Open Conversations; 1; Dr. Otis Maxfield - Religion + Psychiatry

Ladies and gentlemen, I feel very gratified that I have an opportunity to share with you tonight a gentleman whose reputation goes from shore to shore and beyond our own country. I think in the course of our lifetimes we meet people that we mark in our minds as those we'd like to get to know better, people who impress us by their friendships and their achievements and this gentleman is one whom I do not know too well but one whom I know through a mutual friend and one whom I am determined to get to know better, especially since he's now located up here in Crennitz which is one of our suburbs to Manhattan and the Riverside Church. I mean I'm choking putting his microphone. His field is not mechanical at all, certainly isn't my wife said that for years. Actually we were going to meet long about six o'clock and have a

leisurely dinner up in my office and get some ground rules laid but this is the most unrehearsed conversation you've ever heard of. It's it's as straight and as pure as I result. It's unrehearsed and you may think when it's over that it's uncalled for but I don't I don't believe you will. Dr. Otis Maxfield is native of Noldin Massachusetts. He got his bachelor of science and education at Boston University and a bachelor of psychology and a PhD from that same school. He has studied at the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich and for 10 years was pastor of one of the great churches of this country, the first community church of Columbus. The church that has 6,500 members. I'm sure you manage to call on all your members every year. Quite a record.

Presently he's director of training at the American foundation of religion and psychiatry and at the same time is the distinguished senior minister at the second congregational church in Greenwich, Connecticut. Dr. Maxfield is married. He's the father of three girls and two boys and I certainly want to welcome him to Riverside and to this first in our series of open conversations. I'm going to ask certain questions that Dr. Maxfield and try to draw him out just a little bit so that he will have a position against which you may ask your questions in the latter part of the evening. He is responsible to get back to Greenwich tonight in time to give the benediction a meeting up there and so when our time together is over I'm going to ask that no one stir from the seats until he's had a count of 10 to clear the building and get to his car and make his way back up to Greenwich. Otis Maxfield I'd like to ask you first of all just in a very

general way whether you find that the man of religious temperament as you come upon him in our society still continues to be suspicious of psychiatry. But I guess I'd have to define religious temperament and psychiatry and my process definition would not be what the dictionary says because they're both the most kind of misleading. When I think of religious temperament I think of a person who for example takes the inner life as seriously as he does the outer life who thinks that what's inside is at least as important as what's outside if not more so. When I think of a religious temperament I think of someone who takes memories dreams and reflections seriously. For to me out of my bias and I advocate a very biased position you know dreams of the gateway to the soul but I think of a religious temperament I think of

one who you know has the capacity and the desire to turn events into experience. Big difference to have an event or to turn it into an experience and then make a meaningful interpretation of that experience. But I think of religious temperament I think of symbols as well as of concrete deeds and acts and in the symbolic life there are myriads of things which one discovers in the religious temperament as I define it. One does have fantasies of mandalas and crosses. One does have dreams of dragons and fools and idiots. One does experience in his own psyche the shadow of the devil as well as the light side whether we call out the feminine figure or the mother of the virgin. So and I think of religious temperament as the kind of association that I make without trying to get into the fact that that's the religious temperament. Now that kind of person paradoxically I need most of those people have had some exposure to

what I prefer to call psychotherapy rather than psychiatry because psychiatry may or may not know very much about psychotherapy in my view. Anyone here tonight in the APA can make his own statement to that. I don't think of I think of psychotherapy as the drama of affective education in one level rather than simply straightening out the nuts and putting the crazy ones away and figuring out who beat who at age three. But that long-winded introduction. I think the people of religious temperament are suspicious of neither the church you didn't even ask me that or yeah. Seeing on an airplane the three hours I'm delighted to have the chance to talk again. I don't think they're suspicious either of the church if it's process oriented or of psychiatry if it's not dogmatic. Strangely as much of what I see in the church and in psychiatry is similar they both think they get the corner on the market they both think they know it all.

They both act like high priests many do you know notable great exception. So I think if you think of religious temperament as the opposite of rigid and repressed and tight and dogmatic and as gentle and probing and inquiring and open and transparently real then I can only respond that way. I'm already wrecking your question but not so I don't really know conflict then. That's as much for your association to it down. Right. Stella you know you're a long way off out there. Yeah. The further off than you might say. Maybe you want to come and join us. We'll be delighted to hear that. Let's not say how far off anybody is. Well maybe you want to get in the act for further. I think so. It's you know good time anytime. Well let me open myself up here to you know to bear the shall we say the penalty for for some of the guys in my profession like myself who aren't as versed in the field or psychiatry as you are and ask the question as to whether you feel that let's say the average minister whoever he may be who is frequently the

first one that someone let's say within the church might turn to if he feels a growing inability to manage his life. Whether you feel that that this man this average minister does a fairly decent job at this point. I mean I think there are reasons why people turn to him. One is frankly the absence of a fee perhaps. Second is there's not quite the fear at that point and hopefully there will be some accessibility that would have been established. Do you think that ministers help it along or do you think most of us are our obstacles here. Well I think the president company excluded. Yeah well let me react to that you know I spent a fair segment of most of my professional life training. You know you're teaching in the seminaries and now we not only train

psychiatry's in psychotherapy because you know we train the pastor of counselors for specialized training who go to teach others. Yeah I've got a hunch that you know the national suit of mental health is something like 45% of the people think they've got an emotional problem turned to the clergyman first. Now maybe the fee maybe the accessibility maybe the fact that they've seen him maybe the fact that he still carries tremendous power if he don't sense it and utilize it. For what he represents more than what he is because he is an archetypal image of tremendous potency. But I suspect they turn to the clergyman in part because they've got a problem of growth rather than what may as well call the deficit problem. You see and we still struggle in this business about images of pathology or images of health. If I think essentially when you've got a problem it's because something's wrong and we've got to then reduce that problem and help you either adapt to it or adjust to it. That's one thing if we assume you've got a growth problem and that for example the guilt that we see a lot of times in

the clinic and that I see in a private practice over and over again is a guilt that comes because of unfulfilled potential rather than something wrong that was done sometime back. That is indeed a religious opportunity. I don't even like to use the word problem and to the extent that one says now how do I take the symptom or the block and use this as the building stone so that so that I can explore my potential and find a new consciousness, probe a new depth and really you know get in touch with my own soul. I think that's why he goes to the clergyman now to the specific year question. My perception of the clergyman and I see more Protestants and Catholics and I do rabbis and I don't know where some of them are. We train some down time but I seem to spend an awful lot of my time more than something. I should out with the Catholic and Protestants around the world and you know spend some time in South America while I go with the with the main old fathers where we were there they'd send a group of their fellows for training and we're

