Thinking Back on My Spiritual Odyssey Part 2

 I used the first part of this little series to explain some of the differences between how modern Charismatics and Pentecostals view "worship" vs. what worship truly is, and my take on it has a lot to do with how I picture God.  God to me is two things I noted - a sovereign King but also a close friend.  Depending on the context, my own religious faith gravitates to one or the other of these.  In corporate worship, such as attending Mass, I see Christ the King.  In my private prayers for the most part, I see Christ my dear friend.  The second aspect I will focus on now, as it has some complexities.

As with any relationship, a friendship with Jesus is wrought with a diverse spectrum of experiences.  There were times, when at my lowest, I saw him as the friend who embraced and comforted me.  At other times, I gave him tongue-lashings for things I perceived as unjust on his part (I found out later they really weren't as unjust in reality though as they were in my own mind), only to begrudgingly feel bad about it later and apologize, because like any best friend you don't ever truly want to lose them.  And, despite how at times I have been really nasty in my exchanges with God, one of the things I also realized is that God transcends me and every other fallible human being on earth, and he sees past my pettiness.  That is something I am in all honesty grateful for.  I have also done my share of putting out fleeces, bargaining, issuing ultimatums, and other things as a sort of holdover from my Pentecostal past, and thankfully God has more wisdom than I do on some things because usually in retrospect I see why it didn't necessarily go the way I wanted it to, and that may in many cases be a good thing.  Jesus is a true friend in that he lovingly endures my lack of patience, my volatile temper, and other limitations I have, and in that regard he is better than any earthly friend, as many times our fellow human beings have limits and we can stretch them with each other. That too has shaped who I am as a Christian and person of faith, because it makes me take a more realistic approach to my own faith, and thank God for his supernatural grace at times!  In my 55 years on this earth, the main thing I have realized is that I have not arrived at perfection yet, and may never completely be there in this life - but, grace continues to work and grow me, and as long as we let that grace work in us, our faith will be strong even when we are not.  That is a radical take from a lot of things I have seen in both my former Protestant background and in my current Catholic identity - there are Protestants and Catholics alike who think they have to "put on a happy face" and do an act of sanctimonious overkill to prove ourselves, but God is, as I said earlier, telling us to "cut the crap."  The first step to allowing grace to work and to have a genuine faith is to be real - be honest with who you are, and don't worry about if you fall short, because none of us have achieved the pinnacle of perfection yet.  The most encouraging experience I have had with my 11th-grade students I taught last year was a note one of them gave me basically saying "thank you for being real."  An educator, pastor, or any other leader cannot receive a better compliment than that - being real.  Being real with ourselves, with God, and with each other - this will be the root of true worship also.  Which now leads to my next point in regard to that. 

Anyone who knows me is aware that I am not really an emotionally expressive person - I am somewhat introverted, and tend to approach things with a quiet caution, especially when dealing with new people. Part of that is just being a normal man - men are taught to control our emotions, although at times I think that can be taken too far as well.  We are still human beings, and there are things that will affect us and therefore on occasion a man is definitely allowed to shed tears in grief or sorrow, and no man should be diminished for doing that. My introverted, reserved demeanor also extends to how I worship in the Church.  As a Catholic, this is not really a huge issue as reverence and a certain amount of respect for God's house is mandated.  However, when I was a Pentecostal it presented a problem.  In my Pentecostal days as many of you recall, I attended a Foursquare Gospel church in Dothan, AL, and this particular church was, well, a bit expressive.  It seems at some point in their past, that particular church had some sort of revival meetings that impacted the pastor, and he was seeking to re-create that all the time.  So, if you were not a person who waved your hands in the air, yelled like a banshee when "the Spirit moved," or danced like a fool in church services, you were seen as odd, rebellious, and yes, even demon-possessed. I would come to find out later that this particular church was actually a glaring exception rather than the rule in many Pentecostal traditions, and it definitely was not a Kathryn Kuhlman crusade - I was the type of Pentecostal then who was drawn more to a Kathryn Kuhlman kind of worship and faith, and not the one this pastor was trying to impose on his flock.  Even later, I learned that one of the oldest Pentecostal denominations in existence - the Apostolic Faith Church in Portland, OR, which had a direct connection to Azuza Street - was a light-year measurement in distance away from that crazy Foursquare group in Alabama.  Turns out that many of the congregations in the Apostolic Faith movement had full orchestras and they also had a more Scriptural take on things like tongues - they taught that tongues were in a known language unknown to the speaker, and their purpose was more evangelical than self-edifying.  While still supernatural in origin, this particular interpretation of the gift of tongues makes more sense than the incoherent babbling many do in your typical hyper-Pentecostal groups like that one in Alabama.  Looking back on it now, I am starting to wonder if perhaps I should have looked at the Apostolic Faith denomination rather than the Foursquare group I became part of, but then again, my venture into Foursquare was also based on my personal fanship of their most prominent minister at the time, Dr. Jack Hayford who pastored Church on the Way in Van Nuys, CA.  Hayford was a different type of Pentecostal from the pastor I had too, as he was more like what I wanted to be if I ever was a minister - he was well-educated, and he also had those church services then which were personally very attractive to me as they were what I imagined a good Pentecostal church to be.  In all honesty then, despite Dr. Hayford being Foursquare, the local Assembly of God church in Graceville at the time had more in common with Hayford's model than did the more hickish Foursquare church in Alabama that was the same denomination. In retrospect, I probably should have stayed with that Assemblies of God church and things would have been much different.  In other words, I had probably more of an old-fashioned Wesleyan-flavored Pentecostalism than many people I knew, and even more so, I was perhaps more of an Irvingite than anything because I was even at that time evolving a very sacramental understanding of my faith, which for me was a natural outgrowth of the supernatural aspect of the Pentecostal tradition I was part of.  In assessing alternate scenarios though, any way I look at it I would have ended up Catholic eventually because I was on the course for that even in the earliest stages of my Christian walk. 

