Summer '73, Research Assembly July 28, 1973, Final Plenary

Grace and Peace be unto you. From God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

1. I have been reading St. Teresa these last two weeks. What I ran across is the fact that St. Teresa is dealing with the objectivity of the self. In the early days, when I was working with existentialistic philosophy, I was able finally to get my mind around it with these three categories: the first is the experience one day of just being there. The second is the experience of being there as this unique self, or this unrepeatable "is­ness." The third is the experience of just being there as this unrepeatable "is­ness" with passion. That is all the existentialists have talked about -- and thereby they have enabled the fire of the gospel to burn in our moment in history.

2. Teresa knew about this experience of the objectivity of the self. She talks about detachment or the sense of being outside your soul. She says something like this: "One feels as if he has been in another world very different from the one we live in. In a single instance, one senses that he is taught so many things all at once, that if he were to labor for years on end trying to fit them all together in his imagination and thought, he could not succeed with a thousandth part of them." That is the summer as I have experienced it. I want to talk about it under the headings of spiritual matters, foundational matters, missional matters and practical matters.

3. I suspect that all of us sense that this summer, way down in the deep caverns of our being, something somehow has all come together, even though we would be hard put to talk about it. In the great resuscitation of the church in this century, we have recovered the church's ancient understanding of that happening which we term justification. The first fifty years of renewal focused on that alone. That forces you to deal with life under the rubric of time. Everyone who is concerned is dealing with history -- that is, with time. Twentieth­century man has experienced, with respect to time, the states of being of the "Yes" and the "No," of the "No" and the "Yes." We all learned, as if we had never known it before, that you die, and in the light of that great "No" we experienced our contingency -- the fact that life is just one great "No." Life is a "No." But in the midst of that "No," man in our time once again heard the "Yes," he heard the Eternal Yea as if he had never heard it before. Then he knew that life -- all his life, every bit of it -- was "No" -- and then you don't say "and 'Yes'"; he learned that the "Yea" was always in the midst of the "Nay," that every happening was a "No" -- and within that "No" was a "Yes." That was the experience of justification and had to do with time.

4. But now, in this moment, the concerned and sensitive human being is dealing with the rubric of space, not time: the universe, not history. In this domain of existence, he does not experience the Yes and the No of history, or the Yea and the Nay that is history. but he experiences the dread and the fascination that life is. He experiences the dread that life is and discovers in the midst of that dread the fascination. This is crucial to remember whenever we talk about the happening of the holy life or about the experience of holiness or sanctification. Such an experience does not happen, is never a reality, unless you are staring ultimate suffering squarely in the face. One of the little checks - and you are going to need checks here, especially during the next year, for we are all children in this area -- is to ask if you are looking suffering in the face: suffering within and suffering without. If you are not, then what you mean by Resurgence is just one more romantic hallucination. Under the rubric of space, man's experience is one of dread and fascination.

5. I suppose that the most important thing which has happened to me in the last two months is that I became aware for the first time of what communion with God meant. Now, I could have given an intellectual presentation of this for many years, but that is not what I am pointing to. I mean the experience of communion with God. You may not agree with me, but I am convinced that no one present here in his whole life until now has had even the slightest possibility of communion with God. You have to be looking toward the future from the standpoint of this moment to grasp what that means. It means to experience, if I can say it this way, the empirical reality of God. When I try to say what I mean by that, I have to combine time and space. When time and space are profoundly combined, then you have a third entity and that is communion with God. That is the unbelievable Yea within the Nay, and the experience of the awe within the dread.

6. When I use the word "communion" -- and our fathers in the past, I believe, used it the same way -- I am not talking about something that is verbal or intellectual but that which has gone through the verbal symbols and through the intellectual constructs. This experience, as I understand it, is double­actioned: I do image and I do feel and I do resolve, but in the midst of that and even prior to it, there is the awareness of being imaged, there is the awareness of being "feeled," and there is the awareness of being resolved. I suppose that for most of you, these are terms that you have been working with for a long time. It is the relationship of an active and a passive that is the communion with God. No matter how rational your constructs or ideas or concepts may be, they proceed out of this. No matter what poetry may be given you to articulate it, the encounter with the divine, communion with God, is a transcendent, a transparent experience, which is first the experience of consciousness about consciousness that defines the profound inner depths of what it means to be a human being. This is why I have to call it something like profound empiricism, for every man, as Bultmann says, either knows or can know himself precisely what I am talking about and what has been said with one set of poetry or another since the dawn of man. The church has struggled with this as the foundation stone of a total understanding of life. If someone wants you hardened old revolutionaries to point to signs of the renewal of the church, you may say "Lo, here" and "Lo, there," but the basic sign of the renewal of the church in our time is man once again becoming aware in the deeps of his being of communion with God, from which happening all authenticity within an individual, a people or a culture proceeds.

