[Oe List ...] OE Digest, Vol 53, Issue 40 (Sanctification golden pathways 2)

[Lawrence Philbrook]

Summer '73

Congregation B

Sanctification Lecture #4

July 5, 1973


THE RELIGIOUS PEOPLE

(The Awe-ful League)


These sanctification lectures are geared to upset you from the beginning: 
I'm to talk about The Awful League. As some of us were struggling yesterday 
to create this lecture, we realized that the main thing we needed to get 
across was that we did nQl know what it means to be The Awful League. Is it 
the horrible, terrible and terrifying league or a body of people who fills 
everyone with wonder and awe? The title alone doesn't tell you. But common 
sense tells you it's the latter. Who are those people throughout history who 
breathe the awe filling wonder and possibility into everyone else. That's 
what I'm going to take a stab at anyway. That is something we all know about 
even if we've never tried to say it even to ourselves, much less publicly to 
a bunch of other ordinary people like us.


The picture that began to emerge was a group of people who embody 
sanctification as we have already been talking about it and then to share 
out of their own lives what John of the Cross has been pushing for us to see 
in his own way. Over the last two or three days one thing has become more 
and more clear about John of the Cross. That is that every human being knows 
much more about the Dark Night of the Soul than they ever let on. And 
probably there are many people who even know more about it than John of the 
Cross ever did. They just haven't allowed themselves to admit it much less 
talk or write about it. John dared to do it on all of our behalf. Thank God 
he did. Now we are free to admit what we know. Certainly those of us in this 
room during the last year have experienced a purgation of the spirit. I 
have. Haven't you?


This year of the turn to the world has been something else. It has been a 
great rending of our spirits. Therefore, it is incumbent upon you and I to 
articulate to someone and before God what has happened to us. To study the 
classics like John of the Cross is one thing. But to turn around and look at 
our own lives and our own day and to make bold to voice what we see, is 
something else again. It requires honesty and boldness most of us have never 
faced before. But I believe that very fact makes it even more crucial. We 
are dealing here with things that matter. There's nothing academic or 
trivial about what we are trying to do ­ to describe personally and 
concretely who we really are, who we intend to be, in fact who we are called 
by God to be.


Our Judeo­Christian scriptural tradition is very helpful. Listen to this 
rather lengthy passage from The Epistle to the Hebrews, beginning chapter 5, 
verse 1:


"For every master guildsman [it says here, "high priest"] is taken from 
among people and appointed their representative before God to offer gifts 
and sacrifice for sins. They are able to hear patiently with the ignorant 
and the arrogant since they too are beset by weakness. And because of this 
he is bound to make sin offerings for himself no less than for the people. 
And nobody arrogates the honor to himself. He is called by God as indeed 
Aaron was.


So it is with Christ. He did not confer upon himself the glory of becoming 
the master guildsman. It was granted by God who said to him, "Thou art my 
son. Today I have begotten thee." As also in another place he says, "Thou 
art a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. In the days of his earthly 
life [that is, his wormhood life], he offered up [lots of ] prayers, and 
[lots of] petitions, with loud crying and loud tears, to God who was able to 
deliver him from [that horrific suffering] the grave, he was able to hear 
because of his humble submission [what God was saying to him]. Son though he 
was, he learned obedience in the school of suffering, and once perfected 
became the source of eternal salvation for all who obeyed him. Named by God 
high priest after the order of Melchizedek.


I would like to say much [a lot] about this [guy] Melchizedek. Much that is 
difficult to explain because you have grown so dull of hearing. For indeed 
though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone else to teach 
you the ABC's of God's oracles all over again. It has come to this. You need 
milk and not solid food. Anyone who lives on milk is still a baby, and does 
not know what meat is like, but grown people can take such solid food. Their 
perceptions are trained by long use to discriminate between good and evil.


