|
| 10:45
from Ecclesiola to Temple | l} Order Ecclesiola Room 2) Leave briefcases, books, etc., in Ecclesiola Room 3) Take Trek Journal notebook, pencil, Songbook 4) Assemble in Temple Areas for singing |
11:00 Temple 12:00 | TREK LECTURE |
12:00 from Temple to
Solitary 1:00 | 1) After Lecture an assigned person on each team picks up the team's awe center box, while another person on the team gets his monks bowl.
2) Team moves through buffet line together
3) Team proceeds to a solitary space selected by the team
4) After setting up their altar 5) They proceed with their solitary office (M/C/P) while they partake of their monks bowls. |
| 1:00
from Solitary to
Discontinuity 1:30 | 1) Upon a sign by the Guru that the solitary is ended, the team arises, puts away their altar 2) and taking their monks bowls to designated collection
point, 3) take discontinuity until the next workshop. |
1. I take my TREK JOVRNAL and pencil to my sacred space.
Journal. 3. I write my response evoked by the voice of my meditative saint. | |
|
1. I rise and take the MONK's WALK to the altar. 2. At the altar, I light incense, break bread, dip it in the
cup, and partake.
listen to the music. | |
|
1. I list three concerns of the day,
Confession, Gratitude, Petition, Intercession -
and one of the concerns:
I write a prayer using the classical form,
3. I say the "Our Father" then go forth to serve. |
RESEARCH ASSEMBLY LAND OF MYSTERY
Summer '72 Week 1 Otto
OTTO: The Idea of the Holy Monday
In the story of the building of the mighty
bridge over the estuary of the Ennobucht, the most profound and
thorough labour of the intellect, the most assiduous and devoted
professional toil, had gone to the construction of the great edifice,
making it in all its significance and purposefulness a marvel
of human achievement. In spite of endless difficulties and gigantic
obstacles, the bridge is at length finished, and stands defying
wind and waves. Then there comes a raging cyclone, and building
and builder are sweet into the deep. Utter meaninglessness seems
to triumph over richest significance, blind 'destiny' seems to
stride on its way over prostrate virtue and merit. The narrator
tells how he visits the scene of the tragedy and returns again.
When we got to the end of the bridge,
there was hardly a breath of wind; high above, the sky showed
bluegreen, and with an eerie brightness, Behind us, like
a great open grave, lay the Ennchucht. The Lord of life and death
hovered over the waters in silent majesty. We felt His presence,
as one feels one's own hand. And the old man and I knelt down
before the open grave and before Him.
Why did they kneel? Why did they feel
constrained to do so? One does not kneel before a cyclone or the
blind forces of nature, nor even before Omnipotence merely as
such. But one does kneel before the wholly uncomprehended Mystery,
revealed yet unrevealed, and one's soul is stilled by feeling
the way of its working, and therein its justification.
OTTO: The Idea of the Holy Tuesday
Atonement is a sheltering or covering
, but a profound form of it. It springs directly from the idea
of numinous value or worth and numinous disvalue or unworth as
soon as these have been developed. Mere awe, mere need of shelter
from the tremendum, has here been elevated to the feeling that
man in his 'profaneness' is not worthy to stand in the presence
of the holy one, and that his own entire personal unworthiness
might defile even holiness itself. This is obviously the case
in the vision of the call of Isaiah; and the same note recurs,
less emphatically hut quite unmistakably, in the story of the
centurion of Capernaum and his words: 'I am not worthy that thou
shouldest enter under my roof'. Here we have troth the light thrill
of awe before the tremendum of the numen and also, and more especially,
the feeling of this unique disvalue or unworth of the profane
confronted by the numen, which suggests to the man that even holiness
itself may be tainted and tarnished by his presence.
Here, then, comes in the felt necessity and longing for 'atonement', and all the more strongly when the close presence of the numen, intercourse with it, and enduring possession of it, becomes an object of craving, is even desired as the summmum bonum. It amounts to a longing to transcend this sundering unworthiness,
RESEARCH ASSEMBLY LAND OF MYSTERY
Summer '72 Week 1 Otto
Tuesday continued
given with the self's existence as 'creature'
and profane natural being. It is an element in the religious consciousness,
which so far from vanishing in the measure in which religion is
deepened and heightened, grows on the contrary continually
stronger and more marked. Belonging,
as it does, wholly to the nonrational side of religion,
it may remain latent while, in the course of religious evolution,
the rational side at first unfolds and assumes vigorous and definite
form; it may retire for a time behind other elements and apparently
die away, but only to return more powerfully and insistently than
before. And again it may grow to be the sole, onesided,
exclusive interest, a cry that drowns all other notes, so that
the religious consciousness is distorted and disfigured; as may
readily happen where through long periods of time the rational
aspects of religion have been fostered unduly and at the cost
of the nonrational.
