IVP - Strangely Dim

I Wanna Be Your Manager

I’ve had lots of conversations about management this week. Not the management, of course—in case my boss is reading this. I’ve actually been discussing the concept of management—as a challenge, as a calling—with some friends of mine.

*One friend used to manage a team of people, but his new responsibilities have him working mostly on his own.
*Another friend has an opportunity to manage a couple-hundred people after working for years mostly on his own.
*Still another friend loves her work and the people who report to her, but struggles with being the boss.

Meanwhile, my wife and I are doing some soul-searching to figure out what the next season of our lives is going to be like. She’s a manager, and I can barely manage to stay awake, so her vision-quest is taking on a very different character from mine. Still, I find the idea of management pretty intriguing.

Organizations often group people according to task, and then stack them according to tenure or job experience. That makes sense to me—the person on top is most likely to have already done what everybody else can’t figure out how to do—but what if the person on top is a jerk, or a recluse, or a werewolf, or whatever? What if that person’s tenure came through well-timed acts of character assassination and kissing up to the boss? It’s not all about the steady execution of tasks; the atmosphere that a team operates in is established at least in part by the manager, and I for one would find it hard to breathe with someone like that stacked on top of me.

On the flip side, some people train specifically for management and find jobs in industries they know nothing about: they take care of the people so the people can take care of the work. That seems pretty dis-integrated to me—why would you willingly subject yourself to work you’re not passionate about?—except that the people best suited to that type of job are passionate about managing people. One friend of mine has switched industries two or three times and supervised a team of people at each place; he finds meaning not in the product his work is pumping out so much as the act of management. To hear him talk about it, his staff—even the ones he’s had to discipline from time to time—are like his family.

I read an article earlier this year that profiled a department store chaplain. I’d never heard of such a thing. This woman walks the aisles of her store with an eye toward helping people find what they need. Could be customers, could be customer servicepeople. In some cases what they need is toilet paper or a tennis bracelet, but every so often they need someone to give them a break or lend them an ear or offer them up in prayer. This chaplain is practicing the ministry of what Henri Nouwen once called “pastoral presence.”

I wonder if the role of a manager is at least one part chaplain. You can train yourself to do it, I’m sure, but I suspect that it’s at least one part instinctive: you either want to be pastorally present to people, or you don’t.

Happy Bastille Day!

July 14 is Bastille Day, the French equivalent of the American Independence Day. I learned of Bastille Day in high school, both in French class and in world history class, and being a would-be revolutionary I glommed onto it. On July 14, 1789, French commoners stormed the Bastille prison, freeing political prisoners, stealing government armaments, and launching the French Revolution. I celebrate by indulging myself with all things French.

Today, for example, I downloaded the song "Dominique," by the Singing Nun. This French Dominican nun wrote the song as a tribute to the Spanish priest who founded her order, St. Dominic. I used to prance around my house like an idiot to this song, while my roommates tried to put as much distance between them and me as possible.

Coincidentally, I just finished editing the book Flirting with Monasticism, coming soon to the Likewise line, in which author Karen Sloan learns about monastic spirituality over the course of a year in regular interaction with several Dominican communities. I met Karen when she was leading Lauds (morning prayer) at a conference, and the more she told me about her year with these friars-in-training, the more I wanted to hear.

The monastic world is full of mystery for evangelicals, as much because we have no equivalent for our faith tradition as because monks aren't the chattiest people in the world (some of them take temporary vows of silence), and so they don't tend to share much about their lifestyle. The result is that evangelicals know less than they should about the monastic practices that would encourage their faith development, and Dominicans in general suffer from bad press: I was taught that "Dominique" tells the story of St. Dominic traveling through Europe killing Protestants. Needless to say, that's not a word-for-word translation from the French.

Check out Karen Sloan's weblog Wonder. And if you're in the mood to prance around like an idiot, you can download "Dominique" from i-Tunes for 99 cents. Bon chance!

Sympathy for the Bad Guy

I like Lex Luthor. I sent him a letter once, along with a copy of my book. I thought he might endorse it. He never wrote me back, but that’s OK; Lex Luthor is a busy guy.

