Global Order , Council, Ecumenical Institute, Chicago, August 4, 1972

Mission of Religious House ­2

THE EXTERNAL MISSION

THE REGION (George Walters)

The four points in an outline or the religious house mission in relation to the region would be: (1) focus only on penetration; (2) expose the global relatedness in order to create the global consciousness; (3, all structuring is for the sake of structuring the spirit happening into every piece of the region's movemental frame (metro councils, regional councils, sector meetings, everything that moves, moves on the spirit happening within it); and (4) to journey track every human being. Journey tracking means systematically getting him structurally engaged, and that track starts when you get the list of names about five minutes after the RS­I course is over.

I want to expand a little on the first point, focusing on penetration.­ Penetration is the only way in which we can conceive of the galaxy being created and at this point in the movement's being it is the only thing which you ever celebrate. If there is ever anything you get angry about, it is when your penetration fails. If you raise $500,000, have four galaxy churches, and three million people at the regional council but you did not pull off your penetration courses, then you go into permanent despair until that is corrected. And that is effective whenever you begin to operate out of the long range strategic plan that has particular, isolated targets.

The difference between penetration as a machine and just doing penetration is that the machine has its targets timelined. For instance, the targets may be the 24 churches in the Oakland metro that have to be the 24 churches in the experiment whenever that becomes possible. The primary question is naming the 24 and moving on those 24 and then spreading from them to move on everything around them.

The fourth point under Penetration is that­all formulation is for the sake of penetration. You do not formulate so that people can have a new good feeling about themselves, or so that they can think that they have an edge on consciousness, or that they feel they have been given special permission to go and write their names in Heaven. A person has not been formulated until he has been recruiting 13 weeks a quarter. A human being is formulated not when he signs a covenant but when he becomes clear that there is not anything else to do on his week II's except to recruit. This is creating passion for the world in a human being that allows him to beat his knuckles raw' for the rest of his life, knocking on the doors of the last fat lady.

The second point, exposing the global relatedness, may mean that there is no other relatedness that exists. A region is its global relatedness, it just does not know that. Out of our wisdom this summer, that is the indicative of being on planet earth today. To expose that is to build within a region a consciousness of that relatedness that releases it to turn its human and financial resources towards the care of the suffering world. You have to focus that outside of itself. You can say as much as you want to, to yourself and to the regions, about assuming local responsibility, but there has to he that Joe Thomas Gang that shows up every quarter. I don't know how you are supposed to operate when those guys show up, but we decided nothing else was going on when they were in town. If you went to every nook and cranny in that region and showed global consciousness to every human being and demanded of him that he symbolizes the facticity that he is a global relatedness­­that is movement building. It is the way a region begins to sense itself as significantly participating in global destiny.

The third thing is structuring the spirit happening. Your regional structures have not the slightest concern with efficiency. They are only concerned with creating spirit consciousness within every human being, creating his greatness, his significance, his possibility to expend his one life, his possibility to celebrate his one pain. The attention that you pay to designing the structure of regional council that puts spirit into every minute of that council is a thousand times more important than any decision that that council makes. All the decisions are made in the presidium meeting the week before and are announced in the last five minutes of the council. The rest of the time is just sheer happening. We have played around with the ecclesiola format for the metro council. The metro council needs to deepen the spirit life and consciousness of those colleagues. It sings an hour, it studies an hour, it visions the future for an hour, and then it spends five minutes making decisions. After it has spent those three hours doing those three things, you can make all those decisions in five minutes because you have just swept away from the scene of history anything anybody would point at with the category "problem." That's how you keep Satan waiting for an opportunity.

My fourth point speaks of journey tracking every human being. Where we have failed is in grading participants after courses. I have quit classifying them as "colleagues, friends, or enemies" any more. I classify them all as potential spirit men. Too many times the apparent "enemy" has turned out to be your next galaxy pastor. Therefore, I simply look at where he is and ask, "What is the next step for each and every name on that list?" Then you plug that into the regional structures through those metro councils. For example, if you are clear that at this point in history clergymen do not know how to relate to laymen in being a movement, then you set up a clergy nurture frame that journeys them from that ignorance to full humanness. Then they can be plugged into your metro councils or your movement dynamic. There is no one that is lost until he is dead, and that was God's final love for him.

(David Scott) May I underline something? That first point, everyplace you find a business meeting going on, you have Just got to kill it. There is nothing worse than a business meeting, and one of the ways to kill that is to put a spirit happening literally in the timeline. You put a spirit happening right in the middle and then force that meeting to form itself around that happening in the middle.

(John Cock) I have a vivid image there. Once in Milwaukee they had a mechanistic thing going on in which they had a clock in the middle of the table. It got to the point they did not know how to stop. It was down to you had two and one­half minutes for your report and then the alarm would go off. Finally one day Charles Moore said, so it would get heard by the next meeting, "If I ever see that clock here again, I am going to pick it up and throw it against the wall." And the clock never came back. Something happened after that word got out.

(Claudia Cramer) For so long the region has been living out of the story that we were penetrating in order to do something else, or it was always, "Well, we have to get this over with." The gift of the breakloose this summer, in terms of the tactical systems, is that they have a brand new story that tells them that there is nothing else to do but penetration. Building the new social vehicle is penetration. There is no other story that they can ever live out of again. I am convinced if we do our job in terms of telling the story relative to the tactical systems, we are going to see an explosion in penetration. They have known that, but they have never had a way to say that. They always thought some day they were going to do something else, like be a politician.

(Bill Grow) Another way of talking about that same thing, is to say that penetration is a vocational calling, not a part time volunteer task.

(David Scott) But how do you get communicated to people that if you want to nurture RS­I grads, it is called penetration. Or another way to put that is, I know some people who have made it who did not have a nurture structure after RS­I.

(JWM) Yes, you know Claudia's remark on the brand new story relative to penetration, when she talked about "they," she included me in that. The most important thing that happened to me this summer was that I never again am going to be looking for something to change this society. I do not have to look anymore. This summer gave me permission to go on penetrating forever.

(Pat Scott) The other thing, to underline what George Walters says about penetration, is that if you are not careful when you say that penetration is the only formulation there is, then you begin to get involved in elaborate schemes of holding actions like this kind of thing and that kind of thing. Whereas if you stick with point one and point three, which is that in the metro councils, the regional councils, and whatever other kinds of meetings actually critical for the mission, you get all of the sustaining you need. It is like life itself tells you when it is time to have a spirit happening. That very well could be seen by the course calendar. You follow your course calendar and do what is required to bring that off and you do not have to build any other structure. The demon that creeps in there is creating other formulation structures, whereas the best formulation things you ever had were advanced courses and academies. All of a sudden you do not have anybody recruited for academy because you have all these other formulation structures sucking all the life out.

