By Bill Cane

   The call to live a spirited life is not a call to self-satisfaction or self-complacency, but to self-transcendence. We are constantly being called out of our present existence, to form circles that do not yet exist.
    Some years ago, I had a dream. I was standing alone in a small clearing amid trees and crags and gray boulders when I suddenly saw a large opening in the rocky hillside facing me. The wall of the opening was made of clear glass, as were the doors. Through the glass I could see a cavernous room with a number of people standing around talking excitedly to each other. Above the entrance, in red letters that could have been from San Francisco’s Chinatown, hung a sign which said: “THE CHURCH OF THE TAI CHI.”
    A woman inside was beckoning to me through the glass doors. I did not recognize her, and looked around to see if perhaps she was waving to someone else, but no one else was there. I pointed to myself and motioned, “Me?” She nodded reassuringly, and again invited me in with a wave of her hand I entered the group and felt immediately at home. At the time, I did not know the meaning of the words tai chi,” and I had no idea what the dream meant. I even took a course in tai chi movement at a local college to see if the course would enlighten me, but it did not.
    Years later, I realized that the dream had been introducing me to a different sort of “church.” Tai chi literally means “universal wholeness.” I was being invited to become part of a more universal and less structured church—part of a gathering of people who were serving “universal wholeness.”
They were not known to me and they did not hold regular weekly meetings. They were “hidden” and gathered at a depth “beneath the surface,” but the entrance to their meeting place was open and they were easily recognized and joined once one had “located” oneself near them.
    The original meaning of the word “church” (ekklesia for the Christians and kahal for the Jews) was neither a building for worship nor a weekly gathering. It was a coming together of people who were being called out of slavery to a new life of freedom. They were asked to believe in a dream, in a story that had not yet happened and seemed at the time to have not even the slightest chance of becoming history! They dedicated their lives to making this new story happen, and this was their faith.
    The words kahal and ekklesia, synagogue and church, originally meant people called out—people called to leave the ordinary existence around them and enter a new life. Following Moses or Jesus was no ordinary life. It meant leaving security behind and becoming part of shaky and radical movements. But these movements promised an abundance of spirit and life in the future.
    The existence people were called to enter did not yet exist.  When the Jews defied the power of Pharaoh and left their homes, they spent forty years wandering in the desert.  They did not know where they were going and had only the food they could
gather for the day. When the early Christians dared to call Jesus Lord (Xristos Kurios) in a world where only Caesar could be called Lord (Kurios Kaesar), they were seen as subverting the established political order. For this, many of them faced persecution and death. They remained a struggling group at the margins of society for a century or more. If we look at present-day Christianity or Judaism in our country, we can find in them very little resemblance to their radical roots. Most adherents are comfortable within the established order, within an existence that already exists.
    For [historian] Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, entering a new existence that did not yet exist meant turning his back on the prevailing institutions of his society. As a young soldier returning to Germany from World War I, he was offered a position in the government, a job as head of a major religious publishing house and a chair at the university. He agonized over the decision he had to make and then, unexpectedly, he turned down all three offers! It was years before Hitler would come to power, yet Rosenstock already recognized the smell of death in the society. He could not become part of government or church or academia. He had to reject their “dead works” in order to “serve the living God.”
    Only in retrospect did he fully realize what he had done.  He later considered his refusal to enter these institutions his metanoia, his radical change of mind and heart. Turning his back on the major institutions of the society was for him the beginning of a new life in the spirit. “No social space or field exists outside the powers that be and the existing institutions are all that there is at the moment of one’s metanoia, of one’s giving up dead works.”
    ”The words make no sense,” he later wrote, “the atmosphere is stifled. One chokes. One has no choice but to leave.  But one does not know what is going to happen, one has no blueprint for action. The ‘decision’ literally means … being cut off from one’s own routines in a paid and honored position. And the trust that this sub-zero situation is bound to create new ways of life is our faith.
