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.
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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.
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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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