Welcome to the factory, photo and memory by clinker

 7 AM

first day

in the new factory

Rhode Island 1974

                                                                                                                                                            photo by Clinker

The first time I approached the shop, my excitement at a new job - blinded me to certain facts I should have noticed.  

The building was new and modern and painted a cheerful yellow.  Well, that should have warned me right there.  Exactly why was it necessary to paint a factory cheerful yellow?  What was that hiding?  

I should have also noticed the fact that, except for the small guard window looking out to surveil what people were doing in the parking lot, there were absolutely no windows in its huge four acre expanse of a steel frame building.  Oh, there were windows in the front brick section where the white collars worked.  But, in the back, in gigantic box on a concrete slab where things were made - was nary a window to be found.

I should have noticed when I walked into the building from the sunlight into  to the huge, dark expanse.  I felt blind.  I should have taken that as a hint.  I should have noticed the smell in the darkness as my eyes adjusted; the grayness of smoke with whiffs of things inorganic and unnatural hanging chemicals in the lost transparency of the air.  

But I didn’t .

I walked down aisles lit by by glaring but insufficient mercury vapor lamps to find my workstation near the back of the building.  There I found the time clock surrounded by the rack of time cards which would measure us.  I searched among them for one with my name on it.  I think your stomach feels this no matter who you are on the first day.  You know that a week ago or so you answered the add, filled out the application, and you told your little lies in the interview.  You know someone in a white shirt shook your hand and told you you were hired and that you should report on this day before 7 am with your tools and ready to work.  But, there is still a question.  Are you really hired?   Did they really buy it?  Do you really work here?  Do you really have a card with your name on it among all these others?  Can you depend now on taking that first magical step toward a pay check?

I scan the cards sticking their head out of the gray rack, feeling like a youth reading a list of names who made the team.  I feel the eyes of workers who are still strangers to me on my back.  Is it there?  Am I in?   Finally, at the bottom I find it.  Panic eases.  My name is handwritten unlike the others, obviously not yet completely affirmed by the fuller investment of computer payroll integration.  “Clinker - 573.”  So that’s it.  “Clinker - 573.”  I am 573.  I punch the clock.  It is 6:53 and the time clock’s thud and vibration for once feels good at the start of a day and not its end.

The grey machines stand there in a row.  Other workers huddle in small groups talking here and there or are already at their stations puttering with tools to get ready for the beginning.  Here I stand, among them but apart; unassigned to a machine.  I notice the machinist tool chests many have opened and I try not to stand out as I hold my pitifully small fishing tackle box with a few wrenches and screwdrives I have brought from home.  I am as green as new grass, trying to look like I have some possible clue as to what the fuck I am doing. 

But I must learn, and these men, and these grey monster machines are my teachers.

Then comes the hideous noise.  It has become 7 AM.  It is not the romantic steam whistle of yesteryear, but the glaring blaring nasal electric horn.  Switches are thown and the noise begins in earnest as the new shift takes over.  It builds to a whining growl, as tool bits bite into spinning metal, punctuated by the clanging of hammers and crackle and flashing of electric welding arcs in work areas near our own.  

I should have known when I heard the noise.  

An old man walks over in a white open collar shirt.  He is the front line in management’s defense.  “You Clinker?,” he says.  I nod.  “You ran a lathe before before, right?”  I stupidly say “Yes.”   It begins. 

                                                            CLINKER COPYRIGHT 2017

Social Holiness: Prayer and Other Subversive Acts. . .

 An excerpt from:  Social Holiness:  Experiments in prayer and other subversive acts. . . by Duane Clinker, 2006, (unpublished) 

CHAPTER VI: SOCIAL HOLINESS

Then will the eyes of the blind be opened

and the ears of the deaf unstopped.

Then will the lame leap like a deer,

and the mute tongue shout for joy.

Water will gush forth in the wilderness

and streams in the desert.

The burning sand will become a pool,

the thirsty ground bubbling springs.

In the haunts where jackals once lay,

grass and reed and papyrus will grow.

And a highway will be there;

it will be called the Way of Holiness.

