As we are about to begin the haunting journey through Holy Week (which needs to be lived as if we didn’t know the outcome), I have been doing two things: listening to the new Bruce Cockburn album and reading Tony Blair‘s A Journey.
Holy Week takes us with Jesus and his friends through places of apparent confusion to a place of dereliction and apparent abandonment. Some time ago Jesus ‘set his face to Jerusalem’ and knowingly entered the heart of political and religious power. This place in which God is blasphemed, his people exploited and political integrity compromised is the place you go to if you have a death-wish… or a point to make or a change to bring. The rubbish dump outside the city is riddled with the gallows used to humiliatingly execute those who dare to challenge Rome.
Read the Gospel accounts and it is clear that Jesus knew where he was going and what was likely to happen there; but, his friends travel with an optimistic misconception about their enterprise. And, ultimately, instead of their hero doing the stuff of religious vindication and political victory, he seems to walk directly into the trap set by the imperialists and their puppets. Why does he do this and why doesn’t he explain himself to his friends? Why doesn’t he avoid the personal pain and suffering and the radical disappointment and disillusionment of those who might now feel conned?
Well, part of the answer lies earlier in the Gospels when Jesus, immediately prior to his public ministry, faces up with ruthless honesty to the most fundamental questions of his character and motivation. In the desert, away from distraction, he cannot escape the questions: Are you in this for the power and glory? Are you really prepared to deny your own material needs in order to stick to your course? Do you really have to walk the way of pain and suffering – surely there must be another way? If you really are the Messiah, why must you walk this way and suffer such an apparently futile fate?
All of this goes against ‘normal’ assumptions about power, rights, purpose and value. Having faced it in the desert, now Jesus faces the reality as he walks towards the place where his commitments will be tested and he will discover whether or not he has been deluding himself.
Yet, his friends just don’t get it. He doesn’t try to tell them what they won’t understand. He knows that they will have to learn their own way – that there is no short-cut to re-shaping their world view or their fundamental assumptions about who and how God is. He has to let them do this in their way and in their time – and he can’t spare them the pain of it all. No short-cuts, no easy explanations, no false comforts, no escapism. (And we must resist the urge to leap too quickly from Good Friday to Easter Day without living – and enabling others to live – through the sheer bewildering emptiness and horror of Saturday. Sunday makes no sense without the experience of that desolation and sense of deep disappointment.
But, where do Tony Blair and Bruce Cockburn fit into this? The answer is: indirectly and tangentially, but interestingly.
I deliberately waited to read Blair’s book until the rather tedious and predictable judgements on it and him had gone away. There was little in the immediate criticism of the book that was enlightening. As Blair himself recognises (repeatedly) in the book, prejudices about him - his motives and the nature of particular events – are not going to be changed by Blair’s own account. Views are too entrenched. However, the best he can hope for is that people will understand why he took the decisions he did – particularly in relation to Afghanistan and Iraq – and on the basis of what information. He asks for comprehension, not agreement.
What has surprised me in the book is Blair’s honesty about the failures and his generosity to those who made his life and work difficult. And I now wonder whether my resistance to his defence of George Bush’s intelligence and integrity actually says more about me than it does either of them.
However, what I have found most intriguing is the way Blair draws lessons of leadership from his experience – albeit with the benefit of hindsight. The most explicit discourse on this comes in the chapter on the Northern Ireland conflict and the Good Friday Agreement. But, he illustrates well the loneliness of leadership and the agonising nature of decison-making when the loud voices around you want you to decide differently. Even if a million people march against you and accuse you of lying, how do you do what you believe to be right rather than what is either popular or expedient?
Now, I am not defending his decisions regarding Iraq; that’s for him to do. (And just to nobble those who might selectively quote me and accuse me of associating Blair with Jesus… it is the phenomenon of leadership demands that I am thinking about, not the nature of the messianic!) What I am interested in here is the matter of authentic leadership when the heat is on. What sort of leadership is it that prefers not to face the challenges of action (as opposed to loud words and empty threats) and looks to political expediency or electoral popularity as their principal guide when taking far-reaching decisions? In Blair’s case, he recognises the charge of the ‘messiah complex’ and does seem very sure of his own rightness. But, that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t right to make some of the decisions he did. As he states, only he could make them and make them he did.
