I am sort of overwhelmed with the issues you have plotted on those triangles. It reminds me that you cannot do it by yourself; it takes a group to do it. You have to decide that a group policy is the best after all!

I was shocked when I saw all the problems and issues you got out. Yet, they deal with your particular community. But what­really shocked me about them was that, if you look at them, you will see that probably similar types of issues would show up in places all around the globe. For, what is actually going on in our day is the collapse in the effectiveness of local community­both in providing fundamental care for the people in the community and in providing the images and structures by which people can contribute to humanness in our age.

Human Crisis

Human Rebirth

Human Pillars

Human Images

Now Mr. McCleskey talked this morning about the New World. I want to talk this afternoon about the New Human. First of all, I would have to talk about the Human Crises; for I do not suppose new humanness could come into being without a crisis. Then, the Human Rebirth, the Human Pillars, and the Human Images; That is, the images man takes as a human to grasp himself in our day.

As we look now at those issues and what is going on in the midst of our community, we know we are participating in some sort of Human Crisis in our time. Actually, the 1960's were a culmination of an upheaval the likes of which the world has not seen for the past several thousand years. Suddenly we found ourselves projected up against global destiny. When the "moon" men brought us that picture of the earth no longer could we see the world without that globe set before us. He sees the innocent suffering of masses throughout the world there; we see the rebellions and revolutions which have gone on around the globe; we see that all as a new attempt at social progress. Changes have been made; people have burst loose with a new social understanding of what it means to be human. He saw the youth rise up and say "No," primarily to the economic process, or to the gap in his elder's ruling society. We saw the development of the feminine revolution saying, "We are going to be human beings in our own right"' "We are going to stand on our own two feet in the midst of history." We saw the Third World which shook its fist in the face of the Western World, demanding it get its humanness into history. He looked at the black revolution where people were demanding, in the name of justice, equality before the law, in order that, as a people they could take their rightful place in the civilizing process.

Yes, it has been a time of radical upheaval. Everything is turned upside down. Yet, in some ways, it seems change has not taken place as we thought it should. The legacy of the 60's is, I am sure, a myriad. But what is going on, although we have gained much, i8 that after twenty years of the Civil Rights movements, the same Problems exist. In many ways the same battles still have to be fought. We have poured billions of dollars into our cities but the problem of community survival and the sense of humanness still seems to be un­met. Public humiliation of overwhelming failure is upon us.

Our interior response to this going­oneness in the midst of the world, this crisis, is a continual humiliation. It is as if that which happens to us socially is happening to each of us individually. Our families have no way to act out their covenants, our groups are alienated, every attempt we make at change seems doomed to failure. The shift into the seventies left us with collapsed revolutions. There is a deep silence that has permeated society in each one of our beings.

The other day when John Glenn was elected into the Senate, he made a statement something like this: he said, "Today America is passing through the 'Dark Night of the Soul."' I do not know what John Glenn meant by that, but I do know that the internal being of Americans and people throughout the world is in radical shift and turmoil. There is a fear, a dread of the future. Our will to move on our intuitions and take responsible action seems to be paralyzed, paralyzed by the failures of the 60's, We seen to be waiting for something but we are not quite sure of what. All things seem to end in reductionisms and failures and we know that that humiliation will be with us from now on.

Then again, what seems to be required of us is a radical restructuring of society: yet, there is just a built­in gap

There are huge institutions on one side and local needs on the other and these institutions cannot meet the local needs. Indeed, they seem not to even want to be able to meet them however hard they try. There is a sort of impotence about their attempts. There is a weakness in what they are doing. In fact, everything just seems to remain in this same way. They churn, and churn , and churn and nothing happens to meet the needs of local man. Take, for instance, the energy crisis. Was it really a crisis? We kept hearing over and over again we have got plenty or oil, it is just that people are holding it off until the prices go up." You still hear these reverberations months after the energy crisis has ended. What I think hurt me most was when I saw that some of the American­based oil companies were selling out to other countries in order to make a little profit. And you wonder, "What in the world is going on?" It seems that all you and I, as individuals, can do is to sit in our car and wait in line at the gas station.

Well, whether it is the energy crisis or Watergate or the starvation in Africa, how can we genuinely deal with those situations? We play at engagement, saying it is a good thing; but we have tried it and we say "no" to doing something that is impotent, that is "Mickey Mouse."

