Random Thoughts

I don't know why on earth I keep writing, but there are many things that need be said, and sometimes it can be a lot when the inspiration hits and you have to find an outlet to express it.  I have done year-end perspectives already, philosophized until Descartes was almost resurrected, and have been on this continued piecing-together of my story which has gone on now for a number of years.  So, what is left?

Today is the eve of Christmas Eve, and as I am writing here I can say it has been intense this past week.  In addition to Christmas preparations, there was the Archbishop's visit at church, a Metaphysics exam, and I was interviewed by Chelsen Vicari at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, DC, about the prevalent liberalism which has emerged in the Religion Department of my alma mater.  This latter issue has caused somewhat of a buzz, and I have drawn some fire from people who take issue with what I said - that comes with the territory, and exposing error at a large institution will get you attention to be sure.  And, although I have managed to handle the feedback for the most part, it has also been exhausting - you find out quickly when you write on-line or your name has public exposure that not everyone is going to like what you have to say (go figure, right?).  At the same time, there is this conviction from deep within that tells you "this is right!" and it encourages you to stay the course.  It may mean sacrificing friends (I lost a few over it), but if they were true friends they may have tried to understand your position.  Some other friends feel more action is needed, and may be encouraging you to take some bigger steps that may be beyond what you can handle - one of my friends of many years, a pastor and practicing attorney out on the West Coast, suggested for instance that the faculty of said university should be reported to the district office of the church denomination which operates the university, and although I would agree that some accountability is necessary, there are some things to consider with doing something like that.  For one, if a pastor of a church or a professor in a denominational college is teaching outright heresy, there has to be documented proof of it in order to proceed with a measure like that.   Second, although I know for a fact that some things at that university are being taught that shouldn't be, and have heard it with my own ears, there are others who sat in those classes (many of whom, in my estimation, have not been properly taught the essential beliefs of their own religious tradition) who think that what the professor is saying is gospel truth, and they would easily start hurling stones at me instead - that is a big battle to step into by yourself.   Third, it is also factual that I am not a member (nor have I ever been) of that particular church denomination, and their officials would probably be less likely to take that as seriously.   At this point, the best policy would be to sit tight and let this one play itself out - those who are teaching incorrect agendas will eventually get theirs anyway, so there is no need for me to even fire the proverbial shot on that one.  The thing about something when it is wrong is that the person (or persons in this case) who is responsible for it will eventually snare themselves, so it is a matter of timing - so, I just smile, go on about my business, and take a "wait and see" approach on it.

As mentioned when I did my year-end perspective a couple of weeks back, I have had three books published this year - two bound copies and an e-book.  I am not planning on doing as much writing in the next few years save the occasional articles due to the fact that I am probably going to be very busy with graduate work and that has a lot of time invested in itself.   It doesn't mean I will be stopping all writing for good, as I will on occasion write some articles and such.  However, bigger writing projects - such as new books - will have to wait.  At this point, we are also planning a move in the near future, as I will be doing my Ph.D. work in Naples, FL, and we are anticipating that within the next couple of years as it will only take about 16 months to complete the MA I am working on now.  Suffice to say,  I have a busy few years ahead!

I just wanted to drop a note, and as I wrap it up I only want to say that I hope each of you reading this has a blessed Christmas season, and also keep in mind why we are celebrating it - it is not about Santa Claus, but is about a small child born in a smelly barn two millenia ago who changed many people's lives - and, not just any child, but God Himself come in the flesh to institute a purpose that would allow us to be reconciled to Him.  For those of you who may be Christians, these final couple of days of the Advent season are also a time to reflect on your own story of Christ's work in your lives - don't ever be ashamed of your testimony, because every story of God's working in a person's life is a precious thing, and it is one of your most valued gifts God has given you.  So, God bless, and will probably see you all again in 2015.