teaching them past row castling out in the jungle and away it goes. I think most clergyman I haven't met a fool in the clergy. I met some a little slower than others but I really haven't I haven't met a fool and I've seen them doing us a little process possibility. Yeah well you know it's hard to be a fool sometimes. We need more fools in the world unless they're your date lectures I think. No no personal comment there but no most a great I'm trying to get a great many clergyman who are in parishes have had a fair amount of exposure to clinical training today. They're hardly near fights and not many of them are caught on the hook of being junior psychiatrists except when they long for the feed. So I think they're better trained than most congregations realize and that in their modesty they're willing to testify to. On the other side of the coin I biggest problem

for example in training anybody to be a good therapist is to train them to listen and particularly preachers who are still trained in seminary to talk my arguments with theological education having been a part of it for years. He thinks if he isn't talking then he isn't doing anything or that he's simply gathering new ammunition so he can fire again. Yeah of course I preach to not as many as you but in first community I preach to 3,000 people every Sunday and I saw lots of young fools become old fools and never miss a sermon you know. The modification to behavior I'm convinced doesn't come out of talking to people. Comes out of talking with but a lot of it comes out of listening too. So when we train them to listen they begin to become very helpful for but my theoretical assumption is that most people have got the answer locked up in themselves and my job is to be with them in a way so that I don't use them to gratify my needs and to selectively respond to their data so they begin to work out their own solution. So we say good

counseling is helping someone to help himself. That at the extent that most persons know that I think they're essentially very helpful and I think that they by and large do their best job when they get involved in group work and when we employ the principle of group therapy and group dynamics in whatever we're doing. Teaching a content course or running a board meeting or having a group session is such and they also do their best job when they don't get hooked on a few people you know the parents were 200 members about three can drive the guy out of his mind and he doesn't learn how to set limits and how not to let them become over dependent and if he doesn't think that he's got to spend 90% of his time with the sickest person in the community which is a tough decision to make we seem doing very effective things particularly in marriage and family counseling particularly in crisis intervention when the thing is going on a rocks when it's about to fall up particularly in knowing the resources of the community to make to make referrals and then in selecting outer dealing with some people where his own special problem has

let him learn a lot so that he can help them grow so I think he essentially is much more helpful than not the professions think so. I think his problem with the clergyman in the parish is that he's got a sense of inferiority or that he's only there to put out the brush fire or get them to someone who can take care of them and where we meet one who gets a sense of his own worth and goodness even though he may get boxed in some points a great reciprocity. Well it's making a referrals I have found in over the last 20 years isn't always easy because people still have some kind of a block I'm going on to psychiatric help and they feel that you've let them down that you don't really trust them and that maybe you're rejecting them and trying to pawn them off on someone else. Let me move on though. Can I pick up I'd love to pick up on that a minute. Oh go ahead. Yeah, all right. Yeah, I've got to feel it. Fine. Well only that you know in making a referral you don't have to give them away you simply show them with someone else.

Well even that sounds better to get away. Yeah well you know I like to pick up on the new odds in that. Right. I can say you know I want I'd like you to see someone so and come back to see me. That's a very legitimate thing. Another thing that we're doing in lots spaces across country is encouraging the guy not to make the referral but to be in a kind of corporate or collegiate ministry where he can get the help for the person he's dealing with. And again I'm you know not again the psychiatry but that isn't where the exciting mental health it's not in a five hour week analysis and I think the thing is happening today and where the revolution is. So to refer them is is only because somebody else can help you better than I can and if you feel like that's rejection that's marvelous meat then for us to talk about for what that means is your own security needs are so deep and so high that for me to placate them is only to further the problem. You know one of our followers did a study down there and why people get well writing his doctoral thesis. A lot of people write him a lot they get sick and hard anybody to figure

out why they get well and we really don't know. You know you only hold me responsible for this not other professionals in the field who would be horrified but he sampled about 500 ex-patients we've seen in the clinic with their permission and we use checklist and all sorts of elaborate diagnostic tools. I was kind of interested in the feedback the 500 in order of preference I forget the statistics that they check such things as this I think 60 percent said I get better because the therapist believed in me. You know if I don't believe in the patient then I ought to refer him because if I don't believe you've got something in you that can make it go well then I can be formally polite and professionally sophisticated and you know the whole thing falls on his face and I can't fake that and if I think you're the most discouraging thing I've seen I better deal with that with you or else I am trafficking in the thing they checked another one they said he let me make my own decisions even when they were wrong they had a third when he listened to me back to the earlier one they had one he helped me laugh you know nobody ever talks about

laughter as a part of the eye of therapy and healing and homeless and they said he cared you know that somehow the great myth is the the only one maybe today is the one that someone cares and you don't get that out of bucks and you don't get that out of intellectual training you you get that out of I suppose caring enough about yourself so that you're free enough to care about someone else without neurotically getting involved with them a very difficult task well you had something else there well I wanted I wanted to get on to some suggestions you might have for us and for other churches regarding how to perhaps improve the structures of the local churches so that members can priest each other actually the professionally skilled are so few and we're all in need of being priest at it one time or another and I'm curious to know how you would set up the ideal church maybe as to size and the deployment how can we learn to be sensitive to each other and form those little partnerships within the larger whole that you know that can

encourage life instead of defeat it do you have any master plan that you'd like to unfold if you were starting a church from scratch no I don't know as I'd ever start one from scratch again and I certainly not vote for one being as big as first community you know all right I'd rather react to that that's a fundamental question that you could talk about all night and all day in three or four ways number one I wouldn't put all my eggs in the Sunday basket you know if you look at where we spend money and where we deploy psychic energy by and large we still put it all in in in in our on Sunday morning thanks raised the biggest most expensive thing the the preaching ministers the guy that gets the right office and a few other things that go to it I said that wasn't best with the modesty of your place tonight this is when I found my way back to the alcove there in the little room that took you in one of the back room yeah I thought that was yours yeah I just wanted one of my images what it would be like if it was that I'd try to think

of a process kind of orientation to a church which allowed for acts of celebration with regularity which is what a Sunday service is supposed to do which most don't get to but but I I would I would really for example begin to put a lot of money in a lot of first-rate town into what I did with little people and I'd experiment all over the place because I am persuaded that between three and seven very powerful things can and do take place anyhow in affective education a four-year-old is a natural theologian he's could all the right questions until you bleed him out of him and and kind of wall him up and that doesn't come out of sitting with him for 40 minutes on Sunday 20 of which is taking the attendance and putting his rubbers away and you know you don't do that Riverside but I'll tell you where it is around the country. I'd I'd I'd care that experiment a host of ways we've started a private school in one of

