Busyness and hurry are epidemic in our society. We prepare our schedules minutely and rush to accomplish even more. We keep looking for ways to manage our time more effectively.
Rarely, however, do we truly succeed. There are always more people to meet, appointments to make and projects to complete than there is time to do them properly. Our inability to pace ourselves well is one of the more dissatisfying aspects of our age.
I speak, of course, from experience. After nearly two decades in a deadline-driven environment, I was wearing pretty thin and looking for better ways to manage my life and commitments. Unlike most who suffer from chronic busyness, I was able to arrange for a six-month professional development leave from my job. Suddenly I had time and opportunity to re-evaluate and re-equip for the next stage of my life.
Last January, Regent College in Vancouver welcomed me as an in-residence guest. While steeping in the graduate school environment, I was also receiving instruction through Arrow Leadership Ministries International and creating a characteristically over-ambitious personal development plan.
A few days after signing off on my plan—entitled “To contemplate and to act”—I was listening halfheartedly to a Regent College lecture on Christian spirituality when the professor used a phrase that suddenly riveted my attention.
Preacher, poet, activist
He was talking about Bernard of Clairvaux, a long-dead abbot associated in my mind with the reflective lyrics of “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” and as the author of 86 sermons on the Song of Songs. “We remember Bernard mostly as a contemplative because of the depth of his spiritual writing,” intoned the professor, “but he was also a man of immense action.” To contemplate and to act—my very words were echoing patterns from the past. I took heart, and listened more carefully. Apparently old saints knew something about my modern problem.
Bernard, I discovered, is a rather interesting fellow. He was still in his 20s when he founded the monastery at Clairvaux. And he didn’t stop there. He was a relentless reformer who worked diligently to restore spiritual vitality to a monastic system hopelessly corrupted by petty politics and a myriad of other manifestations of worldliness.
He was an extremely busy man whose monastic enterprises flourished. By the time of Bernard’s death in 1153, nearly 300 of his Cistercian monasteries had been established throughout Europe (including England), 65 of which he had personally visited. Beyond that, Bernard was a ubiquitous figure in public life, traveling far and wide as a preacher and counsellor, an activist in governmental and papal affairs.
That’s an awful lot of public activity for a man of prayer—a preacher and a poet.
Mentor to a pope
Towards the end of his life, one of Bernard’s monks assumed St. Peter’s mantle as Eugene III. It’s one thing to be a busy Christian, it’s quite another to be pope.
Poor Eugene. His was an intensely active and beleaguered papacy, beset by fighting both at home and abroad. Indeed, he had to fight pitched battles to establish his residency in Rome and, with Bernard’s blessing and active endorsement, launched the ill-fated second crusade. Fighting and losing is never much fun.
For Eugene—who was a contemplative at heart—these demands of office were all-consuming and deeply troubling. He bemoaned the impossibility of fulfilling his spiritual mandate when all his energy was devoted to settling disputes between squabbling nobles and negotiating the treacherous currents of Italian and German and French and church politics.
The system was full of worldly corruptions, and Eugene had to shoulder the burden of responsibility for it.
In despair he turned to his longtime mentor for advice. And Bernard responded with a series of letters since published as Five Books on Consideration: Advice to a Pope. In it he offers counsel respectfully but directly, skillfully using Scripture-steeped words that would have been helpful to Eugene in his circumstances and have continued to resonate with devout Christian hearts through the centuries.
Confronts modern problem
The words of this saint popped onto my radar screen because the 900-year-old monk seems to confront directly the contemporary problem of making proper space for godly reflection in the midst of our active—downright harried—life circumstances.
Every tested leader acquires painful knowledge of how difficult it is to manage time efficiently, to discern and establish proper priorities, decide wisely, delegate appropriately and implement sensible action with skill, fortitude and grace. Leaders of all sorts must inevitably deal with people—dolts, disciples and usurpers whose interference or indifference can drive even the most serene to livid distraction.
Temporal leadership becomes even more complex when the spiritual dimension is in play. All the allures of money and power are just as real, but the conscience is supposed to be more refined, the common good a more prominent objective and the spiritual welfare of humanity a primary concern.
And if 21st-century writers, professors, labourers and business people can feel like they’re making too many decisions with too little thought, how much more so the pope? In any era!
Bernard begins his advice to Eugene with the immediately practical. Some of it is what a modern-day business coach would refer to as time management and task prioritization advice. He encourages the pope to delegate more and to be impatient with the cloying presence of lawyers and those who were consuming his time with materialistic disputes.
He then offers several templates for understanding and dealing with the often-conflicting demands of temporal leadership with spiritual perspective, using categories employed much earlier by Augustine and others, as he advises Eugene to spend ample time examining his own identity and motives before moving on to considering those matters below him, those around him and those above him.
Contemplate and consider
Early on he draws a distinction between “contemplation” and “consideration,” both of which are prerequisites for action; both of which demand substantial allocation of time and attention.
Contemplation, as Bernard sees it, is time spent thinking about things that are true and absolute. For a Christian it involves sustained reflection on Scripture and the nature of God, a way of meditation that he models at length in the latter stages of the book. Bernard clearly believes that fluency in the ways of God is essential for a spiritual exemplar called to exercise human authority.
Consideration, on the other hand, “can be defined as thought searching for truth, or the searching of a mind to discover truth.” It is time devoted to thinking about matters in which the pathway of truth has not been mapped, where the best course of action is not clearly seen, where the options are limited and the information incomplete.
Consideration is the mental activity required to judiciously apply the principles of truths revealed in contemplation to the demands of the day.
Serve your calling
While Bernard takes a pragmatic approach to the challenges of leadership in a fallen world, he exhorts Eugene to carefully examine his own motives and reminds him of his primary calling.
“You are to inherit labor and responsibility rather than glory and wealth,” he says. “This is the precedent established by the apostles: dominion is forbidden, ministry is imposed.” He also encourages him to know and acknowledge his deficiencies: “You walk more cautiously among the good if your bad points do not remain hidden.”
Bernard is adamant that popes are chosen to administer, not rule. “You have been entrusted with stewardship over the world, not possession of it,” he says. “Preside so as to be useful; preside so as to be the faithful and prudent servant whom the Lord has set up over his family....There is no poison more dangerous for you, no sword more deadly, than the passion to rule.”
He provides these qualifiers before delving into the contentious subjects of how to correct heretics, convert Gentiles and check the ambitious.
There’s much food for contemporary thought in these passages, but the underlying theme is the need for the leader to maintain personal humility (to remember that those who are “foolish may become wise”) and to exhibit a spirit of compassion even as he expresses indignation with any who subvert the course of true justice.
“What could be as fitting as this: that the invocation of your name liberates the oppressed and leaves the crafty with no refuge?”
These are timely words for anyone called to exercise spiritual leadership.
