Summer '73 ­ Research Assembly

July 5, 1973 Congregation C

Repeat after me:

Circus performers know;

that they can break their necks

falling into a net.

It is the uncertainty which

keeps them skillful and careful.

They know also that the net

can save their lives;

It is this confidence

which makes them daring.

Someone told me yesterday that in the group working on revolutionary principles were some representatives who were cynical, and that it was my guild. I would like to report that my guild is not cynical. It is very simple. It fits under the category of humiliation. I asked them the wrong question. Any time you have any­trouble out of my guild, it does not have anything to do with my guild; it has to do with having an idiot for a prior, that my guild has to survive with these two weeks.

You don't have to worry today about being spiritized and all of that stuff I'm going to talk about tactics. You will not have to make any profound decisions about your calling, from which there is no escape or anything, else like that. Let me pass out a chart we will be looking at in a few minutes.

The evolutionary process is in the hands of man for the first time. We are aware of the fact that it is in our hands. An illustration is that drug, thalidomide, taken by some women. Their children turned out deformed. The other statistics most people are not aware of is that most of those children also have IQs of over one hundred eighty. What it means to have the evolutionary process in our hands is that we are confronted with the choice of what man will be one thousand years from now. Will he be a creature like you and I with IQs of one hundred forty or whatever, which is pretty good; or will he be a creature who does not look anything like we do, with IQs of one hundred eighty and above? We can decide that. All we would have to do is give every woman or planet earth that drug and it would be done in ten years. The evolutionary Process is literally, not just imaginally, in our hands.

I've read a more recent one that was even more rocking than that. There is a process they call cloning. Not many of you have heard of it, but they have been doing it with animals. You take any part of the skin of an animal and you can reduplicate that anima1 100% as many times as you like. That has been done with animals. It is being done now. I was reading an article that was raising that question relative to human beings. You could reduplicate John F. Kennedy one hundred times, and you could reduplicate Hitler one thousand times. Which shall it be? Evolution is in the palm of our hands. It is not preordained somewhere. You and I are deciding it now. In this arena of tactics, that is the context for why we need a tactical system of direction action.

I saw a movie called "Johnny Got His Gun". I was in the Academy and thought we would run down and see a movie, and I had not seen it. It is not very often that I take anybody to see a movie that I have not already seen and screened myself. We risked the situation. We went in and it was an average old World War I flick where this guy got drafted into the military and left his fiancee behind. The men were out on the battlefield one night and mortar was flying through the air, and fireworks and guns, and they were falling in foxholes. A group of them jumped into a foxhole and the foxhole blew up. The next thing, you see is an ambulance with sheets over people going in, and the next thing you see is this silver canopy. You start wondering what is going on and that is when the movie starts happening to you. You thought you were going to watch an average movie, but what happened next is that you begin to hear the doctors talk about whether they should kill him or not or whether he should continue to live the way he was. It was revealed that the soldier had lost both legs and both arms and his face was all gone. All that was left was what I did not say was missing and his consciousness. That is where the horror began to move in. ~.e was aware. He started saying, ''I can't move." They just let you inside his consciousness. He screamed, and nobody could hear him scream except you sitting there, and cursed himself. The movie goes on into the dimensions of meditation, contemplation and prayer as he grappls with whether or not he ought to be alive. The movie finally ends with his decision, that what he needs to be is a freak, and that would be the only purpose for his life.

The context of why a tactical system is necessary for the renewal of society, has to with what it is that needs to be a part of the social structures of society, to allow a human being, no matter what his physical condition, to grass his life as that which is significant. There is tragedy after tragedy. I guess there are two kinds of suffering the church has always known about. One is the external suffering people experience, the lack of food, the physical conditions under which people live, the economic, political, and cultural tyranny that exist across the globe. That is one whole dimension of suffering. Another dimension, which no man can escape, is having to grapple with the issue of whether or not his life is worth having on his hands. This one rocks me the most, and causes me the most pain in my own interior. I can stand walking through a place where people are living in mud, and eating whatever they can find in that situation. I can handle that pretty well, up to a point, but where all my defenses collapse is when I run into a human life that does not grasp itself as human. There is not any way I can talk myself out of being rocked to the bottom by that suffering. What you and I are out to do is to eliminate that suffering which is unnecessary. Of course liberals always scream because they think that means creatureliness goes away. That does not mean contingency goes away, but simply that when you and I live in an age of abundance, people do not have to be starving. There is not any rational reason why the globe is not being fed right now. 'None, except nobody has decided to do it.