our educational units and grants my advocational ministry out there because I do believe in a parish and I'm impressed that what's happened in six months where we have centers for human development and tried to shape it for spiritual education not you know congregational history or intellectual dogma but the kind of thing that happens in the quiet center and the environment center and you got to have skilled people as well as volunteers what's happened to the character of four and five and six year olds there in six months I haven't seen happen in 12 years in a casual approach to Sunday and as we've turned a Sunday school experiment with computers and programed instruction in into a reality as well as a sense kind of involvement and taking the dreams and the fantasies of four year olds and seven years old seriously rather than inoculating them with content education which is costly is expensive takes a lot of people isn't a volunteer kind of a thing a tremendous kind of response and so that's the cutting potential edge and and to begin with little ones and their parents has a lot of potential that you don't get when you pick us up with 40

and I think there's a lot of hope for the 40 in the 50 in the 60 year old but what you can do there is great so any parents I think I'd say where are we putting the priorities the money and the skill into real people and to their parents because teaching a parent to be a good person right and right about what it means to be a good parent would relieve us of much of the neurotic manifestations that most of us suffer from there is no question in my mind about that another thing I do would be to and and we work at this I'm only talking about it we do this out where I am we we do our best at it to to have a maximum number of small groups in which whatever the content of the group we're also concerned with affect if that's not a bad word with each other's own personal history and style because you know advocacy and revelation are the twins of the new consciousness in the Aquarian Age anyhow and we can take 15 or 20 people from 20 to 80 whatever their problems and I think in about three months equip them to be fairly sensitive group leaders I'm not trying

to oversimplify what you know five years of analysis and all the training that it didn't do for me or give it away but but to be active in group process to call 80 people out of 800 and let them be skill leaders small groups will meet with them then and they'll have their own thing whether it's the house church or the backroom church or the ladies power thing but but the idea that you will get religion by listening to me or great music I don't buy anymore see that I haven't found it workable in my experience it is for somebody else and that's fine what I have found is that if if the Sunday service sitting in a pew which is questionable too if that's the accumulation of meaningful activity and experience together then that becomes an active celebration but if it's a substitute for it then it's safe you know and it's above the eyebrows and and what's above the eyebrows is somewhere got a hook up with what's below the eyebrows so I work on the cluster I'd work on the small group and I guess I also take it a third step and I'd structure the series of things we did so that so that there was a lot of participation around the areas of concern that

people in the parish hand I mean a laboratory workshop and loneliness would be a great one up here at least for my days at Union a laboratory workshop in how to deal with anger in this violence in the black white thing I mean it's continual not a one-shot thing where I bring in the expert but where we test each other's anger you know an opportunity to rub each other's back you know where we got tired blood and tired muscles and you know one lady told me she was tired in the next year yesterday to have the clinic that's a long way ahead to be tired now the kind of modeling that I think is coming out of the human growth and human development areas like in Esland it's a kind of model I'd have you see now I just who keep the ladies' age aside you know I just who have the brotherhood dinners and then I brought up on them and I'll die with them where they're in my blood but but I don't think that's where the where the thing is so I would take those three things and weave them into whatever I did and I'd also try to make

sure that lots of people testified in church now I want to go to church but but I kind of like to see the preacher think of himself much more as the provocateur and as the facilitator than as the one who speaks for God because lots of people can testify for God out of their experience and it becomes a very enriching kind of thing so so however one does that I don't want to tear down the cathedrals and I don't want to get Virgil Fox off the organ if he's still here we got him a clinic Virgil still here we put in a new organ in first community and he played it right out the window one night and by the time I found him he was out on the grass somewhere and and I want to hear the great soloist sing you know I'm enough of a square on that one but I think everybody wants to celebrate and not many people I know anyone want to go to church sing and and and it's a tremendous thing for us to say how can we reconcile these things rather than trying to bomb one in favor of the other and put them in a perspective that has meaning I think

we're trying to overload the worship experience and make it do everything that should be done as you say in some of these primary groups where you have small scaled relationships or at least good relationships on a small scale yeah or even bad ones on a small scale but so you can do something with them you see to take the stop authentic yeah the repressive inspirational thing is bankrupt too and Mike's you don't accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative then you do mess with Mr. in between you you see in some way we ought to bring our badness into the church we're doing it all outside you know all right so when we come to church to smell good and be good and grow outside for the same old stuff we really do foster this kind of dichotomy and and that's that's what makes for neurotic behavior now to be able to stand my own stench is the prerequisite of my being a good therapist and so I think for a parish to be able to stand its own stench to make no projections to take seriously what you can call the shadow side because there's a shadow side to every institution and there's a shadow in every person

and and and one I think doesn't press on to perfection you can argue this one with me psychologically I think he learns to reconcile the opposites and he looks for wholeness and to the extent that an institution models that behavior then it talks candidly about what it does wrong or is going wrong rather than always talking about the glowing stuff and you know the more you preach about love the more the hater ups on the front door step so somewhere we ought to bring that stuff in I think and I don't know how to bring it in except out of people's experience it's very helpful let me let me pick up far on this question of polarization you are mentioning hatred and bringing it inside the church I think we're all aware that there's a strong intention on the part of many in minority groups to understand themselves as needing to go separately for a while in order to return eventually as as equals in our in our society my own judgment is that we do need an interlude of separateness I'm not ready to

define that or to describe the degree of it but I'm wondering from a psychological point of you whether this makes sense to you otherwise there are many in the church I had an argument with a fellow across the street the other day a very distinguished guy in television and I tell him that this is the way I felt about it and he said absolutely under no circumstances should the Christian church do anything to encourage the polarization even if one sees it as an intermediary temporary step but I'm not asking you to make a judgment on it on that scale but more or less from a from a psychological point of view can the black man after his maltreatment at the hands of the white man for so long come into our society without an interlude where he finds himself first what's your judgment on that notice well I really don't know as much about the whole subject was I thought I once did having been on many of the marches and gone to all the

places and I've always been a hopeless Bostonian white congregation puritan and and lived through the the 50s and the 60s like I suppose all of us have and did and into the 70s and you know watch yesterday's friend be the days enemy and so you know I'm not a mindful of the whole environment which you raised a specific question it's a I'd rather talk about my ignorance and uncertainty rather than the other side I do know this then in looking into human souls and sitting in the consulting room hour upon hour and running I don't know it seems like a million workshops across the country with blacks and whites in it and I am persuaded to one thing which doesn't change for me in this one and that is for me personally I don't know what the Christian church ought to do I'll leave that for others to to pontificate on but for me personally an individual's got to have his own separateness and that's something about his own center and his own identity before he can

relate very openly or freely with anybody else this I do know see the less sure I am about me the more of a threat you out of me that's going to do with color that's got something to do with identity and color may be one part of identity so I've got to have my separateness this is why you know the thing is so strong that until you hate your mother and father and leave and follow me you can't get into the kingdom meaning you know until you become apparent to yourself you can't choose your own destiny and advocate your own position you'll always be trying to live up to somebody else's value and I can't live up to anybody else's values I can have make a good stab of reading up to my own I feel like I'm in the fight then and my values may have collective images that go to the model of Christ but but their mind or I can't make it now I think some of the thing in the polarization thing I see on a psychological level in that sense the the where's my identity who on my means I got to separate from you and particularly from the