7. Now, you are going to have to be watchful. Up to this time, you have not had to guard against Satan. But from now on, you have to watch for the cloven hoof moment by moment. There is nothing ethereal about this. The man who invented the poetic image of Satan was a genius in the area of religion and consciousness. Satan is the Lord of this world, and therefore, because he is absolute sovereign in this world, he never, in this present time, has to show himself. But you let one puff of awe take place, and he has to be there. If I were that Dr. Lao from the movie we saw and could just make a pass which produced a hunk of awe right here before your eyes, then you would see the one with the cloven hooves. He not only appears in awe, but he appears every time that awe appears. For awe is the presence of his mortal enemy -- God. When the awe appears, there is Satan in the midst of it, trying to protect this realm over which he is presently sovereign.

8. Do you remember when you experienced the Cabaret this summer, that at certain points, in the midst of whatever was happening there, as awe filled the room and bathed you from top to bottom, there stole over you a strange kind of uneasy fear? Although you could not put a label on it or identify it, every one of you went out of that room with that powerful, strange, unidentifiable fear within you. In my case it lasted three days. Now what that is is the smell of sulfur. When it happens to you, you know Satan is at hand.

9. When you become a man of faith, a God­man, one thing that you are very clear about is that you do not have any problems anymore. I like these days to play a little game around here. There is a television show with army people, and when the first sergeant does the roll call and cannot hear them answer, he says in a loud voice, "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" These days, when people come and sit across the table from me and begin to unload their problems, although I do not do it directly, down inside I find myself wanting to say, "I CAN'T SEE THROUGH YOU!" (Usually I say it in plainer English.) One thing you cannot afford in an army such as this, is somebody with problems. Why, it would suck up all your energy, night and day, if we were not, through the Grace of God, delivered unto problemlessness.

10. You only have the one contradiction, and that is Satan. And all Satan is after is to occasion apostasy in you. Therefore, he never attacks you on the moral level. If you are attacked there -- and I hope some of you are a little more than you have been -- that is good, but it is not Satan. However, I want to take that back, because Satan never comes intending to show his hooves or his tail or his horns. He always comes disguised as an angel -- perhaps in the form of your father, saying that you have been a naughty little girl. If you say, "All right, Papa, I won't be naughty any more," then Satan has got you. For, however he disguises it, Satan attacks only on the ontological level, only in terms of your relationship to God, not in terms of any other relation. You are going to have to watch this carefully. You are going to be driven to invisible apostasy. And some of you in this experience are going to fall by the side of the road.

11. What happens then, if you have beheld the light and then surrender to apostasy, is inevitably one of two things -- both of which finally are one: you become either a benign or a malign zombie. No matter how you put rouge on your face or comb your hair or get a nice blue suit, you are still a zombie. You can fool with anything in this world except the awe; you dare not play games with that. This is at the bottom of consciousness for those who dare to make such a journey as the one we make. You fool with Satan at your own peril.

12. I get extremely irritated at Roman Catholic priests and religious and at Protestant clergymen who think for one moment that they can ever give up being a priest, a religious or a cleric. They are fools. I know more zombie priests and clergymen and sisters and brothers than I can remember. It has been a long time in Protestantism since those who wore the cloth had any deep understanding at all of what it meant to be a cleric. What called them was Aunt Susy or some hope to be somebody, not the fire of heaven. Of course, if you never were a priest or brother or sister or clergyman, then what I say does not apply to you. But you see, you should not have come here this summer, for whether you like it or not, even those of you that fought against it with every fiber of your being have had the finger laid upon you. That is just the way it is. I mean to be warning you in the days ahead, of all that this means.

