Conference lgp30::christian-perspective

    These are crossposted from note 457 in DEJAVU, first entered back in 1987,
    cut down for size.

    
                  -< Stages of Spiritual Development >-

    
Excerpts from "The Different Drum", by M.Scott Peck, M.D.
=========================================================

From the beginning of the book:

	"To the people of all nations, in the hopes that within a
	 century there will no longer be a Veterans Day Parade
	 but that there will be lots of living people left to march
	 to a different drum, because all the world loves a parade."


From Chapter IX - Patterns of Transformation, pp.186-200
--------------------------------------------------------

The key to community is the acceptance - in fact, the celebration - of 
our individual and cultural differences.  Such acceptance and 
celebration - which resolves the problem of pluralism and which can 
occur only after we learn to become empty (of intolerances) - is also 
the key to world peace.  

This does not mean, however that as we struggle toward world community
we need to consider all individuals or all cultures and societies
equally good or mature.  To do so would be to fall prey once again to
a complex variation of the "illusion of human nature" a variation that
says "We are all different but all the same or equal in our
differences. This is simply not true.  The reality is that just as 
some individuals have become more mature than others, some cultures 
are more or less flawed than others.

Thus we need labor under no compulsion to feel the same degree of 
attraction to each and everyone - or the same degree of taste for 
every culture.  So Gale Webbe wrote in his classic work on the deeper 
aspects of spiritual growth that the further one grows spiritually, 
the more and more people one loves and the fewer and fewer people one 
likes.  (* Gale Webbe, 'The Night and Nothing, p.60)  This is because 
when we have become sufficiently adept at recognizing our own flaws so 
as to cure them, we naturally become adept at recognizing the flaws in 
others.  We may not like people because of these flaws or 
immaturities, but the further we ourselves grow, the more we become 
able to accept - to love - them, flaws and all.  Christ's commandment 
is not to like one another; it is to 'love' one another.

Like community itself, that love is not easy to muster.  It is a part 
of the journey of the spirit.  If that journey is not understood it 
can be a major factor in driving us human beings even further apart.  
The knowledge of its principles, however, can do much to bring us 
together in peace.

THE STAGES OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH

...Over the course of a decade of practicing psychotherapy a strange 
pattern began to emerge.  If people who were religious came to me in 
pain and trouble, and if they became engaged in the therapeutic 
process so as to go the whole route, they frequently left therapy as 
atheists, agnostics, or at least skeptics.  On the other hand, if 
atheists, agnostics, or skeptics came to me in pain or difficulty and 
became fully engaged, they frequently left therapy as deeply religious 
people.  

"Same therapy, same therapist, successful but utterly different
outcomes from a religious point of view.  ...It didn't compute until I
realized that 'we are not all in the same place spiritually'. 
           
With that realization came another: there is a pattern of progression 
through identifiable stages in human spiritual life. .....But here I will 
talk about those stages only in general, for individuals are unique and do 
not always fit neatly into any psychological or spiritual pigeonhole.

With that caveat, let me list my own understanding of these stages and the 
names I have chosen to give them:

		STAGE I   - Chaotic, antisocial
		STAGE II  - Formal, institutional 
		STAGE III - Skeptic, individual
		STAGE IV  - Mystic, communal"

Excerpts from "The Different Drum", by M.Scott Peck, M.D.
=========================================================

From Chapter IX - Patterns of Transformation, pp.186-200
--------------------------------------------------------

With that caveat, let me list my own understanding of these stages and the 
names I have chosen to give them:

		STAGE I   - Chaotic, antisocial
		STAGE II  - Formal, institutional 
		STAGE III - Skeptic, individual
		STAGE IV  - Mystic, communal"

Most all young children and perhaps one in five adults fall into Stage 
I.  It is essentially a stage of undeveloped spirituality.  I call it 
antisocial because those adults who are in it (People Of The Lie - 
book by same name) seem generally incapable of loving others.  
Although they may pretend to be loving (and think of themselves that 
way), their relationships with their fellow human beings are all 
essentially manipulative and self-serving.  ...Being unprincipled, 
there is nothing that governs them except their own will.  And since 
that will from moment to moment can go this way or that, there is a 
lack of integrity in their being.  

