Global Research Centrum: Chicago

Social Methods School

12/14/74

"A New Day" or "To Live A Day" has become a deeply meaningful song for me in the past quarter. Sometimes I find myself singing it on the verge of tears and other times I find myself singing parts of it in anger, beyond any anger I have ever known. Sometimes I find myself singing it in calm reflectiveness. I do not know how that song comes to you­­ maybe in those ways, and maybe in others as well­­ but at this particular time in history, I have a hard time figuring out what to sing. There are about five songs that I find myself choosing, and this is one of them. Perhaps we could begin by singing this song, "To Live A Day."

I do not want to talk about anything that you should take notes on because it may not even be understandable. I want to tell you about a love story and most love stories that I hear are often unintelligible. What I want to tell you is not really sequential, but I do not know how to talk unless I use words that would occupy space in a particular order if they were written. If this love story does have a sequence. I am really unclear on what the sequence is.

As a love story, this is a story of passion, a story of pain and a story of wonder Because it is a love story, I have had to break off in the middle; like ongoing love stories, it does not end and it does not come to a stopping point. You know what happens to al I love stories that reach a stopping point. They either freeze, or they turn in on themselves, or they zombie­­ so I had to break into the middle of this story.

I wonder how the songs in the beginning of our songbook affect you lately? They used to be easy songs to sing -- "Maybe I 'm right and maybe I'm wrong"­­ but now they are terribly difficult to sing, because when you are involved in that love story, they are real.

I want to tell a love story that has to do with empowerment. That is a sign to me that it is a real love story. False love stories are never empowering. They are always debilitating. They always end in nothing. They always end in the inability to act and the inability to move. They always end in the inability to embrace life as it is given .

But I do not want to analyze anything. I just want to describe a love story with the Mystery. That is not Gnostic, for the love story with the Mystery is the love story of the Mystery's engagement with my lif e; and it is the story of the Mystery's engagement with his creation, with life. I do not know where to start. I finally want to talk about the empowerment of that love story; this means I want to talk about hope.

Maybe I have to step back and talk about what happens when you discover that you are, in fact, embraced in love. We call that the Dark Night. The Dark Night comes to one who is in that love story as a glorious, glorious awareness. It is a sociological love story. It is a story of how you all know and have experienced and been in that love story in which the Mystery, the All­in­All of Life blinds us to all of our past images of what it meant to be a man. Isn't that terrifying? The Mystery blinds us to our images of what it meant to be a woman, a nation, what it meant to be economic and what it meant to be political creatures.

This love story is about the beckoning of the Mystery for people to come to him. Our fathers told that love story long ago in a delightful, painful way. God talks to his people in the Old Testament about how he is beckoning them forth to embrace them with love. God says, "I do not understand why they have not turned to me. I have beat on them, I have killed them, I have sent plagues to them, and they have not turned to me "

That comes to me as the way that many authentic love stories start. In the midst of this love story with the Mystery, I have discovered that that which plagues me, blinds me and what I experience as being destroyed, does not go away. This is not an "Abingdon Press movie with a happy ending." The pain is anchored in that weakness that you experience in the midst of discovering that you have been loved in all of those blinding, terrifying things; that racking resentment which comes when you have been drawn into a love you knew you wanted, but not on the terms of the Mystery.

This kind of awareness may be one stage in that journey where I finally discover, and we discover, the abandonment of our being to Being Itself. It is a glorious awareness because it is at this point that you discover, as you have abandoned your being to Being Itself, that you are filled with BEING­­ as you never knew being before in your entire life. That has been given back to you in a new way.

I do not know if this is sequential but the discovery in the midst of that love story is that my Beloved's cause becomes my cause. H. Richard Niebuhr, in one of his papers discusses what it means, when one loves, to love the cause of the other. To love is to love the cause of the other. I discover that I am on a Long March of Care. It is not that I have decided to care but that my eyes have been opened to the care of the Beloved, and I have been literally forced to abandon all of my cares to embrace his cares.

His cares are terrifying. We have named them throughout the week, His cares are the care for the creation of a global society, the care of overcoming poverty. His cares are that people may live in the authenticity of their selfhood in the world in which we find ourselves; his cares have to do with Calcutta, Nairobi and Hong Kong and all the unnamed villages across the g1obe with grids that we have never seen.

In the midst of the obvious sense to embrace the care of that Beloved­the impossibility of all of your attempts to embrace His cares is revealed. You do not attempt to embrace His cares­­ I mean to emphasize that you have been overwhelmed by compassion for his cares. Ineffectiveness sets in on the other side of knowing yourself to have been overcome with that kind of being sucked in­­ and maybe that's where problemlessness happens ­that I have handed over all of my cares to the One who has cared for his creation. I discover that I get everyone of them back in the context of the globe, not in the context of my life or of this country, but in the context of the globe and in the context of the Mystery where I have experienced that overwhelming compassion.

