Sunday, February 24, 2002

The Very Reverend Alan Jones, Ph.D.

"Integrity: Personal, Spiritual, Professional"

MS. LEE: Please take your seats. One of my colleagues just said, "Oh, I just think you're so wonderful to take on this difficult job." You know, it's not a difficult job at all. It's just a large study hall monitor's job.

I am going to ask Harry to come up and introduce our speaker.

MR. McKAY: Thank you, Liza. Alan Jones has been the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco since 1985. Previously he served as the Stephen F. Payne Professor of Aesthetical Theology at the General Theological Seminary in New York City.

Dr. Jones was the director and founder of the Center for Christian Spirituality at the General Theological Seminary. He took a Ph.D. in 1971 at the University of Nottingham, England. He has authored eight books, including The Soul's Journey: Exploring the Three Passages of Spiritual Life with Dante as a Guide, Exploring Spiritual Direction, Sacrifice and Delight, and Passion for Pilgrimage.

His newest book, Living the Truth, was published in October 2001.

I had the pleasure of working closely with Alan for four years during the time that I served as canon headmaster at the Cathedral School for Boys in San Francisco. I believe that he is a gifted theologian, and from personal experience I can attest that he is a warm and compassionate human being who possesses gracious charm and a keen sense of humor. I was truly delighted when I first learned that he was available to join this august group at this splendid Napa setting. Please join me in welcoming Alan Jones as our keynote speaker.

DR. JONES: I'm going to remove all these notes here in case I read those instead of my own. I must say that you as a body have grown in my esteem and estimation ever since reading today's New York Times Magazine. Some of you look as if you have read it. It is an article called "Mean Girls and the New Movement to Tame Them." And it's all about you and it's all about what you have to do in schools.

Being somewhat rebellious myself, I was a bit put off by the title of the conference, because

balance seems such a sort of tame thing. Then I realized that balance, being such a tricky business, perhaps some people need balance in the way of passion as well as equilibrium. It's a tricky subject in the light of what we know about living systems, for example.

One book I would commend to you about business leadership but could apply equally to religion or to education is a book by Richard Pascale called Surfing the Edge of Chaos. It is an evaluation of living systems as they might apply to business practice. And the first principle in that book is: Equilibrium is death. Prolonged equilibrium is precursor of disaster. And as a priest and as a theologian, it is, I believe, my task to be so grounded in the tradition that I can subvert it sufficiently to keep it alive. And that is quite a tricky thing, and I think that's true for heads of schools and for educators, as well. The reason is that a living system is less responsive to changes occurring around it if it is totally stable. So if you want stability, I suggest death.

Secondly, innovation. Innovation usually, according to Pascale, takes place on the edge of

chaos. "In the face of threat," I quote, "or when galvanized by a compelling opportunity, living

things move towards the edge of chaos."

It was said that the purpose of the British rule in India in the 19th century was to see that nothing ever happened. And I think of some people in religion a bit like that, also. This condition evokes high levels of mutation and experimentation, says Pascal, and fresh new solutions are more likely to be found.

Now, please apply this not only to schools, but to yourself. The third principle is that self-organization and emergence occur naturally, and I quote, "When this excitation takes place, the components of living systems self-organize and new forms and repertoires emerge from the turmoil." Just like life.

And the fourth and final one, which is the one I like the most, running a cathedral, is:

Organizations cannot be directed; they can only be disturbed. And perhaps somebody can needlepoint that for the association. Organizations, schools, cannot be directed; they can only be disturbed. Living systems cannot be directed along a linear path. Unforeseen consequences are inevitable. The challenge is to disturb them in a manner that approximates the design outcome. You apply that to your own self and to your own institutions. I'm doing things after 17 years at Grace Cathedral that I wanted to do in the first six months. And there will be a lot that I won't have done when I retire.