From time to time people in Stage I get in touch with the chaos of 
their own being, and when they do, I think it is the most painful 
experience a human can have.  A few, I suspect, may kill themselves, 
unable to envision change.  And some, occasionally, convert to Stage 
II.  Such conversions are usually sudden and dramatic and, I believe, 
God-given.  It is as if God had reached down and grabbed their soul 
and yanked it up a quantum leap.  The process also seems to be an 
unconscious one  It just seems to happen.

There are several things that characterize the behavior of men and 
women in Stage II of their spiritual development, which is the stage 
of the majority of churchgoers and believers (as well as that of most 
emotionally healthy "latency"-period children).  One is their 
attachment to the forms (as opposed to the essence) of their religion, 
which is why I call this stage "formal" as well as "institutional". 
They are in fact sometimes so attached to the canons and the liturgy 
that they become very upset if changes are made in the words or the 
music or in the traditional order of things.  ...Since it is precisely 
these forms that are responsible for their liberation from chaos, it 
is no wonder that people at this stage become so threatened when 
someone seems to be playing footloose and fancy-free with the rules.

Another thing characterizing the religious behavior of Stage II people 
is that their vision of God is almost entirely that of an external., 
transcendent Being.  They have very little understanding of the 
immanent, indwelling God - the God of the Holy Spirit, or what Quakers 
call the Inner Light.  and although they often consider Him loving, 
they also generally feel He possesses - and will use - punitive power. 
 But once again, it is no accident that their vision of God is that of 
a giant benevolent Cop in the Sky, because that is precisely the kind 
of God they need - just as they need a legalistic religion for their 
governance.

What happens to children when they are raised in a Stage II home 
environment?  They are treated with importance and dignity (and taken 
to Sunday school as well) and that they absorb the principles of 
Christianity as if with their mother's milk - or the principles of 
Buddhism if raised in a Buddhist home, or of Islam if raised in a 
Muslim home, and so on.  The principles of their parents' religion are 
literally engraved on their hearts, or come to be what 
psychotherapists call "internalized".

But once these principles become internalized, such children, now 
usually late-adolescents, have become self-governing human beings.  As 
such they are no longer dependent on an institution for their 
governance.  Consequently they begin to say to themselves, "Who needs 
this fuddy-duddy old Church with its silly superstitions?"  At this 
point they begin to convert to Stage III - skeptic, individual.  And 
to their parents' great but unnecessary chagrin, they often become 
atheists or agnostics.

Although frequently "nonbelievers," people in Stage III are generally 
more spiritually developed than many content to remain in Stage II.  
Although individualistic, they are not the least bit antisocial.  To 
the contrary, they are often deeply involved in and committed to 
social causes.  They make up their own minds and are no more likely to 
believe everything they read in the papers than to believe it 
necessary to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior (as opposed to 
Buddha or Mao or Socrates) in order to be saved.  They make loving, 
intensely dedicated parents.  As skeptics they are often scientists, 
and as such they are again highly submitted to principle.  Indeed, 
what we call the scientific method is a collection of conventions and 
procedures that have been designed to combat our extraordinary 
capacity to deceive ourselves in the interest of submission to 
something higher than our own immediate emotional or intellectual 
comfort - namely, truth.  Advanced Stage III men and women are active 
truth seekers.

"Seek and you shall find," it has been said.  If people in Stage III 
seek the truth deeply and widely enough, they find what they are 
looking for - enough pieces to begin to fit them together but never 
enough to complete the whole puzzle.  In fact, the more pieces they 
find, the larger and more magnificent the puzzle becomes.  Yet they 
are able to get glimpses of the "big picture" and to see that it is 
very beautiful indeed - and that it strangely resembles those 
"primitive myths and superstitions" their Stage II parents and 
grandparents believe in .  At this point they begin conversion to 
Stage IV, which is the mystic communal stage of spiritual development.

...Mysticism also obviously has to do with mystery.  Mystics 
acknowledge the enormity of the unknown, but rather than being 
frightened by it, they seek to penetrate even deeper into it that they 
may understand more - even with the realization that the more they 
understand, the greater the mystery will become.  They love mystery, 
in dramatic contrast to those in Stage II, who need simple, clear-cut 
dogmatic structures and have little taste for the unknown and the 
unknowable.  While Stage IV men and women will enter religion in order 
to approach mystery, people in Stage II, to a considerable extent, 
enter religion in order to escape from it.

