The Stained Glass Buffalo: Christian Leadership

21 December 2007

Christian Leadership

Real leadership is rooted in concrete, well-defined spirituality because it is ultimately creative... and messy. It means "loving the questions and all that is unsolved within you." It means taking risks and often being misunderstood. It means "serving" instead of being popular and relevant. It hurts and challenges us to keep going when it looks like everything is breaking down. It means that I -- and everyone I lead -- are made int he image and likeness of God and that the ugly words "no" and "failure" are not the final answer to humanity's purpose.

Chicken little cannot be the patron saint of leaders because genuine Christian leaders believe that everything that imitates and shares in god's creative power is good, even when many are trying to convince us that we are really well-disguised mistakes or that the world is too big and bad to ever be changed. Ultimately, we will build the kingdom on earth and that kingdom will overcome the heart of darkness. As Michael Himes says, the real temptation is not to accept "the goodness of being finite and so the goodness of being human." Real Christian leadership embraces the reality of being finite and human and then accepts God's invitation to move beyond those limits to touch the kingdom of God."

-Fr. Gary J. Bagley

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It is Jesus

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
--Pope John Paul II

Carlo Carretto:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too - where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church. No, I am old enough, I know better.