SYMBOLIC CENTRUM FEBRUARY 26. 1971
We want to continue our journey in our reflections
on the resurrection principle this morning. I want to share a
few reflections and get you to share yours as a group. This is
an appropriate time for us to be talking further about the resurrection
principle as we enter the season of Lent and attempt to recover
this great symbol in the Church year. In just a few moments I
want to come back to the relationship of the resurrection principle
to Lent, as we anticipate in this season of repentance the Easter
morning.
I don't know how you find it possible to check out
your insights, but given RSI, I find it necessary always
to grid any insight that comes to me, or any insight that anybody
has about life, against what is. That's what RSI is all
about. My shortcut to finding out if that is the way life
is ~ if somebody has an insight, is to use RSI. I was tickled
here recently when some people in our group started talking about
"transcendental meditation" and other things like that.
When I talked to them a bit, they could relate it to a lot of
different philosophies, a lot of different insights in humanness
and so forth. But when we "ridded it across RSI, it
was not the way life is, in comprehensiveness, futurity, and intentionality.
So it goes with all of us, I suppose, with insights that we have.
They may be romantically attractive, or they might be emotionally
enticing. They might be intellectually stimulating for a few moments.
But then the shortcut to finding out if something is real
is RSI.
If we reflect back just a moment on RSI in
relation to the resurrection principle, we discover that RSI
begins not only with God, hut immediately also with the Christ
and the Holy Spirit. You not only are dealing with God the Father
in the first part of the course, but all three dimensions of the
Trinity are involved in each part. You soon begin talking about
judgment, although you do not call it that. But Saturday morning,
when you begin to talk about the Christ, you have to talk about
the judgment. And the judgment is mercy, that is, life is all
about having one's illusions invaded and tromped upon. And our
fathers saw clearly that that judgment was the mercy.
Or in talking about the Christ, we say that this
Word"All is received, all is approved, all is
good, and all is open" is the word of life. We do not
say that it is the word about life. This is one of the problems
I find in teaching. It's not a word about life that some philosopher
or we want to superimpose on life. It is the Word of life. It
is what life itself says about life, as you discover when you
look when you have the eyes open to look at life. Or we say, "To
die is to live." And again, that is not a word about life
. That is a word that life tells you. To die is to live. All you
have ~o do to check that out in reality is look. Is that not what
you find happening in rime? The other way to put that is, "To
live is to die." If you want to check that out, all you have
to do is look. For instance, if you want to know if somebody loves
you or loves somebody else, all you have to do is 1o>ok. You
do not have to theorize about it too much. Is not life all about
dying, anr1 is not dying in reality all about life?
In the Holy Spirit section of RSI we say that
freedom is obedience. You do not check that out with respect to
some logical philosophy. You just look where you are really obedient
and find out if that is not where you are really free. Then, of
course, in sentence seven of the third paragraph in Bonhoeffer,
if you want to find out where you are entirely free, the only
thing that sets you free is the absolute obligationfulfilling
that absolute obligation to God and neighbor in Jesus Christ understanding
of life.
Now all that is simply to say that you are not trying
to superimpose something on life. That is our basic stance. When
you come up with the resurrection principle or any other understanding
or insight, it is not that you have got this new insight that
now you are going to go out and superimpose on the world, but
rather that the insight has emerged from the experience of the
human race. That is what I would like to look at this morning
in relationship to the cruciform principle and to the resurrection
principle.
But first, I need to add a bit about this word of
life. Our fathers saw that this word of life "descends into
Hell." I mean it descends into the Hell of encrusted illusion,
in which a person does not want life to be the way it is, and
where he keeps on insisting that it not be the way it is, and
commands everybody and everything in his security system to keep
it from being the way it is, if he possibly can. Of course, it
is hell because it will not work. It never has and it never will.
You can see that played out in life and in a million different
dramas, poems and stories.
How does this happen day by day? I am going to be
relying greatly in the next few minutes on Rollo May and on Paul
Tillich. Rollo May has said, "People commit suicide not because
they are afraid of life, but because they are afraid of death."
They cannot stand to live always in the situation where standing
means to be under the threat of death. So they commit suicide.
He uses the illustration of the life boatnot the one
that some of our colleagues use in the Freedom Lectureanother
one. He says that some people, when they are in a life boat at
sea waiting to be rescued, cannot stand to stay in the life boat
because of the constant strain of wondering, "Shall we be
rescued, or shall we drown? Shall we be rescued, or shall we die?"
