Study Document

Guild #14

Global Research Assembly

Summer '74

A. GLOBAL FUTURE FOR RELIGION AND THE CHURCH

GENERAL

INTRODUCTION

1. The Church as she has moved into the 20th century climate, has faced the necessity of profound change in relations with the world and in redefining and reordering her own identity. Amazing creativity has characterized her life over the last several decades as she has responded to the challenges of scientific thought, globally interrelated urban society, and the secular approach to all fundamental issues. The theological awakening has rivaled any other period of her history. We have also seen the rise of the laity to responsible roles within the Church and her mission. We have seen the Ecumenical movement build relations between all aspects of the Christian people and forge clear images of her united task in service of one globe. Her interior pain and struggle has increased as she has attempted to become more and more practical concerning her role in the local community and her overall responsibility for the destiny of the globe. It was in the midst of this authentic and very necessary struggle that a considerable portion of the Church experienced what might be poetically described as a fall through time into spirit space.
  1. THE FALL THROUGH TIME INTO SPIRIT SPACE

A. The Other World



THE LAND OF

MYSTERY

2. The emergence of spirit space in the midst of our everyday living might be called "the other world." The other world is "other" not in the sense of escape from this life, but as the radicalization of this life into the depths of conscious being. In the midst of studying astronomy, you are told that if the sun were the size of an orange the earth would be a grain of sand 30 feet away and the next star a grapefruit 2000 miles away. Deep contemplation sets in. My life is a bit of luxurious foliage water, and air in the midst of arid emptiness. You read the latest article on black holes, condensations of matter so intense that gravity keeps light from escaping, and your very ideas about the natural world begin to slip off the edge into the dark abyss. The same disclosure of sheer mystery can occur in studying the nature and evolution of biological life or in exploring a single human relationship. Again and again life is disclosed to one as beyond his kin, utterly unknown and unknowable in any way that would make him secure in his knowledge. There grows up within him a resentment like the resentment one feels when friends have left him out. Man senses himself intentionally excluded from the secret: and those who hold the secret are conspiring to keep him in the dark. Man senses that he has been excommunicated, that everything relates to him as excommunicated, and yet there has been no intimation of a decree. These conspirators observe him, he imagines, as he wanders in ignorance. He begins to breed hostility toward that which is­conspiring against him. Deeper down he becomes aware that no one holds the secret, that no one holds the key, that­there is no key and never will be. He experiences not relief, but total injury. That which is beyond him is truly beyond him and will never be his to categorize or contain.




THE RIVER OF

CONSCIOUSNESS

His excommunication is indeed final. This utterly secular experience sheds meaning on the Church's heritage: "Only the Father knows, not even the Son."

3. Self­conscious freedom is a second dimension of the strange world of spirit man is meeting in the midst of his everyday life. There are scientists who say we have four­and­a­half billion years of earth history behind us and four­and­a­half billion years ahead before planet earth burns up in the heat of an expanding sun. We are roughly at the midpoint of the evolution of life on this planet. The genes of each species and the economy of the total Spaceship Earth are awaiting human decision. Our naivete has been stolen from us. The responsibility for the future of the total earth is in our hands alone. In the largest or smallest situations of decision, man experiences himself before a myriad of possibilities, reeling with unconstrained liberty. He retraces his memory of the decisions that have brought him to his present moment, and he anticipates his future knowing that its content is open. The very criteria by which content is evaluated is open. He, in the moment of choice, builds both his conscience and the deeds his conscience will judge. There are no excuses, he has no one to blame. He is alone, intensely aware, and unbearably trusted with the quality of life billions of men and women will or will not enjoy. Secular men, for whom religious vocabulary has become cryptic, nevertheless know very well this essential liberty of spirit which our religious heritages extol.



