Guardians Meeting April 11, 1975
It seems to me that we get fuzzier every day
about what we concretely have to do, and clearer every day about
the inclusive and profound task that we are about. I want to try
to say what I mean by that. I would like to say that I know now
what life is all about. That is sort of silly, isn't it? It is
not so silly, in a way, when we are trying to think about what
we are up to now, what it is that we have to do, and when we try
to push those questions into the dimension of profundity.
I began to look at my life and Primal Community started me thinking.
By Primal Community, I mean something other than what you can
bite at. I am very clear that the family is not primal community.
No family by itself can open up the deeps of what I mean by the
primal Ada, Ohio, the town I grew up in, was far closer to this
than ~y family. In one sense, my family did not have the slightest
idea who it was, save it was in the context of Ada, Ohio. Now,
in our day, that neighborhood sense is gone.
If you get discouraged about our family situations today,
you had better look at that without which no family can ever grasp
what it is as a family. Yet I do not mean simply that the neighborhood
in which a family exists is primal community. As a matter of fact,
as a little boy I did not know about Primal Community in the sense
of a thereness that you could point to; however, the dynamic of
Primal Community was working on me.
I could put it very simply and in sociological terms,
that a dog only grasps that it is barking when another dog barks
back at its barking. That is, there is no such thing as individuality
except inside of community, or another way to say that is that
our sociality is prior to our individuality.
Later on I grasped more concretely that Primal Community in the
abstraction is the People of God whose fundamental intent is to
be Primal Community itself. But by the tine I woke up to that,
the People of God had lost their sense of being People of God,
and therefore primal community did not exist there. This is all
by way of getting around to saying that what we are about is the
recreation of Primal Community.
The second thing I stumbled upon when I began to relive my experience
(and it was forced upon me) is what I want to call my Solitary
Awakenment. I had been well conditioned by Spock and Gesells and
everybody else who said that one way or another you are made
what you are by the neuroses of your momma and your poppa. You
can just hear them beating your papa over the head because he
was not home with the kids enough. When I think about how it is
that I am who I am, I do not see that as right. Do you know what
I see? I see moment of profound loneliness! About two miles south
of Ada, Ohio is Grass Run. It is about 4 feet wide and maybe 4
feet deep in places, and most of the time it is 6 inches wide
and 2 feet deep. I never cared much about fishing. I did fish,
but mostly I would go out there and sit all by myself.. When I
try to grasp the deeps of who I am, that is what I think of. Very
frequently, the days I went there were days of great tragedy for
a little boy, whatever form that took.
I remember Walnut Grove. I sued to go by myself and pick up those
nuts, then pet a board with a knothole in it. Did you ever do
that? You could not pet the stain off your hands for weeks. You
were proud of it, not ashamed of it. I would hull those walnuts,
as we used to call it, all over myself. I also remember when
we lived in the Main Street property in Ada. I would get up in
the morning before anybody else. I would go out and sit on the
back stoop and look out towards the sunflowers on the side of
the woodshed in the back of the lot.
Did you ever wake ~p in the morning, as the sun cones up, and
watch the sunflowers wake up too? Alone. Solitary. You are not
interested in my life. I could tell you about the sibling squeeze
of one brother before me and one after me, of two sisters on each
side of both of them and how my older brother was sort of a wayward
one. My mamma used to pay too much attention to him, and all of
us know the young one had the brains and that he had to be taken
care of. But the way mamma took care of me was to just look
at me sometimes. That was all she needed to do. She was enabling
my solitude.
I am talking about Awakenment. Yet I was far into my manhood before
what mean by Profound Awakenment took place. I am trying to grasp
our mission. I talking about the early church, and I am not talking
about Christianity, but about an instrument, a means of how something
could happen. Who ever thought up that fantastic word for "good
news" -- evangelism. We think of it as some silly piety or
some abstract theology. No! The good news was what people were
trying to talk about when they experienced some kind of Profound
Awakenment in life. What poetry you use to talk about it is quite
beside the point. What is it we are up to? To enable profound
awakenment. I do not know what I would do if that happening that
unveiled the deeps of consciousness about consciousness had not
happened to me.
