Summer '73

Congregation B

Sanctification Lecture #4

July 5, 1973

THE RELIGIOUS PEOPLE

(The Awe-ful League)

These sanctification lectures are geared to upset you from the beginning: I'm to talk about The Awful League. As some of us were struggling yesterday to create this lecture, we realized that the main thing we needed to get across was that we did nQl know what it means to be The Awful League. Is it the horrible, terrible and terrifying league or a body of people who fills everyone with wonder and awe? The title alone doesn't tell you. But common sense tells you it's the latter. Who are those people throughout history who breathe the awe filling wonder and possibility into everyone else. That's what I'm going to take a stab at anyway. That is something we all know about even if we've never tried to say it even to ourselves, much less publicly to a bunch of other ordinary people like us.

The picture that began to emerge was a group of people who embody sanctification as we have already been talking about it and then to share out of their own lives what John of the Cross has been pushing for us to see in his own way. Over the last two or three days one thing has become more and more clear about John of the Cross. That is that every human being knows much more about the Dark Night of the Soul than they ever let on. And probably there are many people who even know more about it than John of the Cross ever did. They just haven't allowed themselves to admit it much less talk or write about it. John dared to do it on all of our behalf. Thank God he did. Now we are free to admit what we know. Certainly those of us in this room during the last year have experienced a purgation of the spirit. I have. Haven't you?

This year of the turn to the world has been something else. It has been a great rending of our spirits. Therefore, it is incumbent upon you and I to articulate to someone and before God what has happened to us. To study the classics like John of the Cross is one thing. But to turn around and look at our own lives and our own day and to make bold to voice what we see, is something else again. It requires honesty and boldness most of us have never faced before. But I believe that very fact makes it even more crucial. We are dealing here with things that matter. There's nothing academic or trivial about what we are trying to do ­ to describe personally and concretely who we really are, who we intend to be, in fact who we are called by God to be.

Our Judeo­Christian scriptural tradition is very helpful. Listen to this rather lengthy passage from The Epistle to the Hebrews, beginning chapter 5, verse 1:

"For every master guildsman [it says here, "high priest"] is taken from among people and appointed their representative before God to offer gifts and sacrifice for sins. They are able to hear patiently with the ignorant and the arrogant since they too are beset by weakness. And because of this he is bound to make sin offerings for himself no less than for the people. And nobody arrogates the honor to himself. He is called by God as indeed Aaron was.

So it is with Christ. He did not confer upon himself the glory of becoming the master guildsman. It was granted by God who said to him, "Thou art my son. Today I have begotten thee." As also in another place he says, "Thou art a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. In the days of his earthly life [that is, his wormhood life], he offered up [lots of ] prayers, and [lots of] petitions, with loud crying and loud tears, to God who was able to deliver him from [that horrific suffering] the grave, he was able to hear because of his humble submission [what God was saying to him]. Son though he was, he learned obedience in the school of suffering, and once perfected became the source of eternal salvation for all who obeyed him. Named by God high priest after the order of Melchizedek.

I would like to say much [a lot] about this [guy] Melchizedek. Much that is difficult to explain because you have grown so dull of hearing. For indeed though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone else to teach you the ABC's of God's oracles all over again. It has come to this. You need milk and not solid food. Anyone who lives on milk is still a baby, and does not know what meat is like, but grown people can take such solid food. Their perceptions are trained by long use to discriminate between good and evil.

Let us then stop discussing these rudiments of Christianity. [My God, he's was over my head already.] We ought not to be laying over again the foundations of faith in God, things like repentance and the deadness of our former ways, and by instructions on the cleansing rites and the laying on of hands. [All these ordinary, simple, basic things like that!] All these rudimentary things like the resurrection from the dead [simple, really?] and eternal judgment [some baby's milk that is!] Indeed let us advance toward maturity. And so we shall if God permits. [Yea, verily!] For when men have once been enlightened [that is, sanctified] when they have a taste of the heavenly gifts, and a share in the Holy Spirit. When they have experienced the goodness of God's Word and the spiritual energies of the New Day, the age to come. And after all this have fallen away, [how on earth?] it is impossible to bring them again to repentance. [I can see why!] For with their own hands they are crucifying the Son of God and making mock of his death. [Is that what I've been doing?] When the earth drinks from the rain which falls from time to time and yields useful thoughts of these for whom it is cultivated, it is receiving its share of blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles [I've been seeing a few of those.] and is worthless and God's curse hangs over it, the end of wrath is purgation and a burning. [That is, the Dark Night of the Soul.]

But although we speak as we do, we are convinced that you, my friends, are in the better case, [really?] and this makes for your salvation, for God would not be so unjust as to forget all that you did for love of his name, when you rendered service to his people, as you still do. But we would long for every one of you to show the same eager concern until you hope is finally realized.

The situation we here in this room are in is that we are doomed to be the religious of the 20th century and into the 21st. I do not know exactly what I mean by that. If I did, we wouldn't need councils or research assemblies. That is precisely what we're here to find out and record. Once we become self

conscious about being sanctified, once we wake up to the fact that we are already living out of the Word and being called every day by day by day by day to act out what it means to be loved and accepted BY GOD. Once we have become self­conscious about all that, we are doomed to be the religious of our era. There is no way to avoid it. We are already in a covenant, a colleagueship that has a sense of history, a linkage throughout history with all the saints and all those characters back through history who discovered the same thing. They, too, lived out of the Word and began forging out what that meant for themselves and others of their day. We've been thrown into this history­long relationship and are thereby

commissioned to to inject the Word into all the academic disciplines of our time and to forge a planet­wide culture curriculum. That simply had to be! It wasn't something we sat down one day and thought, "Wouldn't that be nice?" It had to be done because the Word was already being put into every structure of society.

We have also found that we have to put the Word into our family life, into how we act out our covenantal disciplines. We have to act out what it means to live a loved and accepted­by­God life there as well as everywhere else. That's just what it means to wake up self­consciously to living out of the Word. When you self­consciously enter into that way of living that is what I mean by being the religious of history. It means we don't have any choice but to participate in the resurgence of our day. Oh, we have a choice! We can say, "No! No, I will not embrace the resurgence welling up within me and those

I know, those gathered in this research assembly, those spelling out resurgence with every word they speak from around the globe." But if I'm really a loved­of­God human being then I simply and naturally start being and doing resurgence everywhere I go. And that is what I mean by being the religious of

our day.

We are also being the religious of our day by transparently showing through our own being that we are being our BE to the glory of God. It's not some kind of a law that I can lay down for you or you can lay down for me. It's not a moralism that I hear from my wife ­­ although God does frequently speak through her. When I'm being who I authentically am, it just happens and transparency shows through me.

All you have to do is just stop and look at each other or look at me and you see sitting there or standing here, behind the mask of my own being and always refusing to let the real ME get out ­­ I see my Being and her being and his being. Somehow our masks turn transparent and my ME shows forth when I'm being my BE. The mystery of life itself is thus revealed.

I've really been amazed at our ability to plunge into John of the Cross. The first time we studied that book it was utter, utter mystery, and utter nonsense, the whole thing. We charted it up one side and down the other. We got rational connections of this to that to the other, and it was still nonsense. We translated Medieval terms into 20th century terms, and it was still nonsense. And this time it was totally different.

We waded right in and our experiences were so parallel that all that other study garbage didn't faze us one way or the other. We just said, "Yes, yes, yes ­­ of course, that's the way it is. Thank you very much for saying what I already knew. I just hadn't thought of it that way. But, Yes. That's what I experience." Somehow the Lord has had enough happen to us in the last year or two or three or four that we know the Dark Night of the Soul very, very well. We're bosom buddies like it or not.

And that puts us in this Awe­filling League, does it not? We are selfconsciously a part of a group of people back through history, Kazantzakis' crimson line. When we picked up John of the Cross' book we already were the League or we would have thrown it in the trash. It was us. And we were it. It does in fact pierce through our skulls, our creations, our ideas, our houses and homes, and everything else we have around us. Any new social form that comes into being has that smell about it, that stamp of approval. It belongs to the League.

I really doubt that nations, economics, politics, education and all that is really and truly history after all. That may be what I history books say history is. But in fact you and I know that real history is not so transitory as all of that. Real history is the really Real ­­ the people of God fully being their acceptance by God with no excuse and no apology. All those dates, facts, figures, names, people that we learned in history courses are pointless and ephemeral unless they illuminate the Spirit that runs through life. All that is more of a tangent on life and not the heart of it. The only real liveliness there is is the Awe­filling League burning it's way through history. And we are part of those people.

We are also, within this League, the universal church. So the League becomes especially embodied in a group of people that have a name as being the religious. O.K.? Maybe that's what the church is. The church that pioneers history, creates civilization is also the church that all of civilization rides on the back of. That church is these religious people. And perhaps that's what we've become. That is who we are and understand ourselves to be ­­ the universal church.

There's a curious thing about that which you and I have known for a long time. We just haven't been willing to face it fully perhaps. Yes, we're the universal church but within that we are also many kinds of people. The little old lady that sits back there holding the purse strings of the church; she's the universal church, too. The chairman of the board, the president of each denomination ­­ all those sorts of people are also the universal church, whether they know it or not, whether they want to be so or not. They, too, are a part of this League. They may not be exactly on side with all that we're about, but since the universal church includes everyone under this banner, then they must be the universal church in spite of themselves somehow. That jars me!

The church as we know it all around the globe is there representing this League and keeping the memory in existence without fully realizing what it is they are preserving. Thank God for them!

But you and I we're also something else. We are those kind of weird creatures, back through the whole history of the church, who come to be and forge their relationship to the League in a rather unusual way. At one time they decided to go barefoot. Why in the world did they do that? Or they decided to wear cossacks. Why? They were many shapes and colors throughout our whole past. They forged the monastic orders as a permanent part of church life. In just such a permanent way we are doomed to be the religious. I don't know all the implications of that. If i knew, I might run the other way, too. But if you stay on the Way, a lot is going to be required of you.

In fact, I would say that right here today we are at the point of deciding what weird social form we will forge as a part of this vast array of weirdos throughout time. This is a sociological form beyond that of the local church. The ecumenical parish is very crucial. And it must come into being. But I seriously doubt it can get itself born, established and sustained without some kind of weirdos like us to hold up their hands.

We need some kind of pattern of life, some time design, some places to live in and work to do, and way of supporting ourselves so that we can fully be on a full time basis the religious. No part time presence will do.

When I face that kind of a decision, I begin to feel like I'm split right down the middle. My vocational struggle and decision is on one side where I can really do some significant social changes. I really want to mix my guts with the sociological transformation of society, a new economics, a new educational mode and system, a new politics, whatever! I want to speak with the business people of my city and gather secular people around a table and hammer out those changes. That's one side of my being.

On the other side I like to come to research assemblies. I like doing what we're doing here. I like to be where all this great singing is going on and all this fine fellowship. A good cadre meeting is a great thing! It's kind of fun! In fact why not do cadre meetings and think up ways to have more cadre meetings so we can be more and more with people of like mind. What a delight!

But I say it's a kind of split. I feel torn in two directions at once. But somehow in the last year that split has been pronounced whole. Each side is for the sake of the other. The tension will always be there, but they are essential to each other­­ AS LONG AS one doesn't outweigh the other, or over balance the other, or get in the other's way. We need both of them to be vocated. The religious community that IS socially engaged is what we are after. The Turn has said, That IS your vocation! In fact the Epistle to the Hebrews says that the Word has come into being through the veil of your own being.

The style of the religious is going to happen in our time. Social change is going to happen and it's going to happen down deep at the wellsprings of spirit itself in a religious sort of way. When we put those pins on the other day, there it was. it was happening. I don't mean the externals of what was happening. I mean deep down inside of each of us it was happening, each in our own way.

I don't want anyone to say to me, David, you are called to be the religious in our day. I know it's true whether they say it to me or not. That's just my indicative situation. That's who I am. And that's true of everyone who is self­consciously a part of this movement. I don't know the exact societal forms we have to create. But I suspect if we look at the various forms the religious have forge in various cultures and contexts and times and places we'll soon realize what indicatively we have to do.

Our fate is that since we can see history so clearly, the only way we can be the religious is to be it inclusively, not narrowly or parochially. Joe Mathews was saying the other night that the charismatic movement is also being the religious in our time. We aren't just talking about Catholic monks, you know. We are talking about any band of people that ever got the job done for their day. The denominations were once that. They started to solidify and settle down as the powers on their several thrones. But they were once the religious. That was their societal form. But today we certainly do not need any more denominations.

We first understood ourselves as the people who woke up other people. We were to be the illuminators of history to shed light on the actual lives of people. In China there was a group like that. They were called the literati, or they could just as well have been called the illuminatii. They went from village to village sharing an inclusiveness that Chinese culture desperately needed. They were waking up people. They also had a deep form of poetry, called The Way, the Tao. They broadened and enriched the very language the people were speaking.

And so it is with us. We sing our songs and wake people up and push them into a greater depth of awareness about life in general and in particular. We have also been teachers, emphasizing the methods of education that open up new vistas for people, equipping them to swim in the strange waters of our rapidly changing world. We are providing people with lively images that will guide them to even greater images and life responses to the critical issues in their local communities. These are some of the definitudes for our societal form of the religious, definitudes that we have to flesh out more fully and more thoroughly.

More recently we have understood ourselves as the servant religious, as people who serve the church and world. We now see ourselves as people who do things for all people. Whatever their needs and problems may be: their social or community development, their educational institutions or any other social organization. By serving other people in this way we are also shaping ourselves and deciding what kind of societal form we need to be. What will enable us to serve every last human being? You cannot serve others just by polishing their boots. You don't really serve them by being a doormat for them to walk on. You become a servant by deciding what their needs actually are and addressing those needs.

Sometimes people don't really know what their real needs are. You have to help him decide what the real needs are which means you have to decide what you think his real needs are. I'll never forget my amazement when I discovered this truth. I was a fledgling teacher back in Austin, Texas. One day I had the opportunity to do something to help my friend Udorn Vadanasindu from Thailand. He had just finished his MBA. I figured he needed a night out, a fine meal out. So I made reservations at a fine restaurant and went to invite him to go with me. Udorn was a funny guy. He said, "Oh, great! Let's go to Schultz's Beer Garden." And so we did. What he needed to celebrate wasn't what I thought at all. But his real need got met.

That's often, if not always, the way life is. The real need surfaces only when you decide what the real need is, go for it, then you discover the real need. Don't be caught off guard when it doesn't come out in the exact location you address. It usually comes out somewhere else. But the important thing is address the real or underlying need. Not the first ten things someone is complaining about or seem to need.

This sort of serving function is so crucial. I'm sure we'll move on to address other needs that we haven't even thought about or discovered as yet. We have already learned a great deal about the needs charismatics are addressing for example. Talk about charismatics. If you stop and think about it we are already a charismatic movement. We speak in tongues and we are always interpreting the tongues other people are speaking. We may even be more inclusively charismatic than the charismatic movement.

To get some kind of enlivening injection into the church today is an unbelievable task. How do you get pop songs with new words that display transparency to the way life is into every local church? "Charisma" simply means "spiritual gift". To give spirit into every life situation ­­ we are going to learn a lot more about how to do that. We need new skills to be able to do that.

And this whole business of worship. This is very demanding and crucial. We need to learn how to be liturgists IN SOCIETY! "Liturgy" is the work of the people. How do you be that which symbolizes and acts our and rehearses the depths of life for every last human being?

We are in fact going to have to be "master guildsmen". I find I need to use some sort of secular term such as that simply because we live in a secular age. Secularism has become our "vern ~cular~' so to speak. It's the actual language people speak in our day. ''High Priest" to secular society? The very term almost gets in its own way if you get me. We have to learn to be the ones who can go "behind the veil of the Holy of Holies" for our day as those ancient Hebrew priests did for their day. You know what's behind the veil of the Holy of Holies? There's an altar with two horns. And I imagine what went on when the high priest went back there was something like this. He went in, dressed in the finest raiment money could buy in his day. He went in where no one could see and he dared to grasp those two horns, one in each hand. And because his soul was pure, instead of being struck dead like an ordinary mortal, he is charged with the largest voltage of spirit energy anyone could possibly imagine for a longer period of time than any one could imagine. And then he's ready for the next year. He is literally "charged" to be the spirit person needed for all the people.

