In this talk from the summer of 1971, Paul DeCelles pointed out that people’s beliefs, attitudes and behavior patterns are strongly affected by the others around them and that we need, therefore, to have at least one Christian environment in order to live a full Christian life. This talk was given as part of the deacon training program of the Apostolic Institute, which was preparing men to be community-builders. For more on the Apostolic Institute see Resource 100, “Background Information.”
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
[Tape begins after Paul has already begun speaking.]
PAUL: . . . briefly read that again, just to keep in mind the sort of thing with—and the kind of scope with which we’re trying to approach the question of building Christian communities. This is Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 1:9–10, and some more later on, 9–12.
“For he has made known to us”—this is our Lord—
For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight, the mystery of his will according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in Heaven and things on Earth, in him according to the purpose of him, who accomplishes all things, according to the counsel of his will. We who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory.
And a little later in chapter 2 verse 19, he says,
So then, you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also were built into it, for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
There are three points I’d like to point out that, in particular, St. Paul makes in these short verses.
One of them is that God did then, and he does now, have a purpose for creation and a purpose for redemption. And if we were to miss that purpose, we would miss what we were made for.
The second thing is that his purpose, as far as the human race is concerned, is to create a people who are united to him, to create a unity of God and man, one body, including God himself, a temple in whom God’s Spirit dwells.
And the third thing is that man’s purpose is to live for the praise of God, for the praise of God’s glory.
Now, as these talks—I hope anyway—as the talks unfold, it will become clearer what I mean by illustrating—what I’m trying to illustrate in drawing these particular three things out of St. Paul’s letter. For your own purposes, perhaps you’d like to read St. John’s gospel, chapter 17, verses 20-26, in which you’ll see another source talking about very much the same kind of thing.
Now, one of the points that we were talking about last time was that we were talking about planning. And the point is that we really can know what God’s plan is. And the reason we can know it is because he’s revealed it to us. It’s very much in line with one of the things that Brian was saying, just in answer to a question. Now, when we’re thinking about planning, thinking about building the church, and cooperating in God’s plan, our very own purpose has to be drawn from his purpose, and our planning and our plans have to parallel his plans. They have to go along with and be a part of God’s plan. And his purpose is to build a people, a people of God, a people who are united with him. His plan is to build a body of Christ, a temple of the Holy Spirit. And so ours should be the same: to build a people.
Later on tonight, I’ll use the word “community.” I want to talk a little bit about the sense in which the meaning of the word “people,”—the way it’s used in Scripture is—it would be just as well to translate it “community” rather than “people.” We’re not accustomed to thinking in terms of the word “people.”
So, our plans should be the same as God’s. That is, it should be drawn, our plan, and I hope that our proposals will, in fact, be reminiscent of God’s plan, will be patterned after God’s plan itself. So, ours should be the same, namely to build something, to work to form a people, and that is a people who live for God. And this should be the work, and the result of our pastoral work. That is, essentially the way in which to determine whether or not your plan is in line with God’s plan, and whether or not it’s effective, is to see whether or not a people has been formed, a people who live for God.
I’d like to make a small distinction here between what it is that is the goal of an individual Christian life and what it is that is the goal of pastoral work. An individual Christian should live for the praise of God’s glory, but the goal of pastoral work is to build a people of God.
And sometimes people will be confused about that. They will, for example, think that they have essentially accomplished God’s purpose when they themselves live for the praise of God’s glory . . . as they understand it. But in fact, there is more to that. There’s more meaning in living to the praise of God’s glory than you might—than simply, for example, having your own private prayer life. It also means cooperating with God’s purpose and His plan. And that plan is to build the people of God.
Now, not everybody is involved, or should be, in pastoral planning. And you might wonder—for example, I’m sure some of you might think, “Well, what am I doing here? Because I don’t think I’m going to be doing any pastoral planning.”
It seems to me that in order for pastoral planning to become a reality in the church today, it has to be accepted by all people. There has to be a culture, essentially, in which pastoral planning begins to take root and begins to mean something to the people who are being built into a people of God.
Also, it isn’t at all clear to me who it is who should be doing pastoral planning, and at all times, you should be open to what it is that God wants to do with you.