Finally, this kind of reductionism breeds cynicism and quietism; and we begin to doubt the ability of our own lives just to be a self or to be a new human being. So paralysis sets in and cynicism gobbles us up and impotence and weakness rack our being. Yet maybe, John Glenn's word was right ­­ that a Dark Night is upon us. Furthermore, it seems that this is the way life is just going to be ­­ that impingement upon me and my own weakness are not going to go away. I guess we could transform our weakness into a powerful instrument but it will still never go away.

There is a similar type of collapse going on in our vocation. Though rather a secret, open futility is present in man today. He keeps going on doing the same things he was doing, feeling trapped in his lob and his work. He can't get rid of this feeling of entrapment. If he quits this company and goes over to another company, he knows he is still as trapped there as he was before. He feels as if he is on a treadmill, like a rat, just making the wheels go around. The social imbalances allow the economic to gobble up all his relations in life so that the only story he has to live out of seems to be the Economic story. And he knows that that has a lie built into the center of it. He knows getting more money doesn't make him more successful, more happy, or a better person. No wonder his dreams of success have collapsed. In the midst of that, he is bombarded with community and global problems, and he does not know how to deal with them. So he begins to be filled with resentment and deep rebellion -- not just against his work but against every relation which defines him. Did you see the movie Serpico­­the cop who was trying to be an honest cop? How can you be an honest cop without the whole police force. becoming honest? But if you try to turn the whole police force into honest policemen then you have to turn whole communities and businesses into honest people. Serpico tried it alone and could not make it. That haunting awareness that my resentment is going to be burning within me is just the way it is. It might be transformed but it is not going to he removed.

Then, the economic tyranny over the social pole of the social process has occasioned a crisis in the values and meaning in life. This is manifested in the social institutions, particularly in their purposes in history. All of our values seem to have been called into question. For example, what does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be a Republican or a Democrat? What does it mean to be White? What does it mean to be Black? What does it mean to be a father? or a son? or a mother? or a daughter? What does it mean to work for one of the giant corporations? Or a small one? Or not to work at all? The birth rate in America has reached a zero population growth. Why have children? Why perpetuate ourselves? These are not idle questions, because they burn deep within us. They are the anguish of our lives. So, we find ourselves adrift in the universe with no values or reasons for the "why."

Our interior response to this, then, is a horrible kind of anguish at the bottom of our beings. We begin to suffer. And it is an innocent suffering because the social imbalances and the way society goes on just rip these values out from us and leave us to bear the wounds of the past.. So I suffer. I suffer. Perhaps John Glenn is right again, about that I)ark Night. And you see Save the Tiger? This fellow fought in World War II to save things against tyranny. He came home and created himself a great business by creating women's fashions. In this, he was trying to create for himself a life in which he could be productive. But it began to disintegrate around him. His wife left him. He saw that he was just catering to the whims of those who were socially elite. He began to have flashbacks about the battles of the War and the people who died by his side. It was their screams, their looks at him: "Why are you doing what you are doing?" Couldn't he live on behalf of them? He wished, then, that he had died on the battlefield with them. Finally, he knew that he could no longer do what he was doing. So he hired an arsonist to burn his business down so he might get a little money in insurance and retreat somewhere. And the movie ended.

Our age tells us that our lucidity is that suffering is just going to go on­­this part of the warp and woof in life where the values have been ripped and torn away. It seems our suffering increases as that lucidity increases. Therefore, the only thing left to do with that suffering is to use it on behalf of the world. Yes, the Dark Night, Glenn called it.

But, if you think this is a crisis or a kind of shock, I would like to say that the second thing here, Human Rebirth, really comes to us as a much greater shock or crisis. What has been intensified or radicalized in this crisis and what shocks us to the bottom of our being is that you and I come upon ourselves actually being transformed as human beings. It is as if we are now strangers standing outside of ourselves looking at who we used to be and wondering how we got to be who we are today? We are acting out our lives with altered standards and an evolutionary thrust. We have acquired these evolutionary shifts and you are now more than what you were ten years ago, five years ago, or even one year ago. You find you are changed.

