From the Chief of Chaplains
Chaplain (MG) Donald W. Shea

Some years ago, Lorraine Hale was driving on a Harlem street. Stopped at a red light, she noticed a listless woman sitting on the ground leaning against a building wall. She was gazing, glassy-eyed into space while cradling an obviously sick infant in her arms. Lorraine thought that drug addiction was a terrible thing as she drove off on the green light. She could not get the image out of her mind. Turning her car around, she drove back to that intersection and gave the young drug addict a note inviting her to Lorraine’s mother’s home for help. Before the day was over, the young woman and her baby were living with Clara Hale, Lorraine’s mother.

The word got out on the street. Within six months, in her five room apartment, "Mother" Hale was caring for 22 babies of heroin-addicted women. President Reagan acknowledged Mother Hale in his 1975 State of the Union Message. The Center for the Promotion of Human Potential followed. By the time she died in 1993, Mother Hale personally had cared for over 500 children at Hale House. Dr. Lorraine Hale continues her mother’s mission.

One person, simply doing "the right thing," became a leader and heroine. Others saw this and followed. She or they did not sit down to analyze the concepts of leadership. They didn’t even ask for a leadership assessment, seminar, or organizational chart. They didn’t ask whether theology or ethical goodness was the motivation for her acts. They saw, they identified with, and they followed. The long-term result is a great many people willingly doing the right thing.

Isn’t that what we aspire to do? For our God and our soldiers, don’t we want to be so clearly doing "the right thing" for others that we make the "right thing" something that everyone wants to do? Isn’t this what real leadership is about? Of course! But how?

We’ll have to work out the details in our own life and in our own place. But the principles are common to all. We have begun, lately to speak of "Spiritual Fitness." For us chaplains and chaplain assistants, this spiritual fitness carries with it a divine component. We base our lives on a commitment to God and act accordingly. However, even those people who do not consider themselves religious live in a spiritual world. Spirituality is the nature of a human being, and Spiritual Fitness is as essential to the soldier as is Physical Fitness. It is this spiritual fitness which makes it possible to be a leader.

All of us have been to spiritual basic training. All of us in the UMT have been to spiritual advanced individual training. All of us know about the need for spiritual discipline, commitment, and exercise. By now, hopefully, all of us have committed ourselves to a spiritual exercise regimen which even surpasses our physical exercise regimen. Now what?

When a couple is dating, and so in love, one person is totally focused on the other. One is totally consumed with trying to figure out the next thing to do for the other to make her/him happy or better. One totally forgets about self.  After marriage, there is a tendency to drift back, gradually, from a total focus on the other to an increasing focus on self. When the drift is too extreme and unattended, we start having serious marital trouble. When chaplains start out on a career with the military, they are most often totally focused on soldiers and their families — at the beginning. The tendency can be to drift back to focus on self and career. Spiritual fitness enables the chaplain to maintain that focus on soldiers and soldiers’ families in selfless service and to avoid the drift toward self and careerism. That is leadership! That is spiritual fitness.

Personal spiritual fitness, with all its components, is the essential basis for all effective leadership. It is based on God and firmly based on the best of human nature. By living it ourselves, it naturally spreads to others — all others. Our soldiers then will never ask "Where are our leaders" but "How can I help?" and "How can I be a leader too?"