model would talk to me but evidently about the same time it crucified me you see it's not unlike the new chivalry that a guy named Rockefeller wrote about me somewhat one of your benefactors I think you read that article of his where he says that we've gone from romantic love to human love meaning that we once put the woman on the pedestal or like Faustic's great thing of wrapping Jesus and cellophane which is really to put them down because when you put somebody on a pedestal you know they're out of touch out of smell and out of taste I mean and who wants that kind of flower you know it's it's in the reciprocity thing so I think to the extent that the model has been bad that the experience has been destructive and that a lot of us still have a lot of justification you know I don't know too long zone make it right and the more I get indignant and self-righteous and feel hurt that they didn't appreciate all I did for them in the 50s and the 60s I think the more person that betrays that I've somehow had a secret expectation that if I give you the goodies then you'll reward me see that's just like a mother who who keeps you know scrubbing his hands

and putting his hat on thinking that at least a little guy will appreciate it even if the old man doesn't know if she's still around and that's love that's love with that expectation and that isn't love see in training therapists or the hardest thing is to get to the mood of no expectation which really means that I'm not going to use you to gratify one of my wishes and I'm going to sit humbly and wait to see what emerges out of you and and that what emerges out of you is what I've got a nurture and that's it that's an awfully demanding emptying depressing process that's not romantic love that that that's human love and it somehow fits the mood or blessed of a of a hundred minded or those whose ego's been emptied who feel their spiritual need for then they may be filled with the spirit see so it's somewhere I relate to it in that way and I don't know whether that's the requirement now certainly a lot of people I know who are black say that and certainly it rings with authenticity to me now the drama and the putting down and the

opportunism that goes with much of that that's tough to deal with and it's even tougher to deal with it with candor I find at least in my environment I don't know about this one but I think that's part of the whole process too and I don't think the opposite of of love is hate I think it's indifference and I don't know many blacks who are indifferent to us so that's what I think to to to get the love hate thing in a dynamic interplay like in a ping pong match is is maybe the mood that we strive for but that means I don't fade away simply because the other guy's black and that when he fires at me I don't sit on my hands and say you're right if I think he's wrong because that kind of thing is false too there's a very tough one and I'm sure you people live in the middle of this in a way that that I don't now live in it and so I don't really speak from on higher or with wisdom but psychological separateness is the prerequisite of growth and and a final real teamwork and and the more I know me the more I have the freedom to let you be

you and then the theme is oneness not sameness and oneness is a commitment to a way of solving problems not to the same solution to end of address on that one very very helpful let me just throw one more in before we open this to our friends I'd like to ask you just one question about what place you make in your understanding of man for the will we do seem to be living in a society where man sees himself as increasingly passive he's dwarfed by the forces that play upon him from the outside if he dabbles in psychiatry at all he's aware of an unconscious that roars inside whether he sleeps or is awake and so on and you speak of my advocate yeah I wondering what place you you'll make what allowance you make for the will it seems to me you must have there must be some assertiveness open to the will that one can appeal to in dealing with another

person and also with oneself do you think the will has been downplayed and overlooked in our culture yes I the answer you simply to a profound question yes I do think it's been downplay my perception is that some psychological awareness is the prerequisite of the exercise of will in the pursuit of a goal to which I'm committed that my will falls apart often because it's such incongruity and that there's got to be some kind of cohesiveness between what I say and how I live for example and that the value that I'm to commit to and the energy I'm going to put behind the value is not energy that grows out of my weak side but out of my strong side now it seems to me that that in a in a in a deeper sense there are two prongs to will psychologically and let's read maize book on that power will and let's remember what Kant said

and a human a few others as we but that's not the question you're putting to me I don't think right now but I think there are two kinds two aspects of will that I perceive psychologically what is the will to do and to be and to become which as far as I'm able to sense is one of the things we got going for us in personality so I think there's a there's a tendency to forward movement in personality I don't we can speculate over but I do see it and I see it in the most beat dry that deduced human being you ever laid eyes on you know and I mean you know if you ever think you've had a discouraging mood you should look at some of them that you we get to deal with all the time but there's something there you know even as in dreams there's a forward motion see all dreams are not dreams of regression you know Frodo is argued if you dream of the mother you want to go back into the room but that's just like Nicodemus because sometimes dreaming in the mother is indicative of a birth that's about to come only that's a birth that's psychological

spiritual and so the dream of the mother may be a sign of regression or it may be the preparation for new birth you know for something going forward and it's interesting what happens to us if we latch on to the forward motion of the dream in the personality now there is a will to go forward to expand consciousness to overcome obstacles to move the frontiers I think in the in the deep aspect of the psyche this kind of a collective will that's toward at least toward love as opposed to hate when I'm trying to make a literal definition and toward openness as opposed to concealment and toward affirmation as opposed to denial now as one becomes a person and moves up that scale from the satisfaction of physiological needs to needs for affiliation to needs for self-esteem to what as I then call self-actualization there's a there's a powerful kind of thing which fuses between the the conscious ego and the self which is the symbol I think of the religious element

and when those fuse and someone says this I will do the real satisfaction then is not winning or or release of tension it's in faithful commitment to that to which he's pledged and so persecution and nakedness and peril and famine I kind of the things he has to take in order to pursue that goal now that's the glorious thing that's in human beings I think and I think one latches on to that rather quickly as you deal with an individual now the passivity that we see and in New York here where we see a lot of people I don't mean a eight million cross section but we certainly see 500 people a week in the clinic we run for training purposes there I'm amazed incidentally that the incredible passivity and a lot of the men we see which manifests itself in a lot of ways they're not as aggressive as the women just the age of the feminine aggressive female they're passive sexually they're passive economically and they're passive in terms of

issues they they're the adaptor like linus you know don't care what you believe as long as you sincere kind of I think that's because they're not very much in touch with what's inside with their soul or with the inner function and when someone says to me the outside being me in the spaceship the pollution and everything else the answer to him is but you better cultivate the inner life because if you cultivate the inner life that's where the rich resources are and that's where you find the thing really that moth wherever that thing is doesn't what's it the moth to corrupt whether the things break through and steal and the real treasure okay I'm trying to close on a scriptural note and to the extent that the church I get one other thing I know you're ready to quit but to the extent that the church is simply fostered activism in its own way we haven't contributed very much to the inner life now all the young bucks grabbed me and raised a devil with me literally and when I go out to the seminaries that's

all stuff and they don't want to contemplate their naval and look at their own belicus you got to be out there on the picket line and you know protesting the atomic energy plant and I think I've been out on that line enough time some of the trustees have every church I've been into I've been out there much too much but it's really the combination of the inner and the outer and I meet a lot of people out there marching who are marching for questionable psychological reasons the same way I mean a lot of people sitting home for questionable psychological reason and you know now the real issue with our emphasis on activity and legislation and the use of extra and a power the antithesis of that is who's teaching people how to contemplate and who's teaching people how to meditate and whether you want to buy the psychotherapy bag or not who's helping people to make the most of their dreams and their fantasies and their reflections and why aren't we using Grimm's fairy tales as well as the primer on the you know the new united church christ and how can we draw parallels with the great myths from Greek Egypt and and from

