Colleagues,
Speaking of the New Pedagogy, which implies
a new pedagogue, perhaps the obvious needs to be pointed out. Here are
some thoughts about the emerging shape of the New Pedagogy as seen through the
presence of the new pedagogue.
The New Pedagogy is remarkably different
from anything we have ever done in our past because the pedagogue is completely
different from the pedagogue of the past, even if the pedagogues are the same
person. The pedagogue of the 60’s was not global, in spite of one’s self story,
nor had the pedagogue of the 60’s spent 30 years living the Dark Night of the
Soul. The 60’s pedagogue had no understanding of the terrain and topography of
the other world in the midst of this world, the Kingdom of God,
I believe Jesus called it. The old pedagogue had no first hand knowledge of
what the pedagogy of the oppressed was nor how it worked in every land of the
planet until they went there and did it. The old pedagogue had no clue as to
how to be sustained in a solitary and self-sufficient life. The pedagogue of
the 60’s was naïve about the world and about the consequences of not being responsible
globally, theologically, or economically, as the human condition and the
condition of the planet reveal so clearly today. The Pedagogue of the 60’s saw
ecumenism insofar as the Christian community was concerned and not as a vehicle
for global peace and diversity through interaction of an inter-faith community.
The pedagogy of the past was but a prelude
to the pedagogy we are now putting together. The pedagogue of the past was but
a spiritual shadow of the pedagogues you have become today. But we must shake
off our stylistic compromises and our preferred prejudices we acquired in order
to be imminently presentable to our chosen markets, if we are to build the
earth. We cannot keep doing what we have been doing, we cannot simply wrap our
arms around everything everyone is doing and say that is it, we must
courageously embrace a new role, take a new risk, embrace an open future,
address the global contradiction and see to it that what needs to be done is
getting done.
None of us as individuals woke up until
someone awakened us personally. Only then did we grasp that we could be a
skilled pedagogue awakening and training thousands in a new pedagogy for the
sake of awakening the world to a new way of being human. We live in urgent times now and our time is
short. If we are going to move on this
moment, now is the time to move. There
is no doubt we have been prepared by the fire of life for this. The only
question is who will.
There is no new pedagogy nor new pedagogue
without embodying that which is being disclosed in the style of the
pedagogy. RSI changed our lives because the pedagogues were living their
pedagogy! That reality was the methodology. We, too, are called to be that
embodiment regardless of whether we say yes or no to what history is asking us
to do.
With profound respect, take care for there
is little time and so much to do.
Grace and Peace be unto you.
Bill
Given at the People of
the Order Gathering
July 14, 15, 2010
By
Bill Parker
THE NEW ORDER WITNESS
It was remarkable to see the twenty or thirty people of the Order come to Oklahoma and participate in the
Symposium with OCU faculty and OIKOS student scholars. The gathering was like nothing else and that
special, unique relationship among the People of the Order was manifest again.
We have come a great distance together and alone. Who we were as a community of people marked a
reality still having a major impact on people’s lives. If
you don’t believe me, ask
Jim
Wheeler, who just
bore witness in the Wheeler Declaration
and in what he just now shared with
us. We were a community
transparently grounded in the faith tradition of the Church. Our mission to the world took us deeply into
the great tradition of the Christian faith.
Everything we said, thought and did was carefully understood to
be building on the great tradition of the faith. We probed deeply into the historical church before we
decided to move directly into the world and demonstrate what the Church looked like in mission on behalf
of all.
Our mission to the world took us to places where we all discovered something far more was required of
us,
something new; something capable of sustaining a pluriform community in mission. We could no
longer function as a
transparently grounded community of the Christian tradition: we were diverse, and
yet we needed new myths, rites, and symbols, as well as a practical corporate discipline.
In this turning point, we moved to a secular discipline based upon the most
common denominator: “Those
who care”. We encountered a fork in the road and we took this one and became the Institute of
Cultural Affairs. Now, I am not criticizing our decision. It
was exactly what we needed to have done, as painful as that turned out to be. What we did sustained the movement and demonstrated an entirely new, radical
and effective method for sustainable human development the world over. But for us, the Order, over time,
over
a stretch of
a decade, the foundation of our spirit life was experienced as cloudy, or shallow. Yet we
could not go back. We had become global, spiritually global, and we had gone beyond the Christian faith tradition to a pluriform tradition, or no tradition.
THE NEW TIMES
Eboo Patel, in his book Acts
of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a
Generation,
says the divisions in the world today
are in inter-faith relationships. But, the divisions are not
between Christian and Muslim, or Muslims and Jews, or Hindu and Christian. The line that divides all
faiths is
between the Religious Totalitarians and the Religious Pluriformists within all faith traditions.
The Religious Totalitarians isolate themselves and think of themselves as superior, or even cultivate hate toward those who look or believe differently from
themselves. While the Religious Pluriformists embrace
diversity of faith, culture and practice, and seek peace and community by working together toward a
better world. That is the global division that threatens everything the human community has worked to
achieve.
