Global Priors Council

Global Centrum: Chicago

August 6, 1975

I want to talk this morning about what we call the future directions. I was taken aback that whoever put together the initial draft of this talk called it "Directions". They had an "s" on the end of it, as though maybe we weren't quite sure yet what the one direction had to be. And I guess that's the name of the game we're in these days: in the midst of all the thousands of possibilities to actualize in the next months and years, we have the task of discerning what the one direction is for the future. I want to talk about 4 campaigns. We're clear on our long range objectives, the wall­to­wall or sea­to­sea Fifth Cities or Primal Community Experiments and Metro Cadres in every community across the globe. We're also clear on our initial moves relative to these campaigns: awakenment and social demonstration, disclosing what it looks like to live effectively in the new world. It is the middle game that we're most unclear about these days. In these arenas we're going to be moving with a new kind of passion tomorrow. You could see it in the work of the summer. I want to spend some of my time reporting some of the work of the Chicago GRA, but also doing a little work on them. The four areas are first, the historical Church­­ how we're going to move day after tomorrow, maybe tomorrow, with a brand new passion and power in a strategic way that we've yet to break loose. Second will be historical religions. We've talked about the secular world, but I think we're really talking about the historical religions, with profound consciousness in the variety of contexts it has shown up in or been grappled with across the globe. The third, is the arena of priorship training. We've been working on this for twenty years to train ourselves, to train this planet to stand in the Long March in the midst of the Dark Night. I think we're going to make some moves there shortly. And then finally, the three­in­one. In the campaigns, we've got three­in­one. In the fourth one, there is just style. The fact is that we're going through radical mutation these days. That has happened to me in our time. But first I want to do a little introduction. That was a prologue. Now for an introduction.

I want to focus on this profound consciousness and taking care of yourself, because I think that's the most significant shift that's happened this summer. We now have the poetry and the imagery, but more important, the tools by which to stand before oneself like no other time at least in my life. Profound consciousness is very, very, very dangerous. Do you find yourself for instance, running into door jambs? It's surprising that you're doing it these days, because you weren't yesterday. Or do you find yourself walking down the hall past an old colleague you always greet and never noticing that he was there until he's gone? Or do you find yourself bumping into tables as you go around them? I'm close enough to phase three that I need a pair of glasses. I do not think that is the problem. I would like to think that the problem is I need a pair of bifocals or something. Or do you find yourself singing songs and yet at the end of the song, you realize you never sang a word? Or you listen to a great lecture wide awake the whole time and at the end of the lecture you realize you've not taken one note, not one note? I'm sure glad we've got this tape recorder these days, because we do want to remember what has happened. You know something has happened to you. You find yourself profoundly awake but somewhere else than the immediate situation