He says that in such cases some of them jump overboard and commit
suicide because of that very strange sweat about living in a situation
where it is so obviously true that life is like that. "Will
we die or will we live in the next moment?" He also points
out from the testimony of many heroes that much heroism comes
out of that very same thing. On the battlefield, under the stress
and strain of fire, the stress is "Will I die or will I live?"
Sometimes the attempt to save people's lives comes out of the
person's real unwillingness to live in the kind of situation in
which he cannot face the stresses of the present moment over and
over again. I think that that insight will he helpful In a moment
in talking about the resurrection principle.
But let's look at daytoday life
and ask, as we do with the rent of RSI, where it is that
you see death going on in much a way that obviously gives new
birth. Most of us are experiencing always what Tillich and many
people call "ontological angst," the basic human anxiety
that arises out of our consciousness of our death. Then we transform
that into psychological fear. Here goes your ontological angst
beating along at the depths of life, and the human being, in order
to escape this, transposes it into psychological fear, which can
have an object. It can be a real object, something worth fearing,
or it can be an unreal object, something that is not worth fearing.
In either case that process seems to go on in humanness with us
all. Here you are going along with your ontological angst, and
you decide, "Well, I can't stand to face that." But
you do not say that to yourself. One transposes it over into the
economic life and says, "Well, I'm afraid that I won't get
enough goods, or "the quality of the goods I want won't be
high enough," or something like that. As you know, the Church's
answer to that is, "Poverty"' or, "Face the facts!
You're dying right now and you always will be., In the political
life, we transpose the basic angst about life into, ''I won't
get the significance, I won't get the status that I ought to have
and need"that kind of psychological fear. The
Church has always said you know what to that. In the cultural
dimension it comes out as, "I want to look smart and stylish,
or be the symbol that I need to be, and it doesn't look as though
I'm ever going to make it. It doesn't appear that I'm every going
to get intelligent enough; it doesn't look as if I'm going to
get smart enough or stylish enough, or somehow or another bring
my symbolic self into concretion." These are just daily events
that are reminding us of the everpresent death. In other
words, in one manner of speaking, it is the hoping for the Messiah,
instead of being open to the Messiah that is the NoMessiah
Messiahit is closing ourselves off from life as it
actually is.
This is especially true in the Order at this time
of year when many Internships begin to come to a conclusion, and
the decision must be made as to whether this is what I really
want my life to be aboutthis stupid Order. And it
is not because people are dumb that it takes this long, to the
end of the year. It is because the decision to reach concretion
has to do with whether or not you want to give up your life in
some outfit like this or not. You talk with the persons who are
engaged in this decision, and you can feel great empathy. You
cannot be of any help. There is no help for a person there at
all. But you can empathize with the complexities that are involved,
when they see that the only thing we have to offer in the Order,
if we have anything at all, is a rather relevant way to die. That
is all. Everything else we have not got. Now, on the other side
of that, you can have a very interesting life as a part of this
Order, a very intriguing life. You can tell yourself all sorts
of tales and experience yourself in the life style of Freedom
as Don Juan, the actor, or the conquerorall kinds
of images that one can live by. But if you look at the nittygritty
of it, that is all there isjust a very relevant way
to die that is available in this outfit and in the selfconscious
Church at all points in history.
Otto Rank has talked about this with the symbol of
"cutting the umbilical cord," as it has been used throughout
all human existence, or dying to be reborn to a more meaningful
life in constant situations. He talks of the idea of "individuation,"
or how a self comes into existence. First of all, he says, the
umbilical cord is cut physically, and the baby then immediately
thinks that it is a part of the mother's breast. Then the weaning
process from the breast takes place, and that baby has to give
up the breast in order to be nourished in a different fashion.
Or the child goes on from nursery to school. That is a dying,
if you will, to one self and moving to another. Or one reaches
puberty, and discovers the "notme" in the opposite
sex. These are all dimensions of discovering the notme.
At puberty he says death to the nonsexual being that he
has been and becomes a sexual being. Then there is the possibility
of love of someone of the opposite sex. Immediately, there is
the possibility of marriage. Or it is a question of college, going
on and deciding one's life work, going on and deciding his Profession.
At every one of those points there is a dying to an old in order
to become that which is new. This is also true with ideas. For
example, when a brand new idea is introduced into your mind, you
have to die to your old ideas. This also happens finally at the
deathbed, where, if you have not come to terms with the great
mystery of the Notme of all that is notme until then,
you very well come to terms with the final mystery then.
The point of this is that we repress that consciousness.
