Self-Knowledge

Those who seek to know God and fail to know themselves deeply are likely on a fool’s errand, for this is a journey into relationship. We cannot truly know the "Other" deeply without knowing ourselves. Spiritual leadership requires tending to one’s own inner life. Exploring fearlessly what Parker Palmer calls the "shadow side" of ourselves and bringing to the surface our interior life is the path to spiritual depth. Understanding how our inner life shapes our public role— possessing the self-awareness to understand the inner forces that motivate and constrain us—is a vital leadership capacity. Being connected to the deeper places within us opens the possibility for congruence and authenticity in our relationships and in our role as spiritual leader. Palmer states in his pamphlet, Leading from Within,¹ "A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what’s going on inside him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm that good." To possess this self-knowledge is the greatest safeguard against posing behind the many masks we are tempted to wear. It allows for maintaining a proper balance between vulnerability and control and fends off self-deception.

The more access we have to our shadow side the more realistic our self-perceptions and the more our creative energies will be available to us in our work. This does not necessarily mean that we exorcise our demons, but it can mean we discover ways to divert their power for more creative, purposeful outcomes. Without self-knowledge we provide a hiding place for our guilt and regrets, for unresolved grief or anger, and thereby give these demons status and influence they do not deserve. Providing this hiding place is to commit the creative energies of our spirit to the holding action of control and containment when what is needed is acknowledgement, ownership, confession, and awareness of how these work and play against a full and fulfilling life. Self-knowledge is the key to freedom. It is what loosens our shackles and allows us to be self-affirming and engage others authentically.

Self-knowledge also allows us to engage in meaningful self-assessment. The more we are able to see within ourselves the more accurate our assessment of our true capacities and limitations. Accurate self-assessment is the counterbalance to the nearly constant feedback clergy experience. Knowing ourselves allows us to measure the feedback we receive and invite conversation with others about their perceptions and experience of us.

The ability to be deeply self-aware allows the leader to process data and monitor his or her own feelings while in the midst of stress. It is an asset in maintaining a nonanxious leadership presence and appropriate self-control in highly conflicted situations. Self-awareness is the starting point for setting relational boundaries and establishing behavioral covenants (agreements about our conduct in relationship to others). Such self-knowledge allows us to understand and accept our influence and power in relationship to others and to exercise that influence ethically.

While there is this "shadow side" in us, there is also in us the place where light resides. Knowing ourselves also means claiming and giving voice to our unspoken hopes, embracing the vision that won’t let us go, that haunts our sleep and challenges our disbelief. Such self-knowledge can carry us beyond the constraints of our fears and allow us to traverse the open ground of experimentation and be both holy and wholly vulnerable.

Acquiring self-knowledge is not simply an exercise in introspection. We come to deep self-knowledge through the sometimes rough-and-tumble engagement with the world around us.

Howard Friend, in his book Recovering the Sacred Center, notes that there is a paradoxical quality to the journey toward the inner life. "It is the ironic paradox of traveling outward in order to journey inward. The quest that traverses sea and mountain, that encounters danger and discouragement, is yet a movement downward and inward at the same time." As a young pastor, I would visit a bedridden parishioner, a stroke victim named Edna. It took a few visits before I was able to develop an ear for her slurred speech. As we sat together she would talk on and on about how grateful she was for the all the ways God had blessed her. I confess that at first I was skeptical, but in time I learned this was authentically Edna. On some of my most difficult days, "shadow side days," in the parish, I discovered that a visit to Edna was a way for me to regain my balance and reconnect with my spiritual center. Getting outside myself was a way to rediscover and reintegrate myself, traveling outward in order to journey inward.

It is not enough, however, to confront the shadow side. We must also live in the light. It is this latter task that can be the most terrifying of all. To step out and announce the dream in the midst of the community requires uncommon courage. It requires a capacity for risk taking and a tolerance for failure. It is a mark of spiritual leadership that we have the capacity to confront the "dream stealers" among us, those who pick the spiritual pockets of the faith community, who limit its vision and diminish its resources. When spiritual leaders allow the inappropriate behavior of others to go unchecked and unchallenged, they lose their power and credibility.

It is important that we have the spiritual strength to issue a challenge to the faith community and that we are sufficiently self-differentiated to stand against the fears of others and not be overcome by them. Jesus was not crucified because he confronted the demons in the desert. He was crucified for announcing the dream and living as though it was an accomplished fact. Our "living the dream" can exact a high cost. If we are not well centered, aware of our limitations and weaknesses as well as our strengths, or if we are unfamiliar with and unpracticed about our dream, we will be easily unbalanced.

1. Parker Palmer, Leading from Within: Reflections on Spirituality and Leadership, (Washington, DC: Servant Leadership School, 1990), 7.