I found myself reflecting on an experience I had as a youth, since we have been working on profound consciousness. I guess I was in high school. I got a job riding as an attendant (I call it "riding shotgun") in an ambulance. I was up in the little town of Morton, a little logging town up in the mountains of western Washington. You can imagine the kinds of accidents we had to tend to in an ambulance. One particular time, we got a call for a fellow 30 miles up the road toward Packwood, who had been crushed in a logging accident. A tree had fallen across him, and it had crushed his pelvic bones and his legs. They did not expect him to live but they knew they had to get him to Tacoma, which is at least 100 miles from there. They called and said they agreed to meet us in Cosmus, where we would transfer this fellow and take him on into town as quickly as possible in hopes of saving his life. "Riding shotgun" means you get to ride with the patient in the back. The other guy drives the rig and you sit back there and take care of the patient. And whenever you have an accident like that, there is very little you can do except to stand before the fact that he knows he has been had. And he is up against it. It was a van, really; it was not an ambulance like you would see in the streets of Chicago. It was like a hearse in terms of its length, but it was really like one of these vans you see out here­­ Econo­Lines or whatever, and it did not have any windows. And so you sat up in the back and you looked out of the front window watching the highway come. The guy driving this rig was moving as quickly as possible to get us to the hospital in Tacoma where the man could be cared for. As you might guess we had drugs for his pain. We had strapped him across the chest to keep him on the bed, because he wanted to get out. He was beyond control of himself, and he was in wild agony. I knew all the while we had to feed him blood as fast as he could take it to keep the hemorrhaging supplied. Anyway, he was facing the fact that he had lived all of the life he was going to live. He was at the end of his life, and he was awake­­ I mean to tell you, he was awake. And I, sitting next to him, found myself awake: to my life and to my death and to what was happening and to my impotence and to that whole series of things you and I experience in the Long March­­trying to speak to a man, to care for this human being in the midst of this tragedy. He was not much older than I­­ about forty­five­­ and had a lot of life yet to live. He did not make it. We kept him alive till we got to Tacoma, but he did not make it beyond another hour in history, and he was awake at that time. After a while he became clear of the fact that he could not get out of what he was in, and we did some talking along the way toward Tacoma. Now the analogy of this for me is this: the experience of profound consciousness is like being in the back end of that van and we are moving down the highway as fast as possible into the future. I am sitting next to my consciousness of my life and my death but also of history and society. There is excruciating pain as we make the turn into the next century, and screams are out there and in me as I stand next to life and am called to awakenment. It's almost as if I find myself driving that ambulance sitting right at the edge of the highway and making decisions right and left as you move through these mountain passes and meet trucks coming around the bends and so on, all the while floorboarding it to save this man's life. If you make the wrong decision we have all been wiped out. At the same time, I am at the back of that van at least 100 yards away watching what I am doing. Sort of standing utterly conscious of the fact that we are in this situation that we are in, and at the same time moving 1000 miles per hour. Your seat in back is your seat in the midst of the Dark Night. You look all around you, and you see the profound screams over the centuries of civilization. When you step to the front to make the decision, you have to walk by all of your fathers. Your meditative council sits on the edges along that corridor toward the front seat of that van. And they speak and yell at you. If they fall asleep you awaken them because you want to know what it means to live that moment, to be present to what is happening in history. And so you wake up Paul if he happens to doze off a minute. You get his information and you stand before it. And it is being dislocated or that I experience walking down the hall or bumping into something. I am somewhere else but I am there. While not knowing what I am doing I have to decide to come to the front and sit in the driver's seat and make the decisions that are required at that moment. At the same time I am stepping away from the back profoundly aware of all that is going on in front as well as within the deeps of my own life. I don't know if that is helpful as an image, but it sure is to me. I guess the best analogy out of our common experience is Mountain Rivera going down the aisle. He was awake and he had all of history screaming at him. Some very affirmatively, some screaming out their terror to him, and all the time he was moving on toward the ring, knowing that he was going to his death and knowing that he was going to the possibility of a new life. In the midst of all that was a decision he had to make every step of the way about where he was going, what he was doing. Something like that for me is a way to talk about profound consciousness. Taking care of yourself has to do with remembering you have the patient alongside and you are driving that van standing before the fact that that is who you are, who we are, as consciousness in history. I just had to say that. I guess it is because I find myself trying to get hold of images that articulate what is happening to me these days.

Now, let's talk about the future. First of all, the local Church. We are at a point in our own engagement with civilization where we have decided to step back for a moment from dealing head on with the historical Church, and I think that that is right. Our Local Church Experiment moved the Church as far as we could move it, and we discovered a lot about how to create Primal Community, how to awaken the Local Church. But we did not have the tool you now have called the Local Church Resurgence Mission. I want to say a word about why that title is important to me in a moment. We have discovered in the midst of doing the church over these last twenty years (with RS­I, RS­I, RS­I, and then with the Cadre dynamic) the fact that the Church has stalemated, or maybe to use that term out of chess, it is in check. It is not checkmated, but it is in check. It knows it has to make its move, it has to make a move or it is dead. It is put out of commission, the game is over. But to make a move to get itself out of check, it has to sacrifice its queen, its bishop. And yet in order to keep the game alive and to proceed with the attack, with going on as the Church, it has to make that move. That is, it has to radically transform that sociological frame and its own images of who it is in history. But the Local Church Resurgence Mission is our weapon. We decided this summer that we have another year or so of experimentation yet to do before we are on the road en masse with that tool. And I think that is right. Not unlike the Town Meeting. We are moving down the road with that, putting it in concrete form like no other program we have ever done. We are moving out across civilization with that tool. Maybe next year we will have the Resurgence Mission ready for that Doing.

