[Dialogue] Final Meaning witness

[ML Jones]

Wonderful! Thanks for this reminder, Mary Laura

Mary Laura Jones
Grants Resource Development Consultant
1454 W. Fargo Avenue
Chicago, IL 60626
cell: 773 636-2022
mljones2022 at gmail.com


On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 11:00 AM Richard Alton via Dialogue <
dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

> I just found this piece going through my files: I was Louise Singleton and
> her late husband John's Local Church prior and later worked a decade with
> her on the ICA USA's African ICAs HIV/AIDS work. A little long for a
> witness but what happens to one who spends a month working on final
> meanings on the Southside of Chicago. Amazing what we asked of people! Dick
>
> THE GROUND SHIFTS UNDER MY FEET
>
> SOUTH HOUSE ON BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO
>
> I am not sure what I expected when John and I and three others from
> Montview Presbyterian Church drove to Chicago to attend the Summer Research
> Assembly at the Ecumenical Institute (EI). It was July, 1971; John and I
> left four children eleven to three in the care of the Denver Religious
> House at 1741 Gaylord Street, a big old house that was the home and office
> of those who worked for the Ecumenical Institute in Denver. John, Paul
> Hamilton and Don Elliott planned to return to Denver after a short time,
> but Freda, Don’s wife, and I intended to stay four weeks. I had never been
> to Chicago and my children would spend those four weeks in a Religious
> House. I knew essentially nothing about this organization or what I would
> be doing. What could I have been thinking?
>
> The Kent State Massacre had shocked the world on May 4, 1970. The New York
> Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers in mid-June, 1971. Protests
> against the Viet Nam War were strident. I had missed the up-endedness of
> the 60’s – the rebellion against authority, free-form lifestyle, rejection
> of materialism, and discontented individualism. I had four children in the
> 60’s and to say that I was busy, distracted, and disconnected from the
> larger world is to understate the coziness of my cocoon. I ran into Betty
> Friedan and the Feminine Mystique in 1968 when I was pregnant with Will.
> I got a glimpse of how my wife and mother role had been meticulously
> nurtured into me in my Southern upbringing. Yes, I had gone to Boston to
> business school and happily worked for Polaroid for three years, but still
> I had no idea that I would want a career, work of my own in the world. I
> did not feel much responsibility for the world beyond my family and close
> community.
>
> John and I had encountered the Ecumenical Institute at a weekend seminar
> called RS-1 – Religious Studies I. Its intention was to confront unexamined
> religious literalism with an intellectual and experiential grounding that
> had powerful ramifications for how you lived your life. The course focused
> on four major symbols of the Christian faith – God, Christ, Holy Spirit,
> and Church. It used writings of four 20th century theologians, Rudolph
> Bultman, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and R. Richard Niebuhr to blow
> open these well worn church concepts and the words that name them, and
> ground them in ordinary human experience. It sought to demythologize them
> and re-symbolize them again. To me, who had grown up in the unquestioned
> and unquestioning environment of the southern Presbyterian Church, this was
> radical and exciting stuff. The calling was to live an intentional life of
> service – not to some reduced god, but to the whole world. This was not a
> Jesus Loves You, Y’all Come kind of theology; it was insistent demand. Stop
> worrying about yourself and your soul. Get out there and bring new life to
> the world. Live your life. I had no idea what a month in Chicago would
> bring; I was clear there was an interesting world beyond my kitchen sink,
> and my unexamined life role.
>
> We arrived in Chicago at the Ecumenical Institute offices located in an
> old seminary on West Congress Parkway in the middle of a poor black, angry,
> rioting community. We were instructed not go on the street – not because we
> might come to harm, but because there might be an incident which would
> damage EI’s work in 5th City, a community the Institute was working with
> to offer paths to change and a sense of hope where very little existed.
>
> The first shock was that those of us from Denver were split up and
> assigned to three different locations. A thousand people were expected to
> attend, so other buildings were co-opted. John and I were sent to a four
> story wooden building, an abandoned hotel with rooms around a central shaft
> on Blue Island Parkway. I have no idea where in Chicago it is because I
> only left the building to go to assemblies of the whole body once a week
> and I never walked outside the building. John was assigned to a men’s dorm
> and I was assigned to a women’s dorm on the 4th floor built around the
> four-story atrium.
