PEDAGOGUE'S DISCOURSE V MANUAL

Introductory Poetry

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Prince Five­weapons, snared five times, stuck fast in five places, dangled from the ogre's body. But for all that, he was unafraid, undaunted. As for the ogre, he thought: "This is some lion of a man, some man of noble birth -- no mere man! For although he has been caught by an ogre like me, he appears neither to tremble nor to quake! In all the time I have harried this road, I have never seen a single man to match him! Why, pray, is he not afraid?" Not daring to eat him, he asked: "Youth, why are you not afraid? Why are you not terrified with the fear of death?"
"Ogre, why should I be afraid? For in one life one death is absolutely certain. What's more, I have in my belly a thunderbolt for weapon. If you eat me, you will not be able to digest that weapon. It will tear your insides into tatters and fragments and will kill you. In that case we'll both perish. That's why I'm not afraid!" . . .
"What this youth says is true," thought the ogre, terrified with the fear of death. "From the body of this lion of a man, my stomach would not be able to digest a fragment of flesh even so small as a kidney bean. I '1l let him go!" And he let Prince Five­weapons go. And some versions say Prince Five­weapons then trained him as a servant.
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DISCOURSE BACK­UP


CONCLUSION


IV. The decision to embody this dynamic in history is to involve oneself in a perpetual task of creating the future over against overwhelming odds. It requires new decisions daily to continue enabling the movement of history. Yet in the midst of the struggle, there arises a strange sense of fulfillment as though this task is what one's whole life were created for. It is a life fished full of responsibility and care that produces a tranquillity beyond common definitions of happiness. It is a detached posture emerging from total engagement with history as one immerses himself in the endless process of being itself. A solitary decision to embody the future in a common thrust under corporate discipline is all that is required. It is a decision to respond to the call of history, to be the nobody who sets out on a glorious quest and finds in that quest the happy death.
The one thing that the sticky sociological ogre of our time can't stomach is a life laid down on behalf of the future.


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6. Resurgence is about dealing with the collapse of meaning or the collapse of values, a collapse in terms of any kind of understanding of what the family is about -- no way of understanding authentic values in society. Resurgence is about recovering the ontological, the basic given of life. It is about the recovery of phasiality, or the understanding of the four life­times I live in the midst of life, four fantastic glorious opportunities to expend ourselves. Resurgence is about the recovery of sexuality -- the understanding that I showed up as a male and understand my maleness over against the other, over against femaleness. It is the recovery of the enthusiast dynamic in society, recovery of the adventuring dynamic in society. That is what resurgence is about.
7. Resurgence is about the recovery of rationality, the recovery of the kind of form or poetry which once again shows every man to experience every moment in which he finds himself; the form which shows every man to bring out the significance of the moment; that in which his existence is not just from the few moments of his life which he would consider significant. Resurgence is about the recovery of care. Every man across the face of the globe grasps himself as a caring kind of human being. Perhaps simply getting up in disgust to turn the TV off is a kind of demonstration of his care for the world. Every man shows up as a caring human being. Recovering self­consciously that the whole world is on one's shoulders is what resurgence is about.
8. Resurgence is about the recovery of radical integrity, of deciding not to have integrity in the terms that every other man has: not integrity in terms of one's family or integrity in terms of some particular cause or other. whether it be the job or whatever, but deciding to have radical integrity or to have integrity in terms of the task, which is the task that is out to be the world. That kind of context for the recovery of radical integrity is what resurgence is about.
9. Resurgence is about the recovery of fulfillment, or happiness. It is about the recovery of the full expenditure of one's life in doing that task which is that of giving oneself; to assist in the expenditure or one r S life, which is to give life to meet the need of the world, but not to give life to anything less comprehensive than that. The recovery of fulfillment is what resurgence is about.
10" That is going on in our day. We can increasingly point to signs here and there in the world, where that kind of recovery is going on in terms of resurgence. It has been exciting to see some of those, to see where that resurgence is going on in our time. There is a fantastic resurgence of the human spirit in teens of just the recovery of singing, perhaps in what has happened to us this weekend as we have sung together. Or in terms of oneself, they way you begin to do things. The possibilities are beginning to emerge in society.
