In relationship to social structure, being a moral person (I don't mean a moralist) is not an easy thing today. We are between moralities in a transitional time, not in a superstitious sense but in the way the New Testament used the word "law." In some of the men, to the degree that they never grew up or that an overdose of "boyishness" remained in them, there tends to be a propensity towards the filly when they reach 40 years of age. My guess is that ten or fifteen years later they will see themselves as the donkeys they are. I heard recently of two situations: in one of them the male was eighteen years old, and in the other, about forty­one. As I went over the situations, they seemed to be exactly the same. The last one however, was grotesque for that very reason. Perhaps if you men make an effort through prayer, you will grow up before you get to be forty­two and won't have to be a "grotesque donkey." You can handle this propensity in several ways. For some years, I have like the term "creative flirtation." If you are a man, in principle every woman is open to creative flirtation. A man treats all women, not as persons, but as "fillies." A filly is one of the finest grades of person that I know anything about. I wish I were a woman for a moment so that I could make this speech the other way around, but I'm sure it would not sound as attractive to me as this speech did.

I do my best these days not to look harried or flabbergasted, but down inside I am the most harried human being you have ever seen in your life. Yet I was aware this morning that I wasn't harried like I use to be five or six years ago when we were all having a kind of "corporate nervous breakdown." We joke about those years now, but that was no joke. So I asked myself, "Why? What is the difference?" You know what I came up with? The dark night of the soul. I am grateful to many of you who are in this room and to many who are not in this room for the work we did on the dark night of the soul. Awareness of the dark night is perpetually closer to me these days than awareness of my own breathing.

Being is lending us its presence. Some colleagues were presenting the Town Meeting recently to the city fathers. One of them said something like, "What you lay out is utterly impossible; it can't he done. But because of you, we will go along." That is what I mean by "presence," saving presence, salvific presence. The thing that is important to remember is that this presence is not "your" presence. Being kindly lends you His or Her presence. I mean that literally, empirically. Salvific presence is not your presence, it is the presence of Being that lends itself to you. To put it the other way around, Being borrows your presence. One reason why you know that to be true is that in the immediate situation and then again when reflecting on it later, you experience deep, deep phoniness. Or you experience a deep inadequacy or an agonizing sinfulness or a deep apostasy. That is the way the saving presence operates. We need to find many new ways of talking about this.

I have done some reflecting on resurrection recently. The pronouncement or the announcement of the Word as the means of absolution is a salvific form. But when you are dealing with the spiritual in the sociological where there is no verbal utterance of absolution, then you are presencing resurrection. This is what I saw happen in Maliwada and what you see happening in Town Meeting. This presence, that is not your presence, announces your resurrection ("announces" is not the right word ­ we still have some thinking to do in this area in the future.) It is no wonder that whether you do it literally or through the power of your imagination, you drop down before the altar prostrate and cry out, "Such a worm as I" My mind goes back to the Methodist Church some thirty years ago when we were upset about such things as "such a worm as I". We even deleted it from the hymnal. Well, the overpowering wonder of God's grace, that He would lend you His presence, overwhelms you and your being, not your tongue, cries out "such a worm as I!".

If I were the first­among­equals in a religious house or in an area house at this moment I would try to pull together for myself what that means in order that we corporately take care of ourselves. Finally no one from outside the inner caverns of your being can give you an adequate screen, but obviously that screen must be kept ready. It has nothing to do with how uncertain things are. A screen can operate with the word "uncertain" on it just as calmly as it can with the word "certain" written over this part or that part of it.

My mother used to have a great big round box about six inches high made out of tin (maybe some cookies were once given to her in it). It was filled with buttons. My mother was a great sewer. She had buttons the likes of which you would never dream of. Playing soldiers with Mother's buttons is the game I remember playing as a tiny boy more than any other game. There were some buttons that were brass and they were the generals. Some were shining pearls and they were the commandants. Then Mother would always have ten or twelve that were just alike and they would become this regiment or that regiment. Mother was very nice; laying out all her buttons would have irritated some women, but she never scolded me for playing with them as long as I put them all back in her box.

Now a prior has got to be a guru and a rabbi, but at this moment, more than anything else, he must also be a general. I do not mean the general like in the movie "Patton". Three or four weeks ago I saw on television Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra" It was late at night yet I could not shut the TV off. The thing that held my attention was that the MAN Caesar was unassuming at the same time that the GENERAL Caesar was iron. I thought, "Now this is generalship. The first among equals must be a general.

