Summer '71

Plenary lecture

Research Assembly

July 11, 1971

I am going to read a Psalm 76 as it is affectionately known

"In Judah God is known,

his name is great in Israel;

his tent is pitched in Salem,

in Zion his battle­headquarters are set up.

He has broken the flashing arrows,

shield and sword and weapons of war.

Thou art terrible, O Lord, and mighty:

men that lust for plunder stand aghast,

the boldest of men swoon away,

and the strongest of them can't lift a hand.

At your rebuke, O God of Jacob,

rider and horse fall senseless.

Terrible thou art, O Lord;

who can stand in thy presence when thou art angry?

Thou didst give sentence out of heaven;

the earth was afraid and kept silence.

God, at thy rising in judgement

to deliver all humble men on earth,

for all her fury Edom shall confess thee,

and the remnant left in Hamath shall dance in worship.

Make vows to the Lord and pay them duly;

let the peoples all around him bring their tribute,

for he breaks the spirit of princes,

and he is the terror of the establishment on the earth."

That's all.

I was impressed with George Randolph West's figure that last week you built your own space ship. In that ship, this next week, we are going into space. Not like last week, you at least had a launching pad and were still sitting on the globe. This next week all you've got is that space ship you built; it's not finished; only part of it is there.

We are going to deal with contradictions. In the last two or three months, I have worked with hundreds of you around this country to build that launching pad. I unashamedly say that I got a brand new education. I did not know how ignorant I was until I began with a host of other people to try to push those triangles down to the 4th and 5th levels.

Last week we tried to get hold of the dynamic processes which are the sociological manifestation of the sociality which defines humanness. we dealt with the quality of inclusiveness. It is exciting that some of you who are skilled in the political had to stick your nose down into the economic dimension or those of you who are trained in the economic disciplines were forced into the cultural. One thing that defines a man of the spirit is that he is comprehensive! You and I, if we are to participate and lead the revolution that is going on, and must go on in our time, have got to get a brand new education. We have to be comprehensive as we never dreamed of being comprehensive.

The next quality that we were out to grasp is the dynamical nature of the processes. We had to take our posture as men of the post­modern world in which substance is relationship or dynamics. Whereas the Assembly, as a part of the launching pad, had some guidance relative to the inclusiveness of the Social Processes, you wrote from scratch on the quality of the Dynamical in the process that defines society.

And the third quality you were out to get ahold of was the essentialistic. What I am trying to say there is that you were making an effort to grasp that without which there never has been, is not now, and never shall be any sociological manifestation of sociality. That is if in any triangle you wrote about, you could not illustrate that in an ancient Zulu tribe or in the aboriginal civilization in Australia 25,000 years ago, you were wrong. You also were wrong if you could not point to that going­on-ness in this present moment, and, if you and I were skilled enough, in everything that existed relative to society in between the no longer and the not yet.

And lastly, we attempted to get ahold of the quality of humanness. I touched on that by mentioning the term Sociality. Through the Social Processes, we have tried to understand, in this day of radical individualism, the insight of Martin Buber that there is no I and There is no Thou, There is only I­Thou. Structured society is that without which there is no such thing as an individual. When I was attempting to ground these triangles, I found myself grounding them in me. I am talking about Dynamics inside myself, without which I do not know myself. That is the flip side of saying: there is no such thing as society and no such thing as individual, but there are always individuals­in­society and societies­of­individuals. That is, every one of those triangles and their dynamical relationships are inside of me. (That is why I am so puffy.) In spit of yourself, you got them grounded in the very bottom of humanness itself.

Now this next week. Off in space. The Contradictions. I am so nervous about that, I can scarcely remember Fred Buss's name. We are going to have to inch along, but there are some guidelines. The Little Big Man is, in a way, a Guideline. It has become clearer to me since I got myself spoofed by that movie that, at any time in history but especially in moments of, turmoil, there is the establishment and the disestablishment. Or I like to say, what the pro­establishment and the dis­establishment are equally a part of the establishment. That's where I got spoofed. I didn't see that. In that movie, there is no doubt that Little Big Man had transcended that dynamic of pro­ and dis­establishment Therefore, he was on his way to being a revolutionary, but he didn't quite make it. He saw, and helped me to see, that the pro­ and the dis­ are sleeping in the same bed.