11. You can point to places in society where experimentation is going on, new kinds of structures or possibilities are beginning to emerge. There is a kind of waking up of people occurring across the face of the globe. I point to the assistant manager I referred to a minute ago, who with just a little bit of a story dealing with the world, just came alive in terms of the look in his eyes. People are hungry  to be awakened.
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We talked about how, in our times (although that has not always been the case), the economic has become the dominating kind of process, at the expense of a collapse of the cultural process in society.
19. Thirdly, that practical vision contains some kind of a picture or statement of a comprehensively oriented ideology, of a posture relative to what needs to happen in the world. For us today, that posture is, first of all that we live in one world. This was brought to the consciousness of the people with that photograph taken from the moon when you saw, for the first time, a photograph of the earth. There, you saw one world, just available­all the world just available, all the gifts of the world available to anyone, all the resources of the world just available, all the decision­making processes of the world, available to all the people; all the gifts of humanness, all the inventions of humanness, just available to every man.
20. And fourthly, the practical vision contains some kind of statement as to what is blocking the community from coming into being, or that which is blocking that ideology from actually being a description of the actual situation. I call that a statement of the primary contradiction, that which is blocking the imbalance from being rebalanced.
21. And fifthly, the vision must contain some kind of statement of the sort of thing we have been working on this weekend, the practical set of proposals that get said, in terms of the real society, the existing society we have on our hands, how that society could be moved in such a fashion that the new could come into being.
22. Just a little bit of time talking about that set of proposals, particularly in terms of the way our work this weekend and the work of others like yourselves can come into focus.
23. What needs to come into being in society is some kind of a meaningful secular­mythology. In the language of every man, a firm statement of what humanness is about is what I mean there. We even used the word "mythology" in some of our proposals this weekend. You begin to grasp that as one of the things which need to happen in our time.
24. There needs to come into being a humanized education; that is to say, an education which is not collecting a bit of data or a set of facts so you can get a job, but the kind of education showing a person to live a significant life, and giving tools which will show you to engage yourself insignificantly in society.
25. What is needed in our time is a primalized community beyond the family, which shows the individual to sense himself as participating in all of society.
26. A localized polity -- you can see this kind of thing beginning to emerge. I read an article in a magazine not long ago about Saab, the motor car company in Sweden, who experimented with a kind of localized polity within the plant. Instead of having a sort of hierarchical, bureaucratic structure
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that avalanche of social change that is there on the precipices just waiting for someone to cause it to happen, that set of actions I call the Whistle Points of society that will show that sort of thing to come into being.
30. What needs to happen in society is, first of all, that a mass awakening has to occur. That is to say, local man is sitting there just waiting for someone to come along and tell him what he already knows. You see it yourself, in terms of the new possibilities beginning to emerge. The mass awakening would be one of those kinds of whistles which would occasion an avalanche in our time.
31. Once you have gotten awakened people, there needs to be some kind of demonstration sign, a sign of possibility Here, now, is what I mean by concrete social change, something you can point to that seems to be one of the necessary whistle points which will  allow  an avalanche of social change to occur.
32. Then, some sort of channel that shows, finally, one to make a decision. Having been awakened and seeing some of the possibilities of actually, concretely, coming into being for themselves, some kind of action will have to occur, some kind of channel for specific concrete engagement which would motivate a person into the process of changing society. This might be the third set of actions that would occasion an avalanche of social change.
33. The guild is a dynamic in history. And that, in the first instance, is pointing to a particular group of people in history. That is where you see it. You find out a particular group of people carrying out a particular sort of action. But first of all, a guild is a dynamic in history. Wherever you see an intentional move toward the future, that is what I mean by the guild operating in history -- wherever you see the kind of posture Don was talking about the other night, of maintaining the tension between the pro­establishment (those who maintain the structures of society in being) and the disestablishment (those who scream a kind of "no" to the inhumanness there in those structures). The guilding dynamic is that which maintains the tension between that pro­establishment and that dis­establishment, the transcendence of those which points to a creative move into the future. The guilding dynamic is wherever you see in society a breakloose from the established structures, always imbedded within the establishment. That is what I mean by the guilding dynamic. The guilding dynamic is the caretaker of humanness.