>
> The building looked like a firetrap. My room containing bunk beds for six,
> opened on a hall at the top of this open shaft. I was out on the
> falling-off-the-wall back porch in tears because there was no way that a
> responsible mother of four would put herself in such danger. And I was
> beginning to understand about assignment: it equaled obedience. Charles
> Moore came along and asked what the problem was. I let him have it – the
> danger, the negligence, etc, etc. He listened quietly and said wait. In a
> few minutes he was back with a new room assignment. John and I were
> assigned together to a small room off the porch on the second floor above
> the kitchen. I learned later it was his and Pat’s room. Living in a room
> with five other women would not have been easy, but I might have been less
> lonely than returning every evening to this small room off the second floor
> porch, above the kitchen and facing the tenements behind.
>
> John stayed for a week and returned to Denver. I knew no one – no one to
> help make sense of the strange, continuously objectionable expectations in
> which the rules of engagement were different than any I had ever
> encountered. The Ecumenical Institute was a family secular order of people
> who had decided to live a life of radical service. Those who decided to
> join the Order Ecumenical lived by the ancient monastic vows of poverty,
> chastity and obedience. Poverty meant receiving a stipend equal to the
> poverty level wherever one worked. In India, that could be $10 a month.
> Some people worked outside and their income supported those who staffed the
> work of the Institute. Chastity had to do with the Kierkegaardian idea of
> willing one thing. Your life was about the immediate work and intention of
> the larger group. Obedience was about accepting assignment. These three
> disciplines – seriously observed – came to me continuously as a shock and
> an affront. And yet, all these extremely bright, well-organized, compelling
> people had agreed to live like this. And seemed to think it the most
> important thing they had every done. And the most important thing I might
> do.
>
> The task for the month was to create the New Social Vehicle. EI expected
> nothing less than to participate in transforming the world. Huge white
> banners hanging across the front of the assembly hall read,
>
> All the past belongs to all the people.
> All the wisdom belongs to all the people. All the goods belong to all the
> people.
> All the decisions belong to all the people.
>
> I wondered if this would show up in my FBI file although it seemed
> unlikely I had an FBI file. It had not been so long since the days of the
> McCarthy Hearings; I could believe association with this organization might
> be hazardous. I also felt an underlying implication that my usual role of
> wife and mother was inadequate: I needed to commit myself to renewing the
> local church and helping to re-create the institutions of society to care
> for all.
>
> The day began with Daily Office at 6 am. Wake up call was someone with a
> gong outside the door shouting Praise the Lord Christ is Risen, to which
> we were to respond, He is risen indeed as we rolled joyfully out of bed.
> I was assigned to a working group of about thirty people, which would be
> home base for the four weeks. We met morning and afternoon, breakfast,
> lunch and dinner. The Research Assembly of a thousand people gathered staff
> from all over the country and a few from overseas, plus volunteers and new
> recruits like us. The purpose of the summer’s research was to figure out
> what was needed to transform civil society and create the practical
> programs that those under assignment would implement in the coming year to
> help bring that about. During the working year those under assignment would
> apply the thinking and programmatic actions wherever they were assigned,
> and come back the next summer for another assembly to assess what worked
> and create the organization’s work for the following year. It was a kind of
> practical research. It was an astounding operation, better seen from a
> bird’s eye view than from a hard chair in a working group in the steamy
> summer heat of Chicago. My bottom developed blisters.
>
> The task for that summer assembly was to define the dynamics that occur in
> any society. It would be used as a tool for understanding and analyzing
> what the tyrannizing and collapsing social forces were in current realities
> that need to be corrected. When economic, political, and cultural dynamics
> are in balance, the New Social Vehicle could emerge. Staff had read 1000
> edge books over the last year, trying to discern what was happening in
> communities in the chaotic time of the ‘60’s and beginning of the ‘70’s.
> [image: page3image3330531104]
>
> Typical of ICA methodology, the task for the third of the assembly meeting
> at South House was to define the Cultural Commonality in The Social Process
> triangles. The other two locations would describe Economic and Political
> Commonalities. Those in south House were asked to figure out what
> concretely was meant and went on in Communal Wisdom, Communal Styles and
> Communal Symbols? My working group was assigned Final Meanings under
> Communal Wisdom. This task required a great deal of brainstorming,
> discussion, and corporate writing. It is difficult to explain and define
> the very medium in which you live and operate. As someone said, does a fish
> know what water is? Corporate writing was a new experience. Three or four
> people work together to write, getting their wisdom on paper in a process
> of suggestion and negotiation which can be both long and infuriatingly
> difficult, particularly if you are defining something called Final
> Meanings. The day’s work was sent to Room E where leadership decided what
> the next step would be the following day. This was an evolving process.
>
> I was totally disconnected from home, seeming to forget my children for
> days at a time; I was trying to survive and to contribute; my days were
> contained as if on an unknown island. There were no computers, cell phones,
> newspapers or even telephones for general use. Someone reported the news of
> the day at breakfast. There was a quiet time after lunch when I took my
> journal and incense to an assigned place and thought deep thoughts. Singing
> and Psalm conversations were intended to keep spirits up and intention
> focused on the task. There were regular reporting dynamics with a weekly
> assembly of the entire gathering and some planned activities or
> “discontinuity.” Singing by the whole body when they gathered 1000 strong
> in assembly was without accompaniment – and earthmoving. The primary songs
> I remember were the hymns For I Know Whom I have Believed, Amazing Grace,
> The Lord of the Dance, and Why O Lord, Hast Thou Quite Forsaken Me, Those
> Who Wait on the Lord, and secular songs like Blue Skies and I Don’t Know
> Why I Love You Like I Do. People wrote visionary words to popular tunes
> such as On a Clear Day and the Sound of Silence.
>
> The nuts and bolts of the assembly were directed by staff and carried out
> by participants as assigned – to the kitchen, cleaning, print shop, and
> typing. John worked in the boiler room in the grungy basement. To load coal
> into the boiler, it was necessary to load it into a wheelbarrow and push
> the wheelbarrow up a six- inch plank to reach the boiler. One night on
> breakfast prep, I broke 300 eggs to prepare scrambled eggs. I was
> instructed to break them two at a time – one in each hand; breakfast prep
> was just beginning. Showers and toilet facilities were barely adequate and
> tended to verge on collapse. Documents were printed at the print shop and
> then collated by laying out stacks of each page in order and the entire
> body of people passed by in a line assembling their document – usually
> while singing.
>
> I anticipated that Bill Hudson, who had left the Order and was a minister
> at Montview Church, would arrive for the second two weeks. He had gotten me
> into this, and maybe he could help me understand why it was important for
> me to be there. I was in a school gymnasium as part of a typing crew on
> Friday night
>
> when the phone rang. I heard the person who answered say that it was too
> bad that someone had died. I found out that Bill had had a heart attack and
> died the day before. He would not be coming to Chicago, to South House.
> Bill had left the Order; people did not leave the Order. No one knew at
> that point how the Order should deal with an ex-Order member who died, so
> his death was mostly ignored: he had left the Order; he had refused to live
> his life. I am not overly given to tears, but I think that summer I cried
> about every day.
>
> I still do not know why I did not go home. I expect a few people thought
> up a good reason why they were required to be someplace else. My prior (as
> in the head of a monastery), the leader of my working group was that same
> Charles Moore who rescued us from the back porch. It is hard to describe
> Charles. Like many other people in the Order, he was a preacher who decided
> that this was a far more interesting and significant thing to do with his
> life than working in the desert of the local parish. He lived in the depth
> of the spirit – close to the Dark Night of the Soul. And he could make you
> believe you belonged there too. I could not imagine telling him this work
> was not important and I would not be part of it. That’s what a prior is:
> they keep you pointed in the direction you choose for your life, willing
> one thing and being obedient. I had chosen to be there. When Summer ’71
> ended, Paul Hamilton’s son Cap, and I drove home from Chicago to Denver. We
> talked all night, and by the time we drove in I-70 out of Limon into the
> Denver morning, I understood a lot more about what had happened to me. I
> could think about it and not just respond emotionally. I would not just go
> home, pick up my abandoned children, and return to life as usual. I
> understood that I had now assumed Care for the World – a burden that would
> never leave me.
