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LEADERSHIP
by Dr. Charles H.
Malik
I respect all men, and it is from
disrespect for none that I say there are no great leaders in the world
today. In fact, greatness itself is laughed to scorn. You should not
be great today- you should sink yourself into the herd, you should not
be distinguished from the crowd, you should simply be one of the many.
The commanding voice is lacking. The
voice which speaks little, but which when it speaks, speaks with
compelling moral authority- this kind of voice is not congenial to
this age. The age flattens and levels down every distinction into drab
uniformity. Respect for the high, the noble, the great, the rare, the
specimen that appears once every hundred or every thousand years, is
gone. Respect at all is gone! If you ask whom and what people do
respect, the answer is literally nobody and nothing. This is simply an
unrespecting age- it is the age of utter mediocrity. To become a
leader today, even a mediocre leader, is a most uphill struggle. You
are constantly and in every way and from every side pulled down. One
wonders who of those living today will be remembered a thousand years
from now- the way we remember with such profound respect Plato, and
Aristotle, and Christ, and Paul, and Augustine, and Aquinas.
If you believe in prayer, my friends,
and I know you do, then pray that God send great leaders, especially
great leaders of the spirit.
A great leader suffers in a
hundred different ways, and keeps his suffering to himself.
A great leader survives both his
suffering and the fact that nobody knows anything about it.
A great leader loves being alone with
God.
A great leader communes with the
deepest the ages have known.
A great leader knows there is a
higher and there is a lower, and he always seeks the higher, and
indeed the highest.
A great leader fights against the
spiritual forces of darkness and disintegration, both in his own soul
and in the world.
A great leader overcomes himself,
rises above himself, daily, minutely.
A great leader is very polite, but he
never tones down the truth just to please others.
A great leader never seeks fanfare
and publicity- they come to him, and often he rejects them.
A great leader never craves the
approval of the world- in fact he often intentionally provokes its
disapproval.
A great leader hitches his wagon to
the remote, the unattainable, the stars.
A great leader does not worship
quantity, multiplicity, perpetual motion- he stubbornly sticks to the
one or at most two ultimate truths that there are.
A great leader is very simple, but
the moral force of his conviction shines through every tone of his
voice and every gesture of his hand.
A great leader lets the oneness of
his interest burst forth with endless creativity.
A great leader is absolutely
fearless- fearless because he fears only God.
A great leader loves, not
sentimentally, not by making an effort, but with the effortless
overflow of God's love for him.
A great leader identifies himself
with, and is not ashamed of, the deepest in his own tradition.
A great leader is never disturbed by
the fact that other traditions too have their own deepest.
A great leader is decisive, yet with
the utmost tentativeness and tenderness.
A great leader, under God, does not
care if he is crucified- there is something he knows and sees in the
distance infinitely more important than to avoid crucifixion.
A great leader knows what the Bible
calls "the fullness of the time", I mean the time in which he lives,
and God gives him the grace and the power to fulfill that fullness.
You insult a leader if you call him
great; he does not want your judgment; he wants only to please God.
A great leader calls forth the most
secret and the most sacred impulses of those whom he leads.
A great leader leads those who are
not even aware that they follow him, but only rejoice in the fact that
he leads them.
A great leader is at the forefront of
danger, be it physical or moral danger, when danger strikes.
A great leader heals....
And so, if we really believe, my
friends, we should pray, and work together, and accept suffering and
sacrifice, and we should have the courage of our convictions when it
comes to the deepest we know.
For the greatest single evil today is
this blanket of fear and intimidation spread all over the world, so
that people do not dare to stand up for their convictions.
But nothing great has ever been
accomplished in history, nor indeed can it ever be accomplished,
except through fearless courage in the face of the greatest
terrorization. This is the now-forgotten way of how really to live- I
mean, the way of the Cross. The world needs today the unterrorized
man- indeed, the unterrorizable man.
... I pray you all to consider on
your knees how much God has blessed you and how much you therefore owe
him.
For you owe him everything.
And once we realize how much we owe God, then, since we can never give
him anything commensurate in return, we can at least pay him back
tears of gratitude and love. |
