Global Priors' Council

Chicago

July 28, 1979

We want to recall the examples, illustrations and images we have used this summer to give ourselves a framework for talking about the Way this next year. We want to put down some pillars of the journey we are on. I have nine categories: the earthrise, the primal community, the league, the journey, the finality of the Way, the return to a life of service, the seductions, the mythology, and the methodology (or implications). This spin is also on the corporateness of the Way. In our history as an Order we began with the Question of God lecture in our basic course, RS­1. We talked about the World Wars and the destruction of everything we ever knew. Then we also talked about the image of Sputnik, the image of possibility, of adventure and of creating the new standing on nothing. This summer we have decided to create our third major symbol....it is not the wars and it is not the Sputnik....it is the Earthrise. Standing on the land of the moon looking at the land we have left, we have been cut off from this land and we will return to this land. Everyone alive today has a particular self­consciousness, just as strong as the destruction of all world with the war and the possibility of creating out of the new. I once thought there could not possibly be another image but the destruction of all worlds and the creation of all worlds, life and death are rather inclusive. Some other dimension has come into being, however. We are conscious today of the necessity of standing somewhere, feet planted in covenant, being bound to a place and seeing the whole world in perspective of that place. In Park Si Won's spin the other day, we heard, "We are concerned in finding the place in which to have dialogue with the universe." Now mind you, the earth knows about the destruction of all roles, patterns, covenants, everything­­that is still true. The earth knows about the openendness of possibility. The earth knows about hiding from the destruction and denying that there is nothing to hold on to. The earth knows about being in panic over the openendness of floating from one thing to another, anything to avoid commitment. Yet today we are living in a new image of the universe­­the Earthrise: you are standing with your feet planted in a place that is not your home and never will be your home. You know that you are bound to this earth, but standing on another land. You are looking at the place where we are bound together in covenant.

I am discovering that I am no longer moved by the suffering of one child or the tragedy of a senseless death. My concern is focused on communities. Communities are dying. They are in pain­­"We don't want to die, we want to be vital...Our families don't work, our jobs don't work, our social life doesn't work." In our history, we have always said we chose Fifth City, an urban project, because we wanted to be where the problems were exaggerated, where suffering was intensified, so we live among the poorest of the poor to be able to see clearly. Now we discover that every community we touch has those exaggerated problems. There is no place where communities do not experience dying and looking for a new place to stand. Now mind you, they are on the other side of death. Their image is not on dying, they are very vocal in what they want: to work together without the usual infighting, to have meetings where they actually deal with issues and not everybody's opinions. They want authentic roles for all phases and groups, the want the community to look good, and they want places inside and outside to be together in sports, conversations and activities. Women and youth and minorities are particularly vocal. They want leaders to walk with them, to eat with them, live in the same place they do and see as they see. The various elections particularly have shown that this past year.

There are those who have decided to appear in communities and in the neighborhoods. They are the League. They are the incarnation of care. They are God in disguise. They appear in the community, stand with them, live with them, take on their contradictions and suffering and they are disguised. One really fooled us in that disguise because he came as a baby and grew up in the community. In our mythology, Jesus did not come as a full grown man. He had to grow up in a community. He was one of the people. I am getting clear that I do not live outside this community, learning to be a guide and one day I show up in a place, ready to guide others on the Way­­it doesn't work that way. Being a guide is a process of being in the midst of the community: growing up with it, having parents, brothers, sisters and neighbors, walking the same path they walk, having the same pain they have, and seeing what they see. The Buddha Gautama riding on his horse and escaping the palace where he had been separated from his people, sees the old, the sick, and the dead for the first time and decides that he would have to live among his people.