>
> I did not join the Order, although I often thought about it. I had a
> husband with little interest and four children. And I am not sure I could
> have been sufficiently obedient, willing-one-thing, and detached from this
> world’s goods to have been a satisfactory member of the Order.
>
> Research and working in local communities was
> also changing the organization. At the 1972
> Summer Research Assembly, they emerged
> from the dark night of the soul and waltzed. I
> couldn’t believe the reports of what a fine time
> people had. The decision was also made to
> make the Turn to the World. The assessment
> was made that major change in our time would
> not happen through the local church, but through
> secular society. Soon after, the Ecumenical
> Institute became the Institute of Cultural Affairs,
> because major change in the world would come from change in the cultural
> dimension of society. Human Development Projects were born and established
> on every continent in every time zone where local people learned skills to
> “develop” their community – human devopment. As ICA worked in communities
> with every religion, the intent was not to convert people but to find the
> [image: page5image3331086800]
>
> ICA Meeting, Chicago
>
> transparent life-giving word in their religion. I particularly appreciated
> the EI/ICA intention to create and define frameworks to use in thinking
> about things. My favorite is Knowing/Doing/Being. Although I wrote many
> history exams on the economic, political, and cultural backgrounds of an
> issue, how those interacted with each other were not as clear until I
> worked with the Social Process Triangles. The Global Grid gives a new way
> to imagine the world. And of course, there is Poverty, Chastity, and
> Obedience.
>
> Over the years, I volunteered in many activities, beckoned by the
> opportunity to work with unusually committed people who could see past the
> immediacy of the moment to the possibility of actually changing the world
> to one in which people – particularly the poorest of the poor--took hold of
> what they wanted for their future and worked to make that happen. The work
> opened my life to the world.
>
> John and I were part of a “cadre” at Montview Church, one of four churches
> in the Denver/Boulder area involved in the Local Church Experiment to renew
> our churches. We were instrumental in hiring Ken Barley who with Zoe had
> just left the Order, to replace Bill Hudson. He took the leadership role in
> changing Montview from a senior ministry model to a corporate ministry
> organization. In 1976, I assisted with town meetings in the nation-wide
> Town Meeting Project. It was a massive project--at least one was organized
> in every county across the country--as a way to raise the consciousness of
> residents to the possibility of new life in their community. In 1978, I
> visited development projects in India, Malaysia. and Indonesia while we
> were on sabbatical in Oxford, glimpsing first hand for the first time the
> enormity, richness, and need of the world. I helped organize local
> development projects in Colorado to attend the Global Exhibition of
> Development Projects in Bombay in 1984, and spent about four weeks there,
> helping to set up the conference, leading a group on a field trip to
> northern India, and traveling for a week after the conference ended.
>
> The Order: Ecumenical went out of existence in 1986 and the Institute of
> Cultural Affairs (ICA) became a professional non-profit organization
> working with organizations and communities in the US and abroad. They
> developed, taught, and used facilitation and planning methods called the
> Technology of Participation or TOPTM. I joined the ICA Board in 1995,
> became president in 1998, and coordinator of the 2000 ICA International
> Conference held in Denver at Denver University, attended by 650 people,
> one-third of whom came from outside the US.
>
> Forty years ago, the Kemper Insurance Company sold their office building
> to ICA for $1.00. An eight-story building at North Sheridan Road and
> Lawrence Avenue, it is located in Uptown, north of Chicago downtown,
> between the commuter rail and Lake Michigan. Uptown is a low-income area
> with very diverse population. The Kemper Building became ICA: USA
> headquarters and a center for Uptown community services. There are ICA
> offices on the sixth floor, a conference center on the 7th floor and a
> community and guest rooms on the 8th floor. The rest of the building is
> leased to community service organizations including a health clinic,
> Chicago Social Services and various immigrant and other support services. On
> [image: page6image3331648272]
>
> Sunday music from African congregation services fill the 2nd floor.
