Russ Campbell's song on the solitaries has been a great tool in holding the categories. And then of course, there is the far more important category of holding the participation. If I hum that tune a little bit, something seems to happen to me. This points to what music is, relative to contemplation.

There have to be three things to do the kind of job a chart ought to do. There has to be a key word to hold in your mind as you move, and explodes the universe at the same time. Then there must be two or three words which point to what is happening inside one's self. To illustrate: for me the categories across the top are,. mediator, prior, saint, and colleague. It has to be understood that the word "my" precedes each of them. Above My Mediator, the category for me is "Personal Absolution". I'm talking about the communion of saints, or the interiorization of community. It has always meant to be nothing but your common being in community. Above "Prior" is interior accountability. Meditation is interior accountability. It is personal absolution, not in regard to action, but about 'fellowship', about what does not exist in relations. You are talking about what appears to be living out of your own interior resources; but, of course, that' s a lie. You are living out of the resources of a community that is within you, Your meditation, you and I we never want. I want 'existential guidance ' above "saint." You could also use 'spiritual guidance.' But none of these folk ever tell you that ­­ "E" ='s Mc2; unless the formula has to do with your deepest existential dimension. They may tell you that "E" ='s Mc2, but it has nothing to do with your posture or stance in life.

In the last box, over lay colleague, I have 'missional comradeship'. This has to do with standing in the desert with a task. I'd suggest that the movement across the chart is exactly what the experience of standing as a man of faith is about. There is also nurture. You are not interested in anything but delivering a man to be iron in the front ranks. There is tremendous emotion and sentiment, not sentimentality, but deep sentiment. You know of love here, affectional love, that is almost beyond description. This experience seems as though it ought to be prior, but not the ones of the community who are always there whispering that you "are received" are always the ones who are there to hold you accountable or their understanding and their doing. But we are always there guiding that understanding and that doing. Then and this is almost the most crucial thing, that never have they been there with you, standing on that front line. This is where the discontinuity in this whole thing happens. It is as if they are behind you, but when you get to the lines, it is not you standing there at all, but this host. let's move on, and see if we cannot talk about it further on.

My PRIEST­­ Here is the intrusion of the Word. This is the Jesus experience or the impingement. Maybe you even thought to put it "my Jesus,"

My GURU: the Guru its addressing the particular. He is the one who always deals with the concretion, and always deals with that. The Guru is always privy to your inner being and to mine like no external human being can be.

My FRIEND: I mean you begin to become colleague or to find yourself in a college of Gurus, the dialog is back and forth.

The ETERNAL SAVIOR: I use this symbolic word here. This is where the eschatological hero intrudes, but ad not think for a moment that there is such a thing as an eschatological hero, save he's at the front of the league. You do not have one without the other. In terms of theologizing of the past, the Christ and the Church cannot be separated at all. In terms of accountability, I want to . . .

The INTERIOR ACCOUNTABILITY: my prompter. You have built in prompters.

My JUDGE I'm not sure of this, I've fooled back and forth with it.

My FATHER This is the third one. I used to reverse prompter and father and by father I mean "father image". There are examples of people who are afraid of a Father image, but you and I had better stop being afraid of it. Without it, none of us can exist, ever. The way to handle that? Some of you have spent half your life and wasting all your energies fighting a father image. Every one or us has it. You receive that as a fantastic gift in life. This father damn well tells you what you have to do. If you don't believe it, then keep out of meditations.

The judge is the same kind of thing as the prompter, but it is still an externality. I mean they judge you. Don't you read Luther if you don't want the guts judged out of you. Don't fool around with Thomas if you don't want a judge in your life. You are almost sorry those medieval images are gone. The devil really takes shape. He pushed you quite literally" That's what you are fooling with in this kind of an area.

The HEAVENLY ADVOCATE This is the discontinuity in this column. You remember the punitive theory of the atonement, where the son is both the defense lawyer and the judge himself. That's fantastic imagery. You know that in the courts of the dimension of the spirit being you have witnesses to your character. It is judged not by your character itself, but only by the Word in Jesus Christ itself. The whole hosts of heaven are in that.

My HERO: I think that this is a good way to state it. This is the cultural hero. This is the area of imitation, as you can understand.

My AVATOR: I'll keep this still. Avator means just the Hero with divine qualities. When you use that, it's like you are going to be more objective, but that is not what I am after. You are going to be more concrete. The one becomes the divine hero exactly when the most particular or your life is coughed up and has to be altered, by imitating the hero.

My BROTHER: I think that you and I have to learn afresh of what it means even for us to play that role on that blackboard. You have to allow yourself to become this. There is that moment when the Avator becomes the brother" I can remember when someone who was this to me, gave me permission to call him by his first name. It was like calling God Henry. I've never been the same since. That's only indirectly what I am after.

GUARDIAN ANGEL: Socrates called this one the Daemon. You remember he was a soldier, a bad one, out on watch one night, all alone, out under the stars. His 'angel' or his 'demon', which was always for him his 'good' came and spoke to him. That was his conversion. He became a philosopher after that. The R.C.s in our midst, ought to be scintillated here. Where before they needed to be criticized, because they lost the understanding of what this was before the actualities or life. They would not take it out of another world view. But we can see the power that was there.

My COLLEAGUE: "my elector". The word bothers me, but this is the one who will not let me go. He will not finally allow me to slob into a heap. He has always elected me afresh.

My ANCESTOR: I've decided this word is probably good. I mean the awareness that the job of standing in the past, which the host of witnesses did, is actually my doing. If you and I would die tomorrow, you couldn't even dream of any more being accomplished with everything that Gautama did, everything that Amos did, everything that Socrates did, I did. Their accomplishments are mine. That's what they constantly remind me of. Then ­

My DESCENDENTS: I am doing their doing. Amos is utterly dependent upon me. His word was the worst thing ever done, if Mathews doesn't stand. Every bit of' the Leagues work is dependent upon whether you and I stand. I am not only dependent upon Luther, Luther is dependent upon me. I am his job, but Luther is also my child. One side of this is that I am utterly dependent upon Amos, and he is my Spirit ancestor. But that has ­to be turned around so that he is utterly dependent upon me.

The DIVINE HOSTS: I'm not sure what should go here. This is simply the intensification of the column above. I kind of think that here, reading the League that was the judgement, the court scene, the trial scene in Journey to the East, now you are part of the Heavenly Hosts. To get poetry on that, I was there singing with the angels who announced to the shepherds the birth of the Lord. You have made the whole march with the League from beginning to end. You almost feel psychotic here. I don't want this to get mixed up with a reductionistic understanding of life after death, which was in liberal theology, that you 1ive forever out of your influence. It is not because your good deeds keep going in history. No. But this is eternal life in that I shall always be there in the League, to the end of time. Now, this it seems to me, is what meditation or sociality at the raw edge of the intensified, means.

ENIGMATIC OTHER THAN-NESS ( not­me-ness)

I can simply put in the code word, the 'other'. Then I moved the 'self' over to the last box, and I suspect that is where the experience comes although rationally, you could relate them in terms of space and time.

The PAST: This is archaism. This fearful "never­again-ness". There is not awe, so that kind of word gimmick is better, in the concept or the past. The awe comes in this kind of awareness. Then the future is 'awesome' "not­yet­ness". Again, what you mean by those awkward words, it isn't everybody who grasps what you are trying to point to with the verbal sign "future", as the not­yet­ness. It is only when you experience destiny moving in.

The INTRUSIOIN: You and I know what this means. "When in the midst of life, the other strikes my life." Those of you who, like myself, tend to slip again and again into some kind of personal relations, a No must be said to us. This intrusion means the other is always a "son of a bitch". If he isn't, you haven't got this intrusion. I'm talking not only about people, but about leaves on a tree. Do you remember the training ride through the flat nothing, then a little pond and a big tree out there? I wasn't but sixteen years old. That dead tree was a son of a bitch standing there. That's what I mean by intrusion. I am 57, and that tree, I still cannot get away from it. I've done nothing for 10 years but try to get away from it. You have to have harsh language here. You have to see in this the hound of heaven where you have to get away or be utterly destroyed. But you just get away. One day, maybe some of those who have left our midst will have to come back and make a testimony in this dimension.

The ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Richard Niebuhr liked that word. This word is honor, and you honor that tree was discussing. It has to include "foe or friend".

The OTHER MAN: here you become the "other man," The "all that is not me," as the song goes.

The FATE: Go back and reach Tillich on that. This is the horrifying awareness, After the war, it was the Jewish boys coming back who understood more than the rest of us, what the war had jarred in our heads for what was maybe the first time in our lives. Those people dealt with this, the givenness of my past; then …

The TRANSFORMATION: what this is, when you discover this, is do you have memory? The "what it is" is that only when you discover this do you have a past, do you have a memory. But the moment you discover it, that memory you have but never had, or that past that you always had but never had, is radically transfigured. It is re­created. That is a painful experience. You see, my illustrations are sometimes horribly corny. You remember the one I use sometimes, about my father beating the daylights out of me for not shelling peas as fast as my younger brother. Well the pain of having to appropriate ­­ well!­­ you see those psychologists want you to get rid of these. But a spirit man finds them transformed into the creative moments of his life. Some of you younger squirts still fighting your parents, why don't you understand - fate! Then that mean old bastard who sired you and beat the hell out of you for not shelling peas as fast as your younger brother - or the equivalent thereof ­ that moment becomes the grace of God. It doesn't relieve you from your neuroses. You're not interested in that, but only in the transfiguration of your neuroses.

The CREATIVITY: this is what releases your creativity, this transformation. Only in the midst of that do you become creative. Don't you know I could never have been remotely, a mora1 man if Papa hadn't beat the daylights out of me for that? That's what releases the demand and the capacity to create in every situation for you. Never again would you be caught beating the daylights out of your children for that.

BECOME THE ALL OF HISTORY: I think it's crucial that you see that it is not Adam and all of history. Don't you see that that's saying the same thing? It means the Adam in all history.

The FUTURE: ' the cut­off­ness'­­ All I can come up with here is that term. You do not know you have a future until your future is cut off.. For instance, a mother's baby dies. She thinks that the sorrow is that the baby is dead. But no, it's because the future is cut off. Her plans and dreams are cut off. She never had a future until her future was cut off. Sometimes you and I say that if we were God, we would not have brought tragedy into this world. But you take this kind of tragedy if you take it out or the world, you romantic ones, and me, the leader of all romantics ­­ I don't like to suffer, because I'm a constitutional coward.

The POSSIBILITY: there has to be a little better rubric here, but this means you have to live within the rubric or change. You live open to the future, which means you live open to the rubric of change, or within it.

The CHANGE: my reality is change itself.

ALL THAT'S YET TO BE: only here do you begin to see the fantastic wonder. It has nothing to do with God accepting you. It's just the stark naked wonder of yourself. You have to keep the word Mystery up there. The wonder of yourself.

The DREADFULL­IN­MYSELF­NESS, the thereness of Myself. the UNIQUENESS.

THE PASSION

BECOME BEING IN MYSELF: I just wonder if we get the full impact in that? Lo and behold I am being in myself. Then you can almost understand how that if you ever dare to have one self­depreciating thought about yourself, you have no right to live, But you would be such a slob as to not be filled with wonder at being in myse1f. I wish a psychiatrist friend of mine were here

I was thinking overnight and I think it needs to be called to our attention that one needs gimmicks when working in this area to hold yourself in check and that means you keep this universal, objective, you keep it out of your own being and yet you cannot do your being. And it's these and 9 x 13 and on and on and on till you have 13 of these abstract categories, it's this that keeps your analysis from being personal while it's got to be reelingly personal, keeping abstract in the sense of human, and don't forget that that's why you've got to have so many of these, and these as you move, these master categories, they will remain relatively mixed.

Now­­ the PRAYERS.

Those are all Confession, Gratitude, Petition, Intercession, with which we are all familiar. You see how the dynamic runs in all four directions.

The CONFESSION:­ I use here perpetual repentance. Those of you who know Luther know that this was one of his crucial categories. The man of the Spirit lives in perpetual repentance.

The GRATITUDE: I want to call this situational affirmation. You can find a better term than that.

The PETITION: I would use the term "unlimited inadequacy". You remember that category is used elsewhere in the chart, Obviously, here, you are going to be dealing with the intensification or everything else.

The INTERCESSION: I would use "universal responsibility" here. This is the experience we struggle after

The ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Remember this is always the general. I want a different word than acknowledgment because we have used it elsewhere. Here, on this level, just for the purposes of a thoroughly consistent model, that these be 144 different words, you understand. It has to be that way if you are going to brainwash yourself and anybody else who touches it. Now this category has to do with human illusion, If the idea 'intrudes' you will see that you are sinful. That's the way it always was, the way it always will be, and nothing can ever be done about it" From that moment on, you are never the same human being.

The PARTICULARISATION: this also needs a better word. I want to put personal violation here. I don't need to rehearse stories of where this awareness or human illusion gets concrete,

The BESETTINGNESS: This basically has to do with our neuroses. The way we would talk about it today is that we have just built into ourselves the posture of defiance. Or, maybe it means a posture of just walking with great boots over anybody who gets in our way, for some. Or it has to do with the posture of living your life pulled back from the table, This is all highly personal. The reason you have this prayer is not merely to get rid of this. It is that you have to embrace it as a gift. Then you'll discover that you got rid of it, but, of course you did not get rid ot it. The problem of besetting sins is not getting rid of them. It is coming to terms with the fact that I am this crudy person.

The HEAVENLY SORROW: these are the tears over the sins of the whole world which you now pick up. Your life is tragic from then on. It's filled with sorrow. It's the way of sorrow. You think of those people who say "why aren't you happy?" How are you supposed to answer that sort of crap.

The EMBRACEMENT: this means obviously, that once you have come to terms with your illusion, you live your situation. You embrace that as good. This is "all that is is good"

The SPLENDID VICES: what I'm pointing to here, really, is the cultural goods. Augustine was much better when he called them "splendid vices " It's like we have peace with the world, Well, for us bourgeoisie, who are sitting on top this is a great good, Yet you embrace these. Our country is a great country ­ sure it is. You thank God for that. I mean you embrace the glory of your own country in the midst of all its splendor and perversion.

COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS: this is just "count your blessings, count them one by one." You be thankful. You be grateful that today you have health. You are grateful today in the midst of what you know.

The UNSPEAKABLE JOY: this is the joy where there is no joy. You embrace the whole world in this prayer.

The PETITION: this is the awareness of the utter helplessness of mankind, as a whole. Petitionary prayer has been hard for us, for we live in a time where you have to create the future" The one thing that a man who is going to create the future knows above all else, is that he's not going to create any future. If you don't know that about yourself, you are in a dream. But you had better create the future. This is the helplessness, or the utter dependence of man.

The IDENTIFICATION: again, this identification with the culture, the particular. Again I have to say that this man who prays for the Pentecostals in South America, who is not utterly identified with all of their horrors and helplessness, does not know what his prayer is all about.

The SUCCOUR: this is just for my own particular needs. How do you pray for help at the point of inertia? When you pray here, you never start out by saying "this is a nasty old thing in me." No! It's, Lord, I need your help, in the midst of this situation. This is concrete, in the midst of your personal existence. When one is mean to his or her mate, you know what you have to pray for. At this level, its likely to get you down on your knees.

The LEVITATION: levitation is helplessness Sometimes maybe, we are inclined to think that Jesus had his own generator in himself. Oh, no. But remember, his last prayer was something like, "O Lord, "how in the hell am I going to get out of this? The only reason why one of us has not yet levitated is that there has not yet been that kind of desperateness that breeds the humility that is able to confess that desperateness. Boy! on the day when one does levitate, we won't be interested in that, we'll have our minds focused on the kind of trappedness he got into, and wondered what was what. He'll maybe think he's smart, floating around the room, but we won't be interested in that.

The PRAYER OF OBLIGATION: we used to call this "attentional prayer" No words seem strong enough to get at this. It is just the awareness that every problem in the world is yours. Schweitzer's romanticism when he went back to Africa because of what white man had done to the Blackman, this is the beginning of it all. This horrible America we live in, is still mouthing "we've got to start at home". But this doesn't work when you are acknowledging utter responsibility.