The remarkable fact in this
division is that Religious Totalitarians have for decades invested hundreds of
millions of dollars in the careful training,
mentoring, and encouraging of the rising generations about what it
means to be human. They have nurtured the younger generations ever so carefully in racial or religious
hatred and the accompanying self-righteousness as a true picture of reality. They have built and staffed
Universities, High Schools, Middle Schools, Elementary Schools, and even day care to groom more toward
that way of seeing reality. They have training camps to get them prepared for the “holy” struggle.
While this is
going on, during the same decades, the Religious Pluriformists have invested practically zero
in
the special nurturing formation and development of
the
rising generations toward the desirability and necessity of a world of pluriformity and diversity.
Patel walks us through the known
terrorists and the violent groups developing rapidly in this country and
around the world during the past few years. He points out that it is
the
young who are committing the terrorist’s acts, as they give their lives to it. They are hardly old enough to know what they
are doing but
the older men behind them
are mentoring them in what their faith tradition means, pushing them toward
notions of superiority, hatred of
differences of other people, violence and
acts of terrorism. All the while
the men behind these young people are providing assurances that their violent acts are pure, necessary, and are the will of God. They assure the rising generation that these beliefs, attitudes, and actions are
the fulfillment of their lives, climaxed by dying for the struggle.
The time is now for all those wanting a culture of
peace, diversity and pluriformity to make a bold
decision. We have come to
a historic moment in our life where we are facing another fork in the road.
Jim
Wheeler, the author of the Wheeler Declaration, says when the Order came to that
fork in the road in
1970-1971 it chose the ICA, the secular option; it left the other fork, the
Ecumenical Institute fork,
because of the difficulties its Christian tradition created in the diverse situations in which we were located.
He adds, however, that the unrealized opportunities never go away.
They only remain in the unconscious until circumstances call them forth as a
necessity and that is precisely where we are today.
We had that possibility
in 1970-1971, because we understood
ourselves to be living out of a New Religious Mode, to become the global, interfaith Ecumenical Institute but we chose not to and for very
good reasons. We had to go through that which we went through, where the bottom fell out from
under us,
and we were shattered over time, and ultimately called ourselves out of being as an
Order in 1988.
We were not prepared to move forward as the Ecumenical Institute in a global, interfaith way and had we
done so at
that time, we would have become just another Religious Totalitarian community. God saved us
from that.
Returning to that fork in the road is precisely what is happening today. The
circumstances of our environment can no longer
use
facilitation as the awakenment tool at first. We are living in a time in which a “new pedagogy” must come into being; not facilitation of
everyone’s mixed up and confused thinking that yields a sense of hopelessness and cynicism except on a most reduced scale. We have to cut
through all of the popular rubbish and undergrowth to reach the individual center of
people’s lives so they
may
have the possibility
of deciding for themselves what it means to be a human being today, in this
moment and circumstance. If you don’t see the differences I am pointing to in facilitation and pedagogy, then
you do not understand what I am trying to say. I may need to
find a
better way to say this.
THE NEW PEDAGOGY
This returning to the fork does not mean we return to the old pedagogy and the old courses, but rather a “new pedagogy” based upon grounding of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, or other faith traditions.
Pedagogy is
something we have all got to relearn. We have embraced our role as
facilitators for 40 years
and we cannot facilitate this awakenment. It requires pedagogy that slices through the peripheral to the depths of the human soul. This is the cutting edge today! This new pedagogy is the awakenment task
before us. In this context, facilitation
is
our
tool kit, our
hammer and screwdriver, for engagement but not
our
edge for awakenment.
What we have been doing with OIKOS and OCU, Centenary University, and other associations is getting
access to the rising generations, who by
way of the secular and scientific cultural realities, have never been given the possibility of their own faith traditions as grounded in life and having those traditions
interpret the meaning of their lives. Instead, they swirl around in confusion, trying to interpret and make
sense of their faith tradition and its
relationship to their lives in particular.
Patel describes himself as being raised in a secular Muslim family in America. He visited his Islamic family
in India: Grandmother, aunts, and other members of their household. He was aware of knowing he was a member of a faith tradition but actually not relating to it very much in real life. After many years, during
prayer to observe Laylatul Qadr, the night in Ramadan when the Qur’an was first revealed, on New Year’s Eve, the
turn of the millennium, he had a moment in his life when he was struck with a stark
clarity: he, Eboo Patel, was part of the story of Islam, he was a part of the story of pluralism, he was part of the story of the spiritual principal of human togetherness. He saw himself not as a member of a faith tradition
but
as one who is a carrier of his faith tradition and a
part
of the larger story.
THE NEW ORDER
This is where you can see the 21st Century Spirit Movement. It is
a vast, expansive global movement of the
spirit. It is
diversified and it is already located in every aspect of
human civilization. But, it must be
declared! And we are the ones who can do that and do it on the foundation of our
faith traditions, whatever those traditions may be.