Now when that happens to a society, when that realty is present in life, that kind of care which is always there but sometimes gets illuminated for us, it's right there­­ in between there somewhere ­ that one discovers himself empowered or living in hope. Hope is a hard one for me to talk about as one of the experiences of that love story. It's more like in the midst of that happening in love that I discover myself enveloped in power, and I know it's an enveloping in power because I know I am so powerless.

I know that the next thing I touch in care I'm disappointed in. I bring off a town meeting; and the next day nothing seems to have come from it. Someone here a few days ago was talking about people going to RS­I. If they take it, they get excited­­ then four weeks later it's as if they'd never taken it. And I experience myself as disappointed, deeply disappointed. If I pass through the journey of my attempts, under my own steam to care for some community, I can just mark for you the moments of disappointment where all that was done had fallen apart and my life has been expended for that which turned out to be hopeless and worthless and an absolute deadened. I discover that when the people who are engaged in that turn cynical and I try to fight them off and say, "Don't be cynical.," why, everything they say is true, and I agree with it. That kind of deep disappointment.

And the experience there of fear­­ fear of the future. There are a lot of books out now which are, with our great capacity to project in our time, that are fears toward the future. Have you read any of those books that talk about what will happen if the population keeps up the way it's happening? Or, if pollution keeps going at the same rate it's going. I'm afraid to spray under my arms now because I may protect my underarm, but I may get ultraviolet on my shoulder. That kind of fear of the demise­­ the kind of hopelessness. And you can't say they're wrong when you just look at the facts. And you know that in the context they're talking everything they say is true­­scientifically shown to be that.

And then a kind of cowardliness, loss of heart, I experience ­fear to engage the next time, fear to throw my passion into the next thing knowing how disappointed I've already been, fear to risk even a postage stamp park on the corner that somebody might cover with Christmas trees.

And then, just a sense of lost­ness, maybe aimlessness, given over to the temptation to build for myself some kind of small fenced­in little hunk of hope over here that I can stand in and be hopeful. And Lord knows, that's what's happening in our time, isn't it? You don't blame those people­­ you don't blame people that turn to that kind of fenced in hope in the midst of hopelessness around them because you often wish you could do exactly the same thing. Because you say to yourself in the midst of what you see at least they are trying to forge out little hope for themselves. Well, that's the kind of thing I experience; but in the midst of that I experience that I have been empowered­­ that I have been put in touch with (God, I don't like to say it that way) an unconditioned source of empowerment to hope where there is no hope, Kazantzakis said that the last temptation is hope. He's right­­hope in all those things I did, hope in creation, hope in the next project, is peculiar.

If you put hope in the Primal Community that you're bringing off, I warn you now you will be deeply disappointed if not destroyed. I think of those guys who've written those books on the future. They did a great service in the midst of our time of allowing us to act out what Kazantzakis was talking about - to kill the hope that is no hope - and to free us to be the ones who possibly can't discover that we are enveloped by the power of hope that hopes where there is no hope - the hope in the All-in-all. I experience myself as a man who hopes, and I suspect that writers in those books (I'd say to myself at least) the only way they could write their books is that on the other side of the darkness they are describing there is within their being a hope - or they could never have written.

I've been thinking of Christmas lately. I'm supposed to think of Christmas now. And, I don't know, there's all kinds of perversion with the cultural celebration of Christmas; but I want to suggest that it is the world's expression of the hope where there is no hope. I remember when I was in seminary we tried to cut against that we didn't understand hope that is beyond all hope or hope against hope and we tried to cut that off, and I remember we wanted to get it clean and pure. So we put up Lutheran Christmas trees with Karl Barth sayings for Christmas ornaments. When I discovered or have been discovered by the empowerment of the hope when there is no hope, I think that's the yearning in the heart of secular society. The hope beyond all hope that envelops you in this kind of love story. You don't create it. I go right on being disappointed, fear being cowardly, and being lost but at the same time I discover that I hope, I believe, I hope.

Well, that's the love story. That hope beyond hope is hope in which you can never be crushed by the hopes that don't happen. It's as if in that kind of hoping that it's given to you that you're bold, that's not said right, you're not bold, you are emboldened. It's not as if you had courage ­ you experience yourself as still a coward, but you are encouraged, in spite of yourself, to engage and to be the one who, as the Beloved One, acts out hope­the hope of the All­in­All in the midst of creation

Hope is in the world because there is a body of people who act out hopefulness not toward their immediate projects­they will always be crushed­but hope toward the totality of the Mystery of Creation. Those are the wellsprings of motivity, if you want to know what they are. I don't know what anyone else is going to tell you about motivity, but I just want to get that much into somebody else's lecture. That's the wellspring of motivity.

Well, that's the love story. I know it's not understandable. It doesn't have easy sequences or easy transitions from one part to another; but I know as I've never known before that I'm a man who hopes and has been hoped. It's being released from the dream that destroys to the dream that is beyond dreaming. I guess it's like the "Impossible Dream". The strange lines in there ­ there's a line about hopelessness, ­­"To fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march..." I think it points in the right direction. I'd like to see that movie again, now; and just see if that's what this is all about. Why don't we sing that song?

Justin Morrill

12/14/74