Let us then stop discussing these rudiments of Christianity. [My God, he's 
was over my head already.] We ought not to be laying over again the 
foundations of faith in God, things like repentance and the deadness of our 
former ways, and by instructions on the cleansing rites and the laying on of 
hands. [All these ordinary, simple, basic things like that!] All these 
rudimentary things like the resurrection from the dead [simple, really?] and 
eternal judgment [some baby's milk that is!] Indeed let us advance toward 
maturity. And so we shall if God permits. [Yea, verily!] For when men have 
once been enlightened [that is, sanctified] when they have a taste of the 
heavenly gifts, and a share in the Holy Spirit. When they have experienced 
the goodness of God's Word and the spiritual energies of the New Day, the 
age to come. And after all this have fallen away, [how on earth?] it is 
impossible to bring them again to repentance. [I can see why!] For with 
their own hands they are crucifying the Son of God and making mock of his 
death. [Is that what I've been doing?] When the earth drinks from the rain 
which falls from time to time and yields useful thoughts of these for whom 
it is cultivated, it is receiving its share of blessing from God. But if it 
bears thorns and thistles [I've been seeing a few of those.] and is 
worthless and God's curse hangs over it, the end of wrath is purgation and a 
burning. [That is, the Dark Night of the Soul.]


But although we speak as we do, we are convinced that you, my friends, are 
in the better case, [really?] and this makes for your salvation, for God 
would not be so unjust as to forget all that you did for love of his name, 
when you rendered service to his people, as you still do. But we would long 
for every one of you to show the same eager concern until you hope is 
finally realized.


The situation we here in this room are in is that we are doomed to be the 
religious of the 20th century and into the 21st. I do not know exactly what 
I mean by that. If I did, we wouldn't need councils or research assemblies. 
That is precisely what we're here to find out and record. Once we become 
self

conscious about being sanctified, once we wake up to the fact that we are 
already living out of the Word and being called every day by day by day by 
day to act out what it means to be loved and accepted BY GOD. Once we have 
become self­conscious about all that, we are doomed to be the religious of 
our era. There is no way to avoid it. We are already in a covenant, a 
colleagueship that has a sense of history, a linkage throughout history with 
all the saints and all those characters back through history who discovered 
the same thing. They, too, lived out of the Word and began forging out what 
that meant for themselves and others of their day. We've been thrown into 
this history­long relationship and are thereby

commissioned to to inject the Word into all the academic disciplines of our 
time and to forge a planet­wide culture curriculum. That simply had to be! 
It wasn't something we sat down one day and thought, "Wouldn't that be 
nice?" It had to be done because the Word was already being put into every 
structure of society.


We have also found that we have to put the Word into our family life, into 
how we act out our covenantal disciplines. We have to act out what it means 
to live a loved and accepted­by­God life there as well as everywhere else. 
That's just what it means to wake up self­consciously to living out of the 
Word. When you self­consciously enter into that way of living that is what I 
mean by being the religious of history. It means we don't have any choice 
but to participate in the resurgence of our day. Oh, we have a choice! We 
can say, "No! No, I will not embrace the resurgence welling up within me and 
those

I know, those gathered in this research assembly, those spelling out 
resurgence with every word they speak from around the globe." But if I'm 
really a loved­of­God human being then I simply and naturally start being 
and doing resurgence everywhere I go. And that is what I mean by being the 
religious of

our day.


We are also being the religious of our day by transparently showing through 
our own being that we are being our BE to the glory of God. It's not some 
kind of a law that I can lay down for you or you can lay down for me. It's 
not a moralism that I hear from my wife ­­ although God does frequently 
speak through her. When I'm being who I authentically am, it just happens 
and transparency shows through me.

All you have to do is just stop and look at each other or look at me and you 
see sitting there or standing here, behind the mask of my own being and 
always refusing to let the real ME get out ­­ I see my Being and her being 
and his being. Somehow our masks turn transparent and my ME shows forth when 
I'm being my BE. The mystery of life itself is thus revealed.