(JWM) I am reminded, as you talk, that Jesus answers this for us with the leaven. And the only reason why you do those galactic things is for the sake of penetration, so the church can move out and be the leaven in the world. That is what changes it.

(Ron Clutz) Concerning the fourth point, in terms of rating the participants, we found we had to Just cut out terminology like "turned on" or "turned off," relative to course grads. It throws RS­I into the whole motivational weekend kind of syndrome and enables you to take unseriously people that come out of courses with a deep life struggle on their hands. They are most likely to be your strongest colleagues.

(George Walters) That is where he is struggling! "Turned­on, turned­off." Baloney. He is struggling with God and the question is how do you enable that journey.

(Ken Hamje) One thing that goes very closely with what George said about "recruiting for thirteen weeks" is that you are never recruiting for a course, you are just dealing with an individual in his journey and where it is that he needs to be pushed and moved. If that means you have got to call on him thirteen times in the next four years in order to get him to a course, then that is what you lay to do. That is a continuous process.

(Sarah Buss) Everything is contexted for penetration, yet I think I would something to do with the Permeation dimension Although in a way around the edge for further penetration. That kind of thing has sometimes our role in the galactic thing with the church hierarchy because we were the o ones who could do that, in terms of the initial context, or something else.

(Pat Scott) If everybody took the thirteen weeks of penetration thing seriously, then continental office would not have the problem of the bell­curved calendar I all the courses bunched into the fourth, fifth, and sixth weeks~of the quarter You are free, then, to have a course in the first and eighth week.

(Bob Porter) What George said about global relatedness needs a concrete sign and that is the global course calendar. It has to be clear how having a course St. Cloud is related to having a course in Tokyo and why each has showed up in global penetration scheme. That is the sign of global relatedness.

(George Walters) In San Francisco we have found it is helpful if you have a goo recruitment model, one that is grounded effectively. The RS­I model should he looked at carefully. It has revolutionary implications for the whole movement.

(JWM) Sarah mentioned one thing that I think would be another crucial point in this area. In the regions you have. to cultivate the establishment, both the religious and the civil, but again that is for the sake of penetration. It is not for the sake of getting the approval of people for you to do your work. Why, how could a revolutionary possibly get approval? Mow could he? That is not w} you are after. You are out to neutralize the establishment enough so that you can go ahead and continue your penetration. If you happen to bump into one who is at heart a fellow revolutionary with you, well, "Hallelujah"' You are not out to convert them, to make them revolutionaries. That is not their job. Nor are y~ out to get their blessing for the sake of their blessing. It is for the sake your pene*ration. And that is the way you serve them and love them.

(Herman Green) You know, behind the four points that George made I would wan say that they teach for thirteen weekends. Any person that is doing recruiting is starting off making the journey in terms of being a pedagogue or a teacher.

(Claudia Cramer) And that is first teacher and nothing else. Any pedagogical structures that are not pointed towards active apparent participation are demo There are in this world pedagogical tutorials~that are for the sake of pedagogue tutorials.

(George Walters) We had to say that whenever you get up in front of the room in a pedagogy tutorial, you are the first teacher at that moment. First teacher, a classification, has nothing to do with the quality that is expected of you when' you stand up. You know, someone would get up and slop through something and and his justification was, "Well, I'm only a fourth teacher, so you really didn't expect anything of me." And so we had to start by saying, "No, when you stand up there, you are a first teacher, and everybody in this room is a second teacher, and their job is to bring YOU off as a first teacher."

(JWH) I repent. I see something I have never seen before. I wish I could go back ten years.

A girl from Gary had told herself after going to only one guild that she was not going to be a pedagogue. We let her do that and let her recruit in Gary, do nothing but recruitment, and she finally burned out.

The other perversion is saying we need a special pedagogy for people in our local church, or for the galaxy, or for somebody else. What they mean by that is a watered­down style, and watered­down pedagogy, and watered­down preparation.

(Gene Marshall) There is a nurture principle here. The divine comes first. The first is the spirit happening to the human being; and the second is plugging him into the missional corporate structures where he can make his contributions; and thirdly, giving him the skills and the context necessary to assume reasonability for the other two.

(Pat Moore) I would like to second what George said about metro meetings. If you take that and flip that into penetration, then we would not have any more reports that we made a thousand calls for such and such a course and did not get enough people to have it. If you build the spirit with those who are doing the calling, you will get the people recruited. It is when you get up tight and think, "0 my God, we have to get these people out of this meeting and on the road," that you cannot win.

(JWM) I never dreamed that today we would wrap up the philosophy of the region, but I think we are close to it, just in these few minutes.

(Kathy Zervigon) Relative to the global relatedness, I think the image of sending people out, or constantly sending people to Chicago for internship, was one of the most crucial happenings this year. It dramatized the relationship to the globe.

(JWM) Yea, and let me say a word on that. You be sure you get in the mind of everybody in the movement that you are not prepared to do anything until you come to Chicago. You get what I moan? It has nothing to do with whether it is good or bad. It is the symbolism that you are not really ready to move until you come to Chicago. Every morning when you get up you have got to say your house is nothing, or that how e is not going to make the contribution to history that it needs to make. I think that is a good point. You keep that as simply sacred.

(Bruce Bauknight) While we are on the pedagogy tutorial point, I have discovered that people tell themselves that they are practicing teaching RS­I. Or the question comes, do I pretend these are people who have not had RS­I? Either you are teaching RS­I to the group before you, or you are not teaching RS­I. There is nowhere else to stand.

(John Cock) I would like to talk about what some people have called the "circuit ride." This is where you have to decide who the hundred movement people out there are and prioritize them. Then you go visit those people. Maybe you pick off thirty or forty a quarter. You are going to make your ride and they are going to know that you are making your ride to do one thing, and that is to come out and see where they have come in their journey since the last time you stayed with them. It is like they have the candle burning. They hear you ride into town and they stay at home and cancel all other things because their spirit father is coming around to hold them accountable, and to help them make the next decision about their journey. You are taking those people absolutely seriously about the vocation for their life, and it is one of those calls where you do not ask them to do anything. You are coming to them out of a deep concern over their journey. Then next week you can get on the phone and say, ''Bill, you need to do some recruitment. Get out there and get in gear'" But, without that sort of deep nurture, you cannot call Bill every week on the phone and say, "Bill, get out there and get in gear."