I went to school a long time. I went to college and did graduate
work. I did not get an education. It was not until World War
II grabbed me and knocked my head up against a wall and enabled
the profound awakenment, that I got an education. I got what you
might call these days, a classical education. But that does not
communicate what I am talking about. I really am talking about
transrational training. I did not get an education until I grasped
what I mean by transrationality.
I grasped that when you come right down to it, it is methodology.
It is that no man is his own man in the realm of the mind, until
he has not the data that is given to him, but the methodologies
by which he can make his own mind work for him. What do you mean
by creativity? What are we about? It is to communicate' methodologies
to individuals, groups, communities, and, indeed, all of history,
that will enable individuals and groups to be themselves, to release
their creativity, to genuinely participate in this strange, mysterious
process we call history. Why did that come so late to me? As a
matter of fact, I believe that the whole revolution in education
in our time pivots around becoming aware of precisely this.
Now, when I look again at my life and try to think what it is
about, I come to words like Authentic engagement. It has something
to do with your vocation. The word vocation turns me sick in
my mouth these days, and I think it is because of the superficiality
of it that I grew up with. I am a clergyman, and I think I am
a pretty good one, but that is not enough. That is not what I
am talking about.
i
When you read the news these days, you know you are living in
one of the most remarkable moments in all of history, and sometimes
you wipe that sweat off and think, my God' What if I would be
a damn good clergyman, and die a damn good clergyman and some
way or another had not hooked this ball of creativity into what
was happening in my time? You see, you can ask that question as
a clergyman, as a lawyer, youcan ask it as a businessman,
you can ask it as a surgeon. It is the question of Profound Engagement.
What it is we are about? It is to some way or another enable profound
engagement. I am not interested in Majuro for the sake of Majuro.
I am interested in some way of getting something done that could
be a sign for anybody in this world of what it was possible for
them to do, if they chose to do it as a doctor, as a lawyer, a
businessman, or as whatever they were.
Now comes the one that is even harder, if you try to get this
in secular language, and this is the hour in history which demands
this. You are going to laugh, I suppose at this Transparent
Prowess. How is it that a man knows his way to that other world
of consciousness which is always present in the midst of this
world, which is the only one you and I know anything about? How
do you find your way through the humiliation of contingency, through
the weakness of contingency, through the resentment of contingency,
through the suffering of contingency, through the rootlessness
of contingency, through the sense of ineffectivity of contingency,
through the sense of spentoutness of contingency, through
the nevergoingaway sense of unfulfillment of contingency,
and find precisely in the midst of these without
these every going away the glory of living and dying?
This is when hope appeareth. How do you find your way around this
world, that is the other world, that is only present within this
world? When I taught at Colgate, we were still talking about the
wellrounded man, but people were pointing to the moral level
of life. NO' When you push that to the profundity of the ontological,
this pentagon is what it now means to round out your existence.
When you walk around that pentagon and come back to primal community,
then you know what primal community is.
Opening Address Page 4
Now, what is it that we are about for the next forty years? There
is nothing religious about these things_ We are out, of course,
to build primal community. I do not know what we are going to
call that, but in some places they call it the LOCHEX. We are
out to establish programs of awakenment, which I want to come
back to. We are out to do University 13 and what we call our Academy.
We are not doing Academy for the sake of Academy. We are trying
to get something done to education. We are out to do social demonstration
and we are out to do spiritual odysseys (and I do not mean what
your Sunday School teacher taught you).
We have pretty well bracketed spiritual odysseys now. But day
after tomorrow, men and women of this world are going to come
together for no other reason than to find their way to these deeps
of consciousness in life.
