The Quiet Listener

 Thirty years ago, I was a 20-something speechwriter for a large manufacturing company, and part of a three-person speechwriting team. One day, the vice president of our staff function called me to his office to talk about me writing speeches for his boss.

In the middle of our conversation, the CEO barged into the office and started screaming at the VP. Who didn’t say a word but quickly took up his pen to take notes as the CEO’s tirade continued. The CEO didn’t know me, even though I wrote speeches for him. He didn’t even glance at me. And I thought to myself, what if I had been a job candidate, or a reporter?

The screaming stopped; the CEO left. And then the VP resumed our conversation exactly where we had stopped, as if nothing had happened. I was so shook my hands were trembling.

That’s one kind of quiet listener – the executive who works for a screaming CEO. Luci Shaw, in Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit, writes about another kind, in the context of talking about poetry: “…poetry enriches; it forces us to take time, slow down, and reflect what might otherwise escape our notice. It helps us to view life metaphorically instead of in terms of mere fact or information. Poetry helps us to become whole-brain people, teaching us to be thoughtful and creative in many areas of our lives. Most books that Christians read don’t push them in this direction, where they can be quiet listeners. We’re often pushed by the books we read toward busy-ness, efficiency and self-ism. Poetry can counter that. It opens up the windows to the whole universe, takes our eyes off ourselves, and often helps us to focus on Creator and creation.”

Substitute the words “business people” for “Christians,” in that paragraph, and it would be just as true. If you want to see how the business world usually defines career success, you’re going to be hard put to find the words “quiet listener” as Shaw describes it. “Listening skills” are often considered critically important for managing people, but they tend to be narrowly defined, as in understanding what a subordinate is concerned about or how to help a team function better. It’s about efficiency and effectiveness.

Business has never been known for promoting quiet people, no matter how good they are. No, we want hard-driving, results-oriented, shareowner-value focused A-type personalities who can “get the job done.”

What Shaw is describing is on a different plane altogether. A quiet listener thinks with both sides of his or her brain, in an integrated, big-picture kind of way. But in management reviews, they’re going to be overlooked or considered “not aggressive enough.”

Sometimes these quiet listeners are the prophets, the ones (to quote Shaw quoting Flannery O’Connor) who not only see clearly but also see what’s distant and often hidden. And if quiet listeners are at a career disadvantage in business, you can imagine what can happen to prophets, especially when they’re right.

Quiet listeners and prophets are needed in the business world. Somehow we have to get over this combined disdain and fear we have of them (and the fear is the fear that they may be right). Otherwise, the workplace can become a very nasty, toxic kind of place.

This is the last of our High calling discussions of Luci Shaw’s Breath for the Bones. I started this discussion weeks ago making the claim that what she says is as applicable to business as it is to art and writing and music. Now that  I’ve finished the book, I’m more convinced than ever. Instead of Who Moved My Cheese? or The 7-Minute Manager, we might do much better with Breath for the Bones.

To see more posts on the last two chapters of the book, “The Shadow Side of Creativity” and “Tracing the Creative Process of Poets and Poems,” please visit The High Calling.

Paying Attention

I first heard the phrase in 2002. I was working as an independent consultant, and was in Chicago to meet with a client. Several staff people were in the meeting; my job was mostly to listen and takes notes to write a series of speeches to be given at a conference.

One meeting participant stood out. She would listen to whoever might be speaking, and then respond with, “And the other thing is…” and go on to make her point. I didn’t pay much attention until she used the phrase a third time, and then I started looking at what she was saying and doing (speechwriters are like that; repetitions of words and phrases catch their attention because it’s one of the things they do in speeches).

Each time she used the expression, I could see she hadn’t really been listening to others at all. Typically, “the other thing” had nothing to do with the discussion, and more to do with her point of view prevailing. I thought no one else had noticed this, and it wasn’t the place of the outside consultant to mention it. And then one of the other people in the meeting used the phrased, and everyone laughed. They all saw this, I thought. They all understood she was using a form of control.

I’ve heard the phrase everywhere since. Some people use it as part of normal conversation, unaware of what it implies. Others use it more intentionally, attempting to imply that their point is better or more important, that they’re not really listening to you at all, or if they are, they don’t think much of what you have to say.

And the other thing is…

In Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit, Luci Shaw stresses the importance of paying attention, and especially how important it is for writers and artists (not to mention people supposedly in meetings). “In order to see truly and deeply,” she says, “we need to learn how to pay attention to the seen and unseen worlds…For us to participate in the dream of creation presupposes our need to pay attention.”

She emphasizes the “pay” part of paying attention. “Paying attention cannot be done in passivity. It demands intentionality, choice, and awareness. And that, too, is costly.”