Stravinsky, Chord Organs, and Metaphysics

As I was sitting here the past couple of nights writing some journal entries, a lot of thoughts flowed into my head about so many things.  It has been a pretty intense couple of weeks for me actually as I write this - I have been getting ready for a Metaphysics final exam (which I took yesterday - fingers crossed I passed it!), I have caught some flak over an interview that I had regarding some of the theological liberalism going on at my former university, and the holiday rush has also been quite evident in our household - all the decorating, baking, candy-making, etc. So, I just had to take a step back, smell the proverbial roses, and recollect myself a little.  That being said, I want to share some insights that I organized out of my past few journal entries for your edification, although I had not planned on writing anymore this year.

First, let's talk a little Metaphysics.  One thing about studying Theology at a Catholic institution is how much Philosophy you are expected to learn, and so far I have had to do two prerequisite classes this year for my major - one was Philosophy of the Human Person, and the second was Metaphysics.  I finished the Human Person course a while ago, even getting a pretty decent grade in the course, but this Metaphysics course has royally been kicking my butt!   Surprisingly though, it is not the content that is a problem - it is actually quite good.  The actual issue is the professor of the class almost expects you to have the equivalent of a Ph.D. dissertation by the time you finish the course - it is just a prerequisite!  But, despite challenges, I learned a lot, and in the near future I am going to synthesize a lot of that into a separate writing those of you who subscribe to my Sacramental Present Truths site will see.  Summarily to say however, I now understand why we need those Philosophy prerequisites - they aid in a great way in making people more well-rounded in their faith, and that is a good thing.   That being said, I want to preface the rest of this discussion with a little something from that course.

The primary text for the second half of the course was a book by Fr. Norris Clarke entitled The One and the Many, which is a primer on contemporary Thomistic metaphysics.  Written in 2001, this book essentially takes the question of the "one and the many" and it breaks it down in such a way that it is more digestible.  And, being Fr. Clarke is a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest who taught Philosophy at Fordham University for many years before his repose a couple of years back (as well as guest-lecturing a lot at Franciscan, where his good friend and my former Philosophy of the Human Person professor, Dr. John Crosby, serves as program chair - Dr, Crosby is a fine scholar in his own right, by the way).  However, it is weird that Clarke taught at the same university as another less-savory individual, Merrold Westphal, whose book Whose Community, Which Interpretation was used as a text in a Hermeneutics class at my former university - Westphal is a postmodernist who essentially believes that Nietzsche and Marx are "prophetic voices of Christendom" (read it on page 140 of his book) and in thought he is as far removed from Clarke as Texas is from Alaska.  Any rate, the one thing that stood out in Clarke's text and will provide the focus of some of my discussion today is found page 7 - Clarke on that page talks about distinguishing Metaphysics from religion and Theology, but in doing so he notes that many early theologians (notably his predeceased influence, St. Thomas Aquinas) were simultaneously philosophers, and he notes that their guiding principle was the fact that God has spoken to us in two great books.  The first he called the Book of  Nature, which is where natural reasoning comes into play and nature bears witness of God directly.  The second is the Book of Revelation, which would essentially be Holy Scripture (although he elaborates that it also is deeper than even Holy Scripture).   Clarke contends that both "books" have the same author, but Revelation perfects nature - if I were to put that into theological language, it is this - the Book of Nature would be equivalent to God's rhema word, while the Book of Nature would be more of a Logos.  Again, I will elaborate more on that when I get to the writing on Sacramental Present Truths later, but I mention it here to provide a groundwork for the discussion.  To take all this to a more personal level, each of us has our very own Book of Nature that is being written on practically every day of our lives, and when you read these articles I have posted here, you are actually reading some excerpts from my own Book of Nature.  Of course, the perfecting part comes from our conversion and acceptance of our free gift of salvation in Christ, who in his person is the ultimate Book of Revelation, according to John 1.  Again though, that is getting into theological writing for another time.  Today, I want to now focus on this whole Book of Nature from my own perspective, and what I have come to understand about it, and then I want to talk about some specifics.