We have been talking about the necessity of having a gun in each one of the social demonstrations. Now I don't know what a gun is except that he knows what it means to move it, move it, move it. There are several places where we need a gun. In one situation there is a colleague who must be the first among­equals, but he is not a gun yet. And there is also an old, old hand there who is also not a gun in that situation. I always have to qualify "gun" because I have been astounded again and again how a person can be a "gun" in one situation and not in another. So the man we send there would have to be a gun from the back of the room or from the side of the table. If you are a gun, you don't have to be sitting up front. If you have to be sitting up front, then you are not what I mean by a gun. Actually, you don't t have to be somebody with brass on you. A general is a general; the title does not make him one.

For the next couple of years we have to take care of ourselves. Nobody can take care of us because in the Order itself we have to focus on the arena of permeating society as revolutionaries. I do not think one can ever move his whole line or even his post at once. Many of your lines must be held back while shoving another segment forward. This is not a simple thing to do, for you are after an unbelievable breakthrough that can bring all the forces to victory. We are going to have to focus one more year, maybe two, (and I know for certain segments it is killing to mark time) on the Town Meeting and Social Demonstration in order to break them loose.

I have never known how to be a gun myself though that has been my role from time to time. I have a always felt extremely awkward playing that role. Some people have far more finesse in being a gun than others. I ask myself, "What is it that makes a gun?" or "What is it that unmakes a gun?" Maybe I really ought to watch more western movies! Actually we shouldn't use these figures of speech because they have to do with violence which we are trying to rule out. I must say, though, that the last chapter of Ephesians about the breastplate appeals to me. I also like "Onward Christian Soldiers" these days. I like the way women are guns, if they are women and not trying to be a male gunslinger. It is amazing what a woman gun can do. Anyway, these days one person has to be a general. I would even recommend that you pull out your Mother's button box and begin to line buttons up on the floor if that would help you get your mind around being generals.

The Xavier principle not only applies to geography but to all kinds of arenas. It is a crucial part of generalship. I find that I am not a good general unless I can limit my areas. I may be losing my ability but by the time the fortieth person comes into my cubbyhole and introduces a new battlefield, my generalship begins to wane. One of the crucial aspects of generalship is transrationality. This is never instinct. I can gun a situation well if I have had a night to sleep over it. Don't you wish that every time a new issue came up, you would have an extra night of sleep to work it through to the transrational? It is crucial that the hunk of geography you are in charge of, is the whole globe. That is the key. Or to put the same thing another way, whatever situation you find yourself in, is all of time.

If you don't understand that, you are not going to be a general. You pray about what the general on your left does, but you "do" your situation. Now within your situation, you have your own troops and you have to be sure that you are taking care of your own "left-hand" areas. When one of the foot regiments is tied down, you get your cavalry there in one big hurry, unless the overall battleplan requires that regiment to mark time. Your turf has to be the whole world and your situation has to be the whole of history or you cannot operate as a general.

Tomorrow, you will not be wearing the general's uniform, but the garb of the abbot. Did you read the religion section of Time magazine last week? The Pope appointed an abbot as the new Archbishop of the United Kingdom. The last time we visited the Bishop who rules over the Isle of Dogs, we had a long talk about this appointment. He mentioned this one and that one but Pope Paul went around the whole hierarchy of bishops and picked out a spiritual contemplative who was in charge of the ecumenical work of his order and appointed him the Archbishop. Isn't that something! His name is Hume and he is an eminent teacher and intimate friend of the first­among­equals in Rome. He took me to meet the Abbot one day; he is a very spiritual man.

I find the categories of generalship to be threefold. They are my sanity and tell me how to win my Armageddon or the whole war from my position. My major categories are THE WORLD MISSION, THE SPIRIT MOVEMENT, and THE RELIGIOUS ORDER. Under each of these I have two categories put in the form of the Tactics Chart.

In THE WORLD MISSION are two categories: One deals with history as read in the West, and other with history as Tagore says India understands it, that is, moodalistlcally. He says India tells time by great historical moods. The West tells time by events or happenings. That came into focus as I discovered the NSV is related to the Western way of telling time or to the mission as events, and the NRM is related to the Eastern way of telling time or to the mood. I am concerned missionally with the broadest categories for talking about the happening of a new society. I have about twenty speeches on each of these things. They have to do with local man and with the primal community as an ontological given in the whole of human sociality. I find myself driven by forces unsynonomous with my own generating capacity. The New Religious Mode is not ever separable from social structure or is it ever synonymous with it. It has to do with what is needed for all mankind: ­ that people not be poor unto suffering, nor be uninformed to the point of disablement. But most of all that every man have a life in the spirit.