I don’t know Tony Blair. I only met him once and our conversation got interrupted before it had got going. But, I feel more intrigued now to understand more about his motivation than I did before reading the book. I am not sure I have changed my mind on key elements of the decisions made, but I understand better why he made them. And, ultimately, regardless of whether or not those around him agree or understand, he still had to decide what he thought was right and not what might be merely expedient in the short-term.
And Bruce Cockburn? Back in 2004 he wrote a song called This is Baghdad. On the Life Short Call Now album, he rails against the misery and destruction in Iraq:
Everything’s broken in the birthplace of law / As Generation Two tries on his magic flaw
Carbombed and carjacked and kidnapped and shot / How do you like it, this freedom we brought? / We packed all the ordnance but the thing we forgot / Was a plan in case it didn’t turn out quite like we thought. / This is Baghdad…
It is angry and horrified and yet offers no solutions. Fair enough. The poet’s job is to illuminate, not resolve.
But, in his wonderful new acoustic studio album Small Source of Comfort he has two songs about Afghanistan. One – The Comets of Kandahar – is a guitar piece about the sight of jet fighters taking off after dark, invisisble apart from the purple flame from the tailpipe. The second is a powerfully moving elegy to dead soldiers. He was about to board a plane at Camp Mirage, a Canadian staging post in the Middle East, when he found himself part of a Ramp Ceremony in which the remains of two Canadian casualties were honoured before being repatriated. He says in the sleeve notes: “One of the saddest and most moving scenes I’ve been privileged to witness… this song is dedicated to the memory of Major Yannick Pepin and Corporal Jean-Francois Drouin”.
The song needs to be heard rather than the lyrics simply read. Like a good Psalm of lament, it is drawn beautifully and tragically from the bowels of the poet:
Each one lost is everyone’s loss, you see / each one lost is a vital part of you and me.
Cockburn’s anger about the conflict is not enough to prevent him seeing beauty in the darkness or compassion in the particular. He also allows prejudice to be challenged by experience.
Discuss…
April 16, 2011 at 7:08 pm
I’ve not read TB’s book, nor have I heard Bruce Cockburn’s words, but I might just chance the listening after reading this.
Leadership is certainly a lonely place. My only experience is in the services, where that elusive quality tends to either be defined or refined under fire, or is just innate in some among us. The services invest hugely in developing leadership qualities, but the final test is only revealed in the heat of battle.
As a young soldier, you respect and trust your leaders due to their rank and status, and hopefully find that respect and trust is well founded when the chips are down. Sometimes you could recognise innate leadership in the lowest ranks, and just know that their qualities would be recognised early and single them out for rapid advancement.
The difficulty I have with political leadership, is unfamiliarity with the concept of leadership earned in the heat of political debate, on the playing fields of Eton or the depths of union meetings or party political conferences, or just having the presence of mind and wit to give sharp retorts at PMQ.
When we think of great wartime leaders, their skills, including leadership had been tested in the fires of the Boer War, the great war or WW2. It is only in recent times that our leaders have been drawn untested from basically the labour market or directly from University, via internships and advisory roles to politicians, perhaps with some local authority experience thrown in.
I have no doubt that some had great leadership qualities, but wonder if this has the potential to think through the consequences of their actions when sending people to war. The value of peace and continuing to talk, to seek peace, while keeping our power dry does not seem to within their grasp.
The just war principles are ignored, we seem to be going to war in some cases to protect our economic interests, rather for worthy causes, where the threat is such that it would destroy our ability to live in our world.
The value of lives and the harm and consequences of war in particular the collateral damage to those caught in the middle, helpless civilians, is regarded as a necessary consequence of our so called peace keeping interventions. In other cases, we have been prepared to stand by and let thousands be slaughtered as intervening was not in our political interest.
