Social Methods School, RC, Other World Spin It3 3/14/74

People are concerned these days with improving the quality of life. The only problem is: what is a high quality life? People are also concerned about dehumanizing institutions. The only problem is deciding what is humanness.

I guess what we have been talking about with this poetry of the Other World in the midst of This World, is the kind of consciousness dawning on us as the life quality of mankind. Life is mystery, freedom and compassion and joy, or fulfillment. Or that what it means to improve the quality of life is to intensify the sense of mystery and wonder in life. Going through life like a reliable robot would be efficient, but it is not human. It never was; it never will he. Improving the quality of life has to do with raising a sense of consciousness, a sense of ambiguity. I worry about people who would like to modify human behavior without raising consciousness. Well­tended vegetables are not human. They never were and they never will be.

Becoming more care­filled than you are now, is being more human. The attempt to delimit responsibility is dehumanizing. Being a bystander is not human. It never was and never will he. Finally, dying your death self-consciously and abundantly is improving the quality of humanness.

That, more completely is when I experience myself as Rip Van Winkle. I'm just waking up. It seems like I have been asleep all my life. I am discovering I have been spoofed by our society; that I have been foaled about what joy in life is really all about. Joy has nothing to do with your dreams of coming off the way you planned. Joy has nothing to do with winning rather than losing in the task you have taken on in history. Joy is something that happens at the center, not on the surface of life. Joy happens in the midst of your Being and transforms your immediate relationships. It is independent of those immediacies.

One of the occasions I can remember waking up to this was finding myself on New Year's Day watching the Rose Bowl. parade on television. The theme this year was "Happiness Is..." Charles Schultz was Marshall of the Parade.

There must have been 150 floats in that parade proclaiming that "Happiness is a Warm Puppy"' "Happiness is a trip around the world; happiness Is this and Happiness Is that. When it was over, I sat back and said to myself, "Well its pretty obvious that happiness is just a decision.

What I discovered about myself is the way I usually go about this decision. I make up my shopping list in this manner: I say, "I could be happy if..." Then I start listing: l) If my wife would finally develop the interior discipline to sit on her anxieties for once; 2) if I were assigned to be where people at least spoke the same language; 3) if I were given well, you know how that list goes. After the list­making, I could go out to begin the pursuit of happiness. What dawned on me that morning was, why not make up my list the way life really is. Why not say I could be happy if, 1) I was married to Marcy Clutz, and 2) I Could be happy if I were assigned to elicit spirit amongst the most impossible group of people and so be a sign to all mankind. I discovered that the whole business of making your list is really starting with the presupposition that I am an unhappy man, and then grounding it. Why not start with the presupposition that I am a happy man. and ground that? Why not? I don't know why not.

What I know is that I am getting an education in joy against my will. Life takes you, just slams you on the head, and allows you to discover what is wrong. I have noticed anew form of insomnia. It is related to the way our lives have become, which is weary. Is spent most of the quarter running around the city of Montreal trying to find people who have been thinking about the next twenty years instead of the next year's profit margin. It is exciting when you find one of those people. But it is hard work. And I admit, I have also been trying to find diversion from thinking about the next twenty years. It is exciting, but it is hard work.

One day I got so confused - I had to change from my clerics into a suit in the bathroom of a gas station, and even so, I sold a LENS course to a Jesuit priest and got an Air Canada executive to RS-I. You finally get home after a day like that and there's usually some kind of a meeting over dinner that you must atoned. And after dinner there is usually some kind of meeting that has to do with the evening's work. Then, there are so many things these days, that you meet to find out what is going on. After the work of the evening is over, there are always people with special problems. I used to think my life was made up of getting ready for meetings. Now it's just meetings, with no time to get prepared.

After all the meeting are over, I drag myself upstairs (we live on the third floor) and while I am taking my clothes off and getting ready for bed, I exchange a few comments with my wife, and suddenly it dawns on me that I am on the front end of a two-hour conversation on the future of our marriage. I don't know how it is in your family, but in ours, that is a weekly or a monthly session. There is no way out of it. Finally, after a couple of hours, you arrive at a temporary arrangement or stale­mate. You agree to keep it going.

By this time it is about two o'clock. You final1y lay back to go to sleep, which is what you have wanted to do since you started the day, and the experience is something like shifting into neutral. Five minutes later I say to myself, "I'm still wide awake! What is going on?" I check it out and find that my min is going BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. My mind is just going like 60 miles an hour. Life is just shimmering. In the midst of my wanting to just lie down and go to sleep, the possibilities have seized me and I discover I can hardly wait to see how it's all going to come out. And I am just lying there - I don't have insomnia, I just can not go to sleep because of the possibilities breaking into every dimension of life.

In the midst of that, you experience spontaneous gratitude. Its spontaneous because gratitude is not the way I approach most situations. I have a belly full of indefinite longings - indefinite because I do not know where else I want to be exactly, but I know it's not here. Monday evening, when we started this Social Methodist School, I wanted to be anywhere else; and I was glad that I was leading the first session so I wouldn't have to think about the last fifteen years of my life. But we began to talk and to get out happenings and events, and I got hooked against my will. I don't know what happened in your group, but our group began to add detail after detail after detail; it wasn't good, it wasn't bad; it was history and what a history! To have lived in this time! We couldn't let go of it. It was as if we didn't want to lose any detail. That was gratitude to have lived now and not some other time.

There is a lot more going on than nostalgia in the Arts today. I believe our whole world is going through that kind of gratitude, trying to recover, in concretion, the joy of having lived this last fifteen years. You begin to be overwhelmed with joy when you never intended to have that happen in the first place.

I confess to you that up until this very quarter, when we would read those reports from around the world on Sunday evening, my interior response was something like this. We would read the report from Washington, and it would say John Cock had 150 people at Regional Council; and inside you, was a little voice that said, " We only had 12, What's wrong?" and there would be a LENS course in Houston, and this little voice would say, "We're probably going to lose ours, what's wrong." The more the report went on, the more despairing you got. But this quarter was different. I experienced those reports as absolution every time. That, it didn't matter what we were doing. The world was coming off. I think what happened is that joy killed the pretense of you only having to come off, of having to be a success sometime. The overwhelmingness is when the joy of the future becomes your report, becomes your future.

Then finally, this joy is a joy that includes death, or it's not the joy at the center. It's the calmness in the face of your own death. Last year I was working up in the Boston Area, and I will bet that Don Johnson remembers the evening we were having a meeting over in Worchester. We had a fellow at that meeting who came off and on. Those were the Tuesday night and every­other weekend thing. I forget what we were talking about, but all of a sudden, he said, "I'm sitting here thinking about an evening in the forest before the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. I am remembering that our outfit was asked, that evening, to volunteer for a special mission. All my buddies went, but I stayed behind. I never saw one of them alive again. And ever since then I have regretted that I did not go. Perhaps, that's why I can't stay away from these meetings. I'm still hoping I can make that decision.

What he was struggling with, and is still struggling with, I would venture to say, is not the fact of dying, but the decision to give his death on behalf of all. Joy is deciding to say "Yes" to what is required of you. Joy is deciding now to the about the task you would want to be caught dead in. If you had been waiting to give yourself unabandonly, uncompromisingly, to build the earth, then you have denied yourself this very joy.

I will not say that I always experience my life as filled with joy, far from it, hut I am shocked at how pleased I am to be saved, to be alive, to he doing what I am doing with my very own life. And as far as I can see, the best is yet to come the best is yet to come.

­­Ronald Clutz­-