34. It is peculiar to the local, although obviously something had happened to weld the particular locals together. It is a fellowship of human beings who are engaged in concrete, local, social change. The image itself comes from Medieval European societies. There, in the midst of the emergence of towns, it was obvious someone had to care for that reality coming into being. It was the guilds, specifically the craft guild and the parish guild, which came into being to do that kind of caring. That is where the image itself came from. you can begin to ground that in terms of the guild as a historical dynamic. The guild is that which turns out of the situation the action required to care for humanness in that situation.
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42. In terms of the sign, three kinds of activities are there. Specifically, first of all, the creation of a demonstration project, of particular geographical locations in which social reconstruction takes place, which can stand as a sign of possibility, and in which research as to a possibility of social reconstruction can go on -- ­which can stand as a sign of possibility in the midst of a world which seems to be an impossible situation would be necessary as a task of the Build.
43. Then some kind of servant force. The guild itself is a demonstration of the style of authentic engagement, of authentic phasiality, of authentic sexuality, of authentic rationality. It is a sign of what is possible in terms of a style of engagement in our time. It has to bring into being social involvement constructs. This is a word for some kind of scheme that is an invitation to man to participate. It is a demonstration of authentic corporateness, of authentic fellowship; a body of people engaged in dealing with society which gives that kind of invitation to participate in the changing of society. It is another activity of the guild and it has to be an embodiment of the invitation to participate. The guild then enables practical research schemes which show local man to do the creating of, building of, and engagement with the future. You do not want to have someone else, finally, create a picture for them. They have their own ideas, insights, thoughts relative to what it is that needs to come into being in society. The key is some kind of practical research network which shows man to engage himself in the model­building processes, which shows him to get his intuitions into the building of the great new society. What is the new kind of polity? You can imagine what would happen if you could get a group of people together and work through models relative to particular issues, and then relative to that body, send yourself a representative to a larger body. Representation would take on a whole new type of meaning relative to the systems of our bureaucratic structures, I suspect. Then some kind of community reformulation machinery. This is the practical of the practical in terms of the task of the guild. These are ways in which local man can specifically be engaged in bringing into being that which he has decided; ways in which he can participate in the doing of tactics. That is another type of the task of the guild, in terms of enabling that type of formation in a local global area to take place.
44. The qualities, then, of the guild that enable it to be about that type of a task, in that of being the tactical thinkers of history. That is to say, their approach to a particular task is always to see that they intend that body be brought into being. It is that kind of thinking, rather than the abstract kind of thinking which creates grandiose visions of the future which may or may not happen, but which are not stated or thought through in terms of bringing them into being. They are the tactical thinkers. To think through a problem from the stance of intending to see the solutions to the problems come into being is the stance of the guild.
45. They are the ones who have the quality of being within the structures. Whenever the rebels are staying outside the structures, they operate more or less invisibly within the structures themselves, not as one individual operating over here and another individual here in another direction, but as a corporate type of force. This collegiality shows one to check his
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job, not just friends. It is a solitary kind of decision, to pick up that world which has fallen on your shoulders. It is a decision to come at oneself in covenantal relationships which show oneself to be continually rehearsing, making that kind of decision, which is what the guild is about
49. The guild is a body of nobodies in history. And they are the ones history never remembers. They are the social failures, through which history would not be created. There is no status.
50. It is the calling you have been waiting for all your life, to do one thing. That is what the guild is about, to expend oneself concretely on behalf of the future. That is the glorious quest. That is the happy death. The only thing really that the sticky sociological ogre cannot stomach, cannot swallow, is the life of one who has decided to lay down his life for the sake of bringing into being the future.
 -- Gary Tomlinson
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7. The resurgence of our time across the globe, it seems to me, has gone through stages just in this century. It is hard to say when it began. I look at art for my clue. When art is doing its job of projecting the future, an artist shows that. You see it in the Cezanne's and Van Gogh's  that you have been 1ooking at this weekend on the walls. One artist said, "Times are changing; the world will not look the same as it has looked to you before." I am anticipating a new future.