(JWM) Yes, I think this has got to get in there. And remember, being a prior has nothing whatsoever to do with spiritual nurture In the first instance, when you are doing spiritual nurture, you have a guru's hat on. There has to be a part of that time when you have a prior's hat on, not a guru's hat. I was trying to think of some illustrations. Sometimes I come up here and I am a prior; and sometimes I come up here and I am a guru. And you must not get those roles mixed up, because even though after you say they are separate, of course they are the same.

(Herman Green) Would you say a little more about the roles of bishop and guru? The way I would try and say back what you have said is, in the role of bishop I am the one who holds the accountability and I am the symbol of the fact that we are in history. I do not know how to relate that and hold the tension there with the guru.

(JWM) There are times when you need to be a pedagogue, and that, in my mind, is growing them up a little bit. Then there are times when you are out to lead them into new spiritual deeps. That is a guru. Then there are times in which the bishop, in the way we are using it, is a symbol of discipline. And discipline is giving yourself to a calling, first of all. Then it is, I think, becoming your own man. There are times when I have come before you and you knew you were going to have to slay me or do what I told you to do. What that does is not take your freedom from you, but puts you at the raw edge of your freedom. And yet, do not get this mixed up. When I am yelling, I am usually phony; probably being a pedagogue. Priorship is not the yelling. A man, assuming he has integrity, does not do that unless he is sticking his life into that situation. That is the key to being a prior. Nothing more and nothing less. It has to do with whether your life is in it. I can disapprove of you deeply, but if your life is in the cleft of the Holy, who cares? The Prior symbolizes this.

(Kay Lush) The thing that has been engraved on my memory is your image of us backing up to Chicago, fighting. That has to do with defending the symbolic base. Somehow the people in the region have got to sense that they defend with us. It is not a we/they thing, or they will get cynical about Chicago. They have to understand that the polity system is within you. It is an internal stance they have to take, that they are running the movement, and they could come in to Chicago at anytime.

(George Walters) The key there is the way you ask them about going to Chicago. We have decided to always ask the question, "Have you been back to Chicago yet?" Never, "Have you been?" or "Are you going?" but, "Have you been back yet?" to symbolize that they are from Chicago already.

(JWM) That is good! If you keep this in symbolic dynamics, you will have no trouble. If you see relations with Chicago as temporal polity, then I have trouble, you have trouble and everybody else has trouble. Because if you are going to criticize a religious house, the first place to go to, if you want to be critical, is to Chicago and be critical there. This is no architectonic business. It is symbolism. Perhaps where it should have been was not Chicago but up in Canada, in Yellowknife. I am sorry now that when we left Austin that we just did not keep going north, to Yellowknife.

(David Scott) One of the related elements there has to do with how the religious house symbolizes the relationship to the entire thrust of the movement, as symbolized in Chicago. And that has to do with the one place we have the opportunity to dramatize that. That is, a religious house will be beyond itself, and that is in relation to the Thursday night or Friday morning phone call about teaching assignments. It is crucial, not Just for the people in the house, but for the whole region, for them to witness just utter, utter obedience to that demand. Most times when a "No" wells up in me, it is because that call catches me having not done my job. That is, the anticipation of having to go out and teach always accentuates the incompleteness of my models. The second thing that it exposes is that I to not really trust the house to carry on­without me. Once I have the "No's" laid aside, then the obvious answer is "Yes." But the cruciality is in terms of creating the kind of continental faculty and global faculty that we have. We do not have a chance in the world of a colleague in a metro saying "Yes" to a teaching assignment unless he has first seen priors drop everything and go teach.

(JWM) Yes! Chicago symbolizes your unity and without that unity you do not exist.

(?) A servant is a servant. Therefore Chicago or E.I. is nothing. People who wave E.I. flags in the region are some of the most destructive people relative to getting the job done because they make the issue E.I. rather than the church and the world.

(JWM) Yes, but what we are talking about is E.I. You can call it that rather than­Chicago, but do not ever pull down that flag. When there is attack there, you can be fairly sure it is Satan. Do you hear what I say? When it is an attack because of "E.I." you can be pretty sure that is Satan. That is where you draw your sword and defend. But if you always remember whatever you call that symbol­­Yellowknife, Chicago or whatever­­that is your unity. And you are the biggest joke in history without that unity. Without that global unity you are wasting your lifetime. But there is no sentiment here, why Chicago is nothing. There has to be a symbol of unity, that is all. While you are away two weeks, you do a little plotting of how Chicago prostrates itself before you when you come back. Yesterday's area accountability was the great symbolism of you prostrating yourself before your symbol of unity. Now, think through the way we gather before you the very lest intern and symbolize with great dignity our ­prostration to you and a lot of new ones that have never seen it before. This is going to be important.

(Jim Bishop) The practice of unity are not clear in going global. The polity of the Orthodox Catholic Church has great wisdom. In that sense Chicago is like Constantinople, or Rome. Each area will develop a symbol as well, and then the commonality for the time being, while there is a Constantinople, will be the area symbol. In Australia where there is fragmentedness of mindset and an 'everyone around headquarters runs everything" sort of attitude, for four years we have symbolically and intentionally never held our area presidium in Sydney. I did not believe we could have it in Adelaide under a gum tree, but that is where we had it once. We have had it in old unused storehouses, in ghost towns, in Anglican vestries in wheat farming towns, and in all sorts of places. We have decided we have broken that mindset enough, so we are now building Sydney as the center, and we will have the area presidium in Sydney. Now you can go either way. There is Chicago and yet it would not always need to be at Chicago.

(JWM) I think that in very right. Remember when we first talked about the global council we had figured out the air fares would probably be cheapest to Acapulco, Mexico. Somebody has said that the airline center, in terms of the cheapest place, is Beirut. Wouldn't it be interesting if we had one in Beirut?

(Joe Crocker) That is crucial, but it seems to me to be getting over a bit into the temporal. I think that we certainly need to hold to our area symbols and they will emerge. What I hear us talking about here, however, is the kind of symbolism that we hold in our interior without which we do not have globality. Somehow, in our thinking, we have to get that straight.

(Bill Alerding) When you are the prior, and you show up in the region, you are Chicago, sy~bolically.

(JWM) Let us go on to the next one.

The work in the galaxies and the Local Church Experiment can be captured for me in saying one thing: it gives people deep hope.