I've really been amazed at our ability to plunge into John of the Cross. The 
first time we studied that book it was utter, utter mystery, and utter 
nonsense, the whole thing. We charted it up one side and down the other. We 
got rational connections of this to that to the other, and it was still 
nonsense. We translated Medieval terms into 20th century terms, and it was 
still nonsense. And this time it was totally different.


We waded right in and our experiences were so parallel that all that other 
study garbage didn't faze us one way or the other. We just said, "Yes, yes, 
yes ­­ of course, that's the way it is. Thank you very much for saying what 
I already knew. I just hadn't thought of it that way. But, Yes. That's what 
I experience." Somehow the Lord has had enough happen to us in the last year 
or two or three or four that we know the Dark Night of the Soul very, very 
well. We're bosom buddies like it or not.

And that puts us in this Awe­filling League, does it not? We are 
selfconsciously a part of a group of people back through history, 
Kazantzakis' crimson line. When we picked up John of the Cross' book we 
already were the League or we would have thrown it in the trash. It was us. 
And we were it. It does in fact pierce through our skulls, our creations, 
our ideas, our houses and homes, and everything else we have around us. Any 
new social form that comes into being has that smell about it, that stamp of 
approval. It belongs to the League.


I really doubt that nations, economics, politics, education and all that is 
really and truly history after all. That may be what I history books say 
history is. But in fact you and I know that real history is not so 
transitory as all of that. Real history is the really Real ­­ the people of 
God fully being their acceptance by God with no excuse and no apology. All 
those dates, facts, figures, names, people that we learned in history 
courses are pointless and ephemeral unless they illuminate the Spirit that 
runs through life. All that is more of a tangent on life and not the heart 
of it. The only real liveliness there is is the Awe­filling League burning 
it's way through history. And we are part of those people.


We are also, within this League, the universal church. So the League becomes 
especially embodied in a group of people that have a name as being the 
religious. O.K.? Maybe that's what the church is. The church that pioneers 
history, creates civilization is also the church that all of civilization 
rides on the back of. That church is these religious people. And perhaps 
that's what we've become. That is who we are and understand ourselves to 
be ­­ the universal church.


There's a curious thing about that which you and I have known for a long 
time. We just haven't been willing to face it fully perhaps. Yes, we're the 
universal church but within that we are also many kinds of people. The 
little old lady that sits back there holding the purse strings of the 
church; she's the universal church, too. The chairman of the board, the 
president of each denomination ­­ all those sorts of people are also the 
universal church, whether they know it or not, whether they want to be so or 
not. They, too, are a part of this League. They may not be exactly on side 
with all that we're about, but since the universal church includes everyone 
under this banner, then they must be the universal church in spite of 
themselves somehow. That jars me!


The church as we know it all around the globe is there representing this 
League and keeping the memory in existence without fully realizing what it 
is they are preserving. Thank God for them!


But you and I we're also something else. We are those kind of weird 
creatures, back through the whole history of the church, who come to be and 
forge their relationship to the League in a rather unusual way. At one time 
they decided to go barefoot. Why in the world did they do that? Or they 
decided to wear cossacks. Why? They were many shapes and colors throughout 
our whole past. They forged the monastic orders as a permanent part of 
church life. In just such a permanent way we are doomed to be the religious. 
I don't know all the implications of that. If i knew, I might run the other 
way, too. But if you stay on the Way, a lot is going to be required of you.


In fact, I would say that right here today we are at the point of deciding 
what weird social form we will forge as a part of this vast array of weirdos 
throughout time. This is a sociological form beyond that of the local 
church. The ecumenical parish is very crucial. And it must come into being. 
But I seriously doubt it can get itself born, established and sustained 
without some kind of weirdos like us to hold up their hands.


We need some kind of pattern of life, some time design, some places to live 
in and work to do, and way of supporting ourselves so that we can fully be 
on a full time basis the religious. No part time presence will do.


