Reformation of the church consists in discipline of the clergy.

At the end of this exploration is a discussion of what is done to reform the clergy and who does it. The Who is simple: only Sages have authority and competence necessary to reform clergy. The How is also simple but not to relate. The reasons for this are several. First, circumstances are unique and require unique treatments. Second, when clergy need reformation, as they do today, the problem is not one or two bad apples. The problem is a whole crop diseased and spoiled. So, instead of excising one or two individuals, the orchard itself has to be cleansed and restored. The trees, not the individual fruits, are the problem. Therefore, third, education, not excision or destruction, is required. And, fourth, the process of education is lengthy, not quick. So that, fifth, Sages are always looking not towards fixes but towards changes that are permanent. This means, Sages are looking to correct the whole mess through broad, slow but inexorable activities. They do not have the blood lust that laity develop towards the clergy, who have usually savaged them physically and emotionally as well as spiritually. Sages are aware that getting rid of an individual is not going to help because behind that one are only more of the same.

The orchard, not the individual fruits, is the problem. This is the reality that Sages are aware of and the one they treat. Their activities will not satisfy those wanting a rapid effusion of blood.

Clergy today have garnered for themselves a harvest of dislike and contempt and wish for their removal, harm, or reformation which is as understandable and seemingly deserved as it is also unrealistic. The moving and removing of clergy is endemic to our self-righteous, self-centered society. The laity are truly getting what they deserve, which in this case and for some time futurely is a batch of men and women as clergy who are faithless, loveless, ignorant, ill-disciplined, opinionated, truculent, peevish and just plain stupid. 1

Into this mutual dis-admiration society a Sage or Sages must bring order, justice and a genuine thirst for spiritual advancement. No one can have spiritual thirst until they have been touched by the hand of a living master. This is a truism which those who have not been so touched, at least, bitterly know. In effect, reformation of the church is the persons of Sages. So let us examine some particulars.

Clergy engage in seven types of improper activity:

Drunkenness

Giving Undeserved Absolution

Having Insufficient or Improper Education

Venality

Breach of Confidence

Desertion of Station

Apostasy

The operation of these improprieties produces the following situation. Clergy know they have nothing to give the laity, but they see that the laity does not read this fact and keep coming to them as if they do have something to give. So, the clergy develop contempt for the laity and regard them as fools. In this situation, the laity incurs soteriological harm if not disaster and the clergy puff up with dæmonic hauteur.

Discipline of the clergy aims to clarify their intellects and purify their hearts by uprooting these seven improprieties from their personalities. When the character of the clergy is just and wholesome, all beings can be happy and spiritual progress in the society is steady and secure.

Drunkenness

Consumption of alcoholic beverages and the discharge of clerical responsibility are incompatible. There are no exceptions to this rule, no extenuating or mitigating circumstances. If wine has to be used for prasad (Eucharist), it can be the non-alcoholic variety.

The so-called Pauline texts that support the drinking of wine are spurious.

Clerical abstinence in this area is especially important today, when alcohol is destroying our population.

Giving Undeserved Absolution

The old word for this was indulgences. The practice of giving indulgences was an occasion for the Church Reformation of the 16th Century.

The ways of giving undeserved absolution are many. The gist is, acceptance or accommodation of an intent to harm.

The following activities are evidence of intent to harm:

• divorce
• abortion
• homosexuality
• deforestation
• child labor
• pornography
• restless travel
• rapacious commercial activity
• self-serving professional conduct
• gossip
• exploitation of the weak or ignorant
• suppression of inquiry
• begging
• attenuation of education
• chauvinism
• xenophobia
• adulteration of foodstuff
• clerical presence as a combatant on a field of battle

Clerical acceptance or accommodation of these activities constitutes giving undeserved absolution.

Without contrition, absolution is undeserved and giving it is a sin. Undeserved absolution -- which is no absolution -- deceives all concerned. It is a cruel hoax.

Absolution is deserved by persons who are contrite for specific errors. It is deserved, also, by persons who are primally contrite for a general disposition to error that seems uncontrollable and ineradicable apart from Divine Intervention, which is earnestly sought.

Contrition itself is enough penance.

