[Oe List ...] Beyond 'Reconciling' conversations: How Black Lives Matter is changing the church

Tue Sep 1 06:11:27 PDT 2020

Profound! < Jack and Marshall !
WE ARE the PEOPLE sent to EARTH…

Peace & Grace,
John & Lynda C.

From: OE <oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net> on behalf of OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
Reply-To: OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
Date: Monday, August 31, 2020 at 12:38 PM
To: OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
Cc: Jack Gilles <jackcgilles at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Beyond 'Reconciling' conversations: How Black Lives Matter is changing the church

Marshall,

Your posts are always a great read and spoken with profound (and colorful!) wisdom. So first I want to thank you for what you have said. I believe, like you, we don’t have an “Answer”, but we do know in what domain the answer does lie (We were called “The People of the Question”). As our song goes; “Methods and Spirit are what we bring”. So what is “the question” we need to be focused upon, and just how could we (elders for the most part) move beyond just saying something, writing something, or leading people to historical wisdom, like we are trying to do with the Archives Research Project?

One of our Methods was to collectively do the Ritual response: "Now is the time.” We said it three times, each with a different word emphasis. We did the same with the response: WE are the People!, We ARE the People!, We are the PEOPLE! I will only speak to the first part of the ritual.

NOW is the time! Do not wait, for, "Action removes the doubt that theory can not solve.” This is not about running off and doing something. It means that one moves; which for me is about Timing. We talk about that in our 5 modes of Strategy: Intensive, Extensive, Probe, Flank and Void. Always moving, but guided by the ever-shifting situation.

Now IS the time! This means that it is always Now. Past-Present-Future are in every moment. Time measures our, and the world’s, journey. But the Eternal Now is what the Reality is.

Now is the TIME!  This means that right now there is a Destinal Moment for (how long, I do not know) when consciousness is rising, TWC are connecting, acting and learning. This is what the gift of Rob Work’s term "Movements of Movements”(MOM) points too. Everywhere, there is a quickening, a connecting and a discovery of responding to a Turn that has been happening, but now is announcing there is no “return to a new normal” or final answers. But mobilizing all these diverse, and focused movements is not the way to go (go ahead and build coalitions) but also going Down, deeper, until the Transparency of all authentic responses is seen. Tough job!! I experience this most profoundly in the BLM Movement.

Finally, I just want to inform and witness to my personal response to the above. Each of us is on the same Journey, but not the same Path. So my response is just that; my response. I try and live with being a Person of the Question. I listen more (new capacity!!) and give advice less (second new capacity). I have no idea of what anyone should “do”, but I warn them all, “Speak with your Interior Council and listen for the response. If they tell you what “to do”, pay them no mind. Ask them what question I should be addressing?"

!. Living in the Awe-full world. Each day, each encounter, each situation I experience the Awe. I have moved from Visits to the Other World, to being a Citizen of the Other World. (See JWM’s talk in Vol. I of Bending History on the NRM and the gaps. I have moved from the Outer Circle to the Middle Circle.This is the real Vocational discovery.

2. Being on the Archives Research Team (And what a glorious Team it is!!). I believe the People we can best serve and enable are the MOM’s Rob Work speaks of. The key is creating the window for them to enter. It must resonate with their sense of being in a Truning Point of History, with an urgency to respond to a “never return” awareness. I believe this needs to be more bold then subtle, but again, the Question, not the Answer.

3. I am writing a Guide regarding the Journey. Title: The Flame With No Name: The Disciplines of Profound Humanness. This is being built from integrating my personal Journey with two profound mentors perennial wisdom: JWM and Bob Campbell.

4. I have decided to throw my one life, all my resources and all my talents into bringing into being, into Form, what I sense is being called for. Our Team is calling this place, near my home in Litibu, The Wayside Inn. This Call, came to me suddenly, waking one morning in January with a clear message: "Buy and build the place and space you have known about.” As Bill Cosby said: “R-i-g-h-t. What’s a Wayside Inn??” Or maybe you prefer Fields of Dreams, “If you build it they will come.”

So I will just close with with what I remember (paraphrase) being said by JWM in 1976 when speaking of the Third Campaign (a pinwheel swirl). “The day after tomorrow we will being doing only one thing; The Third Campaign; Caring for the awakened and engaged ones of the world.” The Wayside Inn gate archway will have on it "The Wayside Inn", along with the Spanish phrase underneath: "Posada de Camino Refugio por Vida” (Shelter for Life), with a steel flame lamp in the opening of the gate.   And some just may see: The Way Side In.