There are two levels of radicality beyond the posture of the Little Big Man. One is the Doing. Had he reached that level, he would have been a revolutionary and he would not have been symbolically 121 years old The one from whom he got his name, which was not Little Big Man but Little Man, died in conflict. But not Jack. If he had embodied the Doing pole, he would have been a revolutionary, though he would never have lived to tell the world that he knew the Indians as they was and General George Armstrong, Strong Arm, Custer as he was. So, he was never a revolutionary, or I would have never experienced that spoof.

There is another level and, obviously in terms of jargon, it is the rubric of Being. That is the category of the perpetual revolutionary as Niebuhr called the people of God. The perpetual revolutionary just be's The interesting thing about the professional revolutionary is that he doesn't do a thing he just be's. Which is to say sociologically, the church never does a revolution. The revolution is being done before the church has a role. The church's function is to move into the chaos that every revolutionary­movement experiences and bring order into it. The Church, or to Be, means that you have to have one foot in the establishment Without order, without economic structures, without communal form, there is no such thing as anybody existing, finally. He has one foot anchored in the right manifestation of the divine, and that foot can never be moved This is sheer paradox, for on that foot the weight of his whole being is, and he has one foot. Then he has one foot firmly, securely forever, in the left domain of God, which is the revolutionary. This posture makes Little Big Man as he seesawed back and forth under the same sheets look like the sawed off femininity that he was. The church seesaws across the ultimate river. He knows what it means to be utterly in this world and utterly not in this world. He has lost his soul to neither the revolution nor to the establishment. He serves a higher calling. If you think this Is a theory, you don't even know what I'm talking about. If you think that my image now is abstract, from where I stand, you haven't got quits enough to stand there

I am trying to say what a contradiction is. The revolution is dependent upon the establishment, for he has nothing to revolt against except that. If you don't understand this posture in which you bring form into the revolution, then you can't grasp contradictions.

A contradiction is not a problem. If you are looking for the problems of society you have sought out the wrong friends. A problem is when a set of accepted values are thwarted I cannot even remember when I had a personal problem. I find myself very irritable when ! find colleagues in the movement who have themselves a personal problem. How could anyone who was a revolutionary have a personal problem. Personal problems are gorgeous luxuries for someone who is not willing to move out between the no longer and the not yet. You surrender that luxury when you become a revolutionary.

When you talk about problems of society, you are saying, there are a few cracks around here that need to be patched up. When you are dealing with articulating the New Social Vehicle, you are beyond the dimension of problems.

A contradiction is a category that finally, only a revolutionary can use. In the ultimate sense, only one who participates in that great communion called the People of God can finally use it, in the radical sense. A contradiction is a block to the embodiment of a mission that is forged over and beyond the given social construct. A contradiction is a block to a trend that goes beyond the valuational structures that society stands for and articulates.

What are these contradictions in our time? That is the question for next week. What are the contradictions down underneath the contradictions. I call these matrices of contradictions. This is like the painting by VanGogh, the Starry Night. Did you ever see stars like that? Contradictions are a whirling universe that has within it almost countless contradictions whirling with it. The crucial ones I must be able to identify to give a name or a label to the swirl. That is what I mean by a matrices of contradictions.

If you list 458,000 contradictions, but you are only dealing with problems, that doesn't serve you or anyone else. All that does is to increase the paralysis. Only when you are able to get that mass of contradictions whirling with a focus, with a center, are you able to take enough chaos out of your situation for the revolutionary to begin to move.

Obviously, behind that statement' is the charting method, the whole construct of triangles, the 4 X 4 construct of a lecture. You take­chaos out of your situation in such a way that you do not simply remain an intellectual abstractionist. You become an actor and therefore, possibly, a be­er in the revolution.