13. Last summer, we had religious exercises which we termed "visits" to the Other World which is always in the midst of this world. What moments they were for me! Like Teresa, I learned more than I will ever be able to put together. Yet you could no more have got me on a visit this summer than you could have shot me to Mars. It was no longer a land I could visit because, strangely enough, I had become a citizen of the Other World. I could be a guru and help a group of people who had not reclaimed their citizenship in that reality to go on a visit. In fact, last year when I was running such religious exercises, I frequently would get so lost in the situation that sometimes I felt only I had gone on that visit. Or I went with them, which is never good for a guru. But now I am a citizen of the Other World.

14. Do not understand this as anything static. To be in the Other World is to be constantly becoming in every life situation. To become a citizen of the Other World that is in the midst of this world is to behold in every life situation the wonder and the glory of God, to grasp the dread and the fascination that is awe. Who I am at this moment who can say these things is a soldier. Because I am a citizen of the Other World, I am a soldier of the Other World in an army with God, and from now on God, for what little it is worth, is going to have my assistance in the eternal fight he has with Satan.

15. Now for some foundational matters. We are revolutionaries. We are not establishment, not even ecclesiastical establishment, although some of us have direct functions there. Nor are we civil establishment; we are revolutionaries. Some of my younger colleagues who got attracted while teaching LENS to the sophisticated members of the establishment -- and indeed we pushed hard for a kind of sophistication -- began to get enamored of the establishment. But if you begin to get enamored with the establishment, you are lost. You have to be able to move among the establishment with all the sophistication they have, invisibly, but maintaining your revolutionary stance or that very establishment is lost.

16. We are structural revolutionaries. We are the ones who love the establishment, who live in the establishment, whose being is in that establishment. We are revolutionaries from within, and so it has been from our very beginning -- and over my dead body will it be anything else. Therefore, as we make one step after another forward into the future, we must at the same time make one step backwards into the traditional past. This means that we make sure we are absolutely grounded in the tradition of humanity and in the tradition of the Church of Jesus Christ. In these next two or three years, as we suddenly begin to go twice the speed of light and strike on many different horizons, regrounding ourselves in the tradition of the Church becomes more and more crucial and imperative.

17. There are, I believe, four foundation stones which at this moment in our life as a movement we must keep clearly before our eyes. One is that we believe in a personal God. I want you to hear that: a personal God. You understand that we spent all of our life fighting against the decadent image that came from Leibnitz into the Boston of this country and turned into a philosophical personalism that made God, as they put it, nothing but a blown­up human being. We have had to combat that without mercy. For there is no such reality, and as long as that image was in the minds of men, any personal relationship to God was utterly impossible. We had to stand opposed to that -- and yet, what our fathers have meant from the beginning when they talked about a communion with the divine or about a personal God, we are having to say again now in the language and in the poetry of the post­modern world. This is why you deal with such rubrics as Buber's "I-Thou" in depth seriousness.

18. Secondly, we believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. You know that we have fought the philosophical metaphysics that are antiquated in terms of the world we live in today, but our aim and our stand has always been and is exactly that which our early fathers took upon themselves in the Church: that of the two natures in one person. This reality that is deeply human and transcends the rational itself is not a word in history, it is the Word in history, it is the transcendental Word in history. In RS­I you yet that very clearly spelled out.

19. The third pillar that we have to have in our focus as we move into the future is the category of Life Eternal. Again, you understand that we spent thirty years, and others before us, trying to take to pieces bit­by­bit that monstrous perversion of the last part of the nineteenth century called "the pie in the sky when you die by and by." We cut that part of the two­story universe to pieces. We had to say "No" to that deep sickness in the Church. But now every man has grasped that when man dies he dies dead, and that we have not got the foggiest notion of what is beyond that, in the sense that the nineteenth century tried to claim we did. Now we know that death is utterly mysterious and is just as mysterious as life is mysterious. Thereby we can begin to talk again about participation in the relation to Being itself. I have called this "Endlessness." It is a state of being that you can know of now. Thomas Aquinas called it the "rapture," or the "preview." It is the awareness of being permitted to participate in the endlessness of Being itself. I believe in our time this will be understood as the recovery of what in the past was authentically pointed to with the poetry of "immortality."