That deep hope comes from the experiment giving people a vision. Those working in the experiment can see that the local church is the key to releasing the civilizing process. The local church project, especially in the work of the new social vehicle, gives them back the importance of the church. They become the prior in the local church, requesting other people in the congregation to invest time and energy in that local church. This comes from seeing that it is crucial and that it has importance again. One need no longer apologize to people for asking them to serve on committees, and to work in their local congregation. I think that became most clear to us working with a number of doctors in one of the congregations. Everytime someone would ask one of those men to participate in some meeting or other you saw how much you were a victim to the story that we tell ourselves about the importance of a doctor's role in society. You would apologize several times about asking him to take a night off each week to come to galaxy meetings, or weekends to come to the galaxy sodality. Then we saw that it was much more important for him to become an RS­I teacher and learn to participate in the renewal of his congregation than to devote his time to the physical healing that he was engaged in. We began to see how crucial it was that the local congregation come off, and that came from seeing the hope in the future of the local church.

Disciplined corporateness gives this deep hope in the future. You see that in the disciplined corporateness of the tactical thinking of doing 12 tactics each week on a 4 year journey to accomplish your task in the local congregation. You see that your vision of the future can be realized, that it is not a shallow hope but something that can be done. I think of the woman who said, "You can no more renew the whole church across the world than fly to the moon!" Then she realized what she said. You see the similarity of the journey to the moon to the tactical program, and how the corporate discipline and the tactical thinking gives a deep hope in the future.

The spirit dimension is crucial in terms of how people recapture their deep hope. We saw this especially as the­­Psalm conversations, the Luke conversations, and the reflections on the spirit lectures began to become vibrant and exciting. People had risked their selfhood in making demands upon others in the congregation to participate in various activities, for they saw that the local church was crucial. They would move in on their friends in the congregation to get them to participate in the work of that congregation. Then the burden of being the priors in that congregation began to give them a sense of what the Psalm and the Luke conversations and the spirit lectures were revealing to them about their own life and the possibilities there.

Finally, RS­I is the anchor for the deep hope in the galaxy. We first realized this when we noticed that the statements of the contradictions and the strategic objectives were weak and shallow, and that seemed to be the major block in getting the tactics done well. We also realized that unless the whole auxiliary was working diligently in becoming pedagogues­­in pedagogy guilds and third and fourth teaching in courses­­they were not able to state what the contradiction and objective was because they saw it only in terms of structures. They did not hear the spirit issue underneath. Only in the continual wrestle that it is to teach RS­I are people able to deal with the objectives and contradictions in a way that makes the tactics really deal with the problems of the congregations.

(JWM) What else do you think we ought to have our corporate attention called to?

(George Walters) We ought to mention something about the people who are in your galaxy, or the sign that the movemental church is in the historical church. Their primary manifestation of that, outside of the galactic structure, is that they are engaged in the regional movement as recruiters, as leadership, as pedagogues, etc. They are not the auxiliary until they are under assignment in that region; that is, when they become the auxiliary they become the movemental presence within the historical church.

(Pat Moore) You are not embarrassed to insist that galaxy pastors show up at regional meetings or early morning things.

(John Cock) You have to create within those galaxy clergy a deep consciousness and awareness of the sickness within the clergy in the church today to the point that it happens to them that they care. It is not that most of them are not aware of that sickness. It just needs to be brought to their consciousness and quickened to the point that they see they could lead a clergy guild on behalf of other clergy in that area, or could go all over the region and make signal appearances, etc. This is one of the best ways we have found to get clergy into the movement. They see they are acting on behalf of the other clergy, all of whom would be going down the drain if somebody did not do something quick that begins to break that reductionism of, ''I just want my local congregation to come off."

(Bill Schlesinger) The best way of doing that is to take them with you recruiting a PLC.

(Tim Lush) Another way is to teach a PLC, to experience the risk that is involved there and to gain clarity on the problem of the clergy in the church today. You have, after he has been a 3rd or 4th teacher or a P.O. in a PLC, a different man, a man ready to risk a great deal more in the congregation.

(Sarah Buss) I think the ma]or point I would put there is that there is only the global/local, or there is no global without the local and vice­versa. That has to be concretized, as in the galactic interchange, teaching in the movement, or whatever. But if there is not that concretion beyond the local, you do not have a local church project.

(Carlos Zervigon) I think the galaxy has a critical role in regional and metro meetings. Our story has been, "You are the only sign of concrete hope for this region, and you Just have to tell your story every time there is a meeting."

(Barbara Alerding) What I call surging resurgence has happened to us in the galaxy in the last couple of years through grad visitation. When pastors go with us on follow­up calls of RS­I and PLC grads, fantastic things happen. They see situations where a man is standing alone without a galaxy. They see other situations where the sickness of the clergy is made evident, ones similar to situations in their own work in the galaxy where they may have gotten tired or fallen behind a bit. Then they see through that other situation the gift that the galaxy is to them in a way that nobody could ever tell them. Thus clergy resurgence happens in the galaxy through their participation in formulation and penetration.

(George Walters) In addition, the point of financial self­support is the primary symbol of the auxiliaries' decision to be the movement, putting their resources into the project every week, every month.

(Ronald Clutz) One more point I learned relative to priorship, that was a hard one to learn, is my tendency to get trapped in a kind of mediating role. I found that I had to get clear in my own mind that the people in the galaxy were as much under my priorship as the people in the religious house. And, while I could not operate In quite the same style with them, I had to be clear that that was the relationship. f)ne illustration is that when I walk into the rectory, the kind of decor in that rectory is my business. When you see a sloppy kind of sentimentality there, a demonic symbolism going on, you have to find a way to exorcise it. But, until I got it clear in my image that those people were as much under my care as the people in the house, I did not have any power to move.

(Claudia Cramer) I wanted to say a word about the finances. I have experienced that the only kind of problem with finances is our fault. There is never any reason why a galaxy is not self­supporting unless we have decided it. I think that one of the demons we have operated out of is we have told ourselves the story that the way to deal with the economic is to ignore it, when in fact the most concrete way we will conquer the tyranny of the economic for the clergy and the laymen is to demand their selfhood in financial participation. That is how you break the back of that tyranny. We just have to be hard on ourselves at that point, that we are condemning them to Hell if we do not claim that economic as a symbol of their selfhood.

(Don Cramer) Finanaes is as powerful a symbol as time is of the seriousness of commitment.

(Claudia Cramer) In fact it will release his time and the rest of his life, when he decides to participate financially.

(Jim Troxel) The prior at the galaxy meetings is the first one there and the last one to leave. He does not necessarily have to be up front doing any leading, but he does not have the same chance to create a spiritual happening every day in everybody's life that he would if he were their prior in a religious house. So the times when he is there have to he good ones. He has to probably say something directly to every person there, or somehow honor with his presence everybody there.

