Global Centrum Chicago, RC, Global Priors Council
August 27, 1974
The Ash Wednesday service has always left a great impression on
me. One year, I remember the priest putting ashes on my forehead
and saying, "From dust you came; to dust you shall return."
Several days later, I rushed down the stairs in the morning and
said, "Mother, Mother, didn't the minister say, 'From dust
you came and to dust you shall return'?" "Yes,"
she replied. "Well," I said, "I looked under my
bed this morning and there is somebody there, but I don't know
whether he's coming or going." It is the same with the theology
of love. It has been under the bed all these years, but when you
begin to look at it, you cannot tell whether it is coming or going.
We were talking about Henry Aaron the other day, about the simple
upbringing he had in the South. One of the problems he had in
growing up was a fear of someone being under his bed at night,
so he used to lie awake, worrying. He said his father did not
counsel him about his deep fears hut dealt with them directly
by putting his mattress on the floor. After this he never had
a problem again. That kind of practical care is what we are talking
about with love, and the theology of love. It is an event, I think,
to those of us who are used to thinking hard about these things,
Let me read to you the passage from the New Testament, that is
where in retrospect I think I first began to think theologically
in the context of love rather than faith. I remember very distinctly
my encounter with this Scripture when we were first studying Gogarten.
"Then one of the experts in the law stood up to test him
and said, "Master, what must I do to be sure of eternal life?"
"What does the law say and what has your reading taught you?"
said Jesus. . . .but the man, seeking justification, said, ''Who
is my neighbor?"
"you go and do the same,"
said Jesus.
For twenty years our articulation of our selfunderstanding
has been in the context of faith. I still remember when I went
to the PLC and was addressed by the fact that the category "Christian"
was replaced by "man of faith." During the course, that
term "man of faith" became filled full with meaning
as a way of pointing to what it means to be the Church.
In more recent days, we have fallen into love. I find it interesting
that our culture talks about "falling in love." It is
not a rational decision; it is not sentimentality; it is an objective
fall, like the fall into sin. It is: you "fall" in love.
I believe we "fell" in love in Summer '71. I do not
know what happened to you, but I discovered that my secular presuppositions
were far deeper than my theological presuppositions. That is to
say, I had more existential security attached to the form of the
family, or to economic patterns, and such, and when in the course
of doing the research of Summer '71 I saw that all those things
were relative, and likely to change totally, that is when the
bottom dropped out for me, far more radically than it did when
it dropped out of my theological stance. In Summer '71, we fell
in love with the Mystery, too. The next year, we fell in love
with ourselves. I still remember how we talked about Summer '72;
the visits to the Other World gave people back whole hunks of
their past. I remember one man saying there had been four years
he was a band leader in high school that he always hated himself
for, that came back to him. The experience of falling in love
with ourselves became dominant. This year, we have come to talk
about falling in love with the world. We have discovered that
we care about the world.
Now we must think through again, or rearticulate our selfunderstanding
in the context of love. This is not to imply sentimentality or
some interior quality. Much of our struggle this summer was to
give articulation to love and that will be our struggle for a
long. time.
Love is the expression of the authentic relationship between myself
and other selves, between myself and the world, between myself
and the Mystery. It's the expression of an authentic relationship.
All of us have had any number of experiences where that has been
grounded for us. One occurred to me last evening as I was working
on this. I remember very clearly when I was a freshman in college,
taking a course in Western Civilization. Every Monday we had movies
in the auditorium and all the classes went. Sometimes we went,
and sometimes we ditched. I remember showing up one time for the
films and they were showing a captured German film from Dachau.
I was totally unprepared for that experience. I can still see
the soldiers with the wheelbarrows, wheeling them up to the side
of a huge pit, and turning them over, and three or four or five
bodies, just stacks of human bones, stark white, falling,
falling on top of a mound of bodies. And my interior caved in.
I was incapable of response. I cared about that. I think the way
it came to my lips was "Never again."
What happened was that I discovered that the world in that film
was the world I had on my hands; and it was my world. All of us
have ways of talking about that experience, be it through the
first encounter with the innercity ghetto, or people who
went on Global Odysseys; we have talked about this as the "dead
pigeon experience." The experience has to do with the fact
that all morality is preceded by the perception of a gap between
what is and what ought to be, an objective perception. When you
are struggling with justification or faith, you are struck by
its absurdity. Under the rubric of love, you are struck not by
absurdity, but by tragedy. Gogarten's word was doom. That is what
strikes you. You are also struck by the clear sense that you are
responsible. It is not at all rational that the suffering and
the pain of that gap are mine to deal with and no one else's.