The four points I'm talking about on tactics are the context for building the tactical system, the vision of the tactical system, the procedures for creating the­tactical system and the implementation Or the tactical system. I wove that together in a sentence that went something like: Global innocent suffering requires a New Social Vehicle, brought about through practical repentance of the Church, as the guild, on behalf of all men.

Here is an image that might be helpful. This is society here. What we are talking about and experiencing is something like this. We experience ourselves here as that part of human society that sees the judgment, sees the imbalance that is present in society in our time, the economic tyranny, the collapse of the political process to economic dominance and the total vacuum of the cultural dimension of life. He not only sees that judgement, but has a vision of the resurrection and how that society might be rebalanced on behalf of all men.

The question of a tactical system is how you and I get from here in this given situation, over to here. No idealism. As soon as this happens, there is going to be another imbalance. The way I get that said to myself is something like this. As soon as I fall over into a grave, folks need to put dirt on it immediately so somebody has some more space to walk on to keep going, and clean un the mess I created renewing the fine earth.

People of God are perpetually and forever on the march in history. The question of a tactical system is what we have to forge out here, and the image of the pressure points is fantastic for me. There is one in economic, there are three located in the political, and there are five located in the cultural. Our task for the tactical system is to create tactics, in a rational way, that are inclusive and global, yet can be applied in every local situation, that can move on those pressure point. of society and bring about the rebalancing that is required. Our task is bringing this system into being. If we do, what is going to happen is ­ and it is always a remnant out here ­ a massive awakenment in society and a massive participation on the local leveling the creation of that rebalancing. Without that system Nobody even believes it is possible. Nobody believes this is possible without a rationally laid out plan where all your ex excuses about how it cannot be done are radically called into question every time you encounter that model. You have so many stories for yourself about why it cannot be changed. What people are doing these days is saying, we worked hard ~n the sixties and it did not change anything. We may as well get the best we can and ride on out to the end. Let's ride the last leg of the bourgeois life style as it goes down the drain. All the great revolutionaries of the sixties are not great revolutionaries any more. Unless you have a model that is comprehensive and global and inclusive you cannot stand what you are going to encounter out here; save you have a grasp after the spirit dimension of life, you cannot handle what you are going to run into out here. That seems to me what is required.

That is the question of the system. It is the question of how that gets implemented. How does the system we build move from a rational model to actual living form in the midst of society? What takes place when a tactical system takes place? What do you and I see going on? What will people be encountering? The radicalness that is also present in the midst of this, is that this is structural, not individual. That has been rocking me more than ever before, that there is not one chance of doing this on an individual level. There have to be structures that care. There have to be structures that people can engage in long after you and I have fallen over into a grave. It is operating in that structural context that throws all of us into a whole new universe. I did not know so deep down inside of me I was programmed with the individual way to deal with lie. In terms of the rest of our colleagues in the Assembly, in terms of the form of the guild, it is this tactical system that either makes the form of the guild that they come up with make sense or not. Who wants to be a guild if you do not know what your going to do? You Just cannot sit around and sing. If you are anticipating that, forget it. We will be singing; we will be singing on the roads. and in cars. and knocking on peoples doors, and setting up tables and chairs. We will be singing, but we will be on the road while we sing these twenty years that we are already in.

In terms of the frame of the guild, it is the foundation for the ecumenical parish, and the work we are doing here in tactics. It provides the base from which the vision of the ecumenical parish can become a reality. You and I are not interested in creating form just so we can have new forma because we are tired of calling the old forms we have what we are calling them. It is mission that is calling these new forms into being. It is the future that is calling these forms into being.

In terms of the logistics of the movement, how the movement is ordered these twenty years, it has to do with the fact that the images we are operating out of are going to be transformed radically. You always intuit that and you anticipate it. IT suppose we will get our first radical encounter with that in the Cabaret, how our images, our style, and our practical relatedness as the spirit movement will be altered by what we come up with as the tactical system of the guild. Another way to say that is that it is like we were traveling on several roads in the movement. There wee the region, and then there was the local church project, and then there was 5th City over here, and then there was the Academy, and then there were research assemblies, and everybody was always in deep turmoil about which one. What the guild is doing is pulling all that into one. It is pulling all that twenty years into a practical focus so we can move into the future. It is this moment we have been waiting for.

The work we did on our document is critical because the document we have done in the last several days gives us a common place to stand, gives us some basic common images, articulates what our stance is out of which we decide the tactics. If you do not articulate a common picture and have a common context, you never finally decide what your tactics are. Your anxieties decide what your tactics are.