Now, the practice of this next week. If you take seriously what I said, you are going to have to spot trends that are already operating. Where you are dealing with problems, you have to start with a problemat When you are dealing with contradictions, you almost have to do the positive before you do the negative. You have to identify trends. When I said a moment ago that the Church never initiates revolution, it gives form to revolution, this relates to what I am saying now. You have to begin to identify trends. Like, the youth culture in our day is a trend. When you deal with contradictions, you deal with blocks to these trends If you cannot spot the trends you are like somebody who is caught on the doing pole and never sees what I am talking about now. He is so busy. You have to see the shove of history to recognize the blocks so that you can bend it. That's just point one.

Point two. To identify a trend that is a creative positive, you introduce the problem of values. You cannot recognize a ­trend; a good one or a bad one, save you have a posture that s beyond that trend itself. That is like to get very simple, to say that X is better than Y is a nonsensical statement unless you disclose the third term, so that X relative to Z is better than Y for obviously relative to D, Y is better than X. Do you see this? Behind any valuational statement, there is a faith posture. I don't mean faith in some theological sense, I mean there is an existential decision. There is a manifestation of freedom. I have to define my being in a certain way, either ultimately, or in terms of my family, or nation, before I can intelligently call anything good or bad. When you talk about a creative trend you have already taken a posture which defines your existence and defines humanness. period.

Now, if you are clear on that, you have to raise the question, what criteria do we use? I think the first (I am after the practical not the abstract) is? You trust your intuition. I suspect, ,f you cannot find that at least one other hunk of self-consciousness has or would agree with you, you could not trust your intuition. What I have said is the key to the meditation chart. If I cannot grasp that Luther or Amos or Tagore or that slave from Guinea who gave his life on the slave trip to America is standing beside me as I say this, then very likely I can't say it. The psychotic abyss is too close. But you see here you and I not only have our intuitions as individuals. Every single individual here has 700 minds who are 30 years full of experience. That is 21,000 years of experience. Let's say that each one of us exists in a web of communities in which there are a thousand people. Actually you exist in a web of thousands upon thousands of people due to newspapers and so on.

I am still on values. If together we can trust our intuitions, we have already identified positive trends. We are capable of identifying positive trends, without even raising the value question abstractly, simply by trusting commonly the sensitivities of this group. Although I could make a whose lecture on this, this is an unusual group, in terms of practical exercise, because, whether you like it or not, no matter how neurotic you are, you are more sensitive than most people around you, which intensifies the trustability of these intuitions. without raising intellectually the valuational question, there is your beginning point. This is the meaning of brain-storming sessions. Tomorrow that is where we will begin. Just like kindergarten folk which we are, we just begin with the rock bottom. This is not the time to question anybody's intuition. Let them get them out.

Now, the second web in terms of values, has to do with a common decision that our time has made. The heart of the global revolution in our day is an upheaval in consciousness about consciousness. This sets it off from revolutions, however minor, in the past century located in the economic triangle, and the century before that in the political triangles. In our day, the upheaval is at the bottom of humanness as it is manifest in the cultural triangles. When that kind of a consensus is manifest among the sensitive people in the time in which you live, you have a crucial dimension illuminated in the area of your valuational posture. more practically, this means that the upper triangle in any triangle is the illuminating triangle relative to the revolution. Do you follow that? If the cultural, that means the top triangle in whatever level, 6th, 4th, 3rd, 1st level, is the crucial triangle. If you want to spot the contradictions, you better again and again look through that top triangle out to the two points. I am not trying to say what ought be, I am trying to articulate what is.

Now, the third. We have the criteria. It seems to me, it should come clear in our time. I touched on this last Sunday night. That is, when a revolutionary shows up on a scene and senses that something is wrong, he is dealing with what, from his point of view is warpedness, perversions, twistedness, out­of-gearness. And when he sits down, motivated by the insensitivity to be to the bottom of what we call the dynamics of society. When he finishes this task, the dynamic which for him discloses the way society is, becomes the ought to be for him. Don't hear me too quickly.

