Guardians' Meeting April 13­15` 1973

Chicago Closing Plenary

RESURGEMENT AND THE RELIGIOUS

Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

The glue of any movemental dynamic of the People of God is always an extreme! fragile product. There are no temporal remunerations, finally. I believe that one of the crucial operating principles within our order, for instance, is that, among ourselves, we never thank anybody for anything. That is the way we honor one another. For how could you thank a man who has given his all for anything he does? So in the light of that principle, I have no thanks to give you; but I want you to know that I am grateful to God for what you have done­in these last forty­four hours.

I believe an explosion is about to happen, and this time it will not be continental nor will it be international. It is very obvious that it will be global. This is not simply a geographical category. There has been no time in our history when we were any better prepared for a future event.

I believe that you can tell historical times by the rhythm of Justification and Sanctification. Those are theological categories. However, I am not using them in any particular theological frame of reference, but simply as short­hand symbols to point to discernible happenings in the dimension of humanness itself. In theological circles, that which, in one frame of reference or another, is called "Justification," is the happening of awakenment. The suffix "­ment" means "being " or "state of being." I like that -- awakenment: a state of being, a state of awakening or awakenness. For Sanctification, I like the word resurgement. It means "resurrection," to ride the new: "resurgence." I am interested in the dynamical state of the happening, the state of the happening of "resurgence." Which is, to coin a word, "resurgement."

In the midst of the passing away of any age there are those who awaken; and the awakenment is always relative to profound insights into the raw deeps of humanness of what it means to be a human being. It is like the glorious cultures; not like a painting, a sculpture or a movie. Those are not creativity. They are simply a part of the manifestation of that creativity which is the culture. If you want to see raw, sheer creativity, then you look at the great cultures of civilization. Gorgeous hunks of the manifest humanness concern themselves for a moment with the mind of the Mystery beyond our comprehension and then fade away. In the midst of that very fading, it seems that mystery is all about us. Before the final mystery, these cultures pass away; and in the midst of their very passing the human happening of awakenment takes place -- Lo here! Lo there! and Lo over there! In that moment, awakenment has become almost a common reality, though it is never "common."

Man perceives today as one who has never perceived before. He always experiences that no men has before ever perceived such new deeps of what it means to be a human being. Not only is culture being re­imaged and re­designed, but man himself, you and I, are being re­imaged and re­designed. What is happening now has never happened before. When it becomes somewhat common, then the dynamic of

Sanctification takes place -- or "resurgence." And that is the beginning of the forging of the new. Of course, it began the moment that this one and that one awakened. Here again, mystery is all about us.

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Do you not sense that that new man (I do not mean in a body, at the moment) is here? Yet he is not here. He has got to be called forth out of the marble that has been quarried. At this moment man expends his awakenment. This expending of awakenment is a happening of resurgement. Some never get beyond awakenment and most, of course, never even personally experience awakenment.

At one time the Church used to cry over the people in the world who did not have the opportunity to experience awakenment. I suppose you would have to say that most people living today will have to go to their graves, as Ecclesiastes says, like cows having never had the opportunity to experience the happening of awakenment. I believe, however, that many experience awakenment who, perhaps, do not experience the happening of resurgement. I am not clear here, but T~ believe it is true.

I want to deal indirectly with why that might be. At this moment in history it is a highly practical matter, only it is a happening you do not 1nitiate­. It is the expending of your awakenment, or giving concretion to your awakenment It is the embodiment, in the civilizing process, of your awakenment. In one moment in history there is the reaching after meaning. In another moment in history meaning is poured into structures, or structures are forged to freight that meaning. This is the moment of resurgement -- as human a happening as awakenment,


In this diagram the bottom triangle is the analysis of awakenment which, of course, RS­I deals with. It has nothing to do with doctrine or theoretics. 1t attempts to describe phenomenologically the happening | of awakenment. You begin in RS­I down in the lower left-hand corner. I have used there categories of virtue or character qualities as a way to describe these quickly. In the left­hand corner is your God Lecture in RS­I: Inescapable Contingency.

This is the happening in which suddenly you experience the last rug pulled out from under you. The you face the eternal irrationality beyond your own capacity or any other man's capacity to reason. There is where you meet the Mystery. In the midst of that experience of ''no-thingedness" or nothingness is the first step of waking up as a human being. You die! You know nothing beyond that. Yet lucidity, so profound that you cannot fathom it, comes in the midst of that experience. That is the Christ Lecture.

The final up­againstness you experience as Inescapable Contingency is not only an aspect of life, it ·'s lifer In the Church we call that the Word! Either you accept your life of creaturehood, or you do not have any life. The one life you have is the very meaning of your life. I call that Profound Lucidity. I like that word "profound" these days. It means "radical" -- foundational, rudimentary, fundamental. That is the Word: the painful, wonderful Word.

When it dawns on you that this is what life is all about, you are forced to make a decision. I use the wo­1 'forced,' because you have no choice. You either have to choose the "no" or choose the "yes". If you choose the "no", then you blot out of your mind through one comforting escape or another the experience of Inescapable Contingency. You remain something less than a human being until the worms take over.