When I look at you and I think, having been a teacher, a high school teacher, and a graduate school teacher, the burden and glory of teaching and in the changing face of education, I really salute you. It's a hard thing to be nowadays, particularly in a consumerist culture where education is something that can be bought and sold, and therefore, you&emdash;or people think that you&emdash;can be bought and sold also.

Thomas Merton wrote that if we attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our self-understanding, our own freedom, integrity and capacity to love, we will not have anything to give others. We will communicate nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressions, our own ego-centered ambitions.

So one question to ask you people who run schools is: Who do you work for? Are you part of the consumer society, peddling a product for which there is a market? Yes, you are. You might not like it, but you are.

And is your product what the Atlantic Monthly article by David Brooks calls the organization kid? And I see some of you nodding. You know that article from last September. You note the date, it was September 4th, and then September 11th.

How much of that article, I wonder, rings true to you when he says, "The young men and women of America's future elite work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their position at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life."

Just a small note. I was at our board meeting and we had a report from the teacher in charge of passing on computer skills. And even right in kindergarten, I realized I had a skill, because in kindergarten, evidently, they learned to use the mouse without falling off the chair. And I was so thrilled that I could do it.

When you think of those voices on campus quoted in that article, people don't have time or energy to put into real relationships, is one quotation. But on the other hand, they are not unhappy. Brooks says that the students were lively conversationalists on just about any topic except moral argument and character building. One student said, "Sometimes we feel like we're just tools for processing information. That's what we call ourselves, power tools."

So you know better than I, very goal-oriented with a look at self-improvement, resume-building and enrichment, but not much of a life.

And there is this acceptance of the established order, which is why I wonder whether the balance is needed to teach some subversion, to teach some passion.

The point was made years ago between students who came to campus in a poetic frame of mind and those who come in a prudential frame of mind, and the prudential frame of mind is winning.

A common complaint by the faculty at Princeton is the students are eager to please, eager to jump through whatever hoops the faculty puts in front of them, eager to conform. The new elite does not protest. They're very, very balanced. And I think, of course, I'm being ironic there. They're unbalanced, but unbalanced in terms of being smooth so that the boat isn't rocked at all.

Brooks says that they are the logical extreme of America's increasingly efficient and demanding sorting-out process, which uses a complex set of incentives and conditions to channel and shape and rank our children throughout their lives. Kids of all stripes lead lives of destruction, supervised and stuffed with enrichment. The most honed and supervised generation in human history, it says. And childhood is one long progression of measurements from nursery school admissions to SATs.

And I love that quotation, again, from the article, "Your child is the most important extra credit arts project you will ever undertake." And then the bit I do like is actually playing Mozart to the baby in utero. I like that. I hope you do lots of Mozart at schools, because that is the one thing that will really probably stop those girls being so mean.

More seriously, there is the issue of depression. We are a very depressed culture, and if you want to read a book on that, I recommend Andrew Solomon's, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. And there is obviously a reference in that book, as well as in the article from the Atlantic Monthly, about the medication of America and America's children. As you know, between 1990 and 1997, the amount of Ritalin produced rose by 700 percent. And quoting Brooks again, "Nowadays Dennis the Menace would be on Ritalin and Charlie Brown on Prozac."

"The end result," said Brooks, "of these shifts in pedagogy and in pharmacology is that schools are much more efficient and productive places, geared more than ever towards projecting children into the stratosphere of success. Authority and accountability have replaced experimentation and flexibility."

Now, only you know if that's true. But why a conference emphasizing balance, unless you mean true balance, where subversion and passion and questioning are part of that balance. Where is the epic struggle? Where is the sense of the tragic? And how do we communicate that?

Robert George, a political scientist at Princeton, was quoted in that article, and it quite surprised me. He said, "We would do our best if we could make sure our students had a dose of the Augustinian sense that there is a tragic dimension to life, that there is a sense in which we live in a vale of tears."

