What We Do

Section I

The Charge, and the Shape of the Work

People arrive at this page expecting a list of programs, because that is what a ministry's "what we do" page is for, and we will provide one, because the shape of a ministry is part of the cover and we keep the cover in good repair. But the honest answer is smaller than a program list and older than any of the programs.

We were given one charge, once, and the Statement of Faith records it: keep the memory of the old ways until the stars come round, and be the hands that open the tomb when they do. Everything on this page is that sentence. It comes apart into three verbs, and a chapter that is doing all three is a chapter in good standing whether or not it has ever run a single event with a sign-up sheet. We hear. We keep. We wait. The waiting is most of it, and the waiting is the part no one puts in a brochure, so we have put it in the middle of this one.

Section 2

Hear

The memory reaches whom it reaches. We do not manufacture the reaching, and this is the first thing that makes us strange to the ministry across the quad, whose whole method is manufacture — the card table, the sign-up sheet, the four spiritual laws. We keep no such apparatus. The founders considered a sign-up sheet the one thing they would not borrow, and fifty years on we still do not proselytize, canvass, or knock. A person hears the old sound under the fluorescent hum or does not, and our work is only to be findable by the ones who do.

So what we do, under this verb, is stay reachable. We keep an information table at the fall midway with a hand-lettered sign, the same as 1974. We keep a public gathering that anyone may attend, announced in advance. We keep a website shaped like a joke, because a thing shaped like a joke is armored and a stranger who laughs at the shirt has done our work without incurring any debt to us. None of this recruits. All of it makes sure that the person already listening knows where the door is. We are a lighthouse, not a net. The distinction is the whole of our public conduct.

What arrives, arrives in sleep, and the chapters send it in. The Reader of Dreams reads what is submitted, the Correlation compares it against everything else on the shelf, and most of it is nothing — which is the finding, and which is why we can tell when it is not.

Section 3

Keep

This is the visible work, and it is gloriously dull — the ordinary weekly life of a chapter, the folding-chairs-and-minutes of it, is described on the page about what a cultist is, and we will not repeat it here. What that page describes as a member's routine, this page names as the organization's method: the dullness is the machinery, and here is what the machinery is for.

We keep four things, and only the first of them is a meeting.

We keep the record. The Archive is the actual center of the chapter, whatever the constitution names as the center — because a cult that remembers by relying on the people who happen to be alive has already begun forgetting. What the members hold in their heads, the Archive holds when the heads are gone. Most of it is filing. Filing is how a memory outlives the rememberer.

We keep the house. There is a clubhouse on Elm Street on a lease longer than anyone signing it will live, and the keeping of that building — the roof, the rent, the wax-sealed envelope nobody opens — is itself a rite, though it looks exactly like property management. The building must be standing when its current tenants are not. That is the entire reason the lease runs the length it does.

We keep the calendar — the sky, rather than the page. We gather when the stars say, not when the almanac does, which is why the high feast lands on the solstice and not on anyone's convenient weekend, and why the seven Days of Darkness in December are the year's largest keeping. A chapter that lets its December lapse has lost more than a party. What is actually kept in December is described where such things are described, which is not here.

And we keep the silence — the part of the work done by not doing it. Some of what we hold is held precisely by leaving it off the record, and the space where it is missing is itself the entry. A chapter that has learned which things go unwritten is a chapter in good standing. That is the hardest keeping to teach and the last a member learns.

Section 4

Wait

Here is the program no other campus organization offers: we wait, on a horizon none of us will personally reach, and we have organized the waiting so that it survives the waiters.

Waiting is not idleness. The ministry across the quad keeps a proverb about idle hands and what becomes of them, and uses it to warn its people. We keep the same proverb and warn nobody. Idle hands are Cthulhu's playthings. Ours are not idle, and the Charge is specific about whose they are: be the hands that open the tomb when they do.

So here is what the hands do while the stars take their time.

We buy the world back. Estate sales, a dead collector's shelves, a permit and a van and four undergraduates on a coastline in August. The minutes record acquisitions. What is being acquired is pre-agrarian — the world before anyone worked out how to keep a field, which is the change everything else was built on. Most of it is worthless and correctly identified as worthless, which is what a collection is: the nine hundred wrong objects you handle to learn the shape of the right one.

We hold nights that do not behave. Where, and when, and what, this page will not say; the calendar above gave you the dates it was willing to give.

And we are not neutral about the arrangement we live under. The freedom the Statement of Faith describes is not a thing we intend to be surprised by, and some of the work is aimed at it directly rather than waiting on it. A chapter doing only the waiting has misread a sentence with two verbs in it.