But I want to say just a few things about what I think needs to happen in that Local Church Resurgence Mission. For me it has to be the "Local Church Resurgence Mission." Maybe "Historical Church" or the "Jesus People Resurgence Mission" would be suitable names, the reason being that each of these resurgence missions has to hit head on the cultic dimension of a body of people. When we have a Hindu Resurgence Mission or whatever, that is fine. Then we will have to spin the symbols that are given in that cult and use them to break loose profound consciousness that has already been grappled with over the centuries, the residue of which is the symbols and the sociological frame. We will take all that and use it to awaken people and break them loose. All the while you are doing nothing more than awakening them to the Dark Night and the Long March. We have been given the weapons, at least I would strongly emphasize, to tell the real Jesus story. I mean we have got to break loose Jesus out of the first century and get him running, so to speak, internally with us in the 20th century. And one of the great things in the new LCRM construct is a scripture passage, old and new testament, in every box in all three of those lectures. I once attended one, and we had people show up who did not know one piece of Scripture to refer to in the midst of the HRM. People wondered where in the world they were coming from. They did not even know the Bible, how could they be talking about renewal of the Church? Well, now it is there, a platform. You and I have to figure out how we are going to work on it, to be sure, but it is there in terms of getting hold of great archetypal events and stories that illuminate for you and me what it means to be the real Jesus, the Lord in history. I think that is great. We have to enable that transparent Word to happen in the LCRM. I mean it is happening. It is one­event like the Town Meeting is one event. And it has to be a happening in which people experience the permission once again to live in this world. There are some hymns in the construct. I mean they have been there all along, but we have to break loose the songs of the church. The issue is how to sing them, I think. It is a matter of how you stand before that song and flood its meaning out into history. Third, the resurgence mission is out to objectify the actual situation: where they have come from, where they are, and where they are going as the local Church. That requires facing their history, their greatness, their despair, their sickness, and their sociological reality. Over against this they are going to be reformulated as they decide to take on the world. With the symbols of the Church releasing profound consciousness in their midst, this is the objective situation. They are in the midst of the Dark Night. And finally, we are out to mobilize people. They come out of the day with three things. One is a plan, proposals for action that they are going to take as a congregation relative to their sociological situation. Secondly is their song, symbol and story. But third is a solitary reflections journal. That is interesting to me. It is working off the model of this summer where you have some great passages that throw you into consciousness and then you have a way to reflect on it yourself. And get some of the stuff out of their wisdom and their memory and some tools to break those loose is key. But I think we are going to move on that. They recommended this summer that we move much faster than I think we will. They recommended that we do 6 LCRM's per house for the year. But it may happen anyway. These things are happening whether we want them to or not. But I think the day after tomorrow we are going to move.

Secondly, in terms of our future direction, is the historical religions. Now that is not the right way to put it, yet I think that it has to be said that way. We are being called to do a job on history in the context that is non­Western and non­Christian. We are being called to mobilize the Cadre, the Metro Cadre dynamic, that is Those Who Care, no matter what culture or history or symbol system they come out of. We have to find a way to weld together a body of people who can move together on primal community, on social demonstrations, on history. And I think that is why we have been called to work on the Global Training Institute. Now there is a lot of work yet to be done, I am clear about that. But we made some turns this summer that are exciting. It is called the Global Training Institute. It is much like the ITI. And you can imagine why. It is a three­week secular happening designed for going into any situation and taking those who care and grounding the word in their life, and shoving them into the future with common images and symbols and methods. They recommended that we do four of them this year: one in North America, and three in Taj Gun;, Oombulgurri, and Jeju Do. Now I am not sure we will do any this year. But I think that the first thing about them is that engagement in serious mission is the context under which they make sense. To have a great course for 3 weeks for Buddhist monks to come together and look at their religious condition in today's global society, whatever profound this or that may occur is nonsense unless they grasp themselves to be up against it missionally. In that context you begin to forge out symbols that sustain one in engagement throughout his life. In the midst of saying that we're after historical religions that we will not spend any time in this thing trying to do what we have done in the Church, trying to revitalize their symbols. You will not be having a Buddhist GTI or a Hindu GTI or a Muslim GTI in which you take their tradition and transparentize it. Not that. I am not sure we ever will, but maybe we will. But I do know at this point we are not prepared to do that job. We tried to find, out of Asia some Hindu writings, if you think our symbol system is bungled up relative to articulating the profound humanness, try taking a walk through that maize of Hinduism. It is going to take a long time before we get an authentic articulation of their own heritage, it seems to me. Some day that is going to have to happen, and it is probably going to be done by those who come after us. But anyway, engagement is the context.