Now, there is no one great master planner outside of the Lord himself, and there may be innumerable ways in which you can foster the building of Christian communities. Or, there may be innumerable ways in which you can cooperate with God’s purpose and his plan.
So, I’m maintaining that the goal of pastoral work is to form a people who will do all the things that Christians should do. I’m suggesting that we build Christian communities.
Now, I want to talk about—I’ll spend some time tonight talking about basically two and a half things. The first two—first one I’ll talk about is the notion of environment. And the second thing I want to talk about is the notion of institution. And the half, the third thing, which I won’t be able to talk very much about tonight, is a very special kind of environment, which is called a community.
When you think about . . . let me—I wanna explain one other thing, too. It may seem to you that I may be belaboring the point a little bit about environment, but—as I go through this type of description—but it seems to me that it’s that the notion of environment, and the importance that the environments in which we live have on our lives, is not necessarily a thing which is very easy to get ahold of, to grasp intellectually. And there really is at—in this connection, a key issue which is involved with the nature of man, as well as God’s purpose for man. And as we go through this, I hope to try to describe it, anyway—environments—in a variety of ways, with a lot of sidelights perhaps, that—some of which might strike home and make things intuitive.
It’s really not enough, when you think about renewing the church, or working for the Lord, in addressing groups of people to simply get certain principles accepted or certain values accepted, or even getting individual persons to save their souls, or, so to speak, the phrase that—by that phrase, I mean getting them into a right relationship with Christ.
For example, one thing—there are lots of extremely important things, and good things to do. For example, the Christian mentality on abortion is something which is really important for us to talk to people about. And we can spend a lot of energy and effort trying to, for example, go to state legislatures and address the legislatures, or talk to—present some sort of a lobby against abortion bills. And that’s a good thing to do. But that’s not really enough to actually bring about the kind of change which has to take place in order for people to live a full Christian life. That’s an important thing, but it’s not the essential thing—I hope to show you by the time I’m through tonight.
There are all kinds of things, ideas, for instance, which it would be very wonderful if, for example, everybody in America, or everybody in the world were to adhere to. It would make, for example, the world a much better place to live in. It might make, say—disseminating a lot of ideas about the right way to live, like Christian ethics, is a very, very worthwhile thing. And if the whole world were to think Christian—not—I’m not talking about being Christian, but think Christian, or act Christian—then, in fact, that would be wonderful, because at least that much of the world would be set right as far as external behavior is concerned, and there would be a lot less interference, I mean, real, hard, murderous persecutions against Christians who really want to be Christian, in places, for instance, in Pakistan, as an example.
But one can spend a great deal of time, and legitimately so, on trying to convince people of your position—of one’s position with regard to various topics, having to do with religious or Christian ideas. But that really. . . basically, misses the point of the way people are deeply influenced. It misses the point about an essential aspect of human nature, I’d like to claim. Namely, that human beings do not function independently; rather, they change in groups.
Some of the things that we have to realize about this aspect of things—I’d like to draw this out a little bit as we go along here, but there are three points in particular I’d like to make.
First of all, a person’s beliefs. Beliefs, now, the things that you don’t know what the guy next to you is thinking, perhaps, because they’re not necessarily the things which show the most action, or they may not be externalized. These are personal things, these beliefs. So, a person’s interior beliefs and his own attitudes and his own behavior patterns are affected, to a very great degree, by the environment in which he is—in which he finds himself, and in which he functions. And one of the theses which I want to develop in these talks is—and especially tonight—that a Christian environment is necessary if a person is going to live a full Christian life.
The second point is that environments are more important than institutional factors in forming these attitudes and behavior patterns. So, the environment—environmental factors are more important than institutional factors. I’ll describe both of those concepts.
The third point is, when society as a whole cannot be expected to accept Christianity, it is necessary to form communities, within society, to make Christian life possible.
I want to work to develop these different things. I really don’t want to work at all, but if you can do it, that would be better. [Laughter.]
