[Oe List ...] gridding request

KroegerD at aol.com KroegerD at aol.com
Wed Sep 3 12:49:53 EDT 2008


 
Summer '73, Global Research Assembly, Uptown 5, July 15,  1973 
TEN CONSIDERATIONS IN COMMUNITY  REFORMULATION
1. Breaking loose a community is like winding a clock. There is one small  
interior spring in most clocks which you wind up tight and then it supplies the  
energy for the total. The body of people who do the task have to find a way 
to  intensify their interior life. It is that intensity of purpose that 
provides the  energy for the total community. This energy is a catalyst. A lot of 
aerosol cans  have little balls inside and when you shake the can those balls 
start going  around. They do not add anything to the formula. They do not improve 
it. All  they do is increase the speed of the mixture getting together. As 
they go around  they create waves. In a community there is always motion, but 
you need a  catalytic action. How do you add a catalyst to intensify the motion 
so that  something takes place?
2. Not many people use shoe horns anymore but my uncle never put his  shoes 
on without his shoe horn. That shoe horn enabled his foot to work its way  into 
his shoe. We have to find some kind of shoe horn to enable people to work  
their way into the community. The issue we are dealing with is how do you break  
through the inertia? If you look around in most communities and talk with 
people  very long you see that there have been great visions. People have had 
deep  compassion for a chunk of geography. There has always been a cadre dynamic  
present in every community. In one sense you do not have to create it. It is  
there' rooted in what is going on. Rut now you begin to break through the  
inertia that holds people fixed in a spot where they cannot move.
3. When you talk about breaking things loose or moving over against the  
inertia it is not simply a great deal of excitement you are after. Most places  in 
the world have had a medicine man. When I was a boy we had a lot of people  
come to the door to sell things. That was an aftermath of the great medicine 
man  shows that came to town and sold the cure for anything for a dollar. Most  
communities have had their medicine men, who have come and excited them for a  
moment and then nothing happened. You can understand why cynicism has a kind 
of  accreditation. How do you move over against that? How do you move in terms 
of  the long haul rather than the next two weeks? How do you begin in terms 
of human  deeps rather than in terms of fanciful flights of wonder? You prepare 
the deeps  of human beings rather than tickle their tongue with a new taste. 
How do you do  that sociologically? People have learned how to do some of 
these things  psychologically. How do you do that sociologically so that a 
community wakes up  to its deeps and prepares itself for the long haul of rebuilding 
the earth and  creating new communities?
4. How do you lay the ground for the ecumenical parish overlay? There are  
ten considerations to stew over.
5. The first one is that you have to have a grid in order to begin. You  
always begin with the dirt. The dirt is the base upon which social relationships  
exist. Gridding is not simply laying out streets or patches of ground. It is  
tying together the social relationships that add up to a community. The grid 
is  never just a local grid. The grid of your parish is first a grid of the 
globe  "ridded down to the parish level of intensity, so that your chunk of 
geography  represents the total. Gridding from the global is a faith stance. It is 
a  commitment of your life. You see that your first pre­occupation is the  
global, all of mankind. And that is history long. From there you begin to see 
 that the task is focused on the local. We have one complexity in doing that. 
You  go from the global down to the local via the continent, the area, the 
region,  the metro, the polls, the micro and then the parish. We have said that 
when you  get down to the parish level you should have from 10,000 to 30,000 
people. But  in certain chunks of geography, following this rationale, you 
could have as many  as 100,000 to 500,000 people That would be an unmanageable 
parish. What do you  do? We had 109,000 people in our parish so we divided it 
into five and called  them proto­parishes. We held the name parish to hold 
the common rationale  throughout the movement and then anything less than that 
we called  proto­parishes. In other parts of our world you may have to take 
four or  five parishes and put them together to get enough people to be a 
parish. These  could be called mega­parishes. You always have the parish 
dimension in your  grid, and it will always come after your micro grid.
6. What you are out to do with the grid is to hold sociology, geography  and 
the many other factors together. It is not simply a matter of chalking out  
equal bits of geography or population. There is a whole array of other factors.  
These are the location of churches, serving institutions, etc. The grid is 
the  most important thing. In our work here we changed the grid almost daily by 
just  walking around and looking and then brooding. That went on for about a 
week.  Then we had to go back and recalibrate it and find a rationale behind 
why we  were "ridding what we were gridding until we could tell ourselves a 
story in  depth.