And I'm not saying this. This is a quotation from a political scientist. You'd expect a priest to say something about sin. That's my bread and butter. And there's plenty of it about. But he goes on, "We could make them aware of the reality of sin, by which I mean chosen evil, which cannot be cured by therapy or by science. We don't do enough to call into question the therapeutic model of evil. The conquest of the self, if we come to balance, is part of what it means to lead a balanced life. A generation who haven't been raised with a vocabulary of virtue and vice will not have much chance of a passionate, balanced life."

What about that, then? "The conquest of the self is part of what it means to lead a balanced life." A life of integrity.

Thomas Merton, one more time. "If we attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, our own freedom, integrity and capacity to love, we will not have anything to give others. We will communicate nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressiveness, our own ego-centered ambitions."

I want to suggest to you that passion is part of an authentic life, a balanced life, and the key to it is gratitude. What comes to mind when you hear the word "authentic," for example? Something or someone is authentic when they ring true, when appearance and reality coincide.

We think of the word "sincere," which I was told years ago by my Latin teacher means "without wax." Evidently the potters of old were attempting to cover up cracks in otherwise shoddy work with wax. It was only when you got the pot home that you realized that the thing leaked or had a cleverly disguised crack in it.

The word "authentic," when it comes to human beings, also suggests a maturing ripeness, the kind of wisdom that comes from experience and I daresay comes through suffering. An authentic human being isn't pompous or pretentious, but is both relaxed and aware, exuding an attractive humility which comes from being grateful for being alive. In the presence of a truly authentic human being, you feel more alive and more valued.

When I think about that, when I wrote that down, I thought of the teachers who influenced me most when I was a boy in England, the head of school or the head of the English department, when I was 16. Someone who made me feel more alive and more valued because of the passion they had for their work.

As a friend said to us recently about someone we all admire, "I feel a better and more fulfilled person after I have spent some time with Alison. I become more grateful for being alive and when gratitude takes hold of me, I begin to grow in places I didn't even know existed. I begin to realize what a closed-up life I tend to lead and how fearful I am of other people. Alison somehow gives me the courage to reach out, that kind of what it is to be a person that enables others to be more fully in the world."

And that is one of the great gifts, I think, of teaching.

A friend of mine was in the Vietnam War during the darkest period when they were taking out young men in body bags and bringing in the new recruits, the new soldiers, and the old ones would go out, the survivors would go out with their uniform disheveled and a bandana around their heads, and be glad to get out of there; and the new ones would be coming in all smart, and so on.

And my friend was in Santa Fe at a restaurant and the waiter had also been in Vietnam in the same period. And they reminisced about that terrible time. And the waiter said, "You know, I try and explain it to my girlfriend, but she doesn't get it. I say, 'Honey, this is the deal. If you can wake up in the morning and wiggle your toes, you have won.'"

That sense of gratitude, of every day as a gift and every day as an opportunity either to light a candle or to curse the darkness.

But&emdash;and it's a big "but", because it's also a little article in today's magazine section of The New York Times about the virtuous life as applied to the 1990s in Washington.

I once preached a sermon on Dante's hell, and the circles of hell as they get narrower and narrower and colder and colder. I said, "Let's assume"&emdash;it was during the Clinton impeachment&emdash;

"Let's assume everyone in Washington is in hell. Just where would you place them, in relationship to each other? Where is Linda Tripp in relationship to Kenneth Starr, and where is Bill, and so on?"

Talk of authenticity often leads to the subject of virtue, which is a hot topic nowadays, or

used to be, fairly recently, and there's a lot of superficial talk in our culture about values, about

civic virtue and personal integrity. How do we talk about the authentic life, the balanced life, the life of integrity, without sounding stuffy and moralistic? Lord Macaulay was supposed to have said, "We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public on one of its periodical fits of morality."

One of the weaknesses of American culture is that it doesn't have a great deal of irony at its center. American culture is well-known throughout the world for its ridiculous moral posturing. The bumper sticker on the car which reads, "We support family values" sounds good, but what is the code language being used here?