Symbol--clarity is the key. We did some work on the rituals and things of that kind. Obviously Daily Office is a major issue. We have recommended making transparent the breakfast meal as the opening liturgy of the day by intensifying the dynamics of Confession, Praise, Dedication in a new way and having that be a great happening. That is not right, and yet your alternative is to translate the Daily Office. There have been some attempts and it is something else to look at them. "Hokey" is not the right word. Anyway, we had some fun with those rituals this summer. On that I heard was the wake­up which is always, "Praise the Lord, Christ is risen." The one we had this summer for a couple of weeks as sort of a little experiment was Bang, Bang, Bang­­ "Coffee on the mall in thirty minutes." It did not quite do it. Somebody said we ought to have someone like Art Smith saying, "Heighty­ho, wake up"' I do not know what it is going to be. We recommended "It's a new day," and the response, "It's a new day indeed." That is not it. We did some work on the rituals for the day. We took the profound consciousness triangles and experimented with using them in the structure of the day. For example, the noon meal would be "Those Who Care love beyond love." And the response would be "Those Who Care­­love beyond love'' and then, "Let us feast." We have not yet solved the things about "Amen". We do have a send­out ritual. This summer we just sort of got up and left after the meal. Everybody would say, "See you around," or "You­all come back in about a half­hour." We took this thing that we had done for some time, "These are the times, we are the people" and let that terminate the event and send us on to the next moment. Anyway, that sort of thing is crucial and we will have to spend a major amount of time on it.

Thirdly, is that methods are a vehicle. If we have anything to offer civilization, it is methodology that can take anything and ground it, and get life out of it, I don't care how bad it is. You can art form anything and spin it with our combination of discourse and lectures and questions and so on, and have it come alive. Obviously all of the methods that we have used in our pedagogy and our ITI, etc. are there. We worked with the ITI structure. "The Cultural Revolution" is the first course, followed by what we are calling "Authentic Humanness", then "Primordial Humanness," then the "Social Methods School." We modified it a bit, although that is in fairly good shape. Another course is on "Community Analysis," one on "Community Reformulation Labs," and GTI concludes with the "Missional Family." I think that all of those courses, with a slight modification could do the job on society that we have decided to do.

The final thing about the GTI is that the word of Jesus Christ is the every­man word. It is the platform out of which we operate, the grasp after authentic life that you and I presuppose. You know the old debate: Well, shall the faculty get up and do Daily Office and then go down and do something else with the rest of them? Or do the Christians all come to Daily Office and the rest all stay in bed? I do not know. As you can see, ontologically, you feel phony about all of this, and yet at the same time we are ready in a way that we have not been since the beginning. We have gotten hold of tools, the Other World, the Profound Consciousness triangles. We took the New Religious Mode (we call it the "New Human Mode.")and transposed the charts­­it does not take much­­and I tell you I think they are still a tool by which any human could grasp himself as a human being. "Those Who Care" imagery, the spirit conversations, the Other World treks, the Kazantsakis studies, are all available to us to do for anybody. "The Authentic Human"­­ just a word about that. Someone said "We should call it Authentic Humanness A." A­H­A. I do not think it will sell too well: The "AMA" course. We decided to go after art forms as the basic seminar tool instead of getting another theological statement made by a non­Christian. We decided to take an artform that you could overlay with certain categories or symbols and then ground them with that humanness and have the seminar do the job that RS­I has done. You will be interested to note that the four articles or short stories come out of Western society. For the God event, we selected Camus' "Adulterous Woman," and that is a great paper. We went back and developed teaching forms to articulate the transformation that happens in life. We took an article by Somerset Maugham from "Of Human Bondage to do the final limits section. I am convinced that we have not found the right one for the freedom section. We have an article out of Profiles of Courage and then the last one is taking an article out of Hawaii that talks about the social vanguard. But I think it is the overlay of consciousness and the structure you bring to it through the methodology and ground that is the key to it. I think that I would be able to hit the road tomorrow if I were assigned to work on that and experiment with it. I think it can move human consciousness dramatically.

