At one point during one of the sessions at the Shire, I felt myself getting angry.
The discussion was about the idea of team.
As I looked into my anger, I began to understand. They were rolling out sports team analogies and PC givens such as good teams are based on respect and inclusion etc. My anger was surging because I saw the kind of dangerous work before us could not be tackled by this pallid idea.
If we were going to make a change that would indeed help our society - we would have to have the kind of association that the early Christians had. We would have to be like Luther in Germany and Jesuits in England. We would have to be like the Impressionists before the Academy or Churchill before the appeasers. We would have to have the courage to face denial, attack, ruin, rejection, shame and maybe even death or at least professional death. No soccer team is up to that task. No project team at the office is up to this task. I knew that I needed to become part of a group that would help me find the courage to do this work.
So what kind of "Team" are we really looking for and how is such a "Team" created?
At first I could only think of how war itself can have this effect on front line soldiers.
Here is Rosenthal's (he died yesterday) picture of Marines with the flag on Mount Suribachi - where 7,500 died. Here is William Manchester remembering why he jumped hospital ship to rejoin his mates and face almost certain death because he knew that he could not live with himself if he had stayed away.
"And then, in one of those great thundering jolts in which a man's real motives are revealed to him in an electrifying vision, I understood at last, why I had jumped hospital 35 years ago and, in violation of orders, returned to the front line and almost certain death.
It was an act of love.
Those men on the line were my family and my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than my friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down and I couldn't do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have survived them.
Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, the the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for each other. Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or whom he is willing to die for, is not a man at all. He is truly dammed."
What is this bond? After talking with Tolke and Chris I think I know.
How is it created and do we have to go to war to find it. I think I know the answers to that question as well.
I will post my thoughts later.