The last two years, I have been looking for a nativity scene. It became a passion with me. I wanted a nativity scene. I have so much decor in my room now there is no place I could possibly put it, but I had to have a nativity scene. I looked everywhere. I didn't want one that was glued together and made out of plastic. I wanted one with moveable parts so that I could play with it, put Jesus over here and the Shepherd over here and I wanted lots of animals. I didn't want just three wise men, Joseph and Mary. I tried to decide why it became so important. The cross has been in my room for some time as my symbol of expenditure and I have always had symbols of carvings of men and women who are local men as my particular passion for the moral issue of our times, and I have had masks on my walls as symbols of those who have been burned up because they have seen the face of God. Now I want to put in some new symbols. I want a symbol of the incarnation, of where men have dared to live in community. I have chosen the baby Jesus, unprotected by anything, and want the Buddha, Gautama on a horse, seeing the sick, the old and the dying, and I want one of Gandhi with his spinning wheel. I want symbols of where we have seen incarnation in history. We need to have some spirit conversations on roads and paths we have walked. I think that is going to be key this next year. I don't mean roads as a metaphor. I mean actual streets we have walked down, the roads we have driven and paths we find ourselves on.

Now I want to talk about the time spent on the journey. I want to talk about the journey to the center of consciousness and the return to a life of service. This journey is a spiral, we go on the same journey again and again, we are always going on this journey, deeper and deeper. For the sake of analysis I want to describe it as a one time only journey. Everybody is on a journey, but if they are not conscious of the journey, it is as though they were never on a journey and if they refuse to continue to be on the journey then they forget that they were ever on a journey. It was as though they were never on a journey. This spin is for those who know we are on a Journey and have been for a long time. I want to make a distinction between the consciousness everyone has who becomes conscious and the life of knowing and doing for those who have been on this journey a long time. Somebody wakes up today and they know everything I know. But there is a difference for those who have been on the journey and know they have been on the journey a long time, and it is not consciousness. The marriage covenant is an example. We are always amazed that someone who has just gotten married has as much consciousness about what a marriage covenant means as those who have been married for 25 years. There is, however, a difference between the couples who have been married for 25 years and those who have been married for one year. The difference is not consciousness; it is not knowledge. We all wake up in the some consciousness. I know there is a difference if you have been in a covenant. You have created a pattern of humanness that is interwoven with your particular experience in covenant. There are basic patterns of living that bind you to this earth. Until we read Kazantzakis in 1968, I had not sensed myself on a journey. I was on a journey, but I didn't know it. Now, since I have become self­conscious about that journey, I have added on to myself. Anybody today who discovers they are on a journey knows as much as I do, but there is a difference. This self conscious journey I have been on has created knowing and doing patterns that have changed me forever. The difference is presence. You live in covenant and there is a difference in presence. Not in consciousness, not in what you know, not even in what you do, but there is a difference in presence. It has to do with the word covenant. "The declaration of the covenant transforms individuals into community." This journey is about those who have lived in covenant, with the Word, and with colleagues who also are in covenant with the Word. Now, we are experiencing in a new way, our covenant with this earth in local communities.

I want to describe the journey to the center, first as an individual then as community. A crisis comes into my life that calls for a decision to be myself. I experience myself as complete. Contained in me are all the resources I will ever need. The world is my arena in which to work. The future is open to unlimited alternatives. The past is no longer a burden but a treasure house of learning and resources. I never again have to­strive to be someone or to strive toward a goal that brings a once­and­for­all fulfillment. I discover that fulfillment is at hand. The Word alone sustains me. I see myself on a journey. Everything I touch has deeper meaning. I find myself effective. Fulfillment is everywhere. Everything I touch turns to gold. However, it doesn't last. I experience the dark night; everything turns to dust; nothing brings fulfillment. I am on the wrong journey. The fulfilled life is an unending burden. I can't stand it. Every demand to awaken and engage comes as a ten ton crane. I see the long march as an endless journey of expenditure and consciousness. There is no relief. I am finished and nothing works. I try the old ways. I get up and I say, "I am iron, I can decide." and I fall back asleep. The whole journey no longer makes any sense and it just doesn't help to get up and say, "I resolve today that I am going to be exciting, adventuresome and ready to throw myself into life; it just doesn't work.

