Global Centrum: Chicago
Global Research Assembly
July 18, 1975
Now there are five things we are out to do... and
one of those is Functional Eptitude...
This lecture is about the education of and by the
Movement. In this arena, these days, we are struggling with several
questions: What is training, really? What will it look like in
ten years? And, most crucial of all, How do we grow up priorship
faster?
We used to be an Educational Movement. We used to
be a Teaching Order. In the criticism of the old society, education
is a pioneer function. In the forties and fifties colleges and
seminaries were places where the edge was happening. In the building
of the old society, education becomes a vehicle with which you
give criticism to the old society and bring consciousness to bear
upon what is happening. But in the building of a new society,
education brings up the rear. Since 1971 our life as an Educationa1
Movement and Order has been passing away. It is now gone. We are
a Service outfit.
Education is one of the five services with which
we serve the world. We not only train, we demonstrate what training
can do. The first thing we started after 1971, that great summer
of the turn toward the world, was to work on a course that later
came to be called LENS. Now LENS has evolved into a Town Meeting,
which is not a course at all. Town Meetings are not education
at all. They are a meeting. The masses of the world would never
have been reached in a classroom. The meeting of a whole town
on Saturday afternoon right off Main Street in Wallabalooa, Indiana,
is not education. Now, these community meetings are going to turn
loose and multiply like rabbits. The classroom, however, has the
opposite effect. In a classroom you tend to take something and
refine it like gold. You drag in a lot of people by the neck if
need be and turn a few of them into revolutionaries. In the sixties
we moved on awakening the Church with courses. And out of it we
refined a Movement. A renewed movemental Christianity was distilled
through the use of courses and that job was just done, period.
Now Town Meeting goes forth to wake up the last sleepyheaded
fat lady in the world. The classroom will follow and refine out
a league of guildsmen who care unto death.
Impact focuses on communities and expand -----
Training focuses on individuals and narrows down- - - - - - - - -
Impact focuses on communities and expands almost
unbelievably. Training focuses on individuals and narrows down.
"Narrowing down" does not mean that more and more training
is not done over the years. It narrows down in the sense that
people are refined by one level of training into the next level
of training. That you grow a few great trees out of many acorns.
Now, RSI and LENS are impact in most of our thinking, but they
are education. I don't know if that necessarily makes them training.
You see a kind of mingled ambiguity there. So I have held that
ambiguity by using the word, "impact courses. " At any
rate, RSI and LENS are grade school, so to speak. Many people
will get to heaven who have only gone to grade school. But, we
need to get a few people through university levels in the eptitudes
of the revolutionary life. That is what that chart means as it
narrows down to the right. A prior is a "university grad
in revolutionary prowess." (As represented by that little
stick figure there on the chart.) Now, ITI and GTI (Global Training
Institute), the secular form of the ITI, have training in their
names. Some of us have wanted to call them "impact"
and you can see why. A part of their function is to reach out
into the levels of the world that have not been really reached
in many ways before. But I suppose "transitional training"
would distinguish them from profound training. Eight weeks of
formal education when our methods are taught in depth is training
of a different type, training that occasions priorship. "One
year of corporate living" can mean many things on this chart.
It can mean a galaxy, certainly. It could mean a really good cadre.
It certainly means a religious house. One year in a good religious
house is TRAINING in all capital letters. Training that occasions
priorship. In a religious house where everything that makes a
religious house a religious house has gone to pot, training does
not happen.
The "Forty Days of Solitary Retreat" is
a balloon there. It is not training, but some form of nurture.
It is spiritual prowess rather than functional eptitude. We need
to keep spiritual prowess separate from functional eptitude in
our thinking and planning. Forty days may be too long. Jesus had
a forty day retreat. Ignatian retreats were about that long, but
maybe we can spin through the endless life in nine days. Things
move faster today. Anyhow, the retreat has nothing to do with
this subject. It is sort of a boundary for our imagination here.