OTTO: The Idea of the Holy Wednesday
At its highest point of stress the fascinating
becomes the 'overabounding'~ 'exuberant'. While this feeling of
the 'overabounding' is socially characteristic of mysticism,
a trace of it survives in all truly felt states of religious beatitude,
however restrained and kept within measure by other factors. This
is seen most clearly from the psychology of those great experiences
of grace, conversion, second birth in which the
religious experience appears in its pure intrinsic nature and
in heightened activity, so as to he more clearly grasped than
in the less typical form of Diety instilled by education. The
hard core of such experiences in their Christian form consists
of the redemption from guilt and bondage to sin, and we shall
have presently to see that this also does not occur without a
participation of nonrational elements. But leaving this
out of account, what we have here to coins out is the unutterableness
of what has been yet genuinely experienced, and how such an experience
may pass into blissful excitement, rapture, and exaltation, verging
often on the bizarre and the abnormal. This is vouched for by
the testimony of one writer:
...For the moment nothing but an ineffable
joyand exaltation remained. It is impossible fully to describe
the experience. It was like the effect of some Great orchestra,
when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony,
that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul
is being wafted upwards and almost bursting with its own emotion.
Yet another testifies:
But I can neither write nor tell of what sort of Exaltation the triumphing in the Spirit is. It can be compared with nought, but that when in the midst of death life is born, and it is like the resurrection of the dead.
RESEARCH ASSEMBLY LAND OF MYSTERY
Summer '72 Week 1 Otto
OTTO: The Idea of the Holy Thursday
Loving, tender Lord! My mind has from the days of my childhood sought something with an earnest thirst of longing, Lord, and what that is have I not yet perfectly apprehended. Lord, I have now for many a year been in hot pursuit of it, and never yet have I been able to succeed, for I know not aright what it is. And yet it is something that draws my heart and my soul after it, and without which I can never attain to full repose. Lord, I was fain in the earliest days of my childhood to seek it among created things, as I saw others before me do. And the more I sought, the less I found it; and the nearer I went, the further I wandered from it...Now my heart rages for it, for fain would I possess it... Woe is me!...What is this, or how is it fashioned, that plays within me in such hidden wise?
RESEARCH ASSEMBLY RIVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Summer '72 Week II: Kierkegaard
KIERKEGAARD: Training in Christianity
Monday
And strangely enough it is precisely
this deification of the established order which constitutes the
constant rebellion, the permanent revolt against God. It desires,
in fact (and, so far as this goes, no blame attaches to it), to
be everything, to have the worldevolution a little bit under
its thumb, or to guide the development of the race. But the deification
of the established order, on the other hand, is the invention
of the indolent worldly mind, which would nut itself at rest and
imagine that all is sheer security and peace, that now we have
reached the highest attainment. And then there comes along a single
individual, who has a notion that he ought to be higher than the
established order. But no, it is not necessary to say that he
had this notion, it might even be possible that he was the 'gadfly'
which the established order had need of to keep it from falling
asleep, or, what is still worse, from falling into selfdeification.
Every individual ought to live in fear and trembling, and so too
there is no established order which can do without fear and trembling.
Fear and trembling signifies that one is in process of becoming,
and every individual man, and the race as well, is or should be
conscious of being in process of becoming. And fear and trembling
signifies that a God exists a fact which no man and no
established order dare for an instant forget.
KIERKEGAARD: Training in Christianitv
Tuesday
But most people do not, in a deeper sense,
'exist' at all, they have never made themselves existentially
familiar with the thought of being incognito, that is, they have
never sought to out such a thought into execution. Let us take
simple human situations. When I wish to be incognito (whatever
might be the reason for it, and whether I have a right to do it,
are not questions we need here deal with) should I regard it as
a compliment if one were to come up to me and say, 'I recognized
you at once'? On the contrary, it is a satire upon me. But perhaps
the satire was justified and my incognito a poor one. But now
let us think of a man who was able to maintain his incognito:
he wills to be incognito; he is willing, it is true, to be recognized,
but not directly. In this case there is nothing to hinder him
from being recognized directly for what he is, this disguise being
in fact his free determination. But here we discover the secret:
most people have no notion at all of the superiority by which
a man transcends himself; and the superiority which willingly
assumes an incognito of such a sort that one seems to be something
much lowlier than one is they have no inkling of. Or if they have
an inkling of it, they will surely think, 'What madness' What
if the incognito were to be so successful that the man actually
is taken 'or what he gives himself out to be!' Farther than this
men seldom get, it they get so far. They discover here a selfcontradiction,
which in the service of the Good is really selfabnegation
the Good strives with might and main to maintain its incognito,
and its incognito is that it is something less than it is. A man
chooses then an incognito which makes him seem far lowlier than
he is. He has in mind perhaps the Socratic maxim, that in order
to will the Good truly, one must avoid the appearance of doing
it. The incognito is his free decision. He exerts himself to the
utmost, employing all his inventiveness and intrepidity to maintain
the incognito. This effort is either successful or unsuccessful.