A moment of decision is upon me. I have come to the center of being. I have seen what it is going to cost me. I have been on the journey for a long time and I hear the brothers doomed to die. Now, I have always had trouble with that phrase, "hearing the brothers doomed to die", because that never moved me. I hear people suffering and that does nothing for me. It never came to me that way: to run out there and help those people­­my brothers doomed to die. I finally decided I was trying to be pious. It did not come to me that I was one who had to throw myself into all these suffering masses. Seeing someone poor is not what hooked me or convinced me to continue the journey.

I look at my options in this journey and I see that I could live another life. I didn't believe that before this year. I told myself the story that if I left this journey, went out and got a job and lived a bourgeois life I would commit suicide the first year. After all I would be bored to death. I don't believe that any more. I believe that I could leave this Journey and have a happy life somewhere else by forgetting I was on the journey. Now that took away my last excuse. If the reason I am staying on this journey is because I couldn't make it elsewhere, that's gone. I can make it elsewhere. I have to have some other motivation for being here than that.

One example used this summer illustrated this motivation. There is this mad doctor who is out to get people he can experiment on. He finds nobodies that will not be missed and he entices them into his castle. He feeds them full of the goods of profound living. He makes them work very hard doing Town Meetings, doing projects, creating movements and they taste the good life. They are so busy they never have a chance to look into the mirror to see what was happening. One day they look into the mirror and discover that the mad doctor has been experimenting on them and they have been altered beyond recognition. I really like that image. I know that I have been hooked. I have tasted the fulfilled life; I have seen people who were dead come alive. That is what puts me back onto that journey.

I went to the consult in Azpitia and experienced this. When you are in a consult and the consensus is made, it is glorious. When you come back to a meeting where everybody is arguing and there is no consensus you say, "I don't want to ever be in a meeting again where consensus isn't as glorious as it was in a consult." I never want to go to an awakenment event where it is not as glorious as the last one. I never want to go to a project where I don't see people come alive. That is what hooked me. I was given the privilege a year ago of teaching a special literacy course in one of our projects. I trained the local people in a whole week of literacy classes to get the program started. It was a privilege. The very first night we did the first two­hour literacy session. We did the first evaluations with the 30 students asking, "What did you learn?" One lady who had been speaking English her whole life stood up and said, "What I learned today was," and she pointed to it on the board, "I didn't know that when you say I you mean one person. When you say 'we', you mean more than one person." This is not a lady who is stupid. This was a lady who had never had the language to talk about herself as a self and a community as a community. This meant she never had a way of talking about the greatness of being alive or the greatness of being in a community. This didn't happen in Africa and this didn't happen in some poor place in India. This happened in my own beloved country, in Mississippi in Delta Pace. I went away from there saying that I didn't want to do anything else with my life but give people the tools to know that they are a self. I never want to do anything else. And it struck me, that is how you get hooked. You taste the good life, you get altered and you decide that you are going to continue this journey. You decide to return, but you are marked, you see the finality of this journey in a new way.

In this finality, I experience that the prime of my life is gone. I have been used up and I can see where this journey is going to take me. It is going to use up the rest of my life. I experience myself as getting old. Gene Boivin and I were on the same team one year and when we had to wake up a man who stayed in bed every day because he didn't feel good, Boivin told him, "Now you know when you get to our age, you probably feel as good today as you are ever going to feel for the rest of your life." It struck me that that is right. Every day I was feeling a little bit worse. Somehow I experienced myself as having a used up body. I finally got clear. My health is not going to get better. I am not going to have more time to myself. I am not going to reach a point where my skill always wins. I no longer experience the price I am paying as one great big lump called the dark night blues. I experience the price every single day, that I have been used up, and I am going to continue to be used up. My life is not seen in terms of successes and failures. I seeing fruits to my actions. Everything I have ever done has turned out and is still turning out differently than I intended.