The third and more in the area of the internal is priorship training. We have file drawer after file drawer of wisdom there, and we have made various valiant attempts to do a job on ourselves. But we have never yet self­consciously designed a corporate tactical system for training, except the Academy or something of that kind. A team worked on the canons of priorship, the 52 canons as "pithy statements." You have one for every week that you can put on your wall and remind you of your context and who you are as a prior. I'm going to read you a couple or three of those just for fun. They are really quite good. This is under the prior's life as missional expenditure: "Thou shalt be open to the truth and be careful to recognize it in every disguise." The prior is able to operate intuitionally. That is the category: "Thou shalt distinguish between missional waiting and fearful procrastination." The prior is a practical visionary: "Thou shalt not seek the meaning of your life in some particular aspect of missional engagement." Or under the prior honors the gifts of all: "Thou shall know that when thy expectations fail to be achieved thy task is to create the story that turns defeat into victory lest discouragement block the glorious journey of humanity." The prior is the self­conscious exemplar: "Thou are a type of weightless corporate astronaut and can leap the vast craters of your ignorance buoyed up with the wisdom of your colleagues." The prior is a catalytic self­starter: "Remember that the moving of mountains requires people who are catalytic self­starters. Be one yourself." The prior as explorer of the other world: "Thou shalt know that the only reward is the opportunity of living the expended life." "Be sure that thy words be grounded in profound reality, lest you be caught uttering life­destroying heresy." Then the last one of the whole series is the prior as detachment: "Thou shalt regard all of the preceding with a grain of salt and act with the Lord alone as thy guide."

One of the strategies that they are suggesting is that training is engagement is training is engagement is training is engagement. They got that articulated pretty well this summer. We have been using that kind of methodology for several decades now. It is called "Sink or Swim," in which you take a prior and throw him into the sea of possibility and see if he can swim or not. Klutz had a great time with that image and developed a great spin on the strokes that priors have created to make it across the abyss. What were some of the titles of those strokes? The Boston Butterfly. The Houston Crawl. The Australian Sidestroke. The Montreal Snorkel. The Los Angeles Freestyle. The New York Backstroke. The Edmonton Flip. The Apia Dead­Man Float.

The second arena is that we are out to demonstrate. I find myself day after day having to say to my colleagues as well as to myself as we go about the job of priorship, that you have to begin with the assumption that a human being has made an authentic vocational decision. If he has shown up in this outfit even one day, he has made some kind of authentic decision about his life. And you are not out to try to hang a little bait out there in front of him to see if he will fall down before he makes that decision and maybe fall away until he has proven to himself that he has made a decision. He would not have walked through that front door if he had not made some kind of a new decision about his life, and thereby you are out to find a way to honor that decision, not tantalize and taunt and test it to see if in fact it's real before he can have some sort of authentic engagement in the mission or be honored as a colleague in the task. And I tell you that is subtle and it is demonic if you take the alternative. And it is sinister. We worked out in the training team that we need every area to name the 756 pillars, 21 per Metro, the people that you are out to care for relative to their journey and to find ways to move them down on the road. We recommended that an area team work on what it means to care for them, to bring that to consciousness, and somehow to provide opportunities for training. Of course we are leaning on Centrum to get manuals out, that we need to have for Week II constructs, Ecclesiola, Metro Cadre or PCE Manuals in time. The fact is that we are in the process of training every moment whether we like it or not, and the only question is whether it is doing the job. Our very life together is training. But we trust that authentic vocational decision is there until they decide otherwise and walk out the front door and go somewhere else. Those Who Care. So long as they are in that outfit they are honored.