If it is successful then he has, humanly speaking, done himself
an injury, he has made everybody think poorly of him. What selfabnegation.
And, or, the other hand, what an immense strain upon a man. For
he had it in his power every instant to show himself in his real
character. What selfabnegation' For what is selfabnegation
without freedom? Oh, loftiest height of selfabnegation when
the incognito succeeds so well that even if he now were inclined
to speak directly, no one would believe him!
KIERKEGAARD: Training in Christianity
Wednesday
The decisive mark of Christian suffering
is the 'act that it is voluntary, and that it is the possibility
of offense for the sufferer, We read of the Apostles that they
forsook all to follow Christ. So it was voluntary. Now there is
a man in Christendom who is so unfortunate as to lose all that
he possesses; he has not given up the least thing, he has lost
all. So then the parson valiantly applies himself to study out
a consolatory discourse, but due to his much study, or to whatever
else it may be, everything is a confused buzz in the brain of
his Reverence; to lose all and to give up all become synonymous,
he makes losing all agree with the paradigm 'giving up all', notwithstanding
that the difference is infinite. For when voluntarily I give up
all, choosing danger and adversity, it is not possible to ignore
the offense (again peculiarly the category of Christianity, though
of course abolished in Christendom) which derives from responsibility
(corresponding again to the voluntary) when they say, 'But why
will you expose yourself to this and commence such an undertaking,
when you could perfectly will leave it alone?' This is specific
Christian suffering. It is a whole musical tone deeper than common
human suffering. For when I lose all, there is no responsibility,
and there is nothing for temptation to lay hold of. But in Christendom
they have entirely abolished the voluntary, and by this the possibility
of offense as well, forasmuch as the voluntary is also a form
of the possibility of temptation. They live in an entirely heathenish
way and see no reason why they should not use their wit to deride
the voluntary as a ridiculous exaggeration. Unavoidable human
sufferings one has simply to put up with once for all, just as
in paganism; but they reach them up to be Christian sufferings,
preach them into relationship with Christ and the Apostles. I
would venture to try the experiment of taking pagan works, without
altering anything in them, except to introduce Christ's name in
several places and I shall make people believe it is a
sermon or a meditation by a parson a sermon, perhaps even
a sermon published at the request of many, i.e. of many Christians,
for surely we are all of us Christians, the Parson included.
KIERKEGAARD: Training in Christianity
Thursday
And now in the case of the GodMan!
He is God, but chooses to become the individual man. This, as
we have seen, is the profoundest incognito, or the most impenetrable
unrecognizableness that is possible; for the contradiction between
being God and being an individual man is the greatest possible,
the infinitely qualitative contradiction. But this is His will,
His free determination, therefore an almightily maintained incognito.
Indeed, He has in a certain sense, by suffering Himself to be
born, bound Himself once for all; His incognito is so almightily
maintained that in a way He is subjected to it, and the reality
of His suffering consists in the fact that it is not merely apparent,
but that in a sense the assumed incognito has power over Him.
Only thus is there in the deepest sense real seriousness in the
assertion that He became 'very man', and hence also He experiences
the extremes" suffering of feeling Himself forsaken of God,
so that at no moment was He beyond suffering, but actually in
it, and He encountered the purely human experience that reality
is even more terrible than possibility, that He who had freely
assumed unrecognizableness yet really suffers as though He were
entrapped in unrecognizableness or had entrapped Himself. It is
a strange sort of dialectic: that He who almightily... binds Himself,
and does it so almightily that He actually feels Himself bound,
suffers under the consequences of the fact that He lovingly and
freely determined to become an individual man to such a
degree was it seriously true that He became a real man; but thus
it must be if He were to become the sign of contradiction which
reveals the thoughts of the hearts. It is the
imperfection of a man's disguise that he has the arbitrary faculty
of annulling it at any instant. A disguise is the more completely
serious the more one knows how to restrain this faculty and to
make it less and less possible. But the unrecognizableness of
the GodMan is an incognito almightily maintained, and the
divine seriousness consists precisely in the fact that it is so
almightily maintained that He Himself suffers under His unrecognizableness
in a purely human way.