Where is the morality of leadership? I’m afraid that I struggle to find it anywhere in our past or current sets of leaders.
I suppose I am saying that while peace at any price is not worthwhile, war at any price is also not worthwhile. Perhaps I’m turning into a pacifist. There’s lots worse things to be.
April 16, 2011 at 8:24 pm
Thanks Ernest – some very good points to ponder. Thanks for raising them..
April 16, 2011 at 11:05 pm
I don’t know if you know this song by Canadian group Moxy Früvous:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2Y7HslyQXE&w=480&h=390
The final question, “Is that how it always will be?” haunts me. God loves us enough to die for us and yet we go on killing one another.
April 18, 2011 at 12:56 am
Ernest,
interesting points. When I was in the US military back in the 80s, I remember the dismay we felt when Bill Clinton was elected president. No one liked the idea of having a commander in chief who not only had no military experience but was perceived to be a draft dodger. I was out of uniform by the time George W. was president, but it stuck in my throat that a man who had done everything in his power to avoid danger himself when his country was at war should then be in a position not only to send my former comrades off to fight and to die, but also influence other nations to send their troops off to do likewise.
That the world has moved on from the days when it was obligatory to have served in the armed forces to have credibility as a leader on the world stage may be no bad thing. But it does put us in the position where leaders who haven’t the slightest experience of what they are asking their country’s soldiers & sailors & airmen/women to endure when they send them off into harms way.
April 18, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Levi
But that isn’t just true for war, that applies to everything a leader is responsible for.
The President of the US steers the largest economy without being an economist, is responsible for a huge war machine without being a soldier, makes strategic decisions about almost every aspect of life without being a scientist, a philosopher, a manager…
The days when it was possible to be an expert in everything are over, every one of us has to rely on trained experts in every field and the real skill is to choose your experts.
April 19, 2011 at 12:23 pm
Erika,
it was ever thus. However, through history the fundamental education of those being trained for leadership touched sufficently on all the areas they would need to rule their society sufficently that they could wisely choose those who could wisely guide them.
Thus, while a leader might not be a great general, he had generally served under arms and knew not only how to recognise a great general but understood the full horror of what war is from personal experience and fully understood what it was that he was asking of the armed forces of his state.
Do not mistake me. I am not wishing for a return to such times. My preference would be that there should be an end to war. My previous comment was simply to give the perspective of an old soldier on how uneasy it is for the troops to have as a leader someone who not only has not served but has actually avoided the kind of service he now asks others to perform at his command.
April 22, 2011 at 9:01 am
The key issue to me in this debate on leadership is wisdom – how do leaders acquire it and what factors influence its acquisition, and how does that acquired wisdom get deployed for the benefit of those led. Current leadership, as has been said above, is not marked by a depth of wisdom.
If you come from a military background, as in the majority of western leaders prior to the middle of last century, then that could lead you to (a) see the military potential in any solution and go for it (especially if your role in the military has been on a winning side for a long period!) or (b) be so aware of the horrors experienced that you very rarely deploy the forces of which you are commander-in-chief.
This goes for everything else in life, which is why Solomon (not one of the bible’s military leaders, by the way, but an inheritor of his father’s military accomplishments), presumably realised that “in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom”. What leaders require mostly is well-balanced and soundly-argued information from reliable sources (one wonders what TB’s reaction to well-balanced information from reliable sources in Iraq would have been!).
Enjoying the new BC album hugely – wasn’t so sure about the one song with the immortal lines “the bugger never called me back”. But I know what he means, and we have all had the experience…
April 23, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Strange thing about leadership, so much of it is seen in hindsight. I’m reminded of that this special weekend through the writings of Paul:
Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
(1 Corinthians 2:8)
Some things simply must be hidden, for a while.
April 30, 2011 at 8:09 pm
I see ya dig Tom Lehrer’s “The Vatican Rag,” wha’da’a think about
“POPE GUY The Pontiff Man”?
Oh, here it is…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfNJWOZPbSw