The day had passed and Clara got back on April 9, 2024. We were eager to celebrate her new job. We had been through a lot of things and she felt good about going back to work. She had just been named the newest Administrative Assistant for our home church parish office. I was happy for her. My own day involved an insurance seminar on Medicare.it also involved doing some laundry, cooking a lunch for Clara and I which would leave us with leftovers for another day and also cutting the grass with a motorless lawnmower. It is not an unfamiliar place in life for me to be, sort of trying to put together something that would make me able to get through a set of circumstances for a period of time even though there is no doubt that overall my path is not at all assured going forward. It is certainly a valid point of view to see much of my life as made up of periods of under-enrollment in schools followed and interspersed with underemployment.
Overall my life has been long on pulling away from impossible positions to attempt positions that were simply very unlikely to be successful. In this chapter we reach a place where my course of education that had been difficult in many ways finally was to become a path in which I no longer tried to pursue any direct line of schooling to a goal that was conventional. .
I could have called this chapter “Dropping Out”. However, from my point of view it is a chapter about a transition from one school, the middle school section of Mount Carmel Elementary, to my studies in another school: the Insitituto de Estudios America Latina (IDEAL). However over time.leaving eIghth grade at Mount Carmel would be the defining event in my life for many years to come. In my mother’s second book about our lives there is a quote that illustrates that in the end this view that I dropped out completely after eighth grade came to be the interpretation of events that prevailed even in my own family: Mom’s interpretation of the whole question that begins in this chapter is best expressed by reproducing this paragraph from OurFamily’s Book of Acts dealing with a later passage in my own life. Here is that passage:
“Beau had long wanted to attend the local university. We could see that he was truly gifted as a missionary; we thought that he would continue to love and serve in that ministry. He had explored the seminary in the Philippines, and we had thought he might attend the university in Cagayan de Oro with some of his FIlipino buddies.Once he had demonstrated a real desire to attend college, we fostered his desire, and advised him of risks and advantages that would be somewhat different for him than they had been for us. Beau’s decision to attend college at the University of Louisiana was made about a week before the fall semester began, he had no high school diploma, and had received no real formal education since junior high. Essentially he had no papers to hand in to the admissions office.” (Summers, Acts: “Adding to our Numbers”, page 167) .
I am never really going to know what would have happened if I had found a way to stay in the school system regularly over the course of time. But one of the reasons that I am writing this memoir is to reveal the other stories that might or might not have been involved in the unusual path my education would take. But had it ever really been all that normal?
I would point out that I traveled an inordinate amount, I was enrolled in a number of systems with different calendars and different regulations. I have long ago given up finding even an audience of one that I think would really understand what my educational journey was like even with reference to the more or less indisputable facts if all evidence is examined. However, in this memoir I am going to make it even harder. I am going to invite the reader to consider some other factors which are not only far from obvious but practically impossible to prove. When I left off my studies in class in eighth grade there were many thoughts and feelings in my mind. Where the strange new path would take me I would not know. As we set forth on our journey in life I was letting go of any feeling that I would fit in with the world into which I had been born..
I had some odd moments of calculation and reflection. It seemed to me that the stories of child stars in film and television with erratic and irregular tutors promised that it could be done. Add to these the lives of other nomadic children in crocuses, migrant harvesting crews and I felt that it was normal to be out of school if one traveled all the time. Besides this there were stories of successful homeschoolers. and the stories of self made business tycoons who had not finished high school were more significant and numerous than they probably were. Yet, I was not resigned to staying our of school. I also had a great deal of misinformation about some older men I knew who I had been told did not finish their normal high school careers because of things like World War II. Later in the collection of memoirs, obituaries and archives I would peruse – such as the one listed next: The Eternal Pilot – Memoirs of Revis Sirmon – January 1, 2009
by Revis Sirmon (Author). For me the life of faith and the dimensions of religion were only small parts of the whole series of questions that affected me – I was determined to be excellently well educated no matter what. . . .
When we got back to Abbeville I was running late on the paperwork, acquiring school supplies and getting things together for school. All of this lack of focus on the demands of school always made what would have been a hard time in a school harder. It was a long-term trend. My parents had never been quick to put together the paperwork and other things required by schools. They had never supported my involvement with extracurriculars very much and they were never troubled by any consequences of me being tardy or absent for what they wanted to do. But that was part of a cycle. I often enjoyed the things we did, they often had great educational value and I had managed to keep passing and usually excelling in all my grades. In addition, school was socially difficult for me and it got harder when my classmates saw me thrive after an absence and also when my teachers saw me struggle after an absence. When I went back to eighth grade at Mount Carmel I was determined to try to make the best of it. I had already felt that Mount Carmel Elementary School was not a good place for me to be.