THE MOUNTAIN

OF CARE

4. Care is a third dimension of this other world of spirit space that appears one day in the midst of the earthly trek. Slowly at first man discovers the true scope of his care for life. In the event it comes upon man like an avalanche, like a mountain sitting directly upon him. Perhaps the realization comes to him in learning that his laundry detergent contains ingredients which pollute lakes, kill fish and other inhabitants of the earth's bodies of water. He is quick to discontinue use of the product and encourages others to do likewise. The one day, someone responds to his preaching, "Fool" what difference can it make what detergent you use when every factory on earth is spewing enough pollutants to destroy every body of water on earth. What difference can it possibly make what detergent you use or don't use?" His response is not agreement. The remark makes him aware that not only does his care include lakes, himself and his acquaintances, but those factories as well; and the people who work in them and their families and their families' families and on and on until none is left out. He experiences himself, however absurdly, the guardian of the globe; the whole world becomes his neighborhood. It occur to him that if indeed he is responsible, he needs sensitive all­encompassing means of caring; yet, he is only one alone and no one has elected him chairman of the world. Who would recognize the seriousness with which he cares? Paralysis sets in. He sees that his choice makes no sense. He is one of four­and­a­half billion ­ only one ­ and yet his care will not go away. Encumbered forever by the pain of his inadequacy and the necessity of his choices, he becomes the one who takes charge of history from his own backyard. He is Atlas, a strong man, but a man all the same, forever compelled to walk with the world on his back and being no match for the load.


THE SEA OF

TRANQUILITY

5. The fourth dimension of this spirit topography is the experience of tranquillity, or peace, experienced in the very heart of contingency, ambiguity and crushing responsibility. Like a lightning flash that lights up the sky, it one day becomes clear that there are no problems in life. Problems are an invention of the human spirit which does not wish to live victoriously the real situation it has. The truth about human existence is peace. There are no problems, only issues with which I can deal in a manner which I can create. Marriage, children, Job, warfare, scandal, death, come what may ­ the truth remains: at the center of the storm all is at rest. The captain of a four­Jet airliner coming in to land on only one engine has warned the airport, alerted the passengers, set the controls, placed himself on utter alertness, and now as the unknown future approaches, he allows himself to be conscious of the deeps of consciousness. All is peace. The storm of events has no dominion. There is rest and relaxation at the center of an intense happiness that was never anywhere else than in the very midst of all his worldly woe. The sensitive churchman along with the millions that compose mankind has fallen through time into the other world of spirit space.
  1. The Dark Night; of the Church

6. With the coming of this profound consciousness of the other world, the Church has experienced deep humiliation over its shallow handling of human beings and issues. Well­meaning words and actions have missed the mark. Ethical thinking has proven naive; ideals about building a new society have exposed themselves as mere illusion. Humiliation envelopes the Church as it realizes that it often misunderstood the ancient heritage to which it has given so vigorous a defense. The Church has been experiencing its contingency at a deep intemal level. Such humiliation is what St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Soul. Only now is it clear that the Church has been experiencing the Dark Night for many years It signals not that the Church has lost its way, but that the Church is on a necessary journey to the center of being. The weakness the Church has experienced in the 20t century goes far beyond the apparent problems of declining membership, waning finances or insufficient clergy. These times have spurned the words spoken to them by the Church not because they spoke too deeply, but because they were either irrelevant, sentimental or attempted to wash away the reality of living. The service done for man was too little and too late. When the full demands of the century stood before us, the strongest among us were speechless and paralyzed for lack of tools, methods and strategies. Yet this was strangely appropriate, for the Church, in its powerlessness, was in precisely the right state in which to reappropriate the power of the other world. The resentment the Church experiences over its irrelevancy and weakness is nothing less than the Church's step forward into more comprehensive care for the spirit and all of mankind. The dream of a suffering­less life with no Dark Night must constantly be fought against. The Dark Night is not a temporary affliction, it is humanness itself. The long suffering that results from the ever­present temptation to escape the Dark Night of being the Church is, in itself, a mark of the authentic suffering servant. The Dark Night is a sign that the Church has been following exactly the right course these many years. This realization redeems these same 'lost years,' and reinstates them as a meaningful part of the church's Journey to transformation.

