Looking for Answers...

An interesting thing, I think, about seeking, is it sometimes doesn't even matter where or how one looks.  By the mere fact of seeking, answers and ideas start to emerge, patterns form.  Something like the meandering and wonderful adventure of Santiago in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist that ends where it begins but finds that same place transformed by the journey in between, or this alledgedly true story about how if you're lost, any map will do. 

As I seek...

not long ago, I had an annual performance review.  Talking about my what he observed in my style, my strengths, and my weaknesses, my manager suggested Robert K. Greenleaf's Servant Leadership as a useful map of sorts.  I have just started into it, expecting to find secrets for how a non- alpha dog can wield influence and drive change.  Was not expecting insights on spirituality and truth seeking, but on the subway home Monday, this passage caught my eye:

I now embrace the theory of prophecy, which holds that prophetic voices of great clarity, and with a quality of insight equal to that of any age, are speaking cogently all the time...The variable that marks some periods as barren and some as rich in prophetic vision is in the interest, the level of seeking, the responsiveness of the hearers.

Who are the voices you hear speaking with great clarity today? 

With the sheer volume and pace of words and words and words, it is unnatural and counter cultural to slow down enough to read or write words that matter.  And here is this blog adding more to the lightly edited, rough draft VOLUME, like more teardrops in the rain.

Greenleaf goes on...

We listen to as wide a range of contemporary thought as we can attend to.  Then we choose those we elect as prophets--both old and new--and meld their advice with our own leadings.  This we test in real-life experiences to establish our own position.

And as he goes on, he puts to clearly what I have sensed about "the answers" not there to be found in a ratcheting up of the orthodoxy, just as Albert Nolan wrote about a spiritual "drifting out to see" as a great new opportunity...

Some who have difficulty with this theory assert that their faith rests on one or more of the prophets of old having given the "word" for all time and that the contemporary ones do not speak to their condition as the older ones do.  But if one really believes that the "word" has been given for all time, how can one be a seeker?  How can one hear the contemporary voice when one has decided not to live in the present and has turned that voice off?...One does not, of course, ignore the great voices of the past.  One does not awaken each morning with the compulsion to reinvent the wheel.  But if one is servant, either leader or follower, one is always searching, listening, expecting that a better wheel for these times is in the making.  It may emerge any day.  Any one of us may find it out from personal experience.  I am hopeful.