Yet, I have been altered by the experience of being on this journey. Do I decide to continue the journey and return to this world of service being altered, or forget that I have ever been on the Way. If I choose to continue on the Way, I have chosen to return to this world as a marked human being, as one claimed by the Way.

I want to take the community through the same journey. The declaration that is the decision, resolve and surrender (which you see on the chart), the community goes through in the same journey of selfhood. There is an event. For a project, the event is usually a consult or a Town Meeting in which the community acquires selfhood as they make a corporate decision to stand. They decide to be on the journey. This decision in Azpitia shocked me. You know the speech we always give about the ICA not having any money? We aren't going to pay for this, but we are going to help you. We are going to go on development calls with you. We will go with you to enable you to get funds, but we don't have any money. The next day the community comes up and says, where is the money? It happens again and again. Azpitia heard the speech. I don't know why. They had a brandy sale made from their own grapes. It is really fine. The next day the villagers came to the auxiliary house so they could have the first donation to the project be from the people of Azpitia .

Communities make a decision to be on this journey. They make a resolve. Sometimes it is the resolve to send residents to other projects. Then comes a point at which they have to give up everything they thought it meant to be a community. It usually comes when they have to risk their community's reputation. They have to sign up to be the board of directors or sign up to be Town Meeting orchestrators or get a loan at the bank. Mary D'Sousa's illustration about when the women in the village had the sewing industry all ready to go and all they needed to do was have the people go down and sign up. One woman came up and said, "I don't trust you." How many of you have led the community up to the point where they had to sign the paper and everyone quit? They weren't finally going to give up their reputation, they weren't going to take that journey. But some do. Then the community goes to the center of consciousness and experiences the dark night and the long march. How many times have you heard this year: "Our community has not done anything, our project has not done anything, our state didn't do anything"? "If you made a list of all the projects and how great they were­­we would be at the bottom or maybe next to the bottom; we did not do anything." They go through the humiliation of having no hope of a victory, of never doing anything. This community also has been hooked. They have started Town Meeting everywhere, they have seen profound transformation, they have gone to another consult, the HDTS, they have seen the global film and they are hooked. They never want to be any less than a transformed community. The know the cost. They have been humiliated­­burned out. Can you imagine Lorne de L'Acadie when everything was burned out­­absolutely wiped out. This community had to stand in as much humiliation, as much of the dark night and long march, as we have ever had to stand up and say, "Are we going to close the project or are we going to continue?" Lorne de L'Acadie decided to continue. Furthermore, it was the enemy in Lorne de L'Acadie decided to continue.

The other day I saw a picture of the great people who are in Kawangware now. I do not know a single one of them. Everybody that was there when we started the project is gone. The original core has dropped out. The residents have mud slung at them in these communities. Families are not talking to each other. People have lost their jobs. The have been ridiculed by newspapers. They are clear on what it is going to cost them to continue the journey. The finality of this Way is that it is the point at the center where you have to decide. You know what it is going to cost you and you realize that you have been humiliated and lost everything. Are you going to continue because you have been hooked? I think we get our marks in the center. The Aboriginals, cut in the skin, put dirt in it so it raises it up and you see the marks of passage. I think we get four marks when we decide to return to this Way.

The first mark we get is that nothing works for you personally anymore. No symbols, no taking care of yourself. Nothing works. Humiliation does not describe the experience anymore. I used to say, if that prior can't get stake meetings started, just send me there for two weeks. I'll get stake meetings started. I don't believe that any more. I used to believe if you just sent me with five strong disciplined Order members who have been around a long time, we could transform anything. Just give me a group with corporate discipline. I don't believe that anymore either. The images we have heard this year are failure. Something has happened. We can not get our corporate group working anymore. It is easier to work with the undisciplined community than it is to work with our own colleagues. It has been very painful...the most painful has been hearing people say, if only we would use our methods, why can't we use our methods any more. You even hear the LENS team saying we could really do something if we just used our own methods. You sit there and wonder what has happened.