Isaiah 35:5-8

Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.  For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.        

Ephesians 6.11-12

Seeking perfect, holistic love an the Wesleyan experience

We seek a world turned right side up.  We seek a world united in every cell and breeze of human consciousness with the Creator's love.  This idea is especially strong in the Wesleyan tradition where it takes on a particular language:  Christian perfection, heart holiness or perfect love.  

It is important not to quibble too much over language, for any language we use provides a poor description of the mystery and wonder of Love.  The finest poet surely fails to describe the beauty of the sun shining on a single grain of sand.  How then shall language, or any other art, fully describe God, God's goodness, or even what we perceive as God's plan with respect to life? Other religions, as well as spiritually inspired agnostics, will have their own language; their own insights and their own blind spots.  Wesleyan language (as any other) can be taken to extremes in which the language itself becomes an object of worship rather than a description.  But there is a direction, a reality, a certain slant of the light in Wesleyan language, which helps describe the hunger for a different world which is our subject. 

John Wesley was a priest in the Church of England who, in the 18th century, became completely focused on how a person could grow closer to God. He founded a movement dedicated to the reform of both church and nation.  The river of the Wesleyan renewal movement of spirit, tradition, theology and practice flows back to the 18th century.  It is fed by historic streams from far earlier times.  The Wesleyan movement forms as one particular branch among the many on the great tree of the church which represents all the traditions, gifts, and perspectives of those who follow Jesus.  

Wesley's gifts were the experience and propagation of "holiness," his passion for the poor, and his organizational genius in small group development.  Wesley and his followers fundamentally challenged the view that sees salvation as some sort of cosmic legal contract in the sky.  For Wesley, religion needed to be felt and experienced as a real, this-world transformation or it was useless.  The hunger for this experience drove the tortured spirit of Wesley, until a simple, profound little experience at a Bible study on Aldersgate Street in London in 1738 changed him.  He "felt his heart strangely warmed" with the assurance that he was indeed loved by God.  This experience became hugely significant in Wesley's, and his followers, emerging understanding of holiness.  But it was not the only gift, and not the only breakthrough for Wesley personally in that same year.

1738 was also the year of Wesley's first experience, (he didn't start the practice), of "field preaching" in England.  That is, he went directly to the workers, the poor, and the outcast, without the benefit of  a pulpit or a consecrated church building, which was then considered the only proper way to proclaim something so holy as the gospel.  In his own words, he consented to be "vile."  When Wesley and others did this, he took the possibility of a new life directly to the common people, and connected with an electric movement that traces its roots back through and beyond Christ, even to the earliest Hebrew prophets.  Wesley and his followers tapped into something deep and a movement exploded.

Wesley also had a powerful organizational sense.  Other preachers would draw bigger crowds, but Wesley always left behind an organized group to carry on.  He also knew music and convinced his brother Charles, a brilliant musician, to write new faith-based music in popular tunes for the masses.  Small "methodist" groups spread among workers and farmers across England and far beyond.  In the groups, people's lives were changed and empowered.  The call went out for a religion that would actually matter in ordinary life..

Through all these experiences and his own intense study of both scripture and history of the church, Wesley became convinced that holiness was the result and goal of the faith:  to be whole; to be perfectly in love with the Christ, the Creator, and the Holy Spirit.  He also became convinced that all real Christianity was social and that there was no such thing as a "solitary Christian."

By Christian perfection, heart holiness or perfect love, Wesley in no sense meant that a human mortal would be perfect in physical form, executed action, or psychological aspect.  He was referring instead to the will of the believer as it centered on the desire for God and for love.  Wesley writes:   

The best, most accurate description of Christian perfection is love.  It is love fully formed in the human heart, soul, and mind.  With Christian perfection the heart is so filled with love that there is no longer room for sin and evil to reside there.  One who is perfected in love is consumed with loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength and with loving neighbor as one's self.  Love is the sole guiding principle and power of life.  Christian perfection is letting "the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus" Philippians 2:5.

