The Holiness of Leadership Development

“Relationships between self and God, self and others, self and the environment, self and one’s heritage, and self and body are in each case I-Thou relationships for a person living a life of spiritual commitment. Psychotherapy, when working within a spiritual domain, becomes a task of mapping which regions of one’s relationship ecology are marked by decay from I-Thou into I-It relations. This map sets the direction for therapy.” (Griffith & Griffith, 2002, p. 23 )

I came to social work after a decade-long career as a professional community organizer, spending much of that time working within the Jewish community on anti-occupation (Israel-Palestine) politics. The content of my work often touched on the religious and spiritual — most people were brought to our work out of a commitment to “Jewish values” (i.e. social justice values), and seeing those as in tension with the practices of the Jewish State. Many conversations centered around how the spiritual, cultural, and historical narratives one was raised with informed political commitments.

Ultimately, however, I found the process of organizing to be what felt deeply spiritual — a calling, almost. I come from a practice of relational organizing that emphasizes genuine curiosity, making meaning of stories, vulnerability, personal growth, and most importantly, intentionally cultivated relationships of mutual accountability and investment. Moreover, the work of organizing is to support individuals in gaining access to personal and collective power — power that is their birthright but stolen from them by systems of oppression.

Approaching organizing from this perspective provides glimpses of the liminal. The closest I ever feel to witnessing or participating in holiness are moments in collective action or in one-on-one meetings — the primary tool of relational organizing: a long pause while someone contemplates the answer to an insightful question they’ve never been asked before; tears springing to someone’s eyes because they feel deeply understood; an epiphany of how to put one’s most deeply-held values into concrete action; the joyful realization that acting with other people is a pathway to justice; the experience of watching someone with an intense fear of authority challenging a person in power. To me, these are moments of awe. They are expansive, connective, and get close to the meaning of life. They are moments of genuine I-Thou connection — or, of “communitas…the spirit of unity that pervades those who participate together in the performance of a ritual, the journeying together on a pilgrimage, or the solidarity of a political movement” (Griffith & Griffith, 2002, p. 23).

Ultimately, wanting greater access to these moments — and wanting to create opportunities for others to experience them as well — is a major reason why I enrolled in an MSW program, and why I want to become a fully integrated organizer-therapist. My intuitive hunch of therapy and organizing as akin in these ways is proving accurate — a general understanding of the therapeutic relationship, or the concept of the “analytic third” might be the creation of the conditions for these types of experiences, of self-knowledge, self-realization and I-Thou relationship. Both organizing and psychodynamics understand people as the product of their experiences and relationships, as “incorporative beings” (O’Rourke, 2010, p. 313). I have been particularly struck by how several psychodynamic theories see both secure relationships and developmental maturity as being typified by the ability to withstand rupture and repair. To me, this is also the hallmark of what might be seen as “relationships of mutual accountability and investment” forged through organizing.

However, until recently, I had not considered how the connection I make between spirituality and organizing and organizing and social work might bring all three in relationship with one another. How, as O’Rourke (2010) writes, the “therapeutic relationship, itself” might be “a locus for the sacred” (p. 306). Another name for rupture and repair, for example, is the Jewish concept of t’shuvah, which is the practice of self-reflection, accountability, and amends-making between people and between people and God around the High Holidays. For many years, I have found this process, starting in the Jewish month of Elul — which starts on Monday — to be my deepest, most intentional Jewish practice. I love that it starts from the assumption that humans are inherently fallible, bound to make mistakes every year, and then creates time and ritual to repair what has been broken — with the expectation that we’ll have to do it all over again next year. It requires interpersonal vulnerability, trust, risk, and compassion. The feeling I have in that practice is the same feeling I have in a good one-on-one, is an I-Thou relationship, is a therapeutic relationship.

How, then, might I approach clinical work through the guise of this kind of relationship — not only between people, but between a person and their God, their environment, their community, and themselves? How might I see “violations of relatedness” (Griffith & Griffith, 2002, p. 219) as indicators of trauma, spiritual decay, and places of intervention? How can I use not only my intellectual analysis, guided by training, theory, and cognitive insight, but also the feeling of holiness — or the absence thereof — to tell me whether I am in the presence of an I-Thou relationship? How might I create a therapeutic space that has reverence for the intersubjective space? How might I embody O’Rourke’s (2010) beautiful query: “if we allow for the possibility of the objective reality of God, is it possible that the therapist’s loving attentiveness is, itself, a conduit of God’s love and compassion in a deeply tangible way?” (p. 319).

This was written in Aug., 2021 and reflective of my thoughts at that time. As with all my writing, I welcome challenge, agitation & feedback.

Works Referenced

Griffith, J. L., & Griffith, M. E. (2002). Encountering the sacred in psychotherapy: How to talk with people about their spiritual lives. Guilford Press.

O’Rourke, C. (2010). Healing objects, healing prayer: the use of transitional phenomena in a client’s recovery from incest. Smith College studies in Social Work, 80, 304–322.