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

Fri Apr 24 23:46:16 EDT 2009

Thanks, Jean.

I smile the smirk of the fool with you.  

I had $24K with the Methodist Church pension fund before the current financial crisis.  It is now worth $20K.

If you'd let me, I'll pick up the cost of your lunch salad, should we ever cross paths again!

Jaime
Saipan

On Apr 24, 2009, at 8:08:22 PM, "Jean Long" <jean.long512 at gmail.com> wrote:

From:   "Jean Long" <jean.long512 at gmail.com>
Subject:    Re: [Oe List ...] [Dialogue] Order annuity
Date:   April 24, 2009 8:08:22 PM EDT
To: "Order Ecumenical Community" <oe at wedgeblade.net>
Hi Randy -

Let me clarify what I mean by a continued commitment to the Order and the Order's mission.  Before I found the Order my life was driven to find an effective way to care for the suffering I saw around me and around the globe.  The Order, with all of its warts and bruises, became a vehicle through which my life could make a difference in alleviating human suffering.  When the Order was called out of being, I believe that all of us continued to look for ways to care for the world in the most effective ways possible.

It was important to me to continue to live a life of poverty - not just of detachment, but of actual monetary poverty.  After retiring, I took Paula, Nelson and Elaine with me as we visited the villages and people we had the privilege of working with in the 70's and 80's.  Our "children" have grown and prospered.  In the last two years I have had the honor of enabling the first Profound Journey Dialogue here in Denver.  John Cock contributed his spirit genius with the support of the caring Lynda.  We built it and they have come.  This weekend in Chicago after the 4th Dialogue, supporters will meet to decide how to meet the requests for 10 additional events. 

I did not have as much to give to the Spirit Project that David and Patricia have worked on in the Oklahoma City schools, but their project was as important to enabling students and adults to learn to listen to the profound dimension of life as the Profound Journey Dialogue is. 

I now have $700.00 in my pension fund.  I share this with you in the deepest humility and gratitude that this has been where my commitment has led me.  We used to talk about being a "fool for Christ".  For me it is a very familiar place.

Jean in Denver

2009/4/24 R Williams <rcwmbw at yahoo.com>
The conversation about continuing commitments has been interesting.  Some have stated their lifelong commitment to the OE while others have stated their lifelong commitment to the mission.  Is this one and the same thing, or are they different?

Randy Williams

--- On Fri, 4/24/09, Jean Long <jean.long512 at gmail.com> wrote:
From: Jean Long <jean.long512 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] [Dialogue] Order annuity
To: "Order Ecumenical Community" <oe at wedgeblade.net>
Date: Friday, April 24, 2009, 2:11 PM

Dear colleagues of the Ring -
I think there are a majority of us who still wear the ring - which still grounds our covenant to be the Order until death.  As I have met some of you over the years I have seen this is true. 
I was 48 in 1988, still living in the religious  house in Denver.  Paula's formula is what I remember as we were given the opportunity to join the annuity plan or take a buyout.  The determining factor that I remember is that you had to still be lliving under assignment - although there was no assignment commission.  I had asked Denver if I could move there from Brussels and got an OK.  At 65 I began to receive 71.00 a month - and will rec eive that for 10 years.  If I had been in on the formula I think I would have made the assignment rationale retroactive to 1984.  As  you can see, the amount anyone would have gotten would have been small - but the symbolism of an annuity payment from the O:E has been important to me.
With respect,
Jean Long in Denver where the snow is still falling!!

2009/4/24 RICHARD HOWIE <rhowie3 at verizon.net>
Ellen Howie (continuing to wear my Order ring) here:
Our family was FT Order in 1975/76 assigned to Philadelphia and Baltimore.
For years I had a small life insurance policy whose beneficiary was the Institute.  It became clear that I would pay much more into it than the policy would be worth at my death, thus did Gary Drown recommend that it be cashed in, which I did, and the monies went to Carol Pierce who at the time was helping to handle the funds to benefit Order colleagues.
Our family is fortunate because Dick receives a pension because he worked 28 years for USAirways;  we both receive Social Security.
Love to all, Grace & Peace,
Ellen
On Apr 23, 2009, at 10:41 PM, Nancy Lanphear wrote:

Dear Marilyn, 

I so appreciate you for your perspective in the midst of this issue having many challenges.  Thank you for speaking.  We, too, wear our silver rings knowing that we are the Order forever.

With love to you and Joe, 

Nancy

2009/4/23 Marilyn R Crocker <marilyncrocker at juno.com>
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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