So, when we look at our past journey, it is
not
surprising to see how strong our growth was when we were
standing on a faith tradition reaching back to the beginning of time, thousands
of years. Then we entered
a decade or so of a new secular faith
tradition that went all the way back to 1970-1971. Now we stand at a crucial vantage point to see that we are about the transparent grounding of every faith tradition in order to
bring the faith continuum from
the
beginning of time into the present and future. Only this will enable the care of this world by creating a culture of peace, economic justice, and planetary sustainability.
We need to pursue the avenues of accessing the rising generations, to be among them, to be a grounded presence of
knowledge and experience from
which they can access the foundations
for creating the future.
However, before this can happen, we must corporately work through the current perversions
blocking people from having the opportunity to make a decision about what it means for them to
be human.
We have been called to awaken a new generation of pedagogues in
the
ranks of the rising generations, and provide the solid, sustaining, historical foundations upon which they can provide leadership for the
21st Century Spirit Movement. They will, themselves, become the face of their own faith traditions in caring for the
world and shaping the world to come into
a culture of peace and working together.
If you remember our first decade, then you know how important our
cultic acts were to everything we
understood about life. Over time, we lost
what we understood for so many years as “that without which”
there is
no sustaining substance. I realized, as I looked into it, that corporately
we lost any sense of the
cultic practices long before 1988. When I
did decide, not long ago, to live out of a spiritual discipline with a
continuum of faith going farther back than 1971, I looked for the only cultic acts I knew which had connected me to all the past, present and future: the Daily Office
and
the Common Meal. I wanted to see
them for analytical reasons at first: to
see their components, then the phrasing, and how they connected
to time.
The work on spiritual practices and consciousness by Pat Webb and David McCleskey of the Silence
Foundation and Larry Ward of the Lotus Institute, reminded me of
the necessity of cultic acts for one’s
consciousness, quality of life, and care for the world. I realized that my own
practices did not go back
beyond memories prior to 1971. So I decided to review what I once new about our cultic
practices and I found I had forgotten most of
it
and suspected I
was not alone.
I started
searching for a Daily Office in my files, on our various websites, and in
the
Golden Pathways CD but I could not find the Daily Office I remembered! I could only find something that had been
transcribed into something else and my experience of the change was that someone had taken out the cultic nature of the Daily
Office resulting in what appeared to me as several levels of higher abstraction. What I found started
with “In the Name of
the
Creator. And of the Redeemer. And of the Sustainer. Amen.”
This edited version did not strike me as
a “cultic act” coming out of all the past, over thousands of years. The cultic act I
remembered was “In the Name of the Father. And of the Son, And of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.” That was cultic! How much I had forgotten and I wondered about
others. What do we not understand about a cultic act? It is an act for all time: past, present, and future. It is not
something we edit to conform to some
pressures of the culture.
If we do, we create a different cultic act
not
necessarily connected to the faith tradition.
So, I spent several days pulling my hair out
trying to remember every phrase of
the Daily Office and writing it, piece by piece, putting in the cultic language. As I
worked on this I realized the Daily Office became a solitary discipline for me which connected me to a tradition going back to the beginning of time.
I had a cultic act upon which to again ground my life in
my
faith tradition. I am glad I did that; it has
transformed my awareness of my own life and the understanding of the life around me. I look forward to
examining the Common Meal as well. As Jim Wheeler said when he quoted from
Isaiah in the Wheeler
Declaration: “Look to the Rock from
which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.”
We know now that everything we did was in part dedicated to developing skilled pedagogues who understood the power of cultic acts. Do you remember all those pedagogy weekends we had,
or if it was
not
a pedagogy weekend it was a course that
needed to be taught? Do you remember how our faculty was structured so that pedagogical
training was a co-objective of every course we taught? Think also of
the operations of the corporate life of the Religious Houses, all focused on pedagogical development of
everyone in the House. That was how pedagogical formation happened: we lived
it, we took everyone
under our wing for the sake of
their formation, and it wasn’t just practice, it was working in the presence of
the Order who was grounded in their faith tradition and who became the transcendence
of that faith
tradition to the world.
This is what we have been called to
do and it has required all of our past to prepare us to say yes and to assume the role. And you know something really neat about this historical moment for us? We don’t have to wait to see what the ICA decides, or does. Nor do we need to wait to see what Mark Davies decides, or
OCU,
or OIKOS. This is a decision we can make right now, here in this room, here with these people. We can now leave the old Order Ecumenical behind. We can decide to be a new Order, the same in some ways, but totally transformed by our past life as a
Religious/Secular Order and our
journey through the
Dark Night of
the
Soul. Born anew for a new time, a new
age, a new pedagogy, and a new Order, the Global Inter-Faith Ecumenical Order!
This Order is
not
to be structured like the past Order
but it already is
self-sufficient in its covenant to a
corporate life and mission. It is
an Order of individuals who know that engagement in a specific daily
spiritual discipline is
the
basis for everything else. Wherever there are two or more the Order will have a corporate celebration weekly or monthly. There shall be a quarterly planning council for the global
mission, the great work. There shall be an annual Order Council for the work of
accounting and strategic commitments. The Order shall study together such missionally focused work
as Eboo Patel’s book, for example.
Now, I
am going to stop and let the rest of you have a chance to
tell me how wrong I am.
Thank you