One of the things that had changed was my relationship with the girlfriend from the neighborhood. She was hanging around other aspiring cheerleader and we did see each other but she was becoming a popular girl in the big high school. I felt hurt and confused but I also felt free to think of the girls in my class at school in a different light – that made feeling ill at ease and unpopular harder than it had been before. I now might want to make a connection with a girl at school. I began to think of who that girl might be.
That summer I had begun to have the inconvenience of wet dreams, they had started a few month before my last school year ended. I found books and articles to read about these things in the days before the internet and search engines. But I talked to virtually nobody about them. But they were not that common and I could hide the evidence fairly easily. On our travels things got more complicated. Sexually explicit dreams about girls I knew that resulted in what was called a nocturnal emission was more inconvenient for me because of lack of laundry facilities and extra clothes. I remember washing clothes and bed clothes secretly in campsites and drying them poorly over houses or days in any way I could. I also added things I had rinsed into the laundry baskets myself when we went to stay in homes.
When I got back that summer I had older men speak to me for the first time about my mother’s promiscuous reputation when she was very young and before I was born. They never told me that she had given up a child for adoption before she and my father got married, I assume because they did not know. They then correlated this fact to the fact that we lived in a neighborhood with a significant number of sex workers. I could follow their implications. My response was to push them away cautiously. I wanted to learn from what they had to say but also to protect whatever it was that my mother was trying to build in her life with all of her emphasis on modesty, marriage, natural childbirth, breastfeeding and exploring and developing a workable current understanding of traditional gender roles. But I also felt that I was in a dangerous position and that I was being made to pay the freight for both a libertine past and a severely modest present in my parents’ lives. I was feeling like coming into the sexually charged eras of life was going to be worse for me than for many and I knew that it was hard on many people.
I was also becoming aware that some of the boys I knew were homosexual and that there was an increasing sense that it would be possible for them to live openly as homosexuals or to experiment with heterosexual relationships. I had a sense that I was the oldest of the next generation in a group with very restrictive expectations for the next generation living in a hypersexualized neighborhood and coming of age in a more sexually loose era in many ways. Not for the first or last time, I felt that I was being asked to bear the burdens of dozens of different faults, presumptions and expectations for which I thought that I did not need to take much if any responsibility. Overall, I was confirmed in my view that the world was a hostile place. At an age when most kids are insecure and anxious these things made me more anxious.
I did have an experience where I hung out with my already- former-not-quite-girlfriend and her lower level cheerleader friends. I had interactions with them at other times and I felt like I was considered an embarrassingly oddball connection for my former girlfriend. But on this occasion they all sort of flirted and made a little fuss over me and I sensed it was something that they occasionally did. I also had the sense that it made boys my age uncomfortable when that happened. I realized that l did not feel uncomfortable. Being alone with a group of girls who were wearing cheer shorts and feeling flirty felt pretty great and I had no problem seeing them as interesting people and also wishing that there would be a potential sexual future there. This was not the first time that I thought that for me physical fulfillment would not be found in consorting with prostitutes, not in promiscuous frat house kinds of behavior, not in the culmination of obsessive romantic fixations – that I still knew would be my future. I felt pretty sure that the polygamy of Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and a number of other figures in the Bible was my real sexual preference. I had discussed that sense of a polygamous sexual preference with a few adults in my life and had felt that Christianity was definitely an anti-polygamous religion. I could see that the animosity towards polygamous impulses was quite intense.
At my school, I felt that wearing my cross that tied me to the strange compromises and identities that we were living at Open Door Community in the Styx and with my families missionary designation was just making it impossible to avoid being constantly marked as different in ways that were more difficult than fruitful. I began to try to wear my cross under my clothes and sometimes in my book-sack. At school I had three new connections with girls even as I felt like overall my life was in decline at school. One thing I did find was that I was carving out a few relationships that were tolerable. Three of them were with girls. One of those girls was Clara Duhon, whom I have now married after not seeing each other for forty-five years after that year at school. I enjoyed praying and discussing the Bible and and personal spirituality with her and I tried to end up in her group whenever there was a religious activity in which we might both be included.
Another relationship was with a girl who felt fears and regret about having been swept away into sexual activity earlier than she had thought she should have been involved.In the Styx I knew a couple of child prostitutes. I did not know how to help them or her very much but I could listen to her without much judgment and pray with her and keep her secrets. I did listen, pray and keep secrets and although I rarely saw her after leaving school there she continued to treat me as a friend over the decades.