"Finally, mystics throughout the ages have not only spoken of emptiness 
but extolled its virtues.  I have labeled STAGE IV communal as well as 
mystical not because all mystic or even a majority of them live in communes 
but because among human beings they are the ones most aware that the whole 
world is a community and realize what divides us into warring camps is 
precisely the 'lack' of this awareness.   Having become practiced at 
emptying themselves of preconceived notions and prejudices and able to 
perceive the invisible underlying fabric that connects everything, they do 
not think in terms of factions or blocs or even national boundaries; they 
'know' this to be one world.

Excerpts from "The Different Drum", by M.Scott Peck, M.D.
=========================================================

From Chapter IX - Patterns of Transformation, pp.186-200
--------------------------------------------------------


...Perhaps, predictably, there exists a sense of threat among people 
in the different stages of religious development.  Mostly we are 
threatened by people in the stages above us.

...STAGE I people are threatened by just about everything and everybody.  
STAGE II people are not threatened by STAGE I people, the "sinners".  They 
are commanded to love sinners.  But they are very threatened by the 
individuals and skeptics of STAGE III and even more by the mystics of STAGE 
IV, who seem to believe in the same sorts of things they do but believe in 
them with a freedom they find absolutely terrifying.  STAGE III people, on 
the other hand, are neither threatened by STAGE I people nor by STAGE II 
people (whom they simply regard as superstitious) but are cowed by STAGE IV 
people, who seem to be scientific-minded like themselves and know how to 
write good footnotes, yet somehow believe in this crazy God business."

...Much of the art of being a good teacher, healer, or minister 
consists largely in staying just one step ahead of your patients, 
clients, or pupils.  If you are not ahead, it is unlikely that you 
will be able to lead them anywhere.  But if you are two steps ahead, it 
is likely that you will lose them.  If people are one step ahead, we 
usually admire them.  If they are two steps ahead of us, we usually 
think they are evil.  That's why Socrates and Jesus were killed; they 
were thought to be evil.

...An understanding of the stages of spiritual development is 
important for community building.  A group of only Stage IV people or 
only Stage II people is, of course, not so much a community as a 
clique.  A true community will likely include people of all stages.  
With this understanding, it is possible for people in different stages 
to transcend the sense of threat that divides them and to become a 
true community.

In my experience the most dramatic example of this possibility 
occurred in a relatively small community-building group I led several 
years ago.  To this two-day group of twenty-five, there came ten 
fundamentalist Stage II Christians, five Stage III atheists with their 
own guru - a brilliant, highly rationalized trial lawyer - and ten 
Stage IV mystical Christians.  There were moments I despaired that we 
would ever make it into community.  The fundamentalists were furious 
that I, their supposed leader, smoked and drank and vigorously 
attempted to heal me of my hypocrisy and addiction.  The mystics 
equally vigorously challenged the fundamentalists' sexism, 
intolerance, and other forms of rigidity.  Both of course were utterly 
dedicated to converting the atheists.  The atheists in turn sneered at 
the arrogance of us Christians in even daring to think that we had 
gotten hold of some kind of truth.  Nonetheless, after approximately 
twelve hours of the most intense struggle together to empty ourselves 
of our intolerances, we became able to let one another be, each in his 
or her own stage.  And we became a community.  But we could not have 
done so without the cognitive awareness of the different stages of 
spiritual development and the realization that we were not all "in the 
same place,", and that that was literally all right.

My experience suggests that this progression of spiritual development 
holds true in all cultures and for all religions.  Indeed, one of the 
things that seems to characterize all the great religions - 
Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism - is their 
capacity to speak to people in both Stage II and Stage IV.  In fact, I 
suspect this is why they are great religions.  It is as if the words 
of each had two different translations.  Let us take a Christian 
example: "Jesus is my savior."  At Stage II this is often translated 
into a Jesus who is a kind of fairy godmother who will rescue me 
whenever I get in trouble as long as I remember to call upon his name. 
And that's true.  He will do just that.  At Stage IV "Jesus is my 
savior" is translated as "Jesus, through his life and death, taught me 
the way I must follow for my salvation."  Which is also true.  Two 
totally different translations, two totally different meanings, but 
both of them true.