We have experimented with retreats in our Odyssey, in our experiments
in fasting and vigils. The study of Ignatius is a very important
part of our memory in this area. Perhaps many of us are on retreat
now while we are in the midst of missional work. It seems to me
there is something like a retreat going on in it. Maybe the Starets'
prayer is a symbol of being in permanent retreat while you go
on with your work . At any rate, in full proximity to this there
is profound training where a person has time to anchor his life
in profound Faith, profound Love and profound Hope. Now, you can
take "eight weeks of formal education" more than once
and you can take a year of "corporate living" more than
once. I have been in "eight weeks of training" many
times and am still being trained every quarter. Many of you have
also been in "one year of corporate living" many years
and are still being trained. If anyone knows what else really
trains a prior, please speak up soon.
Now, what are priors made of? Priors are made entirely
out of consciousness of profound consciousness. They are made
entirely out of Faith and Hope and Love. Profound consciousness
just is. It smokes down there underneath everyone's life, but
consciousness of profound consciousness is a journey to being
conscious of the profound consciousness that is just there. Priors
have made the journey. An iron man is iron because he has dropped
an iron rod down into profound belief. It is as if a prior is
made out of iron rod driven into the bedrock of reality, belief,
care, trust, power, assurance, peace, election, presence and joy.
Those are all iron rods sunk into the bedrock of reality. Consciousness
of profound consciousness is key to priorship training and is
underneath all training. Secondly, a prior has to have methodological
knowhow. Profound consciousness is almost a category that
goes off the chart and then when you get back onto the chart you
see methodological knowhow. He is ept, socially, intellectually
and spiritually. Thirdly, a prior has to have horsesense
to relate profound consciousness and the methodologies to real
people with whom he has to work. That is called horse sense for
short. Fourthly, a prior is a servant of servants. The prior is
the first servant among equal servants. It is a strange polity
principle we are working with here when he who served best is
made the leader. Better put, in a revolutionary outfit the best
embodiment of the crucifixion is put on the throne. This does
not mean that the prior excels all the others in gifts. It just
means he is likely to be first in laying down his life.
Now this business of priorship grows in a garden
called profound training. All I am trying to lead up to is that
word "profound training." And whatever else profound
training is, it is the garden in which the little plants grow
into profound priors. Now, you never know which plants will grow,
so you water them all. You water thousands and only 10 make it
to giant trees that can bear the weight of the world. Training
programs have to reach out to the whole earth and "water"
methods so they seep through every fabric of global civilization.
It is as if you have to train the whole world to get one prior.
Training the world is in itself a value. That one prior you get
from all that training is strangely enough of even more value
because you can send him back to do all five things, including
training the world. A prior is really trained by God. This is
another mystery in this whole thing. Our big old training system,
even when it is good, simply occasions the presence of God. Priors
are trained by God. We water little plants with training and God
grows them. If you don't believe that, you just try to predict
who is going to grow. There is utter mystery involved in this
whole dimension.
Priors could also be said to be trained by man. Methodological
prowess is shared from one person to another. I, myself, am most
interested in the methods of spirit prowess. Methodologies for
spirit prowess that give human beings the facility to live on
the edge of this journey. But there are also methodologies of
Social Demonstration, Methodologies for Awakenment, methodologies
for Primal Community, and methodologies for education, itself.
Five methodologies that go with the five things we do
you can reduce those to three if you want to, and you have spirit
methodologies, social methodologies and intellectual methodologies.
Methodologies are shared one person to another, yet it is only
methodology that is tied into the presence of God that really
interests a revolutionary. Methodologies of tirechanging,
sheepherding, and brain surgery do not interest me too much.