  1. You might call the first stage one of isolated pioneers -- people like Albert Einstein who rocked history with his scientific breakthrough for mankind. Or another artist, Stravinsky, who created the "Rite of Spring" -- an example of music that has forever changed musical form, and yet one that you and I are very used to now. You will recall that in 1912 when the "Rite of Spring" was first performed in Paris, people literally rioted in the streets for four days in their reaction to that. And maybe they did not know why, but they knew something was about.
9. Then came the second period, the thirties and the forties, when the world once more was first thrown into a depression and then into another global conflagration. As the bottom dropped out, the vision began to get clearer. The fifties and the sixties brought the time of protest and rebellion, sit­ins, marches, the youth revolution, the female revolution with women demanding more and more rights.  Over and over and over this went on. This is the period in which most of us have lived out our "waked-up'' lives. Now, finally, people have said no. They have said "No! This situation must stop.  And what is coming into being, is a body of global1y awakened people who grasp themselves to be the ones who are going, to chart the course for the future. The demand  now is to build, to actualize the vision of mankind. Whispy dreams must now  be transformed into the practical, the practical, the practical.
10. We want to take a look at four aspects of that practicality, first of all the vision, and then the strategies, then the practical form and what we might call the practical sign. Resurgence becomes a reality when both the vision and the practical realized ends come together. The vision's role is to sustain the passion that is loosed.
11.How the components of the practical vision are what we have been working with this weekend, First of all you take a look at the dynamics of society, the theoretical dynamics of how it is you fool at a society. Our tools for that this weekend have been the triangles.  They give you a picture of just what society is about. Then you look at the imbalances, or how you begin to spot where there are situations in society that need change.  And then there must be a comprehensive ideology. You have to stand somewhere in order to create the practical vision. We said that this weekend in things like the world is a "global village" and the whole earth belongs to every man now. Then you discern what the primary contradictions are. Or what it is that is blocking the  trends that we talked about from breaking through and moving into the future. And then finally, there is the creation of social proposals such as you see al1 around the wall.


  1. To talk about the strategic objectives, or the arenas of society where the change will occur, you begin to talk about the arenas that you would find those in. There are also five of those. This is just some shorthand that you would find in current mythology, or in education - a new way to bring the humanizing into education. There is today screams against the dehumanization which goes
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cries for that. And so a new polity will merge in which local man begins to add to the stew. This is where the local action takes place, where in a small area that is delimited geographica11y, you begin to see step by step action begin to be hammered out.
18. And then a word that I have made up for this occasion, that I call the signalment, that is a word for me that holds the forces that will do this task, that will be a sign, that wi1l embody the kind of fellowhood and corporateness that attack the task. The kind of creation that is needed must be held in the kind of signalment that will be going on.
THE PRACTICAL FORM
19. Now the question is, who are these forces that will get this job done? Who are those at this point in history that will throw their lives into the rebalancing of society? I like to use as a key strategic category here a word from the past that has held that dynamic before in history, and that is the guild. In society you have a dis­establishment and a pro­establishment, and in between those a trans­establishment that embraces the ideals of the dis­estab1ishment and works with the structures of tile pro­establishment. I would suggest that the guild is that which has served this function in the past and can do it again.
20. It is a very old word. I looked it up in tile dictionary, and I found two roots for it. One of them was "g­i­1­d" which had something to do with money. And so that was a body of peop1e that banded together for economic reasons. And the other was "g­e­1­d" which was a body of people that banded together to protect society. That rather excited me and I like that one to use here.
21. This is a dynamic that has gone on in every society. I was reading about the Cheyenne Indians, who have this kind of a dynamic point on in their society. They called them military societies, and they named them after animals like the elk, the mountain lion, coyote, and things like that. The young men at a certain age would get initiated into one of those military societies. And these societies went all across tile Cheyenne nation, so that if you be1onged to the elk society in your tribe and you went to another tribe you would be very much at home. It was just a network a1l across the whole Cheyenne nation.