The INSPIRATIONAL PRAYERS: these are the particular prayers, This is what I mean, for myself, when I ask where does the Holy Spirit lead you to pray this day? I always weave back and forth here. God, in the NT, says he gives certain people the gift of prayer. I'm sure of this, and I have a couple in mindin our group, whom I really think have the gift of prayer. It's taken a long time to believe this, because of the oral diarrhea sometimes manifested. Anyway, God seems to put something into your heart, something on your heart.

The PRAYER OF AGONY: I sometimes call this also, the modalistic prayer. This is where you tell the Lord how it's going to be. This is where you get out your four point program.

The PROMISORIAL PRAYER: We've been over this. It is utter care, utter death, utter nothing, utter vocation. Here is where you lay down your life. This is where you face utter non­being. This is your utter vocation .which becomes utter love and utter care. Jesus says: here you lay down your life.

We cannot go over the formal and the phenomenological too often. Let's begin with the formal category. It would seem to me that the way you arrive at those is through the rational structures that have come to you from the past. This is going to come even clearer when we come to the corporates and see that in the area of detachment, or the economic aspect on life, that you are dealing with possessions and with work and with distribution or relationships. Now our society is such that you cannot read a book on ethics in this area, that does not deal with property, and I suspect from the very dawn or history, and even Marx wou1d underline this because history did not exist until there was private property. That was also the great sin, but that was it. Then with work, and then how in the hell do you distribute the goods. So with all of these. Some of these are much more difficult, but they are difficult because you and I are fairly highly educated through our educational systems in the area of economics. But this area of life has, for one hundred years, been left out of our education entirely. As a matter of fact, we can bear witness to that it's only been within the last year that we'd be willing to be caught reading Theresa. And isn't that part of the wisdom of humanity? You bet it is. Because of the educational system, most of us are unlearned in philosophy. We see it as abstract, rather than this. Now, the key -- well I would want to insist that any kind of communal experience in terms or just raw data in sociality has to do with nurturing one another, with accounting to and for one another, and with mutual imitation. You just think of your little babies. All they do is imitate. It has to do with mission.

Something is happening to me here. To see a 40­yr old person still fighting with his father and expending this fantastic God­given energy. That's a misplaced arena of struggle. To think that you let al1 that tremendous wonder you are go down the drain in some silly hostility, all of which is a great gift, rather than a mean old demon. Your Poppa had better be a gift to you, because he's always going to be your Poppa, and you see, that was built into history

And so, if this isn't the way a man has always experienced his awe, as man has brought his wisdom to try and analyze this, then we're wrong. So that the formal categories are almost like stored up self­hood and these categories are stored up phenomenological experience. By sharing in this, I am sharing in the lives of billions of people, To go back and study Plato or Aristotle now, or these so-called rationalists would be fantastic.

Now, you know how the great evolutionary theory was, that each individual reproduces the history of the race. They even analyzed pre­birth in pregnancy with the idea that we are going through the history of the race there. Well, in one way you see, here is our own personal experience in the stored up wisdom. Both of these are just utterly necessary. This is the journey whereby you participate in the history of the human race. I follow Kierkegaard. There is the intrusion of the idea of the vision of an image. You know, Spinoza is the one who said that a man was altered by the change of delight-filling concepts. This is not sentimental. If you change a man's attachments to an idea, then you have altered his universe. That's something like Kierkegaard was trying to get a hold of. Then this has to be concretized. If you go back to the sickness unto death, you find a fantastic pattern. He always deals first with the abstract. He analyses the abstract, and then, he gets it down to the "going­on­ness to the toilet dimensions or life". That's his method. He concretizes it.

Then I think comes the volitional part, which is the final interiorization, always the submission, to the idea in the concretion or your existence.

And then the "ecstasy". Or to put it another way, this is your Christ lecture, the dynamics of the Christ happening. It is the particularization which is the scandal about which you have to make a decision. And then comes death. Then comes the wonder of the resurrected life.

You can see that here we are working in the area of the solitaries. But the crucial thing, I think for us to remember, though I don't know how to diagram it, is that there is an inconsistency or unclarity in myself. If you put your fist through the corporates, you find only the solitaries. If you put your fist through the solitary you find only the corporates. They would both come back at you through the journeys.

I mentioned yesterday that these categories can in no way be anyone's individuality. The next step down, or even the step after, that you begin to hit the uniqueness. This does not mean that you and I do not make collegial mistakes. But anything in these boxes has nothing to do with the individual. But you avoid making mistakes with the master categories. Then there are 48 that are sub to those and so on. The interaction of these every moment keep you honest, in terms of objectivity. They keep you interpreting the times, rather than your own gizzard, it keeps you being objective rather than cute. " Cute " is always the reduction to the individual level. I think its crucial we do not lose sight of this. This is why finally, this has to be out entirely before you, or you are a lost soul.

Another thing you have to bear in mind is that as far as the group goes, we have been at this for at least twelve years. The second thing, and we should have had more of this, which is a problem, we should have had more direct and indirect workshops as we have already. Sometimes I would almost like to put up the 40­50 charts that have come from various people. Its just amazing the data we have. Each one is itself like a book.