Christianity and you know that's the side that if we're not careful we won't water and that's the side that people will still buy from us and it certainly pays for so I think somewhere it's less than an emphasis that I'd like to push us to it's a good one to close on for this part now let's let's take advantage of our opportunity here yeah why don't we start with a gentleman on the aisle first but then we'll move in one yeah do I think it's possible for a practicing Christian to have psychiatric problems to have psychiatric problems do I hope so no no from from where I sit yes I do see it seems to me that again I always put to me bit in because I don't I really whatever period I'm not sure what the what the establishment

answer is but I do know what some of my feelings are and I'm going to be held accountable for them for me being religious maybe being schizophrenic I know a lot of deeply religious people who are schizophrenic to take a word out of the American psychiatric dictionary I know some people who are tremendously able to to to give and receive tenderness to forgive to be agents of reconciliation who are acutely depressed people I know who have fantasies of suicide maybe some of us do I certainly have entertained the suicide of fantasy without concretizing it which incidentally is adjacent to the soul we've just got the thing so oriented to the obsession that says you got to you know be happy all the time we don't see the richness it comes out of despair and sadness and brokenness now now in one sense there's a call psychiatric problems you see being religious to me

isn't coming out like you've been turned out of the General Motors assembly plan and anymore being religious to me is having a certain kind of morality it's being in touch with what we might call enuminous or the depth as well as the height it's it's kind of feeling in one's own experiencing both if you will the devil and the Lord now that's what being religious is and and it's not incidental there's some of our great religious documents have been written by people who today be classified as you know psychotic in the hospital right in fact they were through some of them in jail and they were great documents you know great documents and then when we pick out blemishes in their moral behavior later we act as if that would repudiate the validity of their religious sentiment now that kind of perfectionism I think ought to go you know say goodbye to it so I think I think if one assumes that being a practicing Christian is a badge of perfection we're

all doomed to hypocrisy for as much as if if you assume that to be the clergyman this the you know you're you're kind of above it or out of it or that somehow an emigantry didn't have something real to say and he really did you see because if a man's soul was found in the feminine symbol this guy was in search of the soul you know I mean that seriously as well as procedurally you see but I whole method of classified and approving and disapproving has got us where we draw margins you know big thick margins and I perceive life as centers were very fluid flexible margins you know so I do think that it's possible to be a practice in Christian leaving the phrase to mutual consent here is what we mean by it and have all sorts of problems psychiatric included tell me next to him yeah me one was in the use of potential which I see as a parallel to the parallel of the town

and also know that I sell and taking these two points into consideration would you say that price was a better psychiatrist than he was a preacher well I had a good question I don't know I didn't hear him and I've heard a lot of people have said about him I don't know I you know that I think for me I kind of take the new testament very seriously but it's a it's a very you got to be awfully careful about I've got to be careful about classifications like that many of you looked I read an essay on the airplane tonight I'll speak a minute more of the question by a guy named Jay Haley who's an expert in doing therapy with families this is his book but the essay that he wrote was the power tactics of Jesus Christ and everybody quotes scripture for his own argument you know even even the new testament experts do but if you read Jay Haley's essay on the power tactics of Jesus Christ you have to say

he's a better power tactic man than he was preacher or psychiatrist and Haley tries to point out that every movement of protest follows exactly the models that he's got in there for why he thinks Jesus did certain things like he always would forgive somebody for wrong and somebody after he never forgave the people who are wrong him you read it carefully man I think he's got a good point I'm not the new testament scholar but he he looks like he did his homework on this one and Paul Judas came off pretty bad after the the betrayal there you know before I was do what you have to do not have to it was better than you've never been born and that's not I like some guys in board meetings where you say speak your peace John but after you know you know you're not a deacon anymore you know which I democracy which they effectively getting you on a missionary board after what I was trying to say it it appears to me and that's why I proceed myself as a practicing Christian and stay in the church because I want to and not be good I'm afraid to get

out of it it seems to me that this that this Jesus what I feel about myself in his presence either as legacy as words the tradition is that which leads to what I think is the depth of my soul so therefore I want to take him seriously and hardly ever literally and never consistently so I don't have a house to respond to that question yes do you come back to the point of polarization if there is such a thing in polarization people go off don't think there's tendency to develop not a true self-propelling group self which I think is the second-ranked thing doesn't that in turn tend to weave him away or making unaware of the fact that he should develop himself well again good comment I again let me be one of the learners in this I tried to preface my earlier comments by uncertainty I don't want a lot of group identity however

a bunch of little guys start running together and getting a tree house there's something pretty important going on and when the little girls get out and back in the ladies room they're talking about what's wrong with those beasts there's something about identity that you know that's taken place and we all have a group you know and now I would prefer in my order to see see us move from the collective undifferentiated like when I'm my mother's kid to the gang that I play with to the individual that I'm in the process of becoming I buy your downrange girl but but but collective identity serve some purpose you know and the other thing is that you say I don't think you can control that that much I don't mean you think but I often see us and I said on that General Boy the National Council for my nine years or something like that and hung on and served on the committees I got appointed to and had a great experience but I often

saw us pass resolutions as if that were going to make it come to pass you know and then get furious when it didn't happen you know if I look at this big in the same way that I see preachers you know who tell them how they ought to do it and then when when they front 30 minutes out of church he the thinks he preached a bad sermon or that they weren't listening you see his arrogance level is pretty high is my we don't control what happens that much I don't think you know I can really only hope to talk about my response to what happens and that's him he's not already passivity like you were talking to before well that's kind of you know being flexible in the face of the thing and not getting stuck with being God good I'm an earthy mystic at best and and and angel with a dirty face at the finest and and and somewhere in the whole thing there are powerful collective processes that work that I think we need to turn over and that die before but which we kind of meet the struggle like like the tire absorbs the shock rather than trying to resist it so I don't

want to say a good word for the group thing and you may be right I don't know how you move that though nor do I know how you move you know a half a million years of you know of using people and then all of a sudden wanting them to come out self-respecting I don't want to get into the hassle that must have raised the hackles on a lot of people here you know when you had a informant with you but but a lot of what he says you got to take seriously and that's precisely why it's so difficult because for me to accept some of that stuff without getting into who's subversive list he's on I've been in so many myself that doesn't shake me up or always lousy through economics because in some ways I kind of industrial capitalism is is allows the economic if you think that's going to help persons grow and become whole and rich so without trying to make that a perfectionist thing a lot of the kind of thing they got triggered is stuff for us to absorb and we do need a big dose of penitence I think and I know from personal experience a toughest thing for me to carry on my back is the consequence not only of my behavior but of the