20. The last pillar is the supernaturality of the People of God. You and I, by the grace of God, have come to see the Church as an eschatological reality in history upon whose back the very civilizing process moves. Granted, the Church is a temporal­sociological reality, but in the midst of that is that which sets God's people off from every other sociological institution, state, family, club or people. These are the people without which there are no people, and we must make this clear. One of the things I am concerned about here is that we find a direct, practical, concrete way of being of service as the movement to the Roman Catholic Church around the world. Just being reminded again, by these reports you have given, of the size of that body -- over 500 million -- is something I am grateful for. Because a revolutionary, whatever else he is, is not stupid. That is literal -- he does not live long if he is. And if you do not have yourself clearly grounded in these great traditions of the Church, you are not going to get past the second door .

21. Of course, you do not go out and say this in RS­I. You would not wake anybody up in 400 years by dealing with what I have dealt with today: it is this they are hiding behind. What we have done is to take these great categories and to see through them in terms of the world in which we live. That is the fodder by which you give this person and that a chance to live his life in Jesus Christ. You talk about these things the way I have when we are together here. Back when I was teaching RS­I, I also always made it a policy that if somebody asked me a direct question using this language, I would say "Yes", and then I would attempt to explain what I meant by that. I am dealing here with hard­headed tactics; if you are not clear that you are grounded in these realities that the poetry of another age in the Church was trying to point to, you have no grounding at all in the Church. Let us not make the mistake of thinking that what we are doing is any more than the metamorphosis of the poetry used by the Fathers who went before us and without whom we would not even be here with a possibility of being God's people.

22. The next thing has to do with missional matters. It took us three years to get to this summer. When those social process triangles came into being, we were on the way to this summer, and yet this summer itself is on the way to somewhere. I believe it is on the way to the concrete realization of a New Social Vehicle on a global level. If you are like me, you feel battered and bruised by this last year. But we have made the Great Turn. That became evident for me this summer. Now when you look ahead, way down the road, you see the New Social Vehicle on a global basis.

23. We are not tired liberals. We are tired revolutionaries. This is not dream we are having: we mean to go and do it. That is going to drop some more of you out, who never knew until this time that you were nothing more than tired liberals. We intend to move and accomplish this. To see precisely how you are going to march there -- this is still painting with a big brush -- you have to start with what you learned two summers ago about the imbalance triangles. that is about the overextension of the economic, the castration of the political, and the smothering of the cultural. We are on the way to the political now. I have a friend who is a tired liberal. He never seems to get tired of picking up the next little gimmick. He thought that marching on the political was just going out and getting into politics or just Yankee activism, taking some big or little problem in a community and attacking it directly.

24. That kind of naiveté you had better get rid of. If you do not know what I am talking about, you are going to have to grow up in a hurry. We are out to catalyze a new society on the globe. To do that you are going to have to march on the political, but you have to be Dr. Lao or you had better stay in bed. You are going to have to out­Pimpernel the scarlet one. No forty­fives blasting directly at the target of the political are going to do anything. You learned also two summers ago that in our kind of work, if you want to hit this pillar, you shoot over there. If your tactics are not highly indirect, you are not going to cut down that oak tree.

25. You also know that you are starting from the top of the top triangle, the one that has to do with the myth that man is. The most important thing you have done this summer, I believe, has to do with the direct pressure points. You start your march with the pressure point having to do with myth, and when you get through with your march with respect to the political, you are going to be standing in the lowest one of those nine pressure points -- the one that has to do with consensus -­ how you make it possible for local man to make his own decisions about the destinal processes of history. In between those points, you have to split your forces. One of them is going to go right and strike the next two pressure points: social morality in the final meanings triangle and formal methods in the humanities area.

26. This means that you are going to have to re­do the educational processes of the world -- nothing less. The educational structures of this world have been called into question. Now you can say, "That's too bad." But from the point of view of a revolutionary it's too good! This gives you a fantastic opportunity. I also think that the idea this Assembly came up with, of the High School Religious House, is just out of this world. It means taking our seventh, eighth and ninth graders, getting them together in a religious house and sending them to the public schools while, as in the Faith and Life Community in Austin, we run our own educational system at the same time. This is to get at the problems of becoming an adult at least six years before you became that age and an adult. It has to do with creating new structures that hopefully will catalyze the whole system of education .

27. Another part of that thrust into education is the LENS course. We don't go around saying this, but it is nothing more than a combination of Social Morality, out to re­do the morality of our world today, and an equipping of people with the methodologies whereby they can creatively impact society with that new morality. The way in which we deal with the economic dimension is to give people there a new morality, in which they can grasp not how to strengthen themselves, but in total responsibility for society, how they can pump up the cultural and the political so that they are as large as the economic. That is the resolution.