When I face that kind of a decision, I begin to feel like I'm split right 
down the middle. My vocational struggle and decision is on one side where I 
can really do some significant social changes. I really want to mix my guts 
with the sociological transformation of society, a new economics, a new 
educational mode and system, a new politics, whatever! I want to speak with 
the business people of my city and gather secular people around a table and 
hammer out those changes. That's one side of my being.


On the other side I like to come to research assemblies. I like doing what 
we're doing here. I like to be where all this great singing is going on and 
all this fine fellowship. A good cadre meeting is a great thing! It's kind 
of fun! In fact why not do cadre meetings and think up ways to have more 
cadre meetings so we can be more and more with people of like mind. What a 
delight!


But I say it's a kind of split. I feel torn in two directions at once. But 
somehow in the last year that split has been pronounced whole. Each side is 
for the sake of the other. The tension will always be there, but they are 
essential to each other­­ AS LONG AS one doesn't outweigh the other, or over 
balance the other, or get in the other's way. We need both of them to be 
vocated. The religious community that IS socially engaged is what we are 
after. The Turn has said, That IS your vocation! In fact the Epistle to the 
Hebrews says that the Word has come into being through the veil of your own 
being.


The style of the religious is going to happen in our time. Social change is 
going to happen and it's going to happen down deep at the wellsprings of 
spirit itself in a religious sort of way. When we put those pins on the 
other day, there it was. it was happening. I don't mean the externals of 
what was happening. I mean deep down inside of each of us it was happening, 
each in our own way.


I don't want anyone to say to me, David, you are called to be the religious 
in our day. I know it's true whether they say it to me or not. That's just 
my indicative situation. That's who I am. And that's true of everyone who is 
self­consciously a part of this movement. I don't know the exact societal 
forms we have to create. But I suspect if we look at the various forms the 
religious have forge in various cultures and contexts and times and places 
we'll soon realize what indicatively we have to do.


Our fate is that since we can see history so clearly, the only way we can be 
the religious is to be it inclusively, not narrowly or parochially. Joe 
Mathews was saying the other night that the charismatic movement is also 
being the religious in our time. We aren't just talking about Catholic 
monks, you know. We are talking about any band of people that ever got the 
job done for their day. The denominations were once that. They started to 
solidify and settle down as the powers on their several thrones. But they 
were once the religious. That was their societal form. But today we 
certainly do not need any more denominations.


We first understood ourselves as the people who woke up other people. We 
were to be the illuminators of history to shed light on the actual lives of 
people. In China there was a group like that. They were called the literati, 
or they could just as well have been called the illuminatii. They went from 
village to village sharing an inclusiveness that Chinese culture desperately 
needed. They were waking up people. They also had a deep form of poetry, 
called The Way, the Tao. They broadened and enriched the very language the 
people were speaking.


And so it is with us. We sing our songs and wake people up and push them 
into a greater depth of awareness about life in general and in particular. 
We have also been teachers, emphasizing the methods of education that open 
up new vistas for people, equipping them to swim in the strange waters of 
our rapidly changing world. We are providing people with lively images that 
will guide them to even greater images and life responses to the critical 
issues in their local communities. These are some of the definitudes for our 
societal form of the religious, definitudes that we have to flesh out more 
fully and more thoroughly.


More recently we have understood ourselves as the servant religious, as 
people who serve the church and world. We now see ourselves as people who do 
things for all people. Whatever their needs and problems may be: their 
social or community development, their educational institutions or any other 
social organization. By serving other people in this way we are also shaping 
ourselves and deciding what kind of societal form we need to be. What will 
enable us to serve every last human being? You cannot serve others just by 
polishing their boots. You don't really serve them by being a doormat for 
them to walk on. You become a servant by deciding what their needs actually 
are and addressing those needs.


