SYMBOLIC CENTRUM
FEBRUARY 26. 1971
PASSION IN PEDAGOGY
We want to continue our journey
in our reflections on the resurrection principle this morning. I want to
share a few reflections and get you to share yours as a group. This is
an appropriate time for us to be talking further about the resurrection
principle as we enter the season of Lent and attempt to recover this great
svmbol in the Church year. In just a few moments I want to come back to
the relationship of the resurrection princ~iple to Lent, as we anticipate
in this season of repentance the Easter morning.
I don't know how you find
it possible to check out your insights, but given RSI, I find it necessary
always to grid any insi~ht that comes to me, or any insi~ht that anybody
has about life, against what is. That's what RSI is all about. My
shortcut to finding out if that is the way life is ~ if somebody has
an insight, is to use RSI. I was tickled here recently when some people
in our group started talking about "transcendental meditation"
and other things like that. When I talked to them a bit, they could relate
it to a lot of different philosophies, a lot of different insights in humanness
and so forth. But when we "ridded it across RSI, it was not the
way life is, in comprehensiveness, futuricity, and intentionality. So it
goes with all of us, I suppose, with insights that we have. They may be
romantically attractive, or they might be emotionally enticing. They might
be intellectually stimulating for a few momRnts. But then the shortcut
to finding out if somethin~ is real is RSI.
If we reflect back just a
moment on RSI in relation to the resurrection principle, we discover
that RSI begins not only with God, hut immediately also with the Christ
and the Holy Spirit. You not only are dealin~ with God the Father in the
first part of the course, but all three dimensions of the Trinity are involved
in each part. You soon begin talking about judgment, although you do not
call it that. But Saturday morning, when you begin to talk about the Christ,
you have to talk about the judgment. And the jud~ment is mercy,
that is, life is all about having one's illusions invaded and tromped upon.
And our fathers saw clearly that that judgment was the mercy.
Or in talking about the Christ,
we say that this Word"All is received, all is approved,
all is good, and all is open" is the word of life. We
do not say that it is the word about life. This is one of the problems
I find in teachin~. It's not a word about life that some philosopher or
we want to superimpose on life. It is the Word of life. It is what
life itself says about life, as you discover when you look when you have
the eyes open to look at life. Or we say, "To die is to live."
And again, that is not a word about life . That ia a word that life
tells you. To die is to live. All vou have ~o do to check that out in reality
is look. Is that not what you find happening in rime? The other way to
put that is, "To live is to die." rr you want tv ·ileck
that out, all you have to do is look. For instance, if you want to know
if someho.ly loves you or loves somebody else, all you have to do is 1o>ok.
You do not have to theori/e about it too much. Is not life all about dyinr,
anr1 is not dyin~ in realitv all about life?
In the Holy Spirit section
of RSI we say that freedom is obedience. You do not check that
out with respect to some logical philosophy. You just look where you are
really obedient and find out if that is not where you are really free.
Then, of course, in sentence seven of the third paragraph in Bonhoeffer,
if you want to find out where you are entirely free, the only thing that
sets you free is the absolute obligationfulfilling that absolute
obligation to God and neighbor in Jesus Christ understanding of life.
Now all that is simoly to
say that you are not trying to superimpose something on life. That is our
basic stance. When you come up with the resurrection principle or any other
understanding or insight, it is not that you have ~ot this new insight
that now you are goin~ to go out and superimpose on the world, but rather
that the insight has emerged from the experience of the human race. That
is what I would like to look at this morning in relationship to the cruciform
principle and to the resurrection principle.
But first, I need to add
a bit about this word of life. Our fathers saw that this word of life "descends
into Hell." I mean it descends into the Hell of encrusted illusion,
in which a person does not want life to be the way it is, and where he
keeps on insisting that it not be the way it is, and commands everybody
and everything in his security system to keep it from being the way it
is, if he possibly can. Of course, it is hell because it will not work.
It never has and it never will. You can see that played out in life and
in a million different dramas, poems and stories.
How does this happen day
by day? I am going to be relying greatly in the next few minutes on Rollo
May and on Paul Tillich. Rollo May has said, "People commit suicide
not because they are afraid of life, but because they are afraid of death."
They cannot stand to live always in the situation where standing means
to be under the threat of death. So they commit suicide. He uses the illustration
of the life boatnot the one that some of our colleagues use in
the Freedom Lectureanother one. He says that some people, when
they are in a life boat at sea waiting to be rescued, cannot stand to stay
in the life boat because of the constant strain of wondering, "Shall
we be rescued, or shall we drown? Shall we be rescued, or shall we die?"
