The crisis of our age is becoming blatantly manifest.
The religious foundations and the social framework that have defined
our global existence have failed. We live in a post-Christian
and a postwestern world. The crisis of today is a crisis
in humanness itself. Here is the clue to the contemporary concern
with the question of vocation and with the category of style.
Here is the key to the current drive for ordering of the corporate
and solitary religious life. Here is the clue to the conundrum
of radical discipline.
ORDER COUNCIL REPORTS: AUGUST, 1968
Ecumenical Institute: Chicago
The question of religious vocation is raised at every
hour in history, but most sharply at the hour of the collapse
of the currant social vehicle and religious mode. For it is in
the religious dimension of life that humanness is articulated
for a given era. Humanness then, defines vocation, Vocation, when
considered in its rich sense is always religious. This is the
function of religion. The articulation is made always by the People
of God.
The signal contribution of religion is in its inventions
of what humanness is. In any period any authentic religion offers
recognition of final mystery or it articulates what otherness
a man is finally faced with. It offers man a self conscious focus
to deal with his life experience. Its second contribution is the
story. Whatever the form of the story, it tells the secret of
fully human existence. It becomes the life story by which one
gages selfhood or unselfhood. The third contribution is a system
or mode of the ethical life. This deals with the practical decisionmaking
process of a man in relation to his situation and to the reality
before which he lives.
The form of the signal contribution of religion is
in its metaphor or its poetic image of humanness. The metaphor
is born from consciousness of one's own consciousness. Simply
stated, a man's actual life situation is the problem of how to
relate his philosophy about the way life is or his idea of life
and his ethical activity to his practical daytoday decision
making, It is at the point of bridging the gap between ones philosophy
and his practical activity that the metaphor functions. It is
the life metaphor stated in poetic imagery that allows for the
subjective response and the objective thereness to be synthesized.
Vocation in this context has to do with how a man spends his entire
life. This is the religious question. It is not concerned with
what disguise he wears as the religious, but that he be the religious.
The religious metaphor tells a man what he must do with his life.
The metaphor never grounds vocation in any particular but addresses
itself to the broad endeavor of whatever it means to be human.
In the most radical and general sense the man of religious vocation
is the one who perceives the chaos of his times and knowing the
way life is, sets out to construct the metaphors(NRM) that will
create order out of the chaos. The metaphors, in turn, inform
all men what it means to be a human being in the midst of history
(NSV). The task then, of religious vocation, is to create humanness
out of chaos.
STYLE
CONTEXT
Style is being. It is to be understood in the complex
of knowing, doing, and being, which define humanness. Man raises
the question of "Who am I?". This is his knowing dimension.
He raises the question of "What do I?". This is his
doing dimension. He raises the question of "How be I?",
not "why?" or "what?", but "How?"
From identity flows vocation and then style which is being. The
dynamic between these is seen in the radical discontinuity between
knowing and doing on one side and being or style on the other.
The second dynamic in this relation is that style or being is
the intensification of both knowing and doing which raises in
a third dimension the issue of identity and vocation. This means
that style is sheer symbol. It is the incarnation. It is nothing.
It is all.
DESCRIPTION
How then does one talk of style? First of all it
is the ordering of our time and space. It is the form we give
to our existence. Secondly it is an art form. It is our invention
of humanness, our painting, our play, our building, our poem,
our musical. This means in the third place that style is life
itself. It is our living and dying, never finished until life
itself is in, complete, finished, perfected. Finally style is
concrete, it is practical. Being is particular and specific and
individual. It is all there is finally to get your teeth in. Paradoxical
as it seems it is the transparency itself which is the only concretion.
Our knowing and doing pass away, our being goes on forever.
FUNCTION
Style can also be conceived under the category of
function. It is not simply the manifestation of the solitary spirit
journey, it is the means, the chart, the compass, the power. Style
is the stuff of civilization itself which is to say that it is
the only strategy of radical revolution. It gives the very climate
for thinking and the foundational construct of all revolts. It
by itself keeps the mystery within the arena, brings men to the
struggle, enables the incarnation of the divine.
STRUCTURE
Style has a discernible structure. It is five fold.
The first and second part of the construct is the selfunderstanding
and the missional election. Style only proceeds out of a task
and a word of basic orientation. The next or third ingredient
is the religious mode which deals with the means whereby we are
foundationally related to the mystery or God. The fourth dimension
is the social presence or our manner of existing in the social
vehicle, The relation between these two is the relation of "in"
but "not of"; and this is realized in the fifth, quality
of style which is discipline. It is therefore sheer symbol on
the concretion of concretion. It is the result and sign and determination
of both the social vehicle and the religious mode. It is the most
practical and the most ethereal. It is the white hot manifestation
of the Word of God and the role of the people of God.