We repress the images of guilt, of death, of emptiness; and this
results in our floating these days, as we have said, or in our
cooling it. This results in the listlessness, and I suppose, the
conformity of much of American life. It especially comes out of
the desire to go back into being a thing, or go back into being
just a part, as the temptation not to be an individual or not
to be individuated takes place. We do this by imagining that life
is about getting more life, or if we could just have more goods,
or if we could just have more status, or more time, more experience,
more whatever. We want to have "fulfillment of life."
But what is happening is that we repress our images of these dimensions
of existence and try thereby to outwit death.
I think of an incident that was reported on television
during the election campaign by the son of Governor Wallace He
said the thing that had really struck him in the campaign was
that his father was hit over the head by a flower child, hit over
the head with a sign that said, "God loves everybody."
I think that is not an unfair illustration of the people saying'
"Make love not war." They do not want to face life as
it is; they do not want to face death. They want to affirm life.
But you check into it at another dimension, and you find out they
want to affirm life without ambiguity, a life without death, a
life without the pain and the struggle that humanness is.
Rollo May's insights are useful here:
I remarked earlier that the Christian misuse of hope
plays into the American romanticization that we somehow are deluded
into escaping death. I happen myself to be a person to whom religion
means something important, and I also happen to be of the Christian
religion. But I went to a funeral of a dear friend of mine a couple
of months ago, a friend whom I miss greatly in his death, and
I wanted to sit and mourn this friend. Mourning is psychologically
exceedingly creative and a healthy function. If something dies
in you, then the only creative way to face that is the way of
grief. Now I wanted to meditate in this service on how much I
loved my friend, how much we all missed him and the joy and richness
that he gave to our lives and to our group. But the young minister,
who is a graduate of the same seminary that Dr. Cole and I are
graduates of, preached a sermon on Christian hope. We do not need
to grieve for our friend because in Christianity we have transcended
death. Now I am here to propose to you tonight that this is a
prostitution of the idea of the Christian resurrection, and that
your Christian conviction, or your religious convictions of any
sort, can be meaningful for you not at all if it stops short of
the fact of death, but only as a meaning to life that you can
achieve, having faced directly and courageously, having mourned
and experienced grief and moved through the reality of death.
Now there is in our twentieth century culture, I
think particularly in America, a kind of staleness, a kind of
fedup quality. Nietszche described this in his nineteenth
century Europe, the last part of the nineteenth century. He called
it "The disease of contemporary man." He said that the
disease of contemporary man is that his soul has gone stale. All
about, said Nietszche, there is a bad smell, the smell of failure,
and I believe that what is going on here is a failure to have
the courage to face the fact of death, and that that smell is
the smell of repressed death. If we do not pay attention to it,
then the staleness and fedupness come as a repression of
grief and mourning and as I would say, as the natural outcome
of the inability to face the reality of life. Now Nietszche says
that the leavening and diminution of European man is our greatest
danger, and I agree with him one hundred per cent. The leavening
economically and the dehumanization of modern man is our greatest
danger. And I think the most vital point at which this occurs
is the point at which we romanticize and avoid the fact that someday
we shall die. We also avoid the individuation, the growth and
the new birth that is possible in each one of these steps throughout
life.
I think this romanticization is a new form of the
American dream, and to me, the most harmful aspect of the American
dream. It is the dream that we shall never die and then if we
do die, somehow our descendants will live in a world of such progress
medically and psychologically that they shall not die. We will
be healthier and healthier. Since, however, we still know we do
die, we repress the fact of death in order that the assumption
that life goes on perpetually may be hung on to. I think this
romanticization comes out in some unexpected ways. One of these
ways which I want to cite for you is in the last book of Erich
Fromm. In his book Fromm says there are two kinds of people. There
are those who love death; these he calls necrophiliac people,
and he gives Hitler as an example. And there are those who love
life, and these he calls biophilia, and he gives Schweitzer as
an example of that. Now I am very grieved by this sheep and goats
generation because I think it omits completely that those who
truly love life love it by virtue of confronting death. Of course,
Schweitzer has died. Of course, the artists and others who enrich
life for us are precisely those who do it by virtue of the courage
to face death. Life takes on its meaning, they tell us in many
different ways, by virtue of the fact that we can face death.
Otherwise there is this dead fed-upness. I think the loving of
life for its own sake is a dehumanization of the human being.
We are distinguished as human beings in the evolutionary line
by virtue of the fact that life is not the ultimate reason for
living.