If you say "Yes", you discover what I call Transrational Freedom -- that you are in charge of the unbelievable gift of having one life to live and one death to die. You and you alone are is charge of it. There is no one to blame -- no wives, no children, no ancestors, no external fates. That is the awakenment happening. It is not an idea about life; it is a happening. It is a happening of the deeps of life.

It is at this point the resurgement happening can happen, and only at this point. When a man has his freedom -- that is, is his freedom or takes upon himself the freedom he is, he will discover that his freedom has to be spent. Kierkegaard said that if you have a penny and you spend it for a lollipop, you do not have a penny any more. You have got a lollipop. Freedom is like a penny; it has to be spent. The resurgement happening has to do with the authentic expenditure of the freedom that he is.

The resurgement happening begins equivalently at the top of the diagram, on the left­hand, where the Virtue category is Universal Benevolence. That happening only happens in the midst of the glee and the buoyancy o~ having grasped the "I am free "' All of life, in a strange, unbelievable way, has become good; it is your life. I like to walk on the beach in the mornings, I like the rain but I like sunny days, too. On some such day, or in some such series of circumstances while walking on the beach, the sun is shining and it ;s great to be alive, and the you stub your toe on a dead seagull. As if it had any right to intrude its death into this fantastic day of yours; Suddenly the sky falls in. It is not the dead bird. In one sense that had nothing to do with it, except that it was the occasion of the sky falling. The failing of the sky is what you mean by unlimited good will, in which you become aware suddenly that you are responsible for the whole world.

It is not something intellectual it is Just there. You are no longer responsible for your children. I cannot put the pain strongly enough. There is not such a thing anymore as your children. They do not exist anymore. There is not such a thing anymore as your nation. It does not exist anymore. You suddenly become aware that you are responsible for everything in creation. Schweitzer went to Africa to atone for the sins of the white man against the black man. He took them all on himself! You slowly become aware that you are responsible for everything that has ever happened. No longer is it, "I was not there!" "I did not do it!" It is just, "Yes, I am present." You are responsible for the whole future. That is not something intellectual. It is just there! It is an indicative! Your common law has no meaning anymore -- only the generations. You cry out, "That cannot be!" You know what I am talking about. You are crying it out now. A thousand­ton crane has dropped on you and driven you into the center of the earth. You try to roll this way and the burden rolls with you. You try to roll that way and it rolls with you. You are trapped! It is not that the inscrutable mystery has yanked the rug out from under you; he has placed the world on top of you.

Radical Integrity, profound integrity, has to do with being crushed by the weight of the world. It includes the awareness that this is what it means to be a man. I like the Jesus figure. John the Baptist baptized people for profound repentance; this turned upside down everything they have ever been taught. Jesus came to be baptized, and in the midst of that sign heard a voice, "Thou art my beloved son." That has to do w'7th Radical Integrity. In the midst of this is the awareness that you did not first of all come out of a family; you did not first of all come out of a race; you did not first of all come out of a nation; you did not first of all come out of a church; you were, first of all, born of woman. You came out of humanity. A voice comes from deep within the cavernous dimensions of your being; the Word is screamed to you from the circumference of the universe itself: "This is what it means to be a man! My beloved son!" This is what it is all about to be human consciousness.

For you, this is just the way it is. Everyone knows the Christ Lecture begins, "My wife is the wrath of God in my life." When you are aware the rug has not only been pulled out from under you but has been pulled out from under all that is, it is at that moment that profound lucidity happens. You hear the Word, "This is the way life is!" When I was younger and thinner, at this point in the lecture I would jump to one side to illustrate that you are thrown outside yourself; you are looking at yourself. Between you and yourself is an unbridgeable chasm, an abyss that you cannot get around. You cannot avoid it. You can only take it into your elf and that is your freedom -- your Radical Integrity.

When the crash comes and you are thrown outside yourself, you become aware that this responsibility .for everything is what it means to be human. There is an abyss; but instead of this abyss being an empty vacuum, it is brimful of weakness. Some of my young colleagues tell me from time to time that I have grave self­doubt I e>perience myself as being humiliated. Precisely when you grasp that weakness is what it means to be a man, then you grasp you cannot deal with it. All of us great big men who thought we could handle the morality in this world, who thought we could handle the decencies of this world, who thought we could handle the normal demands of this world, we suddenly see ourselves as nothing other than sheer weakness. This is the ontological humiliation which is the core of consciousness itself. This is the way life is. "I am the light." Out of this is failure -- ontological failure. If you succeed or if you do not succeed, it does not matter. You can be a little fish in a trig pond, or a big fish in a little tiny pond. Now this is cut through, and you experience only failure. You discover the abyss is filled with objectless pain. How can this be?

