Appreciative Discernment/Inquiry Method Made Simple

A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

What seemed a confusion at the beginning of our Pre-capitular assembly, has turned into our greatest blessing. After a week’s engagement with the process as a way of listening, fine tuning into God’s greater purpose for each and every one of us, I today see it as a welcome conceptual framework for intervention in championing any organization or group towards their greatest dreams by teething on their strengths / positive elements which are plenty over and against all the weaknesses put together. God has blessed us abundantly. John Cardinal Newman, asserts, “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt’. Our confusions, our seemingly apparent difficulties must not throw us off-board and must not hold us hostage.

As a methodology it simply echoes long affirmations founded in the lives of great sons of the soil like Madiba Mandela:  ‘It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us.....as we let our light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same......as we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others’. Reaching out to our light, to our positivity is the foundational strength we need to re-affirm our identity and mission. It is all about embracing the presence of Christ amongst us in the words of St. Paul: ‘for if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies…through his Spirit that dwells in you’ (Rom:8.11).

The schools of Psychology long affirmed: “It is therefore the integral positive relationship to oneself and to others (in counselling psychology -working alliance) that will effect change, growth and self-actualization as opposed to mere mechanical problem solving approach to any organization or individual”. We are accustomed to rallying behind problems, we like to be defined by our problems, while putting away our strengths, resulting to a haphazard picking and pecking of techniques without any overall theoretical or practical rationale. Appreciative discernment as a process invites us to become authentic chameleons, what needs to vary remains the holy grounds to which we are sent, for these grounds sets the stage of change and growth on any given moment. As men of faith, we must remain faithful and consistent to the dream. Choose now what you would wish to have chosen at life’s end (St. Anthony Mary Claret).  It is all about purposeful positive dreaming that will affect any meaningful change.

The Catholic Archbishop of Capetown, Stephen Naido, once arrested on an anti-apartheid mission years ago, said: ‘You can kill the dreamer but you cannot kill the dream - the dream is freedom and the dream is alive and no amount of force is going to change that’.  It is all about I have a dream to remember and constituting structures that will allow the dream and the dreamers to bloom and blossom!!

Freud’s (1967) theory of the conscious in relation to the past as a mere tip of the ice-berg may help us here, the past serves its valid purpose. “The past and the present are meaningfully associated with, and reinforce, one another, not because of any inherent casually fixed relations, but because the being who interprets both the past and the present and their relationship to one another, is quite literally substantiated or made real through interpretations”.  How do we read into our past, positive, negative or none of the two? A positive stance will help us brace the present and the future more meaningfully.

Appreciative inquiry remains in my understanding a conceptual framework for intervention in any organization. I allows me in my dreams to embrace our Society of Missionaries of Africa in my wildest dreams; A society of wild birds and animals called to be part of the foundation of the best bird sanctuary and animal farm that will live to attract many curious on-lookers and in that sense we will have achieved the primary objective of being Missionary: Not to bring the world to heaven, but to bring heaven to the world.

‘When you stand on the shoulders of a friend, more is visible. When you stand back to back, there is less to fear. When you stand shoulder to shoulder, the load is lighter. And when you gaze upward together, the grandeur of the sky is breathtaking - Nothing great was ever achieved without Enthusiasm’.

A fruitful dreaming during the Pre-capitular assemblies and even more so during the 28^th General Chapter Assembly. May our humble EAP contributions enhance the General Chapter next year.

Martin Onyango K’owacko, M.Afr.