Secondly, is that the way you honor them is to provide a significant structure for expenditure. The way you care for someone is to give them a structure through which they can lay down their life. What it means to be catalytic is to provide an authentic structure of engagement, expenditure. We found ourselves opening our weekly troika meeting to the whole House this year. Sometimes we had to have our own troika meeting to deal with some other issues, but to do the brooding and battleplanning week after week, sometimes we would have fifteen people around the table. Metro people would come in to be a part of that. This was providing a way by which they can be a part of shaping their destiny. We were getting their wisdom, and I tell you, it is very helpful having Metro colleagues sitting around that table when you are doing , your serious battleplanning for the care of the House as well as the care of the Metro, the Region and so on. Obviously, publishing your assignments for the week releases people to do their job instead of hanging around asking, Who is on wake­up this morning? Who is on this assignment? Who is going to do this meal?" You spend your whole time worrying about whether the damn structures are covered or not. You go ahead and do the structures and release the House to go on with their job­­ the same with enablement You do not say, "Well, why don't you and you and you, go out there and do the dishes." Get it out there objectified somehow so that there is clarity. And get battleplans objectified in your decor so that you are reminded everyday about who you are, where you are going, what your task is. Spending time on your practical vision, your 21­point plan, and revising it quarter by quarter, are very objective ways of involving people in grasping the concrete task you are about and the way that they participate significantly.

The fourth point of priorship training is taking care of yourself and encouraging your colleagues to do likewise. We have not thought through what that means practically in light of that image from the summer. But a couple of assumptions here I have found helpful in recovering my consciousness relative to priorship. One of them is that there is a great passage in the New Testament where the disciples ask Jesus ''Who is going to be sitting on the right hand, huh? And who is on the left? And will I be the one?" and "Will I sit on your right hand in the great round­up?'" Jesus says, ''Your names are already written in Heaven. What in the hell you sweating it for? The power is in the centre of the table." And I have found since the beginning of my journey in this outfit (and as a pastor) the key is cutting over against status. Whatever else is going on there, wanting to protect my priorship from being exposed, from being self­conscious, from being corporate, from being accounted for­­is seeking status. You have to get some significance from being a prior. How do you enable your colleagues to be the team, instead of being your servants? Colleagues come along behind and you feed them information that you have, or you feed them the plans or the instructions­­it's as though we are falling behind instead of moving on the front line together in the battle. Taking care of yourself has to do with being an exemplar of consciousness. The flip side of that is that I am the Christ. That is all you have to say. Once you say your name is written in heaven that gives you permission to be the Word now. Those are a couple of images that inform my stance being in that driver's seat sitting alongside of the patient. Being consciousness. I still like this: ''One great spirit happening a day." "One great intellectual explosion."' Or ''One great missional expenditure every day," This is great wisdom. And there is a lot more of it.

Finally on style. The basic image for me is that we are called to be service. I think we are going to learn a bit more about that. I learned a hell of a lot this summer and this year, being about the task on the battlefield that I have been assigned to. Part of this has to do with sophistication. I want to get this out of the way. My wife and I have a marriage­long discussion on what sophistication is all about. Sophistication has nothing to do with picking your nose in public. My image is something different: Sophistication has nothing to do with whether you can reserve your gastronomical omissions for more discrete settings. It would be helpful, but finally it has nothing to do with sophistication. Sophistication has to do with four things. Servanthood ­ but the flip of that is sophistication­­ has to do with trusting the fact that this is the resurgent hour of this planet, that the Word is working mightily in history whether you believe it or not, evidence tells you that whether or not you see it in the immediate situation. It's happened: resurgence has happened across this plane, and you and I are simply those who are calling for awakenment. Attention! Here and Now. Every man has had, however consciously or unconsciously, that experience. He has found himself on the other side of the turn that came for me about '69 or '70 when we made the turn into the world. We had decided to go on rather than collapse and die. Somewhere that resolve was made across this planet, and, on the other side of that, fantastic things have begun to happen. People were not simply beaten back by society. The liberals were clubbed to the ground and finally just lay there dying in despair over the collapse of the structures. But people have resolved to step back out into history and take what we have got and make something new of it. The economic community has been raised with a fairly steady diet of winning, of solving problems up against it in a way that most of us don't even have the foggiest notion. That community knows the globality of our planet in a very practical way. Anyway, first of all is trust in the resurgent hour.