"It is," according to Wesley, "a complete inward and outward conformity to our Master."  He writes, 

The goal you are to pursue to the end of time is the enjoyment of God in time and in eternity.  Desire other things only if they help you attain this end. . .   Let love be the end of every word and action.  Let every affection, thought, word, and action be dependent upon this love.  Whatever you desire or fear, whatever you seek or shun, whatever you think, speak, or do, may it be in accord with your happiness in God, which is the sole end, as well as source, of your being.

In perfect love, love finds its original source and center.  It is the love that flows out to all life and creation.  Focusing on that center, that is, that force that we define and experience as God, reorients our perspective.  We begin to love the creation through the love of God.  Balance is restored to life.  No individual (even ourselves or our families), nor any created thing, takes precedence over this Love, because it is the source of love.  As John writes simply, "God is love. 

Love is not a zero sum game.  Loving God first means that more love and more power, not less, becomes available to spread around to others and to all creation.  Loving God means that we can strengthen ourselves to love our families, and our neighbors more fully.  Loving God means change, both within the individual, and within the community in this present life.

Wesley is important to the Jesus movement because he emphasized religion as something that is more than a feel-good ritual, and more than a contract in heaven limited to concerns about the eventual state of one's soul.  Wesley demanded experience now.  

Ye know that all religion which does not answer this end, all that stops short of this, the renewal of our soul in the image of God, after the likeness of him that created it, is no other than a poor farce, and a mere mockery of God, to the destruction of our own soul.  O beware of all those teachers of lies, who would palm this upon you for Christianity! 

Another word for this perfect love and another way of describing our mission in life, is holiness.  The essence of holiness is not perfect rule keeping.  Instead it comes from Hebrew notions of something set apart, something connected with God or God's way or purpose.  In English, its roots go to a sense of wholeness.  When we travel this road we experience hunger for a connection with Love itself that can somehow change us, "sanctify" us, set us apart for life as God intended it,  and make us whole.  

The expression of this hunger in radical commitment to Christ upsets individualized, consumerized, empire-culture.  The satisfying of this hunger for wholeness includes in its range of vision the betterment of our souls (body and mind), and the betterment of the whole world and all of life.  It is a commitment that transcends the old division between personal and social change.  It is both personal and social.  It is especially social in that it begins to build the Kingdom, the realm, the desire of God, right here and now, and not just within but without.  It is a holiness that doesn't get enclosed by church walls but which is open to the world.  It is a holiness that is not legalistic.  It must not define itself in terms of negative rules, but is profoundly centered in love.  It is a holiness that empties us, and yet makes us full of God's joy and power.  It is soul whole-ness, and unfortunately, it is often far removed from our daily church life.  

Effects and limitations of the Wesleyan movement

What was the result of the early methodist small groups and Wesleyan renewal movement in practice?  For Jose Miguez Bonino, the results provide support for the idea that "God intends the creation of a holy people . . . becomes an actual, experienced, visible reality."  He writes of the Wesley period:

It was, indeed, good news for the poor of the land - the miserable masses of uprooted people crowding into the new industrial and mining centers, caught in the crises of the birth of modern industrial capitalism - helpless victims of social anomia.  They were not merely accepted by God, but they could be made anew - given an intrinsic, measurable, effective worth and power. They could become the conscious and active subjects of a new life.  Their works counted; their will was set free.  In a society for which achievement was the meaning of life, here was a realm of the highest possible achievement, accessible to everyone through faith!"

And so it was that ordinary people in the Methodist movement became actors in history, building communities, developing theology, and overcoming.  I believe this is an extremely important point.  It is not enough to discuss the theology, the question that must be asked is what is the result of the theology as practiced at the local level.  

Social holiness means social commitment to God's will for the earth and for humankind.  It means doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God.  It means tending the garden of creation.  It means using brain and spirit and body to open the door to the full and social realization of the Kingdom of God, where the "meek will inherit the earth."  Social holiness means that we act collectively in trusting faith in  God's open agenda of Love.  

Social holiness is not an individual act.

(end of chapter, copyright Duane Clinker 2006 - free to publish for

non-commercial use with credit)