    ”I probably did not advance much in personal virtue by this about-face toward the future, away from any visible institution. I did not become a saint. All I received was life. From then on, I did not have to say anything which did not originate in my heart.”
    Institutions are good at preserving and passing on the steps humanity has already taken. But they cannot create new life.  They cannot lead people into a different future. The Post Office preserves our right to communicate beyond national boundaries, which was originally a revolutionary step. The Post Office preserves that possibility for us, but if you try to get the Post Office to take any radical new steps, you will quickly find that such a massive and established bureaucracy will not easily budge.
    People who move beyond the ordinary consciousness and conscience of religious institutions face very much the same problem. They can draw on the words and the symbols for support on their journeys. But they must not expect the institutions to create new life. The community that will support them can only be found along the way, as they themselves take steps into an unknown future.
    The traditional spiritual symbols are valid. We must be born again if we are to enter into the kingdom. We must acknowledge our illusions and lies and addictions. We must become part of the people if we are to be saved. We must live by faith and hope and love. We must, somewhere along
the way, die to the world that systematically exploits the earth and its creatures. To be saved we must leave deadening power structures and be born again into a new community of life and hope.
    People who have moved out of their ordinary existence and committed themselves to critical but shaky enterprises are part of a community still in the making. That community is being formed not around symbols or rituals, but around the life and death issues that the symbols have always pointed to. Symbols can easily be made into realities unto themselves and get enshrined and worshipped as if they were complete.  That is why Joseph Campbell insists that myth and symbol are not about something that happened way back then.  Rather, they are a key to tell us what we can do now. We
have keys to a possible future, but they are useless unless we act on them.
    Rabbi Weisenbaum of Tucson, a leader in the Sanctuary movement that protected Central Americans who fled to this country, often told Jews that the most pain they feel in America today is in the dentist’s office!  The Exodus and the Holocaust, he claimed, are still taking place, but the Salvadorans and Guatemalans have traded places with the Jews. They are the ones standing up to Pharaoh and being persecuted and hunted down because they have taken a stand for justice.
    In Walking the Red Line Deena Hurwitz introduces us to Israelis who are seeking justice for persecuted Palestinians (New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, 1992).  Rabbi Marshal Meyer marched with the women of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who were protesting the disappearance of their loved ones. He was threatened with death because he dared oppose the Argentine military government. From his roots, he knew that he was standing with the people against Pharaoh. He knew that the symbols exist only to lead us to the radical reality and call of our own time.
    Brian Willson lost his legs trying to stop shipments of arms to Nicaragua. The women and children in India chained themselves to the trees so the loggers would not cut the down.  Archbishop Romero told the Salvadoran soldiers they should not follow orders to shoot their peasant brothers and sisters. Chico Mendez was killed for trying to save part of the Amazon. Ninez Montenegro Garca risks her life for the families of the disappeared in Guatemala. These are people of extraordinary faith and courage who shake us out of our ordinary existence and face us with the life and death questions of our own moment in history. By entering an existence that does not yet exist, they open out for others the possibility of making changes in their own lives.
    History is constantly providing us with opportunities for achieving enlightenment, for moving out of slavery into freedom, for being born again. We are constantly being called into a new existence, out of the lies and devastation and violence all around us. “With every breath of life,” wrote Rosenstock-Huessy, “we either start afresh a time that we want to differ from the past, or we continue a time that we want to perpetuate one day more.”
    To take steps out of the ordinary mainstream existence always means challenging institutional understanding. Years ago, Myles Horton, founder of Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, was talking to Helen Lewis, who had been teaching at a community college in the South and getting her students involved in social action. The college, which wanted nothing to do with social action, dismissed her. She felt bad about herself and talked to Myles about it. “Institutions,” Myles mused, “yes, you have to work with them. You have to work with them, but you have to push them. You push them, and they move a little bit. Then you push some more and they may move a little bit farther. Finally you push them until they get to the edge. Then you push once more—and you fall off!”