Secondly is responding to the actual situation. That has to do with sophistication, with servanthood. You demonstrate your care for people in the midst of their actual life situation which is that they are part of the resurgent hour, but also that they are the world. They are the world. As you and I have begun to step out into the world, our images go wild, for to step out into the world, you have to deal with the fact that the world is the world, and not us. And it is requiring more and more courage to say that to us these days. It is like we have been paddling down a little stream with little trees and birds along the way; any minute you could get out of this boat and step onto shore and hold onto a tree or something. And all of a sudden we've turned the bend and just lurched right out into the open sea of civilization. And I mean to tell you that you do not get out of that boat of knowing what you know and being a part of the outfit that you are a part of. You are in the open sea. You are in the midst of the turmoil of this society and what we have discovered is that they have spotted our flag. Here is hope, here is possibility: they have spotted it and are pointing to that flag in the distance, and saying "Ho, ho, ho, Hope is here." You and I have to do the flip of that, but you and I are also being held accountable. We are being held accountable for the fact that we have claimed to have the structures, strategies, images, discipline, and vision which works. We have heard reports the last few days of what the world has said that to us. And there is no going back from having gotten the flag out in the Main Street of town before the President of the country or before the entrepreneurs of civilization. If you think you want to do a social demonstration, you must be a nut­ball! You ought to have your head examined. Unless you just have suicide up your sleeve and want to take the whole bunch down with you. If you want to talk about radical exposure to the structures of civilization, it is going to be there. It is there already. Day after tomorrow, that is, this fall or December or whenever­­you and I are going to be standing around Taj Gunj with about 4000 of them just watching. Indira Ghandi is going to be standing there watching. Her Cabinet is going to be watching. "Are you going to pull off a Social Demonstration? Ho­ho' Fantastic! I want to see." It is not simply cynical. They want to see. "Do it! My God, do it"' But they are watching. My most immediate experience is a time just a few months ago when I had a visit with the Mayor of our fair city of Washington, D.C. The Bishop made an appointment to see the Mayor to take a gift to him from the Russian delegation that was in this country, and we decided we would ride in on his coattails and talk about Town Meeting to the Mayor of Washington, D.C., whose name is Walter Washington, no less. Until this last January, he was the assigned mayor. You recall the polity of that city as a non­political entity, sort of the locus of the federal capital­­but in January they got home rule for the first time in 100 or so years so that they could elect their own officers and councilmen. Anyhow he had been elected by the time we went in to see him. This is about exposure, I think. I experienced the fact of it at that moment. We walked in and the Bishop was dressed in proper attire as we all were, but we had our secular garb on, the ICA outfit. We had been standing out there in the hallway with nobody around chatting about this event and mumbling the Staret's prayer under our breath trying to get what it means to walk in and see the Mayor and talk about Town Meeting. We stepped into his office after a few minutes, and the Bishop had been to see him before on another occasion so that they had met. I'm sure the Mayor was reminded of that if he had happened to forget. Anyway, he walked in and greeted the Bishop in an appropriate fashion. And then the Bishop turned to his left and said, "I'd like you to meet my brother, the Dean of the Institute of Cultural Affairs, Joseph Mathews." The Mayor graciously received him, and Joe greeted him "Your Honor." And then it was my turn to be received and Jim, as anyone is wont to do at that moment, forgot my name. There was an awkward pause, and so I stepped out there and stuck my hand out, "Greetings, your Honor. My name is Don Cramer." No, I did not even get it out. "Oh yes, Hello, Don, good to see you again." I suddenly found myself way at the back end of that van there. "What is going on here? I have only seen this man once in my life and I was at least 15 tables back in a huge audience watching him do a conference. He has never seen me before." "Hello, Don, good to see you again. You're with the Ecumenical Institute." I did the old triple take. I don't know what happened there. There is consciousness of the fact that we are around these days. I could go on with several other stories, but that is part of the most embarrassing as well as the most startling one.

