Tag Archives: Christianity

Online Memoir Chapter Fourteen: The Other Side of Life in My Hometown

Posted on April 7, 2024 | Leave a comment

In the summer semester of the 2021 2022 school year I took two classes at the University of Louisiana of Lafayette. One of the classes was Education in a DIverse Classroom. The other was Diverse Families. In the DIverse Families course I used the fourteenth edition of the book The Marriage and Family Experience: Intimate Relationships in a Changing Society by Theodore F. Cohen and Bryan Strong. It was another important text in a very long line of texts about sex and family in my life.  Sex has been an important concern in my life for a long time, However, I am  very far from claiming to be a great lover these days or to have become an expert on family or sex. But I have built a body of knowledge that has a great deal to to with the time we spent living in the Sticks (or the Styx) neighborhood in Abbeville, my home town. In that small set of blocks in my hometown there were not large estates, privacy fences, gated communities and a host of lawyers and bodyguards. If one was a very intelligent child in early adolescence it was hard not to notice a variety of happy families with traditional values, young people pregnant well before emancipation and struggling, all kind of pimps from abusive gangsters to benevolent gangsters as well as those who used religion as a cloak for prostitution or child abuse and those right near them who were religious and having connections with  prostitutes and abused children for the purpose of helping them. Promiscuous girls and trafficked teen prostitutes lived together. Violent drug dealers had money and supported their families and others in the same block did the same thing and blew all their ill gotten goods on bad things only.There were people practicing music for high school band. There were openly gay men and men who came to visit them from more respectable neighborhoods that might or might not have paid them.  Sex  in the neighborhood was like music in the neighborhood, the sexual climate was diverse and obvious but not publicly celebrated.Our family was involved with people making music about redemption from sin that involved sexual misbehavior. There were no concert venues but there were still other musicians practicing in their yards and on their porches for gigs in bars and dance halls that would be few and far between for most of those guys – nobody I knew made it big. In music from that crowd. One kid got a music scholarship from a university, but he was the exception. It was a place with music and yet not defined by music, the  mix of rock, choir music, marches, Cajun and zydeco music I heard was sometimes beautiful but was not celebrated communally very much. A little made it to the nearby brothels and clubs but very little. Open Door Community and the Christian Service Center had worship with instruments and voices regularly and that was the most regular organized celebration of music in the neighborhood. I learned a great deal about how other people had sex and defined themselves sexually. I also learned that there was nobody I could safely talk to about most of these sexual matters and the experiences that we had being lived out around us. The neighborhood also had stores in people;s homes with no signs, a real and regular laundry and drycleaner. It ran to a street with bars and a graveyard on one border, to a nicer neighborhood on another two sides and to a large middle school, high school football stadium and a vocational and technical community college on the remaining side. I could leave the neighborhood on my bike on many  routes and I did. But when I was there I lived in a very sexualized place where people felt like they were tolerated but sort of on the edge of what made up  our legal and accepted way of life.     

This chapter is not mostly about sex but without a discussion of sex it would have little to do with my experience.  I will visit it from many points of view before we get out of this and on with the stories of the next chapter.   . `

In Virginia, at the cabin in Brown’s Cove I had taken my attachment to the Bible to a new level and really drilled down on Bible reading.  I had been reading the Bible regularly for years but in the quiet and isolation of the cabin, I had been able to devote a great deal of time to reading the scripture and to studying it with the tools I had at my fingertips. I personally owned a Jerusalem Bible Study Version and a New American Bible Study Version. I am not sure that they were called study versions anywhere but each of these translations came in a version with stipped down appendices, footnotes and marginal cross references. The kinds I had were the Bibles with all the works. A basic start to scripture study was to read the same passage in both of my translations then to try to imagine what original text might have been translated in both of these ways. Then I looked up all the parallel of referential texts cited in the cross references to other scripture passages in both Bibles. Next I looked up every word I thought might be in the McKenizie’s DIctionary of the Bible. After that I would read articles I thought were relevant in the  Jerome Biblical Commentary. Then I would pray for insight and write down a few notes.  

My Parents had several other Bible translations and we had access to a few study aids when we visited the Church early and left late for  Sunday Mass, sometimes I discussed my reading with my parents, some of our more religious guests and also with a priest at church. But mostly I kept my thoughts to myself. We had  pretty good access to Biblical texts. and resources despite our lack of possessions

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My biggest topic of Biblical study in VIrginia was KIng David.  David remains a very powerful and prominent figure in my thoughts about a great number of things.  Here are a few things I remember about that study of David:

  1. David was born into the tribe of Judah:Judah was a tribe set aside for leadership and royalty above most, but it was not the only tribe set apart for a role of leadership.. Levi was a holy tribe set apart for worship and ritual leadership. But the tribe of Judah and the two half tribes of Joseph  that passed under the names of Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh (especially Ephraim) had the most kingly roles before Israel had kings.  Saul on the other hand was from the Tribe of Benjamin, which would have ranked just below these other three in claims to a Kingly role. David was not born rich but he was born with a certain claim to nobility.
  2. David was a shepherd boy who killed lions and bears to defend his sheep.
  3. David was a musician and this would play a big role in the Bible, his life and Jewish History.
  4. Dacid was a hero who killed the giant Goliath of Gath and became a great warrior.
  5. David was a courtier in the COurt of KIng Saul, the first King of Israel and he married Saul’s daughter and became close friends with Jonathan the KIng’s sone.
  6. Prophets anointed and encouraged David as King while Saul as still king. Ln time David became an outlaw leading an outlaw army hunted by Saul.
  7. David was extremely polygamous,
  8. David was prayerful and found religious reasons to give himself to practicing mercy, worship and humility unlike anybody else in his sphere.
  9. David saw himself as a repentant sinner.
  10. David loved his children. His son Absalom led a revolt against him and as killed, his first son by Bathsheba died to punish David for his sins.
  11. David conquered Jerusalem and brought the Ark of the Covenant and prepared for Solomon’s Temple to be built by his son.. 
  12.   David was called by God “A man after my own heart”.
  13. Jesus was descended from the House of David, and was often called the Son of David.
  14. David knew how to lead, plan and administer.

It was clear to me at the time understanding David was vital to understanding the Bible and all things associated with the Bible. I also realized that  I was going to have different ideas about what was important when discussing scripture than many people around me. I remember that we were seeking to hear the Word of God in scripture. That belief in the Bible as the Word of God  was true of the people at Mass talking after church about the readings we had all heard.  It was true of my parents and their close associates. It was true of the Protestant missionaries and preachers I had come to know and it was true of the people in Charismatic prayer groups and communities. I did talk about scripture with learned nonbelievers as well, doing that made me appreciate the historical, geographical, linguistic and cultural information I had gained from my Catholic Bibles and study aids. But before I got  back to Abbeville, I was predisposed to see the many ways in which people related to Chrisitanity and religion in a manner that didn’t blind me to reality.  

My life is perhaps like many other lives in that there are times of distinct success and times of failure. There are times of joy and times of sorrow.  Perhaps also like most humans if one dialed in or zoomed in on the times one would clearly designate as  bad there would be good times relative to the general bad time I was experiencing likewise if one were to zoom in on the good times, one would find there were bad times  compared to the generally good time I was experiencing.  I think that that is pretty well accepted to be the human condition. It is not a new observation, one of my favorite treatments of the theme is in the Bible.  

   Ecclesiastes 3

A Time for Everything This title is from the editors)

1 There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2 a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,

3 a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,

4 a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,

5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

6 a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,

7 a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,

8 a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

9 What do workers gain from their toil?

10 I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.

11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

12 I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live.

13 That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.

14 I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

15 Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account.

16 And I saw something else under the sun: In the place of judgment—wickedness was there, in the place of justice—wickedness was there.

17 I said to myself, “God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed.”

18 I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals.

19 Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath ; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless.

20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.

21 Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”

22 So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For who can bring them to see what will happen after them?’ (New International Version).

My mother tells her version of our return to Louisiana from Virginia in her second book about our family’s lives, Our Family’s Book of Acts: To Love and to Serve the Lord published in 2012.  In the chapter, “News From Home – An Open Door”  She tells of the trip from Virginia. 

“Soon after we left the icicles in Virginia. In early November, we arrived in Louisiana by train. To experience the tail end of a summer not yet retired. The Atchafalaya Basin’s sultry swamp showed few signs of fall. The trip had taken about a week from Charlottesville to New Orleans. We stopped briefly  at the Summers home in uptown New Orleans, borrowed a car and headed out to Cajun Country. We loved the drive over the Basin. It was so pristine; some said there were places in the vast waterways that man still had never seen. Tall, straight cypress trees hovered over the stretches of idyllic scenery.  The “knees” dotted the smooth surface looking like miniature sentries dutifully standing their ground. The skies were incredibly blue, Spanish Moss swayed in the breeze. Yep, we were home, home in God’s country.” (Summers, Acts  page 4).   

What made the difference in my life between here and there, this and that became less clear when I calculated all the things that made my life different from the lives of other people.My parents had found a way to live in the town we all called home.I was very uncomfortable at school. I felt it was just more than I could do to be simultaneously the person everyone remembered ( who was not that popular in the first place) and the new person equally out of the norm. School was hard for me under any circumstances and spending large amounts of time in the busy structures, regulated and conformist environments of a school never came easy. But these new circumstances were more than usually difficult. I never felt that I handled the stress very well.

I had a few obstacles that I did overcome. I had a class largely devoted to reading when I got back to Mount Carmel Elementary School. WhenI first arrived and enrolled we all had streamed drills in groups who read at our speed. I was tested in the slowest group first, my scores showed I far surpassed this group.. Then I was tested in the second to slowest group and the same result occurred. Next I was tested in the second to fastest reading group. I excelled and surpassed that standard as well. FInally, I was tested in the last and fastest group and I was one of the fastest readers in the group and still able to get perfect scores on content comprehension and analysis test on the content I read a t breakneck speed There at least I was back in line with  the top group of students in my class. Mostly they were the same people I had left behind  to go to Tonga. In other areas I struggled. Living as the kind of missionary my parents wanted us to be and going to my old school seemed impossible to me in many ways.

In the stress of the situation, I did not always behave well. I lied to cover up the things I did not have and the paying job that my father did not have. I found solace and joy in the prayers and Bible studies  in religion classes. I had always found schools to be difficult places to be but the behavior of students when no adults were around became harder and harder to tolerate. I got into a fight with a few boys who I thought were severely bullying a boy who was the closest to  openly gay of anyone at our little school.. FIghting seemed to clash with my very religious persona in those days. I didn’t  “approve” of homosexuality but I was less approving of bullying. That fight and other conflicts only exacerbated the bullying that was inevitable given the conflicts in my mind, thee fact that I wore a cross– all of which made it impossible for me to reconcile my new identity in the small intimate school with my previous one. The wear and tear of relationships at school was not my only source of problems but it was a significant one.       . 

“Investigations into teacher exoduses in prior years, including a poll from the Policy Exchange, found that over 70% of teachers identified student behavior as a major cause. Data on the current teacher flight are harder to come by, but a poll from the National Education Association found that 90% of teachers say that burnout is a serious concern; 76% identify student behavior as a driver of it. Local reporting in states like California confirms that many teachers are citing student behavior as a major reason behind their decision to quit the profession.”. (Daniel Buck, The Abolition of School Discipline, National Affairs number 54, WInter 2023; page23)..   

In lives where disordered behavior at school has not been important it is hard to recognize how intense a problem it is for many others.  I was trying to find a way to reconcile too many things and I began to feel that perhaps I was going to have serious issues with fitting in and even more problems controlling my emotions at school. There were days when I walked around in a kind of haze that was different from the way I had always kind of marched to a different drummer than was the ideal at any school I attended. 

One of the highlights of that half year in 7th grade at Mount Carmel Elementary School was getting to the top stream of Miss Clancey’s Reading Class, another was catching up with the class in math where I had already begun to fall behind. But the brightest highlight was when we were all asked to make a presentation on a skill for my homeroom. I listened respectfully to the other students. But then when my time came and  I gave the presentation I  had scheduled, I chose  “How to Read the Bible.” I got a hundred percent even though my teacher had discouraged me from picking it. I discussed commentaries, dictionaries, cross-references, diglots, translations and hermeneutics. I gave examples and I discussed the  Second Vatican Council document on DIvine Revelation. Afterwards, the teacher said “ Beau. Your presentation was so good that I will give you a hundred because I have to give you above one hundred percent in all the categories except connecting with the audience. You never smiled and you almost never made eye contact with your classmates. Everyone appreciated your work, all these people are your friends.”

When she was finished speaking there were tears in my eyes. I don’t remember my report card that year,  but I felt  lucky and successful to have made it that far and gotten back into a decent position in the class. I was not happy and I felt like the burdens I was bearing was more than I could take. Yet I also felt that if I could somehow find peace with the changes that had gone on in my life, I might find a path going forward in school. At some point I lost those records but for many years I kept them and any others I could find in a special file at my Dad’s parents second home in Abbeville, I had a single slightly relevant document from Tonga Side School and another from The Lord’s School. That first half  year, I began to organize some of the local boys into a sort of informal company. We moved things for people, trimmed a few hedges and by the end of the school year we cut a few yards. I made the sales and connections and bought or borrowed as much equipment as I could.  I did do the physical work, but less than  an equal share.  I divided the money among the participants and they all seemed happy. It was a chance to lead and I felt good leading something. Once that year we took a bicycle ride to a place called the Woodlawn Bridge. It was a number of miles out of town and we went as fast as we could and held together to fight off the loose dogs that attacked us. My guys all knew how to swim but had little access to pools. The public pool was closing down more and more or had closed down – I can’t remember. But on the way home we stopped and swam at the pool behind my mother’s parents house on the bayou. They accepted my crew from the Styx and we prayed and made promises in the shrine in the woods. When I was in town we would try to keep things together and grow it into anything we could find.

Between school and this little business I had my own life. But in addition I was part of the Open Door Community and the emerging Christian Service Center.  That was  a complicated time. Our family was very involved with people who were severely mentally ill and others who were marginally mentally disabled. There were people who rented a room in our home who suffered from hallucinations and severe behavioral issues. There were others who came by and got meals at Open Door Community and still others who went by the CHristian Service Center for help. Beyond these people were those who were truly desperate and those who were needy. I would meet child prostitutes, rapists and others who were involved in the life of the neighborhood. The girl I liked and hung out with in the neighborhood  lived next to her grandmother. I am not sure exactly when her grandmother, who liked to go to the dancehalls on the weekend was raped, beaten and left for dead. But we had stolen one real kiss over a long time and once or twice in the dark had held hands. But the day they brought her grandmother out in a stretcher we were a couple for all the world to see. She cried first in my arms on the street and then with her head on my should while we sat on the porch swing of our house. We were never really a couple but there was always a bond. Somehow that day froze everything for us in some way.   A lot of times merge from varied trips and I can distinguish them by where we were living in the same neighborhood that was  to be our base in Abbeville for many years. The Bordelons from Abbeville and Navajoland were back with us in the neighborhood for a while one summer and I found it harder to maintain my friendships with them than when we lived on the farm. We rode about on bikes in the sweltering heat and tried to figure out if any of us would end up back in the missions or not. 

