The big highlight of our worship and observance this Holy Week (the Week before Easter Sunday) was watching our parish pastor, Louis J. Richard wash the feet of my disabled oldest surviving brother – Simon Peter Emmanuel Summers. He has Prader-Wili Syndrome and was one of twelve parishioners whose feet were washed in the Holy Thursday evening Church service that especially commemorates Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist in the Last SUpper and other things he did that night including washing his disciples feet. It was a wonderful ceremony streamed live and re-streamed on the Saint Mary Magdalen site. It was a special highlight in the holidays. On March 28, 2024 we celebrated the start of the Paschal Triduum of this Holy Season. The Triduum is the peak and summation of the Catholic liturgical year. The Triduum joins Lent and Easter. It is made up of the Holy Thursday Mass which has readings from the Bible that focus on the first Eucharist at the Lord’s Supper that was the Last Supper. Then there is a ceremonial washing of the feet. In addition to this the rest of the Mass commemorates the events of Holy Thursday and the Last Supper all the time. Then the blessed bread thatCatholics call the Blessed Sacrament and believe fulfills Jesus’s words that “This is My Body” is at the center of every Mass, But in Holy Thursday’s Mass this Blessed Sacrament is marched from the Sacramental Altar that is at the center of every mass to a special altar of repose. The usual altar of the tabernacle and the sacramental altar are both stripped of all ornamentation and usual things of beauty until they are decorated again for Easter Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday Night. On March 29, 2024 Good Friday, Clara and I were attending Good Friday services at the Church. This was a very moving service contemplating the Passion, Crucifixion and Death of Jesus Christ. Then on returning back in the early evening we sat out on our patio and enjoyed the flowers, plants, birds and weather that mark the Spring. The seasons of the year have a big impact on my life. They always have had an impact.
It was in the summer that we arrived in Augusta, Georgia in 1976. It was a time when it was a joy to swim, a time when kids were out of school and a time when we could get hot and uncomfortable easily but also when the Georgia heat and humidity were noticeably less hot and humid than the heat and humidity of South Louisiana. All of those factors impacted what our arrival among the people of Alleluia Community were like. We lived in transition in those days – but this transition happened joyfully, more or less..
The arrival in Faith Village and the Alleluia Community was the arrival in pecan grove where a village had been built to house married servicemen in the Korean War. The military had sold the land and houses of the village and it had gone through a number of stages in demography and economics. A group of Christians from all denominations, the Charismatic Renewal and thePentecostal movement had come together and produced ecumenical prayer groups around the world. In some of them there was a call to live a more intense Christian community experience. Alleluia Community was one of those communities that formed in those days. Alleluia Community had come to occupy Faith VIllage through the mechanism of some families buying clusters of homes and renting neighboring homes to community members, while others rented from existing landlords and still others bought homes only for themselves to live in the voluntary association of the community had come to occupy most of the houses in the old military village. FInally, though other clusters of people lived in other neighborhoods in the community and some in Faith Village just happened to live there the Community had its center in the village and the village was largely dominated by Alleluia Community life. Crosses or Christian symbols had been put up on many of the corners where one entered the village.In the center was a parklike space with playgrounds and a common fenced area for small kids. It also had large tires sunk in the ground. Prayer and worship was offered out in the open under the trees on a regular basis. There was fellowship and worship shared by those who had chosen to be neighbors. Kids swarmed about playing and visiting. It was summer and school was out and the kids were of all ages.
We were invited to stay in the guest house for the residential community in Faith Village. It was called the Alleluia Retreat Center and generally the ARC (pronounced like arc in arc light or Noah’s Ark). The Covenant Community process ( Alleluia was among a good number forming at the time from among the most committed members of the larger prayer groups of the Charismatic Renewal and the Pentecostal Movements that were seeming to remake much of the life of the Christian churches in the United States and elsewhere. There was a lot of sharing and some inspiration form the first community described in the Acts of the Apostles which tells of the lives of the first Critians after Pentecost, who held all things in common, devoted themselves to the Breaking of the Bread and the Prayers and submitted themselves to Apostolic Authority. However, although all of these communities were inspired by that first Jerusalem community – these communities practiced subsidiarity more that those first Christans (by the way the other Christian communities planted across the world by the Apostles never replicated that first way of life either. And that is evident even in the EPistles of the New Testament) . This subsidiarity meant that they were believers that the economic and social responsibility rested first with the individual, then with the family and then with Covenant Community. Private Property was respected. However in Alleluia there was more apparent economic equality than in many other communities because the houses built by the military in the Korean War were virtually identical. People decorated, renovated and even added on to these homes – but basically everyone in Faith VIllage lived in the same kid of house.
