Parker Palmer and Annie Dillard on Spirituality

Spirituality, like leadership, is a hard thing to define. But Annie Dillard has given us a vivid image of what authentic spirituality is about: “in the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”

…Good leadership comes from people who have penetrated their own inner darkness and arrived at the place where we are at one with another, people who can lead the rest of us to a place of “hidden wholeness” because they have been there and know the way.

— Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 2000, Jossey-Bass

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