Consciousness, Forgiveness, and Gratitude: The Interior of the Servant-Leader

The landscape of servant leadership on personal, organizational, and global levels is imbued with the bright promise of human community and the concurrent gravity of human lack, loneliness, power imbalance, and relational embattlement. To acknowledge the elegant and often elusive presence of forgiveness and gratitude is also to recognize the need for forgiveness and gratitude as a healing presence with regard to the often all-encompassing grip that cynicism, scepticism, and entrenched modes of consciousness hold in the everyday life of people. Empirical research in forgiveness and gratitude (for reviews, see Emmons & Shelton, 2002; McCullough & Vanoyen Witvliet, 2002) has begun to form a bridge that is capable of transforming the bitter rigidity of the family, work, and global environment into the kind of liberty and responsibility attuned to the central essence of servant leadership—a leadership that evokes in others greater health, autonomy, freedom, and wisdom, as well as the deepened will to serve the most important needs of humanity. Within this chapter, forgiveness and gratitude are based on a theoretical groundwork in human consciousness. The poetry of Mary Oliver, together with the leading work of Viktor Frankl and Vaclav Havel, provide sure footing to show how forgiveness and gratitude are an integral part of the psychological make-up of servant-leaders.