Having Insufficient or Improper Education

Clergy train themselves from earliest childhood. They are to the manner born, called before conception. Adolescent or post-adolescent calls are spurious. Most clergy do not recall a call because they, like most humans, do not remember their condition pre-conception.

There are no mid-life calls to become clergy. Anyone who claims to have such is a burglar. They are looking at laity as victim and vestments as disguise. Their ministry is a charade.

The education of clergy is unique. Clergy are the teachers of everyone else. They must grasp all subjects, from skilled labor to business and farming to warfare and government to medicine and philosophy.

Clerical education takes many years. It cannot be accomplished in the brief span of college and graduate school. Schweitzer mentioned that clergy are ready to start their adult career at about the age of thirty years.

Now, formal schooling may occupy a fraction of this time while self-schooling occupies much it. The correct mix of formal-and self-schooling is relative to the student, who, by adolescence, deserves to structure that mix according to their own taste.

Clergy have three qualities:

Regeneration

Belief

Call

Regeneration means they are twice born, first of their natural parents and second of a Living Master or of God, as can occur in the sacrament of baptism.

Belief means that they live the Faith that produces the religion they represent. A Faith is a stochastic structure that is used to regulate the body, the mind and the spirit.

Faith is a condition of life. It is not a subscription to a set of beliefs or dogmas. Faith is the condition of life in which one relies absolutely and completely for everything, including life itself, on God. A person of faith can be recognized by the fact that they are always ready to drop into the lap of death. This is the sign of reliance on God. Faith is willful and fulsome and blissful resignation to the Will of the Master. Faith is a condition of life, not subscription to a set of beliefs.

For example, the Christian Faith is:

• Repetition of the Name of Jesus, Effecting Salvation
• Crucifixion of the Ego, Yielding Bliss
• Awareness that All Life is One
• Taking the Bible as Normative Literature
• Reception of Scripture, Tradition and Hagiobiography as Authority

Christian clergy live the Christian Faith. Some clergy live the Faith that produces the religion they represent while also living other Faiths as well. This is a rare phenomenon, but it exists and is entirely salutary.

Call means they are predestined by God to fulfill the responsibility of clergy, to teach all creatures the modes of earning peace.

There are four callings: Teacher, Ruler, Producer, Laborer. The calling a person has is the best soteriological opportunity they can get. For example, a person called as a laborer is going to have the quickest, easiest means of earning peace (Salvation) by discharging whole-heartedly and efficiently the responsibilities of that calling. Similarly for a person called as a lawyer, one called as a businessman, one called as a soldier, etc.

The callings are not superior or inferior relative to one another. They are incomparable. For each person, the one they have is superior in the sense that it is the best for their soteriological welfare. But the calling one has is not superior to someone else's calling. Relative to another, one's calling is incomparable. So, who can tell whether one person is more important than another? Truly, no one can because no one is. All four callings are equally important and necessary. Society cannot run without any one of them.

This phenomenon involves the wider phenomenon of Grace Itself. So let us say a few words about Grace as it relates to the four calling.

Grace is specific and personal: the circumstances of each person's birth are the best for that person's Destiny. Who can declare that some are less fortunate than others? Does God have favorites? Is it not blasphemy to imply that He does? Each person is the architect of their own fate. So, who can be hard-hearted, saying, "They get what they deserve," or flippant, saying, "God is surely with them."?

Usually, birth is a species of punishment. However, it is a redemptive punishment, an effect of Grace. This is why we delight in birth, taking it for good fortune (as it is), even though we feel it as punishment (which it also is).

Punishment is good fortune? Yes, punishment is evidence of care. Care is love, and love is good fortune. Who goes unpunished goes unloved, and who goes unloved is down on his luck.

This is a little peek at Grace Itself, how It operates.

Clergy have the unique responsibility of teaching all persons. They must master all the callings because they have to teach them all. The burden of this requirement is very heavy indeed. But it is inescapable. Clergy are certifiably ignorant, as they are today, when they do not know anyone else's calling.

Clergy must master all the realms of knowledge, all the callings. They do this by seeking the one thing that, when known, all else is known. This is their calling.

Venality The body comprises five senses: hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell. These are produced by the five Elemental Principles: Ether, Air, Fire, Water and Earth, respectively. Venality is catering to the senses.

The Elemental Principles also produce the seven virtues and the seven vices: love/hatred, faith/fear, chastity/lust, cheerfulness/anger, generosity/jealousy, humility/pride, tolerance/tyranny. Venality is relishing the vices.

Doctors are prone to anger, lawyers to hatred and clergy to lust. Individuals are called to and enter upon these professions in order to conduct the spiritual discipline of removing these blemishes, to which they are prone, from their hearts.

Clergy who are searching for God are not happy with their spouse and are likely to slip into affairs. Clergy who have found God are happy with their spouse and impervious to the blandishments of others'.

Breach of Confidence This impropriety is known to exist among doctors and lawyers. It exists also among clergy. However, while there are both intra-and extra-professional procedures for stanching and repairing breaches of confidence by doctors and lawyers, there is only extra-professional redress for breaches of confidence by clergy. And such means as there are are few, tenuous and desultory. Today, a petitioner against clerical breach of confidence likely will get no satisfaction at all. Clergy rely on the "separation" clause of the United States' Constitution to shield them from scrutiny, evaluation and punishment. This is why they promote that clause and its application.

Right now, there is no redress within the clerical profession for wrongs done by a clerical professional. This is a sign that Kali Yuga -- the Iron Age, when dæmonic tendencies are held as human and human tendencies are scoffed at as ludicrous -- is in full presence. Most clergy today, among all religions, are not clergy. They are dæmonic personalities that masquerade as clergy. And there is no effective means within the profession to correct the mal-and mis-feasance they revel in. Not even federal appointed officials are so immune from review as clergy are. The orchard, not the individual fruits, is the problem. 2

The victims of breach of confidence by clergy are numerous and, often, unawares.

Among Christian clergy today, irreverence towards persons, stories, icons, buildings, traditions, artistic creations and aspirations associated with a Faith and its religion(s) is a species of breach of confidence. This sort of irreverence is so pandemic, so enormous and so unrelieved by shame or penance that it merits the evaluation, Hooliganism. That hooligans fill our pulpits and manage our altars is, again, a sign of Kali Yuga.

Proper clergy revere everything and everyone, equally. They see God in all, as all. They are aware of being accountable for every thought, word and deed. They understand that God sees all, even before it occurs! Clergy abide in the transcendental terror this awareness invokes ... that there are no secrets.

There is an illustration. A dog belonged to a cruel master. The master derived pleasure from hearing the dog shriek during frequent beatings. Finally, the dog called to God for succor. Immediately, He appeared and offered to punish the master for his cruelty.

But the dog declined the offer and, instead, told a story.

He had been a priest attached to a temple and had gotten birth as a dog as punishment for mismanagement of temple property. He asserted that proper management of temple property is next to impossible and that mismanagement of it is a sin so serious that it incurs the punishment he now had.

So he asked God to give his master birth as a priest because in that estate he was certain to mismanage temple property, incur the punishment of birth as a dog and then suffer as he, the dog, now did. This fate, he declared, would recompense his master's cruelty. God agreed with the dog's analysis and granted his request.

This story rings very true, of course, and it forces the entirely reasonable question, "Then why would anyone want to be clergy, or dare to think they could come through clean?" The answer is, they have to do it, and, it is not so impossible as one might think. Remember the plaint of Jeremiah, 20:9. This is the lot of clergy, and for them it is soteriologically beneficial. Clergy have no other raison d'être than to represent and advance the Prophetic Imperative. Their condition is far from untenable, although it sometimes seems to them, and often to others, that it is.

Desertion of Station

• Not wearing clerical apparel in order to go unrecognized
• Declining to think, speak or practice the clear counsel of Scripture, Tradition and the Hagiobiography
• Permitting unqualified individuals to conduct the Magisterium (teaching function)
• Instructing from irreligious or sacrilegious curricula
• Refusing to refute heresy, condemn immorality or expel apostasy
• Giving more attention, and other resource, to the foibles of adults, most of whom are unredeemable, than to the formation of children, who still have a chance
• Preferring fad and frivolity to Truth and Inquiry
• Having attachment to ephemera
• Engaging in restless travel
• Appearing on a field of battle as a combatant

These activities constitute desertion of station. During this Kali Yuga, clergy are engaging in them constantly. For most, there is nothing else that they do.

