Dave Fleming is a spiritual mentor and leadership coach with a doctor of management in organizational leadership from the University of Phoenix. After 20 years in the pastoral ministry, he now helps organizations maximize their potential in order to better serve the world around them. A contributor and columnist for Leonard Sweet's website, preachingplus.com, he is the author of Leadership Wisdom from Unlikely Voices: People of Yesterday Speak to Leaders of Today. In this guidebook for seekers, the author states:
"The journey to God is a continual and paradoxical journey of the spirit. On the one hand, our search leads us home. On the other, the fuel for the search comes from longings that remind us we have not yet arrived. Arrival is not the aim of the spiritual journey. It is the trek that matters most. This paradox exists because our home is not so much a place as a path — a way more than a location. If our home were a fixed location rather than a path, our fundamental drive to search would be negated, and that would violate our design as humans."
Yearning is the spiritual practice that animates a seeker's quest. Fleming had come up with six longings that move us along the spiritual path: from answers to experience, from activity to meaning, from control to compost, from shadow to substance, from performance to expression, and from segregation to community.
We are glad that Fleming has structured this book around his interviews with seven seekers who embody the spirit of the seeker's way. We share his sense that there are many fine spiritual teachers from all traditions who can offer us insights, practices, and plenty of wisdom. Fleming has chosen the late Wayne Teasdale, Catholic monk who worked in the field of interspirituality; Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco; Philip Gulley and Jim Mulholland, Quaker pastors; Lauren Winner, a scholar and author whose writings appeal to a new generation of seekers; Marcus Borg, Jesus scholar and Christian visionary; and Joan Chittister, the prolific Benedictine nun. Those on a spiritual journey will enjoy savoring the work of this energetic band of men and women who reverence the Mysterious One and keep their eyes open to all the meanings that abound on a journey. Fleming concludes this book with material on starting a Seekers' Group like the ones he started in his church.