He says that in such cases some of them jump overboard and commit suicide
because of that very strange sweat about living in a situation where it
is so obviously true that life is like that. "Will we die or will
we live in the next moment?" He also points out from the testimony
of many heroes that much heroism comes out of that very same thing. On
the battlefield, under the stress and strain of fire, the stress is "Will
I die or will I live?" Sometimes the attempt to save people's lives
comes out of the person's real unwillingness to live in the kind of situation
in which he cannot face the stresses of the present moment over and over
again. I think that that insipht will he helpful In a moment in talkinr
about the resurrection prinxiplw.
But let's look at daytoday
life and ank, as we do with the rent of RSI, where it is that you
see ·death going on in nuch a way that obviously pives new birth.
Most of us are experiencing always what Tillich and many people call "ontological
an~st," the hasic human anxiety that arises out of our consciousness
of our death. Then we transform that into psychological fear. Here goes
your ontological angst beating along at the depths of life, and
the human being, in order to escape this, transposes it into psychological
fear, which can have an object. It can be a real object, something worth
fearing, or it can be an unreal object, something that is not worth fearing.
In either case that process seems to go on in humanness with us all. Here
you are going along with your ontological angst, and you decide, "Well,
I can't stand to face that." But you do not say that to yourself.
One transposes it over into the economic life and says, "Well, I'm
afraid that I won't get enough ~oods, or "the quality of the goods
I want won't be high enough," or something like that. As you know,
the Church's answer to tllat is, "Poverty"' or, "Face the
facts! You're dying right now and you always will be.~, In the political
life, we transpose the basic angst about life into, ''I won't get
the significance, I won't get the status that I ought to have and need"that
kind of psychological fear. The Church has always said you know what to
that. In the cultural dimension it comes out as, "I want to look smart
and stylish, or be the symbol that I need to be, and it doesn't look as
though I'm ever going to make it. It doesn't appear that I'm every going
to get intelligent enough; it doesn't look as if I'm going to get smart
enough or stylish enough, or somehow or another bring my symbolic self
into concretion." These are just daily events that are reminding us
of the everpresent death. In other words, in one manner of speaking,
it is the hoping for the Messiah, instead of being open to the Messiah
that is the NoMessiah Messiahit is closing ourselves off
from life as it actually is.
This is especially true in
the Order at this time of year when many Internships begin to come to a
conclusion, and the decision must be made as to whether this is what I
really want my life to be aboutthis stupid Order. And it is not
because people are dumb that it takes this lon~, to the end of tne year.
It is because the decision to reach concretion has to do with whether or
not you want to give up your life in some outfit like this or not. You
talk with the persons who are engaged in this decision, and you can feel
great empathy. You cannot be of any help. There is no help for a person
there at all. But you can empathize with the complexities that are involved,
when they see that the only thing we have to offer in the Order, if we
have anything at all, is a rather relevant way to die. That is all. Everything
else we have not got. Now, on the other sido of that, you can have a very
interesting life as a part of this Order, a very intriguing life. You can
tell yourself all sorts of tales and experience yqurself in the life style
of Freedom as Don Juan, the actor, or the conquerorall kinds
of images that one can live by. But if you look at the nittygritty
of it, that is all there isjust a very relevant way to die that
is available in this outfit and in the selfconscious Church at all
poin~s in history.
Otto Rank has talked about
this with the symbol of "cutting the umbilical cord," as it has
been used throughout all human existence, or dying to be reborn to a more
meaningful life in constant situations. He talks of the idea of "individuation,"
or how a self comes into existence. First of all, he says, the umbilical
cord is cut physically, and the baby then immediately thinks that it is
a part of the mother's breast. Then the weaning process from the breast
takes place, and that baby has to zive uP the breast in order to be nourished
in a different fashion. Or the child goes on from nursery to school. That
is a dying, if you will, to one self and moving to another. Or one reaches
puberty, and discovers the "notme" in the opposite sex.
These are all dimensions of discovering the notme. At puberty he says
death to the nonsexual being that he has been and becomes a sexual
being. Then there is the possibility of love of someone of the opposite
sex. Immediately, there is the possibility of marriage. Or it is a question
of college, going on and deciding one's life work, going on and deciding
his Profession. At every one of those points there is a dy m g to an old
in order to become that which is new. This is also true with ideas. For
example, when a brand new idea is introduced into your mind, you have to
die to your old ideas. rhis also happens finally at the deathbed, where,
if you have not come to terms with the great mystery of the Notme
of all that is notme until then, you very well come to terms with
the final mvsterv then.