7. The second consideration is the economic, political and cultural  analysis 
to grasp the internal workings as well as the external forces. The  problemat 
is the key thing here, but you put it together very quickly. Its  importance 
is to have it before ycn1 is an objective analysis. It is also a kind  of a 
shoehorn to get you into the economic, political and cultural reality. This  
analysis is always for the sake of the future. That is crucial. The way you do  
it in a short time is to use the world's wisdom. Model Cities has grids. A lot  
of agencies have done demographic studies. You get them all and see where 
they  differ, while building your own at the same time. You get population 
figures,  ethnic distribution, age and education, and income groupings, to see how 
it fits  together. That tells you something. Your grid always tells you your 
story. For  instance? when you do the housing grid you suddenly see there are 
large chunks  of vacant lots in your neighborhood. You had walked through there 
but did not  notice there was a vacant lot in that neighborhood and a vacant 
lot across the  street. When you put it on a grid, you notice there is a large 
strip of vacant  lots across your whole grid. You wonder about that. You find 
out that they have  been like that for three years. Then you do a little 
scratching around and you  may find out that someone is going to build a freeway 
through there in three or  four years. You see what is going on in the external 
and the internal forces  operative in your community? so you can get hold of 
an analysis of what is going  on and will be going on in the future of the 
community. You have to know that  better than anyone else. 
8. The third consideration is that you have to have an entry plan,  including 
a basic model and a holding image. We saw that we had to establish a  galaxy? 
that we were the movement and that our job was to provide an end run to  
bring a guild into being to help the emerging galaxy. This is inadequate but it  
is an image that gives you permission to move. You stuff it full of data and it 
 tells you what you have to do first. Your basic model is just an image at 
first.  Then you fill it out. What are the strategic objectives? What is it you 
are  after to Bet this show on the road? What are the tactics you are going to 
use?  What i9 the timeline you have them on?
9. What are the operating principles that you are going to work through  all 
this? Are you going to go out with a megaphone or blow a whistle? Or, maybe  
you take a stance of low profile where you are not out to broadcast but get the 
 job done. I like those lines from Dr. Lao. He said he never did tricks, he 
did  magic. You are not out to do tricks. You are out to do the magic that 
transforms  life. He said there were people who were secretive, and then there 
were people  who were mysterious. You are not secretive, you are mysterious. It 
is not that  you have anything to hold back from people. Do you notice that we 
really do not  know anything that everybody else does not already know? It is 
not a matter of  being secretive' but being mystery to enable people to live 
their lives. You  keep your mouth shut. You adopt a certain kind of stance and 
distance. You have  that written into your operating principles. Then, you do 
not do this alone.  This is always corporate and calls for some kind of 
internal organization. You  have to write a story of why the ecumenical parish, why 
now, and what is the  innocent suffering going on. What is the story that you 
tell yourself. This is  the story of this body of people in terms of their 
task. What is the rite and  the symbol that holds that group in being to get this 
task done? What is the  format of your meeting? How do you lay out your time 
schedule? When do you meet  to report? When do you meet as working groups? 
Then you rehearse over and over  again what it means to be a corporate body. If 
you have not decided to be  corporate you will not know what you are doing. Yet 
if you have not decided to  take your own life in charge, nor decided to be 
an iron man, or if you cannot  get yourself out of bed and on the task, you do 
not know what corporateness is.  Corporateness is deciding that your life is 
given to that task and nothing else.  It is getting yourself on that task. It 
is seeing that your neighbor is always  on that task enabling the total 
journey. You build your entry plan.
10. Then fourth, you win comprehensive authorization. The most critical  
factor is that every community has built into it someone who says there is no  
leadership, or no one cares about this community. Every community has the  
leadership dynamic present. It may be perverted but it is there. Things just do  not 
happen in any community unless certain channels are honored. They may either  
be highly conscious or highly unconscious, but they are there. I have noticed 
 that some local churches are run by a little old lady from her knitting 
needles,  rather than by the official board. And if you do not have her permission 
to move  she will cut your throat, and you will never know it. You will think 
it is  someone on the official board or someone else, while Miss Sweet Susie 
who brings  you pies on Sunday, and looks around to see how you keep up the 
parsonage, is  the one. The community is like that. It has its authorizations. 
Your task is to  find out what they are, both the silent and the overt. To get 
clearer on that  you use your head and look and then make some lists and 
gestalt.
11. We worked out one we thought were symbolic authorities without whose  
symbolic "nod" you did not go very far. It included church leadership, leading  
city businessmen and political figures. Then there are key figures in the  
community. While they cannot give the symbolic nod, because they live out of  that 
symbolic nod themselves, they can block or stop anything you do. Save those  
key figures are engaged in some way in what you are about you dc not move. 
