“What Makes a Visionary? The Story of a Good Idea.”
Look, and you will see there are a lot of good ideas
floating around like effervescing light bulbs in the night sky. Above the heads,
especially of creative persons, you might notice a lot of bright ideas.
Dreamers and inventors imagine more things in one day than can ever become
reality. But a visionary is something quite different. A visionary is someone
who can stick with an idea, develop it, and see it blossom in such a way that
it makes a difference, and even changes the world. Visionaries see what COULD
BE down the road ahead.
The visionary also seems to be someone who is almost
burdened with the persistence of the grand idea. At least that is the case with
my friend Dr Martin Price, who is the founder of ECHO, the Educational Concerns
for Hunger Organization. Martin agreed to talk to me about how he lived several
years with the idea of ECHO until it became a reality. I was curious how the
creative process works, considering that many ideas never reach solid ground.
Although Martin is a scientist, with a Ph.D. in
Biochemistry, his scientific discipline did not have a central role in
launching the ECHO organization. As I learned from him, it seemed to be more
about his Christian faith, and how that faith played out in inspiration.
As I see it, science, in its pure from, can bring many
remarkable innovations to our world. By way of research involving inductive
reasoning, the scientific disciplines pursue new truths empirically. New ideas
are apprehended or grasped with cognitive rigor, and carefully documented
studies. A new truth comes at the end of a long line of reasoning.
But visionaries, I think, do not so much search and
ultimately discover a new truth, as they are seized by a truth. They are often
ordinary people with an extraordinary calling. The vision of “what could be” is
received, as if from somewhere else. In Martin’s case, it was, for him,
inspiration from God. He describes his spiritual journey with this developing
inspiration as sometimes “tortured”. It was as if it were inscribed on his inner
blueprint, whether he desired it or not. Yet he says it would qualify as an
inspiration mostly in hindsight.
He came to believe that all of his skills and training
should be used to help the poor. On a watershed evening nearly forty years ago,
he was taking a walk on the campus of Geneva College when it occurred to him “What
are the prayers of a poor farmer living (in another country) with his family in
some impoverished situation?” When he imagined what those prayerful needs were,
he felt a calling to employ his scientific knowledge to help the desperately
poor. It was not a clarion call exactly, because there were doubts along the
way, and much to be sorted out for his vocational plans. But one thing that did
sustain him was a photo torn from a magazine of a nurse holding a malnourished
baby. He kept the photo posted in his office, as a kind of sustaining symbolic
image of his ongoing and persistent “vision”.
The vision, as I am calling it, stayed with him. And
without clear knowledge of which direction he was to go, he took some risks
with his career. Martin says it seemed right to proceed without certainty of
where the project was going, “because you can’t see the success at the
beginning”. It only gradually became clear to him that he could fill a gap in
the technical preparation of agricultural missionaries. The global problem was
food scarcity among small farmers in developing countries. The structure of a
solution was to provide resources for just these people who needed it the most.
Instead of
supplying food directly to the hungry, trained missionaries, Peace Corps
workers, and community development workers could teach the hungry and
nutritionally deficient people how to increase food production right where they
lived. Along with technical assistance, providing seeds (free) of nutritious
plants was the aim. Many of the plants that could help feed a family were
discovered in one country, but unknown in another country where the growing
conditions were similar. The spirit of experimentation proved to be an
essential quality for putting the visionary ideas into practice. This meant
that agricultural scientists who wanted to share practical ideas could be
brought together with each other and those who, with practical education, would
branch out to share their knowledge. And ultimately, a network of farmer to
farmer.
As simple as this sounds in the twenty-first century,
I see this as part of the historical shift in the concept of global
agricultural mission work. The desire of missionaries to spread the Gospel
became directly linked to a knowledgeable and practical way to feed the poor
and hungry, a Biblical injunction. Within missionary theology, there seems to
have been a shift from a focus on the next world to a focus on the quality of
life in this world. And it suggests viewing a person’s soul wholistically,
rather than as a separate entity apart from the material body.
ECHO’s education and training program now
serves 160, mostly equatorial, countries where food production is challenging
for a variety of reasons. Through its four satellite centers around the globe,
the work continues to expand.
What makes a visionary would seem to be a combination
of good reasoning as well as inspiration. With Martin as an example, it would
seem that some sort of open-minded receptivity was required. My theory is that
good inspirations come from a common source of constructive Creativity, a kind
of Muse. Perhaps it could even be termed, the “mind of God”. Karl Jung calls
this the Collective Unconscious. Such things as medical advances, technological
advances, and artistic creations, that no one else had thought of before, flow
from this realm. If you could imagine that civilization has progressed from the
first wheel to space flight, and from tribal cultures to rule of law, then you
might also imagine that there are yet more benefits to emerge, through
visionaries, to this world we live in.
I asked Martin if he had any new visions for future
development. He thought it might be less an impact than ECHO’s global mission,
but he would like to do more to introduce newcomers to Florida to a 12-month
food gardening season. As a good idea, it could, he suggested, be shared with
anyone in the world.