CONCLUSION
Style then is authenticity. Our life and our death
is our mission. It is the word of the incarnation. It is the deed
of the crucifixion. These are the intensification of knowing and
doing. This is life. Indeed it is style. This is what is meant
by '"going to Heaven." Style is going to heaven or going
to hell. The greatest failure is still the failure to go to heaven.
THE ORDER
INTRODUCTION
The Order in its relations to the church and world
has a teaching, serving and contemplative function. The task of
the teaching order is to evangelize and train leaders who can
evangelize. The task of the service order is to establish signal
projects revealing the mission of the church and to permeate the
social structures bringing about their transformations The task
of the contemplative order is to provide structures of contemplation,
meditation and prayer for colleagues and colleges.
Throughout history there have been three types of
orders. The demand of our day is to experiment with what it would
mean to be an order that embodies all three styles.
With the emergence of a new age there is needed a
world wide forging of a contemplative people, who operate out
of a common rule with varied disciplines This new form of society
is a broad system of presence which impacts the globe with its
structured style. These nobodies are without task or accomplishment
in the world; and it is through their struggle to the conscious
before the mystery that others are enabled to order their lives
and create the new structures of society. Their only function
is to design and live a more human style which occasions the birth
and fruition of a new style.
WAYS
This new religious order would hold together a wide
variation of human expressions in a simple vocational thrust.
One may participate in three ways: the Cleric the Monk, and the
Colleague, all of whom would be based in a college. All three
live under the common rule of poverty, chastity and obedience.
The Cleric is that one who has undergone intensive
training, manifests the Style and is capable of nurturing the
spirit depths of a college. He has decided to live as the iron
pillar under corporate assignment to a college and cadre in various
life situations.
The Monk is that one who has undergone intensive
training, manifests the Style in terms of a life time commitment.
He has decided to incorporate himself in a House which intensifies
the style by its rigorous discipline.
The Colleague has sojourned and pilgrimed in the
style of the contemplative life, is sent to embody that style
in an extended form, and thus enables the Ecumenical Church to
become self conscious of the religious mode, the Denominational
Church to maintain the mystery, and the Movement to reincarnate
the presence in every geographical unit.
MODES
Each of these ways appear in three modal structures
for care and discipline: Co1lege, House, and Cadre. The cleric
and colleague are disciplined and cared for in the cadre and college,
the Monk in the college and house.
The college is the primary mode of contemplative
form. It is found at all levels from the local to the global,
being both mobile and located. Its discipline includes depth study,
accountability, obediences, and solitaries which are so designed
that they enable college members to confront the mystery and to
embody their struggle.
The House is the foundational sustaining mode of
contemplative form. It embodies colleges and enables them to experiment
broadly in the Universal Ur. The discipline life of the House
is such that it presses depth, comprehensive encounter with the
contentless Word.
The cadre is the local grass roots expression of
the contemplative form. Through it the new context is provided
therein the world is impacted, enabling the spirit struggle to
break loose world wide. The life of the cadre is such that it
allows the last fat lady to embark on the universal journey.
METHODS
The contemplative uses three methods: teaching, contemplation,
and serving in the world to develop new dimensions of human consciousness
and to build the next step of the civilizing process.
The task of the contemplative teacher is to enable
every human being to live in the very center of lucidity, to embrace
the contradiction and to feast on the absurd. He lives out of
the decision to gaze calmly into the abyss, to celebrate the chaos
and to embody the paradox. His power comes in enabling the human
community to embody that same decision.
Contemplation is the method whereby he gains distance
on reality. He sees beyond the appearances and breaks loose a
new imagination for the future. This new imagination gives the
human community a vision of possibility.
Serving for the contemplative is not achievement
itself. Serving is the method of bringing intentionality to the
situation in the midst of the contradiction, which in fact creates
BEING. This then becomes the symbol which frees the world to embrace
and participate in the contradiction of doing while forging out
the necessary deeds.
INTRODUCTION
In every age, man has taken upon himself the task
of ordering his existence. The 2Oth Century insight, that man
must be a perpetual model builder, raises the question of rearticulating
discipline in our time. This means that discipline is a sociological
category. It is the practical relating of man to his world. It
is the practical ordering of time and space. It is intentional
maturing of human life style.