For years now, I have been working at writing down so much about my own life story - it has been a journey of self-discovery.  This started somewhat back in 1996, when going through a rough patch I decided to keep a journal.  In October of 1996, I recall, just before writing in my journal that night Mom had come over to visit, and for some reason we were talking about our old dog Jill from years ago, and it sparked in me something that initiated a project - writing down my memories as detailed and specific as I could remember them.  That resulted in a series of journal entries that spanned about a year and a half - it took me all the way up to April 1998 or thereabouts - and later in 2006 I began to rewrite those stories into their own volumes - they are sitting here as I write now in about 5 full spiral-bound notebooks.   Out of that comes a lot of the articles you have been reading here for the past five years or so.  There are still gaps I am filling in with much of this stuff, and it is supplemented by a host of pictures, genealogy paperwork, and other things.  As all of this gets into my head, it comprises what I call my "master book" which one day I want to just type, print, and bind for my own edification after I get through all my schooling and begin to come to a place where I can devote time  to doing so.  I would not call this "Master Book" of my own life necessarily my personal Book of Nature, but it does comprise a significant part of it.  Much of what you have read in recent years - my recipes, my memories of specific individuals, etc. - come out of that "master book" though in some aspect or another.  This is something now though that I can definitely begin to give form too thanks in part to Fr. Clarke's insights, and that is why I wanted to mention it.  Many stimuli go into evoking the memories that make up my "master book," and those can include a musical piece, a book I have read in the past, some people I have met and gotten to know over the years, or other things.  And, that sets my stage today for talking about a couple of things I have thought about the past week or so.

First, a question - do any of you fellow old geezers over 40 like myself remember a small musical instrument called a chord organ?  It was a small, portable keyboard instrument invented by the same company that created the Hammond back in the 1950's, and at one time they were pretty popular due to their portability and ease of learning.   It was simpler than most organs though in that it only had a single keyboard and a set of chord buttons to supply melody .  At one time in my early teens I had 3 of them, as they were relatively easy to find at most junk stores and yard sales (you could pick up one for about $5 actually).  In sound, they more resembled an accordion or a harmonica, but they were good to learn how to play basic tunes and you could actually learn to play piano from one.   

An electric chord organ similar to the ones I had back in the day.

I used to pick around on it then, and as I became more serious later on about its potential, I actually learned to play a tune or two on one.  I kind of miss having one of these around, and perhaps I should do some looking.   According to this article I read on Wikipedia, the chord organ is used by some new musical school called "minimalists," which originated with Danish composer Hennig Christenson in the 1970's and utilizes simpler instruments like harmonicas, xaphoons (a bamboo saxophone-type instrument), recorders and such.  I am not really up on that stuff or really into it, but I think that something like a chord organ has potential and would not mind having another one.  

The second point of today's musings has to do with a composer whose works I really appreciate, Igor Stravinsky.  For some reason this past week I got this overwhelming urge to pull out my copy of Stravinsky's work Petrushka and listen to it - Stravinsky composed this around 1909 or so, and it is essentially based on a Russian folktale similar to "Pinnochio" about a puppet that comes to life.  It is a wintery composition, and has been one of my personal favorites since I was 17 years of age.  Stravinsky is a composer I also got to appreciate at around that point in my late teens, as I recall wanting to find out more about his 1913 ballet le Sacre du Printemps (or, The Rite of Spring). When this ballet first debuted in 1913, it was so controversial that it caused riots, but it is actually a beautiful musical score although somewhat melancholy and dark.  A large part of the early hoopla of this piece centered behind the story that inspired Stravinsky to compose it.  In the late 1800's, a movement swept Russia called Pan-Slavism, and it was a sort of cultural renaissance in the Slavic roots of Russian culture.  Stravinsky I believe was influenced greatly by that, and as he researched historical data, an ancient pre-Christian pagan Slavic fertility rite that actually involved a human sacrifice got his attention (I want to say this was associated with the ancient Slavic idol Perun, a storm deity, but could be wrong) and he composed a ballet based on that.   Some wags over the years - including some over-zealous fundamentalists such as Texe Marrs (my warning -stay away from this character, as he is racist and bases much of his own theology on weird conspiracy theories!) - have misinterpreted Stravinsky's writing of this to mean that Stravinsky was somehow encouraging paganism and he has even been accused by less-informed people of being "pagan/anarchist" himself, which is a frank absurdity.  The reality though, as Dr. Alvin Schmidt writes in his book Under the Influence - How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001) on page 332, was that Stravinsky was devoutly Christian, having undergone a heart-felt conversion at age 26, and his two core convictions can be summed up in two points:

1.  "The more one separates himself from canons of the Christian Church, the further one distances hinself from the truth."
2.   In order to compose religious music, one cannot be merely a believer in "symbolic figures" but must believe in the real person of Jesus Christ, the fact a real Satan exists, and what he called "the Miracle of the Church." 