I am interested in methodologies that tie into the ontological
deeps of social change-battleplanning, framing, workshopping,
consensus building. I am also interested in the educational process
when it is in accord with the way the mind of man actually functions
as it was made to function by its Creator, methodologies that
bubble up through the structure of being itself. This is the methodology
that interests the revolutionary and the revolutionary training
system. A revolutionary person may have to change tires, herd
sheep and do brain surgery, for all I know, but there is nothing
particularly revolutionary about those methods.
To pull together all that a prior needs to know,
you have four categories. Profound consciousness, which is finally
taught by God alone, revolutionary methods, which we have some
hope of sharing with one another (although the profound deeps
of being are a big assist there, too), human insight would be
the third category, and social models. This is the subject matter
of training. Profound Consciousness, revolutionary methodology,
human insight, and social models. Then, maybe you can discern
two types of training two ways in which this kind
of subject matter becomes deeply grounded in human beings. One
might be called formal training and the other might be called
indirect training, a very important distinction. Formal training
means time set aside for the express purpose of advances in methodological
eptitude, time set aside for deep probing into the arenas of profound
consciousness, human insight, and social models. Indirect training
points to the entire round of missional life and missional work
as these occasion training. Just working alongside somebody that
knows what they are doing occasions training, and being thrown
out into the abyss and having to do something you don't know how
to do occasions training or drowning, as pointed out
before. Training goes on indirectly in the midst of all our activity.
In the midst of a research assembly, training is going on, even
though our direct focus on research. In a council, training goes
on, even though our direct focus is building a consensus. In the
midst of our work with task teams training goes on even though
that is not our direct focus, and even in our celebration life
training goes on even though that is not our direct focus.
Three rhythms also help clear the air in my mind
for thinking about training. It is like you have a little wheel
called the weekly rhythm, and a bigger wheel called the quarterly
rhythm, and yet a bigger wheel called the annual rhythm. And training
goes round and round and round to all three of these rhythms.
Every week you have an Ecclesiola, Metro Cadre meeting, a guild
meeting, postwork and all kinds of things. And then on a
quarterly rhythm you have things like Priors Meetings, Academies,
Global Odysseys, ITP programs, ITI's, and Global Research Assemblies.
Round and round in three separate circles, go three separate rhythms.
Perhaps we even need to invent a fouryear rhythm that will
deal with higher levels of competence. At any rate, everyone participates
in education as a part of his life. Not alongside life, but as
a regular rhythm in the midst of his life. You don't go to four
years of education anymore and say, "Now, I am educated."
Education is round and round and round the rest of your life.
Industry and everybody else is clear about this. And so as long
as you live every week round and round you go to Collegiums, Ecclesiolas
and other kinds of things that are training. And round and round
for the rest of your life you do things on a Week II rhythm that
is training. Then round and round for the rest of your life every
year occasions come up for extended sessions of depth formal training
and other kinds of extended sessions in which indirect training
goes on.
Now the next three points are longrange issues
of training, That's point two. Point three is short-range issues
in training. And point four is some crucial proposals for the
next year.
First, let's reflect a bit on these longrange
issues of training. The training of nonChristian leadership
might symbolize one of these long range issues. An entire tack
force worked on the secular ITI, called GTI, this summer. The
point of their work is that we are actually going to do a three
week training program with Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems and other
non-Christian groups in Japan and maybe even China. By far the
majority of mankind do not grasp themselves as Christians and
we are out to train the world. Building on top of University 13
work and other previous work the GTI task force got a long way
down the road in putting together a format that can just be gone
and done. I am convinced that there is no problem in actuating
the GTI. Lectures are no problem at all. We could do them now.