I continue to be surprised at how little we pay attention to others. For all the emphasis in the workplace on teams, or the “greater good” of the organization at large, we still seem to be stuck on ourselves. Perhaps this is what 30 years of corporate restructuring has taught us to. But you can tell when people pay attention, because you’ve done it yourself and you’ve had people pay attention to something you were saying. We know how the process works.

Paying attention is absolutely is absolutely critical for a team to succeed, for a boss-subordinate relationship to succeed, and for all other kinds of relationships to succeed. Paying attention tells someone that they matter, that what they have to say is important. “And the other thing is” immediately communicates that someone is not paying attention t all, and is instead intent upon their own point to prevail.

And if we are to create and innovate, or as Shaw says, “participate in the dream of creation,” we have to pay attention to people, the environment around us, whatever it is that inspires us, and our own hearts. It isn't about the other thing, whatever it is.

Over at The High Calling, we’ve been discussion Luci Shaw’s Breath for the Bones. To see other post on Chapter 9, Paying Attention, and Chapter 10, Creativity, please visit The High Calling.

Me and My Kindle

I had delayed buying an e-reader for a long time. It wasn’t that I was a “physical book I can hold in my hand or nothing” kind of person. It was more “this isn’t a priority right now.” I knew I did not like reading a book on my desktop computer. But Father’s Day was coming, and I solved my wife’s problem for a gift by saying I’d like to have a Kindle.

In due course, it arrived, “it” being the Kindle 3G. A friend at work had an earlier version. He had recently upgraded to a 3G, which he said was a vast improvement over earlier models.

Having the Kindle in my hands, I had to test it out. Immediately. The instructions were simple, and within seconds I had my first e-book, Gravestone by Travis Thrasher.

Oh, my goodness.

Instant gratification.

Press a button and it’s here.

Okay, so obtaining a book was easy. What would it be like to read one? Would I like it, or would I discover that that Father’s Day present was destined to sit on a shelf, gathering dust?

Gravestone was surprisingly easy to read. It was a good introduction to reading an e-book – fast paced and engaging, I’d read a page, press the advance button, and keep going.

I finished Gravestone and said, OK, that was all right. But what about poetry?

Right about that time, Maureen Doallas over at Writing Without Paper had a feature about poet Julie Kane, and noted that her first book of poetry, Body and Soul, was only available on Kindle. Ah, ha, a test! So I downloaded the poems, and found that poetry was just as easy to read.

Since then, I’ve two more, the suspense novel The Undertaker by William Brown and Underworld: The Modern Orpheus, poems by Matthew Duggan. And I took advantage of two promotional specials I ran across, one on Facebook and the other on a blog, and downloaded the English Standard Version of the Bible and another mystery/suspense novel, both of which were free (there may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there is such a thing as a free book) (and the ESV is still available on Kindle for free, as least right now). And I downloaded Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit by Luci Shaw, just in time to start reading it for the weekly book discussion at The High Calling.

Two novels and two books of poetry later, I can say that I really like this little e-reader. I like it a lot. It’s easy to use. It’s back-lit, so you don’t get a lot of glare. It’s easily portable. And it can carry up to 3500 books. That last factor alone wowed my wife, who sees a solution to the bookcases that threaten to overwhelm our house.

It’s not better or worse than reading a physical book. And there are going to be some books that simply won’t work on a Kindle; I’m thinking here of books like The Four Holy Gospels, illustrated by Makoto Fujimura, which is more like a work of art than books.

But for the vast majority of books, the Kindle will work fine. 

As I sit here, reading on my Kindle, that with the cover weighs less than 14 ounces, I’m beginning to glimpse one of the forces transforming the book publishing business. 

Letting Go

“Fullness of life in arenas of art and spirituality demands that we let go,” writes Luci Shaw in Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit, “that we relinquish control – something that goes against the human grain, particularly in a culture obsessed with empowerment. Here we are, trying to bring order and beauty out of chaos, gaining a kind of discipline and control, exercising the authority of experience and hard-won wisdom, and we have to let it go?”

I’ve been reading Breath for the Bones with the rather determined belief that it applies just as much to work and the work place as it does to art, writing and creativity. The chapter entitled “Risk” confirms my belief, and that statement on letting go punctuates the entire discussion for me.

Businesses, and especially large ones like corporations, have historically been designed to control and manage their environments: minimize risk, reduce occurrences of the unexpected, manage across the supply and production chain, maximize shareowner returns. That model began breaking down in the 1970s, with the extended periods of inflation and disruptions in energy supplies (two oil embargoes – 1973-74 and 1979). The 1980s witnessed massive restructurings and reorganizations, which have essentially become institutionalized. At the same time, the electronic communication revolution has changed everything.