Third in terms of the style is that of embodying the Dark Night. We are to be exemplars of consciousness, profound consciousness. I do not have practical tools except that I come in both driving that van and sitting at the back watching, being attentive to my meditative council and caring for the world with my consciousness turned on. And that's a great indicative as well as an imperative. I am an immediate man. I can build models and lay track at 100 miles an hour as an immediate man. I can get things done and all that sort of thing, but to sit back and know that finally every move we make is a major move, no matter how small it may seem. If you put your flag up on U Street in Washington, D.C., as a primal community experiment, the Mayor's assistant for community affairs is going to say what he did to me: "How long have you been there? I am supposed to know about these things." It was not that abrupt a statement, but it was saying that. "What are you doing here?" Not why, but what are you doing here? And who is involved in it? Thank God I had been working in the project some so I could give some names, but that was not the issue. The point was, he was clear that we were there, and he wanted to know what we were doing. Being exemplars of profound consciousness is concretely, practically, embodying a style knowing that you are making decisions that carve out the future of this planet in the particular,because we are public. We are no longer low­profile, I don't imagine, in any place on this planet.

And finally, one more thing. Style has to do with being undogmatically passionate. I do not know how to say that any better. I find myself saying that you and I are passioned discipline, undogmatic, disciplined, but passionate with our life. We are about a task. We are the paravocated, and that is probably the most profound address that we have on anybody's life. We are a passionate body of people who know what they are doing. At least the world thinks that is the case. It is holding us accountable for the fact that we have decided to do what we decided and not just fumbling around like everybody else around us. The director of the Bicentennial Affairs was sitting next to the Mayor of Washington, D.C. He has been the pastor of People's Congregational Church in Washington, D.C. for several years. He was asked by the mayor after the incredible chaos in the Bicentennial structure of that city to bring it together and get the Bicentennial doing something for the nation as well as for that city. We had done some work with him about a year before, a Church Leadership Colloquy. He and six or eight people from his congregation came together for five sessions. We visited with him and the President of the D.C. Federation of Civic Associations about how the Town Meeting was going to fit in with the structures of the city in terms of the whole strategy of the Bicentennial Commission and the possibility of funding, and he had been addressed profoundly by us at this previous occasion. It was evidenced in his statement which I found myself taking notes on, I was so taken aback by it. He said that he was talking to one of his colleagues who was the President of the D.C. Association of the Bicentennial Assembly (Ward level elected official­­about 150 of them across the city) who had raised the question, "This is an outside group, why don't we do it ourselves? We have plenty of trained people here, we can do these Town Meetings ourselves, and save money that it would cost us to do these Town Meetings, so why do we have to have the ICA here?" The pastor said in answer to that comment "Leroy, there is no other firm that can do what this Institute can do in this city, or anywhere near it." He called it a firm. He said, "They can heighten consciousness beyond any group I have ever seen. They can do it for less than any group I have ever seen." And then he said, "You know they are going to do these Town Meetings whether we want them to or not." Part of the data that he had before this conversation was a list of sponsors, people willing to say publicly we will sponsor Town Meeting, for the five Town Meetings we had projected for that particular month.

Something like 35 different organizations and a whole series of churches, PTAs, civic associations, and people across the whole city were named on the list. That was evidence that whether he wanted us to or not, we had decided to do some Town Meetings. But he was clear about that before then. I think what he was clear about was that we had made an authentic vocational decision about our task, and that is the way it is. And that is who we are. We are paravocated like no other body of people in history at this moment. The last thing he said was "We need to work out a way to work with these folks because what is going to be left after these Town Meetings is people who are ready to do something. We had better figure out what we are going to do as a city to respond to that, creatively. We do not want another riot."

Well, I do not know whether these are the directions we are going in, but we have got a fine time ahead of us, particularly in this area of style and how we embody the profound consciousness; never for a moment seeing it as a way to escape from driving the van that we are driving or being indecisive about the decisions we are making.

Donald Cramer