I. THE ESSENCE OF DISCIPLINE
The essence of discipline of the religious is the
self- understanding in Jesus Christ which nurtures the presence
that empowers the comprehensive human revolution and embodies
the essence of humanness. This discipline concretizes itself in
a covenant that holds in being a radically revolutionary body,
and an emblematic community life.
MISSIONAL -- -The missional aspect of discipline
is three-fold. First of all it is a recapturing of a sense of
ultimacy in human existence through metaphors which point to the
ultimate reality. The task is to create the contemporary face
of God. This is the demand to which man must consent to discipline
all of life. Secondly, the modes of sociality are inadequate to
the demands of history. What we have known as humanness can no
longer sustain the new self consciousness that has emerged across
the face of the globe. New modes of sociality must be created.
Nothing short of this task is worthy of the demand to be the discipline
man. And finally, the task. is to bring consciousness to bear
upon man's own self consciousness. This imperative demands of
man a discipline for the sake of releasing global human creativity.
COVENANT -- Covenantal discipline, or the
ordering of time and space for the sake of a task, is corporate.
Every human being engages in corporate structures of a direct
function of the necessity of man to bring order out of the Universe
at every level of existence. First of all, every human being is
bound in covenant with Being itself. This covenant is the inevitable
expression of the fact of existence. It is the gift of Being itself
about which every man must decide, or to which every man must
take a relationship. Secondly, men are bound in covenant with
each other. This covenant is also the act of Being itself. Every
man is bound to life, and yet at the same time if free to affirm
or negate this corporate covenantal relationship to his neighbor.
Finally, within this corporate covenantal structure man is called
upon to take a self conscious relationship to Being, his neighbor,
and himself. In addition he is called upon to be faithful to the
concrete demands of his decision. The man who submits himself
to this discipline is committing himself to the Divine struggle
which is the only human mission.
PRESENCE -- Presence discipline is the embodiment
of the mission toward which the discipline is directed. The new
world being built finds itself manifest in the fabric of the disciplined
life. This covenanted community shows forth the new society. This
presence demonstrates an emblematic community style from which
every body politic must guide its reconstruction.
II. FORM OF DISCIPLINE
Discipline is not only the practical manifestation
of a covenant with all of history, a mission to be the church,
and a self understanding of life in Jesus Christ, it also points
to a unique relation to social existence. The organization of
a formal Rule, as a vehicle for discipline, allows for a concrete
description and analysis of the actual ordering of the corporate
life style of a missional body of people. The form of discipline
is the intentional ordering of the economic, political and cultural
life of the order, enabling the order to engage itself in mission.
III. QUALITIES: MISSIONAL POVERTY -- The qualities
of discipline are missional poverty, paradoxical obedience, and
religious chastity. Missional poverty is self conscious ordering
of the resources of each man to maintain and sustain the globe
in the human enterprise. To serve this end, missional ordering
establishes the pattern whereby we own nothing. All resources
are held in common and all common energies belong to the common
task. Nothing is fixed. There is no permanent structure and any
man can do any task. Within the confines of the rule, care for
every man is sustained by common funds which missionally direct
the common resources across the globe.
PARADOXICAL OBEDIENCE -- - Paradoxical obedience
is the tension between the community and the individual. One always
exists within obligatory structures with the possibility of decisional
freedom. The relaxation of this tension results in abstraction
from life rather than participation in actual decision making.
Obedience is always rendered between the polarities of seriousness
and nonchalance, between phariseism and libertinism, between moralism
and unintentionality.
RELIGIOUS CHASTITY -- Religious chastity is
the principle of willing one thing. Missional singleness must
he grounded in dialogue with all historical tradition as well
as oriented toward the future. Only the intention guided by the
inclusive is chaste; only in the covenant with God comes the freedom
to participate in the relative covenants of life. The demand is
to embody in each situation the posture which signals the next
mutation in humanness.
CONCLUSION
This, then, is the essence, the form, and the qualities
of the covenantal rule of a religious order, sent into history
at the midpoint of Century 20, actively committed to the creation
of the new social vehicle amid the secularreligious ethos
of the new religious mode. The goal of this disciplinary structure
is the mid-wifing of a new style of being. It is first the internal
life discipline of the men of faith whose self determined
burden it is to lay down their lives to hasten and assure the
coming of the new order of reality. Nothing other than the rigorous
corporate discipline can enable men to be the creative, lifedeath
affirming presence in history. Nothing other than covenant in
mission can overcome the radical disparity of the individualistic
willfulness which separates men one from another, and enables
them to focus their wills in a common, life-giving mission.