(JWM) I was thinking of Nai Wong Kwok. The day after tomorrow you are going to have to do what he pioneered in his church, and that is to have powerful visitations from his laymen going to other local congregations. I thought it was tremendous when they did not have a worship service one Sunday morning, and the whole congregation divided up in teams and went to visit the other congregations. I think as a tactician the man must be a genius. We have to think about this in the future. You could begin to get churches ready, and that would be recruitment for RS­I, which is the best way to prepare them.

The second thing is that we are going to have, the day after tomorrow, week day missions, three­day missions in local congregations, I think. We go in there and one night you work on the world, one night on the church, and one night on the spirit dimension that has broken loose in our time. It would be interesting if in each one of your areas you would have a week when twenty of these would go on. You have enough forces to just about do that, if you think of both the galaxy people and the house people and others.

Then a third thing, hefore we leave this. I was rather pleased with the group that met the last week of the Summer '72 Assembly to work on implications for the Local Church Experiment. What they did was sort

­­of half­way bracket doing immediately the parish tactics. I did not see it at the time, but it would be impossible to do that sensibly until we got awfully clear on those whistle points. Those whistle points, in my opinion, are one of these days going to draw together that whole next step. As a matter of fact, they are such that the permeation part, or the secular evangelism, could move tomorrow, and undoubtedly already is. The parish tactical system is going to be quite different than I imagined it would be, and it is going to be simpler. Glory Hallelujah!

Now, let us go on to the internal structures of the house.

I have been very well trained, it seems to me, as I look back reflecting. The first thing that we did when we got to Kansas City was to listen. We found out that there was massive unfaith and self­depreciation. (Now we have other problems, but we deal with them historically as they come.) I did not realize how well trained I was until this summer the Assembly found out that one whistle point is the myth. We had just intuited immediately that all we had to do in Kansas City was to create the story and the myth, and the rest of what was to be done would fall into place. I think that is the truth.

We did that concretely by taking all 7 of us in the house to Oklahoma to plan the next 40 years, 20 years, 10 years, 4 years, and 1 year for the region. A lot was really garbage that came out, but all of a sudden those people had a destiny. It had something to do with geography, and deciding that year how many people we were going to penetrate, and how many courses, and how many interns were going to come in. All of that was part of the myth that we concretely lived out of and evaluated out of for the whole year. So I would put that right at the top of the list. I probably will never begin another year as a prior of a religious house without taking the troops aside geographically and doing this job. Now that we are to have area planning out of the global and the continental context, we will need to get the area strategies mapped out so that we can take them back for our regional house year's planning meetings. This will let those people create and flesh out goals in that context, and symbolize that context for them for the rest of the year.

Secondly, penetration consciousness is another part of that mythology. Penetration is all we are and we do not need to be anything else. You can emphasize this structurally, we have found, with your time designs for Week I and Week II. We are a little unorthodox in the Kansas City House in that we take about 30 minutes in house church for people who have come in from a Week II of some form of penetration to tell all of the miracle stories that have happened to them. That symbolic reporting is always a happening. We also have one morning collegium a week where we do visioning in the area of penetration and formulation. Then on Friday morning we spend about 20 minutes to workshop the house's deployed order report, for the house to do the evaluation, always coming down hard on penetration. We work in penetration on Week II as well as many nights during Week I. The house knows that they are penetrators; the design tells them that they are penetrators.

Thirdly, we were very self­conscious about creating a goal for the number of new interns, realizing that we had to have troops to keep the war going. We created a lot of ways for indirectly allowing people to raise the question of interning so that we could deal with it. You have to put it that way, because it is not arm twisting. Somehow you get to a deep vocational question, and then to the concretion of how that spins itself out, and people will ask what the possibility is of a little special sojourning or interning or something of the sort. You take it up from there, always getting their permission so you do not go and beat them over­the head. In addition, you have to have a concrete goal. We set out for the year a goal of 25 more interns. I think the year is going to produce, if we do our work well when we go back, 60 interns that have come to Base or the house, or to those two new houses this year. The consciousness in the house is crucial. We had quarter by quarter lists of the people closest to making that decision. We thought through what to do every time we were riding in a car with them, and so forth. The house always knew that troop strength was part of the missional thrust.

Once you get them in the house you have another ball-game on your hands. I have learned a lot of things here. As the book The Ronin says, every man is potentially a saint, a fool and a devil. Your problem is how you are going to deliver the saint, from that hunk of flesh. The new intern comes in the house a fool usually, and is not purposely demonic or satanic, though he often demonstrates that style. So you try to hold the other two facets of his being back, to release the saint. My image is that it is like eating an artichoke. You do everything possible to rip off layers of the pent up being that will not get released naturally. Being just does not emerge naturally. It has to be stimulated and cajoled and whipped and everything else to let it loose.

The fundamental thing you are over against in a new intern and I know this out of my own journey ­­ is the integrity syndrome. I am always most conscious when I am dealing with an intern, that he is trying to project his integrity. I found out that I was working out of that when I was assigned to go and make development calls with a colleague. I would crawl under chairs, because that man so offended my principles, but the result was that he did the mission and I did not. So what you are up against when you are dealing with interns is that they are all hung up on integrity. One of the greatest things to do, therefore, is to get people up at 4:30 a.m. to get them to a collegium at 5:00 and do Lauds. This is one of the times you give a careful context for the canonical hours. It is that you just decide to live this day, and you decide to worship God at this time and in the awful situation that you find yourself in. sitting around this table.

House people have to deeply honor each other structurally. That means you make examples out of people. You have all the women burn their blue jeans; you make people wear shoes; you never let a woman come *o anything in the house with hair rollers on. Then women start wearing dresses, the men start complimenting them, and somehow everything is transformed.

In that same arena of the symbology of the house, I have decided, partly I am sure out of my neurosis, that the house is a symbol, externally in its appearance­­ in decor, cleanliness, etc. We lived out of the image "the Bishop is coming." And three of them came! The intentionality of the house's appearance was an impact upon them, especially for Bishop Yap (it happened to be just spic and span when he came). You find one of your fanatical people and have them running around lighting candles and picking up lint and cleaning off the tables, etc. It transforms people's images deeply. Also, celebrate often.

Finally, the best thing that you can do with internal structures is to teach the house to win. For example, one intern has been put in the structures where he will never forget that all he is out to do is win. He may do it badly at times, but we taught him concretely. We said, "You are going up to recruit that PLC and not come back until you do it. \' He did not believe us, but we would not let him back in the house for two weeks. He stayed and he despaired and missed his wife and yearned for home, but he learned to win. Now you do that, or do whatever it takes to dramatize that we are out to win. I liked what one of you said the other day, that the only rule we have is to win.