My second experience in a Foursquare church that came a couple of years later was not a huge improvement.  I went from an authoritarian, abusive, and cultish pastor to one who was essentially spineless and somewhat not sure of what he wanted.  That particular congregation was a relatively new one that initially met in the pastor's house before later moving to a women's club building in the community in Florida where it was located.  As controlling and abusive as the Alabama group was, this Florida group was somewhat disorganized and chaos seemed to be the order of the day for them.  The pastor was putting people into leadership who led questionable lifestyles, including a young Black man who claimed to be Christian but he was still getting his unwed girlfriend pregnant every couple of years and he was possibly involved in some gang-related activity.  He could talk the right talk - yes, he was one of those, relying on all the good religious lingo and all - but something about him just didn't set right either.  The pastor's wife then was into film and movies, and she was at times treating the church services like a screenplay, which was odd. The breaking point for me with this group was the rather weird irreverence they treated Palm Sunday one year - out of protest I attended Palm Sunday services at a Methodist church near the house, and had a much more edifying experience. In time, both this and the Alabama church closed their doors, and the cultish pastor in Alabama ended up dying with Alzheimer's disease (something he had decried as a "demon" at one time) while the Florida pastor and his wife ended up divorced.  In later years, the pastor's ex-wife matured though, which I am happy to say, and today she is a vibrant woman of faith who is doing some good work in counseling.  I am also still close to her too, and a lot of that old garbage from 30 years ago is now forgiven and forgotten.  As a matter of fact, she has been a wonderful source of prayer support in the past couple of years when I faced challenges. So, for that saga it was a good ending.

I know a lot of this has been rehashed from previous accounts, but I wanted to delve into it a little more as watching a little bit of the old Kathryn Kuhlman crusade music got my wheels turning.  In the entire spectrum of my own faith journey, I don't totally reject my Pentecostal roots - they are a part of me, and perhaps God allowed that to help me grow some.  As I continue these conversations, I am going to talk more about how that made me more of a faithful Catholic, even though it is somewhat paradoxical - I lean very much towards a more traditional/conservative form of Catholic faith now, although I am not what you would call a strict traditionalist by any means.  For instance, I am not exclusively Tridentine Mass (although I think the old Mass is beautiful and believe Catholics should be able to celebrate it), nor am I against Vatican II as much either.  On the latter, much of the controversy about Vatican II I have found does not center around the documents or the council itself, but rather how some more liberal factions of the Church applied it - they took some bad liberties with some of the Vatican II reforms that I don't believe reflect the true spirit of the documents or the Council, and thus it caused some serious problems.  And, as a Catholic, I also do not eschew or reject my pre-Catholic past - I knew I was a Christian before I came home to the Church, and although it was an incomplete Christianity, it was still real and I know I was serving God and Jesus - the Church just made that faith more complete.  And, I still have many of my old friends who are not Catholic - I know Baptists, Pentecostals, Holiness people, Methodists, Lutherans, and Anglicans - who love God and do believe in Jesus as the only way to salvation, and that makes them fully Christian in my book although their faith lacks the dimension that the Catholic Church could provide them.  A hunger does exist among many of these people too, as they are getting the drawing to things such as symbolism as well as a deeper understanding of things like the Eucharist, and you see it in their teachings.  One example is my distant relative and well-known Pentecostal evangelist Perry Stone.  Perry is by no means Catholic, but God is working in him, and he in recent years has been teaching about a more sacramental understanding of the Lord's Supper, although he hasn't gotten the full picture of that yet.  Give him time though, because if he is open God can use that to help him grow too, just like he has done with so many of us.  So, while I consider myself a traditionalist and definitely conservative in the form of Catholicism I embrace, I also leave some room for things that many Trads don't.  However, in time many younger Trads in particular will mature, and as they grow in their faith as well, they will learn to appreciate more things too. 