Out of this, you begin to see through the brick­a­beck of society. You begin to see through the ordinary events. It can be in a mundane thing like talking with a colleague in the office or at a coffee break. Or it can be at a party, or something like that. You begin to look at the depth of life meaning in every event and grasp the significance of the happening; to grasp it in such a way that creativity bursts loose in the midst of your being. Now I want to make sure you do not think I am talking about some sort of elite group or special group. I am just trying to say that this is what is going on in the midst of society today. What I am pointing to is what is going on in all of society, in its emerging state. This is happening to every man if he looks to see what is going on. It is part of how the world is evolving in our day. It is sociological reality. It is a happening that is taking place as a global happening. What is happening is that man, more and more, is becoming aware that everything that happens to him is creating him anew in our day. It is making him who he is in our time. He does not have to stand around and peek at the world and describe it as horrible, but he can see that it is giving him his life and creating him anew.

Two World Wars ­­ without those we might not have been global. Without the death of Kennedy we might still be pushing individual responsibilities off onto leaders. Without the Viet Nam war, and all of its horror, we might still not understand the intensity of care that has come upon us, and how we are hurt when we see that what is right by our standards has not been carried out. Without the failure of the multitude of movements in the 60's we might not have seen that there is only one revolution that deals with all peoples and all the nations of this earth at every moment of truth. Yea, even without Watergate, we might not have been able to see that a new way of understanding and creating social morality from the top

.

It is not the awe we have just now begun to see through the grand and great social happenings of our time. It is that we have been given the eyes through which to see the everyday mundane, the little things again, the nitty­gritty, the stuff of the world. What happens in the struggle of your own life or when you are talking to your neighbor? What happens when you are in a conversation with someone or go to a movie or read a new book? What is taking place when you are sitting and looking at the other end of the room and suddenly everything becomes alive and begins to dance? You find yourself beginning to bleed meaning out of every mundane happening, daring to look deeply into every moment, and allowing human creativity to take place.

At the same time, that breakloose is taking place in the midst of our inner being; and we find we have a whole new world and it is not just outside of us but inside of us as well. A new consciousness is coming into being. It is impinging into the midst of our lives. That consciousness enables us to stand and look at the internal state of our lives; and, as we reflect on it, begin to see how it is related to every aspect of our existence.

You know a few years ago it someone had asked me what my internal relationship to life was all about, I would have had a hard time telling it. Now I do not think I would. One way I might talk about it now is through poetic forms. I would have to say that life is all about Mystery. Life is all about Freedom. Life is all about Care. Life is all about Fulfillment. Now maybe those are strange terms, but they are not strange happenings in our lives. We know what it means to be up against the Mystery in life ­­ the utterly incomprehensible of "Where did you come from?" And "Where are you going?" 1 am not talking about methodological mystery , where you grasp that today I do not quite understand this, but as I learn a little bit more I will overcome that lack of knowledge. No. You ­ are talking about the final upagainstness of your life ­­the Mystery. But at the same time, it is the wonderfilledness of that relationship you are in. Your whole being seems to dwell in the midst of that Mystery. It is a feeling of the miraculous.

Precisely because we live in the presence of that Mystery or in the midst of it, life is given to me as Freedom­as creativity. By that I do not mean I have the freedom to eat or not to eat my meal tonight. The very fact that my existence is shoved out into the life that is finally Mystery is to grasp the thrust it is. It is to act out that thrust. It is freedom. Whatever else goes on I suddenly wake up everywhere discovering that. I walk around people and I look at them and see them and they suddenly becomes strange to me. Maybe it is someone not of my culture; someone who does not speak as I do. And suddenly I am thrown against the Mystery of different styles and values coming back in upon me. I look at my­self, at my own style and values, and I think, "Did I create those?" And then suddenly I find my freedom on my hands again. Here, I have been given that back. It is not only the freedom I have to be the on who dares to create Who I am ­­ the thrust that I am. What that takes, I see is the freedom to invent my life. It means the freedom to invent the future.

And, then, life is Just all about Care. And this care is part of the burden, part of the birthright of being born into this world. I didn't come into this world to care, I did not want to care. But I found myself caring for my family ­­ my brother, my sister, my mother, my father ­­ when I was a youngster, and later another family, and others, as well. I do not know if it is because of the TV today and the worldwide news, but it is as if Care has engulfed us throughout the world. It is what we are up against ­­ an overwhelming happening in our lives. I came out of a movie not too long ago with a person who had tears in his eyes. I did not say anything to him because I was afraid I would embarrass him. But I had never seen that person cry before. I guess he read my thoughts because he said, "I find I cry much more today at TV and movies and other things. It is just more painful." And I think, "Yes. Life is all about Care." You and I know universal compassion, because we know that Care.