28. The other branch of this march goes through the community and the individual roles, to the spreading of information, so that down in the political the two forces meet, enabling local man to participate with other local men in the kind of consensus whereby all men in principle can decide what it means to be human and what the future ought to look like. As a broad picture, that is where I see us going.

29. In the next year or two we are going to get clear about the relationship of the imbalances of the social dynamics and the ideological bias that is invariably there. If we attack in terms of the imbalances, we are going to discover something that we never dreamed of -- that when every part of society is dynamically related to every other part and experiences responsibility for one another, then there shall be found right at the center of that balance, the ideology that "all the earth belongs to all the people." Why, Marx would turn over in his grave if he heard that!

30. Now, how concretely are we going to do that? Dr. Lao showed us how, and Uptown 5 picked up on that and did miracles all over the place this summer. I happen to believe that in four weeks we did in this community what it took us four years to do when we were starting 5th City. The way they did it was just to perform one miracle after another after another. If we do that social vehicle for all the world, I have got myself some miracles, and I hope that you have been getting yourself some as well. We have to create at strategic points around this world the most shocking sociological reality that anybody ever saw. One start is those billboards across the street. Just supposing that someone were to start in New York City and see one of those, then go on to Philadelphia and see another one, to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, finding them in all those places. That is what I mean by a miracle. Along this line, suppose that you and I forge a kind of LENS course for the elderly and teach it in all of these vegetable gardens they have been stuck in -- there must be 500,000 people there -- we would rock the world! I could go on with the Cabaret. One of the things that has always impressed me about the Great Awakening was the fact that the people would break out singing just walking up and down the street, in Boston, for instance. We have to get the world singing again, and that may mean that some of you have to get Cabarets on tour in Tokyo and around the world. They are waiting for this in every city. When you are serious about doing something, it is simply a matter of figuring out how to pull off one miracle after another. It is not whether you can do it or not.

31. In these next ten years, I do not know how you can be more excited, but I believe you will be more excited. Somebody told me the other day that the most interesting thing that she grasped about herself is that she used always to be bored with life, and now she is not bored at all any more. That is the most phenomenal thing about us: we are not bored any more. But maybe five years from now you will look back and say, "Boy, I was really bored during Summer '73."

32. This last year was something like being on a 747 half­way across the Atlantic with a fire in the cabin. This next year I believe is going to be more like being on that 747 when it is caught in a cyclone. You remember some of the bad storms you have experienced in a plane. Every bit of it quivers, and you do not see how a wing can stay on any longer. That is what we are going to experience. You sensed this in the reading of these resolutions out of the work you have done. We are going to take off in a steep climb into a new orbit this fall. And that is going to rock and reel this 747 in ways we have never experienced before. A lot of you are going to fall off or get scared and jump off. Given the amount of work this is going to add to what you are already doing, only a psychotic idiot would board such a plane. Think what it would be like if we were not so steeped in problemlessness!

33. That brings us to the practice and to our primary contradiction. This is as clear to me as ice. Although there are a lot of little things, it is only one thing: trained troops. We never ask anybody to come to intern, and I hope that we never will. But I want to beckon just a bit. If you have given any thought to one day coming into a religious house or to Centrum to be trained for however long, I say to you with every bit of passion that I can muster, this fall is that hour. If this is too soon for some of you who are not hardened revolutionaries, then this year is the time because this is the year we move. This is the time for those to move who love the Church and want to see something done to it because they love the world and want to see the Church doing something there. The business of regional leadership is quite beside the point in the great march of God. It's like the old days when the British used to come in with one wave after another, and when one in the front ranks was shot, another stepped in there and took his place. I have discovered, as I have watched over the last twenty years, that when one came out of the region, another one would rise up there, although the one who left was always sure that there would be nobody else. And do not say that we cannot pull people out of the local church because you know that the day after tomorrow we are going to be sending them back to the local church in force. Of course you have to have some that stay there and keep the home fires burning until a new flame can be brought. But I do not worry in that area; now is the time for the troops to be trained. That is the only contradiction we have.