And do we have any idea what virtue is? It has something to do with being awake. The old language spoke of the forming of conscience, and we might think about the forming of consciousness, of being fully awake. Words which are associated with rightness and roundedness of human character come to mind. Courage, justice, temperance, prudence, faith, hope, and love. What type of persons are we called to be, and how does struggling for authenticity work out in practice? How do we live values out in the world?

The problem with talking about the virtuous life is that some people actually believe that they are virtuous. That's why a strong sense of sin is so liberating.

I was at a conference at the Aspen Institute not long ago in a seminar on virtue, and the discussion seemed very heady and remote and I confessed that I'd often tried to lead a virtuous life and failed. I rely on forgiveness. And anyone who thinks he's virtuous is an idiot, and a dangerous idiot, open to cruelty of all sorts. And if you don't know you need forgiving, and if you have reached a certain age and you haven't done things in your life that you regret, you have lived a very miserable existence. Because with age should come some kind of wisdom and regret, and one of the things that you need to do, we need to do, is learn to forgive ourselves.

C.P. Snow, in his great novel called The Masters&emdash;if you want to read a novel about being a head&emdash;there's two men walking around an Oxbridge quadrangle talking about the qualities they want in a new master at the college. And one says to the other, "Give me a man who knows something of himself and is appalled, and has to forgive himself every day to get along."

How we turn out as persons has something to do with intention, with our tendencies, with our sense of direction, our habits over time, or an expression of who we are.

Habits are acquired by frequent practice, which help us to incline more towards one mode of action than to another. Think about learning to drive a car. After practice, your reactions to traffic conditions become automatic. There are good habits and bad habits and authenticity takes time and practice, a kind of ripeness.

So the authentic life is not a matter of our becoming perfect. It is a way of developing a disposition within us that would wither away if we did not exercise it. It's as if there are wonderful things inside us waiting to be helped into birth. And we're inclined toward the virtues, but we don't get out much and exercise them. We need to get out more and give them some exercise. We need to start acting justly, temperately, bravely, if we want those inclinations to become part of us, to become who we really are.

And acting a part is not necessarily hypocritical. Our great fear perhaps is to be thought hypocrites by claiming we are good but not acting that way. But we should fear that kind of hypocrisy, but we might risk being thought hypocrites as we try on the various costumes which life offers us. I as a priest dress up all the time, on a daily basis, in the collar and black shirt and on festive occasions in gorgeous vestments. I only get into trouble when I forget that I am in costume. It would be awful if I dressed like that and believed it. And there are clergy who do. I remember a fierce Episcopal nun who was the headmistress of the school where I taught as chaplain, and she was very scary because she couldn't tell the difference between her will and God's will.

That habit was a costume, and an important one, to play an important role. But in good Jungian terms, you have to be able to take off the jacket, the costume. You have to wear something. You have got to have some kind of persona as a head of school. You have got to be out there being a head of school. But that's not you.

And if it is you, and that's all you are, you're in trouble. No one can survive without

wearing a costume. And we all have to dress up in order to function in the world. We might not feel brave, but we don the costume of bravery when a particular situation demands it. How else are we going to change? A jerk who acts justly just might move away from being a jerk.

The authentic life begins, then, with acting as if something were the case, act as if justice mattered, even in the most corrupt situations, and justice will then have a chance.

I want to tell you a story about a person I'm going to call Simon, a friend of ours, Simon, has really messed up his life. He's a teacher. There's no wholeness, no balance in him right now. In fact, his life as he knows it is over. We don't know yet how to support him. It's all too raw.

Simon, near retirement, did what looked like a really stupid act of self-sabotage. After a brilliant career in teaching, he crossed a line from which he couldn't retreat. A faculty party, as it happens, too much to drink, an indiscretion. There's no need to go into details. It was a dumb thing to do, particularly given the times in which we live, and now he's jobless and humiliated.