Under the rubric of Global Task then, as the first­among­equals I would be interested in Town Meeting. And I mean I would move it, move it, move it! I have been extremely pleased with what has happened this last quarter in Town Meeting. The stories I have heard are unbelievable. We had 350 on Nob Hill and in Texas, 600. I am not pointing to the numbers but through them to a reality that is there. The number that we have done is around 200 now. I find that exciting. I have given a great deal of thought to generalship in this arena. I have had to think in longer spans of time than I used to. I saw something unbelievable when I was shown a graph of long­term projection of Town Meetings. It gave me a whole new perspective.

I have been trying to decide what to do if I were the first­among­equals in Billings these days. I would like to see us have a social demonstration on an Indian reservation right outside Billings. I have a lot of passion for the role the Indian in this nation and in the whole world has played in history. I believe, however, no matter what somebody on a bunch of statistical charts says, that if I were the general in the situation, I would be extremely careful about what I required of myself relative to this.

I would spend a great deal of time defining my goals beforehand in such a way that failure wasn't there before starting. That is crucial, but I would move it, move it move it! I was in a division during the war which was relieved from the line. That was a humiliating experience. Those young squirt marines walked in there standing tall with their rifle held in one hand going forward while we pulled out and went back. Our division didn't get to Okinawa as rapidly as the core general thought we should have. I remember having to bury a lot of guys on the way. I would have hated to be the Commander of our division. I would have been thinking not so much of what that Core General said but what I would have required of myself. I don't know whether that would have helped the Commander in that situation, but if you are going to be a general that is crucial. I did not see the Commander march out, but if he marched out with his shoulders back and his head high, that would have been something. It has something to do with integrity relative to social mission.

The second thing that I would be concerned with is Social Demonstration. I will not belabor this, but it has to do with not having ants in your pants. I would be ready to start a social demonstration tomorrow and if necessary be willing to sit there with my plans in my hip pocket for four years. But I would be ready and I wouldn't care if no one else in the world knew.

The third thing under that category is the Primal Community Experiment. Night and day I would be brooding on this. There is not much you can do now, but I would keep my PCE going. And I would not care whether the flywheel was turning over 100 times or 10 times a minute but I would keep it going. Then I would brood, brood, brood. Because the day after tomorrow the orders are going to come from the deeps of the spirit world itself: '"Move on primal community!" Then I would like to hear the general say from the back, "Forward March!" and immediately march forward. Be ready to move.

Then training is fourth. This refers to courses. RS­I now is not an impact course. Right now LENS is not an impact course; it is a course dealing with methods. If I were overseas, it would be ITI. The one we had in California convinced me that when we have time to sit down and have a five minute rest, we need to get our minds back on doing ITIs in this country.

At the other end of the World Mission category is the rubric of Historical Spirit or profound deeps. Here I would not be doing much for anybody to see, but I would be preparing myself for understandings of profound consciousness. I would be working constantly on overcoming my Christian bigotry and on the entry into the other religions of the world. This sounds like it is simply meditation but it is not for me. The brooding and the meditation is done on behalf of doing, even though that will not come until the day after tomorrow. There is going to be no spirit brought to the last fat lady, to the masses as a whole, save it be a spirit that any, and in principle, everybody in this historical era can grasp and see. The poetry used in this connection will be crucial and I would be brooding on Jesus, the Man.

I tell you, Rahner jarred me. It happened in the one arena where I disagreed with him: neo­paganism. Nobody knows Mr. Neo­pagan like those of you who are doing Town Meeting. If for no other reason God sent you to do Town Meeting, he did it that you might know Mr. Neo­pagan. Rahner said that he would come to visit us if we would pay his way. Well maybe when you get Town Meeting really going we ought to take up a collection, pay his way over here and have him go to two or three Town Meetings and bump up against Mr. Neo­pagan, who is not quite what Rahner thinks he is.

II.THE SPIRIT MOVEMENT. I have the Spirit Movement divided into the Action Forces and the Support Forces. I would not be overly- worried in this area yet. In another year or two, I would have a white hot passion for it. Even though we need troops badly, that is not a concern of mine, but I would work those Metro Cadres. To be honest with you I would not be an Area Prior or a Regional Prior if I did not have all of my metro circuits going. And I don't mean those circuits you do in Town Meeting. You may relate the two; that is fine, but I don't mean that.

