Temple Collegium
December 30, 1974
Stating the spirit climate of the quarter is always
the critical context for all of our work. Many of us have learned
the hard way that even in recruiting courses, the primary problem
is getting enough clarity on the spirit context to genuinely address
people's lives. People in development who are out touching the
world have data on this and they need it more than someone doing
office work. But that is not really true, either. Whether you
are locked up in an E.I. "tomb", or out in the midst
of the world, there is still that need for the quarter's spirit
context.
What has always shocked me is that the spirit movement,
wherever it exists in the world, will have the same basic experience.
The details will be different but when we get together to talk
you will always be surprised to find that the fundamental depth
experience is the same. The Lord sets the struggle for us, we
do not. History gives us the spirit movement's calling and struggle
for any particular quarter.
Last summer we moved from the mode of faith to the
mode of love and encountered the abyss of hope during the fall
quarter. This happened to us once before when we moved from the
preoccupation with knowing to the preoccupation with doing and
fell into being. It may be that this is always what happens. When
you move across from faith to a concern with love you are driven
down into the deeps. We experienced this last quarter, when the
harsh demands of history came to us as a deep assault on the specific
ways we had decided to love the world.
The fundamental constants of history, life phases,
Ur images and obediences to the way that life actually is also
socked us hard last quarter. The way you talk about that "sock"
is that faith is in crisis at the point of love. Love is so demanding,
love is so depth dealing to the human spirit that it raises in
your mind the question as to whether or not you trust God who
has put you in such a strain. It is a deep kind of strain.
I remember watching news programs last quarter. It
was not the harshness of the news exactly that was a shock to
us, the fact is that life is harsh. It was the fact that we were
supposed to be the people who had fallen in love with this world,
but this world came to us as something hard to fail in love with.
You were disappointed, or aware in a new way of how tough it is
to live in this world and deeply clear about what is demanded
of you. I remember one news program when a Palestinian guerrilla
had been killed. They threw his body out of the window and the
Jewish population of the city continued beating on the body, tearing
it to shreds. What struck me in the news program was not that
life was harsh, I guess I knew that, but the incredible passion
that those people had towards that dead body and the realization
that I was responsible for those people, their passion. A wave
of dread, of crisis, swept over me, as to whether or not we would
continue as men of faith to love such a world. The crisis of faith
is not something that goes away. It is a permanent dynamic. It
is the one you have to discover first In the deep descent to what
we call the dark night. And love is not something that goes away,
We recovered that word in Summer '73. Love begins to bubble up
in your being, and here the love we are talking about is the love
of the mystery and of the world in the mystery, or love of the
world In the world. It is the love of God and neighbor, the love
of world and mystery. When that love is born, it tears you up.
We call that the long march and the birth of authentic love as
it matures and further kills your false love. One way to talk
about this Is as a purgatory experience. Love is turned on In
your life and then everything that is selfishness and self hate
is boiled and burned to a crisp. Since all of us are made out
of nothing else but selfishness and self hate, the birth of love
in our life means that we are getting boiled to a crisp. That
is the experience which we call the long march. The way we have
talked about unfulfiIment, rootlessness, and so on describe the
phenomenon of being burned to a crisp by the appearance of love.
When we talk about humiliation, we are talking about an illumination
of the deeps of life which leads us back to crisis.
It seems like this kind of thing goes on all the
time, as you move back and forth across this gap. When you are
just preoccupied by faith you have just one thing to worry about,
and that is faith. The minute you begin to preoccupy yourself
with love, you have all three to worry about, because you have
crossed this gap, and something additional has come up into the
center. The something additional Is hope.
One of the ways we have talked about hope being experienced
in relation to faith is strength and trust. In relationship to
love, hope is experienced as the power to love. Faith is a blind
leap of trust. As life gets more and more intense the blindness
in that leap is overwhelming because you are trusting in the mystery.
It means that you are walking blind and the presence of the mystery,
the presence of trust in the mystery comes to you as a firmness.
Hope gives faith firmness. It is empowered by the mystery itself.
On the other side, hope comes as the presence of
the promised land into which love is trying to bring everyone.
Without that kind of presence, love is without power to actually
move. Your care has been born. You have organized in your mind
your vision of the actual concerns of the world but you sit there
and study, or go back to bed, or you quit. Hope is the appearance
of a new mood. It is the appearance of confidence that going out
and loving God in the world with your life is actually what you
must do, that this is actually the only life there is for you.
If hope is struggling over against false hope, there
is perhaps some other way to go about living. I want to raise
this question in a minute with just a little bit more spinning
to organize in our minds the directions in which to look. It may
be as important at this moment as getting out more data. You always
have this double problem on your hands. You have got a whole lot
more data on the spiritual climate than you have organized in
your mind to practically use. On the other hand, you need to get
out more data, to find a grounding for everything that you say.
Let me do another little chart here. Faith occurs
within the dark night. You might say that it does not occur anywhere
else. It is not as if it were synonymous with the dark night.
Humiliation is not faith. I will put these categories up here.
You know that they are humiliation, weakness, resentment and suffering.
These categories are not faith. They are the death of faith. Humiliation
is the death of all of faith in yourself, certainly, and weakness,
resentment, and suffering. These are just the illumination of
what life is. You are a humiliated being and will always be one.
You are a weak, resenting, suffering being and will always be
one. The dark night simply illuminates the way life is. That always
comes to you as crisis, whether life is worth living or rot. "If
I am going to be as humiliated as all this I think I will quit,"
and so on. So faith is always driven to crisis by the dark night,
and yet the faith in the mystery only occurs in the midst of such
crisis. But what's really being killed is your false faith, your
faith in yourself, your faith in some Idea you had about life.