22. Another example for me, is the family, in China. There are whole towns in China where every single person in the town has the same name. As the people spread across that vast nation, the family held them together. And there was something about that kind of social grouping that was this guilding dynamic.
23. Maybe the biggest flowering of the guild was in Europe around the year 1000 A.D.  You probably have images in your head of  that time in Europe.  I know I do.  I see a castle on a hill, or a beautiful manor.  And all around it outside the wall there are little huts where the serfs lived, if they had a hut to live in at all. And all the land as far as you cou1d  see belonged to the king  or the lord. The serfs owned nothing. That system began to disperse as merchants came into being, trave11ing from place to place. Suddenly mobility became a possibility. And that trade enabled the beginning of towns where there had been nothing before. From peop1e that had had no place to run suddenly, just out of nowhere, little towns sprang up. But in these little towns that sprang up there was no kind of care for the community.
24. And so the guild movement began.  People in the towns organized into groups that cared for all the people.  Everything was provided, the necessities of life like bread and candles, and the care for life, taking care of the sick, burying the dead.  There were no other structures to take care of all that.  I was interested to learn that both men and women were a vital part of these guilds in the middle ages.  Later on, of course, these developed into what is more familiar to you and me, the craft guilds.  Many European cities have guild houses around a square in the center of the city.  I have a picture in my mind of a square in Brussels where all around the square are these skinny little houses.  They look very much alike, brick houses with a peaked roof.  They have a shield above the door of every house, because every guild had its shield.  And every craftsman sought to belong to a guild. These were just local men, creating order and caring for the new forms of society.
25. In the present time in the United States, you could say that, certainly in their beginnings, the labor movement, the unions, were a manifestation of the guild. I grew up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, and I used to travel with my father to the coal mines. I remember as a very little girl being struck by the fact that people lived in company houses, all painted alike. They were paid in company scrip, which was their form of money. It could only be spent in the company store. I remember my family and their friends when I was little, I remember sitting and listening to them argue back and forth, and back and forth, about the virtue and the terrible thing that the labor union was going to be to that part of the world.
26. This is an historic moment for this guilding dynamic to come into fruition once again. The dis­establishment has done its job with its push against the pro­establishment to demand change. And now the pro­establishment says "Okay. How do you do it? Show us what to do." And that has made the dis­establishment collapse. In one sense their role was not to go on and build, so they have very much gone out of being in many ways. They had no practical plan for how to put their vision into practice. And so it is time for the trans­establishment to do this embodying, of the disestablishment ideals, and to do, within the structures of the pro­establishment, the forging of this society of the future.


  1. And just what is this function or task of the guild in society? I would first of all say that it is a local going­on­ness. It springs from the care and the concern of people who join together with the kind of fellowhood that comes from being completely engaged in society. And secondly, I would say that it embodies the change in itself, it manifests the structures and the trends. Third, this guild is a committed body, over against the committee who gets appointed or keeps going. The guild is a committed body who comes into being to do a particular job and may well go out of being again. But the emphasis today in the function of the guild must reflect the needs of the times. In medieval times the emphasis of was the economic, and so the guild emerged as an economic force. Today, the political dynamic and the cultural dynamic are the places where the guild must engage itself to correct the imbalances. So what the guildman does is that he awakens, and he provides the sign, and he acts concretely in his local situation.
28. That would you say the qualities of these people are?  These people who throw themselves into this task and into the breach are first of all tactical.  They are tactical thinkers.  That is to say, they will enable the pro-establishment to change, not taking over, but enabling the pro-establishment with the "how-to" of the vision.
29. They are catalyzers, in that they are a leavening force.  For the most part they are invisible.  That is not to say they are secret, for if they become a secret society they have turned in upon themselves.  They are invisible because they do not seek visibility.
30. Then they are corporate.  They are a corporate force within society with commonness as a major theme.  One of the key examples to the decay of the guild in the middle ages was the fact that one guild decided that its guild was more important than the whole network of guilds.  When it turned inward in that way, decay had begun to set in.