34. Now this last item is a very practical thing. I do not know yet what a religious is. That does not mean I cannot talk about it. But how, in this postmodern world, we are going to get this clearly said to ourselves, I am not yet clear. Yet I know that whenever there has been a great step forward in the civilizing process, behind it in whatever form was the recovery of the everlasting dynamic in history which I point to with that category "religious." The religious are the revolutionaries who, though tired, do not throw in the towel. This summer, a great many of you, maybe all of you, without understanding what a religious is, nonetheless grasped in one sense or another that you were a religious. You did not need anyone to tell you this; you knew the claims upon your life and the experiences of your life.

35. But that is dangerous. A religious who is not somehow contexted, who is not somehow structured, who is not somehow provided a climate, is destroyed. I believe with a passion that the traditional formal orders of the Roman Catholic Church have got people dying like flies today because they have not fulfilled those three things. If you know even vaguely what I am talking about, that is dangerous. I am also convinced that you do not sit behind a desk and think yourself through as to what a religious is. You have to start using yourself as a guinea pig.

36. I believe that many of you ought to write, if you will forgive this, a sort of a "Dear God" note, in which you say, "In the midst of not knowing what it means in our day, I am willing to begin to experiment for the next quarter or the next year with what it might mean for me to be a religious." Now if you do this, you have to have a structure. I do not want to go into detail on this. It will have to fit into any other structure you have because this is not something apart from other structures, but within them. I take this extremely seriously.

37. I do not want to sound too fearful, but I am afraid of what happened this summer if one gets careless. You are going to need several ways in which to do this experimenting, and that is what a rule is. A rule is the means whereby you say to yourself what you are. Even when you are experimenting, the crucial part of that experimentation is probably the rule. I am going to suggest this simple one. First of all, you wear a sign -- for you are a movemental religious. Perhaps it ought to be this symbol of the global guild and of the Great Turn. That is your habit, and a religious who is not in a habit can no more be a religious than fly to the moon. If you do not have the symbol, you have not the slightest chance of knowing who you are.

38. Then, if you are going to write one of these letters, you are saying to yourself that you will attend mass or some form of the Christian liturgy with a body of people not less than once a week. Without that, you have not the slightest chance of being a religious. Although it can be in any of a million forms, without that sense of participating in and maintaining that drama without which history is not history, you cannot be a religious.

39. In connection with worship, you need to have a solitary office. Although we have experimented for years on this, there is still much here that we do not understand. But I want to suggest that you forge your own solitary office, with the one commonness being that for this quarter you read Teresa. Whatever office you do or however you do it, you read Teresa. As a matter of fact, I am going to have somebody here lay it out week by week to see what we come up with. Then, any of you come down to my cubicle; I am going to put up a box and you put your note in there with your name and address. Then, what I am going to do, for I plan to work in this area myself, is to correspond with you. If this works, this first quarter, I want to hear about it. Maybe we will do Augustine's Confessions. It has been a long time since you read that, has it not?

40. The fourth one has to be vague, but you get yourself into some team or cadre relationship, whereby all of you is directed towards a revolutionary task, whatever that may be. You are lost without this. By team relationship I mean that in which there can be corporate discipline, corporate accountability, and in which there can be the possibility of fellowhood. But I do not mean by this any sitting around liking each other. I mean the kind of fellowhood that happens exactly when a body of people are not concerned about whether they like each other but are busy sweating, accomplishing a task together. What you experienced this summer -- that is what I mean by fellowhood. You will discover one day that that is fellowship in the Holy Ghost.

41. Last, you ought, in some way or another, and on a rational basis, to give some of your goods to the movement. I am not trying to raise money here. If you want to send a penny, that would do just as well for me. But get it into the movement. Your goods, as a spirit man, in this world, are your stored­up selfhood, and at this moment, with all the perversion in the economic dimension, you would not have the slightest chance of breaking through into grasping what it means to be a religious if you did not attack with the force of your being that aspect of the idolatry in which you and I are trapped, whether we know it or not. Your money is the stuff of your being, and I am interested in some way in which you can grasp that the revolutionary is not attached to the goods of this world.

42. This last is your symbol of poverty, just as your team is the symbol of obedience and the habit your symbol of chastity. Now write your "Dear God" note if you will, and put it in my office. Then one day this quarter I am going to write to all of you and say something more than I can at this moment.

-- Joseph W. Mathews