The mystery is always gloriously humiliating you which means opening
you up to living beyond yourself.
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L L U M | Humiliation Weakness Resentment Suffering | Spirit Home Power Tears Bliss | Rootlessness Weariness Ineffectivity Unfulfillment |
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T O H R E L R D | |||
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L L U S |
Now love is like a fire that bubbles up inside the
man who is already experiencing the dark night. I think the dark
night clears a lot of trash out of the way, so that love can bubble
up. When love bubbles up it occasions in us these categories we
have been working with: rootlessness, weariness, ineffectiveness
and unfulfiIment. If you feel especially rootless this morning
it is because love Is bubbling up. If you feel especially weary,
that is a good sign, love is bubbling up, love of God and neighbor.
It may be falling in love with some new chick that will overcome
weariness, but falling in love with God and neighbor makes you
weary every time. But that is just a sign of what is happening
to you when love is bubbling up.
The same is true of ineffectivity and Unfulfillment.
You can be effective in a very limited, prescribed arena of love.
Anybody can be effective, and spirit men can be twice as effective
as most men. And so being effective in terms of getting my job
done, that is no problem. All of us can be effective and be far
more effective than we are. In the midst of all of our wonderful
effectiveness, love of God and neighbor bubbles up and shows us
that all of our effectiveness is after all accomplishing a great
deal in a small context. But in the context of all of human history,
which we love, just what is the whole of 5th City accomplishing?
What are twentyfour demonstrations, twentyfour
dinky little demonstrations all around the world actually amounting
to? How many people are you going to teach this quarter out of
the three and one half billion people occupying this planet? Or
when you really get clear on what love of God and neighbor is,
everything appears to be a spit in the ocean. fulfillment is the
same kind of thing. When love bubbles up, these are the signs
that bubble up with ft.
Now we have been talking about hope appearing. I
like that category, "Hope appears." The only thing that
I knew of that appeared before was angels. Angels appeared. All
through the Bible angels appear. I have always been fascinated
with angels appearing. It helped me a little bit when I realized
that angels were awe, and the reason the angels appeared was that
God acted. Or that the mystery had come into the situation and
therefore the angels appeared. Hope doesn't appear because we
do something. It is an angelic appearance, it is an activity of
God that we have to respond to. It is an activity that happens,
only in the midst of the crisis of faith and the dark night. It
is only In the midst of the purgation of your false love that
is going on that your true love appears. It is in that context
that hope appears. It is in one sense nothing other than the intensification
of faith and love. Hope is not some new thing or some way out
of the faith and love struggle. It is the taking of the faith
and love struggle clear to the bottom. It is with the bubbling
up of mobility or power or confidence that you can go on in your
faith and love.
I do not know what category will finally end up there,
but this is one area of interest to me. Humiliation and rootlessness
are both in one sense a lack of a home. Your home is in the East,
your home is in the mystery, your home is in the other world.
You live in the other world and you live in the mystery. You just
sort of visit this world, as a servant. It is the appearance of
your spirit home, where the spirit world genuinely becomes your
home, so that when humiliation knocks you down, you say "Ah
ha, I am at home." When rootlessness overwhelms you, you
say "Ah ha, I am at home." It is not some dumb cynical
thing you are saying, you really are at home. I mean you experience
yourself as being at home. I remember being very excited about
studying the crucifixion and the resurrection last quarter, because
the resurrection came off this time, instead of the crucifixion.
I began to see that the resurrection was just being at home with
the power that crucifies you, that having been crucified by God
you were raised up in glorious delight at the relationship you
were having with God. This was your home, this relationship to
the mystery. This launch into the sheer abyss was your home.
Here you put the category of power, as over against
weariness and weakness I think most of us have been seeing signs
of this for quarters. In the midst of just being weary, you nevertheless
were capable of telling your weariness to go sit in the corner
and behave itself. You had to go recruit an Academy, or whatever
you were doing, and you had the ability to be weary and go on
being weary, and handle that weakness. The ability to be weak,
to go on being weak, but handle that weakness, in the concrete,
was an ability that was given to you. It was an appearance of
power amazing to others and to yourself because normally these
kinds of environments and crises in your life cause collapse.
But you didn't collapse and the ability not to collapse Is one
of the ways of talking about what hope is.
I don't know what these other two categories might
be, but put fear and bliss in here to talk about them.
Hope is the presence of a wild spirit reality, no
matter what kind of images we finally use to talk about It, concretely,
in the midst of faith and love. If you had to talk about faith
in one of our categories of the other world, it is freedom. It
is the free deed of abandoning yourself to the mystery. If you
had to talk about love as one of the categories of the other world,
it is very closely related to care. It collects confusion and
passion for the mystery in your life. And we had better relate
closer to tranquillity. It is the presence of the objective tranquillity
bubbling up in the midst of all the lack of other things.
We are going to be struggling here with hope, over
against the world's hope. In faith you are always struggling over
against the illusion, or the tempter, as St. John calls it. The
tempter is always promising something you will not get. In love
you are always struggling over against desire.
All three of these struggles seem to me to go on
forever in your spiritual life. The question of faith this quarter
is what does it mean that after many years of struggling with
the tempter, we are free to trust the mystery? We have moved over
here into the struggles with the passions of God and the passions
of our being, and dropped into the struggle of hope and eternal
tranquillity. What does that mean? Well, as you try to organize
your screen for looking at life this quarter, where will you be
looking? In what kinds of directions will you be looking? I don't
mean what you will be seeing, because you do not know what you
are going to see. The Lord surprises us every single quarter.
But as you try to organize your mind to look at spiritual reality
In this coming quarter, what are some of the reflections that
you would like to share?
Gene Marshall