There are three major things about structural care. First, the house has to be bubbled in the deeps, and you do that more tangentially than you do structurally. You only have structures, I think, so you can have significant tangents, so that just that bubbling flows out of the deeps. Usually that happens best in a conversation. We have many ways to do that, both group conversations as well as individual.

The next thing you have to keep in mind is that you have to crunch them. The house was to be crunched existentially all of the time, like asking them, "When are you going to become a second prior?" or, "When are you going to be a first teacher?" You can talk about a great global something or other, but you have to find the hot button of each person and watch what it is­that is going to crunch him and hit it, often. It is similar to recruiting people for Summer '72. If you go you and tell them to come and build the world and a 40 year model, they will say, "That's great," but not come. If, however, you tell them we are going to deal with structures that are going to do something relative to their teenage daughter who is on dope, they will come.

The third thing to do after you have bubbled them and crunched them is you vision them in every possible way. One of the ways we have done this in the house is that we have named all of the rooms. We had people saying, "You know down there where Filipski (last year's prior) lived?" and that is just not helpful. It is much more helpful to have the "Bonhoeffer Room." All of a sudden the house remembers RS­I every time they see that written on the door. So symbolize the space. We put up a new wall and created a new room upstairs, called the Jesus Place. When we put up that wall we put up a tape grid of the globe that is 10 feet by 10. That is the first thing you see every time you come up the steps. That is visioning.

So most importantly: "Crunch 'em, bubble 'em, and vision 'em."

(JWM) I think John saw that he came at the matter of structures a little different way. Does anybody have a structural comment?

(?) Have Daily Office every day, and be sure that the orchestration is good.

(Sarah Buss) The key in a religious house is that you operate structurally. The temptation when there are only about a half a dozen of you running around, is to operate in terms of personal relationships­rather than structures. This is important in two arenas. First, use team structures so that you operate structurally in terms of care. That means that the symbolic prior always has a distance one step removed from everyone in the house, when he is playing the role of unit prior. This protects you so that you do not flip into head-beating or something. Second, in the stations again you operate structurally even if you only have a half a dozen people and you need to regroup 15 different ways. This means that the first prior does not go and do things himself in the first instance. Only as a last resort, when there is a failure he goes back and does his homework over again. He regroups and re­enables others to do what needs to be done.

In relation to going aside to plan, even when we get our 20 year and our 4 year and our 1 year timelines, this is still a critical ongoing dynamic. In terms of being out to win, you have to get the wisdom from your priors and find out where their passion and the passion of the people in the house is. Then it is out of that that you vision and create your tactics and mythology. That vision is utterly beyond anybody's immediate tendencies, but it is built out of the concretions that you have available to you, so that when you say that you are out to win that is not an abstraction. Furthermore, in going about winning you always focus on the external mission and not the internal life. For example, you could have problems with youth from now to the end of time, but you never let them utterly consume you. You keep bracketing them and bracketing them and bracketing them and dealing with them around the edges.

(Bill Bailey) The case of using structures to inform you of your tendency as well as your task seems to me to be a crucial point in there. The transparent design and structure releases the gift of creativity.

(John Cock) Most interns are operating out of efficiency and most of them are Pharisees. The structures have to be iron­clad, but at the same time you always have to be cutting across their tendencies to have everything down to the tick of the clock.

(Bill Alerding) On the other side of looking at the structures, one of the signs of knowing whether the spirit of the house is in the right arena is if they are worrying about missional problems, particularly in relation to the region. If you start hearing things like, "Well, I'm worried about the spirit of the house,)' or those kinds of internal questions, then you know that you have a structural problem. If your structures are working, then what you have on your hands is what you want to have on your hands, civilizational problems.

In reference to youth, I found it very helpful to sit them down at the beginning of the year and hold them accountable by letting them take over a collegium. In fact they took over two to report on their youth document. Then we worked out together how to hold them responsible to their own consensus about their stance. We decided that they are adults. Then we set a certain amount of time aside for them to do their study work when they came home from school, and they participated all year in every adult structure like every adult. We found that if you get the youth to work through their relationship to the house, get their consensus about their role, and treat them like adults, they become a magnificent symbol. They were a symbol all year to every regional colleague that came in that house. Every regional person that came in left saying, "My God, you mean that kid is 15 years old and he is talking like that, at one of those meetings, giving those insights?"

We have another kind of problem that has to be thought out in the future. What do you call youth these days that have decided to do more work than half the people you have in the house? You cannot call them interns and yet they are more fellows and colleagues than some of the people who have been around for years. That is a futuric problem that has to be thought out.

(JWM) I was going to talk about this two weeks from now, but probably it might be good to say it now. We intentionally have not had any youth conference this year on two counts. One is that after that great big flair of writing that document, there needed to be a time of utter sobriety, where they have time to think whether they are going to be what they have written, or whether that is just one more little breakloose of youth. Secondly, it has been in my mind to recommend in two weeks that in December we try to get our youth together again. But we will design it in such a way that it is not a youth conference. It will symbolize what they came up with themselves, the fact that they are adults. We want to create the kind of event where the youth would be gathered in mass, but a body of us, I do not mean two or three, would be in on it, and we would have a specific job to do. I hope it will have to do with planning next summer, or with organizing the data of this summer, or something like that. And we will ignore the fact that they are youth, but try to enable them to be what they said they were, and that is adults. We will not call it a youth council or anything like that. It will be a special council in which we need the wisdom of the younger adult in our day. We will try to get them back into the current that way. I am not saying that is what we ought to do, but that is the kind of thing that has been in my mind.

(Bob Porter) The most important thing about structures is the form that gets printed on a piece of paper. It is

a symbol of ordered intentionality, and it has to be something other than just scribbled out.

(Joe Crocker) We have found it most helpful to deal with the internal structures of the house before the quarter begins. Get out a manual, get it set out in a good art form, present it, just assume that you are going to work on the basis of it, and forget worrying about it.

(JWM) Yes, I was thinking that the structures, we have to remember, are only for the mission. They are not for the interior organization of ourselves, but only for the mission. Structures are sort of like that chute in the rodeo that they put the horse in, in order to saddle him up, in which you are "bubbling them, crunching them and dreaming them." I went overseas once and I screamed. I found people all busy spending 3/4 of their time organizing their religious house and therefore doing nothing. That burnt me up about as much as when we shifted to formulation, and people thought we did not have to penetrate any more. And all of a sudden there were no RS­1's taught at all. Then I never could figure out what we were formulating.

