12th Guardians' Consult April 1-3, 1977

My delight in being in this company this evening is more than I am used to. Perhaps all of us are in the midst of one of the necessary pauses of life when we have to think all over again who we are and, perhaps more important, what we must do with who we are. That is the situation our thrust in history is in at the moment. The phrase, "What hath God wrought?", has been going through my mind relative to who we are.

I have tried to delineate what He has wrought in seven categories. One is that we now have a global network for action and service. The second is that we now have a highly disciplined global body that can stand up to almost anything within that network. Thirdly, we have an unusually sound theoretical ground that is deeply rooted in history's understanding of humanness underneath us. You can quickly get your mind around this with such categories as faith, love and hope, or awakenment, engagement, and effulgence, or knowing, doing and being, which define what it means to be a human being for the twentieth century man. Fourthly, we have developed a system of actuating methodologies which have produced effectivity in our efforts of service. Everyone in this room has participated in building these four.

There are three more which have come much more recently and the Guardians, whoever they are, have played a front­rank role in their creation. The first one is a global funding device. It is remarkable that we are still economically alive. The sixth delineating arena relative to who we are is that we have built a global authorization net. I recently wondered how the Catholic Relief Service gets millions and millions of dollars when we have a hard time getting hundreds. Then I remembered that they have 2,000 years of credibility behind them. The last is what I call "the global support forces." These are the Guardians around the world without whom we would not be here. In this last year, the Guardians have given their time, talents and money to make possible the 36 social demonstrations and more than 1,000 Town Meetings held around the world. This is outstanding.

If you take these seven little universes in themselves and put them together at this pause in our life, that is who we are, and answers what God has wrought. The pause is not even for the sake of spending much time giving thanks for who we are, but it is to raise the question of what we do now with this given that we have toward defending the honor of Cod in history and toward sacrificial service of all mankind. As I try to say to you what our situation is at this moment my mind is consumed with that little word "do". We have the social demonstrations; one is set up every hour on the hour. Now, our overwhelming task is doing them. If you Guardians think you have given much up to now, I warn you that if you continue to be Guardians it will look as if you have given nothing of your time, energies, talents and goods, which you do not own but you just steward over as long as you live.

One of our major contradictions relative to our doing these demonstrations is finding and building an instrument to maintain and develop local economy throughout the world. A friend in Korea who is an expert in cooperatives, brought to our attention that comprehensive cooperatives have succeeded only in one nation, Israel. We went to Israel to learn how that nation had managed the local economy. It was remarkable. This was the first time I had ever set foot on what, for us Jews and Christians, is the Holy Land. I am very glad I had never gone there before, for hitherto I had not been prepared to go. As a matter of fact, I probably should not have gone now, for I still am not prepared. But we had to go for a missional reason.

I was silenced a bit and sobered to trod that land. I was interested in the ancient city of Jerusalem and in following the steps of Jesus in his teaching, trial, crucifixion and resurrection. But that didn't impress me nearly the way I was impressed when I went to the northern part of the land to a kibbutz. I wanted to see with my own eyes how they operate corporately in local community.

This necessitated that we pass through the great valley that cuts through the mountains. You remember the ancient highway that came up around the coast of the Mediterranean from Egypt? When you got up beyond Jaffa on the highway, you would turn right and there was this huge valley that would take you over to Mesopotamia. There was the ancient town of Meggedo where some of the great and mighty battles of all of history were fought. The ancient fort that Herod the Great built in Meggedo is still there. Across the valley and way up in the hills is the little hamlet of Nazareth where a barefoot Jewish boy we remember as Jesus grew up. It is something of a city new. That is too bad in one way, I suppose, but that is a part of life.

I looked out over those hills and across the valley to Meggedo and to Mount Hebron where the transfiguration supposedly happened. I was struck with the fact that I was awestruck. To be sure, I was influenced by the fact that the barefoot boy had been there, but that was not all. I began to feel what I think he must have felt. That jarred me into a fresh awareness of my Christian bigotry, and also the awareness that however an ideological posture in the church has been of service for 2,000 years (I mean emphasis on abstract, systematic theology), the time has come when that will be no more. Instead of being concerned with intellectual concepts (and you become a bigot not only over intellectual concepts), the future of the church will rest upon recovering profound humanness through the vehicle of states of being.