The situation has gotten beyond conventional issues of right or wrong, because Simon's problem wasn't sex. It was that he got detached and distant from his life. No integrity. There wasn't a connection at all. He was looking for a way to come down to earth, to get earth again, and he did it, but not in the way he wanted. He had allowed his work to dominate his life and distance himself from his wife and children. He was in tears the other day saying over and over again, "I need to find a way back to myself, a way back home. I want myself back. I want my life back."

We, his friends, love him. He's a good man and a great teacher, I thought. And we felt that his superego was having a field day beating up on him, and actually, I think he'll be all right. He doesn't know that yet, but those of us who know him well can see his deeper and former self begin to come back through all the pain. Transformation through gratitude. We can see it happening.

In old-fashioned terms our friend Simon wasn't prudent. He lost touch with his basic fragility as a human being, with his sense of self as a gift. This basic humility would have helped him through a tricky situation at that wretched party. Prudence is an inner compass helping us find true north, and it's a pity that prudence has a terrible reputation as being too cautious or motivated by self-interest. "Be prudent" means, "Don't get caught," or, "Be extra careful. Watch out."

But prudence, when it comes to balance, is about finding the means by which we grow morally. It's not easy, because it not only means knowing what is virtue, but how to get there. What's more, it is deeply personal, because what might be a prudent course of action for one person would be disastrous for another. We try, after all, to treat our children alike and to be fair, and we should. But each child needs a different kind of helping hand.

For example, the last thing Simon needs is a good talking to or further punishment. He needs a good listening to. With another person it might be otherwise. Great spiritual teachers often give contrary advice. To one they say, "You need to shape up and face what you have done." And to another, "You need to relax, unwind, be gentle with yourself."

So finding ways to grow as persons to get this balanced life that we long for means to understand finding the proper tension between prudence and risk, between when to act and when to do nothing, between words and silence. No tension, no growth. Equilibrium means death.

So finding the right tension depends on who the person is. It's like weight-lifting, I'm told. I haven't done much in my time. I have done a little bit. I did do a little bit. We need to find the right activity that will help a person grow. Is that why people get into a fit about morality? Some think that we're too lax and others think we're too strict. Neither the libertines nor the moralists can stand the tension. And life on the surface is unfair, but it's always trying to teach us something.

And why Simon? What about all those others, the real jerks at faculty parties who got away with far worse? Simon came to see that it was useless and debilitating to whine or complain. He had to live in the here and now, and it's no good looking in the mirror and wishing you were living somewhere else at some other time. This is it, and this is not a rehearsal.

Simon had to decide what to do now. What was life expecting of him? And his finding out, his

response to what is happening to him, is somehow related to responsibility. He is discovering that a human being is one on whom inner demands can be made. Life somehow addresses us in everything that happens to us. And our friend Ram Dass says that everything that happens to us is our curriculum. You are a living curriculum yourself, the lesson for the day.

And so Simon, in all that mess, has a chance of living a more authentic life. He understands this paradox of breakdown leading to breakthrough. Ben Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, and he goes around teaching. He teaches music, obviously, but he also goes around teaching business leaders. One of the things he teaches students is, when they fail, to say, "How fascinating." And when you fail, to say, "How fascinating. What can I learn from that?"

I mentioned Andrew Solomon's book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Well, there is an epidemic of it, and perhaps one reason for the epidemic of depression in our culture is the spiritual blindness caused by the debasement of language. We get mired in the trivial and lose touch with the wellsprings of the heart.

There's a T-shirt in a store outside the Art College in San Francisco that just read, "Wake up or die without a clue," which I thought was a good one. And I think many of us who are balanced, many people I know who are balanced&emdash;actually, I think, a lot of clergy, as I travel around the country, too&emdash;are really suffering from a chronic low-grade depression, and they call it faithfulness, usually. I mean this. It's very sad. Our banality imprisons us, and we have to develop easy strategies for missing the point. What are the antidotes to our invented truisms and carefully achieved wrong-headedness? We think we make sense until we begin listening to ourselves.

I love this example. It's a fragment of dialogue from one of David Mamet's plays. One man says to the other, "Being a loaner in this world," and the other replies, "Is not my bag of tea."

