Joe Perez and The Ministry That Is Not a Ministry

Listening Tour Outcomes, Graduate School Decisions, Ministry Choices

California Institute for Human Science

In the saga announced on this newsletter on January 9, 2022, I proclaimed that I was owning a disowned part of my shadow: a vocation to enter into the mystery of a Spiritual Community (some community, defined somehow, existing or imaginary), one that was Integral. I started a listening tour to find out what integralists want. And like many adventurous stories of old, my tale took some unexpected turns over the past ten months. I’ll tell you a short version.

I used informal surveys in Facebook groups and individual messages to folks active in the Integral community to take the community’s pulse and then summarized my findings for the Integralists group. I don’t know if I reached a representative sample of evolutionary folks or not, but my sense is that the community is caught between a rock and a hard place.

We metamodern integralists want deeper friendships and more meaningful connections, but the intellectual ideas that draw us together have given rise to schisms and arguments that undermine our comity and limit the reach of our work. What I heard is that the community may need to put down its philosophical swords in favor of fostering the social dimension of our lives, making more and healthier real world connections; however, when we look around us today, the community’s energy for coherence seems perhaps to be dissipating.

Frankly, given my ability to be a lightning rod for strong opinions, I’m not sure that I’m the right vehicle for reenergizing the flock’s batteries. I’ve often grown frustrated with the poor quality of interactions in the social media groups we have, so much so that I formed an alternative group in 2016 which rejected Integral Global’s coddling of rampant conspiracy theorizing, misinformation, and political extremism. I’ve made my share of “enemies.”

It’s no wonder that earlier this year the grass started looking greener in another yard. In January, I had a spiritual experience that brought greater spiritual healing with the Roman Catholic Church, and I thought it would blossom into a more substantial relationship. As you may or may not recall from my autobiography, I had left the church as a 21-year-old and rarely visited again, though I kept some of the spiritual teachings (the good ones). I was on the verge of deciding whether or not to join a Jesuit theological graduate school to study theology.

I was admitted to a top school. However, as the reality of accepting admission to grad school approached, I got cold feet. I was certain that my stance as taking a critical but faithful relationship to Christianity was the correct one, but I worried that I could wind up spending years defending that stance, fending off charges of heterodoxy, and wondering if it all was an exercise in futility. Who wants to spend three years constantly on the defensive, wallowing at the margins?

At last, I decided that my dream of writing a graduate dissertation to explore the intersection of Catholic Christianity and Integral philosophy was one that I could defer—probably forever, considering that I am no longer young, so realistically this is my last shot at making a major life change like this one. And then, another grad school opportunity unexpectedly presented itself.

California Dreaming

I joined the student body of the School of Integral Noetic Sciences at California Institute for Human Science part-time beginning in July 2022 (while balancing a full-time job as a technical writer). My program will be a full plate of philosophy and comparative religion with a heap of human sciences and a dash of “anomalous studies”. I’m considering a concentration in Wisdom System Design or perhaps creating my own major in Language and Consciousness.

The road ahead as a student could easily last 3+ years given everything else I’ve got going on. But already, with one-and-a-half courses under my belt, I can see how it is coming together in a holistic way. The professors at CIHS have so far given students a wide latitude to pursue their passions. What I’ve discovered is that when given the choice to write on anything in the world that I want, I most want to write about language and how we usually misunderstand its nature and underuse its potential as a Wisdom System in itself. CIHS is a far better place than most schools for this sort of study.

That’s why I can say that the task of owning a religious vocation from out of the shadows is now well underway, but it will take time to unspool. My greatest shadow is not a dream of ministry deferred, but a dream of creating a unitive philosophical language deferred. I need to give birth to the wisdom that has been emerging within me for more than a decade (unfinished, unpublished, unsung). Until I slay that dragon, I will not find peace anywhere under the sun. If I don’t complete this task or die trying, the shadow of a fragmented soul would haunt me permanently. The saga must continue.

In conclusion, the idea of donning a minister’s robes is one that fascinates (and frightens) me. It feels like a profound vocational choice, and at the same time I need to hold the labels around that choice lightly. There are many ways to bring about social healing in our community and throughout the world. There are many paths for serving the emergence of an integral metamodern evolutionary society. Surely, I’m already on one. Heck, I’m on more than one. They will come together as they need to.