[Oe List ...] a talking paper on being an order of secular religious in 2006

[David Dunn]

SURRENDER

As they say, ³sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn¹t.² As we
used to say, sometimes grace strikes and sometimes it doesn¹t. I find myself
saying, ³The wind has perturbed the waters and I¹m ready to pick up my tired
pallet and walk.²

Half way through my 64th year, I walked with Jesus along the shore of the
Sea of Galilee. I have thought about Jesus for many years. I have even
addressed him in prayer. But I have never spent so much as a moment at his
side like I did late one afternoon just about two months ago.

The occasion for the encounter was a visit with a young man who sees me in
my new role of spiritual director. I sometimes ask him to begin our session
with a sort of dialogue prayer. That afternoon, after he prayed, I prayed,
and then he remained silent just long enough for me to have to decide
whether I was going to be uncomfortable and impatient, or whether I was
going to surrender to the moment. I chose surrender and found myself walking
at Jesus¹ side.

I was startled, deeply moved, and aware that something of mysterious
significance had just happened. Surrender to the moment was a surprising
opening to a deep well of Holy Mystery.

My young companion offered his concluding prayer, I returned to this world,
and we proceeded with our session.

Just for the record, I have also been blessed recently to spend time with
another fisherman, Thich Nhat Hanh, by way of the dharma talks given by
Larry Ward with Peggy Rowe, under the aegis of David McCleskey and Pat Webb
and their Prairie Wind Sangha in Oklahoma City. I mention this as a way of
acknowledging that I am surrounded by blessings in a myriad of forms and a
flood of inflections. If Buddhist mindfulness practices had been my path, or
praying five times a day with a Muslim faith community, I would be reporting
a walk on another shore with quite another savior than the itinerant Jewish
holy man of Galilee.

Fast forward.

A couple of weeks ago, Burna and I saw a stunning movie, ŒWater,¹ the story
by Indian writer and director Deepa Mehta, set in pre-independence India. A
new law graduate is smitten with a beautiful 20-something widow, Kalyani,
kept against her will as a prostitute in a so-called Œwidows¹ house.¹ She
risks imagining her own freedom, he promises to spirit her away, and
suddenly she discovers that she has unwittingly stepped into an impossible
situation from which she cannot escape. When she surrenders her life,
others, including the young lawyer, discover their own power to do
surprising things with their lives.

One person¹s surrender radically alters other persons¹ images of
possibility.

What about the spirit journey, the journey to the center, the journey to the
east, the journey to Ixtlan? What is the nature and experience of surrender
to the way life is, to one¹s life work, to one¹s essential being?

We used to speak about moving from a time of knowing, to a time of doing, to
a time of being, as if this was the necessary historical path of a spirit
movement or the natural course of an individual¹s life journey. I formed an
image of Œbeing¹ as a sort of retirement from doing; ŒPhase 4¹ of my life
would be a time of just being without the disciplines of knowing or the
expenditures of doing. I believe that we unwittingly fell into a vast
misunderstanding and did ourselves a great disservice when we imaged Œbeing¹
as a phase in the development of an organization, or the climax of an
historical drama, or the culminating period in a life-long spirit journey.

Whatever value there might have been in understanding being as the
intensification of knowing and doing, there is a complementary understanding
of equal value, i.e., knowing and doing are the expression of our being. Who
we are shapes the knowledge we create and the tasks we undertake. The nature
of our being determines the kind of energy that flows through us; not
surrendering to our essence means to some degree obstructing the energy that
flows into and animates our lives. If I do not look into the matter of who I
am, and discern the essence of the creation I am invited to become, I am
neither cooperating with the Creator nor allowing Creation to come into its
fullness through me. If I do not decide to be myself‹call this the SK
corollary--I will to some degree remain ungrounded in the power that posited
me.

There is a serious wrinkle in this narrative. My gratitude for the
Benedictine Program I completed last year raised a serious vocational
question for me: Is my calling in history to become a Benedictine oblate,
i.e., one of the laypersons who Œoffer¹ themselves, whatever their life
circumstances, to a monastic community and pledge to live out that
community¹s practices and teachings for the sake of its mission in the
world. When I considered joining an oblate study group in Denver attached to
Benet Hill Monastery in Colorado Springs, the nature of my calling became
clear. I¹m not a Benedictine oblate; I¹m a member of the Order Ecumenical.
To put the matter in a nutshell, over the last nearly 40 years, it has
become clear that being the Order Ecumenical is the essence of who I am. It
took an RS-1 and going on four decades to come to this clarity about the
nature of who I am.

