[Oe List ...] 2007 Living Legacy Event

[David Walters]

What is "RL Symposium in Houston" ?

David Walters

  I joined a movement,not an organization.  I was once advised by a colleague to drop-in on JWM and profess to him absolute allegiance and loyalty.  I thought it was a joke until I realized my dear 'colleague' was serious!

  There is an element of "The King is dead.  Long live the King!" about JWM.  Before I was unceremoniously kicked out of the organization, I relished the story about JWM asking the symbolic 12 to visit him individually in his death bed, bequeathing to each the future of the Order.  A few thought that as a special singular assignment to the deanship of an organization, others understood the old coot's desire for the movement to continue.  Most anecdotal stories are apocryphal but plausibility is the only currency for acceptance, and if the above is factually inaccurate, it nevertheless made a good story to me.

  We were studying about dissipative structures in physics when in 1984. it became evident that the organizational center would not hold.  I was delighted in 1968 when the University Christian Movement voted itself out of existence.  I was already out in '88 (?) when the Order called itself out of being in Mexico City.  Amen was my cry!

  If the Living Legacy folks were intentional in downplaying the memory of JWM, they are in good company, JWM himself included.  Jesus was a Jew who probably never heard of the Greek structure of 'ecclesia.'  But he was part of a movement along with cousin John and guilt-ridden Paul.  Paul would 'organize' the movement.  In my tradition, Wesley started a movement.  Asbury would give it form in the Americas and now, we worship the organization - never mind the movement.

  JWM's message that I got was not so much a focus on the genius of his synthesis and packaging of RS-1.  That was group effort, and still a work in progress.  It was his permission-giving demonstration that one can take the crudy-ness that one is, and fully, unconditionally inject it into the historical civilizing process, and take that resolve as one's personal identity and vocation.

  What he told the symbolic 12 was an echo of the Galilean carpenter: "go and do likewise."

  Dick is right.  Where a party gathers, let 'em and join them if you can.  Shit-ing on one's colleagues does not fertilize!  Santayana's oft-quoted "those who do not learn from history ..." is a crock, perpetuated by the archivists and journal-writers.  Life cannot be lived forward without looking backward.  The Semitic memory of what a Mesopotamian couple did four thousand years ago allows them to take anything that comes their way in the next four thousand years.  JWM's real heirs are not those who can narrate the chronos of his life, nor recall the words of his mouth and pen.  They are does who heeded his call in the kairos of their own space/time to "go and do likewise."  Bill and Mariana Bailey did, and I could name a hundred more, Judy, Janice and Howie, numbering among them.

  The iconic job has pretty much been done by Bishop Jim, and the precis of the summa theologica presented effectively by the Bending History editors.  It is time to talk stories among those in diaspora, and if the Living Legacy gathering will be one among many getting organized, more power to it.  David Dunn's repository could use more usage, if only we were not too stingy in repositing!!!  Blessings to Denver and Toronto, and the RL Symposium in Houston.  May there be more.  Let us be clear, if I went to Atlanta and started spewing JWM-memory to IAF folks, I would not be enabling the movement.  Nor would the human development folks in Tokyo have an ear for it.

  The fact is, JWM is dead.  Long live the Movement!

  Jaime






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