INTRODUCTION
All men have engaged themselves in the solitary dimension
of humanness. Wherever there is humanness, there is the solitary.
The degree to which a man participates in the solitary dimension
is the degree to which he conducts a solitary office. The solitary
office is therefore grounded in man's decision and in his life
stance.
CONTEXT
History is created only by men who unite in a common
deed, and who have made the decision to be responsible for the
whole world. The solitary office is the form by which man individually
actualizes that responsibility. It is the arena for the spiritual
discipline of the people of God which is manifest in a covenantal
rule. The solitary office holds the dynamic tension of the New
Religious Mode and the New Social Vehicle.
DESCRIPTION
The solitary office is concerned with the relationship
which man has to beinginitself. Humanness begins when
man is faced concretely with the dread of nonbeing and consciously
faces the dread of being. In the midst of these dreads arises
a depth fascination. In dread and fascination, profound human
awe before the mystery of being is found. The solitary is that
act of the will where man selfconsciously faces the abyss
and the facticity of nonbeing and being, the continual decision
of suicide or crucifixion, and totally responds to dread, fascination
and awe by affirming the world of perpetual change.
STRUCTURE
Man has always experienced the solitary within a
threefold structure of meditation, contemplation and prayer.
Meditation is the act of selfconsciously ref1ecting upon
one's actual and projected relation to the lives, deeds and wisdom
of those "ancestors" who inform and lend shape to his
imagination, consciousness and solitary struggle. Contemplation
is the act of probing the depths of man's being in relation to
the final mystery through the disciplined focus of the mind, body,
and spirit through particular a myth, rite, and symbol. Prayer
is the act of symbolizing and ordering the investment of man's
life as decisional relationships to and responsibility for the
totality of the past, present, and future.
FUNCTION
In the richness of the solitary, man grasps a new
relationship to his knowing. Standing ;resent to the transparency
of any system of knowing, he is aware of the fact that knowing
always reduces that which is un-reducible, orders that which can
never finally be ordered, and gives meaning to that which is finally
mysterious. The new relation is a shift in man's theological stance
which is not related to any degree of intellectual endeavor, but
to the Word in Jesus Christ. To reduce the solitary to some level
of intellectual astuteness is to engage in intellectualism. The
solitary office is not an intellectual exercise but a depth reflection
of man's total grasp of his function as a knowing creature.
In the power of the solitary, man grasps a new relationship
to his doing. Grounded in the comprehensiveness of life, rendered
by the totality of the self, all action is surrendered in openness
to new demands. The solitary is not a ritual to justify actions,
a form of moralism which manipulates social action, or a psychological
comfort in personal problem solving. The solitary does not enable
man to live his life but is the depth context out of which man
directs all of his doing.
In the depth of the solitary, man embodies a new
life stance as the one who has appropriated his own death, and
is perpetually open to the dynamic mystery of life. The solitary
is deeply grounded in the concretion of an individual's life.
The temptation is to abstract experience to a plane of unreality
or to engage only in aesthetics. If this occurs the experience
is isolated and void of objectivity. The purpose of the solitary
is not to allow man to be scintillated by his own depth self-reflection
but to enable man to continually decide his actual relation to
his total situation.
CONCLUSION
The secular, revolutionary and universal world of
the 20th Century demands that man bring into existence today a
new solitary office. The imperative of the transmutation of consciousness,
whereby man consciously forms his own consciousness, is to create
a new symbolic life. The solitary office, is essential to that
creation for it is the center of that new consciousness of consciousness
of consciousness. The secular world demands that man intentionally
forge out those symbols and patterns of relationships which allow
him to freely decide his own life. The revolutionary world demand
that man constantly forge new structures of civilization and that
he do this within a corporate eschatological group. The universe
demands that man participate in life as the comprehensive one
who stands before the mystery in the Word that all of life is
received and good as it is. The solitary is that which finally
sustains the secular, revolutionary and universal man in that
corporateness which creates humanness.
FORM
In the depths of life, man experiences the awefull
fear and fascination of the struggle to be human. Religious modes
throughout history have derived their form from the three fundamental
dimensions of this basic life experience of awe. Contemplation
is man's encounter with the abyss, in which is stands utterly
present to the final mystery at the center of life. Meditation
is man's encounter with the primordial, in which he dialogues
with the wisdom of his ancestors in order to continually inform
his struggle. Prayer is man's encounter with the demands of history
and his focus on the future of the civilizing process by assuming
responsibility for all that will be. The religious mode defined
humanness by enabling man to stand before the mystery, by articulating
the secret of human existence, and by providing an ethos out of
which he lives.