THE RETURN TO SERVE MAN
  1. II. THE RETURN FROM SPIRIT SPACE INTO TIME

  1. The First Act of Humanness ­ Religion

7. Once man Has Journeyed to life's very center, the needs of man draw him back into engagement in the world. Although he is aware that he has no need that can be filled by achievement in the world, he dears the cry of suffering humanity, beckoning him to concrete service. He knows that some response is required for he resides on earth and is confronted with humanity's needs. This return from the center is a classical story of mankind. It is the story of Buddha who Journeyed to Nirvana and, though he had no wish or need to return, came back to this world that suffering man might profit from the illumination he had discovered. It is the story of Jesus who left the mountain of the transfiguration, despite the protestations of his disciples, and resumed the journey to Jerusalem. It is the story of Isaiah who was told by the Lord in the awe­filled Temple to go and speak to a people who would not hear him, and Isaiah went forth. The first act of the return is the act of creating or recreating the Journey to the center.

THE PRTMAL ACT OF RELIGION 8. How many times did the first human consciousness nearly break through, only to turn back because of the awesomeness of conscious life? How many beings in prehistoric times refused to be human, sinking back into unconsciousness rather than bear the burden of awareness? Human consciousness dawned the day primal man dared to stand present ­ however hesitatingly ­ to both the dread and fascination of being conscious of Being. His response in the face of that consciousness, whether a dance or a groan, was the first expression of religion, the symbolic form given to the relationship he took to the inbreaking of Mystery with its attending experience of Awe. Every culture has birthed myths, rites and symbols to hold the revelation of the Final Reality it has encountered in the midst of life. Religion is both an inevitable part' of human society and the means by which that society relates to the Final Realities with which it must deal. A key perversion of religion has been the tendency to mistake the symbols that point to the inbreaking reality for the Final Reality itself. Man easily forgets that his symbolic expression and representations are but a finite witness to that Reality which no symbol can ever hold nor adequately portray.
THE HTSTORICAL SHIFT IN RELIGION 9. The coming of scientific truth was an earthquake to mankind. It rocked, shook and began the process of destroying the time­honored religious universe man had created for himself. The two story universe painted the profound encounters and responses of the human deeps as stories and dialogues that took place in a metaphorical realm beyond mundane activity. This two­space metaphor was itself a great poem about the discontinuity between this world and the other world. Men lived within that poem not quite facing the fact that it was a poem invented by man until the scientific age forced consciousness to face that fact. The world of the 20th century is one story. There is no religious realm opposed to the secular There is only the secular; the 'religious' is experienced in its midst. Working within the two­story mindset, man set up two social spaces, one for practical religion and one for life. They were the space of the Church and the space of the world, or the world of symbols and the world of practical survival. These functioned as two different worlds. When one went to Church, he left this world and Journeyed into the world of symbols. The Hindu had the same

experience. He left this world and went into the Temple. We know now that the world of symbols was a fanciful world which allowed man to experience what we have now called the other world of spirit space in the midst of this world. But in the past all people had two separate spaces in actual social practice ­ one space for this world and one space for the other world. The connection between the two was thus forced upon man as a key dilemma for religious thought. Today the relations are radically different. The experience of the other world lies in the midst of this world. One does not have to go to Church to meet the mystery. 20th century man meets the mystery in the midst of this world. If he meets the mystery in Church he does so because he has taken the world into the world of the Church by relating the old symbols to world life. Man is already working out new pattems of thought and practice with which to transpose the religious wisdom of the ages into the present world. New wine of the spirit is already spilling for want of new wineskins