The second mark that gets on you is­­nothing works for you personally yet everything seems to work for somebody else. We heard one of our colleagues talk about her model for the children in the village. Her model is destroyed but the community creates its own model. On the chart is what we used to call the revolutionary method of changing history model. A care group of people who are intentional, comprehensive, futuric and archaic created the model that would change history. They would go back into history and history would go this way. At some point, you discover that you create a core of disciplined people, you create a model, you put it in history and history goes 5 billion ways­­not necessarily any of the ways that you wanted it to go. History does not go in a singular point any more­­I guess it never did.

In operations, we have said don't answer the phone because when people in a project call up, you are bound to ask, "How was the literacy program we started three months ago?" "Oh, that all collapsed after you left." "How are the health caretakers doing? " "The what?" You sit there and realize that being a catalyser does not necessarily mean that what is catalyzed is what you intended to catalyze. This is where status gets burned out. The failure we experienced this year was that we failed but the community won. Every story we heard, the community won. Everybody in this room, I think, personally failed. You hear someone say, "I don't think that I can take it another year because everything I did was off target and nobody paid any attention." But those same people did the best Town Meetings that were ever created. I think we have finally understood what it means to be nobodies. We catalyze, but not what we intend to catalyze, but it does not make any difference because the community has won.

The third mark is you discover that you really have given up everything. You have really cut yourself off from all things in order to give your whole life. You do not possess your own habits, thoughts deeds anymore. We talk about how different we are from other people. We stay in the office of Economic Security in Arizona which is the welfare office to do the Pisinemo document. The director of the office was fascinated by us because it was obvious that we were bound together in ways he never knew. He said things like, "Do you notice that when any of you get up to go to the bathroom, or go in the next room, you always turn around and announce where you are going?" The thing that really got him though was when he had to leave the keys and give a letter of permission for us to stay there at night when the building was closed. He said, "I have been very curious and now I am going to find out. Who is in charge of this group so I can give him the keys." I asked, "You need someone name. Who is going to be responsible? "Okay, why don't we say that Don is in charge." He said, "You can't do that." I didn't understand what he was saying so I turned to my other colleague and said, "Don't you think Don should be the one? " She says, "Yes." He says, "You can't do that. You can't just turn and say somebody ...I want to know who is really responsible." For those who have been a long time on the journey, there is something about being possessed by God. We really have given up our own thoughts, habits and deeds.

The fourth mark is that the one­to­one is finally gone. Cause and effect no longer work. I have decided that I know what moralism is. Dear Harold, you know he has sickle cell anemia, he is over 50 years old, he has had three heart attacks and there is no reason why he should still be alive yet every year he keeps showing up. When he had had one of the heart attacks and we thought he would never leave the hospital alive, he called me on the phone and said, "I want you to come down and make my funeral arrangements." That is not what I wanted to do. So I took a colleague with me as I am a real coward. I decided that I could not do this by myself. All the way down to the hospital, I kept thinking, "This is absurd. I don't like his style. We have these great conversations then the next time I see him, he reminds me of what I said before which I am no longer doing." He encounters me as the alien other every single time. We walked into his hospital room and I saw him in the bed. It occurred to me, Harold never gets to things on time. Isn't that irrelevant. And he drinks; isn't that irrelevant? And he irritates me; how irrelevant. We talked about his funeral. We chose the scripture that he wanted, we chose the song that he wanted, we chose the people who would be the liturgists and all I could think of was all those things that I disliked. That is so irrelevant. His life is not about one day walking in late and therefore he is bad. That is just not what life is about. It is total life being given in mission.