It is the happening of resurgement that has happened to you. Suddenly in the midst of life, without knowing why, your being is filled with a kind of pain. You never knew it existed. Some way you secretly know it is never going to go away. (Have I described the abyss enough for you?) You have just two choices. And you have to make the choice It is either "no'' or "yes". There is no deal you can make; you have gone too far.

If you say "no", you turn into a malign or benign zombie. For The rest of your life you are malign. You do not know why, but you are mean. The women you know become mean, mean women. Some of you are married. The men are mean. You cannot see any reason why they are mean, they just are. You see what happens. This is why you pray that this resurgence does not happen to you. What goes away from you is what you learned in RS­I. It is whipped out of your memory. You no longer know your life is significant. You no longer know this world is good. It is taken away. So you are just mean, filled with hatred -- not hostility, but hatred. But you do not know what to direct your hatred at. Or you are benign, and you smile all the time. For the rest of your life you are just nice. If you want a pleasant domestic relationship instead of marriage, it will not be easy to find one. But people have forgotten why they are smiling. They just smile; nothing gets at them anymore.

Or, your answer is "Yes". This means that the rest of your life you have to pay. You cannot really tell anybody about it. You just have to pay. When you return from the Center, the cloud of apostasy never goes away. you say "Yes" to it. You embrace it. That is who you are. Then you discover using romantic poetry -- a silver lining in the dark cloud. It is the silver lining in the dark cloud. The cloud never turns silver. It is then that you experience Endless Fulfillment. There is certitude in the midst of abso1Tute uncertainty. It is always there. You know the struggle inside could not be there if it was not the way you experience problemlessness. The peace that passes all human understanding happens exactly when you have every problem of the world upon your shoulders! You discover, right then, that you no longer have any problems.

In this moment of resurgence, psychiatry will change. These arenas of life are not understood psychologically, but they have psychological effects. This is the moment when spontaneous joy of life breaks through an indescribable burden. This is when you grasp what every culture has always come up with -- the state of endlessness. The Greeks called it immortality -- the sense, even now, of participating in the beginning and the end of being itself. You hare wanted fulfillment. I have just described this which you have yearned for all your life. I did not want to talk about this; but that is the happening of intentionally taking upon yourself this moment of resurgence in history. The Church has called that "Sanctification."

What I want to talk about is "becoming a Religious.'' The happening in humanness which is the expenditure of your freedom, in which you decide your life in the midst of that happening, is what happiness and fulfillment is al1 about. In the midst of that happening you discover you have a vocation for the first time in your life. You are elected; you are chosen. You become aware you are set aside. You become aware you are different from other people. God never calls the clergy. Culture calls clergymen and calls laymen. God only calls the Religious. God, or the mystery in life, could not care less whether you are a Religious as a lay or as a cleric. The moment of resurgence in history is when society becomes aware of mysterious elections to be the Religious.

Many of you laymen in the room -- maybe not all of you clerics, but some of you clerics -- have known for a long time that there is a strange thing here. I thought, until recently, that perhaps there was a difference between a religious cleric and a religious lay. Not so. A Religious is a man who knows what I am talking about. He has no question about his calling. He is called. The Religious is an engaged man. Whether in law, business, medicine, or priesthood, he is engaged to the bottom. No more time belongs to him -- all life is engagement. The Religious is a deeply disciplined man down inside. He knows he could not take three steps otherwise. The Religious is a radically corporate man. He belongs to the whole race. No longer is there any sense of being an individual. He is corporate. The Religious is an obedient man. He is obedient with a strange kind of detachment that allows him to experience the Holy Spirit in his being as a power and a force most men would never dream of.

Nobody can call a Religious or not call a Religious. He is called; he is called to care about all of humanity. These things have to be done for him, for us.

In order to keep from being burned to a crisp, we first have to be given a context, in which this is related to the whole of history and not simply to our own little interior being. Secondly, we have to be given a construct. Try to do this alone, and we are lost souls. That construct, I believe, has to be multifarious; but it has to be a construct. (I would like to talk about the way some of you are going to have to adjust your life for the rest of your days.) Lastly, it has to be given a climate. By a climate, I mean what I am doing now. Those of you for whom this has no meaning, forget that you are here for awhile. I have been climatizing you. You have time over the next three years to work this through together. If I were you, I would read again The Journey to The East, or I would get a little book called The Journey of Kierkegaard. I believe that I would also read Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross; and even though I might understand only one out of every ten sentences, I would stay with it until I got to the bottom of it. That is what I mean by having a climate.

Who are you? Do any of you who wish to accept yourselves? That is fine. That is what you ought to do. You are like an advisory board to what may be an unbelievable Global Movement. You understand that without such a board there could be no Global Movement. To be honest, sometimes I wish you were merely advisors. But you are not. You are what I have been talking about. You wonder what it means to be a man and launch out into the unknown like those who went before the mast for two years? You are before the Mast that would make any mast look ill. You are on the verge of adventure, and there are perils with adventure.

I worry about you -- just a little. Now, you have yourselves a good life till we meet again. Amen.

Joseph W. Mathews