RESEARCH ASSEMBLY RIVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Summer '72 Week II: Bonhoeffer
BONHOEFFER: Letters and Papers from Prison
Monday
During the last year or so I have come
to know and understand more and more the profound thisworldliness
of Christianity. The Christian is not a homo religious, but simply
a man, as Jesus was a man... I am still discovering right up to
this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world
that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any
attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or
a converted sinner, or a churchman (a socalled priestly
type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a
healthy one. By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly
in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences
and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into
the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but
those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemane.
BONHOEFFER: Letters and Papers from Prison
Tuesday
18 July 1944
I wonder whether any letters have been
lost in the raids on Munich. Did you get the one with the two
poems? It was just sent out that evening, and it also contained
a few introductory remarks on our theological theme. The poem
about Christians and pagans contains an idea that you will recognize:
"Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving"; that
is what distinguishes Christians from pagans. Jesus asked in Gethsemane,
"Could you rot watch with me one hour?" That is a reversal
of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to
share in God's sufferings at the hands of a godless world.
He must therefore really 1ive in the
godless world without attempting to gloss over or explain its
ungodliness in some religious way or other. He must live a "secular"
life, and thereby share in God's sufferings. He may live a "secular"
life: i.e. he is freed (as one who has been liberated from, false
religious obligation inhibitions) To be a Christian does
not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something
of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of
some method or other, but to be a man not a type of man,
but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious
act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings
of God in the secular life. That is metanoia: not in the first
place thinking about one's own needs, problems, sins, and fears,
but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ,
into the messianic event.
BONHOEFFER: Letters and Papers from Prison
Wednesday
27 November 1943
...Meanwhile we have had the expected largescale attack on Borsig. It really is a strange feeling, to see the "Christmas trees," the flares that the leading aircraft drops, coming down right over our heads. The shouting and screaming of the prisoners in their cells was terrible. We had no dead, only injured, and we had finished bandaging them by one o'clock. After that, I was able to drop off at once into a sound sleep. People here talk quite openly about how frightened they were. I don't quite know what to make of it, for fright is surely something to be ashamed of. I have a feeling that it should not be talked about except in the confessional, otherwise it might easily involve a certain amount of exhibitionism; and a fortiori there is no need to play the hero. On the other hand, naive frankness can be quite disarming. But even so, there is a cynical, I might almost say ungodly, frankness, the kind that breaks out in heavy drinking and fornication, and gives the impress ion of chaos. I wonder whether fright is not one of the pudenda, which ought to be concealed; I must think about it further; you have no doubt formed your own ideas on the subject.
The fact that the horrors of war are
now coming home to us with such force will no doubt, if we survive,
provide us with the necessary basis for making it Possible to
reconstruct the life of the nations, both spiritually and materially,
on Christian principles. So we must try to keep these experiences
in our minds, use them in our work, make them bear fruit, and
not just shake them off. Never have we been so plainly conscious
of the wrath of God, and that is a sign of his grace: "O
that today you would hearken to his voice! Harden not your hearts".
The tasks that confront us are immense, but we must prepare ourselves
for them now and he ready when they come.
BONHOEFFER: Letters and Papers from Prison
Thursday
Who am I? They often tell me
I step from my cell's confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a squire from his countryhouse.
Who am I? They often tell me
I talk to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bear the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudlv,
like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other
men tell of?
Or am I only what I know of myself,
restless and longing and sick, like
a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though
hands were compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers, for
the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for
neighbourliness,
tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends
at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at
thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to
it all?
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow
another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite
before others,
and before myself a contemptibly
woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like
a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory
already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these
lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God,
I am thine.
RESEARCH ASSEMBLY SEA OF TRANQUILITY
Summer '72 Week II: Chardin
CHARDIN: The Divine Milieu Monday
We undergo life as much as we undergo death, if not more. Let us try, patiently, to perceive the ocean of forces to which we are subjected and in which our growth is, as it were, steeped. This is a salutary exercise; for the depth and universality of our dependence on so much altogether outside our control all go to make up the embracing intimacy of our communion with the world to which we belong . . . And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps (although I am supposed to meditate every day'), I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss . . . I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step
of the descent a new person was disclosed
within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer
obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path
faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottom less abyss at my
feet, and out of it camearising I know not from where
the current which I dare to call my life. What science will ever
be able to reveal to man the origin, nature and character of that
conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life?