THE GLOBAL DECAY OF RELIGION 10. Throughout this century, Christianity has experienced an almost total polarization between those who have sought to conserve the fundamental heritage in its ancient frame and those who have sought to raise the probing modem questions. Defensiveness exposed the weakness of what was defended. Apathy on the part of the masses showed the deep loss of meaningfulness. The times have occasioned these same phenomena in every classical religious tradition of the globe. Once powerful means of articulating the experience of life at the center of being are now incapable of motivating creative endeavor. Every religion will either undergo radical transposition into modem form or it will die out.
  1. The Christian Church and the Task of Religion
THE CHURCH AND ITS RELIGIONS 11. When the Christian Church began it was actually sect of the Jewish religion. It thought of itself as Jewish. Its theological language was Jewish, its worship was Jewish, everything it did was as other Jews did. The only difference between Christians and the rest of Judaism was that, in their minds, they had radicalized what the Exodus meant (and also what the Messiah meant). The happening that Jesus occasioned in the lives of the disciples became for them a new Exodus. How miraculous, they thought, that all of their Jewish expectations were being met in the present moment. But the Christians, in their own understanding, were radical Jews. They did not change religions. Soon, non­Jews became intrigued with the witness of these radical Jews but they themselves had no interest in becoming Jews. The Church was forced to face up to that issue. The struggle was by no means an easy one, as the conflict between Peter and Paul reveals. But radical as it was, the Christians made an exodus from Judaism and began the building of a new religion. Perhaps they even built two, the Eastem or Orthodox and the Western or Roman. Both were Greek religions in that they were constructed out of the insights of Plato and his interpreters. The decision, in a very real sense, was arbitrary. If the Church had left Judaism and gone to India instead of Greece, words like Atman and Brahman would be Christian terms rather than terms such as 'logos'. Though Protestantism, too, is a Greek religion, it represents still another religion of Christianity. The vicious wars between Protestants and Catholics serve to illustrate the existence of a fundamentally different religious way.
12. The Christian Church of the future will participate in building new religious modes. These modes will be shaped in dialogue with all religious forces across the planet whether they be self­consciously religious or quite unconsciously so. Even now, the very meaning of 'Christian' and 'Church' is being grounded in the new consciousness of cost modem man.
THE TRANS

RELIGIOUS

REALITY OF

CHURCH

13. Each 'religion' within Christianity has claimed to hold the definitive articulation of "that which endures forever. " The wonder that has been emerging within the thought and life of the Christian people in recent decade is the awareness that faith, hope and love, which each Christian religion has articulated, are profound secular dynamics which cannot be the property of any religious system. The dynamics of faith, hope and love are indeed enduring, while the religious systems which have attempted to contain them are not. There have been Christians who have spoken of Christian Economics, Christian Politic and Christian Culture. Most Christians are now profoundly uneasy with such temms. Christians do participate in politics and there are criteria for Judging good politics and bad politics, but Christian politics is a meaningless phrase in any thorough modem theology. So also for the temm 'Christian religion'. Christians must participate in religion, even to understand and bear witness to their own faith, but from this time forward, Christians will work alongside all men for good religion, never presuming that any religion ever shall or ever did deserve the adjective 'Christian'.
14. How then does Christianity describe its identity if it is not one of the religions of the earth? The theological task this question points to cannot be completed in one paragraph. But already millions of churchmen are clear that faith in God is a relation of trust in Being itself. The fall into the world of spirit space is a fall into a profound secular experience of that 'Being itself before which all men stand More difficult has been the struggle to see the secular nature of faith in Christ. But many have seen that Christ is nothing less than that illumination of consciousness that sees profoundly that the road to full humanness lies not in the attempt to escape the fundamental conditions of finitude but in embracing them as the doorway to the depths of authentic life. The Love of God for man is the gift of the very finitude about which man feels so resentful and from which man attempts to flee through every manner of foolishness. The Holy Spirit is but the living out of faith, hope and love. All these terms point to nothing less than the way life really is for the man who is committed to act out his authentic humanness. Love is but the active process of giving form to the mountain of care that consciousness discovers life really is. However painful and disagreeable, man simply cares for the whole world. Love is but the unraveling of the twisted refusals to care and the release of that true passion of man into the concrete completeness of his life. The Christian articulation is not about some narrowly creedal or moral subject; it represents a dramatization of that which was already and ever will be present in the life of the world. Theology is a never­ending job. The clarity on the three faces of God is far advanced in the contemporary Church compared with clarity on the sociological face of the people of God. What will be the practical form of the Church? the missional composition of those who intend to make faith, hope and love their whole life? In the midst of foggy pictures, at least this awesome prospect is beginning to clear. The new church will be an utterly secular reality participating with all men in the rebuilding of the religious mode in the secular on behalf of all men.
THE TASK OF

