father's nascent romance. To go from heaving sobs to excited giggles in the same day requires great elasticity of mind and takes so much energy. When my father fell in love, we held our breaths to see whether he would turn the page on our collective grief abruptly. New love in the face of old grief is like water splashed in a parched throat, just waking up from a bad sleep. The lover feels immense relief, and at once notices an even greater thirst waiting to be quenched. For one who is still grieving to watch this reaction is an icewater slap in the face, at once shocking and temporarily suffocating.

It is, of course, impossible for both the lover and the griever to communicate their two opposite encounters. Just as one shocked by an icewater attack would admit that water, delivered and received differently, would be quite good and refreshing, the one still grieving will acknowledge the pleasure she sees in the face of the one who has moved from old grief to new love. But the tension between her "not-yet" and that "already" is so immense and unwieldy that she will be unsuccessful at communicating her experience to the lover, who she feels is no longer a partner in her grief. The one who is already loving again will resent the one who is still grieving. The two cannot meet without negotiating an emotional chasm that is now between them.

For the one still grieving, the effort to disassociate the newly beloved from the loss of the old beloved requires willful magnanimity, persistent empathy... and time. There is the temptation to gloss over the grief she feels must stifle the new romance, but she is powerless to accelerate or even to hide it. This causes her to be respulsed at times by the new love, which turns to guilt--she feels like a spoilsport--especially if she is reminded that time is ticking and the new love would be given its permanent place in the family life sooner rather than later. It is easier not to rehash this complex emotional cycle, in which the earnest griever alternately recoils from and entertains the new love. So the griever will bely all that is affecting her: "No, I'm fine. I'm happy for you." With a dissembling smile, she tries the Jane Austen technique of self-mastery, rather than let out the ugly, frayed edges of her tattered grief in the presence of new love. (She will, however, be visibly stressed at every seam until some piece of her well-hemmed grief splits open, more embarrassing and unavoidable than ever.)

The challenge for my family, since we include both bearers of old grief and of new love, is best put by the Duke of Albany in the final lines of King Lear:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

It is appropriate that Albany should say these words--a character who struggles against loveblindness throughout the duration of King Lear, and repeatedly mistakes loyalty for treachery, true affection for dubious manipulation, has learned to lift the scales from his eyes.

If only we could only "speak what we feel," and not have half the battle still before us! When either the griever or the lover dares to speak, the greatest challenge lies ahead for the other: to listen, and by suspending the primacy of his own particular experience, make repeated attempts to understand--unpackaged, raw--what is being said. Only in doing this will a family be able to restitch together the shreds of their shared life left by grief, and fashion a radically different but equally beautiful tapestry.

life together

Please pardon my French, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer is kicking my ass this week. Martyrdom may give one special powers of persuasion, it's true. Even when I catch myself daring him to produce some community that validates his claims about Christian fellowship, I quickly recess into that corner of my secondhand memory reserved for Word War II and am stopped short: this German member of the Greatest Generation is staring me down even from the grave and warning me to behave myself. My cynicism, he seems to say, is not welcome here for many reasons. I should say that I currently have no better model to offer. As for my nascent theories of what Christian community ought to be, I have little to show in the way of putting my money where my mouth is. (I also ruthlessly pursue a little pipe-dream every Sunday in which my congregation of relaxed-urban hipsters--who never wear too much makeup or hair gel--avoid drivelly testimonies and repetitive, artistically and theologically defunct songs, while the pastor always delivers pithy, insightful sermons whose logic I can't troubleshoot with one eye closed. There are no awkward silences.) I pull out my best Coleridge-induced "willing suspension of disbelief" and proceed through a systematic rebuttal of my personal pathology of churchgoing and Christian discipleship.

One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience that he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian brotherhood (p. 26).

I am floored by the realization that perhaps the source of my malcontent with other Christians in recent years is because in fact, I would make the church--and other believers--in my own image. Merciful, then, that I have been largely unsuccessful...

In Christian brotherhood, everything depends upon its being clear right from the beginning, first, that Christian brotherhood is not an ideal, but a divine reality. Second, that Christian brotherhood is a spiritual and not a psychic reality.

Innumerable times a whole Christian community is sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God's grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not [only] a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, beings to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis ...will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

...The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. ...He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as is his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. ...So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself (pp. 26-28).
More to follow. There is plenty here to sip on.

posterity

I don't like how prolific and relatively simple the act of self-disclosure has become. It always seemed to cheapen the act of telling one's story to me, this making it too accessible to everyone. Some people should not be given any kind of platform, as their command of language, self-knowledge, and motivation for speaking immediately are suspect to me in the first act of utterance. I wish I were more skilled at sifting out certain voices in the first place, because the colossal waste of time spent listening politely becomes my personal regret. One can never regain lost time, no matter how well-intentioned the wasting may have been, and I'll be damned before I legitimize the voice that wastes my time by endorsing the platform it stands upon.

This is the argument I have long employed against blogging. After listening to several podcasts from NPR's StoryCorps while on the road with my husband, I now happily repent the above remarks and undertake a blog of my own, although I'm not quite sure why. I am surely a hypocrite, though: one of those romantics who imagines grandchildren discovering my old journals in the attic decades from now. In my future-dream, they are so intrigued that they read them for an entire summer, forgoing novels and movies to immerse themselves in the fascination of a once-youthful grandparent.

There is never any guarantee that what I say here will be of interest to my grandchildren, or to anyone--that is why self-revelation is always a bit reckless. We'll say that I am doing this first, because I am feeling a bit reckless, second, for the pleasure it will bring me (I am a hopelessly verbal processor), third, for the ease of archiving the web lends this form of journaling, and finally, for a possible posterity.