It was going to be a variety of times that blended together but we would live in the house across from the Christian Service Center, a different house across from the  Seton Elementary School that had just been abandoned and then in the school itself. I try to separate the jumbled memories by remembering whereIi woke for any particular event that I remember or where I went to bed after such an event.. Often during those first months we shared a common meal at least once a day and all did after dinner chores in the former rectory where the Bernards and Listis lived. It was a convivial and television free environment. We shared prayers, chores and conversation. 

There was a common library besides the ones each family had and the majority of the books belonged to the Listi family. But some belonged to the Summers and the Bernard families. They had books on the Bible and Classic comics both of which I claimed to read and actually did read. But there was also a section of books on marriage counseling. I received much of my knowledge of sex not from the questionable sources most boys used on playgrounds and in dark parts of the neighborhood. I read a number of  books from there and added others:Letters to Karen: A Father’s Advice On Keeping Love in Marriage, Charlie W. Shedd  and Letters to my Philip:On How to Treat a Woman I also read Larry Christenson ‘s The Christian Family, that were written by white Protestant Christian Americans in the twentieth century who had a conservative view of family life. A brand new book by Dr. James Dobson that came out in 1975 would be the basis of a conservative family values movement. It was called Dare to Discipline and was published in 1975..  A book more challenging to American culture was another thing I got my hands on; Raymond and Dorothy Moore’s book, which was discussed whenever my checkered education was discussed. That was another book that hit the mass market in 1975:Better Late Than Early : A New Approach to Your Child’s Education. The Moore book was part of the homeschool movement that was gradually coming to play a significant role in my life, even though I had been in seventh grade to the finish and still was not sure if I would ever formally homeschool.   I am so aware that the future would. The Joy of Natural Childbirth by Helen Wessel published in 1963 made me aware of all the things I didn’t know about sex and women’s bodies. It also answered some of the questions it raised.. I could list many other books, but this reading sort of helped to accentuate a sense of a split between the ideals of a stable and monogamous family centered in Christian spirituality and the other sexual influences and also my own thoughts about sex which were not of a single piece and were still forming. I was a middle school kid, but I did not feel like I was ordinary in any way  –good or bad.

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Chapter Eleven of Online Memoir: Pecans, Prayers and Prophets

Posted on March 29, 2024 | Leave a comment

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. .

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Chapter Nine of Online Memoir: Over the Border in Many Ways

Posted on March 24, 2024 | Leave a comment

Today is Palm Sunday and it follows on an election day. Those are both things more readily understood than stories about miracles and personal revelations of God to a family seeking to find a path to Holiness and effectively bringing the Kingdom of God into new parts of the modern world. In El Paso in the ministry with Father Rick there was a new level of hearing God speak to people in person prayer, interpretation of Sacred Scripture and in signs and wonders. But all of this went on as we came in from a life spent praying for healing and having testimonies of people that they were healed quicker than ever before with their medical treatments or before they could seek medical intervention. People who had been enslaved by alcohol, drugs, and other addictions found in faith in Jesus, life in the church and personal and shared prayer dramatic freedom and restored jobs and marriages. People who had been trapped in bitterness and despair found in the Bible as the Word of God a map for hope that gave them joy. Prayer groups founded in the Charismatic renewal in the Catholic Church and the Pentecostal movement in Protestant churches often established soup kitchens, clinics, missions to very distressed communities and lots of other things that could be called both Charity and Social. Minor and major miracles were reported and written about by many in and around those movements.  But  in our journey to El Paso at that time there was another level both of intensity in ministry and in the number of reports that were circulating about the miracles that came with following the gospel of Christ and the move of the Holy Spirit in our times..    . 

Yesterday, Saturday, March 23, 2024, there was a Commissioning Mass for a class of intake members  from Family Missions Company. That is the outgrowth of the ministry that brought us to El Paso and flowed from El Paso. Today, Mome took Clara and I to eat lunch at a nice restaurant in Abbeville. Clara and I took a little time out to try to rescue a well groomed dog which had gotten loose and appeared to be in distress. Mom also told us how beautiful the Mass was and how moved she was by all of it. She talked about remembering the early days of the ministry. “I really wished you, Beau and Clara would have been there because I knew that at least Beau would have remembered the beginning of all of this.”

“What you all did was a lot. In terms of lifetime achievement it ranks pretty high in my book.” Clara said.

“But I don’t think of that in my life day to day. “ My mother answered, “But I know it’s true.”

“You don’t rest on your laurels.” Clara volunteered.

“I don’t think of laurels. “ Mom replied.

So yesterday there was a celebration of a company where one can still freely discuss supernatural experiences and I was not there. Clara and I were each involved in doing more mundane things. This story is  that I am writing is a narrative of mundane and ordinary things as well as personal secrets. Then it is also a story with some parts that fall outside the purview of normal events and into the realm of events that require some kind of extraordinary response. 

  . 

The Crest of the Carmelite Order which operated the Mount Carmel Elementary School I attended.

I am writing a memoir in which I will ask a theoretical reader to really view with their mind’s eye, understand to the limits of their experience and intelligence and empathize to the edges of their compassion with some extraordinary experiences the theoretical reader would normally dismiss. But I am writing not from the heights of success with great incomes, security and property. I am also not writing from a homeless shelter or a prison.my life is in many ways caught up in the flow of normal mainstream things. It is Palm Sunday, March 24, 2024. Like many millions of Cristians I am remembering the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem amid the cheers and acclimation of the crowd. My wife and I woke up later for us and I made coffee and a bigger than average breakfast. She went to pick up our dogs Abbey and Bella from the dogsitters – who are also our friends. We slept in late for  and were very tired when we went to bed after working as commissioners at two different precincts in an election for the Louisiana Republican and Democrat  Party Presidential Primaries. We also had a parishwide Parcel Fee referendum. The turnout for the Republican Primary in Vermilion Parish was 18.7% of registered voters and 94% voted for Donald Trump.   The other item on the ballot across the entire parish was  parishwide parcel fee proposition to fund the Vermilion Economic Development Alliance, the turnout for that  was 12.4% of registered voters and 91% of those who voted in the election in our parish voted down the proposal. The turnout for the Democrat Primary had a turnout of 8.4% of registered Democrat voters and 63% voted for Joseph Biden. It is also a fact that almost three times as many voters voted in the Republican Primary. Non party voters can vote in most of Louisiana primaries – that are held in an open primary or jungle primary format. The primary elections become full elections if someone get more than fifty percent of the vote. If not then top two finishers will engage in a runoff. With two options one is bound to have more than half the votes. If there is a tie (as happens in small town and village elections sometimes) then they run again. However,  every four years for the presidential primaries, we have closed primaries. Then voters can only vote for their own party and are blocked out of the other party primaries. Governor Jeff Landry has declared his intentions to seek more closed partisan primaries and fewer jungle primaries.  It is notable that Jeff Landry running for Governor from his position as a Republican Attorney General beat a field of twelve outright in the jungle primary for Governor and was immediately elected with more than 50% of the vote in that first election. There was no runoff.          

The Wednesday March 20,2024 issue of the Abbeville Meridional came in the mail instead of being delivered by the newspapers own delivery systemI am still getting used to this being the way that I get my hometown newspaper in the mail. I am also getting used to only getting two copies a week instead of five. I have been covered in the newspaper and had my byline in it many times and it is one more milestone of a life moving into unfamiliar territory as I age. This goes with the theme of having applied for disability as I began  writing this online memoir. It is also a fact that there is a very long obituary for James Alexander RIch on page two. I worked for Jim as a sales manager at his company, Catfish Wholesale in the early nineties. We had some success together in those months and not only in sales, we also had a successful buying trip to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Jim’s life of adventure, SCUBA diving, piloting airplanes and his passion for hunting and fishing are recounted. But so are the struggles and ups and downs of his life. He died on February 17, 2024 but I did not find out about it until I read the newspaper’s long obituary. I haven’t kept in touch with Jim and I will be missing his funeral on Saturday March 23, 2024 to serve as an election commissioner in the election that includes the Louisiana Presidential Primaries and the parish wide election to determine if a parcel fee on properties will be assessed to support the Vermilion Economic Development Alliance. This will hopefully support the prosperity of the civil parish in which I live. 

I like my life well enough to feel something good about it as I recount this version of my life’s events. I am also aware that I have not created a record that will appear to demand a very impressive set of obituaries. My Dad had a huge funeral and my grandfather, Frank Summers the first, had many impressive obituaries and reports in the media. My life appears fairly small and getting smaller at the moment. This chapter is in part an analysis of how the life I lived has conspired to place me where I am. So, before getting to my time in El Paso, I will discuss a little more of my life as it is just now. What I am now is largely a creature of compromises and a a union of what is left over from various adventures. I had tried to be more for my new wife, aiming at relatively modest kinds of success. But I am probably drifting back into a place of not really making things work very well.         .        

It is the Lent of 2024 and the last Friday before Good Friday as I write the main draft of this chapter. There are no deadlines for this manuscript as it may never be read anyway. However, there are deadlines in my life I am taking my turn at getting supper on, that is more common now as I am now unemployed. This morning Clara and I went to Walmart to pick up an order of groceries in the parking lot pick up section. The land had lots of standing water. The rain that had brought the water had the dogs that share our lives with us a few times during the night. It was a pretty powerful thunderstorm. We had already shared coffee and I had the bowl of cereal that was my breakfast before we went to pick up the groceries. I put the groceries into refrigerator and pantry while CLara changed into athletic gear. I simply picked up my gym bag and used the shower and lockers at our club. Then we went to the Healthworks club near where we live. Today I swam and Clara worked out in the gym section of the club. Then I took our recycling to the dump and went to donate plasma at the older of the two plasma centers in Lafayette. On the way there I received news of where I will be serving as Election Commissioner tomorrow. The ride back saw me stop to buy tickets for tonight’s Mega Millions and tomorrow’s  PowerBall drawings. Clara had lunch ready when I got home and we enjoyed a good meatless meal in accordance with Catholic practices during the Fridays of Lent. Shortly afterwards we took a nap.Clara is preparing the dogs to stay over with our dogsitter as we work tomorrow. It is not a very thrilling sort of day to recount.       

My mother’s chapter from Go You are Sent: An Incredible Odyssey of Faith. quoted in my last chapter is the same chapter that covers our time in the El Paso area. That chapter is called “Navajos to La Cueva”. She discusses the move to El Paso in a continuity with our time in the mountains of  New Mexico. 

“We were led in prayer to write Father Rick Thomas, S.J. at Our Lady’s Youth Center in El Paso, Texas. Another thing God taught us in those early years, is that Jesus, the Lord of all the Earth, is also the Lord of the mail. We didn’t expect to get a quick response from Father RIck. We knew he had a pretty demanding apostolate to the poor.

He had preached a Day of Renewal in New Orleans in 1974 (my note: just days or weeks before we left for Tonga.)  There he boldly proclaimed that, “Just tithing doesn’t fulfill the Christian’s obligation, as it did in the Old Testament. A Christian Is expected to give everything” (Summers, 182).

It is important to realize that the first book written about this ministry that I became aware of was called Miracles in El Paso.  A miraculous multiplication of the food in a Christmas dinner served to the poor in a dump was at the center of the living memory of the community. Prayers for healing that had been answered when there was little hop were common memories of many. Such stories were common enough in the days of the large and expanding Catholic Charismatic Renewal. If there were many readers for this text I realize that many of them would not believe in miracles.I realize that some dismiss any story of a miracle as simple deceit. My mother’s autobiographical books have miracles in them and so does her earlier play; A Sort of Miracle in Loreauville. But what I think about in terms of her reliability is that she made a living as a journalist in a small community where people had many ways to affirm or deny the facts and conclusions that she published in the local paper. A more recent book about Father RIck, A Poor Priest for the Poor describes in detail with documentation how another family was the first family at a ministry called La Cueva. That is a bald-faced lie because we were the first family assigned to that ministry. Life is crap and sources are unreliable but it is not a simple matter of eliminating reports of events we don’t understand.       

My next chapter in my life story relates to Mexico and Miracles most of all.  It relates to some other things as well. There are many other connections as well that include thoughts about borders, boundaries and poverty. But to understand how I related to these times in my life it is necessary to map out something of who I am. I am aware that the chances I take are not those which everyone else would always understand.  I am aware that there are many reasons why I am writing this memoir without compensation or a readership of any significance. However, it is important that I describe the way that I live my life in terms that have some kind of lucidity.  I have in my waste paper basket,  a set of three Powerball tickets for Wednesday,  March  20th drawing. The jackpot is $687,000,000 in annuity or $327,300,000. In cash. Those are $9.00 in real money (it would be $6.00 but I got the powerplay option that multiplies the prize short of the jackpot. I used $4.00 won from matching Mega Ball in the inflated Mega Millions drawing for  the last Tuesday drawing. I will be buying tickets for the Mega Millions drawing tomorrow. It is not about the fact that there will be a likely reward, the odds are terrible. But when the jackpot of the two largest lotteries is over $250,000,000 I really am pretty committed to buying tickets. This is an opportunity that my society offers me to potentially solve many of my problems. Although the odds are worse than 250,000,000 to one they seem pretty good compared to the rest of my life experience. In the process of playing this long odds game I sometimes win 4 or 8 or 24 dollars. I rarely gamble as much in a year as I do on this very constrained gambling on these large lotteries. I have been buying a ticket that I split with my mother every time the jackpot is over $250,000,000 and when I  am at the drawing in the country and able to buy  the tickets – i have been doing this  for decades. In addition I usually buy an additional two for my wife and I only (or in the past for many single years, two more tickets for myself). . I am less fanatical about the Mega Millions. The odds are long, but if I were to win something big, even a million dollars, then it would be enough to rewrite a good bit of my life story going forward.  

The life I live has been tied to very long odds, to very unlikely events. It is a very negative perspective on life much of the time – but some of the wins along life’s road have been pretty amazing. What remains of my life may not be very appealing  if I am not able to earn a living but I am not unaware that my life has had some high notes to balance out some of the lows.  

As I wrote part of the  this draft of this chapter at 7:15 on Thursday March 21, 2024  I was back in a familiar space of relative lostness. I had  scheduled a meeting on Zoom at 5:00 that I organized for and which I set aside time for – because it mattered and because the people I was approached by the people I almost met  with. I was hoping that the outcome, which was a very significant compromise from my plan A, B and C for the day and the time.I actually set aside for meeting with them. But they did not respond to the Zoom meeting. I will try again tomorrow, but it is a bad sign and not an unusual one in my life. My wife is out at a meeting and I am missing my window to get to the gym and/or pool where I work out on a regular basis  –but I know that this day was just one of many in my life that are similar. I woke in the morning, made coffee for Clara and I, then I went to the dump and dropped off our recycling to the various bins. Then I went to the plasma center where I donated 892 milliliters of plasma and was compensated $50. On the way home, I shopped and made us both lunch. After lunch Clara and I napped together and then we woke up to an alarm on Alexa,  mostly so I could take the meeting that did not happen. The meeting had not been easy to get excited about but it was still depressing to have it disappear.   . 

