Chicago Centrum
Temple Plenary
4/4/74
I had been called a prior for several years before I was ever
sent to a Religious House. But something in the existential situation
of being sent out to a Religious House revealed the blankness
of my mind. I did not know a thing about Priorship.
Perhaps you had the same experience when your name first appeared
at the top of an assignment chart. Those fears and anxieties are
themselves the beginning of priorship. Priorship is always a worry
about this, a worry about that; about yourself, about your colleagues.
It never stops at your own assignments, but that is where it often
begins. Priorship starts with a depth caring about the past, the
future and what is going to take place now.
This is actually two separate, but combined lectures. One deals
headon with the profound function of priorship and the other
deals with methods. In the final analysis, these are inseparable.
One cannot isolate the style of priorship from its methods and
practice. They may be drawn together without distortion.
First of all, trust the methods we know. Practice all the methodologies
we have been hammering out for years. We have wisdom, which is
not to say that every one of us executes each method with precision,
nor are we practicing the methods every moment of our lives. Priorship
is always humiliating, for we always find ourselves not putting
into practice what we know about life. The practics of priorship
are to actualize the intellectual, social and spirit methods we
have developed over the past years. The profound function is to
know that times three methods are the way of history itself. That
is, history rides on the back of our capacity to reflect deeply
on life; it rides on the back of those people who catalyze others
to engage in society; it rides on the back of those who can breathe
spirit and awe into every situation. This is what it means to
say that the Religious are essential to humanness.
All of the functions of priorship can be grounded in one particular
task of a prior: getting people, as well as himself, out of bed.
As the Solitary Office we used in Summer '73 revealed, history
usually undergoes change during the gettingupinthemorning
time of life. The first three thoughts of every person shape his
day; and to expand that to the world, the first three thoughts
of every person in civilization shapes each day of history.
The issue of getting people out of bed has been perennially frustrating.
There have always been those persons who call
it professionally will not get up. One Academy,
there was a woman who refused to get up morning after morning.
One of the older staff members sent a younger staffer up to the
woman and told him, "Go upstairs and tell that woman I am
going to have her arrested if she does not get out of bed."
The newer staff member did not for a moment doubt him and went
upstairs to the woman and said, ''He is going to get the police
after you if you don't get out of bed." That is the profound
function of being in history through priorship.
The incident is more than a funny story. It represents an intellectual
method in that an awareness was initiated from one human being
to the next human being. It was also a sociological method, for
it induced a happening--someone got out of bed. Finally, it dealt
with an individual decision about a human being. That is a depth
happening and therefore, a spirit method. The weaving together
of intellectual, social and spirit methods into a whole is what
priorship is all about.
Priorship is a life dynamic. History does not happen by
chance. History happens by occasioning situations in which people
who need to make decisions about their lives push to some real
awareness, casting aside all their moorings about the future.
History rides on its own time. Priors are the ones who decide
to enact history in daily life.
Priorship is the human activity. The prior is the new man,
the new humanness of our time. There is a tendency, when looking
at the crumbling away of the clergy in the past fifty years, to
think of the Religious as second rate. That is not true. The Religious
profession actually performs history. In fact, even now while
we are not exactly sure about what we are doing, we perform history.
What the Religious in history indicate is that life is filled
with wonder.
Priorship happens whether we enact the role of prior as we need
to or not. That became very clear when I lived in a Religious
House. Sometimes, the priorship dynamic does not happen through
designated priors. Sometimes, the priorship dynamic survives on
what happens to threeyearolds. Have you noticed how
three-year-olds have a fantastic capacity to enable one to reflect
deeply about life? They enact intellectual methods when they get
stubborn; they enact social methods when they stop fantastic collegium
meetings just by kicking and screaming down the hall; and they
enact spirit methods. They can evoke new decisions about life
by leading someone in to the depths. Whether you enact it or not,
the priorship dynamic either in a healthy or perverted form, will
be going on in every Religious House every day, every hour, every
moment.
The prior also plays the roles of pedagogue, social
engineer and spirit guru. I want to push the function
of knowing those methods, of getting them into your being. Reading
manuals and papers will help teach you the methods, but we often
tend to forget how it is they get into our beings. That is the
key to priorship. A prior embodies and breathes the methods until
they ooze out of his being whether he wants them to or not. He
embodies them in his life.
