When I was in a team/group leadership role, during my years of regular employment, I occasionally attended management courses. At the time, the training seemed lifeless, bordering on manipulative… which was possibly an indication that management in the secular workplace was not a good fit for me!
Unexpectedly, however, some of it has stayed with me and has been a source of applicable wisdom that I am drawing upon in writing guided meditations. I am specifically thinking of the guidance to ask open rather than closed questions.
The context in management training was an annual appraisal meeting or a situation where I was giving feedback, to invite the other to self-reflection. In legal dramas, the key skill in cross-examination seems to be in asking questions that lead the key witness to a particular conclusion, while avoiding (obvious) leading questions that manipulate them or the jury. In therapy, the reflective question “How do you feel about that?” has become a cliché. But there are reasons for that: it is open-ended while not being leading.
In writing a guided meditation, there is a balance to be struck.
Each pray-er is a unique person with their own unique relationship with God. So I want as much as possible to give space to that relationship, leaving the path of reflection and prayer open, and this means avoiding asking questions that expect a particular answer and as far as possible asking leading questions.
So “Does God invite you?” is a closed question and invites only the responses “Yes” or “No” or perhaps “Maybe”, while “How does God invite you?” could be construed as a leading question, presupposing that God is a God who invites and would invite the likes of me. Yet it is an important part of the meditation, is open and enables all sorts of responses.
It is therefore good to follow it up with a question like “Notice your reactions to God’s invitations . . . How do you respond?”. This leaves the pray-er’s response open – whether or not they welcome and accept the invitation. It gives them space to wait on God and reflect on why they responded in that way.
I do however want to give a context, which involves a certain amount of leading content: imagine you are Moses with his flock of sheep in a place between wilderness and mountain; imagine you are entering the workshop of God the potter and God invites you further in. In today’s meditation I leave it open initially as to which craft God’s workshop is set up for: God as weaver, potter, blacksmith, or wherever the pray-er’s imagination takes them. But then I narrow it down to a pottery when I make suggestions for composing the place: the materials, tools, and the works God has made that might be imagined.
I do um and ah about whether to make these suggestions. There is a risk that they might be received as expected responses. But I hope that if I apply common sense and give enough choice they would act more as springboards and prompts to the imagination.
I have not had legal training, or training in therapy or spiritual direction. So I give thanks that there are alternative unexpected sources I can draw on; that my management training was not wasted and has provided what might prosaically in that setting be known as a transferable skill, but I would prefer to call applicable wisdom.