"It is also important to remember that no matter how far we develop 
spiritually, we retain in ourselves vestiges of the previous stages 
through which we have come...   I don't suppose I could be writing 
this were I not basically a kind of STAGE IV person.

But I can assure you that there exists a STAGE I Scott Peck, who at 
the first sign of any significant stress is quite tempted to lie and 
cheat and steal.  I keep him well encaged, I hope, in a rather 
comfortable cell, so that he won't be let loose upon the world.  (And 
I am able to do this only because I acknowledge his existence, which 
is what Jungian psychologists mean by the 'integration of the Shadow'. 
Indeed, I do not attempt to kill him if for no other reason than that 
I need to go down into the dungeon from time to time to consult him, 
safely ensconced behind the bars, when I am in need of a particular 
kind of 'street smarts').

Similarly, there is a STAGE II Scott Peck, who in moments of stress 
and fatigue would very much like to have a Big Brother or Big Daddy 
around who would give him some clear-cut, black-and-white answers to 
life's difficult, ambiguous dilemmas and some formulas to tell him how 
to behave, relieving him of the responsibility of figuring it all out 
for himself.

And there is STAGE III Scott Peck, who if invited to address a 
prestigious scientific assembly, under stress of such an occasion 
would want to regress into thinking, Well, I better just talk to them 
about carefully controlled, measurable studies and not mention any of 
this God business."

"...Conversions from STAGE I and STAGE II are usually sudden and 
dramatic.  Conversions from STAGE III to STAGE IV are generally 
gradual."

....It is during the process of conversion from STAGE III to STAGE IV 
that people generally first become conscious that there is such a 
thing as spiritual growth.  There is a potential pitfall in this 
consciousness, however, and that is the notion some have at this point 
that they can they themselves 'direct' the process.  ...I believe that 
we cannot get to God under our own steam.  We must allow God to do the 
directing.

In any case, whether sudden or gradual, no matter how different in 
other respects, Stages I to II and Stages III to IV conversions do 
have one thing in common: a sense on the part of the persons converted 
that their own conversions were not something they themselves achieved 
but rather gifts from God.

As a part of the process of spiritual growth, the transition from 
Stage II to Stage III is also conversion.  We can be converted to 
atheism or agnosticism or, at least, skepticism!  Indeed I have every 
reason to believe that God has a hand in this part of the conversion 
process as well.  One of the greatest challenges, in fact, facing the 
Church is how to facility the conversion of its members from Stage II 
to Stage IV without them having to spend a whole adult lifetime in 
Stage III.  It is a challenge that the Church has historically avoided 
rather than begun to face.  As far as I'm concerned, one of the 
greatest sins of our sinful Christian Church has been its 
discouragement, through the ages, of doubt.  In so doing, it has 
consistently driven growing people out of its potential community, 
often fixating them thereby in a perpetual resistance to spiritual 
insights.  Conversely, the Church is not going to meet this challenge 
until doubt is properly considered a Christian virtue - indeed, a 
Christian responsibility.  We neither can nor should skip over 
questioning in our development.

In fact, it is only through the process of questioning that we begin 
to become even dimly aware that the whole point of life is the 
development of souls.  As I said, the notion that we can totally 
direct this development is a pitfall of such awareness.  But the 
beauty of the consciousness that we are all on an ongoing spiritual 
journey and that there is no end to our conversion far outshines that 
one pitfall.  For once we become aware that we are on a journey - that 
we are all pilgrims - for the first time we can actually begin to 
cooperate consciously with God in the process.

That is why Paul Vitz, at a symposium with me, correctly told the audience: 
"I think Scott's stages have a good deal of validity, and I suspect 
that I shall be using them in my practice, but I want you to remember 
that what Scotty calls STAGE IV is the beginning."

Excerpts from "The Different Drum", by M.Scott Peck, M.D.
=========================================================

From Chapter IX - Patterns of Transformation, pp.200-206
--------------------------------------------

TRANSCENDING CULTURE

The process of spiritual development I have described is highly 
analogous to the development of community.  Stage I people are 
frequently pretenders; they pretend they are loving and pious, 
covering up their lack of principles.  The first, primitive stage of 
group formation - pseudocommunity - is similarly characterized by 
pretense.  The group tries to look like a community without doing any 
of the work involved.