Now, one of the problems, when you take terms like poverty, obedience, and chastity, is always that you have to see there are three levels in those terms you are trying to deal with all at once. The first level is pointing to raw humanness, or the rationality, or the capacity for man to perpetually abstract in the midst of engagement, which I call transcendence. Those of you who know Reinhold Niebuhr pretty well know that he never gave up that word. He simply spiritualised the term and his analysis of sin in the Gifford lectures this word is simply crucial. His whole theology is built upon it. You never heard him preach when he didn't use it. The capacity of the self to transcend the self. That's the way I'm using this word. The second thing you mean by these words, and also those over there, and the one's that will be on this board again, is intentionality brought into this human capacity. This is crucial. Actually, I do not find it possible to use a symbolic word like chastity, until the spirit dimension is injected into it. And the spirit dimension is only injected when rational intentionality is brought to bear. This is intentionality about intentionality. That's why chastity is the white horse of this particular construct. The third level is the consciousness of consciousness. I am sure Kierkegaard is turning over in his grave. There is consciousness about consciousness but this isn't consciousness, this is the rehearsal of consciousness. This is the symbolic. Chastity is also an exercise. It is the symbolic dimension which does not exist. The exercise of chastity which is joining an order is nothing. It does not exist, like an Order does not exist. So you have this as the exercise. Now this is true of the categories we are going to have up here of the solitaries, exactly, and of all the rest of these categories. Then. of course, you have to say that the only thing that does exist is ( this ).

You see, in our day we have come to grasp, in a way that is still astounding, after many years, whatever else you were indicating by the verbal sign GOD, you were indicating nothing-ed­ness.

Now there is no doubt that the piety, in the broadest sense of the word, at any time in history, always flows out of the old and the new testament's understanding that a man must be what he cannot avoid being, like his God. "As I am Holy," you have to be holy; and as a matter of fact, the most important meaning of that word Holy is "nothingness" or " set­aside­ness" or " utterly different­ness", is what the word really means. In our day, we came upon the divine as the nothingness. This is the way we got our grasp on the un­synonymous. Throughout all of this, to be like God is to be like nothing. You haven't the slightest understanding of what piety is until you see that there is just one job in all of these, which is that you and I become nothing. Then comes the wonder that both old and new testaments understood, that precisely when one dares to become nothing, he is everything. That, in our day, must be learned all over again, and that is what piety is all about. Or if you wish, you can make this term of the nothing­ed­ness, you can talk of the un­synonymous, or the discontinuous, and that is all that is here on this board.

The POVERTY: this is disengagement. Poverty has no meaning whatever. It is a symbolic word. As obedience is engagement, poverty is disengagement. This is what human existence is, as over against what we symbolically call animality. Now those of you who know Bultmann really well, smell him here, or at least you ought to. In a way, his theology is just up here on this board, concretized to the white hot center or practicality. It is the un-attached attachment. It is the detached attachment. It is amazing the way he took phrases; its amazing the way he shoved Paul. We are those who rejoice as though we do not rejoice, we weep as those who do not weep, are married as though we were not married, who possess all as if we possesses nothing.

The GOODS: this is "in but not of the world. It is not a compromising "but", it is a paradoxical "but". The explanatory phrases for these categories I have is, sustaining possessions, with Goods. The exciting thing here is that if you give away everything you have but the G­string, you still have the G­string. You try to strip yourself of possessions, and there is something left. For me, this is the utter inter­action of man and nature.

Then creative contribution goes with works. This is why this word "work" is so crucial in our day, when a fantastic transfigurement is taking place in it, it has to be recovered here at the bottom. You see, when a man was cast out of the Garden the curse on the woman was childbirth, but the curse on man was work. If our story of: getting thrown out of the Garden of History is like Marx's story when he spoke of the time when tools were invented, his invention of property or tools, then history began when they were thrown out. And if you use Marx to clarify your own mythology, then history will continue until there is no more work. Oh! the Bible is tremendous on this. In Hebrews so to speak, the basic category is rest. You can use this several ways. One is your two story universe which you have to use to carve at people but after you carve at people with this, then you go back and capture the fantastic dimension of it. Rest from your labours ­­ to be in history is to work.

The RELATIONS: I've got this word "relational distribution." It means intentional distribution.

The OFFERING: I want to call this spiritual denial.

The first category here is peace, or it could be "order" although I'm going to use order above. Then Equity, and then Charity, and I'm getting so I couldn't use that word, for I can only grasp it as benevolence, which is what the middle ages did to it. I can use it otherwise.

The PEACE:. This points to what I have to call enabling order, I want us to grasp that the movement of humanness is from left to right. You can put this very crudely by saying that no man ever worked, save to lay hold of the sustaining possessions. Even the food you eat is a possession. You possess it, you do something to it.

The EQUITY: there is a movement here. Anyone who does not see that the Order is the primary manifestation of engagement, does not know what its means to be human This, we revolutionaries have to hear over and over again. The next is human justice. Unless you have this, equity is not even an issue, not even an experience or humanness

The CHARITY: Here I have social concern. At one time this was a powerful term, but every ass now grasps himself as socially concerned.

The SERVICE: this is spiritual care, spiritual denial of the self, spiritual care of others. You could put love. I want to insist that we never forget that Calvin said: "The Christian life was but two things: the denial of the self and the love of the neighbor."

The whole area is the most difficult one for me. I have had to do with Images, Symbols, Style. Then at the last, I want to put Spiritual Devotion.

The IMAGES: for me this has to do with radical identification. Images are related to knowing, or the scientific revolution, if that will jar your mind.

The STYLE: has to do with human settlement, or the Urban revolution.

The SYMBOLS: this has to do with the religious revolution. This is an utterly secular kind of thing. That sign on the door used to say "Ladies and Gentlemen", as yesterday we had to be concerned with Style; now we have to become religious.

The STYLE: this one is essence invention. And this, those of you who are familiar with Sartre, or Jaspers, or Heidegger. Sartre probably made it the clearest, that man invents his own essence. Whatever else you mean by Style, you mean that. Some days you'd like to have men like that around. I do not know whether I was naive in the past, or they were, I suppose I was, for this in spite of the fact that I understand existentialism in the sense that it is not an abstract rational movement or a relationship of ideas, I do not think I really grasped that this invention of essence was not fundamentally grasped under the rubric of knowing. I want to accuse those men who pioneered the ...

