[Dialogue] Prolegomena to the rule of the order

Mon Jul 23 13:00:23 EDT 2007

The order hadn't been named at the time.

Bill Schlesinger
Project Vida
3607 Rivera Ave
El Paso, TX 79905
(915) 533-7057 x 207
(915) 490-6148 mobile
(915) 533-7158 fax
bschlesinger.pv at tachc.org

  _____  

From: dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of David Walters
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2007 11:26 PM
To: Colleague Dialogue
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Prolegomena to the rule of the order

Why was the fil-in-the-blank space in the fist line for?

David

----- Original Message ----- 

From: PSchrijnen at aol.com 

To: dialogue at wedgeblade.net 

Sent: Friday, July 20, 2007 3:25 PM

Subject: [Dialogue] Prolegomena to the rule of the order

Here is a trans-cription of the scanned documents. The sentence that really
struck me was sentence three. 

THE

PROLEGOMENA

TO THE

RULE OF THE ORDER

A MORAL COVENANT AND CORPORATE DISCIPLINE

A Prologue to Corporate Discipline

I

1.	We, the __________ Community, by our free resolve, before the
creator of our personal and collective destinies and the name of Jesus
Christ our Lord, take upon ourselves the moral covenant and rule of life,
for the sake of a particular corporate mission within the total calling of
the church, to which we have been commonly elected.

                                                      II

2.	We confess, in the first place, that we can do so only because we
have been seized by the word of the love of God in Christ Jesus solely for
the sake of the mission of being His People in the world. 
3.	We acknowledge, secondly, that we can do so only because we find
ourselves so historically situated that we are commonly called to exercise
this self-understanding and mission in a particular time and place and
endeavour.

                                                     III

4.	We further acknowledge and confess that we have been immediately
prompted to this course by the church's new vision of the Gospel as the
freedom to involve oneself utterly in this world; and we believe that free
involvement in the world demands a disciplined life; 
5.	By the church's new image of herself as mission: the bearer of the
Word of Life in and to history without which men do not live as historical
beings; and we are persuaded that historical mission calls for a disciplined
people; 
6.	By the church's new concern for her own radical renewal in our time
which necessitates creative experiments of many kinds and various forms; we
deem this corporate discipline to be one such experiment for the renewal of
the church; 
7.	By the church's new confrontation by the Fathers with the fact that
wherever authentic faith in Jesus Christ has been recovered in the past,
there has followed a new sense of mission to the world and intentional
discipline for the sake of that mission; 
8.	By the church's new awareness, born of the times, that all men live
consciously or unconsciously by some structure and that the self-aware man
does and must exist in a self-consciously ordered life. Discipline is a
concern of our age both inside and outside the church. 

                                                           IV

9.	We must always remember and ever remind one another that in our
corporate discipline we begin with Christ; we do no strive toward Him. Our
covenant is a sign and symbol of our immutable standing before the Lord; it
must never be perverted into a means to that end. God's acceptance of us is
accomplished forever and it is utterly impossible and utterly unnecessary to
gain our salvation through this rule or any other pious work, so called. 
10.	This means, and let us ever be clear about it, that our covenant is
solely for the sake of the common mission to which we have been called.
By-productive consequences there may be, but the rule is not directed toward
the nourishment of our religious life, the development of a sense of
togetherness, the creation of harmonious relationships, or the establishment
of human community as such, in any form. Our common rule thrusts us upon our
task and exists only for the sake of that task. 
11.	We must always remember and ever remind one another that while our
corporate discipline does and must make explicit certain structures in which
we labor, our common existence is in no sense and at no time synonymous or
reducible to structures of any kind, hidden or disclosed, written or
unwritten. Human relationships remain mysteriously beyond the power of human
reason to articulate and any order to contain. 
12.	Again, let us also be aware that tough our covenant necessarily has
a definite fixedness and a certain rigidity, it must always be kept pliable,
ready for adjustment or the varying needs, situations and obligations of the
different individuals participating in it. Finally and most important, the
total rule must constantly be maintained as open for alteration, for
continuing development and indeed for complete discontinuation. 
13.	We must always remember and ever remind one another that in our
corporate discipline, we no longer live and work alone as isolated
individuals. Henceforth our historical calling and mission, our corporate
being and doing, our personal thinking and acting, are embodied in a
definite community itself incorporated into the total life and mission of
the historical church. All men hiddenly or overly live our of some
community; in our moral covenant we make our social being explicitly
intentional. 
14.	On the other hand, we dare not forget that moral covenants are never
for the purpose of escaping the burden of selfhood. Authentic,
self-consciously disciplined community does not swallow the individual; it
rather creates the very possibility of personhood pushing the individual
against the necessity to decide for himself and then holding him accountable
for the consequences of his own actions. Genuine participation in the
structures of community and authentic individuality are two poles of the
same reality. 
15.	We must always remember and ever remind one another that in our
corporate discipline we are both responsible to and for one another. Not
only must each one of us carry the burden of his own relation to the rule,
but we must each bear the loyalty and disloyalty of our brothers under the
rule. We must assume responsibility for intruding into the other's existence
up to the point of his freedom, and in turn, freely open ourselves to the
other's responsibility to intrude into our life up to the point of our
conscience before God. 
16.	Furthermore, let us never forget that tough we are utterly bound by
our covenant, we remain free at any time and in any circumstance to break
the covenant; never, to be sure, by default in decision but by a
self-conscious free resolve made in the light of other claims which other
covenants in life lay upon us. In one sense, a rule was made to be broken
and the disloyalty taken freely upon ourselves. Our covenant thrusts upon us
our freedom and responsibility. 
17.	We must always remember and ever remind each other that though our
corporate discipline necessarily must include within it explicit ways and
means of accounting before one another and exposing ourselves to our
fellows, it is never to the end of maintaining the rule intact, never for
the sake of judgment in and for itself, but rather to provide the
opportunity for taking upon ourselves afresh our freedom to be responsible
persons in our mission. 
18.	Moreover, we must bear in mind that such explicit opening of
ourselves through our covenant to our promises before the gaze of another,
though not determining our objective guilt, does bring many hidden guilts to
the surface of our lives. Such intensifying of our sensitivities to guilt in
a community grounded in the word of acceptance becomes a great gift. The
releasing of hidden guilt and the possibility of embracing the same, is that
without which we cannot and do not have life. 
19.	We must always remember and ever remind each other that a corporate
discipline involves a kind of total commitment; he who enters into it
therefore must do through his own free resolve in such a fashion that the
rule becomes his own life discipline and not some demand thrust upon him by
another. And if the covenant is to remain an imperative from within
ourselves rather than an alien pressure from without, it must ever and again
be renewed with an abandonment which mixes our total being with it. 
20.	Nevertheless it is utterly necessary that any covenant be understood
and held as relative: relative before our relation to God in Christ;
relative to our effective engagement in the world. For this reason it must
continually be grasped as open-ended; responsible discontinuation will then
be an ever-present possibility for everyone involved; our concrete concern
for one another will insure that such a course be taken only in the same
sobriety and fear of God that our entrance into the covenant demands. 

  _____  

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