Summer '73, Research Assembly, July 18, 1973

1. In order to grasp the mystery of life man is going to have to deal with the new that is coming into being. In the past few years there was the constant sense that society might be dying out. Now it has become evident that society is going to make it. That is resurgence. Somehow a new resolve happened and we came through. It is in this social context that we are giving form to the Guild.

2. These are dangerous times, for you realize that the trans-establish-ment has so captured the longing of people across the world that it can go ahead and win. Our time is similar to the time when the church discovered it had the opportunity to create the Holy Roman Empire. That is a terrifying kind of time, a shocking time of possibility. It is a time when you suddenly realize that experimentation has stopped. You look around and there are no wild social experiments going on. What you find instead are local groups with their eyes on the local community. Groups that used to be continually experimenting with different forms of social change are today in the local community looking at what the local form of care might be. Everywhere people are raising the same question. What is the local form of care that works? This is what it means to live in a time of resurgence. You discover that everywhere you look the future is the question.

3. When I first began teaching RS­I it was said that a good pedagogue hangs his neuroses on the door post when he enters a room to teach. I remember one occasion of hanging my peculiar attachments on the door post as I went on stage and then realized I did not have anything but my neuroses to work with. What went on stage was some kind of shell, some kind of skeleton. To say anything I had to figure out move by move what was needed to teach that seminar. We live in a time when this is happening to society. People are becoming less concerned with their attachments and more concerned with what the new shell of society is going to be. What is the form required to be the people who authentically care in our time? That is also the context in which the Guild comes into being.

4. I do not know how to say adequately the kind of foundational radicality that comes in times like this. It is a time like this in which people decided to leave Europe and find the new world. It was in a time like this in which people decided to launch their outrigger canoes and find the islands of the Pacific. There is a foundational shock which happens to people in this kind of time. When people first met the West, with the kind of newness that was there, and it dawned on them that their entire past was changing, for no accountable reason thousands of people died. The population statistics for Mexico, when the Conquistadors moved in, are in no way accounted for by the number of people who were killed. People died out of sheer shock, overawed by the possibility that was offered, and the kind of horror and scandal that possibility was. In creating the Guild we are inventing a social form by which people do not have to die in the face of this kind of possibility. The Guild is a form by which people can live in the midst of the wild transformation and possibility we find ourselves living in. The Guild therefore is an incredible kind of structure. Our struggle in creating the form of the Guild has been with how you structure it in such a way that it holds the richness of these times.

5. First, how do you formulate a Guild in such a way that it holds the incredibly shocking globality of our time? What does it mean to say that I am the center of the universe in my relationships? We are clear that we are those relationships in which we are engaged, and that I am the one who is responsible for the whole of it. The Local Church Experiment Galaxy reports have miracle stories from all over the continent. When you read some of them you wonder how they are miracles. Others that you read are simply unbelievable wonders. I realized one day that those miracle stories illustrate the extent to which each local Galaxy is a sign of the presence of the global movement. Your local place is the embodiment of the possibility of every relationship, for every guildsman on this planet. This week, by virtue of one miracle story, Peoria is the presence of the whole global Guild. And the whole Guild is catalyzed by one little miracle story out of Peoria. If Peoria is the only one around its miracle stories do not amount to much. If you have only one or two Guilds your miracle stories are worthless because they do not have the power of being catalyzers across the movement.

6. If all I have is one Guild I do not have a Guild. I do not even have what I have. If all I have is one, I do not have a system or a network, nor do I have the global webbing that gives my one Guild its power in the local community. If I show up as parish number six in a metro I go and create two hundred fifteen other parish Guilds in that metro before I do parish number six because one parish Guild is useless without the other two hundred fifteen, and without the other regions and areas across the globe. It looks as if the whole thing has to be done across the whole globe at once, because the Guild is that which is the presence of the Global and makes holy the space of the whole earth. On the other side of that you make the whole world holy in the particular, parish by parish, metro by metro, region by region. The Guild is the sign that the parish, which you thought was just a local neighborhood, is the place of the possibility of being the globe.

7. Then, in the midst of releasing the sacredness of every place, how do you engage not just a few well trained guildsmen but the masses? I was shocked by the stories of the baptism of Clovis and all the Franks. The church baptized the whole lot of them. They lined up the whole country on the banks of the river and just went down the row. It struck me as not honoring individual decisions, or even considering if they understood. In creating the kind of mass movement needed in our time we begin with the fact that everyone is aware of resurgence, and with the fact that the Guild is after the whole thing. How do you release the whole PTA to care for the world, or the whole Kiwanis Club, rather than simply one here and one there? The significance of participation in the Guild is that your life is expended as part of, and in the midst of this global movement of guildsmen. The crucial thing is not that I show up as one guildsman in a Research Assembly, but that I show up as one in the midst of a thousand who decide to be guildsmen in the midst of the world.