So first of all, what is an environment? Well, basically, what I mean by the word “environment,” and what people mean when they use the word, is it’s a social situation with some kind of stability. It’s not a mere collection of people. For example, a group of people riding on the bus is not an environment. That’s a collection of people and it—but it’s not a social situation with stability. And I’m not playing on the fact that the car is running. [Laughter.] In fact, if the social situation implies—what I mean by this is that there are interpersonal relationships existing as well, that people are relating to each other. And that’s a key thing, a key factor in what I mean by environment.
For example, an environment—every one of us lives in many different environments, and that’s—seems to be a necessary thing. And I don’t think that one should be—I’m not saying that there should be only one environment in which a person lives out his whole life. But let me just sketch, for example, my own different environments, some of them.
I live in a house, in a household, with variously ten—nine or ten people, depending on who’s . . . the last—the tenth one is sometimes there and sometimes not. This is—not all these are members of my family, my immediate family. Some, a couple are living with me and my wife and children and are very much so [sic] a part of our family and form an environment where, in terms of which, we affect each other’s attitudes, beliefs and behavior patterns. We relate to each other in a fantastic variety of ways. And each person in the household understands that he or she can expect a certain kind of stability and a certain kind of permanent relationship. He can expect to be dealt with at a certain level in our household.
There’s another type of environment that I work with—at my work. Now, I work—I teach at Notre Dame, in the physics department. Now, Notre Dame itself is not an environment. It is not one of my environments. There are many—most of the people at Notre Dame, I don’t know. And when I go to any kind of a large university function, we are all basically not relating to each other. We may be there, for example, the President’s Dinner, listening to what the president of the university has to say, or eating dinner or something.
But at that dinner, which, for example, happens every year, there’s an interesting thing that develops—not at all surprising to any of you: that all the people in the physics department sit at three different tables. Now, that’s by choice. And, not all of them. In each year, these three different tables don’t get mixed up, basically. I’ve noticed that each year, it’s the same set of people sit at one table, and another set at another table, and so on. And that’s a very natural situation that’s evolved there: that within the physics department, within the larger university, in fact, various types of personal relationships have been evolved, and in some cases worked out, so that people will know when they get together, they will expect certain kinds of things and they will just deal with each other expecting to be dealt with personally, whereas they don’t expect that from other members at that dinner.
Well, I have—there—in general, say, something else that might seem like an environment is the parish. But the parish is not an environment. I don’t mean that it shouldn’t be, but it’s a fact that it is not, because, for example, when I go to Mass on Sunday morning, or throughout the week when I go to Mass, the people who are there, I don’t know. I may know them by name, but I don’t actually have any kind of a personal relationship with the vast, vast majority of them. Now, at the 11:30 Mass that I go to sometimes, Ken is there, and Steve [inaudible], and occasionally a couple of other friends of mine. And they’re—now, that’s a very small group, but that is kind of a subgroup of the larger collection of people, which is almost—it’s not big enough to be an environment, really, but it’s a kind of environment where we have personal relationships with each other.
There are varying degrees of interaction within a given environment. That corresponds with the fact that we have various capacities for relating with various types of people, among other things. For example, at work and among the, say, physics environment, in which I work, I don’t expect of them the same kind of personal relationship that I would expect with any one of you, because the vast majority of my personal environment at Notre Dame is not Christian. In fact, it’s manifestly atheist. In fact, they are declared atheists. But, they happen to be people with whom I can talk about physics, and I do relate to them very deeply at the level of the study of physical reality. And that’s a real environment.
The degree of my participation in an environment like that, however, is rather limited, because I can only talk about a certain kind of thing with this group of people. The things which count most to me I really can’t share on a regular basis, for a variety of reasons. And I just—and they don’t—they have not come to expect such a deep personal relationship with me that I would be, for example, sharing with them, for instance, how our Lord dealt with me last night at the prayer meeting, or something like that.
Now, people—all of us may have some difficulty grasping just how strong an influence environments are on us. I think that we hear sort of an idealistic thing very often that all of us would like to think is true. It seems—my own personal conviction is that since it isn’t true, I’d just as soon not wish it were. And it’s this: that people like to think that individual persons are kind of cool, calm, collected creatures who take in a lot of facts and sort them out, and they weigh the different alternatives, and then they make decisions about what they want to do, about what they think about things. And that’s true. We all do that . . . to some degree. But actually, to a much greater degree are we influenced by the environments in which we function.