When we left for Tonga we had sold a car and let go of the camp that my Dad’s family sort of owned together. Giving up the life of a  family where my Dad was a lawyer married to a small town journalist and paid case manager for a poverty assistance program as well as a playwright in my mother. For me there was the kid who had traveled a lot and attended our small town Catholic School. For me it was not at all clear that I would feel safe again in my hometown and I was never someone who felt very safe.  

As the days passed and we were planning to leave the Navajoland missions, I was praying with Mom and Dad about where we would be going. I had mixed feelings, part of me wanted to go back to Abbeville and see my relatives, especially my grandparents. But on the other hand, It seemed like it would be great if we could establish ourselves in some kind of ministry and basic sense of community and residence somewhere – and then possibly go back home for my mother to give birth to my new sibling. It would be wonderful for Sarah (or whoever the baby was going to be) to be welcomed into our extended family and community there. But I sensed even then that there was not  a way to know exactly what going home would be like. Furthermore, we would not be taking a break for the baby to be born if we did not have a big enough connection to any place for us to go back to after the baby was old enough to travel. I was processing all of this  even while I was sincerely praying and seeking to practice a kind of mysticism that seemed to be vitally connected to my whole life.   

The time we spent in El Paso with Father RIck Thomas started with him meeting us at the bus station. We were dressed in a mix of tropical and New Mexico clothes. My father was an attorney turned missionary and my mother was visibly pregnant now, though not really showing a big bump. Everything we had with us was wrapped in a large bundle in a Tongan mat. It was all that there was of luggage. I rode in the back of Father Rick’s pickup truck with the dog and the possessions in the Tongan mat. The dog was named Fe, the Spanish word for Faith. We spent the first night in a nice place, a Jesuit house which I believe was on Altura Avenue. My room was in the basement with a substantial library. I read a good number of books written by Jesuit priests for teenage boys at their high schools. That was my first introduction to Jesuit spirituality. During our first days there we involved ourselves in a number of ministries including the ministry to the Dump where the miraculous Christmas DInner had occurred. We saw the Lord’s Ranch, a booming and growing ministry of prayer, sanctified work, growing food for the poor and caring for animals. They were developing a fish pond the fish in  that pond interested me. But I never fished in that pond or anywhere else while I was there.

It was during that early time that we met some of the families and some of the consecrated religious that were involved in the ministry of Our Lady’s Youth Center. Bowie  High School was a major focus of the ministry of Our Lady’s Youth Center. The focus of the ministry there was in a new building, that ministry was called la “Cueva del Oso”. The “Cave of the Bear” in Spanish. The ministry was focused on the students at Bowie High School.  Bowie Bears were the teams and the student population was largely Hispanic. Our family would move in and work with the kids and their families in a number of ways. We would also try to connect the young people with the ministries in El Paso and the Mexican city of Juarez just across the border. I made some friends among the older kids and a few of those relationships with those kids kept going for a long time. One remained my friend for decades although we were not in continuous connection over the years.

Meanwhile I went with Dad to the Lord’s Ranch, The Lords’ Food Bank, The Lord’s Clinic and prayer and classes at the Our Lady’s Youth Center. I soaked up what I could and read a lot and watched Mom setting up the logisitcs of the La Cueva ministry.. While this was going on I was not in school and was interacting with students in school in a school ministry. I was a middle schooler and they were high school kids. My last time in a formal school was in fifth grade. The world was a complex place and everywhere I had been I had learned something. Among other things, I had learned that in EL Paso a dust storm could plow in under  a rain storm and drops of mud could fall from the sky onto anything below. I understand that this is fairly rare, but it happened twice in our time there.

We had no been there very long before a new school was organized. It was called The Lord’s School. We started with prayer and bible study every day..We did volunteer work with a ministry in the complex of ministries for a few hours each week. We went on one major field trip every week in which the teachers might teach or an expert might be included for that particular outing.

We had about three hours a day where we worked from math workbooks, literary readers,and social studies work books under the guidance of trained and certified teachers who had retired. Several parents had some background in education but had not taught for a long time. My parents had a hard time supporting my efforts to fit in at the school but overall I was pretty happy there. I am not sure. I enjoyed the company of the guys in our group of twenty kids from upper elementary through high school. One family were part of major clothing dynast and had huge amounts of money, Another family was poor and underprivileged. I was attracted to at least one of the girls in our little school and wondered what the future might be like with those kids in this new kind of school.

About our fourth field trip was just after we had been told we would start developing  food plots and food preservation systems on the Lord’s Ranch. We went out on a field trip to some of the wilder and more natural desert that we could reach. On the field trip we all did listen to talks about dry land ecology and the biology of desert plants. “In Tonga Side School, I used to go on field trips around the school and gather samples of the local plants and so forth. Everybody did and then we would measure and discuss them and look them up in books.” That was what I said when we all discussed our vision of the trip.

.. 

Then we read Bible passages about the desert and discussed them. Later we hiked up a hill and I raced several of the kids to the bottom of the hill. I lost control and ran into a Spanish Dagger plant that sunk a three inch needle of a thorn into my knee and broke off. I would limp, bleed, swell and get sick with infection and despite prayers it would take two times for a doctor to remove the entire splinter thorn. I missed some school and limped on the first field grip when I came back. Then before I knew it we were leaving to go home for Sarah’s birth. However, it did not seem like we would be coming back to the La Cueva ministry. We had seen close up large numbers of people volunteering many hours in the ministries of the renewal that we all believed in and we were hoping that we would live out our lives in dynamic and energetic ministry. There was a lot of talk there about avoiding social injustice, creating opportunity and hope for the poor. The Dump had been controlled by violent gangs of super poor people hurting each other. Not long before we had got there the factions had made an agreement to accept aid but also to work with the ministry to coop the sale of recycled products and some more profits and better working conditions were emerging. I myself worked on creating better shelters, water systems and transit in the town of trash. Burning toxic trash pits we still used but less and they were better managed. I was reminded of my own little business recycling soft drink bottles.  

Ernest and Esther were the couple who took over La Cueva and we were packing up as they were settling in and we were headed back towards Louisiana for the birth of my coming sibling. We took a train which I thought was much more comfortable than a bus. The Amtrak train on the bicentennial year as the Independence Day of July 4, 1776 was drawing near seemed very much an American way to travel. Mom was big and pregnant and we were going home. It was exciting and scary and we still believed we would be working with Our Lady’s Youth Center Ministries in Juarez in a few months. I might be in the Lord’s School in August. I loved the view of Javalina and deer from the windows and the chance to eat a meal in the dining car and stretch my legs on the train. I have loved trains ever since. I knew some words and songs in Tongan, Samoan and Spanish and I hoped that we would be able to find a good way to be in our hometown. I also was excited to meet my new baby brother or sister. But I was also aware that life would be complicated and wondered what the future would be like when school started in the fall if we were not back in EL Paso and I was not in the Lord’s School. I felt like going back to Mount Carmel elementary would be tough. I liked some kids pretty well. Among the kids I liked and respected was a girl named Clara Duhon. What I felt about the kids I spent time with were relationships I expected to be troubled. I had never really thrived there and the years had gotten less positive..

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Chapter Eight of Online Memoir: Starry Skies above the Land of Enchantment

Posted on March 19, 2024 | Leave a comment

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When I think back on the brief time in New Mexico I think back on the relatively few days and hours I spent in Hogans and ruins and traditional compounds. I think of the native jewelry in silver and turquoise and the two items I managed to buy and keep for a number of years. I also think of weavings and the Ojo de Dios objects which combined weaving and a woodwork design in geometric shapes. Ojo de DIos was a Spanish phrase, not a Navajo word. I didn’t speak Spanish at that time. I also remember the variety of license plates I saw from various Native AMerican or Indian Nations and the  ones that said New Mexico “Land of Enchantment.” I remember the skies in the dry clear mountain air far from city light pollution that could be so full of stars. I remember talking to my friends the Bordelons about the skies in  Tonga that had different stars which included parts of what was the Southern sky including the Southern Cross  of the flags New Zealand and Australia and parts of the sky that were part of the northern sky that were slightly visible in the North. I explained how it had been a non event when we crossed the equator in almost every way but still it was different. It was about half as far South of the equator as New Zealand, the last place I would live in the Southern Hemisphere. But it had great sky views in those days and I think it still does. So did New Mexico.

I cannot look back on the time in New Mexico after leaving  American Samoa without thinking about all it has come to mean to me since then. That includes the time I spent in Las Cruces when we lived in El Paso Texas and it includes talking to a friend I made even later in life who was from Roswell and talked to me about the culture of UFOlogy there and the UFO tourism in the town.that was her home town. I was  aware when I stayed among the NAvajo that I was there both to witness the Gospel and invite people into the Catholic Church on the one hand and also was very eager to understand what traditional Navajo religion was all about.  When my family toured Europe we had lived on a farm in the Swiss Alps for a while. But really, this was one of my longest states in Mountains up to that point in my life.I was reading the Bible a lot  and I was very aware of Mount Sinai, Mount Horeb, Mount Carmel, Mount Tabor and the unnamed mountains such as that of the Sermon on the Mount where God had drawn close to humanity. Mount Rainmaker in Samoa created its own clouds in the midst of the ocean, but the Mountains of New Mexico raised us up above much of the atmosphere to the star crowded skies.                

We boarded that plane in American Samoa on December 22. So our arrival in the cold of Albuquerque was a Christmas thing. Like most snowy states, first snowfall means the first snow of a tenth of an inch or more that persists. Albuquerque has plenty of White Chritmasses even by that standard. However a lower standard than the records would allow bits of snow on the rocks in mountain passes – I am not sure what the records will show. but whenever legal snowfall documents may state – l I clearly remember our headlights picking up the glint and shine of  bits of snow as we moved through the mountains towards Thoreau and Blue Lake New Mexico where the Bordelons lived. However, It was not a landscape wrapped in snow.  Like almost everything in my life I have no confidence that the records will back up what I know to be the truth of the past. Of course any snow was a big deal compared to the South Pacific. The Bordelon’s home was decorated for Christmas and they had a fireplace and a wood burning stove as well as other heat. It seemed like a great place to land for Christmas.

The big news that we shared was not only the Good News of the Gospel reminding us that on Christmas we remembered the birth of Jesus Christ. In Bethlehem. The other good news for the prolific Bordelons was evident as Mom and Diane charred the joy of her expecting the baby that was going to be known and named as my oldest sister Sarah. Barry and Dad had some rejoicing about the fact that our families were becoming more alike. The Bordelon kids were interested in how I was transitioning from being an online child to expecting a sibling. Overall, I was pretty happy about it.   

The reunion with the Bordelons, who were working for the Checkerboard Missions and serving in Saint Bonaventure Catholic Church Parish in Thoreau New Mexico brought together two families from Abbeville, Louisiana who had already been changed to some significant degree by their time in the missions. It was difficult to know exactly how to be with my friends and to chart the social and emotional distance between the way we had been together in a different time past in Abbeville, Forked Island and other parts of Louisiana. then and the way we were supposed to be now.  We talked about home and who had kept in touch and who had not. We tried to sense the differences and similarities between the ways that each of us had bought into the religious vocation of our respected  families and the degree to which we were resisting it in favor of more normalcy. 

We talked about the Navajo. Went to Church and met the priest,  the school that was not currently in much use for some reason. Before we left my parents and I would spend at least some nights in that school building, it was the first but not the last time we would live in an underutilized or abandoned church school building. While there we would tour the Navajo  cultural and historical exhibits and museums in Crown Point, New Mexico. For was while it seemed that I would enroll in the school that the Bordelon children went to – I was scared that I was not going to be evaluated fairly or well in a way that would assess my placement and I was nervous about the new school in an environment that I did not know. But I am not sure that any of these were significant factors in me not going to school there. Some of my memories have become blurry and confused and the timeline of our lives in those days would be practically impossible to retrace in any effort short of a very well funded book with many months of research for some weeks of our lives. However, it is possible to tell true facts and avoid falsehoods. It is also possible to capture a specific general tone and set of qualities that connected that time to my larger subject – in this text that larger subject is my own life.

I had a very bad experience in my time there but I don’t remember where exactly it fit into the timeline of our stay there. It involved a rather clumsy effort to entrap, shame and humiliate me by the creation of an incident and the misreporting of it. That kind of thing had happened before and many far worse things that I have not reported in this text. The pain of such events and the damage done to me and my long-term mental health were real.Here the betrayal involved one of the Bordelon kids and their father. But the general pattern for me was that among other things as a child observant and aware of people and the misbehavior of adults I was particularly vulnerable to malice and retribution. If I was very decisively an influential lesson in my life. If I was much more powerful and respectable and immune from ordinary harms then I would probably write a very different memoir, I would name names and describe details in some numbers and have research done to corroborate such things.  But as things stand in this version I am still telling less than many memoirs. This is very far from a tell-all. I don’t know what impact the secrets I carry from my life have had on the trajectory of my life. But there has never been a time when I did not have in my memory a good number of really bad incidents that I could attribute to other people.

Although I can emphatically state that I never engaged in anything that could be construed as sexual behavior when I was a kid there were incidents that involved seeing people naked or in various sec acts. Some of these incidents were accidental and innocent and really not situations in which anyone had done anything very malicious or evil. However, others were elaborate forms of harm – some directed at me and some directed at others but  witnessed by me. I also had come to know that people used sex, the shame of sex and the criminal penalties related to sex to pressure and blackmail people into other bad or criminal behavior  – or if they were very vulnerable to sexual shame they might even pressure them into suicide or at least poverty and bankruptcy. 

I was alienated in some significant way by may parents choices, alienated as a kid not in school, alienated by the malice of so much of the human race, alienated by the fact of being a white guy in Navajoland and alienated because my friends among the Bordelon boys knew how to split firewood for the fireplaces and to cut logs into firewood size lengths and many other things related to living close to the land in New Mexico that I did not know. They were not big on teaching when it required a lot of speaking in the cold. So I did not make much progress in learning those skills.

Somewhere in those weeks, I found myself alone with the adults when the Bordelon kids went to school. I set up a sort of school schedule mostly on my own. I read an entire encyclopedia of wildlife and a number of books on Navajo culture and a book or two on the liturgical reforms in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. Sunday Mass was better attended but daily Mass was bothe very poorly attended and beautiful and exciting to me, The priest led a  mass that demonstrated a degree of the experimentation at the time and I was thrilled by both its freshness and the ancient and scriptural elements of the Eucharist and the study of the Sacred Scriptures. Once a week we had a prayer meeting with guest speakers and some were protestants from small churches not so far away who would normally have been pretty anti-Catholic – but these speakers were generally respectful of the place where they were speaking. The greatest oddity of the Church was that the altar, tabernacle, pulpits, baptismal font and other sacred spaces were placed close enough together so that they could be closed off from  the rest of the space. The seating was removed from the rest of the church. The large part that might be called the nave was used as a skating rink for several evenings each week and the funds raised were used to help support the church and its ministries. In addition, Navajo teenagers who came to skate might not come tot the missions for any other reason and there was an effort to share the gospel and invite them to participate in the life of the church. I had long conversations with a few Navajo Christians about the connection between their Christian lives and traditional Navajo religious culture. I tried even then to figure out how this related to the struggle of Polynesian Christians to integrate their faith with Polynesian religious heritage. I also was aware that South Louisiana had religious traditions that either complemented and enhanced or else defiled the practice of Christianity in the region I would always call home.      