The point of this is that
we repress that consciousness. We repress the images of guilt, of death,
of emptiness; and this results in our floating these days, as we have said,
or in our cooling it. This results in the listlessness, and I suppose,
the conformity of much of American life. It especially comes out of the
desire to go back into bein~ a thing, or go back into being just a part,
as the temptation not to be an individual or not to be individuated takes
place. We do this by imagining that life is about getting more life, or
if we could just have more goods, or if we could just have more status,
or more time, more experience, more whatever. We want to have "fulfillment
of life." But what is happening is that we repress our images of these
dimensions of existence and try thereby to outwit death.
I think of an incident that
was reported on telev£sion during the election campaign by the son
of Govenor Wallace He said the thing that had really struck him in the
campaign was that his father was hit over the head by a flower child, hit
over the head with a sign that said, "God loves everybody." I
think that is not an unfair illustration of the people saying' "Make
love not war." They do not want to face life as it is; they do no~
want to face death. They want to affirm life. But you check into it at
another dimension, and you find out they want to affirm life without ambiguity,
a life without death, a life without the pain and the struggle that humanness
is.
Rollo May's insights are
useful here:
I remarked earlier that the
Chrisrian misuse of hope plays into the American romanticization that we
somehow are deluded into escaping death. I happen myself to be a person
to whom religion means something important, and I also happen to be of
the Christian religion. But I went to a funeral of a dear friend of mine
a couple of months ago, a friend whom I miss greatly in his death, and
I wanted to sit and mourn this friend. Mourning is psychologically exceedingly
creative and a healthy function. If something dies in you, then the only
creative way to face that is the way of grief. Now I wanted to meditate
in this service on how much I loved my friend, how much we all missed him
and the joy and richness that he gave to our lives and to our group. But
the young minister, who is a graduate of the same seminary that Dr. Cole
and I are araduates
PASSION IN PEDAGOGY Page
5
of, preached a sermon on
Christian hope. We do not need to grieve for our friend because
in Christianity we have transcended death. Now I am here to propose to
you tonight that this is a prostitution of the idea of the Christian resurrection,
and that your Christian conviction, or your reli~ious convictions of any
sort, can be meaningful for you not at all if it stops short of the fact
of death, but only as a meaning to life that you can achieve, having faced
directly and courageously, having mourned and experienced grief and moved
through the reality of death.
Now there is in our twentieth
century culture, I think particularly in America, a kind of staleness,
a kind of fedup quality. Nietzsche described this in his nineteenth
century Europe, the last part of the nineteenth century. He called it "The
disease of contemporary man." He said that the disease of contemporary
man is that his soul has gone stale. All about, said Nietzsche, there is
a bad smell, the smell of failure, and I believe that what is going on
here is a failure to have the courage to face the fact of death, and that
that smell is the smell of repressed death. If we do not pay attention
to it, then the staleness and fedupness come as a repression of grief
and mourning and as I would say, as the natural outcome of the inability
to face the reality of life. Now Nietzsche says that the leavening and
diminution of European man is our greatest danger, and I agree with him
one hundred per cent. The leavening economically and the dehumanization
of modern man is our greatest danger. And I think the most vital point
at which this occurs is the point at which we romanticize and avoid the
fact that someday we shall die. We also avoid the individuation, the growth
and the new birth that is possible in each one of these steps throughout
life.
I think this romanticization
is a new form of the American dream, and to me, the most harmful
aspect of the American dream. It is the dream that we shall never die and
then if we do die, somehow our descendants will live in a world of such
progress medically and psychologically that they shall not die. We will
be healthier and healthier. Since, however, we still know we do die, we
repress the fact of death in order that the assumption that life goes on
perpetually may be hung on to. I think this romanticization comes out in
some unexpected ways. One of these ways which I want to cite for you is
in the last book of Erich Fromm. In his book Fromm says there are two kinds
of people. There are those who love death; these he calls necrophiliac
people, and he gives l~itler as an example. And there are those who love
life, and these he calls biophilia, and he gives Schweitzer as an example
of that. Now I am very grieved bv this sheep and goats generation becaise
I think it omits completely that those who truly love life love it by virtue
of confronting death. Of course, Schweitzer has died. Of course, the artists
and others who enrich life for us are precisely those who do it by virtue
of the coura~e to face death. Life takes on its meaning, they tell us in
many different ways, by virtue of the fact that we can face death. Otherwise
there is this dead fed-upness. I think the loving of life for its own sake
is a dehumanization of the human being. We are distinguished as human beings
in the evolutionary line by virtue of the fact that life is not the ultimate
reason for living.
The human being is characterized
by "Give me liberty or give me death," and if he does not have
values that are more important to him than the mere fact of living, then
the human being would become a slave. If the mere fact of perpetuating
life is the ultimate goal, we have the human being who has become dehumanized.