One always begins with faith, for unless he has come to terms
with that gap by saying yes to it, then his attempts to love become
attempts to do away with the gap. If I was a Roman Catholic, I
am sure I would know the word for grace that allows me to be "a
man of faith" in that situation and love, without knowing
self-consciously that I am a man of faith.
In experiencing the gap, there are people who find the ability
to love, though they would not in any shape or form call themselves
selfconscious men of faith. Though the experience is not
sequential, you always begin with faith when thinking this through.
Love is something everyman participates in, or it is not love.
In that sense that love is ontological, it is not an achievement
of a few, and moreover, as I said before, it is irrational. It
is engagement it is participation. I think it is also true that
our love is subject to reductionisms. That is, every man is not
loving the totality of his life all the time. Loving the totality
of his life means he loves others, loves self, loves the ground
of being. Therefore our struggle with love is our struggle with
overcoming our reductionisms. I think the bug model triangles
give us a way to see what it means to love the totality of existence.
The witnessing dimension of the triangles primarily get said what
it means to love the self and to love the other. It has to do
with doom, with hearing "the cry of brothers doomed to die,"
with "three billion people die and never live." We have
pointed practically to witnessing love by saying, once you have
perceived that you are loved, with a love that preceded you, that
goes on after you, and once you have perceived that it is the
ground of all being that you love, then you find yourself with
the objective claim of all mankind upon you to articulate the
word of life in such a way that every last human being across
the face of the earth has the possibility of grabbing hold of
his life. There are no barriers, no limits to that freedom. I
think it is helpful that RSI appears in the triangle because
RSI points to the fact that witnessing is a structural reality.
Love is structural. We create the forms and structures for people
which allow the journey in consciousness to go on. That is what
witnessing love is about.
In justing love, we care for society, for the structures of society.
In justing love we see the catalytic efforts of the People of
cod directed at recreating the institutions of society for our
time, or building the new social vehicle.
Primal community is the essence of what justing love is all about.
When people ask me these days, "What is the Ecumenical Institute
about ?" or "What is the ICA about?" I say we are
interested in one thing, building primal community. And we are
interested in doing that in local geographic neighborhoods and
in all social institutions, including the church, schools, businesses,
agencies, etc. In order to build up primal community, we have
seen that we have to BE primal community 24 hours a day. That
is what our Houses are about.
Presencing love has to do with love for the mystery. Obviously
the key in presencing is the Religious. It is the ways and means
we have found for occasioning awe, or living before the awe. At
one point, we said everyman needs an experience of the awe every
day. He does not need witness, in one sense. He does not need
justice. What he needs is to have transparency before him
once a day. The Religious are about seeing to it that the disclosure
of the Other World in the midst of this world HAPPENS. In the
Local Church Experiment, and particularly in the past few years,
we have created an incredible wealth of methods to do that. It
is our care for the mystery and for ourselves, because it is care
for the symbols.
None of these distinctions is absolute but the issue under the
rubric of faith has to do with the meaning in life, with answering
the question of why. The issue under love is how; how do I respond.
Faith deals with coming to terms with the indicative of existence
itself. Love has to do with coming to terms with the imperatives
which emerge from the indicatives. Faith has to do with the consciousness
of consciousness of consciousness. Love has to do with action
The witnessing dimension of life throws Universal Benevolence
upon us. When you see there are no limits to your responsibility
for mankind, as the Religious, you are required to be a guru,
to embody RSI all the time, for you never know when you
have the responsibility of another human life on your hands. In
this way, Universal Benevolence comes to the Religious. In the
justing dimension, or in primal community, love requires the renewal
of every local church. It requires that every local church, every
congregation, cadre and parish be redone so that the word of life
is present for any person to see, touch and taste. The justing
dimension pushes radical integrity upon us. Justing love raises
the issue of what must he done.
LENS was our response to witnessing love. For three years, we
struggled with what social deed was required. We thought we had
the content wrapped up. Then we discovered the social deed required
was to create the process by which that very struggle would be
available to every last human being. That is, LENS is about giving
Indicative Battleplanning to every man, woman and child in the
world. It seems that the intensification of the relationship between
Radical Integrity and the Religious is the guildsman. It requires
that the Religious in our time stick our utterly unrepeatable,
hardtoreplace lives in some stupid, doomed local community.