You go back to physics. The kinds of things, for instance, that I consider really important in the study of physical reality are both shared with the other people in my physics environment, and their ideas are shared with me. And in fact that—what they think is important has had, in the past, and I’m sure will continue to have, a great impact on me, because I really respect—they have really affected me—their ideas about what’s important in physics. So that, for example, the kinds of things that I will spend my time on in the area of physics is to a large extent determined by the people whom I think are the best physicists and who are in my environment also. So, I’m carried along by the environment itself.
Now, one might say—well, you know, there are many, many such examples in your own lives, and I’d like you to think about—in fact, sort of—tonight we break off a little early, I hope, and I want you to answer a couple of questions. I’ll return to this later. But one of them is, What environments do you belong to? And another one is, For what purpose do these environments exist?
One of the environments that we’re familiar with, of course, is the youth. And we’re familiar with it, and we understand—we have a deep feeling for how important environments are, and I’m going to illustrate this by this particular one. Just consider how it is that mothers especially are so concerned about what children their children play with and where they hang out, at the corner drugstore, or in the neighborhood down the street, or exactly where. Everybody senses that if your children travel with bad companions, they’ll get into trouble. And it isn’t that your children are bad, it’s just that they’re really deeply impressed by whatever the whole group wants to do, and there is a strong group impression on them.
Another type of environment which we’re all familiar with is—this is really a loose one, I mean, in the sense of being very unstructured—is the way that at various schools, typical kind of school situation, when a youth goes to school, he will almost inevitably pick up the sexual morality which is common in the environments in which he finds himself at a school. For example, at a university. And if a fellow or a girl starts traveling around with some pretty loose people, then his whole mentality will be deeply affected. He will begin to think, for example, that these things are not really in many ways—these taboos, so to speak, are not anywhere near as important as my parents led me to think. And that if I really want to be a full human being, I have to engage in premarital sex say, or some other kind of behavior. And that’s a very normal kind of thing.
We’ve all seen many, many examples of that, of individuals who are not bad individuals, and they’re not weak-minded and not weak-willed, who will fall into situations which will sort of carry them along. We see this especially a lot, I think, in connection with the drug cultures, the groups of people who will be carried and support each other mutually and have personal relationships.
I remember in my case, there was one particular environment which had a great impact on me because it was the only environment, basically the only environment in which I lived for a long time. And that’s a very rare situation, that you find yourself living in only one environment. But when I was in graduate school, I studied in physics. That’s a very refined, kind of distilled situation. And you can get yourself into a situation where you do nothing but one kind of thing, entirely. You don’t even take time out to eat, for instance, which happened to me. I lost 45 pounds in one year. I got married and I gained it back, and a little bit more, in about three months. [Paul and all laugh.]
But while I was in graduate school, one of the things that deeply affected me was the scientific attitude toward religion. Now, people didn’t talk about religion very much, and when they did talk about religion and Christianity, it was always very uninformed and it was easy to see that what they were talking about was shot full of holes. On the other hand, their whole mentality was something which I did pick up, and could—and anyone could pick up very easily. For example, that religion doesn’t explain everything, in fact, and then you keep talking about religion doesn’t explain anything. And so on down the line. That it essentially plays no role in my life, and I notice it’s playing no role in anybody else’s life, and these people are functioning very well in the kind of life that I’d like to live. So, I could get carried along—without ever having a discussion about religion, as a matter of fact! But I would pick up their sense of values. And I did.
We depend on other people for our beliefs. That’s fact, I think. Now, I’m not saying that that’s the way it oughta be. I think that that’s—I’m not arguing idealistically here; I’m just saying, just take a look at it and see how it is that you have picked up your own beliefs. What has impressed you? Who has been your teacher, for instance? How did you get to hold on to the kinds of ideas that you hold onto? Where did you get them?