I still don't feel like I got everything out on the table with this discussion that I wanted to, so it looks like a Part 3 may be in order next time.  Thank you, and will see you then. 

Thinking Back on My Spiritual Odyssey Part 1

 It is really weird to try to express this in words, as it is more about my general mindset and how I choose to serve God in my Christian walk.  Anyone who knows me will attest I do things a bit differently - I have been scoffed at and hated by some, and admired by others, but many cannot figure me out.  I kind of like it like that in all honesty.  What brought this to mind was the other day when I was contemplating rebuilding a lost music collection, which is in four compartments - one is my vintage big band/jazz collection, second is a small classical collection of composers and works I like (I lean heavily toward 20th-century composers such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky), a third is my ethnic music collection (Assyrian and Armenian music particularly), and the fourth category is my religious/sacred collection.  The fourth is surprisingly diverse, as it contained many things - liturgical music from all Church traditions, vintage Southern Gospel and Black Gospel, and more traditional hymns but specifically things that reflected my own spiritual journey.  One of the items in my original collection was music that used to be part of the late Charismatic evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman's crusades - it was tasteful, featuring traditional piano and organ as well as an orchestra and large choir.  One of the choruses that she often used in her crusades was a composition by Eugene L. Clark entitled "Nothing is Impossible," and it was also featured in Benny Hinn's crusades for many years as he often tried to imitate Kathryn Kuhlman's style being he thought he was somehow her son by God's providential miracle.  The words of it go something like this:

   Nothing is impossible when you put your trust in God

   Nothing is impossible when you're trusting in his Word

   Hearken to the voice of God to thee,

   "Is there anything too hard for me?"

  Then put your trust in God alone, and rest upon his Word,

  For everything, O everything, yes everything is possible with God!

This was an older song that was birthed out of the Charismatic Renewal movement and was composed by Clark in 1966.  While largely forgotten today, the song actually has a good message.  For its time, it was considered "contemporary," but more so in the mold of other Christian hymnodists who wrote similar work like John W. Peterson and Bill Gaither.  It has frankly become one of my personal favorite choruses, both for its simple Biblical message as well as for its melody.  At both Kuhlman's and Hinn's crusades, this song was often the opening chorus to the massive crusades back in the day, and it was done with full orchestration and a mass choir.  While I find Benny Hinn's theology a bit suspect, I have to concede that the music in his old crusades was actually well-done, and the music at his crusades was never truly the issue.  In a 1993 crusade at the Mabee Center at ORU's campus in Tulsa, this song was used, with the mass crusade choir directed by Jim Cernero, and the one thing that always gets me in that recording is the end chorus - there is a slight pause in which the chord of the organ is heard, and it heightens the experience.  It's a detail that was probably lacking even at the time of the actual crusade, but I noticed it quickly.  You see, things like those little details make a big difference in the way one focuses on worship of God, and it is as if the Holy Spirit himself directs either the composer or arranger to include those little things as a reminder of why we are where we are and what we are supposed to be doing.  I notice it even at the Dominican parish in Baltimore I attend now - usually between the Communion hymn and the beautiful Salve Regina that follows it, there is a beautiful organ interlude that sort of draws the person to God and the Spirit's presence, and that is more powerful than many may realize.  And this is not exclusive to the music of the Church either - one of the things that made the late legend Louis Prima's live shows so dynamic was that he employed the same technique to his program on stage - the energy level is kept going, and it aids in making the audience experience more riveting.  Things like this separate the performance from the experience of the event, and it is one way God has gifted talented people with the ability to bring a new level of aesthetic quality to both actual worship as well as just the enjoyment of a stellar concert.  My sensitivities in this regard shape how I actually worship God in the Mass, or even in my old days in Pentecostal revivals and church services.  Many people don't understand this, but it does have a component I will get into shortly.

Also in my old Christian music collection was one album in the Maranatha Music series that I count as one of my favorites of all time.  First though, a little history on Maranatha.  Maranatha grew out of the ministry of Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in the 1970s, and was the birth of what is known as the "worship chorus" that would be used in so many Pentecostal and Charismatic churches almost to the exclusion of traditional hymnody.  It was a creation of the "Jesus People" generation of American Evangelicalism, and to be honest it was not really a bad thing at all - many of the enthusiastic young converts who created the choruses of the Maranatha catalog used actual Scripture as the lyrics and just composed a melody around it - a number of the early ones came in particular from the Psalms in Scripture, and some have actually become so commonplace that a variety of churches from high-Church Anglicans to rural Holiness-Pentecostal chapels use them.  One of these that got my attention early on was taken from Psalm 32:7, and its title comes directly from that - "You Are My Hiding Place."  The music that surrounds these lyrics pulled directly from the Psalms is actually very beautiful, and in its instrumental version it is particularly comforting and also does touch the soul in a profound way.  I am not exactly sure when the exact year was when this was released and began to be used in churches, but I am guessing by its sound it was early to mid 1970s.  Why this is significant will be the next part of my discussion.