The Spiritual devotion: the last one here is spiritual creativity. That's pointing right. That seems to me to be what devotion actually is. Now I always mean for this to be just one picture of the experience of humanness. Then, when you pull it out into this kind of abstract analysis, I mean it to be one dramatic movement, to be present in each one of these categories. In all of this, the break between the sub­categories and the discontinuities, this is more dramatic than the breaks in contemplation, meditation and prayer.

The GOODS: Unmitigated Death. I think this whole thing begins when ones sees as if it is now present, and here, use your dear friend Theresa on the kind of raptures with which you go and peek into the future This is what Thomas Acquinas means in the preview of Rapture in the Blessed Estate finally. This is where you see that you die, and that you die good" You cannot over-dramatize this. Somebody said to Barth, when he said "you have to die' - "Wel1, you do not mean physical dying really?", and Barth replied, " is there another kind?'' It is as though you remember­­­ " when I saw just faces, blown up without single features, nose, eyes, mouth, and the worms crawling in the holes... that's what I mean­that you see the beginning of disengagement. How could you ever again be concerned with storing up goods. Yet I talk as if I'd known this for years. When our carriage house burned, we lost all of our furniture, and that was the gift of God, too!

The STEWARDSHIP: my Methodist background kills me here. This is the first move to stewardship, or if you like this is the first move to tithing. But not in a moralistic but genuine sense. Tithing is the symbol you are trying to get loose in you, which affirms you do not own anything. In the midst of the moralism we are to understand that we own nothing here; we are simply God's stewards.

The DIVINE NOTHINGNESS: this is a kind of external; but which concretizes the fundamental insight. This is adding volitional power to it.

The WEALTH UNTOLD: this is the next one in the movement down the page. I am redeemed, but not with silver. I am bought, but not with gold. I am bought, but with a price, the blood of Jesus, gracious price of wealth untold. That sounds sentimental. You own the universe. You become the Lord of All, the king of the Kingdom. It all belongs to you, This pseudo­pluralism today burns me. It is threatening to you. to realize that you own the earth, and not the white part of it, not the American part of it, and so, wherever any man is the earth belongs to him.

The BEYOND SUCCESS : you have to see that to succeed, you are whipped before you start. No man ever succeeded, and when you say that the problem of the Urban tale is that everyone knows that he is a failure, you see that is the gift of God if we have some way to get the Word into that. That is the gift of God. You see, the man is way beyond the woman in the household except he isn't, because I do not know how to get the Word across to him; but maybe! There are times that all we are doing here is building a model for suburbia. The re­programming mode1 of suburban persons, is that the only way you can address him is under the rubric of being, which all of this is obviously.

The HISTORICAL VOCATION: this means that any work you do is only for the sake of history, no matter if you are scrubbing floors, or whatever, it is all done for the sake of history and that is extremely difficult.

The SOCIAL FAILURE: what I mean by this is that you pour your life into the drain of history itself. This is dying for others, which means you are a social failure.

The REALISED VOCATION; this is the exaltation, the going to heaven, and why my Poppa was a vocational failure, and I mean that. That is why he probably did not like me as much as some of his other children, He sensed I was going to be one too, and he couldn't face that. The trouble was that Poppa was not a social failure in this sense. He was never able to get intentionality into it, but he tried. When he died, you had to pronounce the Word into the midst of that to transform it.

The MISPLACED SECURITY: this is your hanging on, your refusal to be objective, rational about the relationships here. In saying misplaced security, you understand that your understanding of security has collapsed.

The SERIOUS SHARING

The ABOUNDING ABASEMENT: I have trouble herewith these two …

The COMMON EARTH: this is the last one This is the All for All.

The HUMAN CONTINGENCY: here it is that man is a colossal joke. Now-a-days I like for people to mishear the word 'humanness' so that they may hear humanism and then they raise that question and I like to make my little speech that "no humanness" is the awareness that all "isms" of any type: ­­ humanism, Methodism, Americanism, have become a great big joke. And then I like to quote the preacher that when a man dies you take him and bury him like you do a cow. It's a long time since man had that insight; that being human is a colossal joke and no one knows what it means to honor God until that is seen, that is, the radical contingency of life. You are not finally disengaged until you see that as a joke. We are the victims of the most colossal joke that ever was played on anything, and when you see that, only then, can glorious seriousness take place, and out of that comes:

The INTENTIONAL NEGATION OF THE SELF : never again do you ever have to be out thinking of yourself as something tremendous, like very frequently I think I am when giving a lecture people are sobered by.

The SPIRITUAL POVERTY: this is where the poor in spirit get into this. The devils back on you, when you decide and say you have decided to be nothing and take pride in that statement.

The DEFENDER OF THE DEEPS: and by that I mean this is the human being that - - well I was reading an article about Merton who was electrocuted over in the East in which they were pulling this business, spiritual business, you know, this made me sick to hear it, and yet, No, if you see behind that term that we are too materialistic, that we have got to become spiritual is the scream of our day for disengagement,

Well, when what you have done is de­mythologized the statement and got behind the glory of it. We are the defenders of the dis­engagement principle, without which no human being can be. We are the dragons who protect the cavern of the spirit in history and all of that for me has to get into that category and you'd like to talk and talk, until one is utterly disembodied at this point and its there that you get this disembodiment and shove it here but until this happens engagement is an utter impossibi1ity. I just screamed about "you get involved." Well, you were not talking about this, you are not talking about one more slob going out and getting busy no, engagement is that which only takes place on the other side of this .. and the young squirts, if I may as an old man take a crack at my younger colleagues, and not all of them by a long sight, the young squirts who think of engagement as involvement, and just going out and acting, are manifestations of mere do­good­ism. Now, I want to say, the younger generation, the emerging generation today have seen this and are thumbing their noses at their wealthy parents. I would like to say to them personally, I'd like to see what you are doing ten years from now. If you are sitting in poppa's business …." Now, disengagement is complex.