The fact is . . . [inaudible] that we depend on other people for our beliefs, and we depend on them for what we think is important, that is, the set of values. What other—what our friends, what our environment thinks of as being important is what we tend to pick up as—and begin to think is important too. And what we depend—we also depend on other people for the ways that we act and the ways to act. Certain things are expected of you. Certain things are legitimate and certain things are not. And we know how to function, how to survive. And we do it. And we survive, in environments.
Now . . . I think I want to go back to this point. I’m not trying to say that we should all be a bunch of sheep. That’s not the point. I am trying to point out how crucial environments, in fact, are in our lives, and what a great impact they have on us.
When I was thinking this over, in—one thought particularly struck me. I—this is not—this may not be an accurate observation. I’d love to know what you think about it. But, I’ve noticed, especially, that many modern businesses make a great deal of effort to destroy environments.
For example, there is—General Motors has a stated policy that anybody in management will have to be transferred if he’s going to be promoted, and everybody wants to be promoted. And one wonders, well, that doesn’t seem to make sense. I mean, if the guy is doing a good job here, why would you transfer him in order to promote him? And the reason for that, I know, is actually the case.
(Inaudible) . . . one of the executives at General Motors, a very high up fellow, was that they have long since realized that people begin to make deals and make friends in their environments. And those environments begin to be very important things in the way, for instance, a man will do business. He will pay particular attention to his friends when a deal comes along, or he won’t cheat his friends. I don’t mean that General Motors insists that people cheat; but he won’t—if he has an opportunity to, he will do a favor for his friend rather than for General Motors. And so as a regular policy, they transfer people.
Now, actually, many, many people transfer and move around all the time, and a lot of the personal confusion, chaos, in individual people’s lives in this present technological society, which is based on that kind of notion of transferring people in order to get maximum output from them, comes about, I think, partly because they, in fact, do not have very many primary environments. The reason they don’t have envir-, as many environments as they might is because bus-, it’s not good business. I’d like you to think about that and see if that agrees with any of your organizations.
Now, it really is important for people to take in facts, weigh them, and make their own decisions about what they think and what they want to do. And I am really urging everybody to do that. But at the same time, I want to point out that the environment in which you function, all the environments, play an enormous role in what you do in these regards, in your decisions, and what attitudes and values you take on.
Furthermore, I’d like to argue that that’s not a bad thing. A lot of people would say, well, you know, everybody—“the individualistic man is the best man.” And to my way of thinking, that must not be true, because it’s impossible.
In fact, it seems to me that it also goes somewhat against what I was reading out of Saint Paul. For example, Saint Paul mentions in another place about being of “one mind and one heart.” That is, that it really is a value to have something in common and agree to be obedient to each other, for example, and do something together, to hold certain things in common, and to be influenced by that.
Now, the reason that I think that this is not so bad, aside from that last observation, is that we would, in fact, as people, make very, very slow progress if we had to make every single decision for ourselves, according to that pattern that I sketched before. In fact, people taken together make a lot of progress. While individual, isolationist, idiosyncratic people will just not seem to make much progress at all in their own personal lives, for example; sometimes it may seem this way. At any rate, I want to claim that people who in fact do have effective environments tend to be more effective people. So I think that it is, in fact, a good thing to be affected by our environments.
On the other hand, we had better know what effects the environments are having on us so that we don’t just simply get caught up with something and go pell mell in a certain direction because everybody else is doing it, and we have to choose our environments rather carefully because they are very important and make a great impact on the way we live and what we think about and what we believe and hold to be of value.
Now, the church has not been unaware of this in the past. We’ve—we really have been holding on to the—sensing the impact that environments have on people. For example, we in the Catholic Church, we have a great deal—a great many Catholic schools, and that’s part of controlling the environment in which your children are growing up. So that one of their basic environments, and schools to which your children go are just, are the—well, the second most important environment in which they probably will ever live, because they are very deeply affected by their peers at the psychological ages where they are taking on values and beliefs.