A few days before typing the major draft of this chapter I was talking about how I had lived through some exotic encounters with North Koreans when I was in China. “I have lived a very unusual life. I am sure that it is hard to believe some of my stories. That is why I don’t tell some of them very often.”

“I like this kind of conversation.” My sister-in-law responded. 

Overall the conversations of this past weekend of Saint Patrick’s Day 2024 were about the CHristian, Faith, Catholic Sacraments and family traditions. My wife has been doing volunteer work improving Church records at our home church. I find a lot of interest in all her research and when she sends me a picture of a record related to my family it gives me a thrill and almost as much when it is one of her ancestors. My same sister-in-law also has a strong interest in these records, genealogies and family histories.

I really enjoy  a lot of what goes on in the ordinary and not so ordinary flow of life. I also find a lot of interest in and expend a lot of energy on understanding the things I don’t like in ordinary life. But I still do care about some things in  the realm of the mystical, mysterious  and unexplained. I will return to those areas again in this narrative but will not be able to fully do it justice in this book. My mother’s book, Go You are Sent: An Incredible Odyssey of Faith  treats the whole period of this visit to New Mexico along with some other things in the chapter titled Navajos to La Cueva. She spends fewer words on this period than I do but she is more careful to confine herself to recounting those events. My tone here is to talk about my own life and formation as we go. Just since I began writing this online memoir, I have received word that I am probably eligible to at least be seriously considered for the Medicare portion of disability. I am fully vested in DIsability retirement since I earned the minimum of forty valid quarters years ago and I will get something if I live to retire. The minimum retirement age is 62. It won’t be a lot but if I take it then I will get a retirement income. I will get a bit more at 67 and the maximum at 70. For disability the general but not absolute rule is not the forty valid Social Security quarters but rather 20 valid Social Security quarters in the last 10 years and  20 valid Medicare  quarters in the last ten years. I have the Medicare quarters and therefore qualify for early Medicare, if I am deemed disabled enough. But I don’t have the Social Security quarters, some of my paychecks paid into the Louisiana State Teachers Retirement Fund and some went into a special public service FICA replacement retirement fund. Someone from a Social Security office suggested that I apply to one of these funds for disability pay. I am still not sure how it will play out but I may not qualify to get the monetary benefit under Social Security and if that is the case I may be much nearer the end of my life’s journey than otherwise. It is with that sense of retrospection that I am accounting for this period.        .               

When I think of the time in New Mexico I think of having just left Polynesia and thinking how people were seeking to preserve family and tradition in the modern world and how Christianity fit into all of this. I still care about all of those things and they still all factor into the way that I actually spend my time. This past weekend  illustrates that I am still preoccupied with many of the same concerns. 

          .  

On March 17, 2024 Clara and I celebrated the First Communion of her nephew and godson Zacharie in a small rural Catholic Church in Iberia Parish here in South Louisiana. Her brother Clenes and his wife Lori stayed with us for a Saturday and Sunday night  as they came in from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to attend. .Zacharie is the child of her sister Gigi and her husband. Her youngest brother – who is the priest who presided over our Wedding – was there as well. It was a beautiful celebration. Clara got him a rosary with his name engraved on the sterling silver cross. This rosary was like the silver rosary with her name engraved on it that her godfather had given her from the same retailer and sometimes manufacturer of rosaries and other religious items when she was a little girl making her First Communion..  

Today I tended to plants in our lawn and garden area and I cut the front lawn with a motorless push (reel style) lawnmower. I am a homebody when I can be, in a way that seems not so different  from what I remember of both the Samoans and the Navajo at that time. But we did not stay in either place very long. However, our stay in New Mexico was much shorter than our stay in American Samoa. My mother writes of our time there in these words;

The ancient, noble way of life on the reservation inspired us. We were drawn deeply to the privilege that it would be to know them better. We knew that the more that they embraced Christ the keener would be their ability to preach his Word. How beautiful that word would be coming from such a rich heritage.

The Bordelons left New Mexico for a  visit to Abbeville in late January and early February. We stayed behind on Mission with Father Doug. Living in the Mountains gave us a chance to be alone as a family. Barry had been right in his description of the mountains of New Mexico. They were beautiful in a spiritual way. God was near to us there.” (Summers, page 182)..   

In those weeks that we were alone I used to ride the hard plastic toboggan like sleds and disks the Bordelons had for the snow. I often did this alone and sometimes even at night alone.Racing down the little slopes lit by star and moonlight was a great thrill. I loved physical activity and adventure and knew that I rarely made an impression on others that would make me feel better about myself or the activities that I was involved in every chance I got. So doing things alone was always an option that I was ready to consider, the pure love of solitary sports was already a theme in my life.

In the night sky I would watch the shooting stars and the glow of the Milky Way and I tried to find some of the many stars I saw on an old star map I had managed to acquire and hold on to for a while.   In the sky I watched as often as I could, I saw some things I could not explain. That had not been the first time and would not be the last but I had enough things on this planet to occupy my interest until we left New Mexico to join up with Father Rick Thomas  and his ministries centered around Our Lady’s Youth Center and The Lord’s Ranch near El Paso, Texas. When we did leave, I wondered if I would ever again return to Navajoland. So far I have not.

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Monsignor Richard Von Phul Mouton, Obituary Post

Posted on June 27, 2017 | Leave a comment

Monsignor Richard von Phul Mouton of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lafayette passed away Wednesday. He was 86 years old. The press has remembered him already and so have many of the institutions with which he was associated. His official obituary in the Daily Advertiser is here. More or less the same obituary appeared in other papers. I attended only the wake for complicated reasons but expect the funeral to be a grand and deserved tribute.

Mouton died at 2:21 p.m. Wednesday at Lafayette General Medical Center among those attending to his last illness was his brother, Frank Anthony Mouton. He is preceded in death by his father, Scranton Alfred Mouton, Sr., mother, Inez Genevieve von Phul Mouton, brother, Scranton Alfred Mouton, Jr., and sister-in-law, Margaret Apple Mouton. He is survived by his brothers, Frank Anthony Mouton and Marc Gilbert Mouton, Sr., sister-in-law Betty LaCour Mouton, and numerous nieces and nephews.  The Mouton family is a prominent family in the region and Alfred Mouton, at least for now, still occupies a central place on a statue in the center of Monsignor’s hometown. The Mouton House is a museum not far from the Cathedral  where Monsignor lived out much of his last phase of life since July 1, 2007, Monsignor took up residence as a Senior Priest at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. This nearby Mouton house seems small compared to other Plantation owners homes in the South but this  was the town house (not the larger country home) where  Governor and General Mouton — father and son– stayed over to attend mass at the nearby St. John’s  Church in Antebellum Lafayette.  The Mouton connections among Acadians (such as the governor and the General) and the non Acadian French are indeed extensive. Monsignor Mouton was very aware of his heritage though not one to harp on it with people who were not aware of it.

Richard Mouton was born on March 17, 1931 in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was baptized on March 25 of the same year at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, where he would later attend  the Cathedral primary school and receive the sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation. He was ordained at this same Cathedral on June 4, 1955 and assigned as Associate Pastor of St. Mary Magdalene Church in Abbeville –which has always been my real home parish where I was baptized, made my first communion and was wed — but Monsignor did not officiate at any of those sacraments and was not pastor there in any of those years.  I did not know him as Associate pastor.

When I met him he was the intellectually mature Pastor of the Parish who had returned from completing his doctoral degree in Rome. His doctoral thesis was entitled “The Role of the Holy Spirit in the Mass,” Father Mouton returned to Louisiana and was assigned to Immaculate Conception Parish in Lake Charles, the current Bishop of Lake Charles Glen Provost was one of his Associate Pastors at St. Mary Magdalen in Abbeville and they distinguished themselves as a team with their deep love of the liturgy. Monsignor had also gotten an international status as a priest before he was pastor — this was because in 1962,  he attended the Second Vatican Council, in the company of Bishop Maurice Shexnayder, and was subsequently appointed Peritus Concilii Vaticani Secundi (Expert of the Second Vatican Council). Still before I met him and when I was in fact two years old, In June 1966, Father Mouton was elevated to Monsignor Mouton. Like Monsignor Ignatius A. Martin with whom I lived in Duson and who had a major role to play in my parents return to the faith of their youth when he was a  Pastor at St. Mary Magdalene — Monsignor Mouton would also serve as Superintendent of Catholic Schools from June 1967 to the time he received his first assignment as Pastor at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Abbeville in 1973. It was during that period that I got to know him. Many people knew Msgr. Richard Van Phul Mouton better than I but nobody knew him exactly as I did. His official obituary did not mention founding the Christian Service Center in Abbeville, the work he did with liturgy in parish life, hosting the Lay Evangelist Training and Commissioning Program for the Diocese of Lafayette or his significant involvement with the Fr. Conley Bertrand’s Come Lord Jesus program, the ground work and development of the Catholic is the Name Weekends, fostering Perpetual Adoration, or any of the other ways in which our paths crossed most publicly. He also officiated at my great grandmother’s funeral where I read one of the readings and based on that encounter he asked me to serve as lector which I did most of the time when I was in country and he was pastor was it was my turn. Many of the friends of my youth had him as a teacher at VCHS, they told me. I never did. But despite eating hundreds of meals with priests, I was somehow closer to Monsignor than all but a tiny few. It is odd, I suppose. But my real connections were more personal and complicated, he twice asked me to enter the seminary and I twice regretfully declined — that was a long time ago, before I was married. I considered the priesthood at other times but really at those particular times I felt certain that I could not seriously pursue that option. Monsignor was also my confessor and spiritual director for some but not all of that time, I found him an insightful and serious man with whom anything could be discussed.

In February 1987, Monsignor Mouton was assigned as Pastor of St. Pius X Church in Lafayette in a an unusual swap with Fr. Donald Theriot who was the celebrant at my wedding.  Theriot came to St. Mary Magdalene from Pius X. During his time as Pastor, Monsignor participated in the development of various pastoral ministries, most notably the development of St. Thomas More Catholic High School and the founding of St. Pius X Elementary School.  I would later teach at St. Thomas More High School of which St. Pius is a Corporate Parish and would move there during my year of teaching and then away to Baton Rouge to pursue my M.A. but my parents would move there with my younger siblings and  he would remain their pastor and he would be someone I had much occasion to see. When I was teaching at St. Thomas More High School we did have some interactions. Mostly those related to crises in the school administration at a school which is normally stable but was having an unstable year. STM was in the official obituary whereas virtually nothing from Abbeville  was in it except merely his pastorate. However, it is not a matter of question that St. Pius Elementary School there is one of his greatest achievements.  He saw Catholic education as a key part of preserving the Faith and the right kind of Christian intellectual development. But he was a Ragin’ Cajun as well and continued his studies at the local secular university and not only at St. Joseph’s Seminary and the Pontifical College. He saw the light of Divine Truth in all learning, although I don’t have the particular courses at hand I am pretty sure that I remember that. He lived a faith in his time.  To quote the official obituary:

If the loss of faith is a life’s greatest tragedy, then surely its preservation is a life’s greatest triumph; Monsignor Mouton was certainly a great guardian of the Church and preserved Her teachings through his ministry to the many who loved him. 

“I value the priesthood I have been graced to share in…I have happily done what I was asked to do by my Bishop, ministering to his flock, hopefully, with zeal and charity. God knows and I praise Him for the graces I believe He gave me in doing so. All the good I have done I have truly done by the grace of God.”

Monsignor Richard von Phul Mouton

By the Grace of God

Beyond those public ministries, going back to the family comments made at the start, Monsignor was a full and thorough example of commitment to the priesthood but he was also a man with all the connections of a man of a particular, place time and lineage.  Msgr. Mouton had a circle of not very close friends with some common regional interests and I helped people a few times with translations of Heraldic and ancestral documents because they met me when I was discussing such things with this son of Acadiana. He also had great capacity for saying a lot in a few words about places he’d been. I have probably traveled with a hundreds priests, some bishops and a few cardinals — I never remember being in the same vehicle with Monsignor. We were at many receptions together over my lifetime but only shared a meal at table perhaps four times.

Monsignor knew many challenges in life. One of them was a bit vicarious. One of his closest friends in life was also ordained Jun. 04, 1955   and Msgr. H.A. Larroque was the brilliant Canon Lawyer with whom he could discuss many ideas and concerns. Before the explosion of the child abuse crisis Monsignor had (hard as this will be for many to believe) discussed with me his concerns about safe environment issues and the need to do more in preventing problems related to sexual behavior through priestly formation. But the conversations were related to our discussions about my concerns with some seminary environments I had encountered in the world. I had no idea he was dealing with real problems among priests close at hand and not as effectively as he probably should have and felt he should have. His really good friend was caught up in dealing with religious and secular legal matters, world wide media scrutiny and countless other moral issues and it was an ordeal. With me Monsignor never pretended he or his very close friend had perfect answers to any of these crises. I was proud of the fact that the Church paid huge damage awards, sponsored programs, organized safe environment training, struggled to weather the storm and did lots of other things. I often said that while I excused nothing of the worst abuses the Church paid mostly the price of being a responsible and enduring institution in the society of shirking, dissolution and changing  names which characterizes the modern world.    But truthfully the child abuse  scandals did change something about our conversations.

Monsignor and I were both strong personalities, he was clearly the more successful of the two and much older but we held very little back in our really private conversation although they were ALWAYS  cordial they could be both heated and cordial intense and measured. During my later life we corresponded almost entirely about grave and confidential matters and enjoyed only a few brief friendly conversations. Virtually none were related to child abuse or other issues that make a lot of ink. But they were issues we both took seriously.

The Crest of the Carmelite Order which operated the Mount Carmel Elementary School I attended.
My Certification as a Catechist for the Diocese of Baton Rouge
My Sophomore Class Award from the Franciscan University of Steubenville

I considered him a great man and a good priest. Sometimes, I considered him a fairly close friend. That’s not something I find as easy to explain. I lived with Msgr. Ignatius Martin and was a close companion of a Jesuit Missionary priest named Joseph Stoffel in the Philippines. Both were friends and I knew them in more ordinary friendly ways. But Msgr. Mouton and I had some common concerns that I shared with few other people over my lifetime. We didn’t always agree. But the void he leaves cannot be filled by anyone else I know. Life has taken many turns since the days since Monsignor Mouton and I knew each other best.
I have usually posted a kind of obituary on my blog for prominent people who were also significant in my life and I am doing that again for Msgr. Mouton. For as long as the blog exists it helps me organize these memories. People have often revisited these blog entries over the years, so someone else gets something out of it as well. But Monsignor is not likely to slip my mind often for very long.

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Halloween and Elections, a Few Thoughts

Posted on October 31, 2016 | 1 comment

Happy Halloween. Halloween as it exists in America is a time for celebrating the scarier parts of our unconscious and also other parts of the imagination with children.  This election season is for many Americans time of frightening realities and a scary walk and wait for adults. America is well populated with people who are afraid of Hillary as President and people who are afraid of Trump as President.  There are some who are not happy with either and this long post will discuss both Halloween and the elections as scary ritualistic events.