And then I would be concerned with Training. My passion would be there. I do not mean the training as I talked about it earlier, although you might use that. If I were a Religious House Prior, I would be looking for not less than two fine people that I would carry to the Academy myself if I had to. No matter how much I had to work at Town Meeting, I would get no fewer than two there. I would find other ways of training or grooming. In my mind, I want out of my region full groomed leadership for the day after tomorrow. Right now I would be after quality rather than quantity.

I would be after interns. I would be out to get as many people in my house as possible. Now again I would do it in a relaxed way, but I would get them there if I had to go out and haul them in. I would push everybody. I wish I could move a house or two to Korea or India just for a week, where due to colors, heights, and all of this, you notice that there are not any interns. It is just as foolish for a house in Paducah, Kentucky as it is in Asia. I have never been accused of having a very scintillating personality, but I would use what I have and work it on persuading people to move into the House.

1. THE RELIGIOUS QRDER. Under this I have The Religious House and The Religious Turf. You would not believe what I am going to tell you now. Mactan Island is about as big as a postage stamp. When we got there we went to villages on that island that our colleagues have never been in. Then we went to Singapore, and that is also just a postage stamp. We visited villages that our colleagues had never been to. In the Philippines, they did not know the structure of the government. We had to get it. It is an interesting structure. The country is organized into the rural and the urban. In the rural it is divided into provinces while the urban is divided up into cities. The cities are in no way related to the provinces but directly to the central government. Lapu Lapu is designated a city and therefore we don't have to deal with the province of Cebu but can work directly with the Federal Government with whom we have already established good relationships.

Now to say this another way: I would know my geography. I tell you some of your colleagues do not know what it means to grid a city or a country. When we hit Chicago, the first thing we did was to take this city to pieces street by street by street. My area was Inglewood and back of the yards. I tell you nobody knew that part of Chicago the way I knew it and everybody else knew his assigned area as well. When we pulled it all together all of us knew the whole city. Then we drew our grid. Some of our colleagues think gridding is getting out a map and drawing some lines on it. No! The name of gridding is geo­social gridding. I would know my assigned turf geographically, socially, politically, and religiously. One of the fine things that happened in the Philippines was when we went to see the Monsignor Ortiz relative to Lapu Lapu. He said, "You know, Joe, I will take care of the Cardinal and everybody else relative to the church," That is a tribute to our colleagues there, and has to do with knowing the turf.

Now the last category is the Religious House. What would I be doing now in the House? The first thing I would do is structure the house and then I would forget it. Maybe you have to be a Pharisee until you get it structured but then turn in all of your boy scout badges, and let it run. The second thing is Corporate Discipline. I mean we would learn to move in teams. The trouble with some of our Religious Houses is that some of the finest colleagues we have are each doing their own thing. They have not learned that "teamism" is an ontological reality nor how to make consensus nonchalantly. Priors still come in from circuits, do their homework overnight and the next morning when they get it, up on the blackboard, they defend it. That is not what corporateness is. Somebody has got to get up and put something on the board. But if your soul is attached to it, there isn't any chance for the corporateness at all.

Then I would think nonchalantly about training in my House. I would not think of training somebody. We train each other. I would use those collegia in the morning and they would be out of this world, if I had to stay up from two to four every single night. What exciting things there are for training each other. I have been trained more in the last nine months than I have in the last sixty­four years. That is a fact! I find it exciting. In the next nine months I intend to get well­trained in areas in which I now have no expertise.

Last is The Spirit Life. Right now the spirit life is only approached indirectly. I would not worry about somebody pushing toward the solitary office or similar concerns. The job of a prior is to see that those working with him have one great profound spiritual awareness each day and then let God take care of the rest. I am more and more persuaded that it is the very, very small mundane things that care for the spirit. It happens while riding on an airplane, driving in a car, walking on the pavement, or saying hello to somebody on the way to breakfast. I would not try to take care of anybody. When a colleague has a problem, I try to avoid him as long as possible to allow him the dignity of waking up to the fact that he has been a stupid twelve year old donkey. Now if it is necessary, then you have to sit down and talk to him like the twelve year old donkey or the 40 year old donkey he is. I would try to keep the spirit fires going in those with whom I rub shoulders.