Finally, there is a state of being that has to do with Fulfillment. I participate in that state when something occasions my expert profound fulfillment in my life. A friend of mine was telling me the other day about a doorman of a building she went into. As she went in the doorman said, "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" Then she said, "The doorman saw me glance over my shoulder to look back at the rainy weather outside, and as I turned back to look at him, he said, "Well, it is the only day I've got." So it is a question. Is that day going to fulfill your life or not? That is what you and I have on our hands.

I don't think we could have this much understanding of our lives unless we are present to the implosions, the happenings of that new other world inside of us. The implosions are producing a new life style. You and I have a new life style on our hands. I do not know why Care just takes place; it just does. And all the romanticism is gone from it. I don't mean I am not romantic; I mean the romanticism in which there are naive thoughts about the world ~ you blank the world out. No, that is not happening that happens when you know you care ­­ you care for the world. You wish that happening had not happened, but it has happened. where you are, and you see once and for all now the cost of the care upon you.

When I was a kid, I used to look at pictures of Charles Atlas, with his big muscles. He always had the world on his back ­­ that meant you were supposed to be strong enough to lift up the world. They did not know what they were talking about in those days, did they. I always wanted to be like Atlas, and now I wish to hell I didn't., You and I bear the burden of that world. All we have to do is turn on the TV set to know it. What happens is that you find you are responsible. You have the world in your hands. That is just the way it is

Your lifestyle has to do with how you are going to reset in relationship to having that world on your hands ­­ that overwhelming burden of care. Like John Glenn, whatever else he meant, you have the Dark Night on your hands, haven't you, with the humiliation, the weakness, the resentment, and the suffering that is there. And you resent having that world on your hands and that Care shoved at you. My God. you can't handle it.

Not only can't you handle it, but "Who says I ought to handle it?" The trouble with politicians today is not that they curse or have smoke­filled room conversations; no, no, no, no, no. I t is that they have reduced life down to petty struggles and quarrels and cares, and have forgotten to see what everyone of us now has branded on us today ­­ that we care. And you are aware that your care only exists in relationship to the world. That is what integrity is. I wish I did not know that. But today I have no choice but to know it. It is a choice now of whether we live out of what we know.

It all comes back to you :the old question of fulfillment I mentioned awhile ago. It is about deciding to engage in that ambiguous, absurd, free, but mysterious, care­filled, horrifying life. It is a filled full life. What is your life filled with? Well, whatever it is filled with, that is what it is filled with! It is filled with your lives. Now what does it mean to live your filled­full life' What is your life going to be fulfilled with? When I was a kid I liked ice cream. To have fulfillment was to have all the ice cream I could eat. When they poured that ice cream down me by the gallons I was filled full more every moment. When I was a young man, I remember that, when we got into high school, a friend of mine got a brand new car. Oh boy, I loved to ride with him! It was a convertible; we would let the top down and drive down to where the girls would be standing on the street; he would honk the horn and they would all turn and look at us. Whew! My life was fulfilled. I just filled It full with their looks. Sure, that is the way life comes to us. I guess it is easy to have our lives filled full.

Today we do not seem to have option. That is a part of life. I would still like to honk horns if I could get away with it, but it is not that simple. For life comes filled full with what it comes filled full with. It is just filled up. Now, it is filled up with what Glenn talks about as all that humiliation, or, as he calls it, the nark Night. I would rather call it humiliation, weakness, resentment, suffering. You and I are just filled full with our lives at every moment. That is what you have to take upon yourself. There was a movie the other night where these guys were filled full with horrible marriages, and they were trying to get out of them. Finally, one of them said, "I want to get a divorce? As he walked away, he turned around, looked back at his spouse, and said, "Is this what a fulfilled marriage is?" He went back and continued his marriage. You decide about­your life. You decide about whether or not life filled full with life is going to be your life. You have already decided that about living ­­ you have not blown your brains out' Therefore. we live fulfilled lives.