I have never been a big fan of "praise choruses" being used in churches, and in recent years it seems as if Evangelicalism in general has been inundated with some bad ones - some don't even have real lyrics now, and are just repetitive grunts like "oh, oh, oh, oh - heaven!"  That, and the loud, cacophonic rock music setting many are performed in, frankly don't do a thing for me - I don't feel God's presence with that stuff, as it seems the gut-shaking electronic/artificial rhythms and repetitive childish lyrics are invoking more of a Pavlovian response than they are actual worship.  I also have a problem with equally bad music from some smaller Pentecostal churches, where bad singing and equally bad amateur musicianship seem to invoke the same Pavlovian response, all in the name of "worship" of course.  This is particularly true in the past 30 years or so, where weird stuff masquerading as "worship" has invaded so many churches.  The iconoclastic protest against "tradition" has in turn created its own sterile "tradition of men" that makes me feel like I am on a different planet than the Protestant churches I was part of years ago.  In a small struggling church, one can forgive an off-key singer or an amateur piano player who at least try to make a "joyful noise unto the Lord," but the bigger megachurches as well as the thousands of congregations that try to ape them throughout the country with professional stage shows and rock bands are beyond my personal comprehension.  There is no reverence, no sense of the sacred, and it is reflected often in the spiritual lives of people who attend such churches.  And, with COVID-19, it has made this more of a problem because in many "multi-campus" megachurches often the "pastor" is a video screen.  Church nowadays feels more like the mediocre pop concert rather than the house of the Lord, and it is a big factor in why I am no longer an Evangelical Protestant myself.  Despite the pitiful descent of so-called "worship music," there are earlier choruses that were actually quite edifying and beautiful, and many of them were recorded from Maranatha's record label.  "You are My Hiding Place" is the most profound of those to me, but there are others too.  The thing is however, choruses have their place when you look at it from the standpoint of liturgical theology, and frankly they are not designed for inclusion in the liturgy.  Now, for non-liturgical events such as parish missions and such, they work fine though, and no one would object to them in that capacity.  This forms the foundation as to why my faith life is different and it also has a lot to do with how I relate to God.

In my personal spirituality and faith, God to me is represented by two things.  First, he is King, and the liturgy (Mass) is a divine picture of the Kingship of Christ.  In that regard, I worship Christ with a fealty and reverence that says "I am your servant" and as a servant, I am also a warrior for truth to defend what Jesus gave us.  Second, Christ is like a best friend to me - many of my own prayers are extemporaneous conversations with the One who knows me best, and I talk to God often as if he is having morning coffee with me and it is deeply edifying.  Of course, I do more formal traditional prayers such as a Rosary everyday too, and I say the St. Michael Prayer both morning and before I go to sleep at night.  Any rate, a chorus like "Hiding Place" is what reflects with that dimension of my personal faith.  I owe that second dimension of my faith to a guy I knew years ago named Norman Tenney, who served as an associate pastor at a small Baptist mission in Graceville, FL.  Norman was a jolly, somewhat eccentric guy but he had a sincerity that drew people to him, and he was a good friend to me for years.  He taught me the practice of extemporaneous "conversational prayer," and it was one of the most liberating things I had ever come across.  We often get into this weird delusion that in order to talk to God we have to use a pious serious voice and say "Thee," "Thou," or Thine" repeatedly as well as putting an "-est" at the end of every verb and an "a-" at the front.  To be honest, the pious act always rubbed me wrong because in all honesty God knows us already better than we do ourselves, and when a person launches into one of those sanctimonious prayers peppered with Elizabethan English, I picture God rolling his eyes and saying "cut the crap, will ya?"  That may offend some religious scruples of those reading this, but think about it - God does put up with a lot of pretentious, sanctimonious crap from us, and in all honesty does that even make our prayers heard better?  According to Scripture itself, it doesn't - Scripture talks about contrition, honesty, and the state of the heart, and often our tongues and brains don't reflect what is truly in our hearts, and we don't fool God with that nonsense.  The same is true with corporate worship in our churches - we don't have to repeat a childish mantra over and over as a "worship chorus" and jump up and down waving our hands to impress God - he doesn't impress easily in all honesty, because he is the Creator of the universe we live in and nothing we can do will impress him, especially if it is done in the wrong spirit.  God is not looking to be impressed - he is looking to be adored and worshipped, and in a way that is honest and compatible with the person he created us to be.  Therefore, some people will worship quietly, while others may raise their hands and shout, but God is looking at the heart, and often the so-called "shouters" are performing and not worshipping.  Any type of music in a church that encourages performance over worship is not great, and for a performance a person would get more satisfaction at a concert instead.  And, the liturgy in particular is not about performance - at its center is Christ, the object and focus of our worship, and the music and everything else should point toward that.  AND, that is a jab against some liberal Catholics who try to use the Mass as a "social justice" platform instead of the worship of Christ - they are as bad as the megachurches in that case in all honesty.  It is time we get back to what matters. 

