Global Centrum Chicago
Global Priors Council
August 27, 1974
The Ash Wednesday service has always left a great
impression on me. One year, I remember the priest putting ashes
on my forehead and saying, "From dust you came; to dust you
shall return." Several days later, I rushed down the stairs
in the morning and said, "Mother, Mother, didn't the minister
say, 'From dust you came and to dust you shall return'?"
"Yes," she replied. "Well," I said, "I
looked under my bed this morning and there is somebody there,
but I don't know whether he's coming or going." It is the
same with the theology of love. It has been under the bed all
these years, but when you begin to look at it, you cannot tell
whether it is coming or going.
We were talking about Henry Aaron the other day,
about the simple upbringing he had in the South. One of the problems
he had in growing up was a fear of someone being under his bed
at night, so he used to lie awake, worrying. He said his father
did not counsel him about his deep fears hut dealt with them directly
by putting his mattress on the floor. After this he never had
a problem again. That kind of practical care is what we are talking
about with love, and the theology of love. It is an event, I think,
to those of us who are used to thinking hard about these things,
Let me read to you the passage from the New Testament, that is
where in retrospect I think I first began to think theologically
in the context of love rather than faith. I remember very distinctly
my encounter with this Scripture when we were first studying Gogarten.
"Then one of the experts in the law stood up to test him
and said, "Master, what must I do to be sure of eternal life?"
"What does the law say and what has your reading taught you?"
said Jesus. . . .but the man, seeking justification, said, ''Who
is my neighbor?"
"you go and do the same,"
said Jesus.
For twenty years our articulation of our selfunderstanding
has been in the context of faith. I still remember when I went
to the PLC and was addressed by the fact that the category "Christian"
was replaced by "man of faith." During the course, that
term "man of faith" became filled full with meaning
as a way of pointing to what it means to be the Church.
In more recent days, we have fallen into love. I
find it interesting that our culture talks about "falling
in love." It is not a rational decision; it is not sentimentality;
it is an objective fall, like the fall into sin. It is: you "fall"
in love. I believe we "fell" in love in Summer '71.
I do not know what happened to you, but I discovered that my secular
presuppositions were far deeper than my theological presuppositions.
That is to say, I had more existential security attached to the
form of the family, or to economic patterns, and such, and when
in the course of doing the research of Summer '71 I saw that all
those things were relative, and likely to change totally, that
is when the bottom dropped out for me, far more radically than
it did when it dropped out of my theological stance. In Summer
'71, we fell in love with the Mystery, too. The next year, we
fell in love with ourselves. I still remember how we talked about
Summer '72; the visits to the Other World gave people back whole
hunks of their past. I remember one man saying there had been
four years he was a band leader in high school that he always
hated himself for, that came back to him. The experience of falling
in love with ourselves became dominant. This year, we have come
to talk about falling in love with the world. We have discovered
that we care about the world.
Now we must think through again, or rearticulate
our selfunderstanding in the context of love. This is not
to imply sentimentality or some interior quality. Much of our
struggle this summer was to give articulation to love and that
will be our struggle for a long. time.
Love is the expression of the authentic relationship
between myself and other selves, between myself and the world,
between myself and the Mystery. It's the expression of an authentic
relationship. All of us have had any number of experiences where
that has been grounded for us. One occurred to me last evening
as I was working on this. I remember very clearly when I was a
freshman in college, taking a course in Western Civilization.
Every Monday we had movies in the auditorium and all the classes
went. Sometimes we went, and sometimes we ditched. I remember
showing up one time for the films and they were showing a captured
German film from Dachau. I was totally unprepared for that experience.
I can still see the soldiers with the wheelbarrows, wheeling them
up to the side of a huge pit, and turning them over, and three
or four or five bodies, just stacks of human bones, stark white,
falling, falling on top of a mound of bodies. And my interior
caved in. I was incapable of response. I cared about that. I think
the way it came to my lips was "Never again."
What happened was that I discovered that the world
in that film was the world I had on my hands; and it was my world.
All of us have ways of talking about that experience, be it through
the first encounter with the inner-city ghetto, or people who
went on Global Odysseys; we have talked about this as the "dead
pigeon experience." The experience has to do with the fact
that all morality is preceded by the perception of a gap between
what is and what ought to be, an objective perception. When you
are struggling with justification or faith, you are struck by
its absurdity. Under the rubric of love, you are struck not by
absurdity, but by tragedy. Gogarten's word was doom. That is what
strikes you. You are also struck by the clear sense that you are
responsible. It is not at all rational that the suffering and
the pain of that gap are mine to deal with and no one else's.