Peace,

Jack

On Aug 31, 2020, at 1:10 AM, W. J. via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net<mailto:oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>> wrote:

Friends, you may wish to read the latest article from The New Yorker.
And then, if you're interested in more, scroll down to read my personal commentary.
I invite your responses.
Marshall Jones

How Black Lives Matter Is Changing the Church<https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bvSYGGDjrHIJ:https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/how-black-lives-matter-is-changing-the-church+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari>

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How Black Lives Matter Is Changing the ...

“You have this phrase and this movement that is forcing people, essentially, to take sides.” --Jennar Tisby

And now for a few personal words from this writer ...

When large numbers of raging <https://www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/29495-a-tale-of-two-rallies-americans-on-all-sides-want-change-but-don-t-want-to-change> counter-protesters<https://www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/29495-a-tale-of-two-rallies-americans-on-all-sides-want-change-but-don-t-want-to-change> with Confederate flags mounted on their pickups confronted BLM marchers in Maggie Valley, N.C. last month, they got my attention as a part-time resident.

Since then more police shootings of black men have continued to raise the cultural temperature above the boiling point, creating a head of steam that may explode at any moment with unprecedented racial divisiveness and further violent confrontations.

In our current moment Dr. Martin Luther King's practice of nonviolent demonstrations may look in our rear view mirror like sweetness and light personified.

I write as a long term survivor of the Civil Rights Movement. Though I was gassed by the cops during Durham's 1960 sit-ins at segregated Woolworth lunch counters, and experienced 1964's Mississippi Freedom Summer without getting shot at, and photographed MLK speaking at the Methodist Student Movement in 1964<https://methodistthinker.com/2012/01/16/mlks-address-to-the-methodist-student-movement/> for New World Outlook without incident, and staffed the NCC-sponsored Student Interracial Ministry while working for the Methodist Board of Missions at 475 Riverside Drive, NYC, from 1964 until 1967, I was not fully immersed in a radical corporate response to racial injustice until the assassinations of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 propelled me from the quiet environs of Hinton Rural Life Center in Clay County, NC to the burned-out inner city of Chicago's West Side when I joined the staff of The Ecumenical Institute<https://icaglobalarchives.org/collections/institutes-history/training-church-leaders/>.

I could not perceive it at the time, but having a bunch of white honkies living with their kids in a 97% black Chicago ghetto was an in-your-face intrusion into the community. With our unquestioned assumptions of White Privilege, we were sitting ducks. We may have been naive, but fortunately we survived the fires and contributed to the transformation of that devastated neighborhood into the 5th City Model of how to care for every human being in a local community.

See Fifth City: A Decisional City (1983)<https://youtu.be/JJ9fFR9QK0E>, that Oprah narrated and I was privileged to film.

Even with the perspective of my unusual life history, I continue to struggle with how much I enjoy and take for granted my White Male Privilege, which, together with my economic privilege, has kept me feeling relatively safe and secure into my old age.

As I mark eighty thousand miles on my birthday next month, I'm left wondering whether I personally--and we as a group--have done enough to date as cultural, historical, and epidemiological waves collide and flood over us, washing us up onto an unknown shore.

And whether I, and we, need to be doing something different at this unprecedented moment.

In the poetry of D.H. Lawrence<http://www.public-domain-poetry.com/d-h-lawrence/new-heaven-and-earth-22955>:

    Ha, I was a blaze leaping up!
    I was a tiger bursting into sunlight.
    I was greedy, I was mad for the unknown.
    I, new-risen, resurrected, starved from the tomb
    starved from a life of devouring always myself
    now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand stretching out
    and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown.
Perhaps having quiet, comfortable, and inviting conversations with select, non-confrontational representatives of other racial communities is not enough.

If we learn how to step out of our cultural frame of reference and listen more deeply and daringly to what others may be bold enough to say--and only if they can trust us--perhaps even that much is not enough.

As I turn the corner to begin what will probably be my final decade, I am not arrogant enough to propose a sweeping Answer that we should rush to embrace. Rather, I take refuge in the humility of acknowledging that, in the words of JFK in 1961, "the torch is passed to a new generation."

The unanswered question in my mind is whether our "new generation" has been adequately prepared in depth to meet the challenges of the rest of the 21st century. And whether "the old folks" including myself need to do WAY more to challenge them to carry the torch of individual freedom, radical inclusion, and profound humanness. And to invent with them the tools to do the job.

Historical footnote: In 2016 David P. Cline published From Reconciliation to Revolution: the Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement<https://uncpress.org/book/9781469630434/from-reconciliation-to-revolution/>. His choice of title offers insights into how our history has swept us forward from our culturally biased responses of previous decades to confront their limitations and dare to invent responses that are new and different in the Now.

Links in the message (5)
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MLK’s address to the Methodist Student ...
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Public Domain Poetry - New Heaven And E...

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A tale of two rallies: Americans on all...
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The World of Human Development Fifth Ci...

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From Reconciliation to Revolution | Dav...

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