But the positions that we’ve had with regard to the environments, and the [inaudible] assent to these ideas that I’ve been mentioning before, have manifested themselves mostly in a negative way: that we have basically been trying to keep people out of bad environments instead of really concentrating on what is crucial to making a good environment and making it better. So, for example, we have the ghetto mentality. That is, a mentality against—essentially that we want to keep people out of the vicious world or out of all these bad situations that may destroy it, instead of trying—I’m just emphasizing here that in the past, we’ve sensed the importance of environments, but we’ve only concentrated on using them as a defense mechanism.
Not every environment in which a person lives has to be a Christian environment. For example, it’s not necessary for me to live a full Christian life, to, for example, leave the physics environment in which I work, if that’s not a Christian environment. We can—and I’ll explain why that is later. But it’s not—I can function very well there doing physics, which is just fine. That’s what I expect from them, and that’s what they expect from me, and it works out very well. So I’m not—I want you to understand that I’m not suggesting that we should have just sort of one Christian environment, which, in fact, would be a “super ghetto” or something like that. Later on, I’ll come back to what I think is—in the future talks, anyway: What is the minimal sort of environment, or what kind of environment do we need in order to live a full Christian life?
One of the things that we notice about environments—What time do we quit?
MAN’S VOICE [Possibly Kevin]: 10:30.
PAUL: One of things that I—one can notice about environments is that mere coincidence is not a determining factor in what an environment is, or in the taking place of one. But rather, what is important is the nature of the personal relationships that exist within the coincident—the fact that people have crowded together. For example—I can probably get all my examples from, say, a university situation, somewhat, but I think you can substitute your own situations in this rather easily too, I hope.
For example, the fact that the vast majority of the people who go to Notre Dame—I should also explain this is not meant to be an attack on Notre Dame. [Paul and all laugh.] That’s not the intention at all. Just because the situation in Notre Dame is, I don’t think anything different, really, from the situation throughout the whole Christian world, I believe. That—and I’m really talking about a sociological situation basically here, rather than a moral one. The fact that most of the people who go to Notre Dame, the overwhelming majority of people who go to Notre Dame, are Catholic, does not make it a Catholic institution. It simply makes it a fact that most of—the overwhelming majority of people who go there are Catholic. And people who go there, know that to be true, too.
In fact, that may even be true—I don’t mean this with the same proportions, but it may be true of parishes, for instance: that the fact that people go to the parish does not necessarily make it a Christian parish, or [inaudible]. The thing which it would be in, for example—again to return to Notre Dame, some people can come to Notre Dame because they’re Catholic, and they know that there will be so many other Catholics there. When they get there, the environments in which they find themselves, or in fact place themselves, are such that in almost all the cases, that there is no personal relationship between the individuals in these environments, which is based on the fact that they are Catholic and that they hold in common these beliefs, and that they share these attitudes and build each other up. They’re all Catholic together, but they’re not Catholic with! And the difference is really crucial! There’s a conglomeration of people, but it’s not a Catholic environment. Yet it’s an overwhelmingly Catholic institution.
And that notion of personal relationship at the level of values and attitudes and beliefs is the point I want to really get across. [Inaudible.] . . .
So, let me say, in order for an environment to be Christian, Christianity has to be part of the way that the people in that environment interact.
Now that—for example, you can take that right into the rectories. For example, you may have a group of people living in the rectory who do not relate to each other, even though each individually is relating to God, they’re not relating to each other on the basis of their Christianity! They may be good people doing good things for each other, but they’re not really sharing their faith, say. Suppose that that’s the case, or that that’s the case in some convents, even, too. Or that in the—in families as well, where the question is, you know, what kinds of things do you talk about?
Well in families, it’s really more often the case, at least it used to be the case, that people really did share Christianity and that, for instance, the children would take on the values of the family. That seems to be not necessarily so strikingly the case anymore: that, in fact, families are not necessarily— even Christian families are not necessarily Christian environments, as everybody can sense. And the reason for that is that this element of personal relationship at the level of shared spirituality, shared faith in Jesus Christ as the rock, as the foundation, the cornerstone of that very family, that very environment, is missing . . . in some cases.
Now, the thesis of all these talks is that—the premise is that a Christian has to have an environment in which his life in Christianity—well, he has to have an environment in his life in which Christianity is openly accepted, talked about, and lived.
[Recording ends here.]
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