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 ITIs 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 McCleskey 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 $18,000. That is even more of a miracle. Also for the first time in our history we had international teachers. Something like six who 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 recruitment were 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 do -- 19 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 gimmicks -- and I tell you, we learn a lot of gimmicks -- and 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 who 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 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.

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 of -- yourself 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 20. 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.

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 around 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. 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. (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 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 rescued her.

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 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 and forgiveness are 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.

Joseph W. Mathews