The last part of my story of three girls at Mount Carmel Elementary relates to the fact that there was some success in my efforts to be more part of the school. I was invited to a few parties during the early part of the eighth grade year. When I asked my parents I was not allowed to go and they handled the question poorly in my view. I have no reason to think that it would have all gone well but I had not been invited to parties during most of the previous year. Finally there was a little party during school hours with a dance, we did not have to get our parents consent. I brought a snack that I paid for myself. I did not ask Clara or the other girl to dance but a third girl who seemed like she wanted to dance. We had also had a few minutes of practice dancing. I felt happy dancing with her and was feeling a bit romantic I guess. I was not aware that I may have been at the very lower levels of being semi-erect. I was holding her, it was a slow dance and I was not pressed up against her. One of the boys snuck up behind me in class and (using some technique he had used and practiced before) snapped my middle against her by grabbing my belt loops. I felt my penis touch her venus mons at least through all the pertinent layers of clothes. I was furious and uncool and ready to fight. It was a bad scene and another girl in school barely talked me down before I got in trouble for fighting. I never danced with any of the girls in my old Mount Carmel class again until Clara and I got together almost half a century later. It would be easier for me to leave when the time came.
Beyond the school issues, I was feeling pretty sure that while many males might have some polygamous inclinations, I was different. I was built for a kind of sexual and family life structure that did not exist in my own faith. That was troubling for me. I wondered if that could change and I undertook the task of doing some research.
I discovered that polygamy had become a grounds for excommunication in recent centuries long after the Apostles, St. Augustine, Sts. Leo and Gregory the Great and many other Saints who had reflected deeply on the life of the church. The condemnation of polygamy had been part of the Council of Trent. I was aware of the Council of Trent but in case you are not please see the following text:
The Council of Trent (1545-1563) was a meeting of Catholic clerics convened by Pope Paul III (served 1534-1549) in response to the Protestant Reformation. In three separate sessions, the council reaffirmed the authority of the Catholic Church, codified scripture, reformed abuses, and condemned Protestant theology, establishing the vision and goals of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. https://www.worldhistory.org/timeline/Council_of_Trent/
The Council of Trent had established the Tridentine liturgy that had been in force until the Second Vatican Council. The Council of Trent had also been an ecumenical council that limited and condemned most efforts at ecumenism between the separated Christian communions as a false Irenicism, the Second Vatican Council had undermined that conception of the painful divisions in Christianity and encouraged efforts at a reunion. The Council of Trent had also created certain practices in priestly formation that the Second Vatican Council had reformed. The same Council of Trent had officially condemned all.polygamy among Christians: “If any one saith, that it is lawful for Christians to have several wives at the same time, and that this is not prohibited by any divine law; let him be anathema.”General Council of Trent: Twenty-Fourth Session”. Papal Encyclicals Online. February 20, 2017. If that was part of the legacy of Trent then perhaps it too needed to be part of the reforms of Vatican II. The whole process of this was very painful for me and it was easy over the years for me to forget various things I learned and in fact that may still be the case, there are things I have trouble dealing with and that is made more difficult by the certainty of being misunderstood or unheard when I try to discuss them.
At the same time that I studied this COuncil and the Bible teaching on polygamy I I started to notice that Tertullian, who was never canonized and who taught several heresies on marriage at various times was responsible for much of the doctrinal development condemning polygamy, He also lived long after the time of the apostles who knew Jesus personally, living in the fourth century.
