[Oe List ...] Synchronicity

[Tim Casswell]

Dear Colleagues.

Some synchronicity.  I was telling my life story to a friend this week and
talked about the Order and how some people had called it out of being.  My
story was that I left the ICA which still exists, because it no longer
engaged me in ways that were meaningful.  The body, the Order which no
longer exists, I decided to continue to be.  I had, prior to my decision to
leave the ICA, proposed radical ideas about dispersing from our ICA Offices,
to Religious Houses in every Area, District, etc.  going as ones or twos,
without power, wihout strategy, without aims and targets, without a brand,
with nothing but presence. Discovering the community of the Way that was
already there.  No reason to be anything do anything or tell anything.
Simply recognising those who are on the way, engaging with them, encouraging
them, eliciting them wherever they may be.  An enabling invisible role. One
without purpose, or mission, or certainty.  Those on the way may take
decisions, steps, and initiatives.  Energy and passion is sacred force to be
cherished and enabled. Not ours to decide where or how this energy should be
directed  all will be accepted.

I decided that this is what I would be.  I continued to wear my order ring.
I never participated in calling the Order out of being. The Order was about
facilitating spirit and I was a facilitator.

So this initiative to re-cognise the Order... Will we be building a
tabernacle? Will will be building an institution? I am interested and
intrigued, perhaps we meet again.

My first question of this new opportunity to be us is will we be secular?  I
find religious poetry increasingly disagreeable and not just because Bush,
Blair and Bin Laden wallow in it.  I listen with increasing impatience to
fundamentalists.  It is enough to put me off if we are going to continue to
be Christian in our mythology. I know ecumenical is not a christian word but
it has become closely associated with it.  The congolese cross is not
christian either, I believe, but it is hard to avoid the christian
connotations.  In fact I am worried by all symbols. Even the ring can draw
attention. In these days of branding we are in danger of thinking that we
belong to something, that we are something. Let us have the rigor and
discipline to explore other poetry.  Let us explore and speak in new
tongues.  In this world of fixed positions and certainty, image, mission,
and corporate style, let us explore not-being, not-knowing, not-doing,
insignificance, invisibility, from this position we can perhaps look for
being,  look for wisdom, look for significance in others. I have seen the
spirit movement and it was verily not us. In a strange way we can never be
the movement, as soon as we become the movement we lose the ability to serve
the movement.  Perhaps the most profound act of our spiritual servanthood
was the decision to call the Order out of being.  Is this initiative is a
nostalgia for our community.  If we satisfy the longing within our our old
network of ourselves we may lose the sense that the community is out there
not in here.  The community of the spirit is there if we listen to it, if we
look for and see it. It is not here on this listserve. It is not amongst us
who were the Order.  But I am a part of this list serve and still part of
this community.  

Interested in exploring this with you.

Tim Casswell




> From: David Dunn <icadunn at igc.org>
> Reply-To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe at wedgeblade.net>
> Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 02:15:45 -0600
> To: OE Community <OE at wedgeblade.net>
> Subject: [Oe List ...] a talking paper on being an order of secular religious
> in 2006
> 
>  
> 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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