    Among the community of those who have fallen off and the community of those who are still pushing lies the beginning of a different future. And to bring that future into being, we are called to leave the familiar world we have known.
    That which gives life to the world is not confined to one place or to one group of people. It does not exist in one nationality or one religion or one economic system or one ideology. Rather, it is continually being called forth from people at the edges of different cultures and religions and nationalities and professions. The Judaeo-Christian symbols can interpret that reality for us and lead us along the way, but no one owns nd controls that reality. The Spirit breathes where she will.
    We are now at a point in history where massive crisis is breaking in upon us, where people all over the earth are being called to give birth to a different future. They are being called to a new level of consciousness and conscience. They are taking parallel steps on local levels for survival, for peace, and for a sustainable way of living. They are challenging the structures that have been doing violence to the earth and violence to the poor. Some are highly organized; others are simply clusters of individuals trying to live their lives in a responsible fashion. But the questions they are asking and the steps they are taking bring them beyond the group consciousness and conscience of their backgrounds. For the first time in history, we are getting a glimpse of how our actions reverberate around the world, how they affect Gaia, how the future of life on earth hangs in the balance. For the first time, we can see that pledging allegiance to the Whole, not just to a particular nation or corporation or religious institution, is the way of patriotism and piety.
    Who, then, will lead us from death into new life if the institutions will not do it? Who will bring us out of the ordinary existence we see all around us, out of the hypocrisy and hopelessness and pollution and hatred and war and weapons and greed? Only those who are listening to the call and making the difficult journey. Those journeys will affect the institutions in time, but institutions seldom lead the way.  Eventually, the institutions will benefit by the courage of the few—and will incorporate the values that they once felt so threatened by.
    Page Smith, in his Popular History of the United States, describes the people who took part in the massive movement for the abolition of slavery in U. S. history. He describes how the movement arose and subsided, waxed and waned, and at times almost dropped out of existence. It was fueled by blacks and whites, by women and by runaway slaves, by people from the churches and synagogues, by humanists and by socialists, by artists and writers and politicians. When the gathering of believers reached its peak, and abolition finally became a reality, Page says simply that the “church of the abolition” disbanded.  
    The community of people who are “called out” gathers itself together again, and again, and again, and is still gathering itself together at this moment. People from every culture and race and nationality are struggling and living heroically, fighting for human rights and justice and peace.
These are our brothers and sisters in faith. We do not know them, but we know that they are there. The people of spirit cannot be easily defined; there are no walls of separation, no “ins” and “outs.” Whenever people put a fence around themselves and declare themselves a “spiritual people,” they have fenced themselves in. They have made it harder to be called anywhere beyond their own enclosures.
    The community of those who are called forth will always be acting from the future. They will see a new story and begin to live that story out now, before its time. They will be leaving the old forms behind in order to meet the living God. Jesus told his followers that it was better for them that he go away, because if he stayed, the Spirit could not come to them. The former ways of contact could not be allowed to become idols separating them from the Living God. The name that Yahweh gave himself, “I am who am,” can just as correctly be translated “I will be who I will be.” If you think you see the Buddha on the road, the saying goes, kill him.
    We come to know God only as we enter an unknown future. To make an idol out of that which has already happened is to falsify God. “I will not call God Allah,” the novelist Kazantzakis has the dervish say. “A name is a prison and God is free. God is too big to fit inside any name. I will not call God Allah, but AHHH.”
    The ekklesia is always on pilgrimage, always following a vision and a dream. The kingdom will never really come visibly; we will not arrive at a utopia we can see and touch and feel. “Everything good has to be done over and over again forever.” Yet there is a community working incessantly to bring the kingdom into being. And we are called to be part of that community of people who are unknown to us but who are following the call into an existence that does not yet exist.  For the kingdom is already among us, unrecognized but powerful.

 
From: Bill Cane, Circles of Hope: Breathing Life and Spirit in a Wounded World (Orbis Books, 1992) and From Violence To Wholeness.