I think the emphasis upon life as the ultimate ~ood is to erase the distinguishing
qualities of the human being that's human. It robs us of the tragic death
in life; it robs us of the meaning of human experience; it goes beyond
the fact of whether or not I shall live tomorrow. "Give me liberty
or give me death" is not a derived concept. It is a decision. All
the way through history, except since the beginning of our industrial age,
men have known that unless they are willing to die for something, their
lives would be empty. The Greeks said this in a hundred different ways.
Primitive people said it in a hundred different ways. I think it has been
said consistently up until the last few decades, that unless one has the
couraP:e to ~ive up his life for some value, then life itself would have
no meaning.
I myself have despised certain
kinds of sentiment in my life because life finally taught me that sentimentality
was not worth my life. When I learned that, the process for killing off
the demonic unsentimentality involved killing that dimension of one's life
which participates in genuine sentiment, derived from the ontological situation,
from reunion, as Tillich would say. Or in this case, as Rollo May
was talking about it, we have had to kill our ability to participate in
grief. I think probably most of our generation in order to live in this
peculiar twentieth century world that we have had on our hands, have had
to shore up other dimensions of our life in order to become callous to
that experience of sentimentality, or indeed we could not have existed
`1uring this strange period. I think the grieving in Love Story,
the empathetic grieving with what is going on on the screen, is the grievinfT
over the fact th~t we ·lid indeed have to 1 become callous or kill
off a dimension of humanness. Ihe movie is a sort of runern] for it. The
audience is not grieving hecause the girl is dying. They are not grieving
hecause the boy and girl are in love aud the boy is having difficulty with
his father-relationship. They are grieving over themselves. Ihey are grieving
over that which they have quite necessarily had to kill in themselves.
And this is probably one of the greatest opportunities to go to the funeral
of that dimension of yourself which you had to kill, that we have had as
a whole nation, a whole culture, in a long long time. I think probably
the last time that such an event took place was the death of John F. Kennedy,
and we were finally able to say "yes" to the explicit death of
John Kennedy, as we all watched the funeral on television.
I want to say a word about
this in respect to a current problem as I see it manifest across the movement
in our pedagogy. It is the problem of passion. Some of my colleagues on
the experimental pedagogy team I am in bear evidence that dimensions of
passion are present in their lives. But now you get some of those characters
up in front of a group of people, and there is not overall passion. I do
not mean there is no passion, but there is not any empathetic involvement
with people. RSI is treated as a body of material. It is being presented
with perfection, but it is not being presented with passion. It is not
manifest that if a person does not get this, his life is going to be living
Hell for the rest of his life, and if he does not get this point he is
going to diehe is going to stay dead, to put it that way.
Now it is not just us on
this team. I have found lately that passion would often not be present
in my own teaching, and I have been trying to analyze why. Why won't passion
return? Finally, I saw that I was waiting for a Messiah. I wanted something
to manipulate me into having passion for these people when I did not care
a bit whether they lived or diedwhen I was so tired of teaching
that I could vomit. That is my experience, and I have been waiting for
some Messiah to come along that would inspire me to have the passion that
I want again for these people.
Finally I had to face the
fact that that is not ever going to happen. I have got to decide to be
passionate. And then there is another block that comes: "Well, wait,
that's not integrity. If I don't feel passion, how shall I go out and pretend
I've got passion?" As if we had not been doing that all alon~! "Shall
I jump over the fence of deciding to be the phony person we said we would
have to be in the Church Lecture of RSI, deciding to be that phony
guy to myself in playing the passionate role?" The strange thing is
that when you make that decision, passion flows into you, or life flows
through you. As the poem says, "we are transmitters of life,"
when you decide to be the passionate person. In advanced PLC's we used
to have to tell ministers whose marriasTes had fallen apart or were no
longer meaningful that you decide to kiss your wife. You kiss her
every morning or you kiss her thirty times a day. Passion does not happen
to you; you decide passion. T do not know where I forgot that, not about
my wife, but about teaching.
Across the movement, we are
obedient people; we have the most obedient people in the world in this
movement. But in our obedience we have to overcome that sense of "disintegrity,"
or whatever you would call it, which comes when a person says, "Well,
shall I deviate From my mater;`il of RSl just this much in order to
be passionately concerned for people?" In other words, "Shall
I demand of myself both the law and the gospel -- not just the law,
but shall I have both of them in my approach to teaching?" Zorba the
Greek's dance comes in here. A colleague was talking about a Greek down
at Diana's Restaurant here in Chicago, how he turned a situation that we
would call matter into nure spirit by just that Greek approach to life.
