Leading in an Angry Ocean: A Call For Redemptive Leadership

In times of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. — (Often attributed to George Orwell)

For obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to lead — really lead — when the waters around us feel more like a rising tide of anger, fear, and forgetting.

My friend and teacher Parker J. Palmer recently wrote a luminous piece titled Awash in an Ocean of Angry Words. In it, he names the desecration of language we’re witnessing: how words have been weaponized not to connect, but to confuse, divide, and subdue. Against this rising tide, Parker turns not to louder shouting and clever argumentation — but to poetry, to silence, to the ancient practices of remembering and revealing.

As his teachings often do, the piece struck me hard. Forever my teacher, and sometimes my elder, he helped me remember the part of me, which in times of my own anger and fear, can feel dis-membered; the part of me that finds solace and wisdom in poetry.

Indeed, as I’ve been rediscovering over this last year, redemptive leadership — that which I’ve been called to explore — is, at its heart, another form of remembering. (Or to be more explicit, re-membering.)

It’s remembering that leadership isn’t about dominance or performance. It’s not about drowning out the noise with more noise. It’s about anchoring ourselves — and those we serve — to something deeper and older than fear.

In a time when “flooding the zone with chaos” is a deliberate political strategy, as Parker notes, leadership that merely reacts — or worse, amplifies the noise — becomes part of the problem. Yes, as I shared just recently, “you can’t not say anything”, but speaking up with discernment and taking the revolutionary act of telling the truth is what’s needed. To do this well and with fierce regard for our shared humanity, means remembering that:

• That words matter.
• That silence, wisely held, can be an act of resistance and repair.
• That history is not only a warning, but a guide.
• That our shared humanity — not our divisions — must be defended.

Redemptive leadership is not flashy. It’s not grandstanding. It’s not the cult of the strongman, who consolidates power through fear. It is the quiet, daily work of telling the truth — even when truth-telling costs something. It is the work of seeing clearly — remembering that, as Aldous Huxley warned, “that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

It’s the work of creating spaces where dignity can take root again, even and especially in a world scorched by cruelty.

As I wrote in Reunion,“The only true antidote to authoritarianism is love made visible through courage, community, and truth-telling.”

In an ocean of angry words, redemptive leadership is a lifeboat. Not to escape the storm — but to help others cross it.

It’s an act of courage. An act of memory. An act of love.

Because we’ve led through a sea of storms before. And because we will again.

The question is: who will we become in the crossing? Who will we become and, perhaps, more importantly, where will we stand?

“We are now reduced to one significant choice… We can take our stand either on the side of life or on the side of death.” —Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole