That letter that young Gautama wrote me about the spiritual
dimension of life we typed up to hand out. Maybe it's a little
too personal to hand out, but anyway, it's typed up. In that letter
he uses the rubric, the category, of 'Eternal Return,' in the
sense of humanness, not as a metaphysical term. I must confess
that my theological edge, my existential edge, is located precisely
there. Fanatic that I am, the only redeeming grace relative to
fanaticism that I can appeal to, as far as I experience myself,
is that my fanaticism keep changing. My present intellectual fanaticism,
however, is unmistakably at the point of what that life is, after
it has beheld what I mean to point to by the center
I think I got the from Teresa - after, so to speak, one has become
conscious that all his life he has been at the center, what that
life of the dead man is, for only dead men selfconsciously
behold the center. I'd like to give the talk I gave recently all
over again. I think I could really give a talk now, for that life
is nothing less, nothing more, than absolute perpetual service
of mankind.
The reaching out of the world, as I sensed after it on my
trip, toward a new spirituality I tell you, my words these
day seem poverty stricken; I wish I had other words in
my opinion, is the reaching, out for understanding, in that light,
of the return to man. One does not reach out for a grasp of new
spirituality unless he's been to the center. What I'm trying to
say is that our age has been to the center. Of course all men
have been to the center. But at certain moments in history the
consciousness of the fact that you've been to the center screams
out. The trouble is that that consciousness has not really broken
through; so in order to appropriate the spirituality means that
you bring something like utter selfconsciousness to the
journey to the center. Then your selfconscious struggle,
I believe, is to delineate for yourself and to fashion for the
sake of all mankind a manifestation of the life that has self-consciously
been to the center. I'd like to go back to talk afresh about the
youth revolution, about the black revolution, about the feminine
revolution, about the non-western world revolution in these kinds
of categories.
Coupled with that kind of happening to myself while I was
away was very akin to it if not the same thing, that had to do
with my colleagues and your colleagues that are overseas. I did
not realize that my journey for the first time in the experience
of our order was
really an inspection journey. Golly, I hate that word. I hate
anybody inspecting anybody else. I don't mind someone, you know,
screaming most of the time or talking behind people's back, as
long as he does not acknowledge that as a virtue. But I cannot
stand headon inspection. Therefore, it's taken me days even
to acknowledge that that was an inspection tour. I recovered from
that kind of moralism when I realized that I was not inspecting
our colleagues overseas. I was
inspecting us. Certain things that I saw there I would
deem wrong, but in the midst of fantastic accomplishment. Twice
as many people were in the ITI's there this summer as last year.
Slicker sent us a cablegram yesterday saying that therewere
74 in the Ootacamond ITI. There were 128 in Hong Kong. Last year
there were 103 in Singapore. Being the kind of exaggerators that
we are we had 103 but before we were through we lost
about 10 of those. I suspect Slicker lost a
few of those and I'm sure McClesky lost a few. But
if we take the brightest side of it, we had over twice as many
this year as last year; and if we take the darkest side after
those who left last year, we still have over twice as many this
year as we had last. Even more of a miracle is that overseas our
colleagues raised $1S,000. That is even more of a miracle. Also
for the first time in our history we had international teachers.
Something like six that were at Singapore were teaching this year,
and next year! my gracious alive! It could be simply astounding.
And then even more maybe of a miracle, in most cases but in India
very clearly the sponsorship and the recruitment was actually
done by and under the auspices of nationals from various countries.
That is just simply fantastic, to say nothing of the trips to
break open the Pacific Islands, to say nothing of what the Morrills
and 0ylers did in Japan. In the place where we had less opportunity
to do anything, they got 20 people
from there. Or what the people in Southeast Asia were
able to do19 people from Indonesia. That's unbelievable.
The same number came from the Philippines; to say nothing of what's
happened in that extremely difficult part of the world to work
in called India; and what's happened in Australia; and you could
go on.
To get to my point as to where I have criticism of us back
here relative to what I saw on the trip, I've already indicated
the area that these were in. The first one that I'd want to mention,
although it's not the biggest problem, is the problem of adaptability.
If I didn't hate the word public relations so much I'd call it
public relations. I've tried to analyze what the problem was there
and it seems that It's something like this. If one learns a lot
of gimmicksand I tell you, we learn a lot of gimmicksand
these are external to your being,
then all you've got to BE through are these external
gimmicks. If you're in one situation, wham! Another situation,
wham! Another situation, wham! All you've got is a bag of gimmicks.
When you're able to internalize these so that they are not what
you be THROUGH, so to speak, but they are your being, then you
can adapt to any situation, play a million and one roles and are
able with a wink of the eye to move from playing this role to
playing another role. As long as the instruments are the methodologies
and the insights that you possess are something exterior to how
you be your being, you are trapped by those methodologies and
those instruments. You teach RSl one moment and the next
moment are doing a public relations job, and you are still, say
for instance, teaching RS1. That's a problem and was a crucial
problem that I saw on the trip.
The second problem as I said before to you had to do with
model building. I saw some of our colleagues who gave lectures
or model building like nobody's business who were not able in
my opinion to build models, and particularly the kind of tactical
models that set the vision clear for them and told them day after
day after day after day exactly what they had to do relative to
the total missional thrust of our wholebody. Again, I interpret
that as some way or another our total body, including those of
you who weren't here, for you picked up our sins just as much
as those of us who wallowedin the midst of themthat
some way or another that did not get through to the inner grooves
of their deepest
being. That isn't put very well, but I'm sure that it's getting
at the heart of what the problem was. It was not simply lack of
a certain kind of finesse.
To go back to another set of poetry they had not turned their
facility into prayer. They had not really grasped that prayer
is RADICAL TACTIC. In both of these cases I am trying to say that
from where I stood it seemed to be a spiritual inadequacy. I hope
that's right.
The third area of criticism had to do with corporateness.
I said to you the other day that I don't remember ever having
anybody in anything that was ever called my office, and sitting
them down individually and reading them the Riot Act. I don't
ever remember that. For me, that's talking behind someone's back.
The way I read the Riot Act is two ways. One
is to just eat someone out when they aren't present,
in front of their colleagues, in such a fashion that you know
very well that the word is going to get to them. I really climbed
on Townley the other day, and he's an old hand. He was assigned
a certain morning to come up with the master training plan for
the whole local congregation experiment. When he was called on
to produce what he had covenanted with all of his integrity to
do, he went to the board and put up one of the most exciting diagrams
you ever saw. It showed that if we moved the way we were going,
in 1984 78,000 local congregations would be in the midst of embodying
the tactical system we worked out this summer; and it had every
year in between. It simply astounded me, but he didn't do his
assignment. It takes a smart man to do a thing like that. It was
extremely useful, but he didn't do his assignment. I mean, I came
down on him hard, like with
a sledge hammer. It wasn't two hours later that Townley accosted
me in the hall and repeated word for word what I had said. That's
one way I have of not talking behind people's back.
The second way I have is to do the same thing while they're
present, but in the presence of the gaze of their colleagues
not my gaze, mine's not important. Then whether they agree or
disagree with me, they just better make the most of it, and then
do what they please with me.
The third problem overseas is not understanding what corporateness
is. I tell you, when you've been brainwashed psychologically,
like you and I have, that human relations is some way or another
personal in the sense that we have to learn how to make people
like us and make ourselves likable to other people rather than
to deal with one another as unrepeatable uniquenesses in history
that are not dependent on our approval, and when we grasp ourselves
as spiritual beings who are dependent only on God's approval,
only on God's kindly disposition toward us, then
I want to repeat an old saw then something fantastic
happens between Shinn and myself. If there's anybody in this room
who doesn't know that Shinn is just an unbelievable isness,
it's because you've been trying to like Shinn. I want to say to
you, that's ... (You ought to laugh a little louder or I'm going
to suspect that you're still hung up on ancient psychologism.)
I say the third problem was corporateness. It was not that
these people didn't know what corporateness was. Some of them
have been giving lectures on corporateness I suppose for six or
seven years and yet I smelled that they didn't have the foggiest
idea of what corporateness is in terms of embodiment. I suggested
that the other day. Yeah, and I was reading a PSU document that
was trying to define corporateness and it said that it was everything
except ... commonness for mission. I can't stand vulgarity and
when somebody says horseshit I die and so I put question marks
on the page that's my shorthand. Corporateness for
the sake of anything except getting a common job done, you can
have. I want nothing of it whatsoever.
Now corporateness is never private? I suppose the very term
implies that. There is no such thing as self discipline in the
sense of private discipline. Discipline is always corporate
and the interesting thing about growing old in the
midst of corporateness is that if you dare to submit yourself
to corporateness for the sake of prospective investment ofyourself
in the historical process, then what happens in time is that you
become corporate inside, and if you don't submit to the externality
of corporateness you never become corporate inside, that is to
say, you never become disciplined inside. For internal discipline
is the internalization of corporateness. This is about all I really
mean by the whole rubric of sociality or meditation. And there
comes a time, in principle... not actually, in which a person
doesn't need to be set in the midst of external structures of
corporateness because he is corporate inside, period. I like to
say of Slicker, why you could walk him barefooted across the coals
of hell and he would be still standing on the other side. He is
an internally disciplined man, I mean he is not in corporateness,
he is corporateness. And if you think he is not an individual,
you damned well have not met Slicker yet, and to me an extremely
offensive individual. But he is corporate inside. He no longer
needs to have 26 people around him to be sure he gets out of bed
or to be sure that he gets the job that he is assigned to DO done.