I think that my moralism died at that point. Before that, every time somebody had come in late to a meeting I had said, "He is bad, he is late, he is not disciplined, he is not corporate, he is not intentional." Every time somebody said something that was irritating or something that was not appropriate, I would think, "He is bad." Every time somebody did something that was really good, "Oh, that is really great. He must be on the way." It struck me that I wanted to hang on to the old universe in which one activity causes one result. That is not true. I belong to the historical process and I am a part of what goes on. I am not a separate entity. I see my relationship to everything. In looking at the United States' twelve human development projects, it became clear to me that we could not look at one project as successful and some other project as unsuccessful. Because that is my moralism speaking. Primal communities came off this year, not one particular project. You know as well as I do what is going to happen when a project hits the Dark Night: everybody is going to quit, remember that. We know the communities who went through the Dark Night this year, and everybody is ready to quit. Do you know what is going to happen? They are going to be the next sign and symbol. What does it mean to dare to say that two million villages are going to be transformed? That will not happen because of this village or that village, but because the entire historical process has decided that history is going to come off. That is the finality of the Way.

Finality has to do with being at a point of no return. We either have to go forward in this journey or we will have to forget that we were ever on this journey. We cannot afford to forget any experience, any geography since everything together is determining the course of history. Some people actually believe that we invented RS­1 and CS­1. We took all those papers from what someone else had written. I think Research this year is going to need to read everything that has ever been written and is being written and every single newspaper that comes out in the world. We are those who are in history and working with history. We are not a group that stands aside and hopes to determine this or that, but we are working with the process of history. The implication is that when we see the finality of this journey, we discover that we always live on death ground.

The second implication is when we see the finality, we have to name our priorities. Third, we know when we see the finality of this journey we are about the business of transferring power to our shadows, of delegating responsibility. We begin to trust our colleagues because we see the finality of being in history. Fourth, we organize our actions in such a way that death will always find us awake. Joe used to use this image, "Don't let death find you where you ought not to be." When we find ourselves at the center, deciding to return to the life of service, we are concerned about which actions need to stay in history. I do not want death to find me asleep. I am more concerned than ever that every act I do is not a single act, it is to initiate something in history. Remember Jesus's last week? He initiated the last supper. He cleaned out the temple and he was silent when people accused him. He was initiating the acts needed in history. That is the journey to the center.

I want to look at the return to the world using this chart. Everything that is true going to the center is still true, but we have added something to our understanding of the journey. The journey to the center was primarily a time of decision­­I decided, I stand. The time of the return to the world is primarily a time of covenant. As we went to the center the image was that of the Iron Man who stands forever. The image as we return to the world is how local man is winning. On the journey to the center, we were concerned about every moment. There is no moment in which we do not live in the hands of God. Returning to the world, we have discovered also that there is no place in which we do not act out the gift of God. The declaration to the center is the declaration of selfhood. What happens on the return is not so much declaration as locating the settlement, the battleground. On the journey to the center we were concerned with our decision to stand. Now we are concerned about how we walk, or how we be the incarnation. The journey to the center was resolve to live on behalf of. Now, we see the obligations of the covenant that we have undertaken. In the journey to the center, we primarily had to give up everything. On the return, we see we have to once again embrace everything. The beatitudes point to this.