Seminars are no problem if we want to use Western authors. If
we decide we must have Sub Asian authors, Japanese authors and
novelists and essayists that have grown out of those parts of
the world included in the curriculum, then we have got some research
left to do. Symbolic life is another edge there. A song book,
meal rituals, and so on, needs further thinking, but we could
use it experimentally. Workshop details and so on require a few
afternoons of difficult labor. But the biggest problem with the
GTI is just simply deciding when and where you want to start experimenting
with the program. That is shocking to me. I do not think we ought
to be in too big a hurry. What hurry and not hurry means is one
of the issues. Experimentally we could use it this year. I would
suggest that the easiest place would be with Englishspeaking
SubAsians like the Buddhists in Ceylon. This program is
going to be a contribution to the lives of millions who would
not otherwise have been able to encounter the insights and methodologies
and models contained here. I predict that someday we will be called
upon to do eight and thirteen week profound consciousness programming,
new forms of the Academy like University 13 for nonChristian
groups. We will be able to handle a symbol system directly without
any difficulty in the course work if that is advisable. Instead
of Church History, New Testament and Old Testament, we will have
a course on Western religion, the second on SubAsian religion
and the third on Oriental religion, and do the same thing as we
do with the Old Testament. That is, blow the bottom out of it
through the model of Profound Faith, Profound Hope, Profound Love.
There is not any real trouble in going and doing that with a little
scholarship and some determination.
The symbolic life of an eight or thirteenweek
program does seem to me to be an unsolved problem. Symbols are
not neutral and shallow symbols communicate shallow something.
How do you communicate profundity in our symbols, rituals, openings,
closings, and songs? How do we communicate the profundity that
we can, through the benefits of the Christian memory? We have
a lot of work to do on the adequate transposition of profound
worship into equally profound secular modes. But we might as well
begin thinking about it. We have got a lot of thinking to do.
Maybe there is no hurry, but time does seem to have a way of moving
in on us fairly fast. Most of the other longrange issues
of training center around needs for greater and greater competence
in social methods. We need to walk with kings. We need to work
with local people of all types. This requires sophistication of
various new types. It requires precision of various new types
with things like framing, battleplanning, and community reformulation.
It requires updating all of our formal training methods in an
Academy to the more practical details. The accumulated wisdom
gathered on how you really do reformulate a community is in the
daybyday business of doing it. Anyhow five years from
now or ten years from now the entire training system will have
a new look. I am sure we will be building on the wisdom that we
have been piling up for twenty years.
Let's look at the shortrange issues of training.
The basic issue here is more trained priorship in Metro Cadres
ant in the Order over the next two years in every area of the
world. With eight new Social Demonstrations to be done each of
these years, plus strengthening Houses and Centrums, plus demands
for new Houses, and Metro Cadres that need to come into being
and have trained priorship to stabilize them, one is overwhelmed
in looking at the problem directly because the solution is so
mysterious. I am convinced that Xavier did not go to Japan until
after some kind of effective siege of training had taken place
with the help of Ignatius and the men back in Spain, Portugal,
wherever they did it. Anyhow those Xaviers, in order to be the
Xaviers that have to be out over nothing, need some kind of formal
beginning points that are nailed into the center of the earth.
Two hundred additional priors is an interesting figure.
In order to occasion 200 additional priors in the next two years,
3,000 people need to experience profound training beginning right
now. The question is how these thousands of potential giants can
be watered with the adequate experiences to occasion God's action
in growing them up. That is the mission. The flaw in our present
operating system is that no one seems to "reap himself as
being in the right place to handle the problem. Centrums are remote
from knowing the individual people across the world. The local
troikas and cadres know the people and who is ready for profound
journeying in their training, but often the local priorship is
without inclusive models for training. They are without accountability
for their efforts. They are under intense accountability for other
efforts that consume most of their time, and there is some unclarity
as to what really is crucial in priorship training. Therefore
the entire task of priorship training suffers from quantitative
and qualitative neglect.