Stage II people have begin the work of submitting themselves to the 
principle - the law.  But they do not yet understand the spirit of the 
law.  Consequently they are legalistic, parochial, and dogmatic.  
They are threatened by anyone who thinks differently from them, and so 
regard it as their responsibility to convert or save the other 90 or 
99 percent of humanity who are not "true believers."  it is this same 
style of functioning that characterizes the second stage of the 
community process in which the group members try vehemently to fix one 
another.  The chaos that results is not unlike that existing among the 
various feuding denominations or sects within or between the world's 
different religions.

Stage III, a phase of questioning, is analogous to the crucial stage 
of emptiness in community formation.  In reaching for community the 
members of a group must question themselves.  "Is my particular 
theology so certain - so true and complete - as to justify my 
conclusion that these other people are not saved?" they may ask.  Or 
"I wonder to what extent my feelings about homosexuals (or any other 
'group') represent a prejudice bearing little relation to reality?". 
Or "Could I have swallowed the party line in thinking that all 
religious people are fanatics?".  Indeed, such questioning is the 
required beginning of the emptying process.  We cannot succeed in 
emptying ourselves of preconceptions, prejudices, needs to control or 
convert, and so forth, without first becoming skeptical of them and 
without doubting their necessity.  Conversely, individuals remain 
stuck in Stage III precisely because they do not doubt deeply enough.  
To enter Stage IV they must begin to empty themselves of some of the 
dogmas of skepticism such as Anything that can't be measured 
scientifically can't be known and isn't worth studying.  They must 
begin to doubt even their own doubt.

Does this mean, then, that a true community is a group of all Stage IV 
people?  Paradoxically the answer is yes and no.  It is no because the 
individual members are hardly capable of growing so rapidly as to 
totally discard their customary styles of thinking when they return 
from the group to their usual worlds.  But it is yes because in 
community the members have learned how to behave in a Stage IV manner 
in relation to one another.  Among themselves they all practice 
the kind of emptiness, acceptance, and inclusiveness that have 
characterized the behavior of mystics throughout the ages.  They 
retain their basic identity as Stage I, II, III, or IV individuals.  
Indeed, knowledge of these stages is in part so important because it 
facilitates the acceptance of one another as being in different stages 
- different places spiritually.  Such acceptance is a prerequisite for 
community.  But, wonderfully, once such acceptance is achieved - and 
it can be achieved only through emptiness - Stage I, II and III men 
and women routinely possess the capacity to act toward one another as 
if they were Stage IV people.  In other words, out of love and 
commitment to the whole, virtually all of us are capable of 
transcending our backgrounds and limitations.  So it is that genuine 
community is so much more than the sum of its parts.  It is, in truth, 
a mystical body.

...The conversion from Stage I to Stage II is essentially a leap of 
socialization or enculturation.  It is at that point at which we first 
adopt the values of our tribal, cultural religion and begin to make 
them our own.  Just as Stage II people tend to be threatened, however, 
by any questioning of their religious dogma, so they are also 
"culture-bound" - utterly convinced that the way things are done in 
their culture is the right and only way.  And just as people entering 
Stage III begin to question the religious doctrines with which they 
were raised, so they also begin to question all cultural values of the 
society into which they were born.  Finally as they (the STAGE III
skeptics) begin to reach for STAGE IV, they also begin to reach toward
the notion of world community and the possibility of either
transcending culture or - depending on which way you want to use the
words - belonging to a planetary culture." 

Aldous Huxley (from 'The Perennial Philosophy) labeled mysticism "the 
perennial philosophy" because the mystical way of thinking and being 
has existed in all cultures and all times since the dawn of recorded 
history.  Although a small minority, mystics of all religions the 
world over have demonstrated an amazing commonalty, unity.  Unique 
though they might be in their individual personhood, they have largely 
escaped free from - transcended - those human differences that are 
cultural.

...I continue today no longer to belong anywhere in terms of what is 
usually thought of as a culture.  But I am far from being alone.  
Slowly I have found a person here and a person there in the same 
predicament.  And ours was not a miserable affair, like the poor "man 
without a country" who was doomed forever to roam the seas in a narrow 
sailing vessel.  To the contrary, we were far more free than most to 
move through the nations of the world, no longer bound by cultural 
conventions.  There were times when it was lonely, but in recent years 
men and women without a culture have been joining me by the tens of 
thousands.  None of us would go back, even if we could, but we do from 
time to time experience a certain poignant sadness that, as perpetual 
pilgrims, we "can't go home again."