CONSTRUCT
As the basic instruments enabling humanness, all
religious modes have operated out of the same fourfold structure,
which includes an intellectual schemata, a symbol system, a social
methodology, and an image of unction. A belief system in which
man orders his basic life stance, his world-view, and his philosophical
presupposition is necessary to self-consciousness. Rationality,
however, is but one mode of selfconsciousness. Humanness
always manifests itself in myth, rite, and symbol which hold any
religious mode in being and are manifestations of that mode. The
mode must be given expression in concrete social practices, or
it becomes an esoteric system or abstraction. Functionally, the
mode becomes the articulation and expression of the relation of
a people to themselves, to the other, and to the final otherness
to which all men relate in some form.
PRESENCE
Every man in every age, regardless of his social
and religious context stands present to the totality of existence
in four fundamental ways. He is driven always to order the chaos
that surrounds him, to drive his consciousness to the edge of
the knowable, and to remain on the journey of increasing the sphere
of his consciousness. He is also driven to accomplish, to give
meaning to his life through participating in the noble deeds of
society, and to grasp his significance as related to everbroadening
the scope of his action. Yet knowing and doing finally are not
adequate. Man discovers in knowing that he knows nothing, and
that all of his knowing throws him over the abyss. He grasps all
his doing as impotent and so all his doing throws him over the
abyss, He is that which stands discontinuously from his knowing
and doing: he be's through the intensification of both which then
becomes transformed. All of this is the style whereby he stands
present to all of his life and therein creates history this style
is transparency.
CONTEXT
A new religious mode is required out of the turning
back in upon itself of the globe which is producing a consciousness
of the consciousness of consciousness itself. In the midst of
this man finds himself seized by the offensive word of the Gospel,
which requires a decision about his very life: he then discovers
that that decision embarks him upon a journey of spiritexpansion
until he is one with the entire creation and is even then being
superseded in the next step of the primordial march. Paradoxically,
he discovers that only with the inbreaking of the recurring event,
is he able to move along that journey. With his heightened consciousness,
and the progress of his journey, man sees that he has grasped
after humanness out of a particular primordial invention, which
is only one of several, each emphasizing a different, though equally
significant aspect of what it means to be human. This very awareness
is the creation of a new, universal invention of humanness (Ur),
out of both a new relationship to the pluralism of Urs and the
intensification of the uniqueness of each with the consequent
convergence of consciousness itself. It is out of this context
that a new religious mode has emerged.
INTERNAL EXISTENCE
Man's internal existence is that ground out of which
the style of the new religious mode flows. It is never to be confused
with subjectivism or psychologism for it reflects objective decisional
relationships of belief, disposition, vow and posture. Beliefs
in the New Religious Mode is the stance before the Mystery (Awe),
the stance of the Absurd Word, the stance of the Cruciform Deed,
and the embodiment of the stance in the Christ style. Dispositions
is the network of beliefs which rearticulate the decisional qualities
of humility, gratitude, compassion, and the courage to persevere
in these qualities. The vows are man's relationship to the defined
corporateness in the form of chastity, poverty, obedience, and
the steadfastness to these vows (stability). Posture is the internal
response to be the free man who dares to risk his lucidity, sensitivity,
and exposed being in his discipline.
EXTERNAL PRESENCE
The external presences in a religious mode are the
fundamental relationships that are held in being by a pattern
of practices. The objective symbols include myths, rites, symbols,
and the sacraments which express the totality of the final relationship.
The necessary roles are those of the guru, the pedagogue, the
revolutionary, and the prior who embodies and expresses all roles
and each of them as the situation demands. The corporates are
the religious bodies through which the Christ men dramatize their
life stance: the cadre, the parish, the congregation, and the
college, which is the training ground for the spirit journey.
The pieties are the activities by which the Christ man rehearses
the dynamics of his interior existence: contemplation, meditation,
prayer, corporates (e.g. obediences, tasks).
CONCLUSION
A religious mode is that ethos of a times and a people
by which a man is related to the final mystery of existence itself.
It is that style out of which his every relationship is defined,
whether to his own journey or the social vehicle of his age. It
is that ground out of which he is enabled to forge his own particular
selfunderstanding. The religious mode of our age, for the
first time in history, is the mode, not of a people, but of all
peoples. Nothing less than a global mode is demanded of this time.