(?) When you double your regional courses, you tighten your structures.

(Sarah Buss) The arena we have not mentioned is the structure of the first prior. I do not know what all needs to be said there, but I guess one thing is that you do not have a religious house without the symbolic prior, one person or another, all of the time. And it is very apparent as we multiply religious house that it does not matter who is in that role, that we have the kind of wisdom and structures now that allow us to put anybody in that role. He plays that role and it comes off, not because of that individual but because of the whole religious house design.

A sort of flip side of that, and I­­think a particularly critical dimension, is the symbolism. I like the way Danny Kaye does it in Two by Two, when he is trying to get his troops on the ark, and they keep wanting to discuss whether or not that is really the thing to do. He indicates to them that the Lord did not tell them to discuss it. He said to do it. So he goes into this song about "NO DISCUSSION," and that is my image of the most critical principle there. Anybody in the house can be permitted to make any speech as long as they want to, but after the first prior speaks there is "NO DISCUSSION."

(JWM) I believe one way you can handle the problem of trying to be somebody is to decide somebody else is going to come off.

I was wondering how you separate structures and the spirit life -- now I know you cannot. I think that I would want to talk about the spirit dimension first in terms of the necessity of giving form to the spirit journey of the entire house. That has to do primarily with the visioning and anticipation of major events. I do not mean major in terms of bigness, but those occasions when you as prior and as a priorship dynamic decide that the bottom is going to be dropped out of the whole house dynamic, and, as we have already stated, those are always done for the sake of the mission. A body of people discover the depths of their own spirit when they are confronted, not just with the demand of the mission, but with the face of the enemy and the demand to win. There is no question that you always have a different spirit dynamic on your hand when you have selected a spot and picked the whole house up and moved it there and won. You have a different journey on your hands as a body of people, and that includes the priors.

The second aspect of the spirit dimension of the religious house is giving form to the spirit journey of each family and individual. The prior's primary tool here is the assignments. I do not want to water down John Cock's insight and wisdom in terms of the crunch, but I discovered that, in order to keep a bridle on some of my own propensities, I had to hold before myself that in the struggle with assignments you are out to enable a person to say the next crucial "yes." That does not mean that you hand him that which he cannot handle. It means that you are out to enable him to say "yes," not in terms of where he thinks he is, but in terms of where his actual spirit is. Now it seems to me that there is a difference in what I would call a creative crunch and the propensity in all of us to see our colleagues squirm. ­One of those has to do with spirit; the other has to do with the propensity to be destructive. That is why it is crucial to make assignments, not in terms of equity or ability, but in order to enable that person to say the next ­crucial "yes."

The third resource for spiritizing is your own journey. Thin is the place where we have talked about brooding. I would want to get this said to those priors that are going to be sent out. It has taken me a ion, time to get a handle on what brooding is: it is putting my life over against the corporate wisdom of us as a body of people and, out of that, producing models. Now I am using ''model" very loosely: a model could be a paragraph; it could be a spinning sentence. Furthermore, what I mean by the corporate wisdom of the body is something like the Other World, or like the reflections on Gogarten, or a book that the body has said we ought to be reading. If I do not take my own journey and push it over against, for instance, the Other World chart, then my propensity is to daydream, and what happens in the midst of daydreaming is that you invariably create cuteness. The corporate wisdom protects you from excesses of your own spirit creativity and keeps your creativity in the bounds of creativity rather than moving into what I call cuteness. For example, it has always struck me that doing Odysseys is the place where we lean closest to wanting to fall into cuteness. Therefore, if you dream up something to be done in an Odyssey that has not been done before, you only do it after you have checked every other Odyssey model you know about, and counted to 500 one number a day. The line between creativity and cuteness is a very thin line. That is why it is crucial that what comes out of your brooding is not ideas but something down on paper. If you stew the night before a collegium and you do not produce something visible, when you get up the next morning you are going to be in trouble trying to remember what you stewed on the night before; but if you write your brooding down and let it sit overnight you discover that it has a new edge. That new edge for me is the cruciality of brooding. It has been in this context that I discovered the scriptures all over again. If five years ago you had told me I would one day be doing bedtime reading out of the Gospel of John, I would not have believed you. Now, for me, that is part of our corporate wisdom that you use to check yourself.

Fourth, every occasion is an occasion for spiritizing. This does not mean all spiritizing has to look alike. One of the things that we were blessed with in the Houston house was having enough people working in to have a gathering at 8:30 a.m. The propensity of all of us was just to get to the overwhelming task we had to do that day, but we found it crucial to take some time to get our gears moving in the right direction, or humming in the right key. If you did not do this, you would he consumed by the ants in your pants. You could get your job done, but so what? Occasionally I found myself saying, "I have done a collegium this morning and I did a spin at sodality last night, now what am I going to do at 8:30?" Well, this is one of the places where the scriptures are helpful, and there are all kinds of resources there. For example, you could take Bonhoeffer's Temptation (which, by the way, was his spirit spin before his classes) and read two or three paragraphs. You do not even have to talk about it unless something happens in the midst of it that someone wants to talk about. Just read 2 or 3 paragraphs, and the next day read 2 or 3 more. That is what I mean by every occasion is the occasion for spiritizing.

Perhaps the over­all image is that within yourself, within each­individual family and within the house as a whole­­spiritizing is to enable them to grasp their struggle. This happens since spiritizing is relating thoir struggle to the rhythm of the universe, to borrow from Kazantzakis. What each family needs to know is that the struggle they are in i8 in fact the struggle of the universe. One thing I discovered that haunts most people is the idea that their struggle is somewhere other than in line with the struggle of the universe. The relief that comes when a family discovers that they are in the right struggle is what spiritizing is all about. It cuts counseling time to zero. The same is true in terms of the house. When a house is worried about its mood, what it is saying is that it has gotten out of rhythm with what they sense is going on. All that needs to be done is to assure them that moods are utterly amoral, they are not good or bad, they are just there. That is where you start from in spiritizing.

(JWM) That was tremendous. I tell you there are few days in my life when I have learned as much as I have this morning. I wrote it down this way: The inner life of corporateness and spirituality flows necessarily into the external mission of region and galaxy. And the external mission of region and galaxy elicits the corporateness and spirituality of the internal life. You can not have one without the other. That has gotten through to me in a fresh way this morning.