But perhaps the most profound change is the one most often overlooked: it is virtually impossible for any organization, private or public, to control its environment. Organizations who believe they still can exercise control have to distort reality, and keep distorting it, to maintain that belief. (Interestingly enough, this also can happen with individuals – when people have to invent and maintain elaborate conspiracy theories to explain facts that conflict with their worldview.)

Within organizations desperately trying to hold on to control, creative individuals within the organization can often find themselves in a strange position. Their creativity is desperately needed and simultaneously rejected. They can find themselves tagged as “not a team player.” It can get worse if they’re proven right by external events, which they often are.

Over the years, I’ve seen this happen, many times. I’ve experienced this happening. I’ve seen it happen to others.

“The creative impulse is essentially innovative,” Shaw writes. “It’s always discovering new areas to explore. It experiments. It breaks down old barriers and ventures into new territory. That implies a kind of risk…”

As Shaw says, letting go is counterintuitive. After spending enormous amounts of time and resources, not to mention those thousands of college degrees and all those billions of man-years of experience, that it may be in the organization’s best interests to let it go.

It may sound bizarre, but I’ve often found myself in the position of telling experienced communication people that the creation of social media has changed their world forever. They don’t believe it, and they don’t want to believe it. At best, they consider social media to be “new communication tools and channels.” They are far more profound than that, and they demonstrate every day that what we all knew and grew up with – and the way we do things – has changed forever.


Led by Laura Boggess, we’re discussing Breath for the Bones over at The High Calling. Check today’s post there, on writing journals and taking risks, for more posts on the book.

The Baptized Imagination

A dozen years and several employers ago, I spent some time with a career counselor. I needed help in figuring out where I was at work (translation: a bad situation getting steadily worse) and some understanding of whether I was really suited for corporate life at all.

This counselor was good. She had a whole raft of resources, tests, exercises and knowledge, plus a lot of her own experiences. She had even worked for two to three years for the same employer I had. Without knowing me, she knew a lot about the kinds of experiences I had had.

We did the tests and exercises. We had long talks. She interviewed me in two or three different ways. We did sorted and prioritized hopes and dreams on index cards. We talked about the things I liked to do, and what I didn’t. She analyzed.

And then she surprised me.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “that you’re a conundrum.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve lasted far longer in that work placethan anyone like you should have.” She paused and then continued. “You should have been fired to quit a long time ago. You have the wrong temperament entirely. You think nothing like a corporate person. Nothing. You come at things with a decidedly non-corporate perspective. Companies like yours usually find people like you to be very threatening.”

She looked away, possibly recalling her own experiences. “The corporate work place is usually toxic for people like you. It either makes you conform or it destroys you. There’s no middle ground. Yet somehow you’ve managed to avoid that, and more than that, you’ve been successful. It makes no sense.” She stared at me for a moment. “You’re creative. You think the way a creative person thinks. Organizations don’t deal with creativity very well. So, yes, you are a conundrum.”

I understood what she was saying. She was largely correct. But then I really knocked her for a loop.

“You’re right,” I said. “Or mostly right. There’s a reason why I think like I do, why I look at things the way I do, possibly even why I’ve lasted as long as I have.

“I’m a Christian.”

This conversation came back to me this week as I read chapters five and six (on imagination and “the muse”) of Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit. Author Luci Shaw writes this: “It is my wild hope that perhaps creative Christians, by means of their ‘baptized imaginations,’ may be able to help integrate the universe by widening and sharpening their focus, by seeing the whole picture as if through God’s eyes, by observing humankind and the environment and saying, ‘Yes, I see. This is like that. There is meaning in it.’”

And that’s the answer. I have a “baptized imagination” (Shaw borrowed the phrase from C.S. Lewis). I think in terms of connectedness, the “whole picture.” I fight compartmentalized thinking, no matter how personally attractive I find it. How I behave at work is how I behave at church and with family (although I’m much more open with family). I don’t always assume the organization is always right. I see and understand the elements of truth in what opponents and competitors say.

It’s not an easy way to live a corporate life. Far from it. A friend at work heard me “predict” something – although it was less a prediction than a statement of the obvious. The something eventually happened, and he called me a prophet. I laughed. “You know what happens to prophets, don’t you? They get hunted down, imprisoned and sawed in half.”

But I don’t know how to be otherwise.


To see other posts on imagination and “the muse” from Breath for the Bones, please visit The High Calling, where Laura Boggess has been leading our discussion of the book.

The Power of Story

I became part of a story once.

Twenty years ago, the company I worked for, and the industry I worked in, faced a monumental problem, one coming down the track like the proverbial freight train. Whatever company and industry credibility that existed was going to be vaporized.

A small group (“team” wasn’t the lingo back then) of us started working quietly and diligently with a couple of key executives. We knew what had to be done – embrace the coming chaos, take responsibility, and ultimately run the business very differently. My specific job – leading the communications group focused on the change, help design the strategy and write speeches to help pave the way. At least we hoped we were paving the way.