I don't know about you, but it sounds like Stravinsky had a vibrant faith to me!  Sure, he was not perfect - he did love his vodka, like any good Russian - but at the same time his ideas on sacred music are something that many in the so-called "Contemporary Christian Music" industry should pay attention to!   The mystery in all of this, however, is this - why would a devoutly Christian composer like Igor Stravinsky write a ballet about a pre-Christian Slavic sacrificial ritual?   I believe there are two explanations for this.  First, let us look at the chronology - Le Sacre du Printemps debuted around 1913 or so, when Stravinsky was about 31 years old.  He would have been relatively young in his faith then.  That being said, he also noted in a 1920 interview that the music dictated the story, and as he was writing the score this vision of a solemn pre-Christian pagan ritual came to him.  Composers are inspired by both good and bad things, and a composer writes based on that information and it has no bearing necessarily on the composer's own convictions, strange as that sounds.  Also, it is worth noting that the avante-garde (for the time anyway) character of Stravinsky's work, not its story, is what set off the uproar when it first debuted.  For most people reading this, all of this has little bearing, but I do have some more conservative voices that read these articles, and the point was that Stravinsky was telling a story, not preaching paganism - there is a huge difference.  And, when I hear le Sacre, I don't really envision any pagan ritual at all - it is a beautiful and moving piece of music that evokes for me instead the folktales of my youth, as well as feeling the winter morph into spring, and I can even see some of the drama of the Orthodox liturgy or the coronation of a czar in the music.  There is a distinctly Russian character to the music that actually touches my own soul, being a descendent of St. Vladimir, Prince of Novgorod, myself.    And, that is probably why I like it so much.

When I first got into Stravinsky in my junior year of high school, le Sacre was one of the first works of his that I was able to get to know in its entirety, although thanks to my senior-year English teacher, Mrs. McConnell, I also was exposed to his other works, in particular The Firebird and the aforementioned Petrushka.  The thing I remember though about it was the summers at home those years - we took care of an old lady named Myrtle out on a farm on Salt Lick Road south of Terra Alta, WV, and I spent many days foraging woods for stuff like wild garlic, which I would then experiment with recipes - my main thing in those days was a rather spicy concoction I made out of stew beef that only I could eat, and although now I see it needed some work (I have come a long way in my cooking since then!) it was a relaxing hobby I did when I wasn't involved with church activities or my itinerary with the high school marching band.  It was at the same time that I became interested in Eastern Christianity, and the beginnings of my involvement with the dear Assyrian people can be traced back to around that time too.  It was an exciting point in my life when I was younger, more idealistic, and I had great ambitions for what I planned to do.  There are many days I miss that early enthusiasm of my youth, as it is an important part of my own Book of Nature, but that is why I am writing all this in the first place.  Also, my recent studies at Franciscan are starting to call me back to some of my own early Christian roots, and I am realizing that as a Christian (even when I was a very young one) I have had my greatest intellectual development.  The more vibrant my faith, as a matter of fact, the more hungry for expanding my own intellect gets.   And, that is what all this is about - "studying to show myself approved."  

I hope you don't mind my ramblings today, as they have been verbose, but I needed to share.  May you all have a blessed Christmas season, and may God grant you all a blessed 2015 that lies just ahead of us.  

The Year in Review

The year 2014 was quite a busy one for us, and there is a lot to talk about.   There are many milestones to document, as well as a lot of other things.  And, it has been a year filled with ups and downs, new opportunities and a few setbacks, and mostly, it has been busy.  This also marks the end of our 5^th year doing the blog thing, and who would have thought that the combined content of Sacramental Present Truths, David’s Mountain Memories, and David’s Culinary Page would at this time end up being about a thousand pages!  I have managed to take that whole content and publish them into an e-book that is available at www.lulu.com.  In 5 years, I may do it again – we’ll see.  And, I will be talking about where we are going with that shortly too.

