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:
- 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.
- David was a shepherd boy who killed lions and bears to defend his sheep.
- David was a musician and this would play a big role in the Bible, his life and Jewish History.
- Dacid was a hero who killed the giant Goliath of Gath and became a great warrior.
- 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.
- 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.
- David was extremely polygamous,
- David was prayerful and found religious reasons to give himself to practicing mercy, worship and humility unlike anybody else in his sphere.
- David saw himself as a repentant sinner.
- 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.
- David conquered Jerusalem and brought the Ark of the Covenant and prepared for Solomon’s Temple to be built by his son..
- David was called by God “A man after my own heart”.
- Jesus was descended from the House of David, and was often called the Son of David.
- 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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