Sometimes people don't really know what their real needs are. You have to 
help him decide what the real needs are which means you have to decide what 
you think his real needs are. I'll never forget my amazement when I 
discovered this truth. I was a fledgling teacher back in Austin, Texas. One 
day I had the opportunity to do something to help my friend Udorn 
Vadanasindu from Thailand. He had just finished his MBA. I figured he needed 
a night out, a fine meal out. So I made reservations at a fine restaurant 
and went to invite him to go with me. Udorn was a funny guy. He said, "Oh, 
great! Let's go to Schultz's Beer Garden." And so we did. What he needed to 
celebrate wasn't what I thought at all. But his real need got met.


That's often, if not always, the way life is. The real need surfaces only 
when you decide what the real need is, go for it, then you discover the real 
need. Don't be caught off guard when it doesn't come out in the exact 
location you address. It usually comes out somewhere else. But the important 
thing is address the real or underlying need. Not the first ten things 
someone is complaining about or seem to need.


This sort of serving function is so crucial. I'm sure we'll move on to 
address other needs that we haven't even thought about or discovered as yet. 
We have already learned a great deal about the needs charismatics are 
addressing for example. Talk about charismatics. If you stop and think about 
it we are already a charismatic movement. We speak in tongues and we are 
always interpreting the tongues other people are speaking. We may even be 
more inclusively charismatic than the charismatic movement.


To get some kind of enlivening injection into the church today is an 
unbelievable task. How do you get pop songs with new words that display 
transparency to the way life is into every local church? "Charisma" simply 
means "spiritual gift". To give spirit into every life situation ­­ we are 
going to learn a lot more about how to do that. We need new skills to be 
able to do that.

And this whole business of worship. This is very demanding and crucial. We 
need to learn how to be liturgists IN SOCIETY! "Liturgy" is the work of the 
people. How do you be that which symbolizes and acts our and rehearses the 
depths of life for every last human being?


We are in fact going to have to be "master guildsmen". I find I need to use 
some sort of secular term such as that simply because we live in a secular 
age. Secularism has become our "vern ~cular~' so to speak. It's the actual 
language people speak in our day. ''High Priest" to secular society? The 
very term almost gets in its own way if you get me. We have to learn to be 
the ones who can go "behind the veil of the Holy of Holies" for our day as 
those ancient Hebrew priests did for their day. You know what's behind the 
veil of the Holy of Holies? There's an altar with two horns. And I imagine 
what went on when the high priest went back there was something like this. 
He went in, dressed in the finest raiment money could buy in his day. He 
went in where no one could see and he dared to grasp those two horns, one in 
each hand. And because his soul was pure, instead of being struck dead like 
an ordinary mortal, he is charged with the largest voltage of spirit energy 
anyone could possibly imagine for a longer period of time than any one could 
imagine. And then he's ready for the next year. He is literally "charged" to 
be the spirit person needed for all the people.


The religious is always that sort of self­sacrificing person. self­risking 
person. What if he forgot to get purged from one little sin, or one he was 
most ashamed of but refused to let go of. ZAP! He'd be burned to a crisp! 
The religious are the sanctified ones, purged of their sins, prepared for 
whatever comes. The religious need today to somehow become the religious of 
the religious of the religious because their are many forms of the religious 
today, more than any other period in history.


As an aspiring clergyman, I would confess that by the time i got my training 
for being a religious, the true ''religious" was no longer around to join. 
It was gone in fact before i ever showed up. I really never saw standing 
before me a truly religious religious! No one ever displayed for me what it 
means to be a clergyman. And yet here I am being a religious and I'm trying 
to forge out what that looks like today. Maybe most clergy today simply 
never will be the religious in the sense I'm using the term. Or maybe they 
are there and I simply am not present in the same place they are. "Clergy" 
are selected, elected, ordained by the universal church and by the society 
they are apart of. They play a very crucial function in society.