Personal Year in Review

As I have said, this year has had its share of both challenges and blessings, and I want to do a summary of those now as it relates to our lives personally.

To begin, I am unfortunately not having as much luck with work this year, being that I am essentially only getting temporary/contract positions as I have the past couple of years, and those can be quite sporadic.  Although we are OK financially, the bottom line is some extra income would not hurt us any at this point, and hopefully in 2015 things will change for the better.  I would say that if my total work time is summed up this year, it would be about 3 months actual.  However, having some extra time to work with has helped me accomplish some other stuff, which is a plus.

2014 was also my second year of grad school too, which is still progressing well as I have transferred to Franciscan University of Steubenville and it is so much better – I have regained a passion for learning, and although my coursework is all distance education, it is rich with a lot of new insight.  I will be talking more about that later.  In addition, this is the year I have published 3 books and an article in a theological journal, and that too is quite an accomplishment on my part. 

Onto other developments, we have had a collapsed ceiling in my home office this past spring, and the landlady also had to replace the a/c unit during the heat of the summer months – the week in August we were without air was the closest thing to hell I hope I ever have to experience, as summers in Florida are extremely humid.  Additionally, this year in September my mother had to give up her place, and as 2014 draws to a close she has been living with us.  With her health issues and this, I am a little concerned for her, but fortunately she is being taken care of by the Veteran’s Administration, whom we anticipate will be assisting her with several things soon.  All-in-all, Mom’s stay with us has not been bad, but at the same time she’d be better off in her own place, and I think that is what she wants too as she is fairly independent-minded.

Now that I have given you the gist of the year, let me now get into the specifics.

Graduate School

My work toward my Master’s degree is progressing well, as now I feel somewhat liberated after transferring to Franciscan University of Steubenville at the beginning of the year last January. Southeastern University, where I had initially taken some coursework, has totally gone a negative direction and I just didn’t feel comfortable going there anymore.  To put it this way, the difference between the two universities is like night and day, as now I feel like I am really getting an education instead of being forcibly indoctrinated with liberal agendas.  Of course, it has been somewhat challenging, in particular the various Philosophy pre-credits I had to take, but it is actually good stuff – I learned another dimension of my own faith, and that Philosophy and Theology are not in conflict, but rather complement each other – the only real difference is that Philosophy has to do with what one thinks, while Theology has to do with what one believes.  And, I have had a whole new area of theological and philosophical discipline opened to me, of sound scholars like Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthazar, Romano Guardini, and novelist Flannery O’Connor.   Learning some new things and incorporating them into my own belief system has been enriching, and I feel now as if I can authoritatively write theology in a way that I never could before.  And, that has me looking eagerly forward to the next coursework!

Also, I now have a clear-cut plan for my Ph.D. work too – it turns out that I may be able to enroll at another good Roman Catholic institution in a couple of years, Ave Maria University in Naples, and will be in good hands to finish up my education once and for all in about 5 years.  The scary part of this however, is that I will be 52 years old before I do that – oy!!  However, the best thing to do is enjoy the ride and learn all I can, because it is rich material and a stellar educational experience.

Writing Projects

I mentioned that I have had some books published, and this year has been a busy one for that as well.   Back in February, I was able to finally get my first book – a study on Ephesians – to the publisher after finishing the draft on it last year.  The book is entitled Unity in the Body and Sacramental Devotion, and although the first edition was not overly impressive – I had to scan the hard copy as a pdf document to submit it to the publishers, so it’s got mixed fonts, no page numbers, and a lot of grammatical errors.  I am planning a revision of the text next year in order to make it look more professional, as soon as a figure out how to convert my original draft to edit it!  I anticipate though that it will be a good resource to teach others.