The MISSIONAL ENGAGEMENT: this is the awareness of the final, that to live, you are involved. No man was ever un-involved and what you bring is intentionality; And that under the dimension of the covenant you can see that. If you want you could talk about that link in terms of the order, of what the order does first, our order, or any order: what the order does first of all it makes you aware of this, and that is killing and you fee1 you could escape if you leave the order. Becoming part of an order, you become aware of this you cannot face it, therefore you feel if you leave the order this will go away. This is why I say others have got to come back and testify. One day you will find anyone who has to leave here is doomed, until he comes back he has no life whatsoever, but he doesn't have to come back and its because of this.

The SUBMISSIVE OBEDIEINCE: and this is the arms length treatment, that nobody has a chance to be a part of this order until they are utterly submissive. You are not talking about this group. that's the way life is. Nobody ever helped any situation or was authentically part of it until at first they were utterly submissive. I suggest that Luther is a good man for you to read here, but he's not the only one, and only out of this can come radical incarnation. That is, I become my body and all of this is just sheer order ­ sheer orderness of orderness. Intentional engagement, that is the beginning of any marriage, and this is where the fights are, well: its I've married this son of a bitch and I am not going to submit to him. Well, you know this is your problem, but until you do submit to her, or you to him, and I do not mean this is going to be without (do you know what it means to talk about..) spiritual suffering. I've got things in me, that I still haven't got on top of, and I go around having it pretty well concealed, but I mean it's there, and the trouble is, when you won't …..

­ all God requires of you is you suffer spiritually. He doesn't mean you to get on top of that, he means you are in it, and you mustn't let a second out of the twenty-four deliver you, and if you haven't learned that, then if I may speak mythologically, then he brings one more external problem in your marriage, and if you think its hate, its not. Its love, God's love. God, it feels like hate.

Here is your problem, but to the degree it happens, thank God you own your marriage" There is not any one in this room who has not submitted his life to the order who does not own the order. I mean, own it. YOU are IT; and then the discontinuity ­

The UNIVERSAL PRIOR ­ I almost want to say that if there is any community that you have gone through, this in you then, you are just the ruler or every community and if you have not, any God, but this is to say what peace is, there's never been any order, there's never been any peace, except through that experience of humanness, and you see then that most folk in the world are leeches upon the backs of the few who have experienced the deeps. And only then, after this, is the equity,

The EQUITY: if you have not seriously engaged in this any of your talking about concern for justice for other people is one pile of hog­wash. That doesn't mean you cannot use your un­authentic posture. Maybe in our day this area is the most crucial, maybe, and I have to start here with individual rights. The awareness, only here in engagement to beyond the awareness, It's the dimension of covenant or volitional intention in the midst of this. Only as you become genuinely concerned with individual rights when this has happened, or I even like to put it this way ­­ When you have become the universal prior then you are concerned with every last individual, and this then turns into what I want to call corporate duty.

The CORPORATE DUTY : whenever someone is talking about my rights they have just barely got their right toe in the water, when you get up to your ankle you talk about my duties relative to other rights. I want to put it Duty, that is, you become submissive to others rights. you place yourself in the role of always standing for the rights of the not­me, or the other. And this means, within the group, loyal opposition. I so like that word. If Britain had existed for no other reason than to bring that term into history in a great corporate sense they would have been worthwhile. The loyal opposition, and you can see save that happens if you ate fooling with the rights, your rights, within a group here and cause trouble ­ why, you haven't even begun to learn what engagement is. Loyal opposition always stands before the body or before creation itself. finally before God on behalf of the not­me; there's your key to loyal opposition. Oh for years, Moses has just reeled me, you know he came down­and there were those bastards and burning the calf and God said, "I'l1 wipe them out," and Moses was so damned angry himself, he smashed those plates, and then when the Lord said I'm mad too, he turned. "Look here now, you can block me out, but don't you dare lay a finger on them." That's loyal opposition. You know that if Moses had been here today he would have been marching in Selma.

The PASSIONATE CONCERN: and this goes here. I think the medieval fathers were right, only we misunderstood them and in a way, rightly so, they ought to have been misunderstood, they built this architectonically, they were clear about this ­ that love was only on top of justice! We got anxious because we knew that love was pointing to something else too, but in terms of the way they were after it, in terms of my language, it is through justice. This is Why I have decided never again to mention sensitivity training. This is the trouble with those who want to face encounters they went to get around this business of justice. Well, you never love nothing or nobody. I say again­to be just is to be marching in Selma, and just being nice to your wife and your children and your family, As a matter of fact, being nice to your wife and kind to your children in our day has become radical immorality. Remember the article which said that the reason why children today did not respect adults was for this reason. Old Momma Sims can love that little one until the love runs out of his ears, but she's not made a man, until Momma Sims with her total being furnishes the imagination of that child with her own example of being a women who is engaged in justice. Some time you people of Imaginal Education are going to have to write the new psychology for rearing children.