We were in a project this year in which some horrible stories were told accusing the auxiliary of being drunks and stealing money and doing bad things. The story did not happen to be true. We wasted a lot of time deciding how to convince the community that the story was not true until finally we realized it did not make any difference if it was true or not. What we had to do was deal with the myth that the community was living out of, not whether or not it was a true story of theft or drunkenness. My team member stood up with this declaration, "Do you know the most important thing an auxiliary in a human development project needs to be doing?" I know the first thing an auxiliary needs to be doing: they need to be doing stakes and guilds, having community meetings, getting the consensus, I had my list and was waiting to fight his. "The first thing the auxiliary needs to do when they get into a community is to make friends." Oh, that struck me. We have spent all of our time going to the center saying, "I have no friends," and that is true. On the return to the world, we befriend the poor. That is what we are doing in communities, making friends with the poor. Going to the center, we have no home; returning to the world, we are at home. Going to the center, we are detached; returning to the world, we are attached. Our covenants are cut off going to the center; returning, our covenants are given back. We are concerned with resolve going to the center; returning we are concerned with the battlefield. We had given up our lives going to the center; now we are given back a community. We used to have a cold detached presence and everybody who saw us knew that they couldn't touch us in a million years; now we live in a goldfish bowl. We used to spend all day preparing our homework; we are now more concerned with preparing our songs and myths. We used to spend time creating contexts; now in addition to that we spend time in providing an event. We used to spend time writing procedures; as well as that we are now spending time creating a team. We used to be involved in the impact of our style; we are also involved in what is corporate effectivity. We are no longer on this return path. We have taken the journey to the center, and have already returned. We stand in the Earthrise perspective now, looking at the whole journey to the center and to the return. This is a one time journey that we do again and again and again. We take the journey and the whole community takes the journey.

If we are the guides on this journey, we are also those who guard the journey, for it is easy to forget you are on the journey. When we go to the center, we tend to forget it is a journey we are on and we get trapped in the immediate situation, we think the situation is standing still. On the return, we tend to forget we are guides on the journey and we begin to identify ourselves with the community­­we go native. Since we know everything depends on the transformation of human community, we tend to imagine consequences, this is also known as panic and hysteria. Since we see the limitless scope of our options, we get waylaid often and allow ourselves to look at one more model before we make a decision. Since we see the cruciality of our work, we tend toward one­upman­ship, we cut into each other's insights, topping it with our own examples. Since we are always on death ground, we tend to postpone the death ground a little bit. We are always on the verge of solutions. If we had two more hours, we could get the solution, if we had two more years, we could have the project done. These are all called the seductions on the Way.

Now the mythology. We are going to need tools to create the new myth in terms of fiction, legend, poetry and drama. We need to find ways to tell the stories of the journey we are on. By fiction, we create our own images like the mad doctor, or the image we used this week, "God winking at you," in the triangle of the summer symbol. These are fictional devises, images that allow us to know what it means to be on the Way. Using legends we tell stories of the complete life like the whole life of Gandhi, his entire impact. Those who leave the Way loose the significance of the work they did earlier. It does not make any difference if you are ten years on the Way, it is your complete life that creates the legend. There is a story about Thomas A. Kempis, the theologian. He was never made a saint. When he died, after an illness in which he was in a coma, he was buried and then as tradition required, was transferred to a second grave. During the transfer it was discovered that he had not been dead when first buried. He probably came out of the coma, because there were scratchings on the lid of the coffin. This man probably suffocated there, you don't know if he had a few seconds or a few minutes. Because of this, the church has never made him a saint; they could not be sure if he succumbed to apostasy in those last three minutes. When I think of suffocating in a coffin in the last three minutes of dying, I wonder if I would say, "It wasn't worth it, it wasn't worth it, let me out, it wasn't worth it." That story has an impact because it is your total life you are talking about, down to the very last minute, your total life is an address. We need legends.

We had many illustrations of poetry this summer. We heard poetry in a lecture. The poet told how she came alive and saw her transparency. She told the story of what had happened to her because she had seen what happened to the community. This is a poem. Then finally, the drama. We heard one lecture this summer which never said anything about the individual. She only told stories about the community, the drama which tells the story of what happened elsewhere. I think that those are four forms that are going to be helpful.