What about the Human Pillars? When you and I begin to press life into the depths, we hump up against raw humanness. You get beyond my baldness and the fact that I am a fairly medium­height guy. Some guys are tall and some are short, some fat, some narrow, some white, some black. You keep pressing down below all those many multivarious forms and you bump up against that which seems to be there wherever you ~o. You bump up against humanness.

Every human being you and I ever saw was in the midst of a social situation. Just like a fish in water. You cannot be a human without being in society. There is a story from an anthropologist about a wolf girl ­­ a young girl of about eight or nine but who looked like she was three or four, reared by wolves. When her parents died, somehow the wolves had nursed her and given her physical sustenance. But by the time the rescuers found her, she was a complete idiot. She died after about three or four months. She could not be a human being outside of society. That is the way, therefore, we find ourselves. I am only me when I am over against society.

Also, I discover who I am only in the mirror that society shows me of who I am. I am a white man only when I see myself over against a black man. I am me only when I see myself over against those social triangles. It is only when I am up against the social process that I really understand what humanness is. Or, it is only when I bump up against "The Other" of society that humanness is given back to me, through the model ~ see when I look at society. What I see is who I am as a human being.

The anthropologist can only describe who I am as a human being through a screen such as that. So, in one very real sense, those triangles give me back my humanness. Or maybe to put it one more way: Only when I am totally involved in the model of society that dramatizes for me the social process, and holds it before me, do I have a chance to be a full human being. And when we push that understanding, we find out that we are born, grow up, mature, sicken and die. That is the only way life goes, isn't it?

When that happens to us we find that all we do is grow older. Now mind you, I sometimes think that I do not want to grow old. I remember when I had lots of hair and I was young and virile. I have a little hit of trouble holding that image when I comb my hair, but no one really will buy that. My image of society does not change; society's image of me changes. I am really young and virile, I tell myself. But you won't let me get away with that. Instead of having one lifetime go "whooosh," now I have four lifetimes on my hands, all great happenings. There is youth from birth to twenty. Ah, when you are an apprentice and you can learn, you can dream, you feel your way through. Another lifetime comes into being from twenty to forty, when you can build, and shove that virility out into society. Then comes forty to sixty and a whole new lifetime. You can stand back and conserve and pull the values into focus, allow the builder to build the future. When you are sixty to eighty, you become the guide, the old sage who tells the way, who gives the truths and allows his juniors to move. Four great life times. not like the wife of a friend of mine who said, "Ray became forty last summer, and for three months we couldn't do anything with him." It was a great lifetime that came into his midst.

When we get through the brick­a­beck going on in our lives, we bump up against another of those human pillars: our sexuality. Whenever you run into somebody, you run into both a male and a female at least within certain limits. In other words what you find yourself upagainst is simply the way in which we bump up against people. When I say male and female, I first of all do not really mean the biological distinction, but rather the sociological dimension of sexuality. In every society, to be fully human is to have the male principle operating. And in every society, to he fully human, is to have the female principle operating. To get rid of this polarity is to decide to get rid of humanness. Wherever you thrust yourself out to build models for to me now and to recreate society, that polarity has to be held ;n tension. I have a friend who is a great big male and he tries to shove out into the future to create tomorrow but forgets the conserving principle, the context and principle of life held by the female principle. Oh, he does great things but then he collapses. I have a female friend who is afraid of the thrusting principle. She tries to hang onto the past, and cannot forge ahead. Only when the polarity is held and both the male and female dare to live in the tension, creating tomorrow before the future, only then is humanness human.

Another dimension we find when we press to the bottom, is that to be human is to participate in rationality. Was it Plato who coined the phrase, "Man is the rational animal? I have all of the surgings, sight, smell, hunger, propensities of an animal, the lower beast. But I also am able to stand out and reflect upon who I am, I am able to take attitudes and wrestle with that thrust. Not only do I have consciousness., but ~ am conscious of my consciousness. In the midst of my consciousness of my consciousness, I can see into my attitudes about life. I get angry at my wife; I like my wife, but in the midst of liking her I can say that my relationship to my wife is as it is through the myriad of unhappiness and happiness and glories and ignoblenesses that we have shared.