RELIGIOUS

RECREATION

15. The new religious adventure of will be created in dialogue with all the well springs of humanness on the face of the earth. No longer will Greek religion be seen predominant. The struggle with such problems has already begun in the in the Christian Churches. The African Church has struggled for generations to dialogue authentically with the African fomls of humanness. In India, Christian theologians have already taken upon themselves to become experts on Hinduism, to become experts on what it means to be a brown man and a Christian at the same time.
16. Both mankind and the Church will build the future of religion out of the religious past of the entire earth not out of the Greek part of the earth ­­ all religions are finite, that there is no such thing as the religion. The possible new forms of religion defy the imagination at this point, but it is becoming clear to Christians that Plato had no comer on profundity. The great religions of the East as well as the slightly less systematic religious creativity of the south is no less profound than anything we call western. The building of new religious modes is every bit as objective as the task of building politics or economics, even though the issues of religion are concerned with the deepest interior ontology of human nature.
17. It is clear, too, that self­conscious Christians alone cannot build man's new modes of religion. The Church must become the servant of all religions as they struggle with these questions. The task of the present day people of God is involvement in the process of transposing into our time the wisdom of the entire past and of all cultures. The goal is not an eclectic mingling of this and that but the creation of inclusive profundity that encompasses all the insights that consciousness has ever known. As a byproduct of this human task, the Church will find its own new form.

THE NATURE OF

SECULAR

RELIGION

18. How does one achieve some operating sense of what good religion is, if one has no authoritative religious system as a point of reference? Good religion is tested by its relevance to the world's experience and understandings of life, and also by its capacity to embody the profound dimension of humanness. Communism might be described as a quasi­religion, whose myth, rites and symbols were very relevant but whose forms programmed out any serious consideration of the everlasting essences of the human deeps. The classical religions in our time retain the centuries of experience with profound humanness but have become irrelevant to the experience and methods of our time. The transposition of classical religions into relevant images and the challenge of secular shallow ness will be the result of good religion. Good religion will be both profoundly universal and thoroughly embodied It will unite the awareness of mystery with the awareness of real man in his contemporary setting. It will therefore avoid a mysticism which loses contact with practical living and a humanism that reduces man t­o a practical being. Even clearer criteria for good religion can be worked out on a completely secular basis. The task of religious recreation is a task that is never finished. But the task is begun when we can imagine all the world's religions seated around one table with a workable method of caring for the depth well­being of mankind.
III. THE LIVING BODY OF THE CHURCH IS LOVE

19. The love of the world includes, but includes more than recreating the religious modes. The return to time includes actively embodying care for the total world: situation at this point in time. The structures of society that channel goods, freedom and meaning to each individual cry out to be analyzed and rebuilt. Each individual life cries out for the chance to participate in authentic humanness. It is the return to time from spirit space, the visible outgoing action that gives a tangible face to the mountain of care which is our enduring humanness. It is love, the same love the Apostle Paul exalted as even greater than faith or hope. Such love is, by its very nature, inclusive of all existing reality, endlessly appropriate, and essentially human. He who has loved family or Job or nation as a substitute for this total love of being has not yet found his own true being. The love of each man means calling him to this total love of being; it is the same as calling him to his own true being. Even the person who scoffs at the call to love is nevertheless included in its further activity. No matter how one responds to the call, love is not selective; its care excludes no one as it perpetually recreates the basic structures of society.

JUSTICE
  1. The Inclusive Action of Love

20. The living body of the church comes into being around this task of preserving and bringing Justice to the earth. Every man is already participating in the task of justice and every man must be trusted and called upon to intensify his participation. The role of the church is demonstration of directions and possibilities which all men may share in carrying to fruition. Protest is only one small aspect of demonstration.. Demonstration essentially positive and creative. It initiates hope where there is no hope. It is not a futile attempt to create an oasis of Justice in a hopelessly corrupt world. It is finding the places within the processes of this world where a massive avalanche of change can begin. It pinpoints the primary arenas in which humanness is restrained, and raises, just there, the strategic sign. Demonstration is a sign that leaves the whole loaf of the historical process. Such love of the world manifests a basic trust in the essential capabilities of man. It chooses mankind as a whole to be its colleague. It does so, not in naivete, but in spite of the deep selfishness of man and the immense perversions of love and justice. Love begins a process of repentance from current injustice and enables the process to replicate throughout the earth until the last man is delivered from injustice.

