The NEW RELIGIOUS MODE (NRM)
The NRM is an early framework in which the EI explored, mapped and celebrated the interior lives of people.
Research was done to prepare people for life in the midst of increasing global crises of the 1960’s, which shattered the composure of human beings sensitive to life in a new global reality. The NRM dynamics and practices are seen in “the great monastic movements in history” who were not going aside from the world. They saw society going one way to its destruction and they decided it had to go another way. They threw their lives into the breach of history to create a style of life that would do that. Nothing has ever bent the course of history except a style of life. They were missional. I would like to remind you of the Dominicans, the Benedictines, and the Jesuits in terms of their fantastic secular causes that brought them into being.
It was in the midst of this that the great classical language of the orders came into being. It was there that their vows were formed, the vow of poverty, the vow of chastity, and the vow of obedience. Each one of these was pointing to a stumbling block that would keep the mission from coming off. This was not some kind of an ascetic superimposition of something upon life. This understanding can also be found in other cultures and religions across the centuries.
The New Religious Mode re-contextualizes traditional religious language in a secular context. The Ecumenical Institute engaged research, grounding in everyday experience, the classical categories of Christian traditional language: The Solitaries ( Meditation, Contemplation, Prayer), The Journeys(Knowing, Being, Doing) and The Corporates (Poverty, Chastity, Obedience).
Looking at the nine boxes: the corporates are at the top, the journeys are in the center, and the solitaries are at the bottom. There are individual charts for each state of the journey as tools to help bring self-consciousness to our interior reality, to illuminate our consciousness, and to be a symbol of the fact that everyone is on a journey.