There is much more I can say on this, but we will pick this up next time as I see the potential for a series here.  Thanks for allowing me to share, and will see you next time. 

Right to Live Life - Eradicating HOAs

 Over the past couple of months or so, I have been watching some videos about the notorious "HOA Karens."  While Karen may not be the actual person's name, the moniker as understood in modern jargon fits - a nasty middle-aged woman who wants control, micromanagement, and has a superiority complex against everyone different from her.  The "Karens" though are a bad and rotten fruit of a deeper problem with a more nefarious root, and that is what I wanted to talk about today.

In my thinking - as odd as it seems - if you pay your hard-earned money to invest in a home you will live in, then you should have rights to live how you please.  Obviously, there are some common-sense things to do, such as not trashing up your place with cars on cinder blocks in your front yard, or manufacturing controlled substances in your garden shed in the back yard, or playing loud, noisy sounds (music and otherwise) that create a disturbance for your neighbors.  That is all about just basic courtesy and respect, and a responsible homeowner doesn't do any of that anyway. So, what is the deal then with HOAs, especially those controlled by the stereotypical "Karens?"   Let's talk about that some.

In an episode of Duck Dynasty I watched a few years back, Jase Robertson had some issues with his local HOA - he wanted to keep chickens in his yard, as well as burning lawn clippings and dead leaves.  He was emphatically told "no" by the local HOA, and he protested.  His humorous monologue he delivered at the meeting in the HOA president's garage was perhaps one of the most hilarious things I have heard - "We are given the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and chickens make me happy!"  He then extolled the virtues of avian husbandry by noting that chickens get rid of nasty bugs that would otherwise be pests, they naturally fertilize the lawn, and when they outlive their usefulness, you can butcher them and put them in the pot.  In all honesty, Jase's argument was an example of good old-fashioned redneck genius, and he was technically right on all of his points.  However, while I would personally question having a flock of chickens in my neighbor's yard next door, there are honestly far worse offenses in the world than that.  This humorous segment of a hit TV show illustrates the hubris with which many of us view HOAs, and now I want to talk about that for a while.

An HOA (homeowner's association) is in principle an elected body of fellow homeowners in a given community who oversee the security and integrity of the community.  If an HOA actually does what it is supposed to do, it just makes sure the community is safe, that municipal codes are observed, and it also should encourage community cohesiveness in the form of activities and other functions.  The HOA then has the job of representing and advocating for the homeowners who are part of it, and if it did that, many people would not have issues with them.  However, the horror stories of HOA abuse and overreach have become the stuff of urban legends, and there are no less than a dozen YouTube channels about the notorious "HOA Karens," and the protagonists targeted by them.  The end of the story usually culminates in the HOA getting put in its place by a homeowner who has had enough of being abused simply for living life in their own house, and the conclusions of these stories range from humorous (such as wiring the "HOA Karen's" house to loudly play polka music when they open their refrigerator door) to macabre (one story had a "Karen" getting justice by becoming a 12-foot gator's lunch), but all of them contain the same message - HOA overreach is challenged, and the victims are vindicated in some fashion.  Therefore, while an HOA in principle is perhaps not a bad idea, its abuses and overreach are problematic and make it debatable as to whether they are really needed or not.  Let's talk about examples of HOA overreach and abuse.

Many HOAs tend to be controlled by micromanaging and totalitarian shrews (Karens) who get obsessed with "property values" and "community aesthetic," and instead of just enforcing common-sense measures, these boards resort to things such as penalizing people for a slight difference in the shade of paint on a mailbox, hanging a wet rug on a porch to dry, or some other stupidity such as the wrong color of flowers.  It seems like if a person breathes in their own house, they risk being fined or penalized for it. Many of those type of HOAs are more restrictive than Kim Jung Un in North Korea, as HOA tyrants tend to set up their own little kingdoms wanting control of every aspect of everyone's lives.  In the stories on the videos, often this totalitarian micromanagement conceals more dark secrets, as the "Karen" often is embezzling funds or doing something else criminal.  The thing about the worship of control is this - often it means the person who is possessed by that mania wants that control at any cost, and they don't care if they manipulate law or do illegal actions. This is also similarly true of politicians who seek after power for themselves instead of being a servant to their constituents.  And, an HOA is like a festering blister where such germs flourish.  And this is why I think the laws should be changed to eradicate the threat.