There  are others I call middle authority figures. They cannot stop you, but can 
make  life miserable. Unless you have their cooperation they can generally 
foul things  up for you. Then there is grassroots leadership. In one sense they 
can not stop  you, yet in another they can stop you cold. Cave you have all 
four levels of  that authorization working for you, you do not move. In winning 
comprehensive  authorization one thing we have is that we are servants. We 
never go anywhere we  are not invited. Sometimes we have to go in and get an 
invitation, but you get  invited to do whatever you do. You are always a servant. 
We are here to serve  the community.
12. You have to decide what image you are going to project. What popular  
image is needed at that moment to go into that situation. In 5th City there were  
no structures. There we created the image that we were going to build  
structures. That is a popular image. You have a way of getting out dreams,  images, 
plans, building the structures, and then turn that organization over to  local 
people so they can run their own community. Here you would not want to  
project the image that you are a great structure builder. There are so many  
structures around here that they do not know what to do with them all. What is  the 
image? Maybe it is the image of a good neighbor who is out to see that the  
whole community comes off, and that whatever is here is used and honored. The  
popular image you project is key in getting authorization. Finally you always  
get invited. You do not go where you are not invited, even though sometimes 
you  have to go around by the back door to get invited. That invitation is 
important.  You go into other countries, and if you have not had the invitation of 
the Roman  Catholic bishop, the protestant leadership, and local authorities 
you have cut  your own throat. This is true even in your own home town.
13. The fifth consideration is ­that you capture community  imagination. 
You tell them their story like they never knew it before. You get  hold of 
their history and their understanding of their mindset and their future,  and you 
tell that story so they see new possibility that they never saw before.  The 
aboriginal people always knew they had a long heritage, so you tell them,  
"You are the oldest people on earth; you are thirty thousand years old; you have  
changed more than any other people; change is nothing new to you; you have  
always been an adaptive people." Their jaws fall off, because they thought they 
 were always stuck with being cavemen. All of a sudden their whole picture of 
 themselves is changed' and they have a vision of their future. You take the  
community story in any community you show up in. There is a deep rooted story 
 there of the past, and you get hold of it, love it and cherish it. You see 
that  the clue to the future of that story is told. Here they tell themselves 
that all  the new people moving in are messing up the whole neighborhood. They 
say that  the neighborhood is really going down hill and you cannot expect 
anything good  to happen. Put you say, "why this is the new global community. 
This is the way  it is going to be every place on earth in the next twenty years. 
You are twenty  years ahead of the times. You have a chance to experiment 
with all the cultures  of the earth and create a new life style, and to honor 
your own tradition by  bringing it into the twentieth century. Hooray!" You tell 
the story a brand new  way so that it releases people. You capture their 
imagination. Then you provide  a way to release their spirit energies.
14. The other key there has been that whatever we do as a community or an  
ecumenica1 parish is not done for the sake of wherever you happen to be. That  
would be ridiculous. You do this for tile sake of the whole world. You build  
corporate community for the sake of the globe as a sign representing what it  
means to rebuild the earth. This is my one opportunity, my one great chance to  
participate in the globe, to recreate creation. Down in the deeps of man that 
is  what he is after. The release of motivity happens when men see that they  
participate in the totality of their geography. Once you see that you see 
that  you have a way to participate in the totality of history. You capture the  
community imagination.
15. The sixth consideration is that you bring structures to the local  
community. For one thing you bring structure by publishing that grid and getting  
that space defined. People's minds do not operate in our time because they have  
no space definitions through which they can operate in terms of concern. The  
news casts blitz your mind until you cannot think, because you have no grid 
to  organize your concern so your mind can operate. You structure the local  
community by giving people a grid to provide them a symbol that informs their  
lives. You give them some kind of organization, also, where people are working  
on the issues that need to be worked on. In the midst of that you are out to  
create the cadre to give shape and form to the leadership so you can break 
the  inertia. 
16. The seventh consideration is that you subtly demonstrate possibility  
with people who tell themselves they can do little or nothing. When people talk  
about the fact that there is not much external possibility they are always  
talking about the internal. They are saying, "I do not have much possibility."  
