[Oe List ...] [Dialogue] Order annuity

[Marilyn R Crocker]

Dear David,
 
With you, Joe and I have wondered how, with what criteria, and when the
decisions about the annuity were made, since when we travelled to
Oaxtapec in November of 1988, we still understood ourselves to be the
Order.  After 20 years in the OE at that point, we, like you, were
somehow “factored out” and received nothing from the Order annuity.
 
There is a plethora of documentation to support our “entitlement”to the
Order annuity, but when Joe was told after repeated conversations with
Carol Pierce, that somehow, we were “no longer considered on the
assignment chart as of November 1988,” I urged Joe to “just forget it.” 
This happened after our having risked much in continuing to provide self
support over the years to the OE as the Orlando “outpost” to the
turbulently changing Primary Unit configurations, to which we had been
annexed in at least 4 different entities in fewer years -- Jamaica,
Atlanta, Houston, and finally Chicago --often with fledgling priorship. 
 
I was reminded of the passage in Scripture that suggests there comes a
time when one is not being heard that it is time to “shake the dust off
one’s feet” and just move ahead into the future. And that is what we have
tried to do.  
 
Unfortunately for us now, but not for the OE then, Joe and I withdrew all
of our personal funds, including my teachers retirement account, when the
Move 222 was initiated in the late '60s.  This was just before we and
David McCleskey left to conduct a teaching trek through SEAPAC and later,
in August, were assigned as faculty for the first ITI in Singapore.  At
that time we trusted so fully in our corporate mission and willingly gave
all for it.  Furthermore, we believed that “retirement” was not a
category that had meaning for our future; we envisioned unfolding
engagement in ministry into the sunset.
 
David, I think our colleagues who made decisions about how to “parcel
out” the OE funds, did so the best they could, given who they were and
what they had to work with.  Clearly, they did not hold all the values I,
personally, would have hoped.  Nor were the outcomes of their decisions
equitable at all.  I think it would be helpful for all of us to get clear
about what was the "complex formula" that was used to determine equity,
and how it could have possibly excluded many who should have benefited,
and been ensured the care that we all professed to one another would be
available.
 
I admire that you have had the courage to place this unresolved issue on
the collegium table, so that the community can hear it, and “sit with
it.”  I trust those who made the stark decisions about calling the Order
out of being in 1988, clearly without a community consensus, might think
about “what they might have wrought."

I am guessing that you, like Joe and me, are the remnants who still wear
the “ring”, because we have, indeed, never “left” the Order.  
 
With gratitude and abiding affection,
 
Marilyn

On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:58:35 -0600 David Dunn <dmdunn1 at gmail.com> writes:
On Apr 22, 2009, at 4:41 PM, McCabe, Diann A wrote:


Around the meetings in 1986 and 1988 when OE as a structure was ended,
the small remaining amounts in order funds were distributed based on a
complicated formula.



It has been one of the great sadnesses of the last 25 years that I have
somehow not been able to participate in that symbol of membership in the
order I never left.


How might we symbolize the gift and the blessing of perpetual vows?


David


---
David Dunn
dmdunn1 at gmail.com










Marilyn R. Crocker, Ed.D
Crocker & Associates, Inc.
123 Sanborn Road
West Newfield, ME 04095
(207) 793-3711
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