I truly believe that the HOA system as it exists needs to be overhauled and even made illegal.  I propose that the replacement for this be voluntary resident's groups who really invest in the well-being of the community.  Instead of worrying about the shade of beige on a mailbox, resident/volunteer groups would focus on things such as ensuring the safety of the community as well as finding ways to make the community actually a real community, and in doing so it would also preserve the personal liberties of the homeowners who are part of it.  No micromanaging, no fines or penalties, no overly-complicated rulebooks - those things would be made illegal and no one would be allowed to implement and enforce them. In the past we have talked about dignity of personhood as well as things that violate it - things such as abortion, euthanasia, racism, etc.   In the middle of that also sits overreaching entities such as HOAs or even corporate tyrants in workplaces - these individuals are evil, and there is no good in them because they seek to serve themselves and dehumanize everyone they come into contact with.  This is even true with people they try to impress - they will try to kiss butt with those they think will give them an advantage, but if that doesn't work out for them, they demonize and attempt to subvert the system.  The people who do this can be "Karens" on a community level, or they can be ruthless dictators of nations, billionaire oligarchs, or useless bureaucrats in government.  I am not sure if Dante had an assigned place in hell for such people, but I imagine that if he did it would be in the hottest part due to the damage they inflict.  Violating God-given personhood of another is a gross offense of justice, and it deserves maximum punishment - that is true whether the culprit is an overreaching HOA or a genocidal dictator. 

To conclude my thoughts and circling back to HOAs, I think those entities should be made illegal, and indeed, also restricted.  And, individuals who are willing parts of them need to be fully censured and restricted as well.  When a person invests their hard-earned money and labor into their own home, no one has a right to dictate stupid rules and minutiae to them.  That home is yours, if you paid for it and invested work into it, and you have the absolute right to live in it the way you wish without some outside entity dictating crap to you.  This is also true as far as just living one's life goes - God gave us free will, and the positive side of that is that we have the sovereignty to live our lives as we choose.  We of course respect that right for others too, and in doing so we just use common sense and an awareness of the common good to guide us.  Therefore, enjoy what God has blessed you with, and don't let anyone tell you that you can't!  Thanks again, and will see you next time. 

Striving For Significance

 In the past couple of weeks or so, I have gotten into watching a favorite Christian comedian I have followed since the early 1990s, Mark Lowry.  Many who are Southern Gospel fans are familiar with Mark from the Gaither Homecoming shows, as in the late 1990s and early 2000s Mark and Gaither had established a hilarious comedy routine with Mark tormenting Gaither about his hair, etc., and it was frankly funny!  In an interview I watched later, Gaither mentioned that Mark had a sort of sanctified Don Rickles shtick he used, and he told Mark that if he had to pick on anyone, then Gaither would be his straight man - it was a formula that worked too.  When asked by people if Gaither got offended at Mark's ribbing, Mark replied, "he gives me a raise everytime I come up with something else!"  The close friendship Bill Gaither and Mark Lowry have had over the years is an amazing story in itself, and the joy the comedy they produced has made people laugh for almost 30 years now.  If I had one criticism of Lowry, it would be the Christmas song he wrote called "Mary Did You Know?" which does have some theological problems in all honesty.  But, Lowry is not a theologian, and nor do I think he claims to be, and a song like that should be taken with a grain of salt and it doesn't deter from the fact that Lowry is still a brilliant comedian and his work never ages. 

There are a couple of routines that I really found to be my favorites of Mark's comedy.  The first I will briefly mention, as it is perhaps one of my all-time favorite videos to watch.  In the clip, Gaither is performing a song composed by legendary Statesmen lead singer Jake Hess () entitled "I'm Gonna Keep On Singing."  At the time, both Mark and Hess were part of the Gaither Vocal Band lineup, and it was a winning formula in all honesty.  Bill is treating the song in the video like a live rehearsal, and he is giving the group instructions about singing the parts.  The first part is the first verse, and Gaither instructs Mark at the halfway point in the verse to insert an "OOOOOO," and upon receiving the instructions Gaither kicks off the song while sitting at the piano with his group behind him.  After the first four words, "It's as old as..." Mark with a silly face goes "OOOOO!"  He is reprimanded by Gaither who tells him that this was supposed to be at the middle of the verse, at which Lowry replies,  "I thought that was halfway through."  Toward the last verse of the song, there is a line about "I hear the little sparrow," and that too becomes a highlight - on queue, Guy Penrod, the other singer in the group, gives a warbling whistle - Gaither then continues the song and the whistle comes again, so it is done over.  At that point, Mark lets out a huge squawk, and Gaither is apparently perturbed (it is an act obviously, but it is funny!) and Mark's response is "Boy, that is a big bird that came through here - it almost landed in your nest!"  Every time I watch that, I am literally laughing so hard that I cannot contain myself.  After Gaither accusingly calls out Mark and Mark vehemently denies it, Mark then points an accusing finger at Jake Hess, and says "He did it!  You can be replaced - I can wear that wig!" and then he pulls out a wig that looks like Hess's hairdo and dons it and begins to imitate Hess's singing style, which gets a huge audience response and a good-natured laugh from Hess, who is about as amusing in that he is cracking up laughing during Penrod's sparrow calls.  In all honesty, I could watch that over and over, as it is just hilarious to watch and it is classic comedy at its finest.  While that is perhaps my favorite routine of Mark's and Gaither's, there is another one that got my attention too. 