My first book, published in February of this year (2014)

My second book was another project that involves close to 25 years of research, as there are denominations and fellowships I wanted to publish a church history book about that many “mainstream” scholars have chosen to ignore.  When I published it in July though, there were a few things I was unable to add at the time as I was still waiting on some other material, but most of that has gotten here now and I plan a revision of that next year as well.  The title of that one is Where Two or Three are Gathered – The Small Fellowships of the Highways and Hedges, and it definitely looks more professional than my first book, as I did this one right.  It has nice footnotes, uniform font, and it just looks really good – once the final information is added in my revision, it is going to be even better.   I anticipate this one to have a little more exposure than my first volume, as it deals with more historical information.

My second book, published in July of this year (2014)

My other publishing venture was somewhat smaller, but was my first this year.  A friend of mine who is a traditionalist Byzantine Catholic priest, Fr. Jack Ashcraft, attempted to publish a theological journal but for some reason it didn’t go.  The publication was titled Watchman Theological Journal, and it only had one issue in the winter of this year (2014).  However, I had an article on Transhumanism published in it, which is my first serious theological publishing venture.   The article I submitted was originally a class project for a graduate-level Theology of Ethics course I had taken back at the end of 2012, and it garnered so much interest that I decided to publish it for a wider audience.   Thankfully Fr. Jack gave me the platform to make that happen, and for the first time I have an actual published article in a serious academic context!  I hope to do more of this type of writing in the future, as another old friend, Dr. Robert Paulissian of the Assyrian Academic Society, is encouraging me to write more and submit some material to him as well.  We’ll see what happens next year.

The issue of Watchman Theological Journal my article was published in (2014).

Summarily speaking, it has been a busy year of writing, and I forgot to mention the “blog book!”  That one is only going to be available to a limited audience as an e-book, being it is over 1000 pages, but hopefully I can get it published as a hard-copy volume for my own use.  It is entitled Five Years of Ramblings, Musings, and Other Masterpieces – The Blog Collection Vol. I, and it is big!  I wanted to put all of my smaller articles together in one volume, and this was my way to do just that.  Additionally, I have also included some photos of my artwork and other stuff I have done over the years, so it acts almost like a portfolio of my entire creations.  If I get that one bound, it will be limited as to who can get it, etc., as it will serve as a sort of blueprint for other projects I have in coming years.

Although 2014 was a busy year for writing for me, I don’t anticipate doing much more large-scale writing projects until I get my graduate school and doctoral studies completed.   Mainly, I am confining myself to blog articles and revisions of work I have already done, as school and other commitments may hinder any plans for writing anything else.  However, I am anticipating a book in the near future that would pretty much embody my theology and political perspectives, but we’ll see where we go with that later.

Church Work

2014 has also been a busy year for church work, as I am entering soon my fourth year as a licensed Lay Reader with the Anglican Catholic Church, as well as serving a second year as delegate to Diocesan Synod and now in 2015 I have also been nominated by the diocese to go to Provincial Synod, which fortunately will be in Athens, GA, in October.  However, the big news was that this year at Synod I was elected by pretty much a unanimous vote to be our diocesan Deputy Speaker of the House of Laity.  I am still not sure what all that entails, but as I understand it, if the Speaker (who is Jack Kylander from Chapel Hill, NC) cannot make it for some reason, I am next in line to preside over the House of Laity assembly at the next Synod – oy!!  I only pray Jackie stays in good health!  However, that aside, I have been really blessed with being part of the ACC Diocesan Synods representing our parish the past couple of years, and it is good getting to know the extended ACC family, as they are truly a great group of people – both our clergy and laity are some of the best, and Archbishop Haverland is a phenomenal blessing as the spiritual shepherd not only of the Diocese, but of the whole First Province of the ACC, which pretty much covers the entire globe except India, which is the Second Province.  My church work is also tied pretty closely to my studies at Franciscan University too, as I hope to serve the ACC better in future years as a lay theologian or catechist.  I had originally thought about ordination, but maybe that is not what I am supposed to do.  Of course, things could change, so we’ll see.

My Record Collection

I would not have a complete report this year if I didn’t deal with my musical library and its growth.  Unlike in past years, I have not focused as much on acquiring new material, although I did get some this year (including the entire “Molly B” polka Christmas specials she broadcasts on RFD-TV).  I did manage to buy a few vinyl items (mostly gospel) but for the most part it hasn’t been a very active year.  As we come to year’s end, my collection now stands at 1190 CD’s, 903 LP’s, and 96 DVD’s.  However, I have a new development that I wanted to talk about, because that has increased the collection a little too.