The religious is always that sort of self­sacrificing person. self­risking person. What if he forgot to get purged from one little sin, or one he was most ashamed of but refused to let go of. ZAP! He'd be burned to a crisp! The religious are the sanctified ones, purged of their sins, prepared for whatever comes. The religious need today to somehow become the religious of the religious of the religious because their are many forms of the religious today, more than any other period in history.

As an aspiring clergyman, I would confess that by the time i got my training for being a religious, the true ''religious" was no longer around to join. It was gone in fact before i ever showed up. I really never saw standing before me a truly religious religious! No one ever displayed for me what it means to be a clergyman. And yet here I am being a religious and I'm trying to forge out what that looks like today. Maybe most clergy today simply never will be the religious in the sense I'm using the term. Or maybe they are there and I simply am not present in the same place they are. "Clergy" are selected, elected, ordained by the universal church and by the society they are apart of. They play a very crucial function in society.

We know when someone among us truly becomes the religious. Who is it that breaks open the kind of songs that are needed at this precise moment? They are the religious. Some master the calling of being our symbol carriers or our maker, protectors, guardians of our spirit deeps. That would scare the pants off most of the clergymen I know. In fact it already has. I met some clergymen recently who thought they wanted a renewed congregation but when it came down to actually doing something toward that renewal they backed out. They decided it really wasn't renewal they wanted

It is in this mood that brought us to understanding sanctification. This is why this has all happened to us. You have to have been through justification to be able to face what sanctification actually is. You discover in the midst of the purgation of the Dark Night that you don't really know what justification was in the first place. Do you hear that? To really understand that my life is accepted and received becomes harder than before. Now I know my inadequacy more than ever before. This impossible living is now exposed to me.

During this past year justification somehow got all foggy again. And I was being purged of my best theological understanding. I stood nude before God with nothing to hide behind. Sanctification is not something you go out and find or accomplish. It is what you already are. Do you recall when you got your life all squelched and squoze and warped that you had to care? And that you had to care inclusively, barring no one? Any of us can care for ourselves. We know how to do something for ourselves. But to care inclusively for every person, you have to have every attachment shorn away from you. And that's what has been happening to us.

Universal benevolence becomes that which happens on the other side of the hundred ton crane that drops on you. it's that outgoingness toward all of life, that is CARE! We now what radical integrity is. It comes in a humiliating fashion. You might summarize it by saying you have to be so totally humiliated that you cannot do anything else but be who you are. That's radical integrity.

A metaphor that still speaks to me goes like this. When I finally woke up to see who David McCleskey is as the religious of our time a creature, a human male animal, that was one day drug out of a cow. I am that crummy, ordinary creature. Because I am and know that I am that creature, that crummy, ordinary creature, I have radical integrity.

It is also endless felicity. Once you are fully and only who you are you then know happiness like you never even dared to yearn for. You know full happiness when you decide to be the religious of your day. You can be that osprey that swoops down and sinks his talons into the great fish, that great White Whale of Moby Dick and forever you are locked onto his back and drug down into the profundity of life WITH A SMILE ON YOUR FACE! That's endless felicity! You know that you are going to be called upon to live and serve as the religious today and tomorrow and tomorrow and the tomorrow after that. It is simultaneously the greater agony, the greater suffering, the greater illumination, the greater at­one­ment, the greater integrity and that is true happiness.

I don't know whether you find this a hard lecture or not, but I find it so impossible you wouldn't believe it. Being the religious is no romantic gig. It is the embodiment of being fully sanctified people. If you dare to allow yourself to be sanctified, YOU ARE THE RELIGIOUS! When you are perfected, when you are fulfilled, you're the religious. Once you know that there's nothing else you can do with your life. Accept it, live it. Or say NO! And don't live or serve. It's not really imposed upon you. You make a choice. All I can do is report what choice I've made.

I would call upon us not to let another day go by but that each of us start forging out for ourselves what the societal forms of being the religious is for us today. It is nothing less than recovery that impossible vocation that brings together the whole universe into health and wholeness ­­ true happiness. Social engagement and the religious life is what it means to be fully human ­not out somewhere secluded from the rest of life, but here in the midst of life "on the street where you live". The religious aren't something special, so sacred no one can touch them nor can they touch anyone else. They're just radically human. They are human beings that all of civilization depends upon to provide a whole human future.

David McCleskey