Then on the other side of saying that, why, of course, nobody
is ever outside of the need of theexternal gaze of the neighbor.
Go back and read Bonhoeffer on Community in this area. One of
the silly ironies of history is that precisely when you become
in your being a corporate human being, then it is that you care
for mankind, which is another way of saying the same thing, I
don't mean that you are mushy about mankind, but that all of you
all of the time belongs to mankind. There isn't a part of you
that belongs to your family, not a part of you that belongs to
your wife, not a part of you that belongs to your children, not
a part of you that belongs to your mama and your papa, not a part
of you that belongs to your friends, but all of you all of the
time belongs to all mankind. That is what it means to be corporate.
About the time that happens inside yourself then you become an
elder, even if you are only twenty. And the rest of your life
is spent being corporate internally in order that the novices
coming on can learn that corporateness is in the total BE of their
being.
Now I have tried to say that the problem of corporateness
is not an external problem (and no one can teach you this); it
is a problem of spirituality. I get awfully angry when people
talk about charisma in terms of leadership as if charisma was
something somebody was born with, and some have it and some not.
For years I've been saying that the source of charisma is the
capacity to stand day after day after day in the waterless desert.
While this one falls over and that one fades away in the strain,
you just STAND day after day after day after day. THAT is charisma.
If some of you young ones think it would be fun to have a dose
of charisma, then it is very simple: you just stand day after
day after day with the shells falling all around you and this
one, he starts bitching and bitching and hitching, but you give
up the luxury of bitching and grind away at the task. It is just
that simple. This is interior discipline ... and interior discipline
is corporateness. The reason why most of you have lousy marriages
is that you never learned to be corporate. Most of you bring up
every other day or so why you might do better in marriage with
another filly. The problem of corporateness overseas was a spiritual
problem.
That brings me to the fourth problem overseas that I saw ...
the spiritual, this time head on. You know it's sort of fun to
eat somebody out that you really like, like young Gautama.
It's simple for me to eat out Wiegel because he is
sort of like Gautama for me. If you watch their eyes you see the
twinkle in the midst of the hammer blows falling on them. And
then the next day you get a letter from the young Gautama in which
underneath his utter lack of spirituality he discloses himself
as a deep spirit man. That doesn't alter things one iota. That
letter helped me to see that my yelling at them was not at them
at all. NOW I believe that the twinkle in Gautama's eye meant
that he knew that I was yelling at myself and the rest of you
back here and not at him at all. Now wouldn't that be irony.
Now what do we do about it? I want to start at the crucial
beginning and then touch on two or three other things. For three
years we have used ourselves as guinea pigs in trying to recover
on behalf of every local congregation in this world that ever
existed and ever will exist what the little church or ecclesiola
would fool like. Being an extremely impatient person I've been
irritated by those characters who went to ecclesiola and thought
it was dull and not going well. There are always the sort of abstract
perfectionists who could never if they lived to the end of history
understand what an experiment was. There are no experiments
for them. There is some kind of realm of the eternal
in which everlasting patterns exist and they always want that
perfect pattern already existing. If it doesn't exist they never
dream that they might be stupid; they'd say that something else
has a pipeline into the eternal and they were just not stupid
enough to use it to bring it in. The ecclesiolas have been experiments.
Nobody has known what they are and if you get bored and think
it's going wrong, then it's your job (and not bitching in some
reductionistic way but thinking in terms of 1000 years from now)
to come in with the next step.
Because of the kind of problem that I sense in the world and sense inside of us and certainly saw in terms of our mission in other countries, I would like to suggest that we spend this year and maybe next year and maybe the year after centering, not on such things as the seminary or the college or the sodality. First of all, those things do not exist. An ecclesiola or
a college is not something that takes up space at a given time composed of a coagulate of human beings. It is a dynamic. Think of the spiritual aspect of the dynamic that finally defines a local congregation; let your mind go back to earlier lectures. The dynamic in the seminary is that of selfhood. The dynamic within the sodality is that of fellowhood. The dynamic within the college is that of Godhood. That's not a metaphysical category. God-hood does not exist outside tile dynamic of selfhood and fellowhood, and so with fellowhood in relationship to the other two, and so with selfhood in relationship to the others. They are a dynamic. In each one of those cases you're dealing with turning matter into spirit, to use the category of Kazantzakis. What I mean by selfhood is the process of turning matter
into spirit. If you are not turning matter into spirit, you
haven't got what I mean by self hood. The same is true of fellowhood,
and the same is true of Godhood.