This is what we are about. There are just five things in life,
and I do not know which the greatest is.
I am going to concentrate a bit here. I am not going to talk about
Majuro and social demonstration, but I want to say something about
framing a social demonstration. We are structural revolutionaries,
and therefore, we have to work within the structures. We discovered
that you had to penetrate the local structures. One of the most
exciting things that happened in Majuro is their document of intent,
signed by the 100 leaders in the Marshall Islands. That had to
include the iroij or the kings, the symbolic figures, the business
community, the political community, the religious community
all front of the local. We have advocacy in Washington. Then we
had to get advocacy on the regional level, which was the territorial
government on Saipan, and then on the federal level, and that
means Washington.
In the past seven weeks I have spent most of my time in Washington.
I felt like the perennial freshman, like a little child starting
out all over again. I am ashamed to say this at 63 years of age,
but in the last seven weeks I got thru my skull how our national
government operates. I would like to teach civics now. Without
shame, I will say I am impressed with the dynamics of our federal
government as I had never been in my entire life. I have a brand
new appreciation, as a hardheaded old revolutionary, of the men
we send to Washington. I thought we were the only people in the
world who worked as hard we work. I was shocked to see that was
not true. Those men are there night after night after midnight.
You call for some young aide and frequently the Congressman or
Senator himself answers the phone. They arrive extremely early
in the morning. I am saying a word of appreciation.
Anyway, we had to learn that up on the Hill is the legislative
branch and down in the Town is the executive branch and in between
the two, there are two lines. From the legislative angle, there
are committees the committees of the House and the
committees of the Senate, and they pretty well duplicate one another.
From the President's side, there are bureaus and agencies' the
Interior Department, Health, Education ~ Welfare' State, and so
on. What you are after is where the power lies. It lies where
these two meet, where the bureaucracy and the committee structures
meet. The committees parallel almost exactly the bureaus and agencies.
One thing does disturb me a great deal. The people in bureaus
have become termited. If you call at 4:39 or even at 4:25, you
will not find anybody there. If you go into a bureau with a creative
idea, you3might as well stay at home. They grind out what has
been told to them. You go from one, you hear the same story at
the next one, and at the next one. They are told what to say and
they are given a certain amount of money to do this with.
Of course, there are exceptions to this. The legislative side
can see the creativity and keeps injecting it into bureaus both
in terms of deciding what programs they administer and also in
funding, and then, of course, they oversee them and check them.
When you try to get a program like Majuro through, you have to
walk in between these two, where the fire flies. When you are
in a dominant Democratic House and Senate and meet only Republicans
on the other side, you have to be ready for warfare.
Originally, we planned to fund Majuro by going to each one of
the bureaus for each single program, and yet to be able to move
down there, you have to get certain outstanding congressmen and
senators to call them or write a letter or send their aides, or
you cannot even begin to break through with any kind of novel
program.
I am not really talking about just seven weeks. I am talking about
10 years of trying to get 5th City funded. I wish I had known
than a little more than we did. Anyway, during that battle, it
was recommended that we initiate legislation to fund the whole
program in Majuro and with Congressional help, that came to $1,800,000*
We may not win it, but there is little doubt that Majuro funding
will get to the floor of both the House and Senate. You may not
think that is a wonder, but I do. It has nothing to do with Majuro
or with us. If you want to move in Congress. you had better get
to the key men.
What I am interested in is that if we move to twenty-four social
demonstrations around the world, we are going to have to learn
to work with finesse with the civil structures, not only in our
own country, but in South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, India,
Kenya, in West Germany , . . . Do you know who opened up this
possibility? You . . .the Guardians. You know, we always dreamed
of a Global Guardians dynamic, but when you try to set up something
without the necessary mission, you always end up with a Boy Scout
troop. Have you noticed that? The time is at hand when we are
going to have no choice but to have a Guardian's network because
we are going to have to have the pressure and the clout and the
knowhow to operate in many different arenas in this world
in order to do social demonstrations.