From Wikipedia on Tertullian: : .Marriage
Tertullian’s later view of marriage, such as in his book Exhortation to Chastity, may have been heavily influenced by Montanism. He had previously held marriage to be fundamentally good, but after his conversion[dubious – discuss] he denied its goodness. He argues that marriage is considered to be good “when it is compared with the greatest of all evils”. He argued that before the coming of Christ, the command to reproduce was a prophetic sign pointing to the coming of the Church; after it came, the command was superseded. He also believed lust for one’s wife and for another woman were essentially the same, so that marital desire was similar to adulterous desire. He believed that sex even in marriage would disrupt the Christian life and that abstinence was the best way to achieve the clarity of the soul. Tertullian’s views would later influence much of the western church.[46]
Tertullian was the first to introduce a view of “sexual hierarchy”: he believed that those who abstain from sexual relations should have a higher hierarchy in the church than those who do not, because he saw sexual relations as a barrier that stopped one from a close relationship with God.[46]
It was the fact that a tree flawed in many ways had brought forth the fruit of not permitting CHristian polygamy. Tertullian argues against polygamy amongst Christians in a way that shows that many CHristians of his time supported polygamy as one among several Christian lifestyles. :
“But let us proceed with our inquiry into some eminent chief fathers of our origin: for there are some to whom our monogamist parents Adam and Noah are not pleasing, nor perhaps Christ either. To Abraham, in fine, they appeal; prohibited though they are to acknowledge any other father than God.606 Grant, now, that Abraham is our father; grant, too, that Paul is. “In the Gospel,” says he, “I have begotten you.”607 Show yourself a son even of Abraham. For your origin in him, you must know, is not referable to every period of his life: there is a definite time at which he is your father. For if “faith” is the source whence we are reckoned to Abraham as his “sons” (as the apostle teaches, saying to the Galatians, “You know, consequently, that (they) who are of faith, these are sons of Abraham”608), when did Abraham “believe God and it was accounted to him for righteousness?” I suppose when still in monogamy, since (he was) not yet in circumcision. But if afterwards he changed to either (opposite)—to digamy through cohabitation with his handmaid, and to circumcision through the seal of the testament—you cannot acknowledge him as your father except at that time when he “believed God,” if it is true that it is according to faith that you are his son, not according to flesh. Else, if it be the later Abraham whom you follow as your father—that is, the digamist (Abraham)—receive him withal in his circumcision. If you reject his circumcision, it follows that you will refuse his digamy too. Two characters of his mutually diverse in two several ways, you will not be able to blend. His digamy began with circumcision, his monogamy with uncircumcision.609 You receive digamy; admit circumcision too. You retain uncircumcision; you are bound to monogamy too. Moreover, so true is it that it is of the monogamist Abraham that you are the son, just as of the uncircumcised, that if you be circumcised you immediately cease to be his son, inasmuch as you will not be “of faith,” but of the seal of a faith which had been justified in uncircumcision. You have the apostle: learn (of him), together with the Galatians.610 In like manner, too, if you have involved yourself in digamy, you are not the son of that Abraham whose “faith” preceded in monogamy. For albeit it is subsequently that he is called “a father of many nations,”611 still it is of those (nations) who, as the fruit of the “faith” which precedes digamy, had to be accounted “sons of Abraham.”612
Tertullian had a powerful effect on ending a specific kind of polygamy among priests, many were known to marry two sisters from a very religious family who could support each other in the hard challenges of a family in ministry. But Tertullian’s passages provide a vital record, not well known that many Catholic priests were in fact married to sisters. He does not say these things because he likes the practice but while condemning it
:It was therefore fitting that all the form of the common discipline should be set forth on its fore-front, as an edict to be in a certain sense universally and carefully attended to, that the laity might the better know that they must themselves observe that order which was indispensable to their overseers; and that even the office of honour itself might not flatter itself in anything tending to licence, as if on the ground of privilege of position. The Holy Spirit foresaw that some would say, “All things are lawful to bishops;” just as that bishop of Utina of yours feared not even the Scantinian law. Why, how many digamists, too, preside in your churches; insulting the apostle, of course: at all events, not blushing when these passages are read under their presidency! https://ccel.org/ccel/tertullian/monogamy/anf04.iii.vii.xii.html
I also knew that Jesus had recruited women who were seen to be promiscuous and harlots as his followers, I knew a prophet in the Old Testament had been told by God to marry a prostitute. I knew the church had often given special ecclesial blessings to a man who would marry a prostitute with the purpose and effect of reforming her. I knew that some women really gave up their promiscuous behavior or promiscuity but others entered into marriage to regulate loose behavior and rear children in a little more safety. Christian communities did not handle this tradition perfectly but they struggled with the challenges of the tradition and scripture. However, polygamy was simply and easily rejected and condemned partly because of the horrific behavior of a handful of the most brutal and violent Muslim invaders in a few key points in Church history.
Additionally, I knew that there were real and even mystical celibates in the church who gave up sexual fulfillment in search of some social, spiritual, aesthetic and ascetic intensities which were precluded by the expenditure of energies needed for sex and family life. I was sure that St. Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, was that kind of celibate and I had known a few of the same kind of celibates in my own life. But I was also aware that celibates in the church had patterns where in some societies (even among Christians) they had acted as sperm donors where husbands could not get their wives pregnant and a priest was available nearby. I knew that some celibate communities were haven for a significant number of Lesbians or male homosexuals in societies that did not tolerate gay and Lesbian identity very well. It was complicated, but many Chrisitan communities continued the struggle despite the problems – but not with polygamy.