31. They are comprehensive. And that has again to do with the fact that they see the whole thing. These people imagine that between the temples of their head is the whole globe, and they see what needs to happen all at once across the globe to create change. In terms that I rather like, they are history builders. That is to say they see their task, not first of all to build a family or first of all to build a business, but their task is to build history. That is an essential quality of a group that would want to engage in change.
32. Finally, I want to use the word global here.  I was struck by the comment last evening about how many of our proposals had the word global.  That is a reality for us today, because nothing less than a network of people who care for the globe will change anything.
THE PRACTICAL DECISION
33. One of my very favorite poet friends has said, "At every moment of crisis an array of troops risk themselves in battle." He is talking about the guild. He is talking about that dynamic that discerns the resurgence that is flowing and becomes a demonstration of social change, for the sake of the new society. So he is the practical sign. To be the guilding, dynamic is to be that sign.
34. This century has seen more self­consciousness break loose than at any other time in the history of man,  I do not know how you mark the point at which man realized that things had dried up. For me, it was the day when mankind realized that World War I was not the war that ended all war. Maybe for you it is another time, but to suddenly come upon the e realization that 1ife was not going to be lived happily ever after, but the strugg1e, the strugg1e would go on. It is like 1iving in a desert. We have .seen the pain of social breakdown in the West, and maybe the even more painful struggle of emerging, nations who strugg1e to create a new social system in their spot on the g1obe.


35. But the one march of resurgence has come. And giants in our midst have joined the call to the long march of history where many have, step by step by step, just with nitty-gritty work done the job of creating societies.We have come to a time when there is a call for a massive response to join in that march. It is clear that man has seen a possibility for a whole new earth. But this claim that comes when one hears the beckoning of life is total, and that is frightening. For it is not a romantic journey that you are being asked to embark upon. When you take upon yourself the job of altering history, there is not enough of me to do it, there is not enough of me to throw into it.
36. But to throw myself into it is clearly the demand. And the demand is to dream years and years ahead even when you and I find living from this day to the next, in the kinr1 of world in which we live, almost impossible in itself. We must create a vision for a thousand years. We must think about the next hunc1recl years, and, at the very least:, what the practical demands of the next twenty years will be. Nothing less than that is worth your life.
37. 1Ihen you give yourself to this task with the men and the women of the world, you join in a kind of history­long, league of what I would call single solidarity with people who have come before and people who have come after. A corporate thrust with a mission that is common, who have been willing to risk themselves in that battle.
38. The irony of this, of course, is that to answer that call does not give any guarantee of success. And you and I do not like to engage in any activity that does not offer us the promise of success. You are offered a promise, but you are not offered success. There is one thing that you can be certain of, though. For the people who engage in creating a future history will not turn out looking the way they thought it would. That you can be sure of. But their secret is that they bend history.
39. And this is a demand, a call, to engage myself precisely where I am. The post­modern knight does not need to venture into unknown geography, for our geography is the globe. And our geography finds the key in local man, local man. The new society will not just happen, it will not happen unless there are rare, courageous human beings, who are real men and real women, who live every moment of their lives as though the care of the world upon their backs were but a feather, who waltz into a wonder­filled, terror­filled future. All of your life, you have wanted to be out there. You have wanted to be a person of integrity. You have wanted fulfillment. All of your life you have dreamed of dying happy. Well now you know that it means to participate in resurgence.
40. I have a dream that there are people who will make the impossible possible It is painful fulfillment. nut to be a practical sign in caring for this fragile, fragile earth. It is for me the most glorious quest a post­modern knight could embark upon.
 -- Mary Warren Moffett


Random Notes on Guilds
October '72
Research Station

A guild is a group of spirit men bound together in corporate discipline for the sake of effecting a specific and direct tactical action toward the service of the humanizing process on behalf of and as the church in the world. The guild is the church. It is a spiritual concept. It is a parish dynamic in the local church. It is not a congregation dynamic, nor is it a cadre. It is a socio-religious or socio­spiritual phenomena. It is not a training or research form. It is not a nurture or discipline cell. It is not the place for worship or devotionals. Though some or all of these activities may at one time or another go on in this dynamic (indeed such may even be necessary or inevitable) yet these activities are not definitive for the guild. The guild is a religio-social tactic or rather the force for effecting such a tactic or better it is the concrete operating design for carrying out such a tactic.