WITNESS21. The living body of the Church comes into being around this task of witnessing to each man concerning the possibilities within his unique life. Each man, whether he knows it or not, is facing a foundational decision: the question of whether or not he will live his life in all its fated givennesses and all its undetermined potentialities. Each man stands in need of vision concerning whether and how his life can concretely make a contribution in the inclusive drama of his era. Moreover, each man needs the witness of others into the profound 'fabrics' and 'joumeys' of the inexpressible deeps of humanness. The task of filling this need for­each man is immense and complex. It requires strategy and organization and effective programs and methods. It is the essential enablement to the task of Justice. The profound care for each man is the central concern that makes global Justice worth doing. Even economic and political well­being become empty unless an individual is enabled to find his own authentic fulfillment in relation to himself, his world, and the profound.

PRESENCE
22. The living body of the Church is itself the task of love. We have called this love 'presence' to distinguish it from the acts of Justice and witness. Presence is also an action, the action of the Church's style as a sign to the world of what is possible for human beings to be and do. Style is the way space and time are practically focused in one's life. Style is how one's own intimate space and time are related to all space and all time. Style is the translation of the profound deeps of one's own humanness into a poem of extemal words and deeds addressed to all men. The living body of the Church is the action of love through its very presence when its style manifests the qualities of: lifelong dedication to global justice, lifelong dedication to the depth care of consciousness of each human being, and lifelong commitment to be the constant effort toward extemalizing profound humanness. Such presence is but­ the intensification of the tasks of justice and witness. It is the intemalization in one's own being of the love that is never anything other than action beyond the self toward the need of the world.

DISCIPLINE
23. The living body of the Church maintains and sustains these tasks of love by itself becoming a discipline body of nurture and task commissioning. The gathered life of the Church must be reconstructed with the tasks of love in mind. The only purpose of the Church is fulfilling the tasks of love. The gathered life is for the sake of those tasks. These simple principles must be worked through radically in relation to worship, study and common life. The care for the self in order that one may not fail to be effective in caring for others, is an essential fomm of love for the world. Also essential is the establishment of a social point of reference for rehearsing in concretions the inclusive sending from spirit space into time. Economics, polity and every other issue of the common life become alive in the body of the Church when each is related radically to the task of love.

B. The Long March of Love

24. What all this means in specifics will become clear only in the midst of actually loving the world in our time. The Church is entering upon what may be called the long march of love. The march is somehow very new in its specific depth and global scope. But the march is also very old, at least as old as Moses and the desert tribes, perhaps even older than Abraham and his family. The march has also been manifest in India, China, Africa, ancient America and wherever else man "built civilizations and set divinity free. " Long and rich is our memory of the experience of the march of love with which to dialogue. From our experience of the past we can anticipate certain depth qualities of our march into the future. First of all, we can anticipate a sense of being adrift in empty space as we constantly struggle unsuccessfully to express the truth of the mystery in our witness to the world. The experience of homelessness is intensified as we sense ourselves traitors to the world in maintaining our creative affimmation of the mystery. The task will never cease to seem too much for us. Our most shocking success will seem a speck of dust in the face of the immense work to be done.Then too, we must be ready to see our motivity fade and profound weariness settle in on us. The very vision that gave our love direction will collapse and leave us stumbling aimlessly for a new hold on this forever fragile vision. All four of­these profound experiences are not an indication that we have lost our way. They are signs that we are on the path of radical love for this world. We must embrace these devastating interior events as part of what it means to be on the long march of love. Happy are the rootless, the inadequate, the weary, and the stumbling, for these very lives of burden are the authentic promised land of God's kingdom. These very lives of burden are the emergence of our authentic humanity. To grasp ourselves sent to love the world is to finally grasp our own true selves beneath all the sham and escape Being sent from spirit space into time to wholeheartedly love this world is the living body of the Church.