The Guildsman is very particular, radical expenditure, in the
context of the whole globe.
Endless Felicity is the relationship of the Religious to the witnessing
and the justing. To the Religious, witnessing becomes Popular
Preaching. I think that we came closest to Popular Preaching in
our mundanity spins this summer. It was almost like taking one
of everything, which is what popular preaching is about. In talking
about something that happened to him, usually in the last 24 hours,
the lecturer in the mundanity spin summoned the awe, the transparency.
I tell you lives were healed and issues were solved by those spins
like nothing we have ever done before. It was the bleeding of
Endless Felicity into our whole witnessing dimension.
Endless Felicity pushed into the justing dimension requires primal
community as a social demonstration. Endless felicity emerges
when you take a structure of society in which people live and
work, experiencing life as sheer dread and terror, sheer waste,
sheer dark night. The Religious go into that situation, either
business, government, or whatever builds the methods and structures
which allow people to understand what they are doing is human
engagement, That is social demonstration. It creates presencing
love.
I have played a bit with what "unlove" might be for
the Religious. Sometimes people fall off on the witnessing dimension
but do not hold the other two poles. They wind up being superficial.
The trap is superficiality. They get trapped into neat formulas.
The formulas, in one way, are true enough, but they fail to deal
with the particularity of the people that they are working with.
Or, they lose the depth that comes from the ongoing encounter
with Awe that changes all formulas.
The other trap is winding up on the justing pole. We get re wed
up to do a demonstration, but forget witnessing and presencing.
We wind up being reduced. We wind up giving our whole being to
some little ridiculous thing rather than on behalf of all. We
stand in shallowness, not in the depth that comes from standing
over against the Mystery.
The attempt to be presencing love without witnessing and justing
is ridiculous. It is to fall into immediacy. It is to attempt
to get immediate stillness, immediate timelessness, or immediate
eternality. Love of God takes place in and through the Word, in
and through the care for the world which means witnessing and
justing love.
I discovered my whole life I had told the Good Samaritan story
with the question, how do I come off like a Good Samaritan? How
do I come off justified? When that question exploded the story
for me, I saw that Jesus was not answering my question with the
story He was only concerned with the picture of a
man of love. I spent years of fruitless speculation wondering
how to deal with panhandlers who come to the door of the office.
I was worrying out of the context of justification, probably because
of my interpretation of the Good Samaritan. But the story was
really about what a man of love looks like. The issue was what
does it mean to be neighbor to the world.
Segundo's interpretation of the sheep and goats story is also
helpful. He pushes us to see the issue has to do with engaging
in the love or the care for the world, and that being the church
has to do with being the ones who know, on the other side of engaging.
Segundo says that the church in our time engages in care for the
world with people who have all sorts of weird contexts for such
engagement. They do not believe what we believe. They do not have
the same presuppositions about their humanness that we do. The
only thing that binds us to them is their concern to get food
to the people who are hungry. As we move into these parishes,
that is what we will find ourselves doing. We have talked abut
what it means to be mated with unbelievers. We have talked about
establishing long term relationships with Ceasars, federal governments,
and people who do not believe any of the things we believe about
humanness. That is what the sheep and goats Parable is about.
As we brood on the theology of love, our meditative council should
include some old friends and some new ones. Those of you who were
here this summer saw the Man of La Mancha as a new movie. It was
new because we could see what that movie was talking about from
the standpoint of love rather than faith. I experienced that movie
the first time as utterly bewildering. It was an alien image to
my theology. After 20 years of telling ourselves the way life
is, Don Quixote gives a speech and says the worst thing of all
was to see the way life is without seeing the way life should
be. Everybody just collapsed. You know he is right, you intuit
that he is right. Yet it shattered you if you have done any RSI
teaching at all.
Kazantzakis, another saint for these times, says that in coming
to terms with faith, one must consider what the heart requires
beyond the mind. The heart says "Damn! This gap is going
to be filled up with the stuff of my beingeven though it
is impossible, even though it is hopeless. Nevertheless, that
is my crusade. That is what my life will always be about."
We saw Cromwell this summer. In the film, Cromwell, having retired
from life, is called back because of his care. Do you recall the
line, "This nation is going to be governed if I have to do
it myself." He will be a helpful figure for us as we continue
to work with the theology of Love.
Ron Clutz
8/31/74