A guild may deal with a comprehensive tactic and be very long ranged or it may exist for a specific relative minor tactic which would require a very short span of existence. It could deal with a very clearly established arena of society such as education. In such case it could be either comprised of spirit men educators or it could cut across many different professions. All these matters are secondary qualities of the guild.
The concrete function of the guild is not for the most part to directly do the tactic as a guild ­ though indeed it may de precisely this ­ especially as a demonstration that serves as a catalytic agent. Usually it operates as a seeding or leavening agent which brings depth comprehensiveness, rationality, practicality and motivity into a situation by which others are aroused, equipped and directed to action.
The Guilds were local man's effort to get into the decision­making process. They were a revolt against the church which was the secular establishment and the tyrannical social dynamic. And they were occasioned by the religious order which carried the movemental dynamic of religion. They were a disestablishment activity toward changing things for the sake of creating a new future. For us, the guild is the form of the movement in which the leavening force would be the movemental order. It is our answer to the problem of directly engaging the multitudes, of enabling them to live historically, of developing the "force" to budge the snow­bah, of enabling the church to be concrete mission in the world. This has to do with our whole station -- church, society, and movement.
The Guild is invisible (a secret society only when it turned in on itself­solidified -- pride -- prejudice -- defensive) even in its visibility. Usually it is not that it tries to be invisible, it just does not seek visibility. ­This is true for 2 reasons: First, the eschatological. The guild seeketh not its own but others' own and finally the honor of God. It practices humility. It is sacrificial -- giving its life for others. Love, humility, sacrifice. Second, the practical reason. It can best accomplish its task by being invisible, relatively unnoticed, indirection, the spiritual job (which is always indirect). Social change from within is like the Holy Spirit ­ it blows but you can't see it and don't know from whence it came and don't even raise the question of where it is going. The task is reprogramming the mind and hence can't be head­on. They do the changing for the most part. Though at times direction is necessary and at times you must literally go underground. But it is never a secret society.
It is essential that the guild dynamic be grounded in humanness. This means that we must be able to point to this dynamic now going on in our own lives however hidden, broken or fragmented. We must be able to point to it in every culture and to point to it in every age including our own. We must be able to locate it in the very dawning of consciousness that defines our race. What then are we to look for7 Here lies the question. First of all, you are looking for disestablishment not pro and not bans in both its eschatological and historical meaning. But this pro­est is too fine and subtle that it may be very difficult to discern. First of all, it is always exactly in the establishment and never apart from it. Sometimes of course it is more prominent than at other times but it is very deeply within the proest. None the less it is dis­est and if this is not present there is not guild.
The guild is a revolutionary force but a quiet one. (for the most part. So silent that few, and those rarely, discern its revolutionary nature.) The tension with the pro­est principle is constant -- always operating. This is why it doesn't stand out as dis­est. It is deep and to an amazing degree even in its push. (Obviously there are exceptions to this.) Now of course the guild dynamic operates in the dis­est but as it does, the dis­est is to the guild dynamic the pro­dynamic. In brief the guild is informed by the eschatological trans­establishment dynamic. It is the invisible eschatological revolutionary principle ever concretely at work directly in the social process. It is even ahead, out in front walking into the future, tugging on the heavy loaded red wagon of civilization. This indicates, partly at least, what is meant by terming the guild a socio­spiritual dynamic. Now let's try to identify this essentially human going oneness in ourselves, our order, our society at times, and in every culture and age and in the rising of consciousness itself.
The modern guild is related to the medieval guild in its broad historical function but different in its particular role. Or better put it is the same in terms of the religio/moral role bur then shifts because of our present times from the economic to the political emphasis. The classical guild was concerned with all three social dynamics: Cultural (Religion/Moral)/Economic/ Political. Though there were differences among the guilds the stress was E: CP or C:: E: P . Now it would be P: C: E: or C:: P: E . This is obviously the reflection of the foundational imbalance in our time. The inclusive historical function of the guild would require that it specifically would take this firm today and the same is true of its particular role in the rising of the economic dynamicing. The guild dynamic is the direct outreach of the religious force into the social. One could term it the latent, the secular manifestation of the church. It could be termed the frame for social action or the social gospe1.