The other thing that distinguished these communities was that most of them had definite lay leadership. Few had Catholic Priests among the leaders called “Coordinators” Where a Protestant Ordained minister became a coordinator they were carefully made to separate the two roles. Eventually most of the Covenant Communities would confederate into either the Sword of the Spirit or the Fellowship of the Covenant Communities. But in 1976 it was not clear where this adventure was headed. It was clear that their way of life was extraordinary in many ways. For me it was not hard to see that the life of this community had a great deal to offer. Among many other things, I found it joyful to lose myself in worship. But I noticed that few of the kids my age were as enthusiastic as I was about the shared prayer. Many were more devout than most kids I knew but in the communities of the poor and those who ministered to the poor in El Paso it seemed like there was more enthusiasm for the faith. In the villages in Tonga, children generally seemed closer to their parents in involvement in choirs and such things. Among my irreligious friends in various places the lack of religion was much the same for children and adults. Here I sensed that there was a working out of the way to bring the next generation into the connections their parents had made. But the transgenerational process was not yet settled. In 1981 the community members would all contribute funds to purchase the Fleming School on nearby Peach Orchard Road. It was on 11 acres of land and had three school buildings and a gymnasium. At the time it was being renovated I would end up spending a few days there helping to demolish some of the worst maintained internal structures so that they could be replaced. But when we were there in 1976 we were to help renovate and repair other structures but there was no community school. The children lived with a real tension between the values and way of life in Alleluia Community and the values and way of life in the schools that they attended. It was summer and I was not truant but I was starting to feel like I was becoming someone who did not really have any chance of finding a home in a school. But although I really did think about all of these things, I was also happy to mingle with a bunch of good Christian kids. Some of whom had problems that I could relate to as well.
I had “visions” at prayer meetings and mass in those days. Not simply imaginative prayers and also not full on hallucinations or apparitions but rather a kind of visual insight in prayer that was practiced in the Charismatic renewal. I also spoke with several adults who were acknowledged to have a gift of prophecy. I did believe God was speaking to me and what I meant is hard to describe.what that meant but I will work on it and harder topics over the course of the rest of this book. While we were at Alleluia Community I pulled out a notebook from my family’s meager possessions. I am not sure the exact type of paper or other aspects of the physical notebook. I can still see, in my mind’s eyes, the content of the notebook in the form of writings and drawing. I can see the pages and the shape the document took now. There were brief bullet points without the bullets, paragraphs and references.
But I remembered when it had been created. My father had a very long vision, before we left for the missions. The Vision is described in the twelfth chapter of Mom’s book Go You Are Sent: An Incredible Odyssey of Faith is called (appropriately enough) “The Vision”. On pages 122 to 123 of the 1995 edition of the book the vision is described. I had looked at it then and I looked at it before shortly after it was created. There were little things in it that seemed to me to have been fulfilled in our lives and other prophecies as well from those times when Dad had the vision. Some people in Alleluia were certainly drawn to our intense family spirituality. But the truth is that as I slipped the book back that day I was aware that there were prophecies in it about me and that I saw the meaning of those prophecies differently than my father did. In the vision there was a segment where he saw me as a human boy, as a sort of icon or even a doll and as a kind of gloriously resurrected figure. I worried about the way he found it easy to accept it might mean me dying and going to heaven as a child in our first years of mission. But I also felt that in fact it resembled an experience I had had a number of times in which I fell asleep and viewed my sleeping body below me in the night and moved out into other realms as a glowing figure.
I was to experience these strange dreams several times during the month we lived in Alleluia. But I did not share those dreams. A great deal of what I talked about was the trips we made to Fort Gordon. I loved swimming there. I loved swimming anywhere. We had a system where we gathered rocks as we swam out to a big floating platform in a deeper part of one of the lakes. Then we stacked the rocks on the platform. The rocks were big and heavy enough that when we had filled our lungs and dived off the platform they would speed our way down to the depths of the dark lake and slightly muddy waters. We would then swim round in the depths and on the way up use the chain from the permanent anchor to the platform. We could see well as we got close and would push off from the chain to get near the edge and pull ourselves up. Some of the boys joined or were on the crews where Dad and I often worked together on renovation projects. However we also played together on the equipment. I had broken bones, been X-rayed and in casts. I had lots of other injuries. I knew the difference. We were playing King of the mOuntain on the big tractor tires and I fell off and heard a snap and felt a very distinct pain. Several kids commented on the snapping sound. I was helped to a Coordinators house and there was examined by several people with some medical training who thought It was broken , I was in agonizing pain and just in a broken arm kind of way. Others had prayed for me. But when my Dad arrived he prayed for me and anointed me with oil and I was instantly free of pain. I sensed that nobody could fully relate to the experience that I had known. Sme who had been sure they had heard and seen evidence of a broken arm were enow wondering if I was putting on some kind of show. Others just figured I had made a mistake in reporting my pain. Those who believed it was a miracle still found it hard to relate to me.
We had not employment there for funds. We visited friends who had a ministry in a nearby town in South Carolina. But nothing was settled. We had been in touch with Dad’s brother Jim and his wife Kathy who lived in VIrginia. They invited us to housesit after visiting them for a while. We began to discuss and pray about that and soon it seemed the best next step for all of us. Although the school year was approaching and we had no plans for that..
Alleluia was not ready for a full time missionary family in membership and wanted Dad to go back to practicing law as he discerned some kind of mission aspect of community involvement in the future. The coordinators were willing for us to stay as part of the community but as prophetic outsiders. My first cousin Jennifer was born to my mother’s only sister Rachel while we were still there in August. Rachel had many health problems and the baby girl born in August had serious lung problems. We all prayed for her and she made what some in the medical community thought was miraculous progress. But that was not as strange as what had happened with my arm. When I left Alleluia my mind was full of experiences but I felt lonelier than before. .
Franksummers3ba's Blog 