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Making Spirited Decisions: The Art of Creation
Delivered at the Fifth Annual International Conference Promoting Business Ethics sponsored by the Vincentian Universities in the United States: DePaul University, Niagra University, and St. John's University
October 29, 1998
The proposition that I want to put on the table is that our decisions create our lives, our businesses and our communities. The implication is that through our decisions the detail of the universe is created.
We all have an idea of where we are and how we got here. Let's step back to an earlier time. This is the time that you were first asked the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" While this question has little near term impact on the child, it is significant. Any answer other than, "I don't know," requires that the child entertain specific possibilities. The answer to the querying adult sounds like a decision. Generally, the adult gives some clue whether or not the right answer has been given. If the child begins to identify with the answer a decision has been made. The child may not be able to act on it for several years, but the universe of the child is altered.
There is a whole body of literature on the innocence of children. One of the common themes is that children are closer to the realm of the soul because they are only recently in the world. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" has real relevance, but children generally don't have the language to respond with the soul's purpose if they could remember it. The implication of actually listening to children and encouraging them to remember their soul's purpose is nothing less than revising all of our ideas of education and success.
Later the child, young adult and parents will make many decisions that will create the circumstances of the grown up child. Twenty years or so after the question was first asked most children will in fact be something that holds the uniqueness of being grown up. Besides all of the social pressure and parental projection, the child faces one other significant challenge to being the grown-up that matches the soul's purpose. This challenge is how to manifest the soul's purpose into something that resembles a livelihood. The livelihood may not be obvious. I was at least a decade into adulthood before I knew that something called facilitation existed and facilitation is one of the means that I can fulfill my soul's purpose.
I've observed that essentially there are three ways that we can go about making decisions.
1. We can be passive and let the decisions of others and the environment create our conditions.
2. We can make decisions according to what we can perceive.
3. We can make decisions with guidance from spirit.
Since we are talking about active creation we will skip the first method. The second method is most commonplace in business discussion. We make decisions based on the facts. We make decisions about things that are only relevant to business. We make "business" decisions. I have never seen decision that could conveniently be limited to just business. The decision to hire someone has an immense impact on the life of the person hired. The decision to award a contract has immense personal impact on the individuals in the firm who presented the contract. A carpenter at the then First National Bank of Chicago told me, "I've put my kids through school moving people around in the bank after hours." When we only make business decisions we generally create businesses that do not last and lives that feel like there is something missing. That something is spirit.
The awareness of spirit comes about when we realize that business is not just the "bottom line," and when we realize that there is more to our lives than our material circumstances. When this awareness comes about we notice that what we say and do creates the world in which we live. Another question that occurs throughout life is, "Why are we here?" This question can only be answered with an awareness of spirit. Physics refers to each black hole as a singularity. It seems to me that each soul is a singularity of project and purpose. In the Baltimore Catechism, God created us to know, love and serve. The knowing is that we are of spirit and only partake in matter. While we may not do it, what is asked for in love is fairly straightforward: see that you are part of everything and everything is part of you. What does serve mean?
Serve means surrendering to the purposes and projects of the soul. It seems to me that the purposes and projects of every soul are to participate in the creation of the universe. You have to admit that the first chapters of Genesis as well as every other creation narrative are fairly high level. All of the detail comes later. We are the detail. There are no companies, corporations, organizations in Genesis. Families, or a family, does not even come about until after the expulsion from the garden. What we do when we make a decision is that we create all of the detail for the universe that God outlined. If there is to be an organization that provides services that serve and nurturing context for all constituents to fulfill their singularity, it is created by you and me. There is not a single example of anything that has sprung into existence fully formed like Athena out of the head of Zeus.
The spirited decision then is one that creates the universe in connection with the soul's purposes and projects. Spiritless decisions also create the universe, but it does not seem to be a universe in which we are happy. The world of everything done for the bottom line seems to lead to the view of Hobbes. "...the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Through spirited decisions we have the opportunity to create heaven. Through spiritless decisions we create hell.
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