We have been creating a context for ourselves in terms of the times. This was the practical work that was done, articulating the times, because the church is not some invented response of people who are doing what they would like to do in the first instance. The church is a response to the times that God has placed in them. We always articulate the times, and what is required in the midst of those times for humanness. Then we began to wrestle with the question of the style, or the characteristics of that response. You and I cannot operate as the pariah clerks did fifteen hundred years ago in terms of the guilding dynamic. What is the twentieth century guilding dynamic? How do you know it when you see it? What are you pointing at when you are pointing to the guild in our time? What is the intention of that dynamic? What is it out to occasion? What is its function in the midst of society? It is the kind of thing we have been doing. I asked a colleague what were same of the implications out of 0a guild work; and­he said, "My future is going to be tiring." I suspect that is the overarching implication of all of our work. The future is making us tired now, and we have not even begun yet. Just thinking about it gets you weary.

The interior deeps that we are going to be called on to have these twenty years is gain" to be more than we ever imagined ourselves as capable of having. I suspect you have already experienced that. Our prowess with methodologies and corporateness is going to be far beyond anything you and I have ever imagined we were capable of as a movement. You already sense that coming into being, that new style, that new people we are. The style in which we act out our tactics, do our tactics, is being forged out here.

I have been up all night trying to define direct tactics, and I have not done well, so I tried to come at it with a bit of humor, which always helps when you did not do well. Maybe a direct tactic would be like the whole dialogue between Moses and Pharoah. When Egypt is having family night you call upon the Lord and put frogs in everybody 'e beds. That is a direct tactic. And Pharoah screamed. Pharoah were really upset by the whole thing. Then the locusts started attacking people. Pharoah was stubborn. I have been driven to read the Old Testament. I think it has to do with sanctification. Anyway I was reading that whole journey of the people of Israel and reading the dialogue between Pharoah and Moses. Pharoah was hard to work with. It was incredible because at the beginning God told Moses that Pharoah was not going to do what he was asked, but you go ask him anyway. Moses goes back three hundred times. At the end of every time Pharoah says, I will let them go. Bo Moses goes back and gets ready to give his great victory speech, and the word comes that Pharoah was just kidding. This line in the scripture says, "Just as God said he would."

Direct tactics have to do with dealing with the establishment in a way in which you and I have never grasped ourselves dealing with the established structures of society. It is frightening, as far as I can tell. It is just frightening. It means dealing with the disestablishment in a way in which you and I have never dealt with the disestablishment. That is not the hooker. The hooker is dealing with both of them at the same time, around the same table. This is where the crunch comes, and where you and I are going to become whole new people in terms of what it means to enable corporateness to take place in any situation we show up in, and mission to happen and care to be acted out. Direct tactics is practical action. That is one of your criteria. It is practical. It is concrete. It is nitty­gritty activity. It is having a Cabaret in a community of five thousand. It is a reality. It is a hunk of humanness there. It is practical. It is real. It is a LENS course, or something like that, a direct encounter with people's lives and a direct question to be raised of the future, and the people there grappling with that question of what the future is all about. Altering the consciousness of those that are encountered is what a direct tactic does.

I was doing the priest conversation in Winnipeg and everybody had just about given up on me. This Sister was going to be nice and help me out. That kind always kill me. She was going to "take me to the airport", so she said, "Now wait a minute. Why don't I leave you at the airport hotel (I was leaving my wife and everything) and I'll go talk to your wife and try to get things straightened out. You just wait here for a day; and if it does not work, I will come back and get you." I said, "Oh no, I would never do that kind of thing. What would I wait around in this God­awful place for?" And I just sort of dropped her through the floor. She paused, and then she said, "I won't do it." I said, "What do you mean you won't do it?" She said, "I won't take you to the airport. I know what I will do; I will turn around and take you right back where you­belong." And the bottom of the whole room fell out. That is a direct tactic. I will not take you to the airport. You are going to stay in this situation that you have showed up in and live it. And I have got the doors locked. I think that is directness. It is an explosive event. It is a catalytic happening.

One of the ways to get hold of tactics is remembering when they have been done on you. That broke loose the whole Local Church Tactical System for me. I ask people, sometimes, "when have tactics been done on you?" One time I knew this man who was considering whether he was going to get married to this woman. All of­sudden there was a huge family explosion about whether or not he was really serious, and three months later he was married. I was tacticed. I am not sure whether it was direct or indirect but it worked. To ask when tactics in­are been done on you is one of the ways you can get yourself grounded in what these are all about.

A direct tactic is strategically organized; it is not an immediate response. It is not a reactionary relationship to life. My image of being strategically organized is this little old lady who walked into a room and said, "What did you do, beat up a couple of bums? I've got a whole regiment." Direct tactics are not just doing things that come to your mind which are interesting, nor doing all the things you either failed at trying to do or never had enough nerve to do years ago. That is not what tactical thinking is. It is not trying to redeem your past. It is creating the future.