8. What might this look like? If you had ten in every parish across this world you would have something like five million guildsmen. What does that take in my parish? My family makes four, plus a couple of families in the neighborhood makes eight, plus the butcher and the baker makes ten. Now we have that parish and move on to the next one. It is almost that simple in terms of the number of troops that you go after. Ten in a parish and move on, then ten in another parish and move on ­­ that is the kind of formulation that you look toward. This kind of task is being the church in an incredible way as the leaven in the midst of primal community. It releases people to participate creatively in a community, as it gives form to the human motivity breaking loose in this time of resurgence.

9. I have been struck by the way people show up for research PSUs, weekend after weekend. One Friday evening a colleague showed up and said that he had decided this PSU was so important that he had taken the weekend off from his work at the hospital. What we were doing with PSUs was transformed when I realized that participating in that kind of research was of such significance that people saw it as more important than their jobs. That is just as possible in any parish. People have decided that looking at their primal community and engaging in serious discussion and planning for their neighborhood is as critical as the way they spend their time on their job. When you see that kind of impact going on in a PSU, or in a LENS course, you begin to realize that the Guild offers every person a way of participating in renewing the dynamics of their society.

10. I could not believe they were going to televise the Watergate hearings. Then I could not believe people would watch the hearings instead of their soap operas. It struck me that you could almost see ten million people sitting in front of the television during lunch and longing for a way to be able to help, longing for a way to participate in that situation responsibly. For that crisis is in the fiber of everyman's existence, as much as it is a crisis at the upper levels of government. Watching the hearings was one way to get involved in that kind of crisis. Some people said they would much rather see soap operas because they could not stand this kind of struggle. The Guild has to enable people to pick up this kind of possibility, and enable creative involvement.

11. What would it look like to have the kind of social form present in which you could enable local men to pick up this kind of crisis and act on it through a direct tactic arena? I can envision both the incredible passion and the incredible chaos that people will rind themselves in. And, how can I use my missional resources effectively? It is clear to me that in teaching the LENS course and talking about the vocational malaise and people struggling with genuine masculinity end femininity, you experience deep interior pain. Then I realized in the midst of a lecture that what you are giving to people is precisely the resources they need, to come to terms with and offer possibility to every situation they are in. In that realization I experienced care about the vocational chaos my life is. I discovered that without my own vocational chaos I would not have any resources to enable other people to deal with the sort of vocational malaise they are experiencing All of the things I thought were my problems show up as the most helpful resources I have. What does it mean to name this chaos my most valuable resource, the only resource I have to deal with our times? This also is what the Guild is out to do. To say it another way, the Guild enables every man to be the glory of God.

12. St. Augustine once wrote, "The Church uses everybody to show that the Word is true. The Church uses heathens to show that the Word is true." The Church uses everyone that comes along, both the faithful and the unfaithful, the chaotic and the orderly, to demonstrate that the Word is true. The church offers the kind of social construct by which all men have the possibility of participating in the renewal of society. The Guild is the construct that does this. The Guild offers a way for everyone in the community to participate in renewing that community whether they want to or not. It offers a way for people to be a sign of possibility whether they are out to be a sign or not. It offers a way for someone who just likes to paint handrails to participate in the renewal of the community, whether he even knows he is renewing the community or not. You are out to see to it that everyone sees the vision, but you are also out for everyone to participate in the extent to which the Word can be released at any given time. In the midst of all that, you are out to offer people the incredible opportunity of being the people for whom the mystery, the wonder of living, is present in every bit of life. That is all that the Guild is out to do. It offers wonder, mystery, freedom, care and tranquillity in the midst of every kind of life. The way you can tell a guildsman is that he is the one who is brooding eternally on the questions the Lord of history is raising. He is the one who stands before the awe that just keeps showing up in the midst of life.

13. I have spent the last two weeks figuring out research procedures for coming up with the form of the Guild. Last Tuesday, we decided, was the day that the form of the Guild would emerge. We said what we were doing was orchestrating a miracle. We stayed up late and wrote perfect procedures in order for that miracle to happen. We worked out exactly where the groups would meet and even planned special food. We considered every detail and expected a fantastic day. The day the miracle was to happen we waited in anticipation of the feedback from the research. We kept looking in to see how well it was going. About eleven o'clock I went to a meeting and someone asked how it was going. I replied that it was going fantastically great. In the middle of saying that I realized we had forgotten two­thirds of what had to be done. We had created procedures only for the primal Guild, and completely forgotten the Guild system and the Guild network. So we went back to work on how we could possibly still get the job done. We worked until three o'clock in the morning getting out new procedures. It was one of the few days in my whole life that I did not have even a trace of a spare minute. It was absolutely fascinating. It was incredible. It was one of the fullest days I have ever lived.

14. The Guild is out to create a situation in which that kind of fullness can happen, in which that kind of wonder in the midst of day to day living can take place. It is out to provide a vehicle by which everyman on this planet, no matter who he is, can come to terms with the awe that shows up in the midst of the mundane of this world. The Guild is the possibility for the guildsman to demonstrate that life is good, not in some generalized way, but that life is good in every mundane moment, in every mundane structure. The Guild sees to it that everything becomes a mirror in which every man sees reflected the incredible wonder of living.