Pedagogy has again become an urgent issue. We have fallen
into a number of perversions in pedagogy and must say "NO"
to them. Pedagogy is simply the guiding of individuals or groups
of people into the depths of life. The question is: How does one
acquire the skill, the finesse, and the ability to be a pedagogue
in every life situation? A pedagogue always embodies pedagogy
in life. He brings objectivity to the situation of our lives.
Our fourstep method for pedagogy is the iron pillar of both
pedagogy and all of our methods. The pedagogue raises the objective
question, the reflective question, the interpretive question,
and the decision about the interpretation. Once the fourstep
method is woven into one's being, everything he does comes out
of those questions. All of our newer methods are based on the
four-step method for dealing with people at the center of life,
for the objective, reflective, interpretive and decisional dimensions
are forever present. Why, even when the fire inspector comes at
the beginning of every summer program we employ the four-step
method. Someone rushes in saying, "The fire inspector is
coming, the fire inspector is coming." Then someone will
be assigned to take him around and the first question the guide
will ask is, "What fire inspector? When was he last here?
Who spoke with him last?" Those objective questions immediately
objectify the panic. Objectifying a situation is the role of a
pedagogue.
The pedagogical method is a life method. Our greatest perversion
in pedagogy is "pedagoguing,", or overdoing the pedagogical
role, or starting at the interpretive level. There is a great
temptation, especially among us older hands, to decide exactly
what needs to be done about fire inspectors or anything else.
We start with, "Well, this is what needs to be done,"
and go about enacting our decision. Have you noticed how often
this method backfires?
Or, in attempting to get someone out of bed, to begin with the
interpretive or, "You are a slob, get out of bed!" is
not very helpful in motivating a person to make a new decision.
Charting is simply a fantastic method. It goes beyond the
studying of papers and can take place in all kinds of situations.
A Galaxy pastor tells the story of a man who would telephone him
every week just to talk for an hour or so. The pastor did not
know why this "telephone man" kept calling so one day,
he decided to chart the conversation by marking off segments of
the conversation as the subject changed. The chart showed him
exactly why the fellow kept calling. He was asking something like:
"Will you please articulate the vocational question for me
today?" Even though the fellow never would phrase the question
in that way, the chart gave the pastor a way to grasp what was
really going on. To use the charting method is to embody it. That
is one hint as to how one begins to embody pedagogy as a life
method.
The art form conversation method is also essential. It is a basic
pedagogical method which goes on in all pedagogy. The art form
method, like charting, is a life dynamic. In the Movement, we
use the formal, intellectual methods of the story, the seminar,
and the lecture. But as a Prior, you are called on to act in many
informal situations as well. Somehow, there is always occasion
to reflect on the authenticity of life.
In the area of social methods, the Prior must learn to
be a social engineer, a model builder. The reason
for acquiring our depth awareness of life is to take it into the
fabric of society. The social fabric is not some architectonic
structure out beyond; it is a Religious House, it is your family,
your colleagues in Tulsa, or in any other social setting. Priors
use social methods to bring the spirit dimension into the social
fabric. The question for a Prior is: How do I demonstrate sociality
in everything I do?
We have come to a point in our journey where we must be sophisticated,
sophisticated enough to be appropriate to the context we live
in. To put it simply, we must learn to be servants at home. Contradiction
analysis is an attempt to try to grasp the situation we find ourselves
in and then discern the appropriate method of being that situation.
Sophistication is being appropriate consciously using the appropriate
dress, style of speaking and so on.
The look of a Religious House is also key to Priorship. One of
our stories is that a Religious House must be spic and span at
every moment, ready to receive the Bishop. That is true. but we
must not forget the methods we live out of. Remember, the dirt
in the Religious House is sacred dirt. It speaks of a group of
people in the world who are about something other than keeping
their house spic and span. Many worthy people in the world keep
their houses spic and span. We are not about that. Our method
is to do whatever is sociologically appropriate to a particular
moment in history. So if dishes must be left sitting in a sink
for three hours while we do a critical workshop to prepare for
a bishop then that is what we do. Of course, when he is there,
the House had better be spic and span too.