We know when someone among us truly becomes the religious. Who is it that 
breaks open the kind of songs that are needed at this precise moment? They 
are the religious. Some master the calling of being our symbol carriers or 
our maker, protectors, guardians of our spirit deeps. That would scare the 
pants off most of the clergymen I know. In fact it already has. I met some 
clergymen recently who thought they wanted a renewed congregation but when 
it came down to actually doing something toward that renewal they backed 
out. They decided it really wasn't renewal they wanted


It is in this mood that brought us to understanding sanctification. This is 
why this has all happened to us. You have to have been through justification 
to be able to face what sanctification actually is. You discover in the 
midst of the purgation of the Dark Night that you don't really know what 
justification was in the first place. Do you hear that? To really understand 
that my life is accepted and received becomes harder than before. Now I know 
my inadequacy more than ever before. This impossible living is now exposed 
to me.


During this past year justification somehow got all foggy again. And I was 
being purged of my best theological understanding. I stood nude before God 
with nothing to hide behind. Sanctification is not something you go out and 
find or accomplish. It is what you already are. Do you recall when you got 
your life all squelched and squoze and warped that you had to care? And that 
you had to care inclusively, barring no one? Any of us can care for 
ourselves. We know how to do something for ourselves. But to care 
inclusively for every person, you have to have every attachment shorn away 
from you. And that's what has been happening to us.


Universal benevolence becomes that which happens on the other side of the 
hundred ton crane that drops on you. it's that outgoingness toward all of 
life, that is CARE! We now what radical integrity is. It comes in a 
humiliating fashion. You might summarize it by saying you have to be so 
totally humiliated that you cannot do anything else but be who you are. 
That's radical integrity.


A metaphor that still speaks to me goes like this. When I finally woke up to 
see who David McCleskey is as the religious of our time a creature, a human 
male animal, that was one day drug out of a cow. I am that crummy, ordinary 
creature. Because I am and know that I am that creature, that crummy, 
ordinary creature, I have radical integrity.


It is also endless felicity. Once you are fully and only who you are you 
then know happiness like you never even dared to yearn for. You know full 
happiness when you decide to be the religious of your day. You can be that 
osprey that swoops down and sinks his talons into the great fish, that great 
White Whale of Moby Dick and forever you are locked onto his back and drug 
down into the profundity of life WITH A SMILE ON YOUR FACE! That's endless 
felicity! You know that you are going to be called upon to live and serve as 
the religious today and tomorrow and tomorrow and the tomorrow after that. 
It is simultaneously the greater agony, the greater suffering, the greater 
illumination, the greater at­one­ment, the greater integrity and that is 
true happiness.


I don't know whether you find this a hard lecture or not, but I find it so 
impossible you wouldn't believe it. Being the religious is no romantic gig. 
It is the embodiment of being fully sanctified people. If you dare to allow 
yourself to be sanctified, YOU ARE THE RELIGIOUS! When you are perfected, 
when you are fulfilled, you're the religious. Once you know that there's 
nothing else you can do with your life. Accept it, live it. Or say NO! And 
don't live or serve. It's not really imposed upon you. You make a choice. 
All I can do is report what choice I've made.


I would call upon us not to let another day go by but that each of us start 
forging out for ourselves what the societal forms of being the religious is 
for us today. It is nothing less than recovery that impossible vocation that 
brings together the whole universe into health and wholeness ­­ true 
happiness. Social engagement and the religious life is what it means to be 
fully human ­not out somewhere secluded from the rest of life, but here in 
the midst of life "on the street where you live". The religious aren't 
something special, so sacred no one can touch them nor can they touch anyone 
else. They're just radically human. They are human beings that all of 
civilization depends upon to provide a whole human future.


David McCleskey

----- Original Message ----- 
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Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 3:17 AM
Subject: OE Digest, Vol 53, Issue 40


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> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Requiem for Republicans (W. J.)
>   2. Salmon: Sanctification (William Salmon)
>   3. Salmon: RESPONSE TO  Requiem for Republicans (William Salmon)
>


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