Direct tactics relate to the pressure points, these nine: inclusive myth, community groupings, basic roles, social morality, formal methods, knowledge access, bureaucratic systems, deliberative systems and anticipated needs. Doing the direct tactics relates to these pressure points and that is where we are going to begin to work today, getting on top of the past memory and wisdom that is there. It is out of the practical vision document that direct tactics are forged. It is to actualize the nexus: humanized education, globalized economics. Those tactics are out to bring that off as the future.

It is to impact the total social process so this whole thing explodes with the vitality and passion that is laying underneath it all the time. What does it mean to explode that passion, that vitality in society? It has to do with radically changing the social fabric. It is not liberalism. It is the transestablishment posture out of which direct tactics are forged and implemented. The disestablishment is the dynamic in life that calls into question that which is established. The proestablishment is that dynamic which maintains in being that which is established. The transestablishment is that dynamic which lives both of those at once, and grasps itself as that which wholly honors the past and yet is utterly out to invent the future at the same time. It is within this posture that the tactics will be acted out in society. It is to bring about revolutionary charge to sustain the new consciousness that is at hand in the twentieth century. Have you ever seen people who for a moment have the new consciousness, and then you just see it go away? The tactics are out to sustain that vitality that breaks loose in people 'e lives.

We are living out of the forms and images that some characters gave themselves two thousand years ago. And they are on their way out. They have held us in being and allowed us to grasp ourselves as human. Somebody has to do that job today. Civilization is like a large building, and the windows are cracking and the paper is peeling and the paint is cracking and the plaster is falling apart and the steps are squeaky, but you can always find people who will wash windows. There has never been any trouble in history finding those kind of people. You will always able to find people who want to help varnish the steps. The people that are hard to find are the idiots who will go down in the basement, no matter how many there are, and half of them line up on one aide of the building and support it while it is falling down, and the other half build a new foundation on this side, and then they switch. Those are the people who are hard to come by. That is what it means to be a thousand year revolutionary. You know about the broken windows all the time you are in the basement. You know about the steps falling apart and how somebody is going to trip and be killed because you are in the basement. You also know that without a foundation, everything goes. It is to that one thousand years we give ourselves as we forge out the tactical system.

The qualities that are there have to do with sociological healing. What does it mean to heal sociologically? How can that be manifested in the fabric of society? It is grounded in the Word. What does it mean to nurture the fragileness of human lives? What does it mean to restore dignity to life? I go into restaurants and I always like to pick on the waitresses. Just by the way they walk to your table, you can tell whether or not they grasp that there is not anything finer than being a human being? There is not anything more important, more glorious than having shown up on this planet. To restore honor into the midst of life so people might grasp life as a privilege rather than a burden is a part of what the vision of the tactical system is.

I saw this movie "The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao", and it see something. It was about this little Chinese character. I could not believe it. I did not believe anybody ever produced it. I thought I was having a dream or something. But it was real. Somebody actually wrote it and produced it. It wee on television. It was this little Chinese guy who rides into town on this mule. He is a puny character, I mean real puny. He has this fishbowl and that is all. He has no other equipment, nothing but a fishbowl and 0a mule. The next thing you know he goes into this town and starts doing strange things. And then there is a circus tent. It looks small outside, but it is huge on the inside. He gets the printing press working again, and he is starting to move in on things, when he spots the contradictions. He has located the pressure points in that local situation, and begun to move on them. And nobody ever knew he was doing it. It was devastating.

He had a fortune teller who moved in on one of the women who was there in the town. I think that is under the basic roles pressure point. The fortune teller rocked her to the center of the earth about what her life was and how she had decided to relate to it. She tried to run from that and ran into Medusa, the Greek mythological reality, who turned her into stone. Then Merlin, who was a feeble magician who could not even pull rabbits out of his hat, healed her. She was a different human being. It is possible to heal society. There was a little boy who wanted to be somebody, who did not understand that he already was all' he could ever be. At the end of the movie he was screaming, "I can do it. I can do magic. I can make life happy." There was a liberal who was running a newspaper and at the end he was transformed' The villain got transformed. In the movie they showed the transformation. That is the kind of job you are ­­out to bring about, to have that actually happen in a local situation.