So what do we propose to do? The proposals are spelled
out in some of our documents and we have talked about them in
various ways around the edges. But it seems that we are on to
something that could be critical in moving ahead practically over
the next couple of years. An Areawide perspective on the
care of potential future priorship is a very helpful image. The
Area priorship can, through their collegiality as Regional and
Metro priors, get on top of who it really is that needs to be
selected for the next levels of training, and see to it that training
experiences are intensified. Imagine something like training task
teams of old hands in each Area who sit down and compile a list
of 756 names, that is 21 per Metro. That is 756 people in each
Area who are being screened very carefully as to what needs to
happen next, relative to their experiences in training. In order
to do this each Metro would have to come up with 21 names per
polis. That would be 756 per Region as the brainstorm for the
756 names per Area. We have got to get that responsibility located
in the Area and down to the local in such a way that people see
very concretely what it is they can and should do. Time is needed
at the Area meetings to get this planning done, and to set up
a system that will work in that Area for the caring and training
of these 756 people. It means thousands of people trained all
over the world.
The second proposal is to intensify the local happenings
in that weekly rhythm of Collegiums and Ecclesiolas. And upgrading
of our training happening across the world can take place, if
those become excellently done. House troikas need to rehearse
the importance of these occasions and find the time to do quality
work. Meetings of priors at Area levels could discuss their training
work and share what worked and what did not work in their concrete
conditions and then do some corporate preparation. These ideas
might be experimented with in order to focus our minds that every
time any group gathers, profound training goes on.
Another proposal is to put more responsibility on
the Global Centrums for producing the kind of materials that can
save time and increase quality of training in the local arena.
The materials would include common memory Collegium constructs
for a year, Week II conversations, updated archives materials
and various materials for Ecclesiola, Metro Cadre, and Primal
Community. This is already being done. But a new flashlight is
put on how important these materials are in the light of the local
busy prior who needs materials so he can very quickly discern
whether or not they will be good in his situation; therefore,
get good materials and good happenings down the road more quickly.
Now the last proposal has to do with imaging training
more clearly, especially the imaging of its shortrange priority.
The emphasis on priorship training discerned in the settingup
of the research summer is a key insight in the whole training
system. Priorship training needs to be seen as an underlying push
in these next two years. But in these next two years, Town Meetings
and Social Demonstrations have to have first energy.
This current and strategical picture shows two endruns
with the armored cavalry of the Global Community Forum and the
Social Demonstration, endruns on the historical Church,
involving the historical Church as much as possible. Then there
is a slow march with the infantry. That is the Primal Community.
One trench at a time into the future. We have discussed how critical
that is. The point I am leading up to is to also do a rearguard
action with the supply train. When I was in the army as a chaplain
I was assigned to division trains of a division. Division trains
included training systems and the quartermaster corps. Their
job was to keep fighting elements moving with whatever they needed.
That has stuck in my mind that supply trains are part of the military
machine. Priorship training might be thought of as part of the
supply train. You take some energy that you really need for combat
and you assign it to trains. You do a rearguard action in
which all the many people that are being awakened, that are concerned
what to do now, are seen and put into the training funnel and
accelerated around functional eptitude back into priorship of
the Houses and the Cadres. Now the difficulty in pulling off this
strategy is that it takes precious energy and applies it backwards
in order to go forwards. It takes a bit of longrange perspective
and careful thinking to see that is what is needed in a concrete
situation. Human energy is expended on getting more human energy.
But you do not get that human energy back immediately. It is like
spending your oil for drilling oil wells. You are burning up oil
in drilling an oil well. It is that kind of a feeling that comes
to you on the local frontline. But the return on that expenditure
is good over the long haul. The lack of pouring our money into
the rearguard action is the longrange extreme problem.
How to think that through is the problem of the shortrange
priority. We do not need to panic over 5,000 Town Meetings plus
replication plus eight Social Demonstrations. We need to maintain
our "cool" and assign a select portion of our valuable
energy to the rearguard action, even though that is going
to seem absurd under certain circumstances. To keep straight that
indirect training is doing the crucial job is not going to be
enough. The kinds of training pointed to under profound training
are an essential part of the garden that grows up the priorship
that we need. All dimensions of our training have to be kept in
motion to get our job done.
Gene Marshall