And then Emil replies, "It's no good. No man is an island to himself." "Or to anyone else, either."

Listen to yourself. Much of the time human conversation is background noise to make us think that everything is all right. Listen to Al Dunlap, Chain Saw Al, who saw himself as a superstar in the field of business. "I deserved $100 million dollars for 20 months' work," he wrote. "That work I did when Scott merged with Kimberly Clark&emdash; you're not in business to be liked. Neither am I. We're here to succeed. If you want a friend, get a dog. I'm not taking any chances," he says. "I have two dogs."

Think of that as a kind of emblematic of our culture and the kind of corruption it brings for all the budding Al Dunlaps out there.

There's a California firm which makes imitation car telephones for those who want the look of success without the expense. I'm not making it up. I'm not making it up. "Fake it until you make it" is the slogan of one company. By such means we create a phony authenticity through the pursuit of signs of status or fashion or marks of individual eccentricity.

But inauthenticity can take us in the other direction. Not only can we don the costume of inflated achievement&emdash;back to the issue of costume&emdash;we can also put on the rags of a nobody and parade around in the dress either of false humility or damaging self-rejection.

There's a group in southern California, just southern California, a self-help movement for people who have dropped out of other self-help groups. It's called Failures Anonymous. The members have surrendered to the view that their lives amount to one big nothing. They are self-admitted zeroes. "Hello, my name is Mary and I'm a failure."

Ben Zander would say, "I failed. How fascinating." You can always learn something. In each session you're supposed to find something good to say about yourself. So Keith gets up and said, "Yesterday I did my laundry."

Now, that isn't a bad thing. I'm not dumping on people who are really, really mentally ill and struggling and in pain. I'm merely pointing out that inauthenticity can take many forms. It leads as much to our lying to ourselves about our own futility and insignificance as it tempts us to lie about our inflated importance. And from the point of view of the spiritual life, one of the hardest things for someone to give up is their own low self-image. I might not be much, but...

Rabbi Pierce, a friend in San Francisco, tells a great joke about the day of atonement. You must know this story. The rabbi and the cantor are at the front of the temple or synagogue. The rabbi

is beating his breast, saying, "Oh, Lord, I am nothing. Oh, Lord, I am nothing. Oh, Lord, I am nothing."

And the cantor takes up the refrain, "Oh, Lord, I am nothing. Oh, Lord, I am nothing."

And the janitor at the back decides to do the same. "Oh, Lord, I am nothing. Oh, Lord, I am nothing."

And the rabbi looks in consternation at the cantor and says, "Look at him, who thinks he's nothing."

Even our low self-image can be a source of fun. You might not think you're much, but boy, listen to my story. And in our culture, perhaps the temptation is more in line with the slogan, "Better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody."

I think of the character Tom Ripley, who murdered his rich and shallow friend and took on his identity. Some even take on a false identity because it is the only way of doing what they want to do, of living a life that would otherwise be closed off.

You might know the story of a woman, James Barry, who was a highly regarded doctor in South

Africa, working with the Crimean War wounded. A woman who poses as a man so she could be a doctor. Or Billy Tipton, a woman, who was a jazz pianist and saxophonist who died in 1989, who lived most of her life as a man and married four times.

There are also serial imposters like Ferdinand Demara, who was turned down for the priesthood, and he became, all without qualifications, a doctor of psychology, a teacher, a research biologist and a naval surgeon during the Korean war. He performed three serious operations and later went on to become a warden in a high-security prison. He died of a heart attack when he was only 60. He was also described by his doctor as "About the most miserable unhappy man I know."