behavior of my family racial and otherwise and that does feel as if it were across much of the time now Karen at burden is not to think that I'm worthless you know nobody loves me everybody hates me I'm going to the garden to be worms but it is to say that humility is close to humiliation and it's simply the same thing I think is once not simply it's so difficult well all of a sudden the person realizes that what he thought was his goodness has really been his badness it almost breaks him and he kind of has the fall out of that psychological garden of innocence and a lot of us have been thrown out we haven't even fallen we've been thrown out some of us haven't even hit the bottom yet and in a throw it's not unlike the terrible problem the Vietnam thing I think speaking not as a pacifist an old Navy man and a warrior stood on the deck of a ship more than on the fan day of the Bible you know I didn't come to the right route but I've got a great sense of humiliation about the arrogance of power now they carry that and still want to be a faithful

loyal American citizen is a tough deal and I don't do that by firing my pistol raising my flag and riboring people with a label you know I do that by by walking with a sense of brokenness and with a sense of of haunting concern because when I eat somebody else stards and when I drive somebody else gets clipped and when I drive in your parking garage I see the cops are rolling a guy out of a out of a dive down here already tight on cheap liquor you know getting beat and so I you know I want to know joy but I sure got to carry that kind of anguish pretty close to the where I'm smell living it or I'm like a hot house plane I know it's only that kind of mood I you know you guys a good question and I just pre-associate into it but that's a tough one and so in this group said we want our separateness we don't want you coming to our meetings no more when we set the national council thing in the personnel committee said we don't want to vote for anybody you're electing and you know we're gonna toss you out and a guy that I sent beside the three years use good theological language toward me and a psychological that

you know all the right words that coming down I got to try to remember what perspective he's talking about and and that this thing isn't a Sunday go and meet and thing where you spray yourself with perfume and put on your Sunday go meet and have that this is kind of the laboratory where where beakers blow up and Benson Verne's catch on fire and things explode and acid gets thrown and you know there's something about that that's exciting too if you can kind of get feeling with it but it's a tough one and I think there's some group thing going on there and I don't want to analyze every social phenomenon you know the guys that do that are the sociologists but from where I said it kind of feels that way yeah who made that statement today sir oh I see you I missed the first part that the trouble with young people is there too much permissiveness

oh boy I don't know I am I interact with it in several ways really there's too much permissiveness I think there's also too much coerciveness you know you take your take your choice we say that there three kind of parents we see in the clinic there's the over coercive kind that's you know put on your hat check your rubbers blow your nose you know call me when you get when you get there it's only because I'm interested in you really then I want you to call you know or I'm only hitting you now because it's in your best interest which never worked with me as a kid I'll tell you that's the over coercive one we we see a lot of people who had over coercive parents and you know there's a child of the past in every adult little boy and every man a little girl and every woman never goes away and the child of the past often treats itself in the same way the parent treated you that's why the sins of the fathers get visited upon the children so if

you had an over coercive parent often when you're a little boy and you're a little girl and you start acting out it acts out over coercively you know what we say it takes it for to make a marriage the man of the woman and the little boy and the little girl and if the two children of the past get into a fight you know the thing blows up and later they commit and one says I wasn't myself when I said that and he said well who were you you know well it was the child of the past that we often news touched with the nurse just a case well we see the over coercive one we see the over permissive one you know whatever you want I'll give it to you in fact I'll figure out what you want ahead of time and buy it before you know you need it and then I'll get mad when you don't look at it you know we got that syndrome around and then we see the perfectionist you know you got two a's and three b's you know why don't you plug it up to the three a's so no matter what you do you can't get there if there we meet a lot of these people in churches not to classify us you know if they have it a good time they got to feel guilty and nothing naturally happens that way they do something so that they can work up a case of you know of a retribution here

in punishment now I don't know about that one see the kids I see I guess I'm so impressed with including the ones I struggle to stay in touch with in my own house which span a lot of years it's hard to stay in touch with them all got stereo in their rooms now they go in the room and shut the door you know really only ones that still got a radio I mean that's gone they got their own telephone and I can't get in on there isn't it more than I can on ours when I call on distance so they get a new consciousness you know I see them setting unbelievable goals for themselves I see them becoming new hunters you know the old hunter either doll of his life in 24 hours he didn't decide he was gonna hunt the saffoon and lug this morning and sleep tonight and he went to sleep when he was sleepy and he had to live it all today and when I hear them talking about not waiting till they're 65 to have some rewards that kind of speaks to me what they really say is they don't want to get life that compartmentalized again so I I see them standing on picket lines I see them enduring hardship I see them dropping out from school the dropping

education and get out of a cerebral factory not just where you see life so I don't see that as the problem what I see is the problem is rather we the most of us don't know what philosophy of life we're committed to and so they've grown up with the blur where we are and and we don't testify enough to what's the depth and the height of our own soul sometimes we don't know where on earth it is we don't know where the car is and where the stock option is and how we like the organ plate and so the kids says tell me about death and you say very heaven say don't don't be so gloomy tonight you know or the kids says tell me about sex and you say go see your mother or or they say tell us how did you feel when you shot guys in the war and I say this time a good time for that I've got to go out and talk at Riverside now to the extent that the extent that the kids are empty I think it's because somehow we be the downplayed our own experience or we haven't thought that was the most precious legacy we had to transmit

and and and the transmission of our legacy is what's in peril and ask us what we've been trying to do in preaching and in writing publication I'm only suggesting we ought to transmit the legacy as it's taken form and shape in our personal experience now if you give the person the legacy the kids is particularly then I think they organize that into their own meaningful experience and they go on a some suffer from from over permissiveness but most of them suffer from from that that wasn't true that kind of philosophy of life and in a post literate society where it's an electric medium or the cool message and and boy the church ought to get this one and it hasn't got it by its structure by its style by the skills that trains its guys with what when we really get to take that one seriously that then I think we'll we'll still have problems with permissiveness and curiosiveness and perfectionism to take my Trinity but by and large we'll maybe have people who can testify not only to what they've seen and heard but to also what they've experienced is it runs the garment of life and wherever I've gone kids have got a lot of time to talk with me

if I'll listen to them but if I'll testify and I'm going very much time energy to listen to me if I'm going to give them a neatly packaged statement see it's a new kind of subjectivity and it's personal and it's got to be intimate and I'm one of the group in the therapeutic role I think it's going on there too you can't sit in the white coat behind the desk and grunt or finally through your throat and say tell me more about it you know because finally they want to wear you you know and what's your experience with this thing and all of us were trained 20 years ago and never tell them never even let them get well enough to ask the question it was the way of that it's not going to come through I think you know but well good question I think it's where the philosophy is and that's for me where the gap is good question and a great answer yes please I think a lot of people we see kind of because they're having trouble with change and what I relate that to growth because if it works it's obsolete that's the problem and as some of you