One always begins with faith, for unless he has come
to terms with that gap by saying yes to it, then his attempts
to love become attempts to do away with the gap. If I was a Roman
Catholic, I am sure I would know the word for grace that allows
me to be "a man of faith" in that situation and love,
without knowing self-consciously that I am a man of faith.
In experiencing the gap, there are people who find
the ability to love, though they would not in any shape or form
call themselves self-conscious men of faith. Though the experience
is not sequential, you always begin with faith when thinking this
through.
Love is something everyman participates in, or it
is not love. In that sense that love is ontological, it is not
an achievement of a few, and moreover, as I said before, it is
irrational. It is engagement it is participation. I think it is
also true that our love is subject to reductionisms. That is,
every man is not loving the totality of his life all the time.
Loving the totality of his life means he loves others, loves self,
loves the ground of being. Therefore our struggle with love is
our struggle with overcoming our reductionisms. I think the bug
model triangles give us a way to see what it means to love the
totality of existence. The witnessing dimension of the triangles
primarily get said what it means to love the self and to love
the other. It has to do with doom, with hearing "the cry
of brothers doomed to die," with "three billion people
die and never live." We have pointed practically to witnessing
love by saying, once you have perceived that you are loved, with
a love that preceded you, that goes on after you, and once you
have perceived that it is the ground of all being that you love,
then you find yourself with the objective claim of all mankind
upon you to articulate the word of life in such a way that every
last human being across the face of the earth has the possibility
of grabbing hold of his life. There are no barriers, no limits
to that freedom. I think it is helpful that RSI appears
in the triangle because RSI points to the fact that witnessing
is a structural reality. Love is structural. We create the forms
and structures for people which allow the journey in consciousness
to go on. That is what witnessing love is about.
In justing love, we care for society, for the structures
of society. In justing love we see the catalytic efforts of the
People of cod directed at recreating the institutions of society
for our time, or building the new social vehicle.
Primal community is the essence of what justing love
is all about. When people ask me these days, "What is the
Ecumenical Institute about ?" or "What is the ICA about?"
I say we are interested in one thing, building primal community.
And we are interested in doing that in local geographic neighborhoods
and in all social institutions, including the church, schools,
businesses, agencies, etc. In order to build up primal community,
we have seen that we have to BE primal community 24 hours a day.
That is what our Houses are about.
Presencing love has to do with love for the mystery.
Obviously the key in presencing is the Religious. It is the ways
and means we have found for occasioning awe, or living before
the awe. At one point, we said everyman needs an experience of
the awe every day. He does not need witness, in one sense. He
does not need justice. What he needs is to have transparency before
him once a day. The Religious are about seeing to
it that the disclosure of the Other World in the midst of this
world HAPPENS. In the Local Church Experiment, and particularly
in the past few years, we have created an incredible wealth of
methods to do that. It is our care for the mystery and for ourselves,
because it is care for the symbols.
None of these distinctions is absolute but the issue
under the rubric of faith has to do with the meaning in life,
with answering the question of why. The issue under love is how;
how do I respond. Faith deals with coming to terms with the indicative
of existence itself. Love has to do with coming to terms with
the imperatives which emerge from the indicatives. Faith has to
do with the consciousness of consciousness of consciousness. Love
has to do with action
The witnessing dimension of life throws Universal
Benevolence upon us. When you see there are no limits to your
responsibility for mankind, as the Religious, you are required
to be a guru, to embody RSI all the time, for you never
know when you have the responsibility of another human life on
your hands. In this way, Universal Benevolence comes to the Religious.
In the justing dimension, or in primal community, love requires
the renewal of every local church. It requires that every local
church, every congregation, cadre and parish be redone so that
the word of life is present for any person to see, touch and taste.
The justing dimension pushes radical integrity upon us. Justing
love raises the issue of what must he done.
LENS was our response to witnessing love. For three
years, we struggled with what social deed was required. We thought
we had the content wrapped up. Then we discovered the social deed
required was to create the process by which that very struggle
would be available to every last human being. That is, LENS is
about giving Indicative Battleplanning to every man, woman and
child in the world. It seems that the intensification of the relationship
between Radical Integrity and the Religious is the guildsman.