I did a lot of research on my own. But at the same time I met two men who knew the other I had met when we lived in my great-grandmother’s garage apartment. They taught me about the Cajun French vocabulary of some institutions in my own heritage. They taught me to shoot a pistol for the first time and they recommended a few books they new were in my paternal grandfather’s library. But they also addressed the concubines of Joseph Broussard and some of his descendants, the Quadroon Ball and the placement and liaison of mistresses who were Creoles of Color in the history of Cjaun men.They discussed an earlier council that had condemned concubinage among married Chrsitian men before Trent condemned polygamy as well. It was a brief series of meetings on our farm, behind my grandparents house and in the back of a house where I cut the grass. But it steered me in a particular direction. One thing they indicated was that there was no way to be polygamous unless one was wealthy, intimidating and high status –it might be impossible in my time but it had never been easy throughout history.
I was already aware of the ideal of chastity before marriage. But after this period I began to pray rosaries and to fast for chastity. I began to go down a path which would include flagellation and wearing a cord with knots that I left tied till it bit into my skin. All of these things were done to deepen spiritual insight and strengthen the will .Usually they were not meant to as St Paul writes in the New Testament “Work out my own salvation in fear and trembling” or “make up what was lacking in the suffering of Christ”. I did offer up these pennances for my sins and for other. In time masturbation would become my main sexual sin as I saw it. But I did have girlfriends in my next few years. Sometimes we moved closer to sexual fulfillment. When I had a girlfriend I was exclusively and monogamously devoted to her. I thought that I would devote myself to being the bast monogamous husband I could but in my mind In knew that I had figured out what my nature was at 13 and it was likely to remain polygamous in orientation at its core,
I am happily and monogamously married now and I never slept with anyone else when I was married to my first wife nor did I seek to be polygamous in any way I can remember. But despite a fixation greater than average on my spouse in each case I am not willing to lie about how the parts of me that I have come to know work within me.
My parents were waiting to hear about the mission to Colombia and accepted an invitation to go and visit a convent of nuns in the rural nearly Mesa and arroyo lands near Amarillo, Texas. We went there to wait to hear about the visas. There we worked on their farm, canned foods, fed chickens, prayed the Liturgy of the Hours and had Charismatic prayer meetings. Sarah loved toddling around chasing the geese near the main house. They helped us realize that we need to learn Spanish before we went to Colombia. They helped us make contact with people in Mexico including the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Mexico City. Among the contacts in the Archdiocese was Father Carlos Talavera Ramirez who was the head of the Comunidad Justicia y Alabanza, Justice and Praise Community. Father Talavera had been ordained in 1948 for the Archdiocese but his ministry now focused on the Charismatic Renewal in Mexico and the service of that popular Christian movement to the poor. In a few years in 1980 he would be ordained and consecrated as an auxiliary Bishop in the Federal District’s super diocese. My parents, with my younger siblings would serve under Talavera many years later when he was bishop of Coatzacoalcos, but I was doing another thing at that time. We would stay with Father Talavera’s wealthy family members in realtive comfort approaching luxury for a little while.
Sister John Marie was the head of the community of the Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ and she had a friend named Sister Antoinette who worked with the Archbishop. She would help us lay out a plan to stop over in Mexico City and then study at a school she liked in Cuernavaca. There were quite a few intense language schools in Cuernavaca. They did not usually take adolescents of school age, but they were likely to make an exception for me. The course would take at least a month, then perhaps I would be able to attend a school in Mexico until we went to COlombia – if that worked out to be our path. We had help getting visas and signing up for study at the Instituto De Estudios America Latina in Cuernavaca near Mexico CIty. We got close enough in our preparations to be almost ready and went back to El Paso which was on the border. We were facing a two day train trip to Mexico City without speaking Spanish and while we were on our own. The visits in EL Paso were more relaxed and people seemed to really want us to succeed, some saw that perhaps after we spoke SPanish we might come back to serve in one of their ministries.
I still remember the train trip and arriving in the megacity at the heart of Mexico. I knew we would not start at IDEAL for a few days at least but although there were so many things to do and see I was already seeing myself as a student of Spanish language and Mexican culture. I met a girl there who I saw at various events and who helped me learn a little Spanish. I wondered if I could really learn enough Spanish to go to a school like the one she went to. Her name was Elsa and her father seemed to like me alright. I wondered if I would find my path fitting in as a student at a Mexican colegio
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