The contextual ethicist never begins with what ought to be. He is an abstractionist. He always begins with what is, when he pushes the IS to the bottom and draws it together in rational form, by which I mean two things: Inclusiveness and internal consistency which is what is intended in your triangles. That raw radical is-ness, becomes his ought to be. It is before that that he gets a hold of the crucial warpednesses in society.

Now when you are dealing with the factors of the cultural revolution, the Process, the descriptive paragraphs that you re­wrote in that document are going to be crucial. When you deal with what I am talking about now, then the dynamical paragraphs that you wrote in that document are simply crucial.

In that paragraph, or all of those together, you have attempted to say the way sociality is in its sociological manifestation at the bottom.

I'm trying to hold the pole that any post­modern man has got to hold, the pole of relativity. If I were standing in another age than this one, I could be saying the same thing, but it would not be that picture of triangles. But whatever he came up with when he pushed sociality to the bottom, and organized It rationally, that is his, it becomes his ought. If you just think for a little on those dynamical relations that you wrote, you will begin to feel that.

What I am saying is not easy to comprehend. But we are not boy scouts here ; we are not children. We are not here to do some little thing that we get satisfaction out of. We are here to do a job on behalf of mankind. If some of you get a little tired on those offices, or hearing the Psalms, you count up to 10 before you vomit. For our expertise is the capacity to shove humanness to its transparent bottom. That's what is going to give form to the kind of a revolution we are in today. At this point we are experts There are no greater ones in the world.

There is one other construct of values. That is what I call the ideational posture, or the ideological posture. If I could talk about what I talked about last Sunday, and it is this that I was trying to make clear, in which I took the Christ happening, the word happening Good, Accepted, Approved, Possible and took those and shoved them into the sociological manifestations of humanness and found the transparency of archaic-ism and the transparency of the center of being and the transparency of globality, in which I suggested that when you, like a little child, waddle out to become universal in the sense of breathing in a climate beyond the one that we were conditioned to breathe in and the transparency happens. You get the crucial plank in your ideological platform.

That plank is "All the earth belongs to all the people." That isn't something that some one invents That's what is seeping through in our time, and you can point to 1000 places where that has become evident. You can point to the youth movement. You can point to the feminine movement. You can point to the black movement. You can point to the Movement of the revolution of the non­western world against the west. You can point to the revolt in the Roman Catholic Church

Some way or another in our day, the transparency at the point of inclusiveness has been a few understanding that all the goods of this world belong to all the people, that all the wisdom of humanness belong to all the people.

Somebody asked me last night: what is your valuational structure that enables you to say that "not all the goods belong to all the people." The moment when I hear that, I know that I don't have a revolutionary beside me. I have somebody back there in the society, the revolutionary sticks his foot out of, still trying to patch up the situation. It is obvious, in terms of your studying those triangles, that there are the have's and the havenot's; there have always been and there are always going to be. Nothing naive here, nothing utopian here, but when you work with "All belongs to all," then you move into the dimension of covenant. (You people who studied in the political) It is in the context of covenant, I like to use Hobbes here, when he suggested the state was to build upon the state of nature in which everyone has his own power and therefore it was "Dog eat dog." There was no hope for humanness. And so we make a contract that I surrender this much power and you surrender power and we operate But there is not equity here. That is impossible finally. Do you not understand that there have always been and there always will be kings You can call them Presidents or Panjayats or whatever else, but I mean that is built into humanness.

You have the same thing as a covenantal relationship. It is the socialism that has been in every society. Martin, here is a dentist, and what I have done, I say to Martin, I can't be a second rate theologian and a first rate dentist at the same time. If you will take care of my teeth, I will try to do something about the spirit dimension of your life. And then we both like to eat, so we make a covenant with some farmer up here who is going to give us wheat to eat. You could carry this on. There is where it is based upon "all belongs to all." It is a funny thing. Though now when you look back through history you see dreams of this being articulated, even in our day. And you will not live to see the wonder of the insight. You wonder how it took 50,000 years for that. All the goods of nature, all the decisions of history, All the gifts of humanness belong to all men. Now, that is the ideological posture. You and I didn't create this, we perceived this breathing in our moment. What we are out to do is to give form to that. We are out to discern the contradictions to this trend, and it is a trend.