The Dean has the folding chairs. We have the receipts.

The hardest thing we ask of a member is not belief — belief is easy and the door swings on it — but patience across a span of time that will outlast him, the discipline of keeping something faithfully for a payoff you have accepted you will not see. Most faiths promise their members the ending in their own lifetime, because most faiths know that a promise past the grave is a weak recruiting tool. We make no such promise. We tell every member plainly that the stars may not turn for another thousand years, that he will keep the memory and hand it on and die with the tomb still shut, and that this is not failure but the assignment working exactly as designed. The ones who can hold that are the ones we keep. The ones who cannot — who reach for the freedom before the stars have turned — have not sinned. They have deserted the Watch, and the Watch is the only thing we ask of anyone.

So the waiting has an architecture. We recruit no one but we replace everyone: a chapter outlives its every member by teaching the next cohort to keep what this one kept. We maintain the Archive so the memory survives the rememberers. We keep the lease into the next century because the building must be standing when its tenants are not. Everything we do that looks like an institution — the minutes, the filing, the dues, the careful boring continuity — is the machinery of outlasting ourselves. That is what the waiting is: not sitting still, but building something that keeps sitting still after you are gone.

Section 5

The Wider Body

A word about scale, since the page has so far described one chapter and the sign above the door says something larger.

Campus Crusade for Cthulhu is a national organization, and it is run from Arkham — the Alif Chapter is the original and the seat, and "national" is not a thing above us but a thing we are the head of. We do not advertise this, for the same reason the whole site is shaped the way it is: the organization that looks like the national office should never be the one that is. So there is an International body that sends press releases, keeps a letterhead, and answers the phone as though it were in charge, and we are content to let it, and it does not speak for us. When you read that we maintain no national office, read it the way the founders meant it: we maintain no national office that you would recognize as one.

At the scale above the chapter, the work takes forms a clubhouse does not. We keep company with the law. The organization maintains cordial relations with police departments and sheriffs' offices at the municipal, county, state, and federal levels, and gives freely to their charitable foundations, their benevolent associations, and their annual balls. We have found that a religion which is generous to the people who might otherwise take an interest is a religion left to keep its calendar in peace. We recommend the practice, and we note, because it is true, that it is entirely legal. Enforcement is their office and not ours; we do not assist it and we do not obstruct it, and we have never been asked to explain the distinction because it has never come up. It is not our business.

We serve in the armed forces. The ministry supports servicemembers and their families on installations in many countries. We are franker than most faiths about why the work suits us: the profession asks the faithful to end lives at the lawful order of the state, without hatred and without hesitation, as a duty and a discipline — and there is no more honest school for the temper we hope to cultivate, nor a more sanctioned one. We are grateful to the servicemembers among us. We do not waste their training.

We keep certain relations on the coast. There is an Order, older by the sea, whose oaths are not ours and whose ceremonies we do not share. In public we hold it at arm's length, and we do not answer questions about Innsmouth, and both of those remain true. It does not follow that two houses which keep the same Priest never keep anything together. We say no more than that, and the reader who requires more said is the reader we are declining to say it to.

What we do not do is chase. When a stranger takes the pamphlet and leaves, we let them leave. You found us, or we found you, and if neither has happened this page has done you no harm.

Section 6

The Cats

The organization operates more than a hundred and sixty no-kill cat shelters across the United States, and this is the one thing we do that has no second meaning, and it is the only sentence on the website of which that is true.

There is an old town in the fragments where the killing of a cat is forbidden by law. We did not invent that law and we do not enforce it, having no jurisdiction over anyone's cottage. We simply keep it, the way we keep other old instructions whose reasons have worn off but whose wisdom has not: where the memory says no man may kill a cat, we run a shelter instead. It is cheaper than the alternative the fragment describes, and the fragment is clear about who ends up on the floor.

The doctrine under it is older than the cult and older than the town. The cat is a cryptic animal, close to things men do not see and in no hurry to explain them, kin to the lions and to whatever the desert remembers, and it has looked at every terrible thing we keep in the Archive with precisely the interest it shows a closed door it did not want opened anyway. A dog needs you to be good; a dog reads your face for permission and calls the reading love. A cat needs nothing, reads nothing, grants nothing, and is completely happy — the one creature that has already achieved the composure in the face of the truth that we are still, on our best nights, only rehearsing. That is not a pet. That is a senior. We keep the shelters because a house that means to inherit the earth ought to be kind to the tenants who were keeping their counsel here first, and will be keeping it after, unbothered either way.

We love the cats. Make of it what you like. They already have.

Questions