....Nowhere in all of literature is there a better description of 
someone who had transcended culture than in the Gospels.  Before and 
since Jesus, from time to time there have been saints who have 
transcended their culture and also had "no place to lay their heads."  
But they were one in ten thousand, if that.  Today it is different.  
Because of the multiplicity of factors - most particularly instant, 
mass communication that brings foreign cultures to our door, and the 
availability of psychotherapy that leads us to question the programs,
cultural and otherwise, within which we were raised - the number of
people entering the mystical stage of development and transcending
ordinary culture seems to have increased a thousandfold in the course
of a mere generation or two.  They remain a minority - currently no
more than one in twenty.  Still one wonders if the explosion in their
numbers might represent a giant leap forward in the evolution of the
human race, a leap toward not only mystical but global consciousness
and world community.* " 

* Perhaps the greatest prophet of this leap was Teilhard de Chardin.

             <<< HYDRA::DISK_NOTES$LIBRARY:[000000]DEJAVU.NOTE;1 >>>
                             -< Psychic Phenomena >-
================================================================================
Note 457.1                  Religions and World Peace                    1 of 29
FDCV13::PAINTER                                     154 lines  19-AUG-1987 21:55
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    {From "Christianity and the World Religions - Paths To Dialogue with
           Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism", by Hans Kung with Josef van Ess, 
           Heinrich von Stietencron and Heinz Bechert, pp.440-443}

Hans Kung: NO WORLD PEACE WITHOUT RELIGIOUS PEACE
           --------------------------------------

Concluding word:

This dialogue was not supposed to be anything more than an interim
report.  It was, as explained, an attempt, a risky experiment, and it 
is not for me to say whether it succeeded.

In its course, certain convergences and divergences between religions 
have become clear.  And if we have managed to clarify the one 
question of what religious dialogue no longer has to argue over and 
what it does, we will have achieved a great deal.

The Christian Responses in particular will be criticized - presumably 
from both sides.  For some they will be too "Christian"; for others, 
not "Christian" enough; for some, too open, too yielding, too 
pluralistic; for others, too narrow, too limiting, too self-conscious.

......

Why must this dialogue go on?  First of all, in order to get an 
increasingly better understanding of our contemporaries, the men and 
women with whom our lives are becoming ever more closely linked.  But 
also to understand ourselves better, which we can do only through 
comparison and encounter. ...  And thirdly, because interreligious 
dialogue is anything but a private, personal, local or regional 
matter.  Its global dimensions are obvious, and so are its 
repercussions on the communal life of the nation and the world.  These 
days, nobody would seriously dispute the fact that peace in the world 
very much depends on the peace among the various religions.  And in an 
age when the technology for an atomic holocaust is already in place, 
this aspect of religious dialogue is more important than all the 
meticulous academic precision, theological subtlety, and intellectual 
sophistry.

There is, then, a significant connection between ecumenism and world 
peace.  Anyone who feels a sense of obligation toward world community 
and who takes seriously the fragility of all human arrangements, who 
has glimpsed all the possibilities of technical and human error, must 
know what is at stake here.  He must know that threats to peace and 
the need to regulate it have long sense burst through the dimension of 
specific, regional conflict, and have become global political 
problems, on which the survival of us all depends.  The ALTERNATIVE 
TODAY IS PEACE IN THE ECUMENE (INHABITED WORLD) OR THE DESTRUCTION OF 
THE ECUMENE ITSELF.

What can an edumenical theology contribute to the pacification of our 
warlike world?  Surely no direct solutions for all the complex 
questions of strategy, military-industrial technology, and 
disarmament.  That is not its original and primary responsibility, 
anyway.

Its very own domain of reflection and action - and even scientists and 
politicians are beginning once again to pay more attention to this 
ethical-religious dimension - is behavior, morality, religion.  And 
here ecumenical theology can help to discover and work the conflicts 
caused by the religions, confessions and denominations themselves.  
And there are a great many structures of conflict that will have to be 
dismantled.