I can build a story to hold our relationship as it moves into the future. I am trying to say that you create. Rationality gives you that chance to create. There are both the utter irrationality and the utter rationality of life. Thus, rationality holds both the rational and irrational. Rationality is holding both the event and the meaning and the freedom that you and l have to establish that event. It is amazing how this can take place.

A friend of mine has a young boy about fourteen and like many young boys he did not do well in school. He wanted to quit, to go home and work. He did quit and lounged around; he would get up late and his mother would have to shove him out of the house and drive him to work and then pick him up to keep him from going to the local bar. Then she would bring him home and he would just lounge around. After a time, he suddenly did not want to leave work. He would phone and say, "I am going to stay late at work, Mother." At first she thought this was fine, but soon she began to "smell a mouse." "I know him too well," she said. She went to his work place after he started staying four hours late every day. He went in and asked the foreman about her son and he said, "0h yes, he hen been working here all week He is one of the best workers we have. Then she said to her son, "You've got to come home and get your rest." "Mother," he said, "I am making seat belts that save fifty thousand lives a year!" That is one example. Or take Black Power or Caesar Chavez: someone who takes the downtrodden, beaten up, pushed aside and gives them a story which allows them to appropriate their past, their destiny and their future. That is rationality. What it means to be the human is to grasp ourselves as rational beings.

Last, the Human Image, or talking about how you grasp yourself as a New Human. I like to talk about it as Ethical Man. I do not mean in the moralistic way in which we used to talk about it. I mean, instead, that you and I are ethical creatures just because life has presented itself to us and we live the life which is given to us. In one sense, life asks nothing more from us but the fact that we live. That is the first step in being the ethical man. You and I have found ourselves in that situation. I remember reading the story Burma Road, where soldiers in World War II were traveling on the Burma Road, and everyone had gotten dysentery. They had fouled their clothes; they were se weak they could not stand; they fouled their beds and the ground around them and the steps or anything they were lying on. It was all a horrible mess. Only two of them had not been hit by dysentery. One of them looked at the other and said: "It's too bad we are here. But we are here. Let's get at it!" That is the first step in being an ethical man.

The next step, for us is to have a comprehensive, futuric, and intentional context. We have no other kind of world to live in, do we? The world revolution is impinging on us ­­ and, brother, it is impinging on us' It impinges upon us in our local situation. The community from which I came is not like your community here but you and I have to respond where we are to that world revolution. This is where we have to hammer at the problems. To you, the issues may show up in different ways that they do in my community, but it is the same revolution to which we both respond. We create models, build practical visions, develop our tools and the creativity of pouring our life into it all. That is the ethical man.

And then we are also the Tactical Man. By tactical, I mean someone who explodes a situation imaginally, who introduces the brand new possibilities that are present. He uses indirect methods to demonstrate that you can do what he is pointing to. You ask, "What in the world does all that mean?" Well, I don't know. In Uptown, my community, they are going about setting up a housing project. They did not go and buy themselves a bunch of hammers and nails and go down to the mortgage company and borrow enough money to build an apartment building and start building it or hire a contractor. They began by building plans. First, they began to acquaint other people in the community with those plans. They went to banks, to promoters, to schools, and to community organizations. They began to picture what life would be like with the new housing in the community. They began to talk about the project and get the word around. What all this did was to give them permission to overcome the fights they had about it. At first, they all disagreed on which way to move, hut by building plans, they were released to move through their differences. I would refer to that kind of responsible, catalytic group as a guild.

What they did gave permission for the banks to begin to consider the project. It gave permission for the government to have a new look at that community. These people never drove a nail or borrowed a cent. They just gave a brand new image, a brand new picture of what could take place.

In Cincinnati the other night, on of the guilds decided it was going to change the community's image of itself. One of its tactics was to create a "miracle" overnight in the center of their community at an old run­down abandoned service station. The service station had been there for years. It had oil all around it and cans and barrels and tuba and waste rags and broken branches and paint. Everything around it was like that. Instead of doing something about the eyesore, people just kept piling more stuff on it. So at midnight, the guild went in and started cleaning it up. At four o'clock in the morning, they had everything stacked up in neat orderly piles. They asked themselves, "I wonder what people will do in the morning." About that time, a fellow drove by with a dump truck. "what are you doing?" he asked. They told him, and he said, "Well, let me haul that away in my dump truck." So they loaded the dump truck and he hauled the trash away. In an hour, he came back and asked, "Who are you guys?" They said they were just some people cleaning up. He said, "Well, I want to work with you. I have been waiting all my life to do something like this." That is what I am talking about. The happening exploded that man's picture of what is possible. By the very fact that they cleaned the lot, they elicited his support. That is what I mean by tactical action. They did not go knocking on his door and say, "Now, if you're going to be a good citizen, you are going to have to haul garbage." No, to be tactical is to be indirect.