Unless that is dealt with, whatever you do externally does not help at all. Be 
 careful how you move here to dramatize possibility. To dramatize 
possibility,  means that you always create the impossible, that which is unexpected and 
could  not be done When we were working on the parking lot park one man just 
got angry.  He was huffing and puffing and he said, "You guys cannot do it, you 
do not even  have the right tools." He was right. Some of those shovels looked 
like Don  Quixote's sword. When you pushed them into the ground they did not 
even move.  One man who came by said? "These people have to be out of their 
mind. They are  trying to go through concrete." There was a concrete slab we had 
not noticed,  but when you have decided you take the slab out with your 
hands. 
17. In Mowanjan they decided they needed a garden. There were three acres  of 
land full of rocks, stumps and everything else, and they did not have tools.  
We had four shovels, ten hoes and two hundred fifty people. All the men, 
women  and children went out there and pulled grass with their knuckles until some 
of  them were bleeding. In one day they cleared the whole field. The 
impossible was  done. You find that that which dramatizes the impossible, in one 
sense, does not  have anything to do with the external. It says to my interior 
life, "I can pick  up my life and I can live it." It is a deep RS­I in one 
act, so to speak.  You operate on their felt needs in terms of dramatizing the 
impossible. It is  impossible to keep the city clean and beautified, so you 
beautify it and then  you find ways to celebrate that. You do hard labor and you 
get sore. In clearing  the field you worked in one hundred twenty degree heat 
all day long. The next  day you really feel it. It does not feel good, but you 
celebrate that. Instead  of talking about a day when we all got whipped and 
were miserable and thought we  were going to die; we celebrated it and everyone 
thought it was great. We had a  great celebration that night, killed a great 
big cow, and roasted it, and ate it  and danced around the fireside. You saw 
that it was great. It was not anything  to be sorry about. It was tremendous to 
celebrate the impossible. 
18. The eighth consideration is that you initiate leadership training.  You 
get the people in the community that you need, in terms of their leadership,  
and you train them. You put them through LENS courses or you set them down and  
teach them, or whatever way you have to train people directly in 
methodologies.  Secondly, you do it indirectly. You do this by defining roles, by giving 
people  images, and by providing people with involvement. They begin to be 
trained. In  the midst of that you are out to extend leadership. You go into any 
community  and you have fantastic human beings. Grey's is a great poem for me. 
You look at  that graveyard and you say, "Look at all this human possibility 
that never made  it. Just think, there are thousands of Shakespeare's and 
Longfellows out there  and they never knew it. They just died, like the three 
billion people who die  and never live. You extend the leadership. Anywhere you go 
you find people who  are fantastic, but never knew they were fantastic. You 
give them a possibility.  One thing that will excite a community and give it new 
deeps is to see old  Charlie Brown, who has always stumbled through life, all 
of a sudden get a hold  on his life and become a man. Everyone of us in this 
room knows that he has the  methodology to take some old willy limp leg and 
release him as a great human  being. You extend leadership and then you deepen 
their commitment. You deepen  the commitment of the community so it can assume 
responsibility for its life,  and can be a sign for the world.
19. The ninth consideration is that you dramatize the serious intent.  There 
are a number of ways to do this. If you happened to be in a religious  house 
you might improve its appearance. The neighborhood may look like a slum,  and 
if you tell people we are going to rebuild the community, it is hard to  
believe, if we look like a part of the slum. If you go around with your hair all  
straggling and you are dramatizing serious intent about rebuilding the earth, it 
 is hard to believe. This has nothing to do with anyone's integrity. It has 
to do  with getting the job done, with secondary integrity. You claim the 
outcast. We  have always been a people of the outcasts. We belong to the outcasts 
of this  world and let us never forget that. But you dramatize serious intent 
by bringing  in the outcasts. You take those in the community no one cares for 
and claim  them. You turn them into that which is great. You turn them into 
that which is  fantastic. Then you take awe, the that is struck and you turn it 
into symbol. I  imagine that very soon the awe that is there will become a 
symbol. Then you  create global consciousness of what is going on in the world. 
Something happened  when people in 5th City and Samoa and Mowanjum began to 
sense that they  participated in the globe. I will never forget when we put the 
newspaper out in  5th City and they saw that grid, or when they went to the 
festivals and learned  the Chinese people were somehow different than black 
people. There were  fantastic dances and interesting food and all, and they became 
interested in the  globe and began to see themselves participating in it. Al1 
of a sudden there was  a whole new kind of commitment in the community from 
the oldest skeptic to the  youngest rebel.
    1.  Then, with this serious intent is commitment to the long march. Until 
 someone has decided that he has put his foot into the ring for life he is  
never a human being. He is always thinking that there is some time in life  
when his illusionary dreams will come true and he can lay down on his back and  
gloat on a permanent summer holiday. Unless one sees his life as nothing but  
expenditure in terms of ninety nine years, unless he lives to be one hundred,  
he does not know what it means to be a human being, committed to the long  
march, to be a community on the move. 