We need to remember that the guild is a dynamic of the frame for a dynamic. This dynamic has its form in relation to the Universal church and in relation to the social process. In the first the inner dynamic is comprised of awakenment, care, and the guarding of human justice. In the second the dynamic is that of society itself Cul­Pol­Eco arranged by the imbalance form in the moment in history. These two models are related through our categories of direct and indirect tactics -- or the difference between a social actionist and an eschatological spirit. The guild is first a religious and then a social complex and these can't be separated. The religious dynamic is the foundational. Its inner dynamic in specific form is related also to the times. Perhaps the caring dynamic is the prior always and then the times determine whether the emphasis is next on either the awakening or on the justing dynamic. At the moment I believe that the stress has to be on the awakenment. This means evangelism is the prior need. But this must be seen in the most broad sense and as rooted in and directed toward secular humanness. It is awakenment. And it takes priority over guardianship, though both are second to enablement or care. Another way we talk of these is the love of justice, mercy, and salvation.
Though further work on these abstract dynamics must be done especially on their interrelatedness our chief problem is the interior content and practical forms. This involves the question of the "one and the many;" what kind of guilds; the time design; the meeting format; the mode of operation and the like. Perhaps there should be one master parish guild for each ecumenical parish that would meet once a quarter and one paramount parish guild for each polis that would meet annually. In the world there would be 11,664 paramount guilds. From these on up one would be dealing with the network system. Each region would have 36 paramount guilds. Each area 216, each continent 1,196. Now what should the primal guilds which together comprise the parish guild look like. First should they be called parish guilds or should only the master guild be termed such. The how shah they be conceived on the basis of the several "calling" or relative to the delineation of the social dynamics or rather to particular issues or contradictions or should they be devised geographically something like the stake. Since this is the age of the Political should they not all be formed relative to today's human settlement polity. The network of guilds require -- a local research scheme and a local training scheme and a local sustaining scheme. (Local Ch. Experiment) It also requires a 5th City demonstration project and a demonstration of motivity and concern and know­how.
The guild is fundamentally a local social/spiritual construct of human sociality. But it must have a universal dimension and a regional (or areal) dimension in order to effectively operate locally. The local construct I term the guild system. This moves from the parish level up to and through the Metro. From and beyond the metro, that is the regional, areal, continental level of the guild machinery I term the guild network. So our practical concern is with both the local guild system and the global guild network.
The People of God have been, are, and will he, on mission forever. The mission never changes and never ends. It is just mission, mission, mission. That's their journey. They are the people of the Way. And "way" first means their mission journey. They are on the endless way of service. Second, "way" means the way of life of truth, fulfillment. Here alone is the long march, the great march. (It's as if we have been doing a quick march for 50 years in our time to catch up with the great invisible march that has been going on forever. Ever and again we must remind our selves that this final great march is not simply going somewhere to do something (though in the sense that it is going to complete the formation of history, it is this) it is itself the doing. The march itself is the serving of mankind which is the honor of God. The march itself is the creation of history, the forging of the journey of man. of course, the march is also more than or other than the service or better put the service is one dynamic in the threefold dynamic. And of course, it is the crowning dynamic and though invisible the most visible in one sense. (From another perspective it is the most invisible of the three). Let us call this dynamic the service of God
One of the other two is the honor of God. It, the congregation, stands on its own ground as this. Relative to the service dynamic it disciplines and equips for the march. The third dynamic we will call the defense of God. It, the cadre, also stands on its own ground as this. Relative to the service of God dynamic it is the motivating force of the march. On the journey some go and come and some pet lost and some give us and some lose their sight and minds. The dynamic of the historical order keeps it every moving. So there is the motivation and the visioning glories in themselves but the greatest of these is the service of God which is the guild. In a word, there are three things that will last forever; faith, hone and love, but the greatest of them all is love." The endless journey is the journey of love and that is why it is endless. Next episode: The content of love.