There was a clip where the Gaither program was taped live in a major city, and it is close to Mark's birthday.  After an amusing monologue about the "joys" of "turning forty," which Mark says sounds like clabbered milk, he then gets off on a speech in which he says the first fifty years of his life were about success, but for the second fifty he is striving for significance - he then launches into an amusing song called "God Help the USA" which is his fictional run for President (this was taped after the 2000 election, so there are jokes about recounts in the song as well as putting Willy Nelson in charge of the IRS - that was brilliant, as at the time Willy was having a few issues of his own with unjust tax laws enacted under Clinton's administration).  While the song was amusing - especially the part about making Gospel music legend Vestal Goodman his running mate - that line "striving for significance" did hit a chord with me, and I wanted to reflect on that a little.  Despite the amusing comedic setting this was uttered in, there is a grain of wisdom in it too, and recently I related better to it myself.  

It has been almost 6 years since I hit my 50th birthday, and in all honesty what came after I turned 50 was perhaps some of the most challenging times of my life.  Barbara and I divorced, I lost both of my parents, I lost my home, I got a doctoral degree, and I started a new career as a teacher as well as moving to Baltimore.  Things have definitely got a little shaken up after I hit mid-century in my life, and even now I am still making a lot of adjustments to everything.  At 55 now, a lot of that dust is starting to settle thankfully, but I am still in the process of trying to make sense of some of it.  In many ways, like Mark Lowry I have achieved a level of success, but I also struggle with significance.  Am I significant enough, and do I really want to be?  Those are challenging questions to which no answer comes easily.  And, can significance be a thing to strive for, or is it just something bestowed once others notice?  There are people God places in our lives that we impact for sure, but for most of our lives we are not even aware we had that impact on them, and in many cases it is only recognized after we die.  It reminds me of the words of Shakespeare I had to memorize in my senior year of high school many moons ago in Julius Caesar when a monologue states "the evil men do lives after them, but the good is oft interred with their bones."  The truth in that is that often people remember more about what was wrong with you than what you accomplished, and in life that is even more so because even our families at times take us for granted and don't really see the hard work and other efforts we make to achieve our goals in life - I actually had relatives that mocked my doctoral degree, criticized the fact I successfully went to college and got a good education, and they even are dismissive with my other work too.  That is why I have finally come to a conclusion about that, and I will add that now.

I have talked about the fact that at times our families can be toxic, and what is really sad is that since I have moved to Baltimore, I have perhaps as many as twenty relatives living within 15 miles of me, yet I never see them, they don't talk to me, and they frankly don't care I even exist - oh, that is unless I can be useful to them.  When I first moved here as a matter of fact and was looking for a place to live, I wanted to reach out to my cousins about possibly subletting a room or something with them, and they just brushed me off and didn't even respond - the old axiom that "blood is thicker than water" is not applicable with relatives like that, because their blood is about as sterile as water when it comes to how they relate to other family members.  I have another cousin who lives back in my hometown who is a notorious gossip also - never hear much out of him either, but for some reason he likes to run his mouth to other family members about juicy details in my life that are none of his business.  I have found that I have little use for these "relatives," because although we may share a family tree, they don't treat me like family and frankly I am probably better off without them. This is why in recent years I have concluded that perhaps it is time to reshape my family legacy, and as mentioned earlier there are a couple of things I won't divulge at this point that are in the formative stages of doing just that.  While I cannot say a lot about that now, I can say that it will be something that writes a new chapter in our family history, and it will be a different chapter that will look radically different in generations to come while still maintaining the better aspects of my roots.  It sometimes becomes necessary to close an old chapter and then pick up the pen to write a new one, and that is what is happening now, with the past five years compelling me to do so in all honesty.  While this is still in the formative stages and I am not at liberty to say a lot about it yet, I can say that when the time comes to reveal things it will be a shock to many, but also it's a beautiful thing that I am happy with too.  Writing a new chapter in one's life is never an easy thing, and there is some shaking up that happens in the process, but the new chapter will be something much better.  And, that is where significance comes in.