I have posted about Halloween here.  I also dealt with this day in the context of other days around this time just here. I have remembered that for me it was near my maternal grandfather’s birthday. I have also remembered the occasions of All Saints Day and All Souls Day which follow hard upon us.  The New Orleans Saints Football team was also founded on November first, the Feast of All Saints and of course the two things are related although how they are related is not so clear.    Family Missions Company and many of my family members usually have a Holy Ween Party with many traditional aspect of Halloween where the kids however costume as Saints while they bob for apples, get candy and play games . It is a rather beautiful and fun custom. All these events other costuming and the national celebration of Halloween make up the meaning of these days for me. The memories of those days are largely good ones as are the memories of many of the earlier days I spent Trick or Treating.  There have been plenty of bad memories as well.  But nothing really terrible is closely associated in my mind with these days.

This particular Halloween 2016 is one of those days which is not all together one thing for me and not all together another. It is a day when the weight of many problems ways down upon me but the weights, worries and regrets are offset by other aspects of my life. Nonetheless what is most notable about it is that it is Halloween. It is also the day after my deceased maternal grandfather’s birthday and the day before all Saints Day. But today, while trying to find out if the party is happening and perhaps drop in on it I will also be helping my aunt  with whom I share my grandparents house where she has been living for a long time recently and I have lived many times in the past. She will be giving  out candy during Abbeville’s official Trick or Treating hours between 6 and 8.    The town also has a  public access Scare on the Square in the late afternoon. That is my contact with the mainstream Halloween. The first picture posted below is not one of those pictures but I may add some pictures of the Square to the mix over time. There are quite a few decorated houses which have gotten elaborate. I might get a picture of one or two but probably not as to do them justice on really needs to go out at Trick or Treat time and I am not doing that.

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Among Cajuns  in the past the customs of these days varied from place to place. But generally some of the adolescent boys, in some cases united into societies that passed on their customs across generations and in other cases not in such an organized way raised a little hell on day we call Halloween. They went to houses and put skinnier and lighter cows on roofs and in barn lofts, made ghostly shapes and figures on window panes, howled like wolves and brought their dogs around to scare the farm animals but not enough to do serious harm.  Inside around the fire and stove there would be a few traditional treats and some scary stories. The loup garou  or Cajun werewolf tradition is not deeply tied to Halloween but it is tied to all things scary in this culture. I have posted about that tradition a little bit here and here in the glossary. The connection is available in music today, there are many things to be written or said about the  Halloween, All Saints and All Souls Day  customs in the region without mentioning the werewolf tradition but one song of some significance  by a musician named Daigle is viewable here. . On the morning of Toute Saints or All Saints people would walk ride or drive through the village, town or region to see the mischief done. Then people would go to church for the feast of All Saints. After Mass in some communities there would be a feast and music in the cemetery so that people could wake up early and clean, repair and decorate their ancestors tombs on the feast of All Souls on November first. In most communities however people ate at home and got ready to go to the cemeteries on All Souls. Caring for the tombs and visiting with others doing so was the  main focus of Acadian and Cajun practices around this time of year. In some places it was customary for widows to remove their black shawl on the first All Souls Day after they finished one year of  mourning.  In other places the calendar year alone was the key for the end of all mourning dress. Courtships sometimes began between widows and those men repairing other tombs who would pay respect to the dead husband’s tomb before courting the widow. Only taces of all of those custms remain today. But all of these things are in my mind on these days.

I also grew up a good bit of my life in Mexico and remember the various customs of the Dia de Los Muertos — the Day of the Dead. I have spent significant time in cemeteries and changing out flowers and such around the tombs of family members but that has not been as associated with this time of year as I would ideally have liked it to be.  So that is a summary of what these four days in a row bring to mind most for me.

In Celtic tradition this was a time when the year passed from the light half to the dark half of the year and the dead  were free to move between realms through a sort of portal opened up by these occasions. the very early Christians (such as the Galatians to whom St. Paul wrote)   included many Celts. There were people of living  flesh and blood who took advantage of the time of spiritual and demonic activity to do some bad things. Jack O’ Lanterns and scary costumes have some connection to scaring off bad spirits and bad people in ancient Celtic society.  The Christians gave some Christian meaning to those cultural acts but the darkest and worst parts of paganism such as human sacrifice were woven together in the same symbolic language and the controversies have been ongoing from the earliest days.

To lump all of this together in a single post when more clever writers are discussing the elections is probably only another means of whittling away the tiny readership that I still have.  Perhaps the scaries Halloween reality for me is embodied in that reality related to this post and to the fact that I used to write a great deal for many thousands of folks and get paid. Now I am trying to embrace the career path I am on which will end with paying one person a great deal to read my work. It never hurts to know where you are heading. Like many writers over history I might do well to dress as an unpaid bill or perhaps a a literary agent. those are scary realities for sure.

But is there anything that can be said coherently about all of these varied faces of this time of the mysterious, the mortal and the unusual. For me the unusual and the little known ar not unique cetainlu to Halloween.  I have had an unusual life thus far. In it I have sailed small vessels, ridden horses, hiked, climbed, spent time and energy in  pretty exotic and secret places. Form Boucheries, to Hula dances, to cava and Haka ceremonies in Polynesia to teahouses in China — I have sought the insights of the treasured common ceremony. My own life as a Christian every day  has been wrapped about with a number of secrets. Now I am in the process of revealing a few of them. Of course the Catholic Sacraments are described by the Latin word “Sacramentum” but also by the Greek word “Mysterion”, the same word translates as mistery. Catholics pass into the sacred mysteries at different phases of Christian life and the human lifecycle. They gain spiritual insight, renewal and energy.

I never pledged a college Greek Fraternity. I got a bid from the TKE chapter at Steubenville but declined it, I was honored but unable to take on the commitment and I was committed to a household that had few secret aspects to its initiation.  But there have been rituals that have been part of my life beyond church. I have posted a good bit about Mardi Gras, here and here for example. Besides the  Carnival and the  Official Christian Catholic mysteries, I remember being bloodied after a significant kill and bloodying young boys after a first kill — this is an important hunting ritual that I have seen in many forms. I remember fathering my hunting cap for the first kill of significant desirable duck or geese species like mallards, pintails, specks and snows. Then somehow I remember my first time at a bar after a rugby game, my first byline in print, my first time in a deep pool cave where sun never shines, my first time in a bat filled cave and a weta cave. Drinking and caves also remind me of other drinking rituals and not all involving alcohol or drinking cava in ceremonies on the Pacific isles. I remember getting a driver’s license and learning how to use computers — in both processes there were real initiation rituals and the car is extremely dangerous in many ways. Like a lot of people there were many milestones on the way. Somehow I got involved with some rarer and more exotic ones. When I was a teacher at St. Thomas More High School one of the classes that I taught was the Junior year “Sacraments and Morality” year. Both the editors of the textbook and I chose to show how rituals like birthday parties and Friday night football games were formative for young people learning the language and practice of rituals that they would use in Confirmation, the celebration of their weddings and the celebration of Mass.

For some people the politics of this election cycle are a bit of a mystery.  The cycle does not fit with their view of the way things should be and their ideas of what is normal in America. For some people much of life is a mystery, but many still hope for candidates from both parties that feel transparent and normal. Spies, detectives, lawyers and clerics keep lots of their life’s work hidden form many people who know them. I have known prophets, witches, mystics, shamaans, monks of various faiths, nuns, vampires and members of secret orders of knights. Some people would argue that virtually none of these people can exist. But nobody can argue that Anthony Weiner’s laptop full of Hillary’s email and his own problems exists. Nobody doubts Trump has said and done tings on record which many Americans consider abnormal or scary. these are our major choices this year. Neither Hillary nor trump were my choice this year.  I believe in the duty of citizens and I did my duty.

I voted. I voted yes on all but one of the Constitutional Ammendments — although I had less conviction than is ideal. I voted for Marilyn Castle for Supreme Court. Both seem qualified but she is very well qualified and I found her husband a decent boss back in 1989. I voted for Charles Boustany in the packed Senate Race. I selected Scott Angelle for Congress. Mike Francis for Public Service Commissioner and for the big finale….

I have voted for a third party or independent candidate once in a while but never for the Presidency. I voted for Keniston. I do not apologize for it and give him a limited endorsement:

Chris Keniston 2016 – A New Voice, A New Choice, For All Americans
Who is Chris KenistonChris Keniston is a family man, a patriot, a veteran but more importantly he is an American that will work for the people. Get to know Chris and…
CHRISKENISTON2016.COM

I believe in the basic claims of Christianity and in differences between good and evil outside of the question of whether something is Christian or not Christian. By no means would I put contemplative Carmelites and human sacrificing demon worshippers on the same moral plane. However, both groups like their privacy, both like to use symbolic language and both can be communities with long traditions that are well known to insiders and little known to outsiders. Discussion of what Halloween, All Saints Day  and All Souls Day mean are tied to the problems that exist across any tradition f rituals and secrets tied also to public celebrations.  I would urge that, if you have never thought about it, you realize that metaphors can be made real on film and effects are used to sell tickets. Halloween does not answer all our questions about the scary beings portrayed in some costumes  just as Real nuns don’t fly or seem like characters in “Sister Act” but you would recognize real nuns from either “The Flying Nun” series with Sally Fields or from Sister Act. I have had the time, desire and guts to get into a whole lot of varied mysteries. Sex and love are of course among the greatest mysteries and none of us exhaust them.

I have taken up too much time and space to discuss the other things I wanted to discuss. But we have concerns at the holiday and on election day. I will do my best to cope with each.

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Posted in 1, Abbeville, Acadians, Childhood Fun, Christianity, family, Family Missions Company, Frank W. Summers III's family, Genie Gremillion Summers, Greece & Greeks, Louisiana, Vermilion Parish

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Racial Violence, Islam, Christianity, America and Me… Part One

Posted on July 19, 2016 | 2 comments

There is a lot to say and so I am using a series to look at our challenges described in the title. This is not a long series of posts it has only two parts. There was an assassination of police officers in Baton Rouge this Sunday. Three officers, two white men named Matthew Gerald and Brad Garafola were killed as was one black man named Montrell Jackson. The basic original report of their tragic death is covered here by the Times-Picayune.  Of the dead, two – Jackson and Gerald- were Baton  Rouge city police and the other one was an East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s deputy. All leave behind families that include children. At least three other officers were wounded. All casualties were from the same two departments. One of the wounded, Nick Tullier, is still struggling for life. The others seem certain to survive.  It makes me sad and angry to think about the loss of life, the breach of peace and public order and the cost to all parts of our civil society arising from these tensions and their many manifestations. I especially realized how emotionally involved I am from video on one of the local television stations which showed me in a distant wide shot asking the panel my question during the forum. I was more agitated than I normally am as far as body language can allow one to communicate agitation, and that was without voice or a close up. But nonetheless I am not devoting this entire post to these events.  I do have emotions about these events that I need to express but I feel the need to express more than those emotions… But frankly, this post is only partly about the police ambush. A small part is about this important story in fact. This blog has some themes to pursue and these sad events occasion my pursing them a bit further. However, this has been more intense of an experience for those who represent the State of Louisiana at the capital city, and that has been covered by the Advocate here.

Baton Rouge cops shot art

In what has been described as a rambling series of YouTube presentations by several reporters and analysts, Gavin Eugene Long claimed to be a former Nation of Islam member, there has be no public affirmation or denial of this claim by  any Nation of Islam leadership that I know of so far. Also on what was basically a You Tube show, however unsuccessful, Long in fact referred to Alton Sterling, the armed black man who ran a long term squatter based DVD business in front of a convenience store and was killed by Baton Rouge police officers on July 5,  this was seen in graphic images and there was at least an element of summary execution in the images that a reasonable prosecutor could pursue as grave police misconduct. Gavin Long operated his own YouTube channel under his new legal name, Cosmo Setepenr which he had adopted in May of 2015. He used the Sterling shooting as an example of oppression, making references to oppression against blacks and police protests.Also relevant to these acts Long called the shootings of five Dallas police officers an act of “justice” in one of his videos. His political analysis led him to declare that  “One hundred percent of revolutions… have been successful through fighting back through bloodshed.” Some portion of the reporting on these matters is well handled by the Los Angeles Times here.  In his You Tube presentations Long said  the act of peaceful protesting was a futile method based on emotion and was easily forgettable. So he claimed association with the Nation of Islam and with more exotic small and less Islamic supposedly Muslim groups. But he also belonged to a number of groups most Islamists would never touch. The individual sovereignty movement is very small but also very diverse, with members varying enormously from one another in every way and it appears that Long was part of that movement. I did receive a degree from  LSU and I had intended to be there in a few weeks as of not so long ago. I reported recently that that would not happen.

More or less what Acadian means to those who do not know…
My graduate degree diploma

Monday, July 18,2016 I attended the Acadiana Press Club Forum Panel Discussion on policing in times of civil unrest. Panelists included David Khey, head of the criminal justice department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette;  Reginald Thomas, interim chief with the Lafayette Police Department; Marja Broussard, Lafayette NAACP leader and community organizer; and Maj. Art LeBreton, enforcement commander with the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office. Not in attendance as announced was Tracie L. Washington, a New Orleans-based National Lawyers Guild attorney. The discussion also included a number of people from the audience all of whom were concerned about the state of affairs we have been hearing about in Baton Rouge among other things. The mood has been tense in various places across the region since the shooting of the police in our state’s capital on Sunday and remains so to some degree today. But where I am and in many other places it is a subtle tone and feel which is easily missed. The usual  moderator was absent and a young woman from the Advocate organization named Lanie Lee Cook did an excellent job of moderating.She allowed a number of issues to come out including my question about tendencies to unduly nationalize crises and questions about riot gear which later shaped her own article appearing in the Acadiana Advocate.  I met here fro the first time when I helped her bring in the water from her car to go with complimentary snacks. But there was for me a mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces as there always is in these events. Several people were there for this topic who would almost never normally come but still that is not so unusual as people come specifically for each topic as well as those who try to come to most events. The violence in Baton Rouge including protest violence and arrests certainly colored all other discussions about this topic. A pastor and a senatorial candidate from the  African American community certainly brought up black on black violence and how this affects all of our perceptions of the current troubles. But admirable as I find these fora to be they are always limited in scope.

There should be enough material for several blog posts in discussing the Baton Rouge police ambush shooting, the protests and arrests as well as the Alton Sterling shooting that went first in this timeline. The video taken from a witness’s phone showed police struggling with Sterling and shooting him to death. It appears that in both the Sterling shooting and the ambush police responded to reports of an armed man who appeared to be a threat. Gavin Long, Sunday’s shooter was dressed all in black, was a military veteran ( like the Dallas cop killer) and seems to have come all the way from Missouri to kill Baton Rouge law enforcement officials. Rich as that story is, I am only going to deal with it briefly. He was clearly involved in the political realities of his time and clearly was not overly successful, not so different than me or a good number of other people I know in that regard. Just days before his deadly rampage Lafayette General Hospital was launching the formal establishment of the Mayci Breaux Memorial Scholarship founded to honor one of the two women killed at The Grand Theater in Lafayette. That story was reported on my blog here and here.  Also this reminded me that like that shooter, only more so, this killer drove a distance to come to Louisiana and kill our people. Two known high profile incidents do a pattern make. They may also indicate a larger pattern. I can think of a lot of reasons why the choice to attack Louisiana might seem a natural one to some people. Hauser was a man as much an open Christian as Long was a Muslim and then had some nearness left to spare. But his Christianity was of the Hitlerite variety and I will mention Hitler and his views just a bit below. Hitler was a larger supporter of a breed of anti-Semitic, violent and disruptive Islam not so different than the Islamist terror movements of our own day. These two groups often find it easier to converse than Muslim  Sufis and Catholic Charismatics for example. But I believe that for America the Catholic Charismatics and the Sufis would have more to offer as citizens and in productive dialog.