Now, to be entirely candid, this has put me in a quandary. How do I know
that? How can I demonstrate that, to myself and to others, who, knowing that
I am who I am, might find encouragement to become who they are? If I am the
Order Ecumenical, what is it necessary to know, and know that I know, so
that I can help others know what is life giving to them as well? And what am
I called to do that is uniquely what the world and its creator requires of
me as the Order Ecumenical? How can I be true to who I am if I am not
knowing the knowing and doing the doing of the Order Ecumenical? The absence
of houses and incorporation papers has not removed the Order Ecumenical from
history.

And this, of course, is what put the subject of surrender on my mind. If my
essence is Œbeing an order¹ and my particular contribution to Being takes
the form of being a secular religious in the form of the Order Ecumenical,
am I going to sit uncomfortably with that knowing or am I going to surrender
to it and see who I meet on the shore of the Sea of Galilee? Or,
de-mythologized, what would it look like to walk the walk of the OE and to
talk the talk of the OE? And if I knew the doing and did the knowing of the
OE, with whom would I find myself in relationship?

I am persuaded, of course, that these are not just personal questions. There
is clearly an ŒUs¹ in history, and so there are questions for ŒUs¹ as well.
As we approach the completion of our individual lives, the question of
surrender is front and center. (I am mindful of beloved Brother Brian¹s
surrender; may he live in eternal gratitude for the wonder of his new
assignment.) How many of us are essentially the Order Ecumenical and what
does it look like to surrender to the reality of being part of a living body
with a charism and a calling? It no longer suffices for me to be the Order
Ecumenical and to find it necessary to add the awkward caveat to my story:
³I¹m a secular religious and a member of the Order Ecumenical, but the OE
doesn¹t exist any more, except that it has a terribly rich virtual common
life, and a profound sense of connection and mission, and a lively
intellectual history that is being carefully and systematically recorded and
published, andŠ²

The writers, the community builders, the social commentators, the faith
community leaders, the facilitators, the managers, the educators, the
journalists, etc., etc. all raise for me the question of what to do with
this immense light that we¹ve been given and that has been shining in our
lives all of these years. I long to come out of the closet (with apologies
to those for whom this has painful associations) without setting myself up
as a kook or a fraud with grandiose but hollow claims of membership in a
memory. I long to stand in front of a group of people who have come to a
workshop or seminar I¹m offering and to be able to say not only, ³This
order¹s life experience is the source of this insight² but also, ³This is
the direction our order is taking.² It¹s been my experience that there are
people all around me who are dying to hear from a person of spiritual
integrity even just a half of what I have forgotten over the last 40 years.

I am coming closer to a bottom line. What are we about? How will we know it?
Who will be able to see our creation and contribution to this world and its
sources and make a decision about whether to identify with it and add to it?
I am nearly persuaded that we are entering a dark age during which the
memory of authentic religion and depth spirituality needs to be carried
forward in the lives of people who are grounded in the kind of unique
experience we have shared. And if by the grace of God and the effectiveness
of the forces of light we avoid a new dark age, we will still be confronted
by the grueling birth of the ecological age in which much of humanity will
be coming to terms with limits to growth, affluence, consumption, freedom,
and a host of other presumed luxuries that will be rapidly changing if not
outright disappearing in the face of the demand to create sustainable
planetary systems, values, and life styles.

So here are the fundamental matters with which I am wrestling at my core.
What will it look like to publicly associate ourselves with the body of
wisdom and practices that is the core gift of the Order Ecumenical? What new
energies and perspectives need to be invested in the already lively task of
rearticulating our common memory? Who wants to explore what it means to
build collegial relationships with the movements of progressive religious,
spiritual, and social organizations that are emerging today? Who is willing
to say to the world, ³If you are on a spirit journey, or if you want to
begin your journey anew, I invite you to make use of my life experience as
your mentor and guide?²

And then, finally, there is the matter of symbols.

Who has wished to pin a small Congolese Cross on a sweater or lapel? Who
would like to invent a new rule of life for a common something that doesn¹t
yet exist? Who has wished to work up the courage to put an ³OE² after his or
her name as a sign of being a member of a real body that grounds one in both
historical experience and future promise?

These are not rhetorical questions. We have sown and cultivated. We have
reaped and winnowed. We have lain fallow and received refreshment. Now‹or so
it seems to me‹it is time to see what new green shoots are offering
themselves to the sun. In a world of genocide, terrorism, famine,
environmental destruction, profound discrimination, and HIV/AIDS; in a world
of intimate global relationships, explosive knowledge creation, and
ingenious social innovation; in this amazing world, I wish to carry my
bucket alongside the colleagues who came from and gave themselves to India,
Africa and the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, North and South America,
and Europe as the Order Ecumenical and the institutes to which it gave
birth. I have more in common with me these brothers and sisters, who are not
me, than any of my next-door neighbors. The history that we share is the tip
of the iceberg of what makes us an historical reality, and the common
reality that we share but have not named or celebrated is quite possibly the
salvation of our planet and the key to its future.

David Dunn icadunn at igc.org Denver