Luthor, played on the television show Smallville by Michael Rosenbaum, earned my appreciation in the first season. Here was a character known universally as a villain—the villain in the minds of many—reconceived as a tragic hero, struggling to come out from under his cold, calculated machine of a father’s thumb to do right by his friends and his community. I knew that Lex would eventually go bad, but on Smallville Lex won my sympathy.

This summer we meet the fully grown Lex Luthor in Superman Returns. He’s a villain again, but maybe he’s just getting bad press. After all, he’s playing opposite a superhero—the superhero in the minds of many—that some equate with the Messiah.

There’s more to Lex than a bald head and a bad attitude; recent storylines in the comics are reconsidering the Superman-Luthor conflict not as muscle-envy or longstanding grudge (the early 80s SuperFriends cartoon suggested that Superman caused Lex to lose his hair) so much as a clash of worldviews. Lex sees humankind, not Superman and not even necessarily himself, as the world’s savior.

According to Lex’s worldview, Superman is in the way, a pressing problem in humanity’s evolution. Superman is not one of us; he’s an alien come to Earth by accident, merely pretending to be human. He can’t be hurt by men or women or anything natural. He can’t even be grounded. He isn’t human and thus can’t appreciate the human struggle. It takes one to know one, Lex believes, and by extension, it takes one to save one.

Lex reflects as he looks out the window of his helicopter in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel:

It’s ironic that Metropolis never looks more magnificent to me than when I see it from his angle. But does he see what I see? Does he see the finest example of what humanity can accomplish, reaching for the sky? . . . Or does he merely look down on it?

He’s not the only person to hold this conviction; consider the reflections of David Carradine in Kill Bill, Vol. II:

When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red “S”, that’s the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears, the glasses, the business suit, . . . that’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak, he’s unsure of himself... he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race.

If Bill and Lex aren’t authoritative enough for you, orthodox Christianity professes a Savior who was fully human. To presume that a being not fully human could accomplish our salvation is to commit heresy. Superman, of course, is not at all human, and so Superman condemns us even as he saves us.

Score one for Lex Luthor. But where, then, does he turn for salvation? Humankind is its own hope, Lex argues, the source of its own deliverance from its unique crisis: lives of mundane mediocrity. Addressing the entire world in the miniseries Justice, Lex allows that heroes like Superman

may save us all from a giant alien starfish in the middle of the ocean from time to time. But they save us only to send us back to our old lives. Back to our bills, back to our useless jobs, back to our suffering. If they were really the heroes they claim to be, they’d save us from those same lives as well.

The ultimate solution to this fundamental human problem is the actualization of human greatness. “Someone has to change the way this world works. That’s what we’re about to do. That’s what we are inviting you to be a part of.” Lex argues that we create hope out of nothing; it’s our birthright, our responsibility. Again, in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel: “We were created to create ourselves. . . . Fate was invented by cowards. But destiny is something we hold in our hands.”

Lex manifests his worldview for the rest of us. According to the first Superman motion picture, he’s the greatest criminal genius of all time. In some continuities he’s president of the United States. He’s an icon of power and greatness. But how he achieves greatness exposes the flaw in his worldview. His power is consolidated through the methodical manipulation of people and events. He’ll even help his greatest enemy on occasion; in issue 123 of Superman he co-opts messianic language: “As always, the question is this: do I gain more from Superman’s suffering—or his salvation?”

Behold our “savior” in action, according to the worldview of Lex Luthor. A savior that is not fully human is insufficient, but a savior that is merely human creates a similar problem. The capacity to save is a kind of power, and power, in the hands of mere humans, corrupts. Mere humans cannot save themselves without destroying themselves and others in the process.

So we’re left with a paradox: the source of our salvation must be human but cannot be merely human. We need the otherness of a deliverer as much as we need the sameness of a savior. Superman and Lex Luthor alike are not enough. But a God who created us, who took on flesh out of love for us, who is not so distant as to be “unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but . . . has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin”—such a savior would be enough.