This is the season where one can argue endlessly about the success of various programs and wars and not really agree on where the results stand. In his final Prime Minister’s Question David Cameron dealt convincingly with the progress of the war and yet one knows that there is no doubt that the war on ISIS has a darker side than he describes when hne lists the devastation of their militarized territoties and even claims that their foreign recruits have been cut off by as much as 90%.  Even if those things are true, and it is hard to be sure we know that the region is a mess and the world is made more unstable by the many degree and layers of chaos that are ongoing there.  There is much more to say about that dark side of the Syrian and Iraqi political realities and their consequences elsewhere than we can get to here. There is so much to be said about the recent terrorist attack in Nice that deserves more attention in this post than the Baton Rouge attacks and that event as a whole is more than we can get to here. The Nice attacker was of Tunisian descent but his family seems to have arrived in France even before that early wave of the Arab Spring. He was not directly a part of the huge displacement of people, the refugee crisis and the resulting tensions across the region in Europe and even here in North America which has resulted most of all from the Syrian war. But that is not the only bad outcome. However, it is  quite debatable which outcomes are good and bad fairly quickly.  For me few things could more clear than that we need to fight ISIS and that it has not been an entirely successful fight  — I hope this post contributes something  to understanding what has contributed to the faults in our strategy. The fight with ISIS, the Black Lives Matter excesses, the remnants of Al Qaeda, the Arab Spring, the chaos in Turkey and the tensions related to BRexit cannot all be seen as purely disparate phenomena. In addition,  in September of 2012 in this blog I posted a post  titled “The Current Crisis in US- Islamic Relations…”, you can link to it here but it is reproduced significantly in what follows. In that post I was declaring that the angry Muslim crowds protesting outside US embassies, the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his four companions at the consulate in Benghazi were all  deeply troublesome events. I reminded readers that from 1776 to 1950 no United States Ambassadors were killed in office.  I speculated given my lack of research resources that perhaps two or three died in transit from posts or even sickened and died after taking some kind of leave but none died in office. Just as with Lincoln no presidents were killed in office before him nor shot but a good percentage were shot or shot and killed after the Kennedy assassination, however I failed to mention that if Andrew Jackson had not had the skills that he had as a sort of action hero co me to life then he might well have been shot on at least one occasion and if he survived that then perhaps on another. This initial shooting of Lincoln after our greatest national crisis also tied to race forms a pattern for future and repeated violence and if one leaves  aside the Indian curse and natural deaths in office that made up a patter until Reagan survived his shooting then one can say it was a creation of a new bloody political discourse when John Wilkes Booth shot the President he perceived as a tyrant. If that is the Case then Ambassador Steven death for which Secretary Clinton bears little penalty might become a very important and seminal historical event because it had been almost thirty years since our singular period of bloody Ambassador service had ended, that is from 1950 to 1988 seven died violently in office. Two in plane crashes ruled accidental and five in armed attacks. The last one killed in an armed attack was in 1979, that was almost forty years ago. It is true that in the last few years no more Ambassadors have been killed. But since on September  11 2012  the whole consulate in Benghazi was gutted and the Ambassador, an IT specialist and two armed men (one of whom was a former US Navy SEAL and the other a State Department Security professional) were killed we can see an escalating patter of violence and worldwide disorder related to the forces that killed them.  Symbols matter from the prompt reality that the within hours of the Libya events  the US flag was torn down in our embassy in Cairo and desecrated and an Islamist flag was raised in its place to the attack in Nice and the shootings of cops by two people who had some ties to Islam in their final views on what to do in America. Other embassies surrounds are erupting and the potential for more killings is very real. Prior to the attacks on the embassy, in fact one day prior on September 10, 2012 I posted the following  paragraph in a note here in this blog:

I am concerned about tomorrow’s anniversary. There have been a lot more shootings in Afghanistan lately of our troops, there have been a lot of ammo dumps opened up to terrorist groups through the so-called Arab Spring. There are new governments with ties to these terror groups. There have been a lot of mass shootings in the USA lately. Our border is very porous with Mexico in which violence is breaking out in new ways daily. In addition the Arab element in Mexico has multiplied many times over in recent decades. Very little has been done to honor the woman who shot the Fort Hood shooter or to punish the Fort Hood shooter. I do not mean to predict that there will be ground based terrorist attacks on our soil this month. Probably there will not be. But if there are they will not be unpredictable.

We find that I was well aware of the general kinds of risks that we would face on the very day that disaster occurred because I was aware. Montrell Jackson was a big armed black man,  sexually vital and successful enough to be a father and financially successful enough to make it in middle class America. he was not less assertive than his killer or less black. But what did he care about: He discusses being tired sending out prayers and hugs working for peace and unity. He has a desire for the civic good to come about as inspired by and separate from the religious good but connected to it. I do not know where this man whose wife had just given birth to a son a few months before worshipped but it is a deeply Christian vision with roots in Augustine and the book of Acts of the Apostles. Labels are not the most important thing and all Islam is not the enemy of all peace in America. But it is true that here the killer found solace in the Nation of Islam and the defending martyr in sentiments with a deeply Christian provenance. Adolph Hitler in his early years of organizing decried the efforts of German missionaries to  make Christians converts among the negroes in Africa. More subtly but clearly enough Macaualay the great British historian indicated a few truths that string together for him into a doctrine. First that Catholic Christianity leads to race mixing more than Protestantism and  secondly that Protestantism produces a superior civilization.  He also believed Catholic Christianity had created the English as a racial entity by mixing the Norse, Celts and Germans but that having happened then it was important that it not happen again. Christians in America do not subscribe generally to such explicit ideas, but they are not irrelevant to us. Christians here do not really understand that Egypt, Turkey and Syria form a real part of the Christian Holy Land and the churches devastated under the years of American influence are deep and sacred parts of our heritage. Almost every comment Christians in the west would make about the racial and ethnic identity of those old Christians is offensive ot most of them even though all the statements are profoundly at odds with other offensive statements from the West.

Montrell Jackson Post

This is not the easiest post to write and not all of them are easy to write anyway. What we have to recognize in my opinion is the real history of the United States as regards Islam. The role of religion in the life of the United States and in geopolitics was probably less open and more minimized during my early childhood than ever at any other time among American children. The Soviet Union was the great Marxist atheist adversary which had reinvented itself and had nothing to do with the thousand year formation of Russia as it struggled to be a Christian nation. The struggle for nationhood and the struggle for Christianity can be separated for discussion but they are deeply linked and in the most complicated ways. We also have to remember that the Slavic peoples we criticize for abusing Muslim territories have an ethnic name of Slav that resembles  slavery in English largely because they were enslaved by Turks and Arabs on a broad scale for centuries.  The numbers are staggering and althoughmany died horribly their genes as much or more than Hellenic and Minoan communities absorbed before account for many of the Europena genetic features in parts of the Arab world which would other wise be far more negroes because of other people enslaved by Arabs and other Muslims then freed over previous centuries.    In this period of history of which Putin is likely more aware than Trump or Clinton most white slaves did not have definably negro masters but certainly thousands of whites did have negro masters and the overall tone that informs the racial dialog in America is in blissful ignorance of these matters.  Almost exactly year before Long shot up Baton Rouge a Muslim shot up a recruiting station in Chatanooga, Tennessee.  Did the internet savvy Long find those memories online when making a decision? The endless bloody chain of events has no end and we must at least understand it — that includes the slavery in America and the COnfederacy but those events have a context as well.  Monuments and flags are coming down across America but what is taking their place?

Today we all know religion has a profound influence on the world, its politics and its power arrangements at least as compared to the secular tone of my childhood as it was portrayed in the news and politics more often than not. I am myself a very openly Christian person and it is not hard for me to connect my  faith to anything else that I might be interested in doing, talking about or writing about in this blog. Sometimes the connection is that what I am doing is not very Christian but there is always a connection. The future of Christianity in America is not assured and not easy to define. It can take many forms and it will face many challenges.  But however much I may disagree with many Americans about what that faith is  meant to be and what its role is — but I think we can not ignore its significance. In the next part of this series, which may or may not be the next post , I will look at how Christianity and Islam offer competing visions of America which affect the violence in our streets.   But for now I will simply conclude by saying that we will not get anywhere I want to go without a lot more painful and uncomfortable discussion of the inter changes between race, religion and violence than we have known so far.

The struggles related to race go back a long time and are not likely to end soon….
Press from Acadian Museum Corinne Broussard Scrapbook
Window in St .Louis Cathedral showing the Crusader saint’s body being borne back when he died after launching a great war against Islamists who were terrorizing local Christians and others.
Window in the Saint Louis Cathedral in New Orleans showing the sainted King of France for whom the church is named caring for the sick directly.
Anika placing the baby Jesus figurine in a family nativity scene called a creche.
The seal of the Confederacy ties the Lost Cause to the Revolution and the past long before that war.
This is the author of this blog. I am standing beside the stone boat in the Summer Palace in Beijing.

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Posted in 1, 9-11 attacks, Christianity, Islam, Louisiana, media, Personal Philosophy and Moral Economics, race, United States of America, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Vermilion Parish, Western civilization

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Faith Camp, Bukidnon Youth Conference and the Future

Posted on July 14, 2016 | Leave a comment

Faith Camp is a one week long camp held for middle school aged students based somewhere in Vermilion Parish. There are currently two such camps held each year. While the kids are the focus it is an event that involves people of all ages. For many who participate in its various aspects it is both an optimistic and fun experience and a deeply spiritual one. The Catholic faith is celebrated in a context which is fairly complete and brings the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the experience of church into the lives of these young people in a complete way.

The last two weeks  before this posting there has been ongoing the 20th year of continuous Faith Camps. This ministry was founded by my sister Susanna whom I saw at Faith Camp last night. At the time she founded she and were regular prayer partners and she was in the area and living at Big Woods during the summer after having started her studies at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. It was a fairly small camp that year but I was deeply impressed with it and shared with her my own memories of a live-in conference  in Bukidnon when she was a child as one of my better memories and so the two things were linked in my mind at the inception although there was not much of a causal link.  Susanna wasalso a small child when the Bukidnon Youth Conference was going on around and near her in various manifestations in Malaybalay, Bukidnon on the southern island of Mindanao in the Republic of the Philippines. I haven’t been back since the 1980s but it was a time which I have always felt had a big influence on the rest of my life and other lives in the family. Many members of my family have played key roles in the success of the camp over the decades. This year a middle school aged child of one of the campers at the second camp was a camper at Faith Camp.

Austin at a faith Camp reunion a few years before he was shot.

 

 This year my sister Sarah’s eldest daughter Alyse is the coordinator of Faith Camp as she was last year. This is one of the blog posts that I write that is not primarily driven by the news. It is more driven by  a series of important experiences, recollections  and feelings which resonate in my life. This is one of those posts which combines both some vivid recollection and some fading memories: But the hope one felt at key times continues. The possibility of really putting together a history of those years is a daunting and not a very promising prospect. But the prospect of trying to recapture some of the spirit of those times seems a worthy aspiration as it will help me to convey some thoughts about the current times and some of the times in between now and then. I went from New Zealand to the Philippines with my birth family when I was seventeen and arrived there around Christmas. The bottom right hand picture below is of the Maranatha Youth Group in St. Pius X Church Parish in Titahi Bay which I left behind there on those cool windswept coasts. We passed through Australia on the way there.The top set of damaged images are from my time in the Philippines as is my better picture of myself leading my sisters on the carabao. The bottom right hand corner isa picture of the wall of my Household at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.

 

faded image of my sister’s First Communion in the Philippines.
Our family loved our rare vacations to Camiguin Island while we were in the Philippines.
Like these faded copies of pictures for which originals may still exist some aspects of my ties to the Philippines and some memories have faded.
Leading my sisters on a carabao in the Philippines.
College Household at FUS
The Maranatha Youth Group in Titahi Bay, New Zealand with me in it.

 We were in the Philippines for a couple of years (or so I remember without checking) and Simon was born with difficulties associated with Prader-Willi Syndrome. That was also at Christmas and was at the time of my Bukidnon Youth Conference which is the real subject of part at least of this post. Due to Simon’s condition we came back to the United States. While there I completed my Freshman Year at USL — now the University of Louisiana  — in one semester and in the preceding summer worked in some college and youth ministries in the church. Then we all returned to the Philippines and I renewed my ministry for a while and in the summer just after my brother Joseph was born and having overstayed my visa in a tense time in a country on edge and with a gift of a large and dangerous looking tribal sword I flew back alone to the United States.The picctures I took there for various reasons have not much been digitzed and the ones that were have not al made it into part of the cloud I can access. But the memories that I have of the Philippines are indeed plentiful and meaningful. Many of them were pleasant enough. Although the images in the pair below do not show the day to day life there as I justified that life they do show some of the rewards of the experience. Visiting the sick westerners in trouble, prison ministry, speaking to dozens of groups and working with college ministries all filled most of my days. But the Bukidnon Youth Conference was perhaps the  peak of my ministry there.  Being a 52 year old, divorced, childless near indigent was not the future among many possible futures which I saw as most likely in those days. But the journey since has certainly been a complicated on and rich too in color and texture and that sense of richness makes me feel like an expert on almost everything on some days. While that is not fair to much of anything neither or the days entirely fair when I feel that my onIy efforts to communicate come from having little else to do that is fulfilling and that I only ever feel that I  am well qualified to be a sage because I appear not to be qualified for anything else. My life has not been laser focused in a single direction and my time in the Philippines was not either. I like Faith Camp and I liked the Bukidnon Youth Conference in part because they touched many aspects of life from the arts to sport to socializing over dinner. This reminds me of one of my first Facebook notes when I wrote about  some of the extracurricular activities and hobbies that have enriched my life  and divided them into the big three categories of Faith, Science and Sports which I  chose to denominate as easy issues for that early Facebook note. These Easy Issues are not to be confused with the Easy Essays written by Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker Movement. His essays were easy,  because he easily guided the reader through the complexities of political philosophy to a simple and cohesive approach which would provide the framework fo the movement he and Dorthy Day were founding. In my Facebook the subjects are easy because of my tremendous insights into the very narrow experience I had in each of those fields — I did not concern myself with the larger picture. There was some tongue in cheek in the use of there terms and words but Faith Camp and the Bukidnon Youth Conference were also founded to give young people a real body of experience that they could claim as their own. A small window of controlled positive experience from ehich to see the world.