There is another aspect, or what I want to call being Methods Men. It used to be that if you were going to be a human being, you had to go to college and get all sorts ~f degrees and learn about the world through that college education. Today, you cannot learn enough, can you? Computers will whip you every time. You can carry a computer ­around in your hip pocket so you can push a button and have it all there. But that is not it. What it means to be human today is to have methods with which to operate. The methods are not something outside of us. They are a part of being human. For example, it is the human drive which you and I are experiencing. It is almost as if I want to sit on top of my drive but it will not let me. I am driven, forced out. To provide the methods that elicit that response, to allow motivity to burst loose, is the way to expand a person's apace, to give him a new and much larger world to live in, and to expand his time from beginning to end.

Every time I see the television program U.S. Steel sponsors, I find I cannot wait for the ending when they say something like, "U.S. Steel­We're Engaged." I find my whole being going out to them, wanting to be a part of them. What they are saving is, "I do more than produce steel."

The Continental National Bank has four grids on the hank walls ­­ one of the World, one of North America, one of the Midwest and one of Chicago. It is obvious those grids are not up for the stockholders. They are up for the employee, so that each one of them can see just how it is he is participating in Continental'x global activities.

Both of these stories bring a heightened awareness to the employee of the significance of his work. They dramatize that the secretary and the janitor both have the opportunity to participate in the work of a company, just as does its board of directors. When a corporation provides images to match the thrust its employees experience, then the thrust fills full the image.

So to release people to engagement, stories are needed to dramatize the significance of work, waye to channel social action, ways to bring heightened awareness to the greatness of being human by exploding the absolute wonder in the mundane, every dayness of life and having ways to decisionally participate in that mundaneity.

Implementing the human drive in the world happens when people have visual ways of looking at what is happening. Time designs, symbols and charts all are helpful. Even rituals and visions and stories about a community or corporation give individuals a new incentive to action. There must also be ways of continually creating new leadership, as well as ways of balancing life's various dimensions. For instance, there need to be ways of balancing individual activity and group activity.

We also must consider human fellowhood. We die for fellowhood and yet the fellowhood we get seems to crumble up in our hands, in all sorts of ways. There is the story someone told about being on a levee in Mississippi. The flood began to break over and hundreds of people got together to sandbag. When they got through sandbagging, they were standing around with each other and one person said, "I haven't had a feeling of fellowship like this in my whole life, Why can't this go on all the time?" He was talking about a common task. If a community like this would pick itself up and go out and do what it has to do, can you imagine what would take place?

The last method is human vision. You fill those visions full by practically solving the problems that can move you from one point to another in order to get something accomplished. You need rational models and comprehensive goals ­­ those can be handled. What you are doing today begins that process. Then you need an inclusive perspective which includes every available insight. One of the people who was here this morning probably was not very well educated ­­ I doubt if he ever even graduated high school But did you see his insight get up on the list we made? This is what I mean. Problem­solving requires that everyone contributes and gets his insight into the stew. In this way, new communities will come into being.

The radical reconstruction of our society is the recovery of humanity ­in our time. It is where human beings become human. This is a continual process of building models that forge out the practical vision of man and his society. I know that you and I are out over nothing when we do this, but, my God, it is the only way we can demonstrate care for our neighbor. There is ambiguity and there are not any available answers. But as the question comes back to us, we know that it is the significance of being a human being and the reason for living a full life. It is engagement in this time and ;n this moment. And the recovery of humanity in our day is releasing the human drive to participate in the many fellowhoods engaged in creating a vision for the sake of the radical reconstruction of the social fabric through the rebalancing of the social process and the recreation of the human story. This morning you worked on rebalancing the social process and you will continue on that work this afternoon. Let us remember that as you and I participate in this, we are actually beginning to recreate human story.

Joseph A. Slicker

5/27/74