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

[marilie at att.net]

Thank you, David...as I am preparing to "coordinate" and adult class on mission at the church for the Fall, I find myself drawn into some of the same gratitude and reflection on how OE has made a marked difference in my life and the lives of those friends across the globe.   Thanks....  Marilie

Marilie Blanchard, living in Santa Fe...affiliated with OE/EI since 1971...

-------------- Original message from David Dunn <icadunn at igc.org>: -------------- 


> 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 
> 
> 
> 
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