The human being is characterized by "Give me
liberty or give me death," and if he does not have values
that are more important to him than the mere fact of living, then
the human being would become a slave. If the mere fact of perpetuating
life is the ultimate goal, we have the human being who has become
dehumanized. I think the emphasis upon life as the ultimate good
is to erase the distinguishing qualities of the human being that's
human. It robs us of the tragic death in life; it robs us of the
meaning of human experience; it goes beyond the fact of whether
or not I shall live tomorrow. "Give me liberty or give me
death" is not a derived concept. It is a decision. All the
way through history, except since the beginning of our industrial
age, men have known that unless they are willing to die for something,
their lives would be empty. The Greeks said this in a hundred
different ways. Primitive people said it in a hundred different
ways. I think it has been said consistently up until the last
few decades, that unless one has the courage to give up his life
for some value, then life itself would have no meaning.
I myself have despised certain kinds of sentiment
in my life because life finally taught me that sentimentality
was not worth my life. When I learned that, the process for killing
off the demonic unsentimentality involved killing that dimension
of one's life which participates in genuine sentiment, derived
from the ontological situation, from reunion, as Tillich
would say. Or in this case, as Rollo May was talking about it,
we have had to kill our ability to participate in grief. I think
probably most of our generation in order to live in this peculiar
twentieth century world that we have had on our hands, have had
to shore up other dimensions of our life in order to become callous
to that experience of sentimentality, or indeed we could not have
existed `1uring this strange period. I think the grieving in Love
Story, the empathetic grieving with what is going on on the screen,
is the grieving over the fact that we did indeed have to 1 become
callous or kill off a dimension of humanness. The movie is a sort
of funeral for it. The audience is not grieving because the girl
is dying. They are not grieving because the boy and girl are in
love and the boy is having difficulty with his father-relationship.
They are grieving over themselves. They are grieving over that
which they have quite necessarily had to kill in themselves. And
this is probably one of the greatest opportunities to go to the
funeral of that dimension of yourself which you had to kill, that
we have had as a whole nation, a whole culture, in a long long
time. I think probably the last time that such an event took place
was the death of John F. Kennedy, and we were finally able to
say "yes" to the explicit death of John Kennedy, as
we all watched the funeral on television.
I want to say a word about this in respect to a current
problem as I see it manifest across the movement in our pedagogy.
It is the problem of passion. Some of my colleagues on the experimental
pedagogy team I am in bear evidence that dimensions of passion
are present in their lives. But now you get some of those characters
up in front of a group of people, and there is not overall passion.
I do not mean there is no passion, but there is not any empathetic
involvement with people. RSI is treated as a body of material.
It is being presented with perfection, but it is not being presented
with passion. It is not manifest that if a person does not get
this, his life is going to be living Hell for the rest of his
life, and if he does not get this point he is going to diehe
is going to stay dead, to put it that way.
Now it is not just us on this team. I have found
lately that passion would often not be present in my own teaching,
and I have been trying to analyze why. Why won't passion return?
Finally, I saw that I was waiting for a Messiah. I wanted something
to manipulate me into having passion for these people when I did
not care a bit whether they lived or diedwhen I was
so tired of teaching that I could vomit. That is my experience,
and I have been waiting for some Messiah to come along that would
inspire me to have the passion that I want again for these people.
Finally I had to face the fact that that is not ever
going to happen. I have got to decide to be passionate. And then
there is another block that comes: "Well, wait, that's not
integrity. If I don't feel passion, how shall I go out and pretend
I've got passion?" As if we had not been doing that all along!
"Shall I jump over the fence of deciding to be the phony
person we said we would have to be in the Church Lecture of RSI,
deciding to be that phony guy to myself in playing the passionate
role?" The strange thing is that when you make that decision,
passion flows into you, or life flows through you. As the poem
says, "we are transmitters of life," when you decide
to be the passionate person. In advanced PLC's we used to have
to tell ministers whose marriages had fallen apart or were no
longer meaningful that you decide to kiss your wife. You kiss
her every morning or you kiss her thirty times a day. Passion
does not happen to you; you decide passion. T do not know where
I forgot that, not about my wife, but about teaching.
Across the movement, we are obedient people; we have
the most obedient people in the world in this movement. But in
our obedience we have to overcome that sense of "disintegrity,"
or whatever you would call it, which comes when a person says,
"Well, shall I deviate From my material of RSl just
this much in order to be passionately concerned for people?"
In other words, "Shall I demand of myself both the law and
the gospel -- not just the law, but shall I have both of
them in my approach to teaching?" Zorba the Greek's dance
comes in here. A colleague was talking about a Greek down at Diana's
Restaurant here in Chicago, how he turned a situation that we
would call matter into pure spirit by just that Greek approach
to life. When they do those things, they are not doing them because
they have been motivated to do them, or because that is their
natural tendency. They are deciding to do that, to be passionately
involved with whatever it is.