During those years when ministry was part of my life I did a lot of work preparing to work . One thing  or another or many things must be left out including almost all my regular Catholic  school time but I now note  the religious education I received. Some I received within the context of the schools mentioned. However, I also took a set of remote preparation confirmation classes in the Diocese of Lafayette within the Come Lord Jesus Program and the brief imediate preparation course at a Parish in the Archdiocese of Wellington, New Zealand. I was confirmed by a cardinal. In the Diocese of Lafayette I also completed instruction in and was commissioned for Evangelism as a Lay Evangelist of my native dicoese. This was also where after college I was certified as a catechist. Beyond those things, I completed the Life in the Spirit Seminar, the Cursillo de Cristiandad (en Ingles), a basic Lector’s training, Prayer Group Leaders Training Course, a salvation history micro course and stdied as a journalist the English translation of the Prelature of Bukidnon’s Alagad course which was a successful lay leadership course. I also read and discussed the Documents of the Second Vatican Council many times and in many contexts. Susanna who founded Faith Camp completed here degree in theology while continuing to build up this ministry. The two things have in common that they communicate to the kids from a depp and well laid foundation.

Like a lot of activity among Christians it is designed to provide an opportunity for a personal spiritual experience. The importance of personal spiritual experience in America is more evident than in some countries. One of the reasons for that comes from a man who was not a Christian but had a profound influence on the Christian and other populations of these United States at a critical time — the Revolution. Thomas Paine, one of the great thinkers of the American revolution basically stated that one of the profound problems with revelation as a basis for any law or covenant is that as soon as it is written down or described rather than existing as a perceived miracle or apparition or Messianic epiphany it becomes mere tradition. Three things can be said about that idea that miracles and revelation become traditions:

1. It is somewhat true and worth keeping in mind.
2. If God, the universe, the gods and Divine Wisdom were communicating with humanity they might not excuse people who said “Well, I needed that direct Apparition your Highness — didn’t get it so it’s your fault not mine.”
3.In places and times such as existed in the Charismatic renewal there was a renewal within the person which was seen to confirm the written Word and the received tradition. It is out of that third connection with the renewal of the background music and lifestyle of our family that the Bukidnon Youth Conference (BYC) and twenty years of Faith Camps have come. The Bukidnon Conference was less part of the Charismatic Renewal than was some of my work in those days and the current Faith Camps only remind one of the renewal. But the tradition is there.

St. Augustine is credited with two sayings that mean a lot to me as far as faith goes. One is “Seek not to understand that you may believe. Seek rather to believe that you may understand.” That saying is not perfect and is easily misconstrued but it remains profoundly true and truly profound.The second saying I will allow to explain itself and to be interpreted without me. St Augustine wrote “The best and the worst men in the world live in monasteries.” The idea that these young people come together to find understanding and to explore a fully lay spirituality does not mean that none will later become monks, priests, scientists or theologians some do and those around usually rejoice.  But the experience is of a different focus of informing a growing faith and living for Christ in the world.

That Filipino journey  in which the Bukidnon YouthBconference was born was one  which only temporarily ended just after the conference itself. But after returning with them from my time at USL and in this region I did not stay but went to enroll at the school where Susanna was studying when Faith Camp was founded.  I returned a bit early and went to live that summer with my paternal grandparents in a larger than most two storey house beside a park. That  is where I lived in that intervening summer have lived at other times and is also where I am living  now as I type this but I have only been here for a few months this go round. Then I enrolled as a sophomore at the Franciscan University. The summer after my sophomore year I returned to the Philippines to visit and overstayed my visa yet again by only a few days and flew home alone. I left school in mid semester for complicated reasons including some to do with problems in the Philippines related to those whom I had invited into the region to help me with the Youth Conference and  shortly after leaving school I met my parents returning to Abbeville where I currently reside. All of that was along time ago and I took a break to do some more ministry and other things before enrolling again at USL and finishing my degree there. Thousands of picture taken during those and subsequent years are unavailable to me here and now on this blog. But the family on the bottom left hand of the set below are the son of Abbeville friends and his wife who have been FMC missionaries where we once served for more than a few years now. The picture on the bottom right hand corner shows my brother Simon and my parents at an FMC Donors Dinner. He clearly survived the ordeals surrounding his birth as did we all.

Our family posing in our home garden in the Philippines
Some photos of their ministry before Family Missions Company
My Sophomore Class Award from the Franciscan University of Steubenville
New Zealand Youth Group at Botanical Gardens
Sammy and Lindsey and their family in missions. Donald long supported the mission work of my family.
A picture I took of my table at the Donors Dinner

 

Of the  actual BYC as an event I have no photos to share and never had many photos. Indeed of the conference itself very little documentation was made and far less survives. But there are a few things and here are a pair of snippets of that time. The newsletter Resounding Praise which defined so much of our communication with the rest of the world had a feature on the conference. This gathering so distant in time and space is still near to my memory and sensibility. The sense and vision behind the conference was one of bringing young Catholics and some not sure they were Catholics together to celebrate the gospel and to deal with the real challenges not only of their personal lives but of Islamist and Communist pressures from groups which in several cases were profoundly hostile to their Catholic Christian commitments.  There was also a real openness to finding what could be improved in the generally pro-American, Catholic, free market synthesis that informed the conference. There was not a tone of xenophobia or paranoia but of relatively optimistic participation in the world as it was  for young Catholic Christians. There is something in Faith Camp’s tradition that has always reminded me of that event.

 

 

There are bigger events in the world than Faith Camp or the Bukidnon Youth Conference but bigness is not everything. Nonetheless as America approaches it participation with other countries in the Rio Olympic Games I am reminded that the New testament is full of references to Olympic events. Paul wrote of racing, boxing, archery and of the disciplines of training as well as the glories of victory in those ancient games. For those going to the Olympics who are Christians while they should respect the games and the diversity there it can be both a mission and a spiritual experience in Christ.

A few years ago London prepared to see the wedding take place in Westminster Abbey there was a lot of suffering and pain in the world. Truthfully, there is almost always a lot of suffering and pain in the world.  Whatever their role may be in adding to the sum of distress in the world, the British royals do quite a bit to lessen the sum of woe and that was not the less true in a year when they were planning a royal wedding . That  set of outreaches to those in need is an effort that  is well documented. Prince Charles, Camilla Duchess of Cornwall and Prince William (the bridegroom this weekend) all have long supported a variety of charities benefiting humans, animals, ecosystems and cultural groups in distress.Prince Charles has a substantial income as Duke of Cornwall and donates a great deal of the income to charities in such a way that it leverages and is leveraged by other charitable donations. While it may well be that not a direct penny of that family’s efforts and gifts will go to help those hurt by the tornadoes whch ripped through the South last night it is also true that they are part of a philanthropic community around the world in which helping is informally circulated almost everywhere. Two babies (at least) ago the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth celebrated on the 29th of April 2011 The wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. This expensive and extravagant occasion was also a Christian ritual and gathering and an expression of faith. The scene was truly extraordinary and the elegant venue and the well prepared  liturgy and preaching were all rather impressive even for those who are not so easily impressed.  The sermon of the Anglican Bishop of London is one which I have found to be a worthy sermon to address our times:

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” So said St Catherine of Siena whose festival day it is today. Marriage is intended to be a way in which man and woman help each other to become what God meant each one to be, their deepest and truest selves.

Many are full of fear for the future of the prospects of our world but the message of the celebrations in this country and far beyond its shores is the right one – this is a joyful day!

It is good that people in every continent are able to share in these celebrations because this is, as every wedding day should be, a day of hope.

In a sense every wedding is a royal wedding with the bride and the groom as king and queen of creation, making a new life together so that life can flow through them into the future.

uture.

Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Joseph Granger arrived early after preparing the reception and were waiting in the bleachers for the ceremony to begin on a beautiful evening.
My godson Mark John Braña with his wife and children in the Philippines
An image showing the basis of all this Christmas celebration.
A picture I took of my table at the Donors Dinner
Thanksgiving Dinner 2014 — a single backlit shot to serve for a whole set of images and memories…
my fiftieth birthday
My fitfieth birthday
two of my grandparents
Me in front of my family in Micronesia
Michelle and I kiss on our wedding day.
Former wife Michelle Broussard Summers and I — Sea Island Georgia

 

The future does flow through families and gathering and weddings and the like. Churches and other communities have an obligation, it seems to me to prepare young people to be conduits of the grace of God and the hope of the future into new generations. They need to be prepared for the task. All married couples, all celibates and many other classes of not mutually exclusive kinds of people have to be educated in that complete humanity. For Faith Camp that is a Catholic Christian experience An I like that best but it also speaks to those not with us in that community. I am not a young optimist and my own view of life can be pretty bleak often enough. But while  I am sorry that when caught up in nearly apocalyptic events I often already have declared myself to have been involved in a number of calamities — sorry but not very repentant. these conferences and other things have not made me boldly cheerful in that sense. But each Faith Camp and its predecessor to my view  have in fact reminded me that how one engages with life may change over the years  but faith filled engagement  and courage remain necessary.  I know that I  was at one time more fully engaged in meeting the world and the changes going on around me with gusto and energy than I am now. I beilieve that some of those now enthused will persevere in doing good but will not have the same zest when they are my age as they do now.  The world is no stranger to my dire assessments and prognostications regarding my own life and future but the truth is I am still in the fight for the same causes and so are some of those who fought with me under that old distant BYC banner. So also is Susanna and her early team.

Faith Camp prayer - 8   But there is a time and a place for looking back on all that has happened in ones life and that place is this blog. The time is spread out over many posts and pages. The truth is that I was not always quite so late middle aged, directionless and chronically despondent as I am now.  There were times when I aspired to other and more things in daily life than a differing serving of a perpetual mix of the routine, the impossible and the trivial. I was working hard at BYC but perhaps nobody got more out of it than I. I rejoice in the legacy I see although nobody else may see it the same way exactly.

The outgrowth of my various involvements and labors over the years are not all that easy to track, however there has been an institution which has grown out of all that activity in one sense or another and which is also dear to my heart for various reasons…  My brother John Paul was the head coordinator longer than anyone else so far I believe. It is also interesting that this year’s head coordinator Alyse Spiehler has a brother who although he only went to the first camp and was abroad on his birthday during the second camp has celebrated his birthday at Faith Camp several years and probably will again. In fact all of my sibling except Simon and my deceased half brother have served ads head coordinators or coordinators although I never have. I did of course at BYC which I consider to be an ancestor of Faith Camp. The family tie is a real one with my family but there are many other family ties as well. This does not make the focus more narrow and our family does not embody any analogous local set of privileges to those that shaped the hosting of the large wedding in London mentioned before. But the family story is part of the Faith Camp story.

 

That is, with everything else already mentioned and many other things not mentioned here  — the ongoing work of Faith Camp. That is the distant legacy of the BYC. And in some way it is the universal call of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are called to be the Body of Christ as Church and to celebrate the mystery of the fullness of life Christ came to offer and assure. All of that is part of the Faith Camp Story.

faith camp week 2, 2016 - 4 faith camp week 2, 2016 - 2 faith camp week 2, 2016 - 1

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Clinton’s Campaign: Does She Have Credibility, a Creed and a Contest ?

Posted on July 5, 2016 | 1 comment

Will Secretary and Senator and Former First Lady  Hillary Rodham Clinton be the first female President of the United States? It certainly seems likely. Here you can read my first post when she became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.  Since the very first version of this post came out the Washington Post has run an article saying that her credibility is damaged, that article is here and it may or may not represent political reality. But the contention made here in all versions of this post so far is that there appears to be a small chance that she will be indicted, arrested and charged in the email scandal or in any matter to do with Benghazi. By small of course I mean that there is not a large chance. There appears to be a miniscule chance that Bernie Sanders will mount a successful revolt or set up a powerful third party challenge which would derail her path to the presidency. There is more or less no realistic chance that she will be stopped from being elected except by the victory of Donald Trump as the Republican Nominee over her as the Democratic Nominee in the general election. Almost no chance is not the same as no chance. Any number of things could happen including death of physical impairment. But the odds seem to be better than fifty percents that she will be the next POTUS. Few people have ever had more relevant work or official experience when approaching the highest office in the land. To be a Senator is a lot, to be Secretary of State is a lot, to be First Lady is a lot — to be all three is a staggering degree of experience. Of course I physically stagger more easily than some more physically gifted readers and so I go to that adjective and the related adverb more readily than they might. But if one does not stagger one at least must take notice of the degree to which she embodies tremendous experience. Compared to her:

  1. Donald Trump has never held elected office,
  2. he has never lived in the White House,
  3. he has never lived in the executive mansion of a State,
  4. he has never held an office appointed by a President,
  5. he has never led a sustained policy discussion as Clinton did with healthcare,
  6. he has never been officially invited to sit at the table to negotiate  a formal treaty on behalf of the United States.

To safeguard liberty we must be able to adapt to the changing times.

To safeguard liberty we must be able to adapt to the changing times.

On the other hand they do have some lack of experience in common:

  1. Neither on has held a major post in a religious institution,
  2. neither has served in the military,
  3. neither has served in the workaday world of the intelligence community,
  4. neither has lived on our borders or in border towns for any length of time,
  5. neither speaks Spanish of French well, official languages of our neighbors,
  6.  neither has lived and worked as a citizen in the way business people, missionaries, journalists and  volunteers do every day across this world as they forge an American identity abroad.

Ambassador Stevens was an unusually high ranking victim of violence abroad. In the last few days other Americans have lost their lives around the world but a glimpse into the kinds of decisions he faced is also a glimpse into kinds of decisions that Americans who believe in what they are doing abroad face every day.  The following excerpt is from the recent report on the Benghazi incident:

While the end of the fiscal year funding deadline was looming, the Diplomatic Security Agent in charge at the Embassy in Tripoli was, nonetheless,
concerned about Stevens’ trip to Benghazi. Although his first planned trip to Benghazi in the beginning of August 2012 had to be canceled because of security,14 Stevens was adamant, however, about going in September.15 The Diplomatic Security Agent testified:
Previous to this—to his decisions to going up there, there was— we would meet weekly to discuss the security situation in Libya.…[
T]here was a specific meeting regarding what was happening in Benghazi. In that meeting, we reviewed incidents and  probable causes, what’s initiating it. And a lot of discussion was that it was the conflict or the incidents up there were, you know, local population against local population and that that they weren’t specifically targeting Americans … up there. I expressed my concerns about the incidents that did involve us. And the basic response was that they … were anomalies.

We all have images of what leadership should look like which are not simple portrayals of reality.

We all have images of what leadership should look like which are not simple portrayals of reality.

Romney was a missionary in France during anti-American times, Bill Clinton visited Russia as a student in the Cold War years and there are other connections to tat least the same world Chris Stevens lived in that can be found in other political lives outside the military but not in the lives of Hillary Clinton or Donald trump so far as I know. Both have traveled a great deal. both have been at some risk but the proportion of risk to resources has never been equal in my opinion to the baseline many Americans abroad have experienced every day all of my life.

The other thing that they have in common is access to fame, fortune, privilege and the people in power. This is not an even contest between the two of them but neither does it really matter who has had more of such opportunity. These opportunities have defined both of their lives for a long time. One big difference of course is that Trump like all previous American Presidents is a man and Clinton is a woman. I visited that in the post where her candidacy was all but assured but I am not going to deal with it much in this post.