21. The tenth consideration is that you solidify for the future. After  you 
have been through your model building you intrude into the community. It is  a 
painful rupture, even though it may be done in style and people were laughing  
and suffering all the way and having a great time. Never­the­less it 
is  a rupture. Now you have to bring that together. You celebrate the  
accomplishments. You get people planning. I guess that is the greatest healing  that 
ever comes into people's lives. It happens when they sit down and plan and  
lay out what the future has to look like. Then, you have to heal rifts, and that 
 is not done psychologically. That is done though celebrations. That is done  
through the planning. Then you pull back and talk through with the community. 
 That pull back is very important. People begin to pick up new roles. They 
take  on new tasks and begin to exercise what they know.
22. Now, here are a couple of warnings. One danger you have to watch is  your 
own liberalism. It comes in a couple of packages. One is that if I get my  
method and model down and tell everyone what to do it will work out smoothly.  
Once you have a model done, and you really worked hard on it and it is perfect, 
 then everything ought to go right. I cannot understand why uncle  
so­and­so is upset, and why this blew up, so something must be wrong  with the 
model or with my colleagues. They did not do what I told them to do, or  what I 
thought they ought to do. A model, however, is always built to go smash.  You 
never learn anything in building a model. Where you learn is when you stick  
it into reality and it goes crunch. Then you go aside and get your wisdom out 
of  that. Then you build a new model. Ortega y Gassett said, "Life is pure 
problem."  He was right.
23. The second danger to be watched is the conservatism in us. This is  
operating out of what we are out to do, finally' is to get the whole show  rolling 
so smoothly that it really looks like the establishment. You get  everything 
operating as smoothly as it can and before you know it you are back  in the 
throes of the bureaucracy. No, you are responsible for the totality of  life, and 
you know that life is chaos. You do not forget. There is order in the  midst 
of that. In the midst of the chaos and your brokenness and struggle you  are 
made whole only in one thing, and that is the Word in Jesus Christ. Your  
wholeness does not come from your accomplishments nor the approval of your  
brothers nor in your futuric vision. Your wholeness is in the Word in Jesus  Christ. 






In a message dated 9/3/2008 1:14:43 A.M. Central Daylight Time,  
ptuecke at charter.net writes:

 
Hi  Ann, 
I’m  sure I have a copy of the handy little Methods Manual that you and I 
created  in a Summer Program – don’t remember which year. Tomorrow I will look 
for it;  it’s in my files somewhere. That was a fun project, wasn’t it? I 
think I have  a page on gridding – from some course or another.  
Will  look for it, scan & send both to you. 
Pat  (Jones)Tuecke 
 
 
From:  oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf 
Of  Ann Avery
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2008 6:19 AM
To:  OE
Subject: [Oe List ...] gridding  request

 
Hello  everyone,

 
A little  request for advice on teaching gridding  as simply as  possible--
I  couldn't find anything on gridding in the (wonderful!) repository except  
some images of the global grid.  I would appreciate improvement on what  I've 
written below, and some other graphic examples that might be  available.  Does 
anyone have a copy of the "handy little" Methods  Manual (no date).  Does it 
have a green cover?    
Gridding your  geography 
Geographic gridding is a way of  understanding your geo-social environment.  
When you grid, you make  decisions about the geography concerned, guided by 
observing and asking  questions.  
Then you represent this  information with a simple straight line drawing that 
anyone can reproduce  easily.   
This process can build  consensus about your physical and social context. 
You  can  grid the planet, your country,  region, district, or  community.  
[Here I would like to  have a few samples, in addition to a version of the 
world grid from the  repository. Does someone have others of smaller areas such as 
districts or  villages to share?] 
Steps: 
1.  Determine the outer  boundaries of the area you are looking at. 
2.  Simplify them by drawing  straight lines to make a shape that you could 
easily draw  freehand.  
3.  Thinking about the area, looking at maps or talking to people who know it 
 well, ask these questions, and record the information on your  shape. 
What are natural or manmade boundaries within the  area? 
What roads, bus routes, paths, train tracks, air routes  are important? 
Nodes: Where do people gather for commerce, celebration, health care,  
education, etc. 
What are physical landmarks?    
4.  With that information,  where would it make sense  to divide the area 
into 5 sections?   How would you describe each area?   
5.  Name each  area. 
  
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