There is a connection between the pedagogical "moment"
and the consciousness of death. Again, I quote from Rollo May:
I am going to talk from now on quite a bit about
consciousness, because I think the real critical issue in the
facing of death lies in the area of the human being's capacity
for selfconsciousness. Your consciousness is what is unique
about you. You hear these ideas applying in a way that nobody
else hears them in this audience. Your case, if you are honest
with yourself, is always different from anybody else's. Your perception,
the way you have of looking at any given scene, always has its
original form. (This is like that quote out of Kazantzakis, isn't
it, where he says, 'You, Adam, you brought a new rhythm to life,
as soon as you appeared on the scene.') Back in the days when
I was an artist, I noticed that when a group of artists were painting
a model, every one of us conceived of it very differently. Now
it is a different model to me from what it was to the person next
to me, and it was not because one of us was a better artist than
the other. It made no sense whatever to say, "We are going
to measure this female to see whether she is the way I am painting
her or not." This is all completely irrelevant. It is rather
that human consciousness, by virtue of its being the consciousness
of an individual, always is such that the form of life which is
perceived by that consciousness, is unique. This is the richness,
the preciousness, the greatness and also the terror of each individual
act of consciousness. This is your original feeling, and your
values, if they are worth anything to you, will be values that
begin with this original act of consciousness. This is the stand
you take.
This is interesting. For an act of consciousness,
for an act of perception, I posit my body vis-à-vis somethingthe
model if I'm painting, a problem of my life, or whatever it may
be. But I posit myself vis-à-vis something, in the world,
and it goes on then between me and this something, whether it
be a model, or idea or tragedy or whatnot. What goes on
between me is a unique act of reforming what I see. Something
is born out of that incident that is unique and new and original,
and it becomes so by virtue of the fact that I can stand, I can
posit myself, and I take responsibility for positing myself vis-à-vis
this model, this idea, or this problem. This is what distinguishes
you as a human being, and the fatal question is in this consciousness
of yours, "How do you relate to the fact of death?"
the unique thing about the human being which differentiates him
from all the rest of evolution is that we have a word for death.
We can know that we die. We can foresee our death. And as I say,
I think a great deal of the compulsive activity, making money,
buying insurance, living more and more in our day, being compulsive
conformists in the squirrelcage sense, keeps me away from
the fact, that regardless of all my life insurance, that if I
were quiet with myself, I would know that someday I shall die.
We know that we will die. We are the creatures who anticipate
our own deaths. And our problem in the last analysis then becomes,
will we run away from death by making a cult of believing in automatic
progress? This is, I think, what we are doing mostly in this country.
Will we make a cult of progress? " Some how God will relieve
us of this vulgar crisis." Or will we obscure it by making
it impersonal? Will we resort to statistics, saying that "one"
dies, rather than that "I" die, hiding the fact that
the real problem for me or for any man is that at some point my
life will end?
To go back to my general theme of resurrection, let
me say finally that a person experiences the resurrection that
takes place as death gives birth to new life in daybyday
events when he finally faces the totality of death, or when he
gives birth to new life, or when he's a walking, talking dead
man, as we say in our course. There is no blackmail. You control
your life. You control your time, yourself, no matter what the
situation. I do not mean that you control it individualistically.
But in corporateness you know that you are the one who controls
your time because you choose to give over your time into corporateness,
or you would not even be the kind of corporate man that the movement
requires.
It would be interesting to examine the resurrection
man over the immediate man, the circumspect man and the defiant
man of Kierkegaard. When a person dies from his immediate relations,
a kind of resurrection takes place. Resurrection also takes place
when a person dies from hiding in circumspection, when he has
the death of the weak self on his hands. That's what Kierkegaard
as you know says that a person has to face. He must allow that
self to he destroyed. That's how he becomes a circumspect mannot
wanting his self to be destroyed because it's a weak self and
he thinks it should be nourished instead of destroyed. And you
could go on with the defiant man.
If you look with Rollo May at the deathwish,
it clarifies the wisdom of the church in setting aside a season
of Lent, in which we self-consciously symbolize our death, allowing
the Word to descend into our own most personal hell of illusion,
and see that the jaws of Hell do not prevail against it. In the
vocations conversation in RSI you open up the secret that
in facing death there is resurrection. In that little exercise
of putting your name and the epitaph you would like on your tombstone,
a person has an imaginal experience of the possibility of seeing
what the Christian faith means by the new life that is born when
you embrace your death.
Joseph Pierce