Dear All,

Herman has started a new and profound dialogue. This is indeed what we were aiming at with our creation of the Springboard group and list serve years ago. There is no doubt that there is a core of us who feel deeply about the need to relate together in a proactive role in a number of domains. It was the basis of the Springboard that the Order decision so many of us participated in transcends any particular manifestation, and many of us consider ourselves "Order" until death. I believe, like Herman, the existence of a self-conscious Order is something to seriously consider. All of us have encountered people who never heard of the ICA/EI/OE but would see themselves as part of the "Invisible College", "The League" etc. and would find a covenanted body meaningful. The key question is "for what end" would it be? I have always liked the name "Order of the Earth" (OE) as a holding category and shifts the relationship from religion to Ecology (in the most profound sense). 

Anyway, I an certain that not everyone on this list serve wants to participate in this conversation, but I'll let others suggest at what point we would shift to either a newly created list serve, or perhaps better, into Google docs. and eventually Google Hangouts. But we need to, at some point, begin to move toward some collaborative 'doing', even if that doing is some research and/or some corporate writing. 

Let the dialogue continue. Thanks Herman, Jann, Jim etc.

Jack

On Jun 24, 2013, at 8:27 AM, Herman Greene <hfgreenenc@gmail.com> wrote:

Excellent Jann,

ESI is something in which various organizations can collaborate without losing their identity. 

On the issue of a new teaching force, a new EI (either Ecumenical Institute around John Cock's redefinition of ecumenical) or an Ecozoic Institute drawing on Thomas Berry's understanding of that term but not making it a Thomas Berry institute) is something that I am probably in a strong minority in thinking about. The gist of the idea is that OE would turn over to a new generation an understanding of pedagogy around a new core curriculum. As I see it that would be a curriculum developed in the collaboration that ESI is, but there is also the possibility that some group would take it on as a project and there would be nothing wrong with that effort becoming organized. 

As I was going through materials yesterday from OE, I came across two article by Bill Parker on the new pedagogy. We are thinking along the same lines. They are both presented below and I can send them as attachments to anyone who asks for them. 

In one Bill makes this salient point: "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."

In the other Bill makes this point: "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. "

I too look forward to substantive dialogue around this. 

See articles below.

Herman 

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

--
__________________________________________________

Herman F. Greene

2516 Winningham Road

Chapel Hill, NC 27516

919-942-4358 (ph & fax)

hfgreenenc@gmail.com

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