Social demonstrations are important right now for us, but they
are not as important as Awakenment. Awakenment is the Town Meeting.
For awhile, you know, we thought of Town Meeting as social demonstration,
because everything that is serious is a demonstration. But Town
Meeting is Awakenment. Those of us in the Church, like myself,
get all mixed up and do not know it.
I almost hesitate to say this because I love the church, but we
in the Church reduced Awakenment to somebody believing a set of
ideas. Can you imagine? That is not in the New Testament. The
New Testament talks about somebody being born all over again in
such a way that you can see it. When the New Testament writers
talked about someone becoming a new creation they did not mean
some ridiculous thing going on in somebody's head. They meant
that their whole posture was profoundly altered into the concretions
of their life. I am not interested in Christianity. The Buddhists
have done the same thing with the category of illumination.
What is Awakenment? Awakenment is when somebody becomes aware
of the profound steps of their own consciousness. As I listen
to the Town Meeting, do you know what I see going on? People are
waking up. It gives you something to nurture, if you want to nurture.
They are waking up about precisely what I was talking about. Would
it not be funny if a group like this stumbled on the way in which
mass awakenment could happen at our moment in history? It has
happened before, and where it has not happened, there have not
been great leaps forward in the progress of human settlement and
the refurbishment of the image of man.
This Town Meeting that we are doing does not have anything to
do with the Bicentennial celebration of our country. It is nice
to be 200 years old and to have our nation stand up and have somebody
tell us it is good to have our being in history. As a private
citizen, I am very pleased with that, but I am not just
a private citizen. I am part of a strange body ~ at cares.
I am interested in Community Forums in the whole of Australia.
As most of you know, I dropped the idea of Town Meeting in our
meeting there with the Australian Prime Minister. I am interested
in Town Meetings in every middlesex village and crossroads in
Japan and South Korea and India. I am interested in local man
finding a way once again to directly participate in the determination
of his own destiny. I am interested in the recovery of grassroots
man. I am concerned with human beings having the opportunity to
awaken deeply. I am interested in the geography of the United
States, the geography of Canada only because they
are part of the geography of the globe.
A colleague in London told me a few days ago that the expatriate
community is really excited about Bicentennial Town Meeting '76
and that they were going to see Elliot Richardson, the U:S. Ambassador
to Great Britain. Now Great Britain needs a Town Meeting, It is
where we got the idea. What we are about is the whole of these
strange islands and every community having a Town Meeting. Germany
is ready, I think,
Finally, no one knows what is going to happen across the globe
as a result of this, of course. Who made it possible for us to
cream of doing 5,000 Town Meetings in this country, let alone
the globe? Well, you Guardians did. For the rest of our lives
as a group, we are going to be interested in Town Meetings and
social demonstrations.
This is what the civilizing process is all about. The People of
God are standing there, waiting for this. Our whole Order symbolic,
extended, movemental or whatever stands there. Then
you sum ' it up in this way: those who care are standing there.
This means again that you have to go to one of those symbols with
the word love or care at the center.
If somebody were to ask me now what it means to profoundly
love or to
profoundly care, I would have to point for my concretion to being
about the building of primal community wheresoever; to being busy
awakening man to the deeps of consciousness, to giving him methodological
skills to enable him to release and use his own creativity, to
constantly pioneering with social demonstrations, and finding
ways of nurturing people in the realm that everyman knows about,
the world of transparentization.
You can understand how this time the body is gathered to be of
service. In a way we have no choice but to do what we will with
Town Meeting and a little bit on the social demonstrations that
will follow. I am thinking that here in this strange moment of
solitude, we had better take a pretty good look at ourselves now,
because a year from now, when we gather, we are not going to know
each other, we are not going to recognize ourselves. That might
even be true if this thing breaks loose by the time we gather
in October and November. Who knows?
Joseph W. Mathews
4/11/75