Dag Hammarsköld, who led the United Nations when Africans were seeking an end to colonial regimes, was a skilled and humane diplomat. He was also an interesting human being.
Hammarsköld died with others in a plane that crashed or was shot down in Zambia in 1961. His grieving friends published his journal as a book called Markings.
That’s how people learned that perhaps the world’s most effective diplomat was also a seeker.
One of Hammarskjöld’s biographers, Roger Lipsey, used that word: “seeker.”
But Lipsey said Hammarsköld was also a practitioner, rather than a believer. What a person did was more important than whatever a person might believe.
Hammarsköld spoke of “spiritual disciplines” and reported on his experiences, mainly in notes and poems. He also wrote short memos to himself. For example:
You listen badly, and you read even worse. Except when the talk or the book is about yourself. Then you pay careful attention. Are you so observant of yourself?”
Even on a spiritual quest, Hammarsköld was an efficient, effective administrator. Souls or psyches or selves — like recalcitrant heads of state — sometimes must be called on the carpet.
• Source: Roger Lipsey, “Stillness in Action: Reflections on Dag Hammarskjöld”; Lion’s Roar, Sept. 24, 2013. It’s here:
https://www.lionsroar.com/stillness-in-action-reflections-on-dag-hammarskjold-november-2013/
Lipsey’s Hammarskjöld: A Life, published in 2015, is on the list of books I want to read.
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