There are issues related to Clinton that have very little to do with the fact that she is a woman. Trump recently said he just knew very little about her religion and she responded by declaring her self emphatically enough to be a Methodist. My own take on some of the discussion of Clinton’s religion has been posted in this blog before and can be seen here. Of course there may be more to say as time goes on.  One fact about the election of the first Clinton to the Presidency is that the result was likely determined by the most credible third party candidate in presidential politics in my lifetime — Ross Perot. He made it more than possible for Bill Clinton to defeat George Bush Senior. Thus Clinton did not face the kind of intense contest he would have otherwise.  This kind of splitting is well established in British politics and may have been fostered in some way or another by the Rhodes Scholar, Bill Clinton as the biggest take home lesson from his time in Oxford. Some may see Trump as Ross Perot on steroids. He is the third party candidate who became the  candidate of a major party and the main obstacle to Clinton’s election. that would still be true even if Romney or someone becomes a real third party candidate somehow. So how does trump match Clinton on matters of faith?

To see Clinton’s faith in political terms this season means to examine Donald Trump’s faith as well. He seems to be a person, like Clinton, about whom one could say a great many contradictory things based on pretty good evidence. That is not necessarily because he is deceptive or a hypocrite but may be because of the place he comes from in his life context. Interestingly enough he has made it clear that he supports Christmas as a national holiday and seeks to preserve it. That was the narrow subject of my original blog post about Clinton’s faith and the faith of other candidates.    Christmas was of course never my only interest in the religious identity of candidates. I love Christmas very much and the Christian observance of it by this country is a tradition I think worth striving for and worth some sacrifice. However, it is interesting that the ugliest rumors and suspicions about Donald Trump involve the ways in which he reminds people of the NSDAP or Nazis and the Third Reich. While many Christians nothing like the Hitlerites have rallied around Christmas, there is also no doubt that the Nazis made Christmas and especially the control of Christmas tree sales and early focus of political activity.  In further clarification, it is interesting to note that the list of candidates in the Democrats poll I posted in that article did include Biden but did not include Sanders. Even more interesting is that Trump does not appear among the six Republican candidates who appear in the poll I posted and reviewed in terms of the religion of the candidates. Huckabee was the leader in the poll and he was of course a Baptist minister who claimed the same hometown as President William Jefferson Clinton — Hope, Arkansas. So where does that leave the discussion of religion as I saw it back in 2014? It is not a perfectly relevant post in every way  then.  But here is the principal quotation from that blog post as it pertains to understanding Clinton’s faith in very general political terms. The first paragraph below deals with how Americans likely to vote Republican were thinking about Republican candidates in 2014 and how that related to Christmas and it observance by the Christians of this nation . However the remaining paragraphs  relate to what Clinton’s religious identity is likely to be. It is perhaps best to look at the text:

There is a lot of shaking out to do if these numbers mean any thing before any Republican can claim the nomination.  But it does indicate perhaps the streams of thought that are shaping the country as regards finding a religious root for values expressed by America’s  “right” in politics.

What then about the left? Where does the other side of American  political energy come down on our connecting with the roots of Christianity.  Unlike the possible GOP nominees, Hillary Clinton has tended to tower over her challengers for the 2016 Democratic nomination. Some people are saying that candidates like Elizabeth Warren are poised to show explosive growth but it would take a lot of growth to challenge  Clinton in the primary.

Joe Lieberman who ran with Al Gore was not a Christian but a Jew who seemed to tolerate a good deal of public Christmas. Mitt Romney belonged to what most scholars consider to be a post-Christian religion but it is one that celebrates Christmas as an American holiday and the birth festival of Jesus Christ. Many presidents have been devout Christians: Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wilson, John Kennedy and half a dozen others are clearly men who in my opinion must be seen as Christians entirely. Whatever they did not achieve of the Christian ideal is not because they did not adhere to that faith and religion. Richard Nixon was reared as a Quaker and (though many American Quakers seem pretty much to be Christians) Quakers as a whole are not a Christian faith but one which grew up among Christians.  It is hard to say what Nixon was when he was President. With men like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and  a few others it hard to say where they stood in terms of religious classification and identity.

So that brings me to Clinton. She is a favorite enemy of the Christian Right and other religious people in American politics and she may well deserve it. She has a background which is mostly verifiable: Clinton was reared a Methodist Protestant Christian, belonged to a Senate Prayer Group and has spoken at Prayer Breakfasts.  Her profile may seem different to American atheists than to most other people. Here is an atheist site evaluating Clinton’s background and religious values.  It is hard to know how  she would deal with Christmas.

I have just finished observing the Independence Day  holiday in a minimal sort of way. It is always a time that I like to think about what it means to be an American and posts about those thoughts can be seen here. But although those ideas have been posted here they have more often been shared in other places and my thoughts about America have been posted here on other holidays. Those holiday thoughts on Memorial Day have been  here and on Veterans day have been here. While I have in common with Clinton and Trump that I have not a day of service in the military in my past it seems to be the military holidays that most inspire my patriotism. My observation of the Independence Day holiday was not entirely minimal by every standard and I did post quite a few notes and the lyrics of the National Anthem on my Facebook profile but minimal my observance  certainly was  in some measures. Neither Trump nor Clinton were very visible in my own perusal of our nation’s birthday. But one of them will likely be the American Head of State by next Independence Day. Unlike Christmas these holidays are not specifically Christian. I am a Christian and for me Christian prayer is part of these national holidays. I am not sure how the faith of either major candidate informs  their celebration of these days.  But faith and the most gung ho kinds of patriotism are linked by many as can be seen at links here and here. What else does  America expect from a leader and does Clinton have it?

Clinton has a lot of government experience, but the range is not infinite. One of the big achievements of this week has been the placement of the Juno observatory in position as a satellite of Jupiter. Some of the reason many people around the world are interested in this project can be gleaned here.  Neither Clinton nor Trump seems to be the kind to play an extraordinary role in blazing a pioneering trail into space.  These kinds of brave explorations may shape the future or not but they do not seem to define the vision of either Clinton or Trump.

One question many people have about religion is whether or not someone who prays for help should be President. Perhaps prayer means one cannot do the job. But some contend Clinton had private emails because she did not want to disclose the degree to which she could not do her job. That story can be seen here. It is to be noted that this not entirely clear story comes from a publication as biased in favor of Clinton and against Trump as one can get. But the point is here only that Buzz Aldrin, a rocket scientist, astronaut and space planner is a noted public prayer promoter in his own life and not being known for religious acts makes nobody a scientist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in 1, Christianity, France, Independence Day, Religious Holidays, Russia, United States Armed Forces, United States of America, Western civilization, White House

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Christmas is a Coming and a 2016 Presidential Preview

Posted on December 14, 2014 | 3 comments

An image showing the basis of all this Christmas celebration.

An image showing the basis of all this Christmas celebration.

It is still a bit too early but “Merry  Christmas and  Happy New Year!”  This post mixes Christmas wishes with political discussions. That is surely not every one’s cup of tea. It is not always mine. But this blog combines such themes as they are combined in the passage of time in my life. This blog post is another one of those. In some ways it is perhaps an admission that neither  one’s Christmassing nor one’s political life are all that they should be. I have been opposing much of Obama’s agenda in this blog and it certainly seems to have slipped back a few notches in the most recent election.  This Christmas we as Americans can see that the world is in flux. We can hope to find our way forward through these holidays and the coming year without a great catastrophe but we can also know that there are crises afloat and afoot. Americans can find some solace in the stresses endured by the Holy Family on that first Christmas.

Mom with a Christmas tree in a previous year. Today she is scheduled to buy a tree.

Mom with a Christmas tree in a previous year. Today she is scheduled to buy a tree.

I have not had an exemplary early Christmas and Advent and by some measures I am spoiling whatever moral or religious value it had be sharing it with you. This year I made some new ornaments to replace the missing ones in the old set my parents hang on the Jesse tree which is one of the only objects I still have from when I was married. I also put a few dollars into the Salvation Army kettles out and about, donated a few gifts to the toys programs at dollar stores and discount stores  and posted a bit about Advent. I also went to religious services and participated in the Advent rituals around the wreath and Jesse tree at home.

The celebration of Christmas rates some substantial coverage on the White House’s official website. You can link to some of that coverage here. Wikipedia takes note of the White House Christmas tree tradition here.  So, perhaps mixing up the elements of a Christmas blog post and an early presidential politics blog post is not such an odd idea after all.

Santa Claus is a powerful Christmas symbol in America today. Santa is certainly part of the landscape of my holiday.

Santa Claus is a powerful Christmas symbol in America today. Santa is certainly part of the landscape of my holiday.

 

Even for a conservative Catholic Christian like me it is getting closer to the time when one might say “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year”. I have used the word “Advent” in two blog posts (as well as the word Christmas in one of them). None of these posts have been as seasonal as some other I have posted here, here and here in previous years. It is also early be discussing the Presidential election of 2016 but  I am doing that as well.

We all have images of what leadership should look like which are not simple portrayals of reality.

We all have images of what leadership should look like which are not simple portrayals of reality.

 

The reality of our political life is such that the Presidency is currently our biggest symbol and most important feature of our political life. What we have in our society is a dearth of many of the symbols of the cohesion and sharing of our social values with one another in the way that a great holiday can unite a nation and a society. So Christmas and its presidential aspects have a lot to do with our awareness of ourselves as a people and as a society that stands out as existing in some real way in the world. With ISIS executing American hostages almost continually, Russia flying more military sorties than it has since the Soviet Union was at the height of its Cold War assertiveness, the North Koreans mobilizing large cyber resources against us and real decay of US stature in Europe we are either likely to say what does our Christmas unity matter or we are likely to say that the unity we express is not the most important national concern. That is of course unless we are like millions of Americans who have very little concern for foreign policy. It is also true that some of us think of Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Mankind as a particularly relevant sentiment in times like these. The Angels greeting which came with that sentiment at the first Christmas was joined to their adoration, “Glory to God in the Highest!” Many Americans will be going to a variety of churches to honor God as they celebrate Christmas. Others will go to other places of worship to celebrate other holidays – including Chanukah which is a holiday Jesus’s family would have known. But Nativity scenes and even Christmas trees have become a set of lightning rods in the controversies about Christmas in public life. That discussion in return has become a big part of the discussion of religious expression in public life. What Presidential contenders will think about faith is increasingly a political issue that can be seen from many points of controversy.

Me in a shot by one of the proprietors on my phone as I walked into the Donors Dinner.

Me in a shot by one of the proprietors on my phone as I walked into the Donors Dinner.

While the President plays the role he does in pardoning turkeys, lighting the National Christmas tree and seeking to embrace a holiday theme that resonates with the nation it is not impossible to think of the Presidency of the United States as part of our Christmas landscape. When we do there is a sense of the way that our society does and does not function which forms part of our  vision of both the holidays and the politics of our nation. So who is likely to be the next President of the United States of America?

 

 

Christmas has long been a political and legal battlefield. The assault on Christmas has been part of the story but so has the defense of Christmas in public life. In the chart featured below which may still have some currency even though I believe it is based on data from before the 2014 Congressional elections we have two Republican contenders for the Presidency in 2016 who have about equal shares of prospective primary votes. One is Mike Huckabee who regardless of what he might say if asked about Christmas is a former Protestant Christian ordained minister who clearly has a likelihood wanting to keep the tradition of honoring the birth of Christ as a nation.  The other is Rand Paul who, regardless of what he might say about Christmas is deeply committed to a libertarian point of view and politics. Such libertarians often find themselves in alliance with Atheists, some other religious groups and liberals of particular strip in undermining America’s traditional Christian holidays.

Early December 2014?

Early December 2014?

There is a lot of shaking out to do if these numbers mean any thing before any Republican can claim the nomination.  But it does indicate perhaps the streams of thought that are shaping the country as regards finding a religious root for values expressed by America’s  “right” in politics.

What then about the left? Where does the other side of American  political energy come down on our connecting with the roots of Christianity.  Unlike the possible GOP nominees, Hillary Clinton has tended to tower over her challengers for the 2016 Democratic nomination. Some people are saying that candidates like Elizabeth Warren are poised to show explosive growth but it would take a lot of growth to challenge  Clinton in the primary.

Joe Lieberman who ran with Al Gore was not a Christian but a Jew who seemed to tolerate a good deal of public Christmas. Mitt Romney belonged to what most scholars consider to be a post-Christian religion but it is one that celebrates Christmas as an American holiday and the birth festival of Jesus Christ. Many presidents have been devout Christians: Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wilson, John Kennedy and half a dozen others are clearly men who in my opinion must be seen as Christians entirely. Whatever they did not achieve of the Christian ideal is not because they did not adhere to that faith and religion. Richard Nixon was reared as a Quaker and (though many American Quakers seem pretty much to be Christians) Quakers as a whole are not a Christian faith but one which grew up among Christians.  It is hard to say what Nixon was when he was President. With men like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and  a few others it hard to say where they stood in terms of religious classification and identity.

So that brings me to Clinton. She is a favorite enemy of the Christian Right and other religious people in American politics and she may well deserve it. She has a background which is mostly verifiable: Clinton was reared a Methodist Protestant Christian, belonged to a Senate Prayer Group and has spoken at Prayer Breakfasts.  Her profile may seem different to American atheists than to most other people. Here is an atheist site evaluating Clinton’s background and religious values.  It is hard to know how  she would deal with Christmas.

 

Early December 2014? Whenever this is it is Clinton's race to lose at that moment.

Early December 2014?
Whenever this is it is Clinton’s race to lose at that moment.

Christmas and even religion are important but most religious people realize that religion connects to how they see all the world and does so in complicated ways. Real issues like how to evaluate science, how to evaluate ethical policies and how to make peace are informed by our religious background, point of view and  activity. We see this with political issues from funding homeless shelters, to stem cell research to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. But it goes beyond that.

I am a Christian and many of my blog posts are explicitly Christian.  But my thoughts about science are in connection with my religious thought. So my scientific areas of discussion do seek or do have a harmony with my faith. Here, here and here are some examples.  So my choices of how to use resources here and elsewhere are in connection to my religious values. I do accept and embrace pluralism in America. I see a kind of pluralism in America and the structure of the universe.

The truth about all of life is that it is a bit interactive and interactive and multifocal.  That means that what we do affects what  we see done and there are many other active people and forces creating the continuous drama that is the universe, playing out the great game — or whatever other metaphor might work for you.  Increasingly one  may disagree with what the meaning of different part of the drama or game may mean, how much they will matter or who should care. For example some scientist are feeling sure that they have just recently  found the key to working out the meaning and structure of dark matter in the universe.

I am very interested in Astronomy but probably my use of space exploration money would place low priority on this research until  a better theoretical framework was developed. That also has something to do with Christmas. So Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Whether or not you are a Christian or an American I think the American experience of the holiday has something to say to us all. Chinese New Year and Chanukah are different indeed but they also represent a reaching for unity, meaning, celebration and often family.  Not just a reaching for money, power and resources. A society with no spiritual moorings seems very close to shipwreck to me. I hope we will never see America in such a condition.

 

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