The last level. Only the Church has this secret, which transposes all these other things. We have an eschatological posture. This is our faith stance. We stand or fall, live or die, in the Christ happening. There is nothing pious about this, nothing religious about this. He are saying that the Christ happenedness is what humanness is. What explodes the bottom out of all images of humanness. That is the basis upon which any ideological or valuational scale, any essentialistic valuational scale, any temporal scale, in the sense of the time in which you live, and that is the ground that is behind any intuitions that you and I have in terms of the trends of society in the shallow part of our sensitive mechanisms

Practically ­­ O God, O God, O God, this means that this revolution, like any authentic revolution in the past, is first of all concerned with communicating its anthropology. I'll use other language. It's Gospel. That all men might participate in the radicality of humanness. Yes, you laugh now, but in the last century there were those in the Church who cried tears over the lost heathen across the world. Don't you laugh until you, through empathy, put yourself in that situation. Corny as that seems to us now, blinded as they were, obtuse as it appears, there was depth concern for mankind.

One of the proud things (if you non­westerners will forgive me), one of the few proud things the west did happened through the Church. Almost everyone of the revolutionary leaders that have come out of the east were the ones who were touched in depth. They may have thumbed their nose at it, and I think I would have to, at the instrument that brought it, but they were awakened.

Now, what I am trying to say: we in the movement, sooner or later are going to learn all over again to cry. For 20 years now, people have breathed down our necks, saying, "You isn't happy enough!" My word is, we haven't learned to be sad enough. We are going to learn to cry for the millions and millions and millions of people in India who come up on one stage of life and go down on the other end, to the tomb, in thirty years, who never have the slightest chance at all to grasp what it means to be a human being. You and I are going to cry over them. Or in the United States of America, how many suburban men and suburban women, and you and I represent them, get themselves born and get themselves died (and you are not blaming them) without ever having had any chance to grasp what it meant to be a human being. You are going to learn to cry, or you are not acing to be a revolutionary.

It is one thing to stand up here (as difficult for me, anyway, as it is) to get this kind of thing said. God, you could add to it in many ways that I am not bright enough to get ahold of. I read some of your document I am shocked at the quality of it.

This next week, with the kind of insecure sobriety, if you are like me, and if what I said to you is hard to get your mind around, it is harder for me to get my mind around it. We are going to stick this ­­­ I call it a valuational screen ­­­ up against those books you wrote and try, first of all, just to begin to list in the comprehensive fashion, the contradictions. Then we are going to push this way and this way and this way, trying to get some kind of a rational picture by Thursday night. And then, guess what. We are going to try to gestalt those things into matrices and write a book. Do you think we can do it? ­­­ If you felt like leaving last week!

Just supposing that we had something there in the Analysis of the Dynamical Processes of Society. Just suppose, we come up with something. I mean something in the articulation of matrices and contradictions, and then the next week, maybe we will all want to go home. We will be trying to get these into hard­headed practical proposals. Not tactics ­­­ next year we have to work on those.

What our times, what every revolutionary individual, at whatever level, is reaching for, is some ­­ you wee, we are not creating anything here, we are drawing together into a practical visions, that which revolutionaries are waiting for. There is a paralysis in the youth movement right now, there is a paralysis in the black movement right now. There is a paralysis in the Women's Lib movement. There is a paralysis in the revolt of the non­western world. I believe there is a paralysis in local man everywhere. I believe that they are waiting for, not some new creation, but the drawing together of a practical vision. I believe the black man will move again creatively. I believe the young man will move again creatively. I believe the eastern world, though they have to transpose this into their own, or use it as a seed to do their own job.

And you know, the Lord willing, in the last week, in the Council, we will take these 3 hunks of paper and try to boil them down into some kind of a manifesto, perhaps, that is for the Movement. That perhaps, could spark us further with our move on creating a grassroots structure through the local congregation experiment that would enable a reprogramming of the mind of the local man in our day in such a way that in our day there shall be a new heaven and a new earth. I am all finished.