We need facility and agility so that in every situation, we are
relating appropriately to what is at hand. Once we have embodied
these methods, a lot of the complexity we feel on the other side
of the turn will probably dissolve.
Contradiction analysis is for spotting contradictions.
It is never anyone's subjectivity that is the contradiction. It
is never the absence of something that is the block. It is always
that which is objectively there. If the contradiction is a lack
of high collegiality in a particular team, then the question to
be asked is. "Where is that lack of collegiality manifest
in that team? Where is the sociological thereness?" Whatever
is determined to be the "thereness" is the contradiction
When the contradiction has been determined, one is free to make
proposals.
Gridding is another area we must struggle in. It is one
thing to have a grid of a region, but a grid alone will not tell
what the Region is about. If a regional grid has not been evaluated
recently, and you are depending on someone else's grid, you do
not know your region. What are the actual sociological dynamics
happening in a region? I hope the day never comes when everything
is gridded. Certainly, grids cannot be altered every week; if
metropolitan regions are to come into being, then grids must be
kept essentially the same. But grids also should include areas
that are totally unknown. Perhaps we start gridding the moon or
Mars once all the parishes are gridded, and we do it with a group
of people in a House. A most helpful part of gridding is gridding
terrain with people in it. If it is geo-social, then it must have
population. Never change your grid but ground the dynamics of
gridding into your life. Gridding is a social method which promotes
the objective, reflective and interpretive. It objectifies a piece
of geography, offering a reflection about what the dynamics of
the geography actually are. Gridding demands you make some decision
about the future.
Finally, the Prior is out to occasion contextual authenticity,
or an authentic relationship to his context. He is out to occasion
productiveness and motivity in relating to the Movement and the
Church and the World.
As spirit guru, he leads the people with nothing to do
into the depths, then leads the people with depth into society.
The spirit guru is always taking someone into the Other World.
He always takes the stance that life is loveable. He takes everyone's
chambers of horrors, everyone's anxieties and favorite cocoons
and says, "That is life." Priorship is enabling people
to decide to live out of their decisions, and to embody those
decisions in their daily lives. The prior knows that every man
no matter how shallow he may seem, is deep. Every man has problems
he has never pulled beneath and his surface parochialism indicates
where he is living life in the deeps. The parochialism indicates
his decision about what life really is. Whether or not you agree
with him, that is who he is. The question for a prior is, how
to get an imaginal technique that enables him to deal with the
truth of everyman's depth, problems, parochialisms and decisions
through spirit methods.
One way a Prior learns this is to become acquainted with the fact
that death is his companion. Death is the one companion
he can most trust. There is aloneness in Priorship. It is not
long before a Prior discovers he cannot trust his colleagues or
his husband or wife. The companion he needs is death-- not death
in the abstract--but HIS death. When your death is your constant
companion, you can turn to it and ask, "What shall I do here?"
"What is really going on?" Death always gives an honest
answer. It always makes it clear that you are the one blocking
a situation. Neither your emotions or your presuppositions about
life will tell you, as a Prior, that you have to like that idiot
in the Region who you do not like. Only your Death will tell you
that is what is necessary.
A Prior is always about finding ways to enable someone to grasp his depth role, or his relationship to life. Back in 1968, when things were necessarily quiet in 5th City, one colleague kept badgering the Prior assigned to 5th City, saying, "We've got to get out and do something. We have got to get out there and get busy." The Prior said to him, "Have you ever heard the story Buddha told about the fish that flopped out of the lake?" To this day, the colleague has never heard the story but somehow, his whole relationship to life was altered when the Prior asked that seemingly unrelated question.
We have many tools as spirit gurus: the Scripture methods, the
Spirit Conversations, the Visits, the Psalms. Our tools are means
of dealing with the entire practical memory of man. Yet I underscore
that they are tools, something a Prior can use to find ways of
getting people out of their intellectual blocks.
The profound function of priorship is the embodiment of these
methods. Whenever we get insecure in the methods, we revert to
our old ways of living life. As a Prior, the tendency is to revert
to the status of Prior. Instead, try the intellectual and spirit
methods. There is no situation in which those methods will not
help. It is the methods of Priorship that have revealed Priorship's
profound function.
David McCleskey
6/18/74