Now some immediate practical considerations. If it is all right with you priors, we will substitute Lapu Lapu for Trastevere so that we have our eight for the year. Since we have a consensus there are other issues. The question of what we do in terms of social demonstration in the next year, July 1, 1976 to July 1, 1977 is one. I think we can work that out when we gather this summer. We have one possibility in Indonesia which will need to be started soon. Once paranoia sets in, it is not easy to heal. It is never healed by words, but only by deeds. Paranoia never happens when people have their feet on the pavement. It always happens when your feet are off the pavement and you have time to think up "bugaboos." Something else might happen to you on the pavement. Two guys in blue might grab you and put you on the next plane out of the country ­ but you would not be sitting around wallowing in the kind of psychological state that allows paranoia.

This Summer. We have got to have a "this summer". But Town Meeting is far more important than this summer this year. Next year, it may be quite different. We don't have to be bound by what we did yesterday, nor by what the manual said. The reason I hate manuals is that I am afraid that I will take seriously what the manual said yesterday. Nothing cuts off creativity more than a manual. Have you noticed this? Maybe if you read a manual and then tear it up, there would be some creativity. A suggestion for this summer has come basically from your colleagues in Trastevere. (By the way they have moved in with the Trinitarian fathers in Trastevere and are working there as the PCE preparing for the time of social demonstration.) They suggested that we bring together a few colleagues and divide into groups of thirty to fifty and for two weeks operate independently for the most part, doing very specific work. Maybe the entire assembly could meet every other day just to say hello. I would like to see if some kind of corporateness or new sense of teamwork might be one result. They suggested that maybe the time has come for us to try to publish a series of essays. The whole group of thirty would get together and decide the arenas in which we now have something to say. Then divide up into units of three in order to "rough out" the arena and build a battleplan which would be presented to the whole group to talk about before each unit writes a first draft. The whole group would read the first draft, critique it, and send it back with the unit for the writing of the final draft. Then another group of people who had not been involved in the writing would judge whether it were any good and how it could be used.

If I were planning the summer, I would set a figure for participation. In North America we have fifty­four houses. There should be not less than one person from each house and it does not have to be the prior this time, but you ought to choose this person very carefully. In some cases it ought to he the prior. You can decide that. I would wrap the spirit life around Jesus and the four Gospels. I would not ask you to do that. I do not think a great deal of work needs to be put into either recruiting or in setting it up but the work that is done should be top­flight work.

The World Bank is sending us to Sweden to get a $100,000 grant to put the manual on "How to do a Social Demonstration" into final form. Well, I could see a group of people­rendering a good hunk of that into good English in two weeks. I think that they are going to send us to another Scandinavian country to ask for funding of $100,000 to get the replication school on the social methods of social demonstration done. By taking parts of the social demonstration, SMS, LENS, and University 13 manuals thirty people could write the manual and the philosophy for the Replication School. At least this is the kind of thing that has been going through my head. I think it would be good for people overseas to get here this summer. It would be fine if somebody from each region could get here.

GUARDIANS MEETING. I have said that I thought that this Guardians Meeting maybe ought to be seen as the most important one we have had so far and that we are going to have for awhile. The key word in my mind for it is engagement. One of the guardians suggested that they needed to become more independent. If you take that suggestion on the surface, it is the last thing that needs to happen, for it would make a bunch of boy scouts out of them. If you look at the depths of that suggestion, it is right, but it is in engagement in assuming responsibility for the global movement. They do not have to operate independently, they just have to be engaged in depth. The practical possibilities of that are manifold. we will need more Guardians with high expertise that can go to various parts of the world for two weeks or two months. We also need more Guardians now who give not only their money but their clientele. A heart surgeon would take us to some of his wealthy patients where he has something at stake with his name. Or an attorney would introduce us to his clients. One guardian has done very well up to now but I see pain on his face four feet thick every time he does. He is giving us the most cherished thing he has, the name he has built in many years in his firm. He is a man of integrity and this kind of engagement hurts.

The present guardians ought not give a nickel for the Global Conference Center renovation. Instead they should get out and get twenty other people whom we have never approached to help build the sixth floor. Then after they have raised all of that money they can give all they can. It is that kind of engagement we are after. We have never really had a list of patrons. The Guardians could help there. They need to articulate the relationships they have around the world. We need that more now than ever. We need the network of people who can and would get us to crucial members on boards of directors and foundations. The Guardians went a long way in developing circuits as those of you in houses know.

Isle of Dogs Consult: The thing that worries me the most in a consult is the participation of local people and I was particularly frightened that they would not be able to get the "old working­man­England" out to do the consult. But they have 41 full time participants, which is 11 more than is really needed, plus sixty that will be there for the night sessions. That is good news.

Joseph W. Mathews