Another story, something that might be familiar to you, sadly. Another friend, a highly successful businessman this time, lost a son in a violent suicide not long ago. He now serves other families as a grief counselor and teaches young people about suicide prevention. "Our son was by any definition a star. He was very popular, athletic, a good student. The question his mother and I will never know the answer to is: Did we let him know how much we loved him, apart from his achievements? Did he come to believe that our affection and approval were dependent on his trophies and success? We were so taken by his great strides, his seeming self-assurance, that we presumed that there was a matching inner strength that went with it. We assumed he was a bearing wall upon which more expectations could be built. And then one day his mother discovered accidentally a stash of drug paraphernalia and confronted him, and a few hours later he found my shotgun and shells from another place and killed himself.

"Now our lives are spent helping parents and kids learn from our experience. We help them to understand each other and how to always express appreciation and love ahead of expectation. We all need more love and appreciation than we show. And we especially need to express our gratitude for those we love while we still have them."

I'm leaving out some really good stuff. But there it is.

Ram Dass tells the story of the village tailor, Zumbak, the most famous tailor in the land. A man wanted a new suit. He had himself measured and later went for the final fitting. The right sleeve was two inches longer than the left, but Zumbak never admitted a mistake and didn't like back talk. "There's nothing wrong with the suit, my good man. Clearly it's the way you're standing." So the tailor pushed on the man's shoulder until the sleeves appeared even.

Then the man saw that the fabric at the back was hunched up around the neck. "There's nothing wrong with your suit. It's the way you're standing." The tailor thrust the man's head forward until the suit appeared to fit properly.

So later at the bus stop, the man, with his shoulders lopsided and head straining forward, met a friend who exclaimed, "What a beautiful suit! I'll bet Zumbak the tailor made that suit for you."

"How do you know?"

"Because only a tailor as brilliant as Zumbak could fit a body as crippled as yours."

I'm back to the costume you're wearing. What suit are you wearing? And how have you been crippled by resentful or rejecting interpretation of your struggle and suffering?

If you want balance, remember Merton's

admonition to go inward and know yourself. What has

pushed you toward the inauthentic life? At what

point did the well of gratitude for being alive

begin to dry up? But ask what is the most real thing about you? The trouble is that the picture we have of ourselves, partly due to the costumes we choose to wear or have been forced to wear, tends to be both damaged and distorted. We forget that we have chosen or have had imposed upon us a particular picture of the world and come to believe that our view of the world is the only real one.

It's fascinating to me as a priest in the church now, and looking at all the great religious traditions that are in tremendous upheaval, where the divisions now are not between the traditions but within them; where I have far more in common with&emdash;

I mentioned him before&emdash;Stephen Pierce, the rabbi at Temple Emmanuel in San Francisco. We're far closer, not just because we like each other personally, but theologically, philosophically, than I would be with many people who profess and call themselves Christians. And all that has been done in the name of religion, that has been so cruel in the world, and needing to sort of revisit that and to repent of it.

I think of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, "The Snow Queen." You know it? About a troll's mirror. Everything great and good reflected in it becomes ugly and small, while everything bad and wicked becomes distinct and prominent. And the hero, Kay, exclaims, "Oh, dear. I feel as if something had stabbed my heart." And poor Kay had gotten one of the fragments of the mirror right into his heart, and it would soon become a lump of ice.

So we think of the troll mirrors in our society which distort reality and in the end distort us. The mirror which reflects the true and authentic is made of trust and gratitude and everything else is seductive and distorted.

And I'm suggesting that when you live gratefully, you become balanced in the right way. When you live gratefully, you become more truly yourself.

So let me finish so we can have some questions in this very discursive and inconclusive presentation. Charles Handy writes, "Ask people, as I have often done, to recall two or three of the most important learning experiences in their lives, and they will never tell you of courses taken or degrees obtained, but of brushes with death, of crises encountered, of new and unexpected challenges and confrontations. They will tell you, in other words, of times when continuity ran out on them."

That's what I'd ask you to think about in this conference because you have got some great topics, great lectures. Ask yourself when continuity ran out on you or, put in another way, what happens when the story you have been telling yourself about yourself stops or becomes too painful.

And then, from my perspective, the perspective of the mystical life, of the spiritual life, or the inner life, that's when something wonderful and new can happen to you. The very thing that you dread is the opening of your soul.