When they do those things, they are not doing them because they have been
motivated to do them, or because that is their natural tendency. They are
deciding to do that, to be passionately involved with whatever it is.
There is a connection between
the peda~ogical "moment" and the consciousness of death. Again,
I quote from Rollo May:
I am going to talk from now
on quite a bit about consciousness, because I think the real critical issue
in the facing of death lies in the area of the human being's capacity for
selfconsciousness. Your consciousness is what is unigue about you.
You hear these ideas applying in a way that nobody else hears them in this
audience. Your case, if you are honest with yourself, is always different
from anybody else's. Your perception, the way you have of looking at any
given scene, always has its original form. (This is like that quote out
of Kazantzakis, isn't it, where he says, 'You, Adam, you brought a new
rhythm to life, as soon as you appeared on the scene.') Back in the days
when I was an artist, I noticed that when a group of artists were painting
a model, every one of us conceived of it very differently. Now it is a
different model to me from what it was to the person next to me, and it
was not because one of us was a better artist than the other. It made no
sense whatever to say, "We are going to measure this female to see
whether she is the way I am painting her or not." This is all completely
irrelevent. It is rather that human consciousness, by virtue of its being
the consciousness of an individual, always is such that the form of life
which is perceived by that consciousness, is unique. This is the richness,
the preciousness, the greatness and also the terror of each individual
act of consciousness. This is your original feeling, and your values, if
they are worth anything to you, will be values that begin with this original
act of consciousness. This is the stand you take.
This is interesting. For
an act of consciousness, for an act of perception, I posit my body visavis
somethingthe model if I'm painting, a problem of my life, or
whatever it may be. But I posit myself visavis something, in
the world, and it goes on then between me and this something, whether it
be a model, or idea or tragedy or whatnot. What goes on between me
is a unique act of reforming what I see. Something is born out of that
incident that is unique and new and original, and it becomes so by virtue
of the fact that I can stand, I can posit myself, and I take responsibility
for positin~ myself visavis this model, this idea, or this problem.
This is what distinguishes you as a human being, and the fatal question
is in this consciousness of yours, "How do you relate to the fact
of death?" the unique thin~ about the human being which differentiates
him from all the rest of evolution is that we have a word for death. We
can know that we die. We can foresee our death. And as I say, I think a
great deal of the compulsive activity, making money, buyin~ insurance,
living more and more in our day, being compulsive conformists in the squirrelcage
sense, keeps me away from the fact, that regardless of all my life insurance,
that if I were quiet with myself, I would know that someday I shall die.
We know that we will die. We are the creatures who anticipate our own deaths.
And our problem in the last analysis then becomes, will we run away from
death by making a cult of believinr~ in automatic progress? This is, I
think, what we are doin~ mostly in this country. Will we make a cult of
progress? " Some how God will relieve us of this vulgar crisis."
Or will we obscure it by making it impersonal? Will we resort to statistics,
saying that "one" dies, rather than that "I" die, hiding
the fact that the real problem for me or for any man is that at some point
my life will end?
To go back to my general
theme of resurrection, let me say finally that a person experiences the
resurrection that takes place as death gives birth to new life in daybyday
events when he finally faces the totality of death, or when he gives birth
to new life, or when he's a walking, talking dead man, as we say in our
course. There is no blackmail. You control your life. You control your
time, yourself, no matter what the situation. I do not mean that you control
it individualistically. But in corporateness you know that you are the
one who controls your time because you choose to give over your time into
corporatenes, or you would not even be the kind of corporate man that the
movement requires.
It would be interesting to
examine the resurrection man over the immediate man, the circumspect man
and the defiant man of Kierkegaard. When a person dies from his immediate
relations, a kind of resurrection takes place. Resurrection also takes
place when a person dies from hidin~ in circumspection, when he has the
death of the weak self on his hands. That's what Kierke~aard as you know
says that a person has to face. He must allow that self to he destroyed.
That's how he becomes a circumspect mannot wanting his self to
be clestroyed because it's a weak self and he thinks it should be nourished
instead of destroyed. And you could Fo on with the defiant man.
If you look with Rollo May
at the deathwish, it clarifies the wisdom of the church in setting
aside a season of Lent, in which we self-consciously symbolize our death,
allowing the Word to descend into our own most personal hell of
illusion, and see that the jaws of Hell do not prevail against it. In the
vocations conversation in RSI you open up the secret that in
facing death there is resurrection. In that little exercise of putting
your name and the epitaph you would like on your tombstone, a person has
an imaginal experience of the possibility of seein~ what the Christian
faith means by the new life that is born when you embrace your death.
Joseph Pierce