Base Centrum, Spring Quarter

Area Prior Spin

June 18, 1973

All year I have been trying to understand why nobody provided me with the practice of The Turn. Then I recalled my theology and realized that the practice are already there, I just had not seen them So I have been asking myself a question like our eschatological hero might ask, "To what shall you liken the practice of The Turn?" Because I cannot describe them, the only kind of summary I have been able to liken the practice of The Turn to is an Astro World.

Houston is rather a bustling metropolis. Next to the Astrodome is the Astro World, a fund and games park with a lot of rollercoasters and that kind ~f thing. You can go in there and just have fun. I have not been there yet, probably because fun has never been much a part of my life. I tried to remember back to the times when I really had fun. About the only time I can recall really having fun was when my old man had a garage in West Texas. Being on a coastal plain in West Texas the elevation rises some 600 feet, We used to get all the old cars in the garage to work on. Usually people would never come back for them, and so I would inherit some of them. I would drive them around. We had a baseball field -- not much of a baseball field in West Texas, because the rocks are a little large; but it was a place where we could go to drive the cars. I have noticed that has come into vogue these days among the very young. We would go in there with this little "bucket of bolts" and drive it around, and around, and around. Sometimes the doors would fly open and everybody would fall out this way and that way and it felt like all you had was this steering wheel in your hands. That is what the practice of The Turn is like. No vehicle underneath but still lots of fun.

It is fun, and it is engagement, for engagement is there at the same time. It is the kind of engagement you have at an amusement park. By the way, on the billboard the subtitle for Astro World is the Other World. It really is. I would like to redesign it now. It is on the surface of life but the engagement is there.

I find that the practice of The Turn have to do with spending a year walking with city planners and city controllers, the finance officers of a city. Houston's city controller is a Mexican­American. He said that the reason he got into that job was because that is where everything is happening. That is where he can control the purse­strings. All the funds of the city come through there. Recently he told me he would like to see whether it was possible to take a community of Mexican Americans and in five years raise their economic level ten­percent. No one has done it and no one was going to try. The curious thing was that as I looked into his eyes I felt like we could do it. We have the social analysis and methodology that if we tackled the job, we could do it, with a sense of adequacy for engagement in the world. the economic world.

We have teaching methods with which no one else compares. This year Donna came within an inch of landing a job at twelve thousand a year for Texaco Oil Company, training their personnel. The fellow she talked to was convinced, but some board member backed out. But the sense of engagement was there, fun in engagement. It seemed like a lot of fun, when you stop to think about it.

I think it is there with our accomplished methodologies. If you add in our spirit methodologies then I think there is no one more proficient than we are.

I have discovered that I am not a Baptist, but being the character I am, walking with bishops does not come easily. Yet I felt quite adequate walking with bishops and getting the nod of approval when it did not seem very likely.

Well, I do not know what fun in engagement means but I am looking forward to the Cabaret. That is where we are going to discover the practice of The Turn, which are already here.

-- David McCleskey