Everyone knows how much disaster has been occasioned in politics by 
RELIGIOUS STRIFE AMONG CHRISTIANS.  One need only recall Northern 
Ireland to realize what I mean.  And Catholic-Protestant antagonism 
was likely a contributing factor, at least subliminally, to the insane 
war over the Falkland Islands; just as the feelings of superiority and 
the efforts to win hegemony by Protestant Yankees in Catholic Central 
and South America - and the reactions to them - have always borne the 
stamp of culture and religion.

What have churches done to oppose this?  True, they have SPOKEN for 
peace and not war, at least in recent days, and that is a good deal.

Generally they have done this speaking, to be sure, only where they 
could do so without any risk.  But have they DONE enough for peace: in 
Vietnam, in Lebanon, in Argentina, in Great Britain, in Germany, in 
Europe and America, Africa and Asia?  Let me say once more, 
unmistakably: Religions, Christianity, the Church, cannot solve or 
prevent the world's conflicts, but they can lessen the amount of 
hostility, hatred, and intransigence.  They can, first, intervene 
concretely for the sake of understanding and reconciliation between 
estranged peoples.  And second, they can begin to do away with at 
least the conflicts of which they themselves are the cause and for 
whose explosiveness they are partly to blame: They can settle the 
doctrinal (and ensuing practical) differences that have divided the 
Church.

This is not demanding the impossible of religions and the churches, it 
is merely asking them to live up to their own programs and basic 
intentions, asking them to direct their appeals for peace not only 
toward the outside (important as that is), but to the inside as well, 
and thus to do deeds of reconciliation and set up signs of peace in 
their own backyards.  We can be sure that these deeds of 
reconciliation, that these sighs of peace, will not fail to radiate 
powerful signals onto the fields of conflict "out there".

Furthermore, there is no denying that the great world RELIGIONS 
THEMSELVES (and not just Christian denominations or ideologies that 
have swollen into quasi religions) share the responsibility for some 
of the most NOTORIOUS POWDER KEGS IN THE WORLD.  Looking from the Far 
East to the Near East, no one could fail to see that in the Vietnam 
War there were religious factors at war (antagonism between Buddhist 
monks and the Catholic regime); that the conflict between India and 
Pakistan, the territorial split that occurred against the will of 
Mahatma Gandhi, has to this day fed on the irreconcilable hostility 
between Hindus and Muslims, continually leading to new massacres (not 
to mention the blood shed by Indians and Sikhs); that the war between 
Iraq and Iran has roots in centuries-old inner-Muslim rivalry and 
enmity between Sunnites and Shiites?

This is to pass over the Middle Eastern conflict, where, as everyone 
knows, Muslims, Jews, and Christians confront each other, armed to the 
teeth, and where they have already lacerated on another in the fifth 
war within the past few decades.

The most fanatical, cruelest political struggles are those that have 
been colored, inspired, and legitimized by religion.  To say this is 
not to reduce all the political conflicts to religious ones, but to 
take seriously the fact that religions SHARE the responsibility for 
bringing peace to our torn and warring world.  Christians, Jews, and 
Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, are facing the same challenge.  The 
peoples in question and the rest of the world would have been spared 
tremendous grief if the world religions had recognized sooner their 
responsibility for peace, love of neighbor, and nonviolence, for 
reconciliation and forgiveness - as exemplified by the Hindu Mahatma 
Ghandhi, the Christian Dag Hammarskjold, the Muslim Anwar el-Sadat, 
and the Buddhist U Thant, all of whom promoted the politics of peace 
out of religious conviction.

To sum up, ecumenical dialogue is today anything but the speciality of 
a few starry-eyed religious peacenicks.  For the first time in 
history, it has now taken on the character of an urgent desideratum 
for world politics.  It can help to make our earth more livable, by 
making it more peaceful and more reconciled.

There will be no peace among the peoples of this world without peace 
among the world religions.

There will be no peace among the world religions without peace among 
the Christian churches.

The community of the Church is an integral part of the world 
community.

Ecumenism 'ad intra', concentrated on the Christian world, and 
ecumenism 'ad extra', oriented toward the whole inhabited earth, are 
INTERDEPENDENT.

PEACE IS INDIVISIBLE: IT BEGINS WITH US.

re Note 805.5 by TNPUBS::PAINTER:

        Just a reminder:  try, if possible, to keep your notes under
        100 lines.

        Bob

    
    I will, Bob...that was the last one.
    
    Thanks.
    
    Cindy