Therefore, I would like to see us this next quarter
and I suspect that it's going to take a year go forward
in the experiment by stripping the seminary and stripping the
sodality off the college and center on the college. I think that
the crucial problem at the moment is not in self awareness and
it is not in fellowhood but I want to take that back in
just a minute. Fundamentally it is in the lack of interior facility
of bleeding every episode that we participate in, bleeding it
of its interior meaning that, to speak mythologically, was placed
there before the dawn of time itself. That is to say, lack of
facility in eliciting the transparency of every relationship and
every situation in which we find ourselves. That's the function
of a college. We would try to take that and push that to the bottom,
not in abstraction, but for the sake of seeing that a local congregation,
the dynamic of selfhood, fellowhood, and Godhood, is never
located in time or space that is, a given time and a given
space. I must BE the local congregation in that sense of dynamic
In every situation. That is to say, self awareness has to be going
on. Spiritual relationship to Shinn has to be going on. I tell
you, I want to put this back again. When anybody criticizes Shinn
in my presence, I stamp with both feet unless I hear an affirmation
of that being. Do you hear what I mean? Every situation has to
so to speak, turn Shinn into spirit. He's a big blob of matter,
and not a very likable one either. Matter needs to be turned into
spirit in every situation, not some scintillating situation and
not when you're with someone who delights your being, every situation.
You haven't got any sociality, you haven't got any fellowhood
if you've not learned how to turn matter into spirit.
You and I after last year know in abstraction what a sodality
is. We don't need to worry about that any more. How do you get
the dynamic of a college operating within the dynamic of a sodality,
without which you haven't got any locality? When you take human
relations out in the midst of the world, and set that aside from
the dynamic of eliciting transparency, you haven't got any human
relations; you've got some kind of animal relations. Mow if we
did this it would mean that maybe on Thursday night we have just
college ... not ecclesiola, knowing that even in that college,
time and space don't define the college ~ The college is when
the symbolism of that night begins to penetrate every aspect of
our existence.
Now the second aspect of our problem is to redo our conception of a division. This is not the right way to put it. Most of our divisions, I believe, for the last two years have been lousy. Frankly, I don't quite know what you do about it. That is, I haven't known what to do. I had felt that maybe the cure of it would be to set Slicker here for a time, but that didn't work. If Slicker can't do it, maybe the Lord is trying to get something else through our skulls. So let us say for a moment that we see our divisions as the sodality. This means that those of you that have a hard time seeing, what an experiment is bracket the problem as to whether A division is a sodality or a guild. Just BRACKET that. This is what experimentation is. You just bracket a certain area so you can test something over here. That is, your rational facilities are always ahead in one sense of your data, or you are not experimenting. And then we self consciously try to bring into those divisions the dynamic out of the college. Do you see what I mean? That would that look like? I did not know this until recently but all last year, and I have done this . or years, I ran a division. I didn't know I was, I was trying to get ready for the local congregation, but I was running a division. You know, if I had known we wouldn't have had any fun. This year I don't think I'm really going to run one, I'll probably interfere with one. How do you get this experiment actually in flesh and blood? That is probably my assignment. Well, when I say I'm not actually going to run a division but to interfere, what I mean is that if that leader who sits up in front doesn't make that division dance with (Lord, I wish I had more language) spirituality, THAT'S when I'm going to move. Because by golly, I'm not going to sit any longer in any wooden sodality that is not what it IS, a dynamic in relation to a college and in relation to a seminary in its self awareness. This means an experiment at that point is really an experiment in the ecclesiola but one that gears in on the college, and another aspect of the same experiment that gears in on the division. I don't know how we're going to do this, but it is going to have something to do with the kind of conversation that we created last year called the spirit or guru conversations that we used this last summer. How it can9t be a formal thing and I've been fooling around for a few days. I suppose any hard headed strategist would call it wasting time but I don't call it wasting time. I think a man who knows who he is spiritually and is intentionally attempting to turn matter into spirit can accomplish in five minutes what
it takes a man who doesn't days to accomplish. I am convinced
of that, deeply. I think I saw that in the month of June, I think
I saw that in the month of July.
But then we have to fool in other areas. how do you do this?