(Paige Fisher) It seems to me that this is the hardest year I have ever been through. I think that is probably true for a lot of people, particularly if you have had a house that tripled in size and ended up with nine adults in it. It seems to me that anytime I go into a situation now I hate it just as much, but I have come to see that God loved me last year in a way I have been praying for Him to love me for about three or four years, and he finally gave it to me all at once. It is the struggle that allows you to make a free decision. That is why we hope we never get to the point that RS­I becomes a mandatory­entry course to something else, because that takes away that struggle. It is because last year was like being on a rack that we have moved so far in the spirit dimension.

(JWM) For instance, I do not think a few years ago I ever dreamed that one of our colleagues in a meeting like this would make the statement that for a year she was praying and God delivered the prayer. That has tremendous meaning for me.

(Jim Troxel) One of the things I think we must get said to all of us, but in particular to the newer priors, to the newer people in charge of the spirit life of a group of people in a galaxy and a region, is this. I had thought that what it meant to be a prior, in terms of the spirit life, was to come off as a great something­or­other. For me, reflecting on this pulls together the past year under the spirit life.

This year I was the replacement for Charles Moore in Milwaukee and I thought what it meant to come off was for them to remember me as they remembered Charles. I thought I had to be witty and I had to think of things to do that they would recall a year or two from now. I was thinking I had to be something that I was not.

I learned, first of all, you had to affirm the situation. I had to affirm I was the guy who followed Charles Moore. That was difficult. And I had to affirm that group of people. Then you had to affirm the self that you are and your own spirit struggles, whatever they were. Then, when you overlay your own particular spirit track or trek onto the situation you have, you discover that you know exactly what to say, exactly what to do, exactly how to be. It even tells you what kind of jokes you are going to toll. And they are not like Charles' jokes, they are your own.

Then after that, once you have affirmed your situation, Your own life, and its great spirit resources, you discover that you can use anybody else's resources as well, for the sake of getting the job done. You can call Charles up on the phone and ask him his advice if that is what is necessary for getting the job done, rather than always trying to "one­up" him. The religious house model will work only if the priors learn this lesson, that they are not to one­up anybody' or that they are not out to come off. If they learn that, then we have a priorship dynamic.

(Doug Curts) Not every year does the kind of breakloose that occurred this morning happen to us, to a whole group of us­­­especially the kind of breakloose that Paige Fisher mentioned: that the crunch that you have been in during the whole year breaks loose and you see it as the love which was exactly what was needed to push you into the next year. I would like to suggest that the only possible response to this is a wild kind of passionate involvement in the task throughout the whole next year. This involvement is going to fog up the clarity we have experienced this morning; not the intellectual clarity, but we are going to find ourselves experiencing a different kind of desert, which is to say that the journey or the struggle will go deeper. This clarity will get acted out everyday in every house all year, and get pushed deeper to the next "seeing­through" after another year, or two, or three.

(Bruce Bauknight) I can see that at the December meeting of the priors, I had a foretaste of what happened this morning. I think five years from now I will remember this year as the year that we learned about waiting on the Lord. That song will probably hold this year, the trusting of the mystery that is waiting on the Lord.

(Merge Tomlinson) It has shocked me, that everything we have said this morning is also true of Base.

(Kay Lush) I recall what we said this summer about trusting the givenness and not trying to live anymore out of the ought. I think this year we saw a radical risking in the deeps of the way life was or found ourselves trusting life. That has to do with being men and women. It has something to do with female ontology and male ontology. Radically risking in the deeps is what it means to be a real man, and you don't find those very often, yet there are many real men sitting in this room.

(Gene Marshall) This whole last year has been a struggle with solitary gianthood, and that has come together under the category of indicative resolve. That solitary gianthood has arrived when those indicative resolves have arrived. We have been waiting on the Lord for those indicative resolves. This has clarified something for me in the whole dynamic of nurture, that has been illustrated this morning. When someone arrives at an indicative resolve, then he is under compulsion to work out the actual social forms that form those resolves into objective patterns. Those two things work over against one another. Either you have the objective social forms demanding of individuals the indicative resolves that build them up, or, if you have the indicative resolves there, they demand of the individual that he work out the objective integrities demanded by them. That is a deep clue to nurture, a pincer movement on every human life, coming at them through the exterior form that demands spirituality of them, and coming directly at occasioning the spirituality that build up those forms.

(Barbara Alerding) That is symbolized for me by wearing the cross. I suppose in the eight years that I have been in this Order, I have struggled more deeply with wearing a cross than with any other thing. I went around wearing the Yin­Yang for three years, and I have tried telling myself a story about not wearing jewelry, and so forth. This summer for me symbolizes­that kind of life­time decision to wear the cross, which is externally symbolizing an interior decision.

(Don Cramer) What Jim Troxel reported was similar to what I discovered relative to my image of myself in the role of the prior as a guru. It began when I got said to myself that I am a spirit man, not that I am becoming one or trying to be one, or one of these days will be one, perhaps. I saw that it has to do with dealing with status, and it has to do with saying that the Lord has given me an unrepoatable life, and He has exposed me to Himself, to His face, time and again, in different ways than to any other man. That is not to say I am any more or less than any other man in history. I am a spirit man. Whatever is going on inside of me is utterly unique. Even though I am surprised and shocked and spiritized by other people spinning, it is not like saying, If I could spin like that, then I would be a spirit man." I saw that my spins are as shocking to someone else, as his spins are to me; that is to say, my life is included in the way it is, as much as anyone else's is.

The other self­story that did the job in terms of mission was, I am a bishop of the Church, and I am finally, totally, utterly responsible for the historical Church. I am its leadership." Until I began to order my interior montage accordingly, with that kind of indicative resolve, I was paralyzed relative to anyone else in the historical Church. My own interior life, finally, was forged out on that kind of anvil, that in responding to pastors, laymen, and local congregations I am the bishop. This does not have to do with status, but with getting said to myself that I am the historical Church, and whatever we mean by the future of the Church, I'm it.

(JWM) Somebody asked the question of what is the equivalent for the Church in our time, of the desert, of the fiery testing ground, out of which the monks, priests and bishops were forged. I believe we have found the desert in our time and the religious is only created in the desert. Our experience in the religious houses and the relationship to them is the equivalent. It would not surprise me if one day the established Church would take one of you desert fathers, or mothers, and call you to her side. One day the Church is going to come to some of you who have been in the desert, and say, Come, come lead us. And the funny thing is that although some of us be dead, we will have a sense of having participated in that manifestation of deep wisdom on the part of the established structures ­­­ those structures that are created to care for the humanness of all mankind, namely the Church of Jesus Christ, the People of God.

Now, let us sing "The Eagles" ­­­ "Those Who Wait on the Lord."