Presentations were made. Meetings were held. Consultants were consulted. We weren’t openly laughed at, but you could always see the facial expressions – people thought we were out of our minds. The problem as that no one else had a solution. And our little troop kept getting bucked upward. “Just wait until the CEO hears this! He’ll chew them up and spit them out!”

When we reached the CEO, he didn’t chew us up. He immediately grasped the problem and our solution. He fully embraced, and went further than we were suggesting.

The result changed the company and the industry. We embarked on a series of initiatives than confounded friends and foes alike. Real change happened. I had my hands full with communications and writing more and more speeches.

About a year later, I was in a meeting with several of our business executives. One had been talking with a counterpart at our biggest competitor, who’d followed us with their own initiatives. The executive said that both of them had agreed that “the damn speechwriters were running our companies.”

There was a silence, and several heads turned toward me. No one said a word (but all of these executives likely agreed with the statement). And then I said, “Actually, all the speechwriters are doing is writing the speeches the CEOs are asking for.”

This period in the company’s history lasted for about six years. It overlapped and even opened the doors for another fundamental change – the beginning of the worldwide web and electronic communications, and our little intrepid band got to be that story, too.

The power of story is enormous. In Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit, Luci Shaw talks about the importance of story in our lives, and considers the role it plays in the Bible. “The bible,” she writes, “doesn’t teach theology systematically. It tells stories. It chronicles human failures and triumphs; it voices human lament and celebration. God reveals himself through the stories and poetries developed by the human authors who wrote the books of the Bible.”

The writing and telling of stories become imperative for us, she says. “…I believe that my learning faith and writing about it are gifts from God and that they have value; therefore, I persist in telling stories…”

Stories have power and value, and not only in art. They can change and transform the work place as well.

And like Shaw, I persist in telling stories.


Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing Breath for the Bones. Today the focus is on chapters 3 and 4, on metaphor and story. Visit The High Calling to see links to other posts on the chapters.

We Are all Poets in the Workplace

She captured my attention with the imaginary house.

For The High Calling’s Monday book discussion, we’re starting to read Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit by poet and writer Luci Shaw. I’ve “met” Shaw through her poetry, like Harvesting Fog: Poems, and then moved a step close when she joined us for a TweetSpeak poetry jam on Twitter two weeks ago.

In Breath for the Bones, she explores artistic creativity and imagination as profoundly influenced, perhaps even directed, by “the spirit and creatorhood of God.” She speaks to “the artistic process from a profoundly God-centered perspective.”

For a Christian, this sounds like a no-brainer. Yet for evangelical Christians, it is actually more of a fairly recent no-brainer, because it has been only in the last three decades or so that evangelicals have come to consider “the arts” – fiction and other writing, poetry, theater, art, music, film – as something that just might possibly be connected to God.

My own introduction to this whole idea of God as the source of human creativity was Flannery O’Connor, and though she was Southern she was also Catholic, so she didn’t “really count.” No, we evangelicals needed one of our own here, and we found one in Francis Schaeffer and his “How Should We Then Live” book and film series in the mid-1970s. (I was actually reading O’Connor about the same time that our church in Houston showed the series on Sunday nights.)

In her introduction, Shaw imagines a house, “a large rambling house – old, with multiple doors and windows at different levels, all opening onto a landscape of fields interrupted by trees, and beyond this rolling hills, and even farther away, the glistening horizon of the ocean.” She describes the house and its diverse community of people, of both sexes, all races, all ages. “Moving among them, talking and working along with them, is an ordinary-looking man; it is the Christ, the One who lends the house its personal warmth, its structure, its creative center, its vision, its reason for being. This is the house of faith.”

This is a book about art, creativity and artistic imagination. What caught my attention was whom she included among the residents – artists and actors and poets and writers, yes, but also the businessperson, the carpenter, the marketing expert, the inventor and the computer programmer.

And I was seized with an idea, an idea of how I’m going to read this book, and how I’m going to participate in the discussion for the next several weeks – by focusing on how art and creativity and imagination can and should flourish in the workplace, as much as they do in novels, poems, plays, paintings, movies and music, and that here, too, they arise from “the Spirit and creatorhood of God.”

In other words, for those of us who live God’s kingdom in offices and cubicles, on trucks and airplanes, standing behind counters at Macy’s and handling insurance claims, we are all, at heart, the artists of God. We are all made in the image of God, and part of that image is the creative, artistic spirit and force.

Consider joining us. I’m reading the book on Kindle (instant gratification!), and it’s easily available from Amazon and other booksellers like Hearts and Minds Books. Laura Boggess is leading the discussion at The High Calling, and she’ll be posting on Mondays with links to other posts in the discussion.

Come help us write a poem.