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!