The PERSONAL OBLIGATION: this is equivalent to where in other places you keep your own conscience. But the suffering of every child in the world becomes your obligation; this is what engagement is, this is what corporateness is, this is what becoming part of an historical order is, for the last is a symbol of all this I suppose, and this turns into --­

The DISINTERESTED COLLEGIALITY: I wish I knew more about what I mean by that. But in principle, from that moment on, you are nothing, more than a colleague first, and God help us, this is horrid isn't it? When you are in charge of the print shop and you want ever so much to get done and you fee1 I've got to be in charge of when you are in charge of a division or a college, well, you know. Be in charge here, and when you are the symbolic head of something; Oh, I've got to be in charge here: NO, God help us, anyway, then ­ ­ then no longer are you in charge of nothing, and then you are not in charge of anything that has to do with any man in the world. Everyone is your colleague.

The SACRIFICIAL FRIENDSHIP: What I mean here is the shepherd; it's the ninety and nine; that you are the shepherd of all history; and this is part of what I mean when I say that women who suffered and nobody ever knew that she existed, who suffered a thousand years ago. I am responsible to see that that woman gets to heaven. That's what I mean. You see there must not be a single soul who does not get to heaven. He descended into hell, ha, ha, to take care of those who didn't get a chance, who lived and died as slobs. You know the story about the man who had feet that hurt. Well they hurt terribly; they were always in pain. Then one day he got a pain in the stomach. And so he went to the doctor, and the doctor while examining him, discovered this terrible, inhuman pain, and he says, "how can you stand that" and he said. "I just thought everybody's feet hurt like that." There's a great number of people in history who are slobs and never knew that life was ever anything different.

The SERVICE. if I was to try and get flesh and blood on to ethical existence, I would want to do it through Kierkegaard, and try the second immediacy into the shift from the aesthetic into the ethical man, and then this one, I'm not too sure.

The GLOBAL BROTHERHOOD

The ETENAL IDENTIFICATION

The COMMUNION OF SAINTS. I sometimes thought the NT uses categories of the powers of heaven and earth, and here I would put the historical guardian or the guardian of man.

The SELF PROGRAMMING. "I say so," you've got to be very careful here, for one of the ways in a sophisticated group that a person hides from life is to make a fuss about 'I say so.' If anyone makes a fuss about 'I say so' then they are not "I say so­ers." If it is important for you to get your thing in, then you are not, 'I say so.'

The COMMITTED TEACHER: take seriously what he sees; therefore he has to propagate it. Nobody can help being a witness to their own authenticity, but their own authenticity to the degree that it is their own authenticity does not belong to them, it belongs to humanness. This is why evangelism always was, and is, and shall be: even the demons are evangelists. That is, you have no choice but to be a pedagogue or teacher.

The TRANSCENDENT GURU: and you can see this moves into the wherever you are and you are sharing the wisdom of a concern for them.

The ETENAL CHRIST

The RAW REALITY and I do not know how to say that except this ­ ­ you see when the only reality is symbol, and that you never again. There are a million ways to say this the way he put that chart on the board is more important than what's there. If he had crooked lines, unless you were trying to give the impression of the whirlpool or chaos.

The SYMBOL MAKER: you have to be careful here. This is where cuteness comes in. I don't know what, but this is the man who knows that nothing was ever done without symbols, and symbols are not only given, they are created. Now if you are playing cute games, you are not even in this league. You are way back over there somewhere. You assume responsibilities for making decisions and you understand only that you make them with your life.

The TRANSPARENT EXISTENCE: this means we talk more about my acting over here; it's where you decide you are a symbol; and the pain of that; it is interior pain: if you have been sleeping well, this will interrupt it.

The TRANSFIGURED JESUS.

The STYLE HERE IS SELF­DETERMINED: this is where external discipline is radically internalized. This does not mean that any of us can get along without external discipline. It is not fragmented, or if you take what Dale Griffee pointed out, that in every one of these you really have the polarity. The more deeply you think of these the more sinful you grasp yourself to be the error is to bear the burden, with the increased sense of sin, and you know how Teresa shoved at that hard.

The REVOLUTIONARY SIGN. of where you intentionally turn that self­determination into a sign of the future, and you in whose life, your whole life, now becomes the human example, and this is " follow me as I follow Jesus".

The HISTORTICAL JESUS: and I'm having a bit of a hard time, but this in not what for me is the historical Jesus, it is in the midst of this that you get to know your eschatological hero. All we know about him is that he was a character with a smile, How after you say that our scientific processes, though we have no direct empirical data, you can work backwards and begin to get a feel after his style ­ like he liked his Momma, but he wasn't damn well attached to his family. He had a profession but he wasn't damn well attached to his profession, and in everything about him he rocked the fine bourgeois around him. He just rocked.

ALL THE DECISION MAKING PROCESSES ARE FOR ALL THE PEOPLE: all the inventions of all humanness are for all the people, and in Jesus life, my God, that's just what it was.

The DIVINE CAPTIVE: you sang the song the other day that I like so, so much: "make me a captive Lord." And this obviously is sentence 7 of Bonhoeffer's 3rd paragraph. This is the obedience and the only obedience that makes one radically, radically free.

The ETENAL FRIENDS: it points to one aspect of this under mission, which ever it is, here. Where you march with Abraham and with the host and with Jesus.

The SECONDARY INTEGRITY: This is what Paul means when he says. "my sure defence, my only weapon is a life of integrity." This is not moral integrity, this is ontological integrity, and that is back when people knew what they meant and they said you tarnished my name and you destroyed me before they had that in some silly damn moralism. Then you guard your integrity with your life, you can lie, and you can cheat and you can steal and you can do anything but violate your own integrity, or allow anyone to violate it.

The LITTLE CHRIST

Joseph W. Mathews