I began to grasp after the state of being of that young boy, which must have come early for him. It might very well be that the New Testament is right that it happened to him when he was around twelve years old, though it took him many, many years to grasp what was going on. As I look back on how man today remembers his life, I am thoroughly persuaded that what he suddenly became aware of was the profound mystery of life. He grasped the mystery in terms of radical objectivity, not subjectivity. That is not the key to it yet.. More important, however it happened, is that he experienced and came to understand a state of being in which he could say that the Mystery was his father. Now that is a poetic image. "It was my Father." When I think back through the New Testament, he just "fathered" it up one side and down the other, "It is the Father." "Don't call me good, it is only the Father." There is no theology in what I am talking about. It has nothing to do with something that was Christianity, some kind of a doctrine about what happened down in Jerusalem. I am talking about the profound human awareness of a barefoot boy.

Then, as he dealt with this state of being, he came to grasp that because this Mystery which was Father was the Mystery, period, that everything in life was important and all men were his brothers. That is all he had to say and he spent his life saying it and acting it out. I think, as I thought on the hills of Nazareth, that he came to see that the greatest suffering (so far beyond any kind of other suffering that you can hardly put them in the same realm to compare them) was to have been born and to have died and never to have grasped what it means to profoundly live. Hunger is suffering. Sickness is suffering. But the suffering beyond all suffering is to have lived yourself a life and died yourself a death and never grasped the profound dimensions of humanness.

He would have understood what we are beginning to see in our situation today, that 85% of the people in this world live in an entirely different universe than us 15%. We have all of the education; we have all of the health; we control all of the resources; we manage the means of production, and the others know nothing of these things. These are the 85%:­­3 billion 4 hundred million people. But in this, the greatest suffering, by far, is that most of these people get born, live like dogs and die like dogs, without ever grasping in any profound sense what it means to be a human being.

The barefoot boy became aware that the final objectivity in life was the Mystery. Plato said, ''Nobody doubts whether or not there is a God." If you stick that into some kind of abstract, rational concept it becomes nonsense. To put it another way, for fear you do, no one doubts that there is a final upagainstness. "The question is," Plato said, "Is He good?" Plato was right. That is the insight of the barefoot boy: "Father." My guess is, from the moment of that awareness, that state of being, he spent his life in sacrificial service of suffering humanity, I suspect that is what that strange kind of a death he had was all about. The next thousand years of the development of the religious bodies of this world are going to be dealing with what I just talked about.

One of my colleagues rushed up to me in Rome not long ago and showed me a quotation out of a new translation he had found. It said, "He came to bring life and to bring it in super abundance." It was describing the barefoot boy. He didn't come to bring faith or love, he came to bring effulgence. Life is the intensification of the acknowledgment of that which is finally real and is the intensification of expending your life on behalf of suffering humanity. To put all this in simple words, it requires integrity, and integrity means that you not be caught dead at any other place than where the ethical issue of your time is. The ethica1 issue of our moment in history is that 85% of the people of this world know nothing about the glories of the world that the 15% of us do.

Now, I am still talking about what we do. We have one demonstration in Micronesia on Majuro where some of you people spent a part of your life. We have one on Botayama, Japan, a coal mining community where the mine is closed. We have one in Oombulgurri out at the end of nowhere in Australia with the Aborigines, and one in Kwangyung in South Korea.

As a matter of fact, you might be interested to remember that we have really had three laboratories. The major laboratory was Fifth City on the West Side of Chicago. Yesterday I went to see Ambassador Andrew Young and we had a great time together. He was on the West Side when it burned. We were colleagues in the 60's. I suggested to him, modestly I hope, that for the last thirty years the highways and byways of time have been strewn with the litter of social demonstrations that were tried in this country. Our nation put billions of dollars into them and now they are gone. But Fifth City goes on. The second laboratory was Oombulgurri and the third was Majuro.

The first of the 24 around the world beyond those labs was Kwangyung I1. This year on June 25th we are going to have something like a Social Demonstration World's Fair to honor Kwangyung I1. They shall have been there 18 months and they are supposed to pull out in 24 months. We are going to celebrate their being ready to pull out. We are going to bring an indigenous person from all of the 36 social demonstrations we have in the world. The Korean government, hopefully, is going to pay for it, and if not, some of the corporations will. The government is coming, as well as villagers from many of the 35,000 other villages in South Korea to have a two­day celebration. I look forward to seeing that come off in Kwangyung I1.

We also have a social demonstration in the central Philippines, in Sudtonggan. We have one in Taiwan down at the southern tip close to Kaohsiung. This is a little fishing village called Nam Ping, which means "Southern Wind", the "Wind of the South", or the "Wind of Peace." The next one is Nam Wai, which is a broken­down fishing village in the New Territory of Hong Kong. Tomorrow your colleagues who are there move into a new building that the people built for them to live in. It will be a community center when they pull out. We have one in Malaysia, in a little village called Sungei Lui. This is over on the edge of the jungle in frightening but gorgeous country, about an hour east of Kuala Lumpur. Then we have Maliwada in India.