The impact arena, in terms of the global contextual components, are the audiences. What are the groupings that need to be impacted relative to those nine pressure points? That is a global question. Then what are globe1 contradictions in those arenas, in those nine arenas? What is the global social vision of what is possible for tomorrow? The master strategies have to do with what are the stages toward bringing off the goals that we lay out. The rationale, out of which we do our tactics, is the master strategies. A paramount tactic is a tactic that you can do on a pressure point that does as the others at once. There are charts and triangles that will just blow your head right off your body in terms of pushing this little button here and the whole universe lights up. You can actually see how that takes place. That is what is devastating. It is not just fun and games. You do a paramount tactic and the whole universe, the whole social process is altered. A primary tactic is doing just one of the pressure points, with some obvious tangential implications, but not the power of the paramount tactic in terms of the whole social process. The secondary tactic is one that begins to move forth actualizing and bringing off one of the primary tactics. There are nine paramount tactics we have to come up with. There are five primary tactics for each pressure point, and fifty secondary tactics for each pressure point. That is four hundred fifty, not a whole lot. We still have a week and a few days to do it in. We will have a total of nine paramount tactics one for each of the nine pressure points.

This is a lot of work we will have to do. We will have to check ourselves in terms of inclusiveness, in terms of depth, in terms of honoring our past wisdom, and in terms of being open to the future. Some of the ways we want to do that is to hold ourselves before the practical vision; to look at the plotting work that has been done, or the locating of proposals from the past summers on the social process triangles or the locating of contradictions and how they relate to each other. This is to hold us to comprehensiveness, and inclusiveness. We are going to hold ourselves over against the revolutionary principles we worked out in the last two days, in the context that we spelled out in this document. All of those things will be there to be guidelines for us. We also have the Cozart model. Whatever we produce has to be inclusive, internally consistent, rational, beautiful and elegant.

One other thing is that Mountain Rivera has to be able to do this. Whatever we come up with, Mountain has to be able to do it. That is not elevating ourselves, because if none of us know we are Mountain stumblebums, then we are in trouble. A colleague in Bombay has to be able to pick this up and say, "Yes, yes, it makes sense. I see how I can engage in that; I can see how I can give myself to that." It has to be simple and comprehensive. We have to write up a document for the procedures of how you go about doing this. It has to hold the awareness of the global and the local as a dynamic. If it does not, we may as well not start. There is no one local place in the globe that will survive on behalf of itself. Imagine the wisdom, and the forces, and the connections. If only fifty local communities in North America were self­consciously related together, just imagine what would happen. There are four hundred nineteen thousand parishes in the world. We need to do every one of them.

The LENS grade must pull together the back up work, and all that wisdom, and how that relates, so this will be a global­local happening. What motivates people? One of the things that motivates them is a model, a plan that calls them into the future. You see right now moat people have no future. They do not have any image at all of any future that is different than their present situation. A model motivates and calls people into the future, releasing their creativity and their passion.

Sanctification will be part of the tool. You and I have to undergird everything in terms of the interior discipline that is going to be required to get this task done. There is a simple explanation for interior discipline. You are marching down the battlefield and see Henry get his head blown off, and Paul breaks into tears because of Henry, and you say, "I can't take it any more." But, you keep on going. That is interior discipline. When you have lost all your guts, you keep going anyhow. Your vision gets dark, and you cannot figure out why you are doing what you are doing, and you do not have any more nerve left, but you keep right on going. I had a colleague who came up to me once, who thought she was having a spirit problem. She said, "I do not have any spirit deeps. All I have got is this big hole in my stomach." Someone was standing next to her, so I said to him, "Shall I tell her now or later. That is your spirit deeps. That big hole in your stomach is your spirit deeps." When you know that you have no more courage, then you have nothing to worry about. If it is all gone, having it or not having it never will bother you again. You just keep right on going.

I had an image shift that was helpful. It was terrible but it was helpful. One of my images of justification is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They get to the cliff and the sheriff and everybody in the posse are coming behind them. One says, "We'll have to jump." The other one screams, "I don't know how to swim." And the first one says, "That is all right, the jump will probably kill you anyway." That has to do more with justification, destroying yourself in the breach of history. Sanctification is just the opposite. In sanctification if you look in front of you, there is no cliff. There is Just the open road. There is a cliff behind you. There is no where to go back to. If you turn back toward the cliff, you know what happens. The church has always known what happens. That is Lot's wife. I saw "Sodom and Gomorrah" one night on television. It was devastating as she just turned to stone. So do not turn around because there is nothing back there. The future is ahead of you. The interior experience of turning and facing the future is like you experience yourself lying in a casket. The lid is coming down on you, and you can hear lt. And it is irritating. The last thing before the lid closes, which is what tactics move you into, you see, you peek out the little crack that is left, about an inch before it comes all the way down and God winks at you and says, "I've got you." The only appropriate response is, "Well, I've got you too." Tactics has something to do with that.

Larry Ward