It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around
us, which set that current in motion. My self is given to me far
more than it is formed by me.
CHARDIN: The Divine Milieu Tuesday
To adore . . . that means to lose oneself
in the unfathomable, to plunge into the inexhaustible, to find
peace in the incorruptible, to be absorbed in defined immensity,
to offer oneself to the fire and to the transparency, to annihilate
oneself in proportion as one becomes more deliberately conscious
of oneself, and to give of one's deepest to that whose depth has
no end . . . The more man becomes man, the more will he become
prey to a need, a need that is always more explicit, more subtle
and more magnificent, the need to adore. . . We shall not seek
to escape this joyful uncertainty. But now that we are familiar
with the attributes of the divine milieu, we shall turn our attention
to the Thing itself which appeared to us in the depth of each
being, like a radiant countenance, like a fascinating abyss.
CHARDIN: The Divine Milieu Wednesday
And if any words could translate that
permanent and lucid intoxication better than others, perhaps they
would be 'passionate indifference'. To have access to the divine
mileiu is to have found the one thing needful: him who burns by
setting fire to everything that we would love badly or not enough;
him who calms by eclipsing with his blaze everything that we would
love too much; him who consoles by gathering up everything that
has been snatched from our love or has never been given to it.
To reach those priceless layers is to experience, with equal truth,
that one has need of everything, and that one has need of nothing.
Everything is needed because the world will never be large enough
to provide our taste for action with the means of grasping God,
or our thirst for undergoing with the possibility of being invaded
by him. And yet nothing is needed; for as the only reality which
can satisfy us lies beyond the transparencies in which it is mirrored,
everything that fades away and dies between us will only serve
to give reality back to us with greater purity. Everything means
both everything and nothing to me; everything is God to me and
everything is dust to me: that is what man can say with equal
truth, in accord with how the divine ray falls.
CHARDIN: The Divine Milieu Thursday
It could be said that Providence, for
those who believe in it, converts evil into good in three principal
ways. Sometimes the check we have undergone will divert our activity
on to objects, or towards a framework, that are more propitious
though still situated on the level of the human ends we
are pursuing. That is what happened with Job, whose final happiness
was greater than his first. At other times, more often perhaps,
the loss which afflicts us will oblige us to turn for the satisfaction
of our frustrated desires to less material fields. which neither
worm nor rust can corrupt. The lives of the saints are full of
these instances in which one can see the man emerging ennobled,
tempered and renewed from some ordeal, or even some downfall,
which seemed bound to diminish or lay him low for ever. Failure
in that case plays for us the part that the elevator plays for
an aircraft or the pruning knife for a plant. . . The collapse,
even when a moral one, is thus transformed into a success which,
however spiritual it may be is, nevertheless, felt experimentally.
But there are more difficult cases (the most common ones, in fact)
where human wisdom is altogether out of its depth. At every moment
we see diminishment, both in us and around us . . . how can these
diminishments which are altogether without compensation, wherein
we see death at its most deathly, become for us a good? This is
where diminishments the most effective way and the
way which most surely makes us holy. God, as we have seen, has
already transfigured our sufferings by making them serve our conscious
fulfillment. In his hands the forces of diminishment have perceptibly
become the tool that cuts, carves and polishes within us the stone
which is destined to occupy a definite place in the heavenly Jerusalem.
But he will do still more, for, as a result of his omnipotence
impinging upon our faith, events which show themselves experimentally
in our lives as pure loss will become an immediate factor in the
union we dream of establishing with him. Uniting oneself means,
in every case, migrating, and dying partially in what one loves.
But if, as we are sure, this being reduced to nothing in the other
must be all the more complete the more we give our attachment
to one who is greater than ourselves, then we can set no limits
to the tearing up of roots that is involved on our journey into
God. . . The progressive breaking down of our selfregard
is no doubt a very real foretaste of that leap out of ourselves
which must in the end deliver us from the bondage of ourselves
into the service of the divine sovereignty . . . There is a further
step to take: the one that makes us lose all foothold within ourselves.
God must, in some way or other, make room for himself, hollowing
us out and emptying us, if he is finally to penetrate into us.
. . he must break the molecules of our being so as to recast and
remodel us. The function of death is to provide the necessary
entrance into our inmost selves. . . What was by nature empty
and void, a return to bits and pieces, can, in any human existence,
become fullness and unity in God.