follow as in corporate life now I spend a lot of time with business people doing the same thing we do in church unbelievable to me I think the corporate thing is in a radical revolutionary shift that most most of us in education that we're having even caught up with and I couldn't buy action and spent I was with the general mills people this morning in Minneapolis gosh heaven I have an 11 really the executive group that's really what it was really it was 11 and dealing with with the ultimate religious questions you know way that to me is quite remarkable and the hostility and the search for candor and the capacity to talk about you know how do you help someone live all of his life today rather than postponing the reward on the Aronis assumption it'll be better later basically when you leave it to someone you know I think the change thing though is very difficult you remember most of us who are 40 you know live in a world of which

railings I mean it's sort of like you were the first generation Irish that came to my home down a Boston you know I grew up with those kids on the ice wagons and then the in the slums of the city which my mother admonishes me not to report on when I'm out they really weren't slums they were three decker houses in which we you know always had enough to eat but I still go back once in a while and see some of the some of the kids I knew there and some of them never get out of the block and you know they're still suffering from that first generation the lace curtain Irish up there now in some ways all of us who are 40 or lace curtain Irish in the sense that it's not the world we were born in not the world we were adolescents in it's not the world we want to college in so so it isn't in a sense of how on earth did you catch up with it and you know when our best scientists graduated you get this PhD from the best university those three years after he's out of school he'd be obsolete unless he starts learning again it really is a very

tough kind of a thing and the technology has has has shoved the ready to change unbelievably I'm sure you've heard that Ernie must preach on this theme over and over again but they really took us you know the first you know five million years to begin to get a speck of consciousness that in the last 50 years we've just blown that thing wide open so that our capacity to absorb no matter who we are it is very tough now the people we say are the people who aren't so frightened by change maybe it is they're kind of tight and rigid and I think if they let go or what they learned is a kid then they won't find anything else see if I keep hold on to what I learned as a kid then I have to make my world fit the ice wagon my kids don't even know what a nice wagon isn't so that way anymore we go on these things that makes the ice cubes you know and they've always grown up in air conditioned cars and when I tell them about riding the the trolley to reverbeats with 15 cents to get a candy to apple and ride the merry ground they think I'm out

of my mind they spend money before I know I'm going to make it well they spend it well so so I do we do see that's a good way to classify now you say isn't there anything I can hold on to and of course in the Christian Church we we've argued there's some things that don't change and we want to know the difference between the changing and the change less I think it's very difficult and I don't see that as an erotic problem and I resist putting a label of classification on it I see it as a growth human potential problem to say can I live with exorbitant uncertainty on the outside but with some kind of warmth and assurance that there is an identity in me that is me and yet is more than me and when we can start working out that way then it's incredible how one doesn't need to know very much about what's going on in that world out there because that's not what trips is anxiety so I think it is a valuable construct and it is a reality problem and it's a human growth problem for all of us anywhere that we are

even as much as nobody's yet absorbed very well the separation of baby making from lab making which is now here to stay well the transplant idea but I think that some some guy with spectacles in a laboratory might decide who's going to go on living and which of us is going to get the kidney all of a sudden the locus of authority it's not upstairs it's not downstairs it's not in the poop it you know it's in the pathologist the most pathologist I know look like deathmormed over anyhow with all due respect to any of you who may be but you know says all of a sudden you see the whole locus of life and death and rebirth is hung up some place else you know it's it's that's a wild one when I associate on religion it's a kind of in drugs I wish I knew more about the drug but we've got some fellows who do if you ever want to run a seminar on them I mean oh well I think it relate these meaningfully there are a lot of

specialists in drugs like there are a lot of specialists in psychiatry and I'm looking for the new hundreds we kind of try to live around life and bring their special special knowledge to the whole rather than getting on a pinhead you know see it seems to me that that it's oh you know you saw that thing I heard it this morning I read in the Minneapolis paper people stormed the Lindsey's office because some some kid died with an overdose of drugs and the kind of things they said you're living that kind of mood all the time up here we live in a dive we live in Greenwich you know Greenwich is a deprived suburb it's a it's a it's a very deprived suburb in terms of your psychological needs being met meet the physiological needs appropriately we meet the self-esteem needs superb but the love needs and the belonging needs are very tough in our kind of the prime that's our deprivation and if you saw Newsweek they reported that something like 45% of the kids in the Greenwich High School said they were using drugs one of my colleagues out there a guy named Gabe Campbell who knows the seventh and eighth grader better than anybody I

known is down at NYU keep talking about the natural high with kids and he's assembled two or three hundred Greenwich kids you know very interesting laboratory experiment to to move from the drug high to the natural high so I see some of these nuances and I see us dealing with the addiction squad here in the city and trying to run small groups for for teenagers who've been with it the fact of the matter is that just as the new technology needs a computer to make it work you can't do it with a pencil the new consciousness however you want to call it I think it is the age of Aquarius and that that means something to me with it without here you know it's it's not the age of the fish it it and I don't know how those things come and I don't want to throw the astrologer out the window or throw Gene Dixon you know down the street there's something in the intuitive thing that breeds a new consciousness and it's around us I don't know I can live a day without knowing it now the new consciousness demands new kind of symbols and they come not out of our rational sense they come out of our subjective sense and it seems to me that the quest and the

inquiry for the symbol to match the new consciousness like the computer to the technology is not unrelated to the drug bit so I'm not trying to justify the thing and I deplore the overdose bit but in the controlled experiment and in the intensification in the fantasy level there was a probe going on for something that the desperately is needed in our kind of age now we're stuck with it in a terrible way in the sense that the whole total abuse and its economic use you know it's like it wasn't a race problem it was an economic use I got the black man to be a slave and it's economics for people making a fast buck all the way from the mafia to to quite respectable people that are pushing the drugs but the chemical culture is here to stay you know I don't people take a pill to go to sleep and they take them to get going in the morning then they take another one to make it through their diet lunch then they take another one if they got to go to church in the evening you know and then they deplore the kids being on drugs you know and I do know that the drug is by and large it intensifies consciousness and alcohol depresses it and so on it's not like

grins the kids say you know don't talk to us you know let's put it all in the river first they will meet you on an equal terms and talk I think that side ought to be put out while we're all talking about the known side and the deplorable side and maybe we've got so many hang ups and so much anxiety we can't possibly see the chemical culture as an aid to us in a new consciousness like we've been able to get the computer to be an aid in the new technology but I think that was where the beginnings of the thing was now to turn on the natural high is I think to take the psychedelic experience in the multimedia center and and all the sight sound tastes smell feel and touch but very seriously for if one is enabled to somehow make sense out of the new consciousness in his own psyche then he's going to go start craving man for he's got to absorb and make it meaningful and and he often starts the drug on that basis now I know a lot of other people started on a whole other basis and maybe we've got a control like the prohibition thing now

