The Equanimity of Eldership

Or "Why Jesus Slept in the Boat"

“Stay near this book
It will stretch out its leg and
Trip you;
You’ll fall
Into 
God.”
— Hafiz

I spoke with my dear friend Dawnita recently about eldership. It was as if the Great Spirit was teaching both of us through our words to each other. We identified one of the key traits of eldership as the Enneagram Type 4 virtue of equanimity—that state of imperturbable peace no matter what happens around us, which itself springs from a long-learned practice of benevolent detachment. 

The key story we named that illustrates this quality so beautifully is the story of Jesus falling asleep on the boat in a storm (Matthew 8:23-27). It's not that Jesus did not care about the men on the boat, or their fear and distress. Of course he cared. But he was living in a much larger story than they were. He wasn't caught up in the stress and panic of the moment because his feet were firmly planted on much higher ground. 

This is how he could nap in the storm, and why it was the right thing to do—not just for him, but for the men—because it is only from this place of equanimity, this benevolent detachment, that he could speak with the transformative authority and power the men needed. When he woke up and said (angrily, on purpose) to them, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” His words carry the power to sink deep into their hearts, and wake them up out of the dream of their small story, because he was speaking to them from Somewhere Else—a deeper, truer reality, a larger story. Then he rebuked the storm to emphasize the point: “There is a deeper Story, larger than all of this, a reality more powerful than anything that troubles you in this world.”

Eldership is in large part the art and practice of living in this Larger Story and speaking from that place into the smaller fear-driven stories that rule the human heart.

I can see how often we would-be elders fail in this when we try to rebuke the fear narratives that drive so much of what we see on social media these days. A would-be elder posts how we ought not slander our brothers on the “other side,” and within minutes the vitriol lands in the comments like flies on a carcass. But the real failure comes when the would-be elder gets sucked in to the small stories of the commenters. The would-be elder starts defending his position and debating the finer points of everyone's misinterpretation of the storm. The moment he does this, he is lost. He loses his authority, because he's no longer speaking from equanimity, from benevolent detachment, from the larger story, where he alone can stand and speak into the smaller story with the gravitas of true eldership.

Jesus never defended his choice to sleep through the storm, though his disciples tried to provoke him to do just that. “Don't you care that we are about to perish?!” Rather, he kept his feet grounded in the larger story, the deeper truer reality of things as they really are, and in that place of benevolent detachment, he spoke to the core issue in the disciples that had snared them up in their panic and fear: “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?”

A powerful question, asked at the right moment from the place of benevolent detachment can shake the world, and set hearts free.