There is also E1 Bayad in Egypt. This is a fine place, but it is the worst of all our villages. We sent a health team out there and they did a tremendous job. Their story is absolutely out of this world. One of my colleagues talked one day about symbolic illness, and that if you were going to do miracles in a village it would be good if you could get hold of the symbolic illness and do something about it. In El Bayed and other parts of Egypt, they have a certain kind of parasite which evidences itself by passing blood in the urine. For 10,000 years the men (women, too, although we won't mention the women) urinated blood. You would be interested to know that in E1 Bayad they have just dug a well and the bacteria count of the water is zero. The people laid pipes from the well to the village, working day after day. Now pure domestic water in the village. I thought to get rid of parasites you would have to have a lot of shots, but actually you take one pill and all of parasites are killed. If you drink good water, bathe in good water and wash your clothes in good water, you will be free of parasites. For the first time in 10,000 years they are free of parasites in E1 Bayad. The important thing is that up to this moment they have been feeding at least two critters and maybe much more on a diet that was inadequate for one. Now, they have gotten rid of that other critter and nutrition is being improved in such a fashion that men and women in E1 Bayad are experiencing a new kind interior vitality that they never knew could possibly exist and which you and I have had from the time we were children.

There is Shantumbu in Zambia, and in southern Italy is Castlegrande. There is Kreuzberg Ost in West Berlin and Ijede, the little kingdom in Nigeria. There is the Isle of Dogs in London and Cano Negro in Venezuela. I would like to remind you that these are black people. They are descendants of slaves that the Spanish brought to Venezuela and were liberated by Simon Bolivar in 1810. They have a hard life. There is Ivy City in the United States and in eastern Canada in the northern part of the Maritime province of New Brunswick, are the descendants of the Arcadian people in the village of Lorne de l'Acadie. Next week the consult begins, there.

Here is City Five. If you haven't been to Fifth City for some time, you ought to get over there. There have been times, especially since the riots, when I suppose all of us thought that all our labors would come to naught. But that is not the way God chose to act. Fifth City has, in the last six or eight months, come to a kind of fruition that I don't think we dreamed could possibly happen. It is a high honor to go there and talk with the leadership that has developed in Fifth City. If you don't believe it, go over to the shopping center and meet the men and women who run it and run it well. First year feasibility studies said that the store ought to just break even. That first year he made $20,000 net; the second year he made $50,000; and this year he is going to make close to $100,000 and they are doubling the space of the whole shopping center. Isn't that a story? I went with him to Delta Pace for the consult. He said to me afterwards, "Now, I really understand that you people don't want anything." Let me remind you that we are never after money, notoriety, credit or acknowledgment. We are only out to serve humanity and its suffering.

The next one is Delta Pace. I have dreams that every rural black village in the southern part of the United States can move, and I think Delta Pace may be just the trigger and the sign that could bring that about. Then Cannon Ball out in the Dakotas where Sitting Bull was murdered. Lastly, and this is the 24th, our demonstration in Western Canada. It is with the Metis people. These are the half breeds that go way back to the Hudson Bay Company. These are suffering people who started two great nations in Canada which the white people destroyed and then hanged their leader. We probably will have the demonstration in the village of St. Ambroise at the bottom of Lake Manitoba.

These are the 24, but these demonstrations in themselves are nothing. If they cannot be replicated, they will have no meaning. There are fifty million people in the state of Maharashtra in India and 35,000 rural villages in this one state. Somewhere near the middle of Maharashtra is our first project of Maliwada. When the Indian government invited us to use Maharashtra as a laboratory for replication, our aim was to do a village in each of the four divisions of the state, then one in each of the 25 districts in the state and then one in each county or tahsil. There are 232 tahsils in the state. Our timeline calls for 25 villages in the calendar year of 1977. There were times when I thought we were mad, but three months have gone by and we have twelve of those 25 villages underway. This makes it pretty clear to me that if the present government keeps the same attitude as Mrs. Gandhi toward helping the rural poor we will have done all of the districts of Maharashtra before December, 1977. The next year we have got to do 250 and that is going to be something.

We can fake it if we have to, but we don't want to. The way you can fake it is that within a matter of months ten or more villages around any village you do, start to do their own development. We want one in every county. Then we will have caught up with India's five year plan. In the first year, 1979, of their five year plan, they are going to do 2,500. In the next four years they are going to do 25,000. That 2,500 will be simple if we don't snatch the idea and fake it. That will mean that they will just have to draw together the ten villages around the 250 that we have started. This ought to give momentum to what they call the Nava Gram Prayas, or New Village Movement. If that kind of a move gets started, then doing the 25,000 will be no problem. You will have a social demonstration of what can be done in any developing nation, for this one state is larger than most nations of the world. What you and I have to remember is that in this world there are two million rural villages. If Mao was correct when he said that if you do one percent of what you set out to do, you have the whole thing done; that would mean we would have to do only 20,000 villages and we would have this thing moving.