which is only indicative of the of the fight with which we run so you know I run when the rubber people say you know what are you excited about eighty percent of their samples say nothing kind of tells you where where the American culture is and how desperately it needs to be enriched and infused with the very things that people on the drug report happens to them within a controlled base and I only worry about the the vigilantes who are crusading because I worry about crusaders you know that they look good but boy they sure wrecked a lot of havoc and again how to live with the kids on drugs the same way we live with the separatism in the black it's a very tough thing to do and people want you coming down hard on one side or the other rather than trying to stand and hold it and love and and by the example of your own depth set a more excellent way by which they can do something so and again if you start taking them into the place rather than examining with the door I'm putting them out you get accused of you know taking the bad people in and that's again right right I think the Christian posture though I ought to be we we got to get in with each other

rather than saying the bad ones are out the good ones are in or we'll end up like the parable you know all the ones that thought they had it made row knows it had never been tapped learned that they were in you know that's that would always haunts me when I but I'm looking for a position to come down hard on so the position of ambiguity and uncertainty I think maybe the posture of the Christian man for dealing with it well I don't know how to associate more you know within the context of a minute let's take one more let our speaker get on the road yeah I'm waking up and enjoying it I know listen you're a thoughtful group of people this is like getting a massage it's tremendous but let's stay with one more who's got it I let you put the massage room in reverse side too that it helped you with with the treating everybody on instead of higher while everybody everybody else is back sort of like Eric Burns stroke for stroke yeah but boy if you if you can legitimize that and do it socially I'll tell you no I know but that's where it is more than batting around what boobers said to tell it you know we ought to do that too but well if there's someone who hasn't asked one question and would like to ask before anyone

might go to a second one yes let's let this be our last one please I don't know this is exactly a question a little louder click something that's been bothering me and I've been feeling that the city was the frontier to which you would go and if you really wanted to be with it or in the action you wanted to be doing something or a marathon for yourself from living the city was the place I'm in the city now I'm here that the frontier is in the summer let me try to feed back a little what I heard to say then some of you weren't hearing it and then just make a quick response or reaction she saying she noticed I use the word hot house

that she had moved to the city feeling that this is kind of where the action was if you want to really be of help and be in the frontier and she found that a lot of people in the city also are like hot house plants and then she's recently been hearing that the real action is in the summer so you better get out there with the frontiers and you know where is the frontier anyhow or you ought to keep moving it's a long road and everybody's got a wheel because this is to go with my aspirin I think the frontier does change all the time personally for me because I think it's wherever you get people maybe the hottest frontiers in the farm community where we're going to finally get around the dealing with the subsidy program and you know what our own particular brand of communal supports been out there in God's country I think the frontier well the real I think relevant part of your question is that you can't identify the frontier

for more than a few months anymore that's part of the change thing that a while ago see every place is next to someplace and someplace is next to every place and you're not even sure whether it's up or down or interout anymore you only talk about vectors and valences and projected relationships to one another the best conceptualization of time in the theological sense that I've read in 20 years just written by a physicist trying to talk about the ratio of velocity beyond the pullover's gravity to growth when you get velocity in in ratio to growth beyond the pullover's planet you don't age as fast as you otherwise might so if you're going to send your sweetie off to a three-year trek to the moon and you're already worried because you're as old as he is and you come back and you're three years older than he is and he's only aged four months you're going to have a problem now you see what timelessness said this is a whole new place where the frontier is we might even dust off you know John of the cross and his gloomy

predictions about timelessness not all of a sudden find the theological quotient here thank the frontiers where you are probably you know that's the obviously cliche to quit with and and to be able to try to gather fresh something that's relevant from your inner life as well as your outer life every day that you live probably is the first step toward being a new hunter and when you do that then I'm kind of persuaded that there is a kind of spirit or a sense that gets you to where you ought to be and I however would only quit by saying that for me in my experience I'm deeply persuaded that this is the exotic continent this thing we call America and I'm deeply committed to the fact that it does have a grand design always changing always moving always regrouping and from whatever my limited experience has been and I'm not that much of a world citizen

but out and around it because I love to go in it and I love to fly in it I don't know where else you can have a judge declare a recess in a court trial for the Panthers because one's having a birthday why do you got one old dried up dejuice character on a bench in Chicago doing a reverse I mean you know I don't know where else you could find it where you know they would come banging in on a mayor's door that a little kid had just died and I don't know where else you could find it that Agnew and my book could put I don't want to get too get you in trouble already this is only me but your radio station you know could personally put his finger on a very hot issue because there are too few people making fire reaching interpretations of the events of the day and at the same time get get properly a rebuke for flip easy generalizations all over the world them I don't know where else you'd come out like this on a night like this to sit for an hour like this you know and and so without any attempt to gloss over the tough parts and the bad parts and

the dirty parts because they're all with us gosh I'd like to say a good word for for this exotic exotic continent and for the kind of legacy that it spawned and for the kind of dream that it's still nourishes for the kind of experiment that it still carries out and and somehow carrying all the anguish in the shadow bit that I talked about kind of talks somewhere about affirming the light and carrying that forward and that means several things and I don't preach your sermon along getting in that mood I'm trying to give that up for a couple of years now but it comes back to me here you know I do think that you ought to all of us ought to be on the move I think we ought to have churches without walls I think we ought to be awful careful about the bucks we put into buildings I do think that all of us ought to come and go and put our money to that run into buying a new car or even putting our kid into one of the real deprived schools the ones that cost the most you

know where they'll turn out technicians I do kind of have a feeling that we ought to mix it up ourselves not for life but for a while you know time is not only going to give us problem in space travel but what it does right here so anybody can live for three months in Ecuador we have anybody can live for three months in Europe we have anybody can live for eight weeks at Laguna Beach and visit with the surfers anybody can drop out an esterial in Portugal where the kids have got videotapes and drugs and everything else so that's where they take their year abroad about father thinks he's paying for the University of Barcelona but it's really down on the beach and they read great books and they videotape everything and critique their own feedback there's a way in which you know the easy writer theme powerful poignant drama which if you haven't had not to bring into church along with some of the other great dramas that we've thought were secular you know I think the frontiers where you are and I hope that where you are in three months will not be where

are today and in the midst of all that I hope we will have a kind of community of believers where we have a slender thread that does tie us together and give us a place to drop into wherever in the world we might be because we need a thread and I think we need a gang as well as an individual kind of thing and in the middle of all that I hope without being exclusive some of us can be more effective than we've all been in in identifying why the myth and the symbol that was Christ can be adaptable and changing and refreshing in a kind of cohesive thing today even as it was all through lots of other changes and hope essentially is not in what I see remember he said it's not seen or touching or expecting even it's kind of that quality which says there's an emerging new possibility even in this day well thank you Ernie for letting me you