From Bonhoeffer to Weatherhead

My friend wrote to me about yet another potentially great institution doing something stupid. I found it helpful to respond in this way:

Subject: From Bonhoeffer to Weatherhead

I was talking yesterday afternoon to my process theologian friend about the evil that institutions do. I do think you must be talking about institutions and their mad, insane, irrational preoccupation with Bonhoeffer's subject, success.

Here are three theological seminaries with which I have personal experience. Three that have accrued such a surplus of stupid decisions that they cannot but do the harm they do. Add to the surplus of stupid the surplus of irrational idealism that we -- oops, I-language, Anne -- *I* invest in them. I want them to do the good that they can do. The good is why I wanted to join up with them. When I find that they are not communities after all, but collectives, with all of the magnification of human potential for bad, it hurts all the more. They continue to do this harm over and over. The salary and benefits eventually are not enough, and my capacity for detachment is not enough, to keep me there, entrapped by the system and my collusion in it.

What potential, then, is on the public face of these institutions, if not the evil one? Gospel potential, the rebel Jesus, the impulse of self-giving love, whatever it is that draws us into that light -- *that* potential. That's the false consciousness, I think, that sets up the miserable disillusionment and sense of the hidden parallel reality of meanness, bitter cruelty, and mindless plowing under of any nascent creativity and novelty.

Witness the damage these collectives have done. Not just the accretion of history (Inquisition, Constantine, the theologians and institutions under Hitler whom Bonhoeffer might have been addressing), but the immediately past memories of our own lives in churches, seminaries, and the institutions who employed us. We, the ones with whom I am now speaking in solidarity, threw our lives into them and were beaten down bluntly by the collective wickedness.

I asked M, is there not still a sum of good, potentially, that these broken institutions can do? We argued ourselves into a place that said, no, they have to eventually exhaust themselves (die?) of all of the negative energy they are accumulating more rapidly than they care to know. It takes a long, long time because the momentum they have accumulated is so strong. Creativity, novelty, options, the force of the better argument are not overwhelmed, however. These forces for good (may I say, forces of God -- in all of the beyonds, thanks, Laurel) emerge where they will, especially in the critical consciousness of those who survive the blunt force trauma and others who are able to escape the entrapment.

Will institutions always have this sine wave, of diminishing duration, this alternating current of good and evil? It seems such a waste because so much is possible when an accumulation of sufficient numbers of people form committed communities capable of clarity and unity of vision. Can't we go into these idealistic (real world) communal efforts with eyes wide open on the possibilities of distortion, to the net effect of a surplus of good? Isn't this happening somewhere? Or does it happen only for brief times and eventually succumb to the fatal flaw?

[I said to Chiclette (age 8) recently as we were approaching the bottoms of our ice cream cones after her softball practice on one of our just-the-two-of-us outings:
--Well, Honey, I guess all good things must come to an end.

Her reply, shaped by the disillusionments she has already suffered:
-You mean like you and Mommy?

Stunned, I responded:
--No, Honey, just ice cream cones. Your Mommy and I are just fine and we love you very much.

I think my point is, this relationship requires attention, careful presence, mindfully monitoring the potential for erosion of the energy that draws us together. The erotic idealistic energy that drew us together is not as sustaining as the energy of relationships anywhere eventually, in which the love and its potential must evolve constantly into novel forms and spaces. It's hard to explain all of that to an 8 year old. It requires lots of ice cream, and watching us grow, argue, test, bond, laugh, cry, etc.]