Apostasy To denounce the Faith one has affirmed, to stand aside from the loyalty one has announced, to go back on one's word regarding one's espousal of spiritual loyalty -- this is apostasy. Apostasy is treason in the spiritual realm. Those who affirm reliance on God and then turn aside to rely on what is not God -- usually their own vagaries, which, swelled with pride, they read as capacities -- are apostates. Apostasy is the most serious condition a human being can develop. It is also the most dangerous.

Apostates are not neutral: they assault representatives and representations of their former commitment.

Many clergy are apostates. Sometimes, what ends up as apostasy began as desertion of station that grew so habitual it underwent qualitative transformation and became apostasy. Sometimes, apostasy occurs because fate dictates that a dæmonic aspect (vestigial animal trait) overwhelm the human nature of a personality and falsify its loyalty. In this case, the individual appears, and is, insane. Most often, however, apostasy is occasioned by fear of the opinion of others, that is, by greed and envy. Greed and envy weaken character. They make an individual supine and eventually suffocate them.

Apostate clergy are not clergy. Some remove themselves from clerical responsibility. Most do the work of the church, not believing a word of it. They conjure the devil, developing contempt for the laity and hatred for religious, 3 whom they especially fear because these see their disposition.

According to the tradition, which distills the experience of elders, apostates are impenitent and very dangerous, the embodiment of bad company.

W h o and H o w ?

Who disciplines the clergy? How is the church reformed? Certainly not by the clergy! Leverage is required.

Wisdom and ability,

capacity and power ...

... these are the leverage that is required. They are qualities concretized as specific persons, Saints and Sages, Who reside in monasteries and produce religions. Saints and Sages are saturated with insight and force sufficient to reform the church. Besides Avathars, they are the only personalities so endowed.

Lay and clerical conclaves can discharge executive responsibility, but they cannot plan ecclesiastical affairs. They have no authority to decide the course the Church will take. Planning, which is initiation and control, requires a nexus of authority that only Saints and Sages have.

Saints and Sages reform the church.

They discipline the clergy.

How do they do it? Well, that is up to them, their prerogative. However, we can say about their decisions that they:

take account of time and circumstance,

cannot be predicted or foreseen,

do not hew to a pattern,

exemplify the plenary authority which they embody,

and are fresh, unique, unambiguous and correct.

Saints and Sages do not call attention to themselves. They come, accomplish their task and return. They are the embodiments of insouciant celerity and limpid charm.

The thoughts of a Saint or Sage, surcharged with wisdom, take effect no matter where they reside.

What can laity do to discipline the clergy? Make their own life a model pilgrimage. Shun attachments. Practice quiet. Be saturated with love. Make the mind hard as diamond and the heart soft as melted butter. Keep the heart and house clean in order to deserve the company of Saints, Sages and Avathars of the Lord. 4

The church is not essential for salvation. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (Outside the church there is no salvation.) is a saying not true. Like all things material, the church is subject to birth and decay, life and disease. Reformation, when it comes, is effective for a brief span. Then, decay sets in and runs its course.

Do not get entangled in this never-ending round. Do not think that God is always wanting the church reformed, pristine and fresh. Far from it! He has use for decay and putrefaction just as much as He does for stalk, flower and fruit. A seed undergoes putrefaction as a condition of fulfilling its nature. Decay is nourishment for life. Misery compels us to concentrate on Him. Grief is the bait He uses to hook us ....

For Saints and Sages, misery and grief are neither more noteworthy nor less desirable than happiness and good cheer are. Indeed, they petition Him for grief because with it they get His consoling Presence, than which nothing is sweeter nor more auspicious.

The church is conditionally, not ultimately, important. It has a use at one time and not at another. It exists for some people and not for others. The well have no need for a hospital.

The important thing is that the mind be immersed in Him and that faith in Him be unshakable. When the mind is saturated in the thought of God, and when faith in Him is steady, the personality has equanimity ... which is peace. This is the Goal.

It is good to be born in the church but not to die in it. We must travel beyond all boundaries of reason and the mind and emerge in the Absolute.

The last Church Reformation was driven by Habakkuk 2:4.