If anybody knows, then, for God's sake, speak up. I haven't read
the Bible for a long time, years. Now mark you, I've read the
Bible, but I haven't READ it. There was a time when, due to the
kind of training that I had had, you could name any book in the
New Testament and I could go to the board and chart it paragraph
by paragraph. That was a long, time ago. I haven't READ the Bible
except, you know, I'm going to HAVE to read the Bible. How in
the wide world do get something like think that fantastic snatch
in Corinthians, without which there isn't any RSI: 'My sure
defense, my only
weapon is a life of integrity'? If you didn't read the Bible,
where would you get that? You can't teach RSI without that
verse tearing through your being. How would you dare to stand
up and teach RSI if your being was not grounded on that
verse, for after all, who are you, you're some two bit
nothing, that's who you are, outside of the Grace of God. I know
enough about you and you know enough about me to know that's true.
Well, I haven't READ
the Bible for years. I would like to go and teach it in the seminary.
I would do the art form method, that's form criticism.
But I want to read it as seeing Jesus as the guru and I mean Jesus is there in Corinthians just as much as he is there in Mark. Now he is the strangest guru. I have had fun recently. Who is the Indian name of the Deerslayer? Natty Bumpo. Now you remember in the last part of the book, the heroine is captured by the Huron Indians, and the way she left a trail is
that she kept tearing a little bit off her petticoat. (Now Cooper was born before the Freudian era so that was a sociological matter. If she had torn her dress, the Indians would have noticed.) So, anyway she left a little snatch here and a little snatch there. She must have the thought the Indians were stupid and they couldn't see. But anyway the story is great up until the
time you get to be 58, and then it gets rather childish. And
old Natty Bumpo would go along and find these hunks of petticoat
and eventually he found her and rescued her.
Now Jesus is sort of that kind of guru. He just dropped something
and went on. Like he says 'watch and wait' or 'wait and watch,'
and then he goes on. And it took 2000 years for Natty Bumpo to
come along and find that little patch of petticoat. But that didn't
seem to upset Jesus, he just dropped a little petticoat here and
dropped a little there. He's not like the professional guru in
India who gathers his disciples around and really spells out the
unfathomable mysteries of the universe. No, Jesus was a petticoat
guru.
Well, you know in our pseudodivision we started, I don't
know if we're going to go on with it, reading the Bible. I've
decided to start on Luke, but we're reading it just like snatches
of petticoat. We decided on Luke, but I just couldn't
stand going through
those angels singing with shepherds beholding, so somebody said
let's start with Chapter 3. So we started with Chapter 3 and I
looked at it and that one has the long genealogy in it clear back
to Adam and on JOSEPH'S side. In the first sentence it apologize
that Joseph was not the real father. Now you wonder, why should
you read that: And, of course it changed when I realized that
the reason they left it there was that was MY genealogy. When
you start on mine, you need to apologize for me before you start.
I don't really mean the petticoat business, but what I did
just then was the origin approach hermeneutics of
spiritualizing. Do you see what I mean. That's not what I mean.
I just got through doing it for you about myself with the genealogy.
The other part I read was about John the Baptist. It's got John
going out beginning to teach. His message and I never saw
this before was, This is the time of repentance. The forgiveness
of sin." But that wasn't his message. His message was, you
have got to create a sign that this is the "Time of Repentance
and the forgiveness of sin." And he said, "Don't give
me that nonsense about being the children of Abraham, etc., etc.,
etc. You have got to create a sign. God could raise up out of
these stones as many children of Abraham as he wanted. That's
not the way life is. You've got to create a sign that repentance
for forgiveness is a reality." That's what he said.
Then he's got three audiences that come one right after another
with a question. The first is the multitude at large: 'Well, what
is this we shall do?' John says very clearly, 'Detach yourself.'
My moralistic Sunday school teacher she couldn't help it,
she was a bourgeois said
that what he said was, 'You've got to clean up your virtues. You've
got to become honest.' That's not what he said. He said, 'You've
got to be the sign of poverty detachment.' Then the
taxcollectors that's getting down to the bottom
of the barrel, isn't it? They said, 'Well, what is it we shall
do?' And John said, 'You detach yourself,' all over again. Then
he really hits the bottom. The soldiers get uneasy. They say,
"What is it we shall do?' And John says, 'Detach yourself.'
That's the end except for that last sentence, 'And Herod's men
took care of John.'
I'd like to tell this over the next three times we meet. As
far as I'm concerned, the reading of the Bible in the midst of
being a division is crucial; because learning how to be all things
to all men because you ARE all things to all men, learning how
to build the future because you ARE the future, earning how to
be corporate because you ARE corporate, and learning how to be
spiritual because you ARE spiritual that's a division.
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