St. Brendan, the navigator, crazy Irishman, on his little journey in his little boat. I like the Irish vision of a pilgrimage. The good western Latin knows where they're going. They go from here to Canterbury, or from there to Rome, or from there to Jerusalem.

But the Irish&emdash;they get in a boat and say, "Let's see where the wind will take us." That's the pilgrimage.

And there's St. Brendan with a little bird on his shoulder, whispering in his ear, because he's longing for paradise, longing for balance, longing for passion. The little bird whispers in his ear and says, "You are the veil that hides the paradise you seek. You are the veil that hides the paradise you seek."

So when did continuity run out on you? When did you have no past experience to fall back on? No rules and no handbook. And yet Handy talks about these kind of people. They survived, however, and came to count it as a learning, as a growth experience. Discontinuous change, therefore, when properly handled, is the way we grow up.

So you might try this. You might, over the next 48 hours, write down two or three of the most important learning experiences of your life. When did continuity run out on you? When did you have nothing to fall back on, no handbook? And what are the things that have happened that made you, forced you, even, to grow up?

Authentic life. Balance. Gratitude that you have made it. You're here. And you learned something. Rather than pretending to be virtuous, give me a man who knows something of himself and is appalled, and has to forgive himself every day to get along. Now, that would be a true companion and a great leader, I think, particularly in education.

Thank you.

Five minutes? Any rebuttals? Questions or comments? Please use the microphone, too, if you have anything to ask.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Good evening. I really enjoyed your welcoming address. Thank you so much.

I'm the wife of a headmaster. We're continually exposed to hundreds of families. It seems for some reason this year has been extremely difficult for many people. When we run into the Simons in our lives, what's the best way that we can help them through these journeys?

DR. JONES: I think, obviously, in terms of presence with them, but immediately what went into my mind after being present with somebody and being present with Simon, in particular, is not to be sucked into the culture's interpretation of events. It doesn't mean they're not going to go through agony and pain, but the culture is crazy. And it's crazy around the very things that we treasure.

That's what's so maddening. We have turned everything into some kind of consumer culture. Spirituality is bought and sold. Everything has a price. And it's very hard, when everything is crazy, not to be crazy. And so we need a lot more of being able to support each other and name those things.

So one of the things with a character like Simon, he had to do two things. One is to say, he really did screw up, but not to take the society's evaluation of him as gospel. In other words, what he did was comparatively trivial, but society really clobbered him.

We live in a society where everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven. It's the worst kind of balance you have got. We live in a kind of permissive puritanism. We think of what's being peddled and pushed out into the world through television. It's trash, trashy stuff, all the time and yet at the same time we're highly moralistic.

And so one step, besides loving people and being with them, is to help them resist taking in the way the world reflects back the reality, taking that as truth.

Not much of an answer, because I think that's perhaps why we're such a depressed culture, as well. Don't underestimate, though, just being with people and being present to them. I think that is a powerful, powerful way to help them.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Why did you assume in your critique of the theme of the conference that the definition of balance was this deadening stability, rather than the tension of a spinning top?

DR. JONES: Good question. The reason is that I had just read Surfing the Edge of Chaos, and I thought of that. And then the first principle of equilibrium is that&emdash;you're absolutely right to call me on that. That is a wrong assumption, and that's what I tried to say at the beginning, that maybe for some people balance means the recovery of passion, or balance could be fostering a little subversion in a life that doesn't have that creative tension at all.

So it's a very good point. I think I was infected by the last thing I read. A dangerous thing.

It's Sunday, and it's after 6:00. And you're all looking a bit glassy-eyed.

MS. LEE: I don't think we're glassy-eyed. I think I just think we're stricken dumb, because it was so beautiful. Thank you so much.

The number on your envelope is the number of your table tonight. The number on your envelope is the number of your table. Do not go around switching tables.

The drinks are ready, so please go and have fun.