There is a lot of good music online, both through Youtube and another service called Soundcloud, but the problem all these years has been trying to find a way to capture it.  In the past few months, I have discovered that I can download Youtube videos, convert them to audio MP3’s, and save them on audio CD discs.  I have managed to rack up several recordings of those, which I don’t include in the statistics I listed earlier, and that too is a great little accomplishment.  In addition to saving a lot of this on discs, I also have discovered the miracle of the flash drive, and have reserve copies of the various “playlists” I have created on those too.  It is a great way to get quality music without a lot of investment.  Of course, there is work involved in doing this, as I want to create suitable album covers for my newly-created discs, but finances have restricted my printing capabilities although I can create the covers easily.   I will eventually have a lot of work printing and cutting out covers for all those discs, which number about 30 now, and that may be a task for next year once I have ink to do the job.

I am not anticipating a lot more buying up of recordings for the collection, as for the first time in a long time I feel like I finally have that vintage big band collection I have always wanted, and have even dreamed about since I got into this stuff at the age of 10.  I will no doubt get some new CD’s, and maybe even a few vinyl items, but not near the scale I have in the past.   It is now time to just enjoy this great collection and maybe even find a way to utilize it to work for me – education maybe?   That is definitely something to consider that is for sure.

Where Do I Go From Here?

It is now at year’s end, and I am both optimistic and frustrated a little as I am writing this.  A lot of things have challenged me this year, from some former co-workers looking down my nose because I don’t travel as much to badly-misinformed in-laws falsely judging my graduate school endeavors.  I am ready for a major shift to occur – in the positive – for me to forge ahead with what I am supposed to be doing, but making that happen is often not the easiest thing when you have limited resources to work with.  So, I wanted to talk about a few things that have been on my mind recently.

To begin, this new education at Franciscan University has opened up for me a whole new dimension of things – I now appreciate philosophy better, and I am being enriched as far as theology is concerned.  I am chomping at the bit to get all this new stuff digested, and then be able to formulate some new material in my writing that will hopefully benefit others.  As is the case though, it is a lot to absorb, and my head literally swims with a lot of stuff that I need to channel and organize, and I am praying for help to do that in the coming year.  I also need a source of revenue to fund things, as I want to begin to include field research in my studies and make the material I produce even more accessible to others.  This is especially true as I begin to incorporate some of the better things I am learning from both personalist philosophy and metaphysics, and as I read these great thinkers like Norris Clarke and Romano Guardini, I want to utilize the things they have to offer and incorporate them into my worldview, but how do I do that?   This is perhaps the greatest struggle I have in the year to come, and perhaps I would be best served if I reached out to some individuals who can help me channel all this stuff in such a way that it becomes productive for me.  Mostly, though, I need open doors – my prayer for the coming year is that those will become accessible to me.

A large part of my own writing thus far has been an expression of my own collective experience – I often envision a “master book” of my story from which I can write and apply to so much, and my goal is to make that “master book” a tangible reality one day.  I have in the past few years done more contemplation about who I am, where I came from, and have also sought to incorporate various components of my own past in such a way that I can present a fuller picture of myself.  Mom has unwittingly been a great blessing in that regard, as we sit often during the mornings talking about certain things over coffee, and it provides some fill-ins of gaps I may have in my own recollections.   Good friends, relatives, and former classmates from years ago that I have recently reconnected with on social media have also been a great asset in that regard too, and these people do not know what a tremendous blessing they have been.  In the past year, I have not indulged in as much family history or anything as I have previous, but I have begun to get many of my own materials better organized for the eventual bigger project when the time comes to get it on paper.  I only hope that everything will come together with almost a symphonic harmony so that I can leave a legacy for future generations to follow.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it – 2014 in review for me!   There are probably other things I could have included but didn’t.  However, you may see some missing material in future blog articles if you keep track.  May all reading this have a blessed 2015 as it dawns, and will be seeing you around the cyberspace arena!