The last category is methodology or implications. What does it mean for us to be the corporate exemplars? I have new criteria for the completion of a project now. It is not how many programs have been done, what has been started. The question is, has the community become the exemplars? The project is completed when the community becomes the sage, the ones who can put things in a destinal context; when the community becomes the poet, the ones who can tell the story; when the community becomes the general, the ones who can strategize and lead the programs; and when the community becomes the saint, living on behalf of other dying communities. An image of the corporate exemplars comes from H. Richard Niebuhr, "You become the place of revelation." In Azpitia the auxiliary was discussing who would be in the village itself and who would be doing permeation and authorization. The assignments when they were made for permeation did not take in to account that the village needs to see the presence of those who have decided that nothing is impossible. Even if the auxiliary didn't do anything but sit in the collegium room so that every time there was a crisis and somebody asked, "How do I deal with this?" they could very calmly give a context. There has got to be a presence in that community. That is the function of an auxiliary. There you become the place of revelation. I was impacted by Ivy City's ability to see their auxiliary as a primal community. On that auxiliary, are just normal everyday human beings, some get drunk and some get into fights. The community looks at how that auxiliary sees itself as a primal community, how they deal with children, how they deal with drunks, how they deal with the people who are great, how they celebrate, how they take over from failure. What it means for us to be the guide is to dare to be the experiment in primal community.

That was an unbelievable story about Rich and the baseball game. He couldn't play baseball because his father was watching. Then his father hid behind the trees and Rich played the game not knowing his father was there. After he hit a home run and the game was over, his father came out and shook his hand. Isn't that a great image for being the guide? We are the magicians who disappear while the community comes off in history and then we slip out from behind the bushes and shake their hand.

The glory that we experience now is a little different than our experience on the journey to the center. It is outside ourselves. We see other people awake and we become awake. We see effectivity and we become creative. It is not ourselves being effective, or wise or transformed, it is profound community coming alive. We experience ourselves as part of that happening, not as separate from it. We experience ourselves as part of the total working with history.

I received some letters from a colleague in Latin America this past year. Her letters are really great. The first paragraph is what I call her suicide note: "This is terrible, nobody pays any attention to me, we don't do collegiums any more, everything is falling apart, we might as well quit, everything I have tried to do is absolutely irrelevant." Then the next four and a half single spaced typewritten pages with notes on the side is about what has happened to the community. You ought to see the project, people are working, we have built a bakery, the whole cadre is alive, the stake meetings are starting, and on and on and on. Four and a half pages and then an ending note, "I really don't know what I am going to do but I see somebody needs a tractor part, I have to go, so goodbye for now." That is the end of her letter. She had written a Psalm. "The whole world is against me, Oh Lord, come to my defense." Then the whole middle section was, "What great things God has done for us." And then the finale, "And now I know, and I am going to return to the world. I am going to go back into the fray." Wouldn't it be great as guides along the way this year to write letters like a Psalm. Oh Lord, I have been humiliated and burned up, but let me tell you what has happened to this community, and now it is time for me to get back in there as a burned out nobody.

I had a humiliation this year, I made the mistake of bragging in Azpitia that I had given a great development spin and gotten a lot of money. So they asked me to do the development pitch for the consultants. I gave a great, emotional, sentimental, wonderful, stirring development pitch, and nobody, of course, gave any money. One part of the pitch said, "empty your pockets." When I leave a project, I do that. I leave all the money I have because I live on a stipend that is larger than anybody's in the project. So in the pitch it said, "As symbol of care for communities everywhere, empty out your pockets." In Azpitia, Thelma, the Papago woman from Pisinemo, and Mervis Edwards, the lady from Jamaica both gave a donation. They emptied out their pockets. Here were the poorest people, not the rich old ladies, or some of the rich consultants, but two of the poorest people in that whole room.

We didn't win on the development pitch but profound humanness won.

What if in evaluation, we asked ourselves not what did we accomplish this year but where did profound humanness unfold this year? Not, what did I or the government do but where did you see profound humanness unfold. Then finally we ask the question of those people who are on the Way, where did you see history win this year? For we are the people of God who have been hooked by seeing profound community. The only question that we have ever had is not, "What did I do that helped?" but "How did God win this year? How did history win?"