> Particularly during the years I was on the Board, I was there frequently,
> staying in a guest room with the bathroom down the hall, eating meals in
> the dining room on the 6th floor and listening to the traffic and sirens
> that filled the night. I would fly into O’Hare, take the train to Jefferson
> and catch the Lawrence Avenue bus that stopped right on the corner of
> Sheridan. It was about a half hour ride through neighborhood after
> neighborhood, each a different nationality with its own ethnic flavor. That
> eye-opening ride was preparation for entering that building and the work
> that goes on there. For many ICA people, it is a place to return to, to see
> colleagues, work on project, maintain the archives, and touch base. It was
> a home I shared with many others. Over the last few years it is being
> turned into a green building modeling energy conservation and
> sustainability. In 2012 ICA participated in and was an organizing leader in
> Chicago’s Accelerate 77, which stands for Accelerating Green Initiatives in
> Chicago's 77 Community Areas. The building also has a new name: GreenRise
> Building Uptown.
>
> At the ICA International Conference in Denver in 2000, called the
> Millennium Connection, there was concern about the threat of HIV/AIDS to
> development in Africa. African staff were overwhelmed by their experience
> of HIV. People were dying and AIDS was decimating communities. At that
> time, the HIV rate in Zimbabwe was 26% and 16.2% in Zambia. Every family
> had at least one person sick and dying. In 2001, I joined several
> colleagues to develop and implement the African HIV/AIDS Prevention
> Initiative. That work called on everything I had learned in public health
> and years of ICA and life experience. I had the opportunity to work with
> committed colleagues in the US, Canada, and the UK, but most importantly I
> worked in Africa with African staff and on the ground with rural villagers.
> I experienced the great pleasure of working with colleagues in a common and
> significant enterprise.
>
> What had often seemed like living my life in parallel universes finally
> came together. In the previous thirty years, I had many friends and
> colleagues in Denver who knew of and worked with ICA. Denver had had a
> Religious House with ICA staff and many in Montview Church were active or
> aware of ICA. But most people in my day-to-day life were not involved. I
> often felt ICA was too strange to be understood by my “normal”
> establishment friends and family. If you hadn’t been there, how would it
> make sense? ICA always claimed that it was not dis-establishment but
> trans-establishment – between the no longer and the not yet. I felt my
> experience was far outside that of most people, hard to explain, and hard
> for friends and family to grasp.
>
> The ICA African HIV/AIDS Prevention Initiative was something everyone
> could understand and support. Without funding of Denver friends, Montview
> Church,
>
> and the sponsorship of funds from several Denver and Boulder Rotary Clubs,
> we would have had a difficult time launching the Initiative in eight
> countries in Africa. Working in eight countries was possible only because
> [image: page7image3332124816]
>
> of the network of self-governing country ICA’s with local staff trained to
> lead Human Development Projects since the early 70’s. They were local
> community revolutionaries in their countries. Assisting those staff to
> address HIV prevention and management, as an integral part of their
> development work was our goal. This would become my work for the next
> decade and beyond.
>
> ICA as an organization is working as a professional non-profit
> organization in an establishment world and it is not easy. It has not yet
> learned to be a reliable beneficiary of funding organizations. The
> commitment of those from the next generation is needed to continue vigorous
> work as those involved since the ‘70’s retire and die. It is difficult to
> inspire young people to take up poverty, chastity and obedience – but I
> know from experience that that is what will be required to move to the New
> Social Vehicle, which seems less attainable and more essential with every
> newspaper report.
>
> 2012 was the 50th anniversary of this organization. Using the social
> process triangles, it is clear that the economic process is the tyrannizing
> force with the political as ally. The cultural dimension is collapsed,
> divided into sides, each unwilling to even talk about common values – those
> final meanings. The Occupy Movement had a glimpse of this, but did not know
> how to build that new social vehicle. It is the task for the next twenty
> years to figure out how to live in community that has changed radically at
> every level—local, national and global--since 1971, but still seeks the
> same human benefits. I am one of the people who want to make that happen.
> The blessings upon my life by my work, my colleagues, and association with
> this remarkable organization – this global home – have been beyond measure.
>
> Written as part of a memoir, Between Earth and Sky, self-published in 2015
>
> ICA Global Citizen –1987
>
> --
> Richard H. T. Alton
> One Earth Film Fest ( OEFF)
> Green Community Connections
> Interfaith Green Network
> T: 773.344.7172
> richard.alton at gmail.com
> **Save the Date! One Earth Film Festival 2021, March *
> http:www.oneearthfilmfestival.org
>
> Make Plain the Vision, Habakkuh 2:2
> Won't you be my neighbor?
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