Your colleagues in India have done a tremendous jab. Their task is to train 5,000 Indian people to be catalyzing forces in the villages. They have now trained 200 and tomorrow their third school starts with 160 people. Most of these people come from the villages where they are going to replicate. Some of them are illiterate and none of them are educated. But they do very well in the school. In the first two schools all of them volunteered to give at least two years of their lives in any village we want to send them in the state of Maharashtra and that is where they are today.

I wanted to check out whether our colleagues were choosing the right new villages, so I went to one south of Bombay. It was one of the worst villages I ever saw, and I decided that they knew how to choose the right village. A young Indian lad showed me around the village, and he looked like he couldn't have been over 20 years old. I didn't know him from anybody. Finally, somebody said, "This man is the director of the project in this community." He had just finished the eight week course in our school and was now the director of that project. It ought to make us all a little bit humiliated to think that an illiterate Indian lad could do the job in eight weeks. I find this one of the most encouraging of signs. I used to think that it was going to take us 15% to raise up the 85%. Now, I say "no" to that. It just needs a few of us who will be spies to take what we know from the 15% universe and share it with the 85%. They will do their own catalyzing. All they need is a little more know-how and a little more sophistication in their instruments, and they can move.

Look at this chart. I like it in its ugly form, because it shows that it is still a working paper. This has to do with the practice of what we are doing. I said that when we went to Israel we were looking for the kind of machinery that would do the local economy of a community. In Israel they spoke, like we do, of a comprehensive cooperative, instead of a cooperative that just does marketing or purchasing. The whole community is a part of the cooperative. We have talked about wedding a cooperative and a stock company to create a new instrument to handle local economy, in which you avoid making the few who are better off still better off and the ones not so well off even worse off. We could do that very quickly without even intending it. In Israel we discovered a kind of comprehensive scheme that enabled us to draw together a possible organization on the local level.

At the top of the chart, the decision­making body is the whole community. They might meet once a quarter, once a month or once a year; but the community as a whole would constantly keep deciding what they wanted to see happen. You will notice that there are two commissions. One is the social commission whose job it is to take care of and watch over the vitality, the awakenment, the engagement, the process and the leadership of the community. They work at that through three guilds. One guild has to do with health, the second with education, and the third with family development or welfare as a whole.

The economic commission watches over the production, the marketing, the procurement activities, the financial activities and the overall management of business in the community. It works at these through three guilds: agriculture, industry and commerce. In addition to that is the stake in which the whole community is divided into five geographical areas. The people in those areas work together toward watching over all of the people in that area. For instance, a few weeks ago in Maliwada, an old lady died and they didn't find her for three days. The stake structure wasn't working adequately there. That is just one kind of an illustration. In E1 Bayed the way they check the nutrition of the children is to weigh every child once a week at stake meeting. The figures are kept and they know immediately where there is trouble, and they move on it. That would be directly under the Secretariat (on the West Side we called it "the Board of Managers"). You have a tensional dynamic here. The commissions report to the total community, as well as to the Board of Managers, or the Secretariat, so that no one body finally becomes the ruling power within the community. Without this kind of framework we are never going to get our staff out of these villages.

We have to leave a structure behind that will enable the community to continue its own development. If you bear in mind that with the technological revolution, where man for the first time was capable of broad and long­range planning, local man got left out. The structures that he used to have to maintain his economic and social life crumbled into dust. The task now is to help him rebuild those local structures so that he can authentically and seriously participate in the decision­making processes that determine his own destiny. I might also point out that although that need is more dramatic in the developing nation, the same need is in my country, in Canada and in the developed nations of Europe and other places.

I am more convinced than ever that the profound trend in history at this moment is the rise of local man. Our work in Town Meeting and Social Demonstration which is geared toward local man is on target in that sense. If we remember that all of our effort in Town Meeting is toward awakening men into humanness, and all of our effort in Social Demonstration is the creative engagement of men in history, then I think we can see that we have the possibility of being of service at this moment in history by bringing effulgence, by bringing life to mankind. People like yourselves with far more practical know-how than I possess, need to figure out the concretions of that. I answer the question I started with, in the broad, by saying that we must use this that God hath wrought in our moment in history to defend the honor of God and to serve even unto our death, the needs of mankind at the moral point and no place else.

Joseph W. Mathews