It requires that the Religious in our time stick our utterly unrepeatable,
hardtoreplace lives in some stupid, doomed local community.
The Guildsman is very particular, radical expenditure, in the
context of the whole globe.
Endless Felicity is the relationship of the Religious
to the witnessing and the justing. To the Religious, witnessing
becomes Popular Preaching. I think that we came closest to Popular
Preaching in our mundanity spins this summer. It was almost like
taking one of everything, which is what popular preaching is about.
In talking about something that happened to him, usually in the
last 24 hours, the lecturer in the mundanity spin summoned the
awe, the transparency. I tell you lives were healed and issues
were solved by those spins like nothing we have ever done before.
It was the bleeding of Endless Felicity into our whole witnessing
dimension.
Endless Felicity pushed into the justing dimension
requires primal community as a social demonstration. Endless felicity
emerges when you take a structure of society in which people live
and work, experiencing life as sheer dread and terror, sheer waste,
sheer dark night. The Religious go into that situation, either
business, government, or whatever builds the methods and structures
which allow people to understand what they are doing is human
engagement, That is social demonstration. It creates presencing
love.
I have played a bit with what "unlove"
might be for the Religious. Sometimes people fall off on the witnessing
dimension but do not hold the other two poles. They wind up being
superficial. The trap is superficiality. They get trapped into
neat formulas. The formulas, in one way, are true enough, but
they fail to deal with the particularity of the people that they
are working with. Or, they lose the depth that comes from the
ongoing encounter with Awe that changes all formulas.
The other trap is winding up on the justing pole.
We get re wed up to do a demonstration, but forget witnessing
and presencing. We wind up being reduced. We wind up giving our
whole being to some little ridiculous thing rather than on behalf
of all. We stand in shallowness, not in the depth that comes from
standing over against the Mystery.
The attempt to be presencing love without witnessing
and justing is ridiculous. It is to fall into immediacy. It is
to attempt to get immediate stillness, immediate timelessness,
or immediate eternality. Love of God takes place in and through
the Word, in and through the care for the world which means witnessing
and justing love.
I discovered my whole life I had told the Good Samaritan
story with the question, how do I come off like a Good Samaritan?
How do I come off justified? When that question exploded the story
for me, I saw that Jesus was not answering my question with the
story He was only concerned with the picture of a
man of love. I spent years of fruitless speculation wondering
how to deal with panhandlers who come to the door of the office.
I was worrying out of the context of justification, probably because
of my interpretation of the Good Samaritan. But the story was
really about what a man of love looks like. The issue was what
does it mean to be neighbor to the world.
Segundo's interpretation of the sheep and goats story
is also helpful. He pushes us to see the issue has to do with
engaging in the love or the care for the world, and that being
the church has to do with being the ones who know, on the other
side of engaging. Segundo says that the church in our time engages
in care for the world with people who have all sorts of weird
contexts for such engagement. They do not believe what we believe.
They do not have the same presuppositions about their humanness
that we do. The only thing that binds us to them is their concern
to get food to the people who are hungry. As we move into these
parishes, that is what we will find ourselves doing. We have talked
abut what it means to be mated with unbelievers. We have talked
about establishing long term relationships with Ceasars, federal
governments, and people who do not believe any of the things we
believe about humanness. That is what the sheep and goats Parable
is about.
As we brood on the theology of love, our meditative
council should include some old friends and some new ones. Those
of you who were here this summer saw the Man of La Mancha as a
new movie. It was new because we could see what that movie was
talking about from the standpoint of love rather than faith. I
experienced that movie the first time as utterly bewildering.
It was an alien image to my theology. After 20 years of telling
ourselves the way life is, Don Quixote gives a speech and says
the worst thing of all was to see the way life is without seeing
the way life should be. Everybody just collapsed. You know he
is right, you intuit that he is right. Yet it shattered you if
you have done any RSI teaching at all.
Kazantzakis, another saint for these times, says
that in coming to terms with faith, one must consider what the
heart requires beyond the mind. The heart says "Damn! This
gap is going to be filled up with the stuff of my beingeven
though it is impossible, even though it is hopeless. Nevertheless,
that is my crusade. That is what my life will always be about."
We saw Cromwell this summer. In the film, Cromwell,
having retired from life, is called back because of his care.
Do you recall the line, "This nation is going to be governed
if I have to do it myself." He will be a helpful figure for
us as we continue to work with the theology of Love.
Ron Clutz
8/31/74