So what does all that have to do with striving for significance?  Over the years, I have had things come a little later to me than they do for many people, and for some reason it is perfect timing.  It must be understood also that significance is seeded by success, but success is not something that has a blanket definition - what some view as a failure may be in reality the greatest success to the person whom it is bestowed upon.  Success is not about financial wealth necessarily either, as it more explicitly has to do with getting to the place one has worked toward in life.  In many ways, I can say I have success, although there is always room for improvement and new goals to achieve.  So, being success is not uniform and there are many forms of success even in our individual lives, what happens when we get there?  That is where significance comes in.  Significance is simply something that really stands out, and it marks a distinction between where you are vs. where someone else is.  What is significant to one person may not be for another, and that is why we don't need to try the "keep up with the Joneses" racket with others.  Their significance is not yours, and yours is not theirs.  And neither form of significance is negative - we achieve it for ourselves and can be satisfied to a degree, but we also should celebrate it when others achieve significance.  It is not a competition or race, as the life course we each walk upon has different rules tailored to our specific goals, individuality, etc.  This is why we don't strive to imitate others, because we have a unique vocation in life that sets us on a different course, and we need to follow that to achieve our own particular success.  Again, our measure of success is not necessarily relevant to anyone else, as there is no uniform rule for success.  This is why too in our overly-consumerized culture we perhaps have lost our way.  We look at movie stars whose images are as shallow as a puddle of puppy urine, and society dictates that we have to look a certain way, think a certain thought, or buy a certain product to achieve their definition of "success."  The only ones who get successful from that in all honesty are greedy corporate entities who profit from our collective insecurities about ourselves, and to be honest it is so convoluted that even if a turnaround happened in society now, it would take decades (if not centuries!) to untangle the mess it has caused.  While others can inspire us and motivate us, we should not emulate them - we are our own persons, and what we are supposed to do is not necessarily the same as them. Until that sinks in, we will continue to have an unbalanced society. 

Any rate, the point is to strive for significance, and to have an awareness of our own model of success instead of trying to play "monkey see monkey do" with others.  If we do that, we may be more fulfilled.  Thanks again for allowing me to share, and will see you next time. 

The Cardinal Sin of Micromanaging

 We all have things that get under our skin.  What may be a minor thing to some is a cardinal offense to others - that is just human nature.  And, one has to be honest with themselves - we all have these things, and we call them "pet peeves" or other names.   Some of us have more than others at times obviously, and I am no exception being a card-carrying member of the human race.  So, what are mine?  I am going to talk about one now. 

Many of us Gen-Xers have a culture we were part of, especially given many of us were young 20-something professionals in the 1990s.  In 1999, Mike Judge (who also created the sitcom King of the Hill) got into the movie business and created a cult classic called Office Space.  I have seen that movie several dozen times and it never gets old because I essentially lived that life back in the day.  The plot of the movie centered around a discontented white-collar software programmer named Peter Gibbons, and he was so burnt-out and disgusted with his life that he just "went through the motions" every day at his job.  Although he lived a comfortable life financially, as many young professionals our age did then, it was as if something were missing.  What exacerbated the problem even more was his boss, an overly-egotistical and micromanaging guy named Lumbergh.  Lumbergh's ominous greeting, "Hey Peter, whaatsss happening?" was such a bane to Peter's existence that every time he heard it he cringed.  Lumbergh was the epitome of everything we as a generation saw as evil about Corporate America and the office politics and other garbage that went with it. And, that is why Office Space was a big hit with many of our generation.   It represented our rejection of being made to fit in a predetermined "box" and it also gave us purpose as many of us also grew up during the mid-1980s, or the Reagan era, which led to two things.  First, we were the "latchkey kid" generation, in that a lot of times our parents were not as involved in our lives as perhaps they should have been, so we often had to grow up fast by learning life skills on the fly.  Second, the general economic prosperity of those years opened up doors to us - we saw the evils of communism before it fell, and most of us (liberal and conservative) wanted nothing to do with that system. We had new opportunities presented to us as well - we were the generation that saw the rise of the personal home computer, the cell phone, and the compact disc.  So, technology was very new to us but we overall embraced it.  It is because of those factors - learning to do things for ourselves as well as embracing new technologies - that made micromanagement a nasty, evil thing in our eyes.  And it is a huge reason why I, like so many others of my generation, have issues with it.  So, I now want to share my own personal experience recently with this. 

Since moving to the middle of Baltimore last November, I have had to make some adjustments - being a Gen-X Appalachian-American caused the challenges I faced to be something I had to take on out of principle, and take it on I did.  The landlord I have now - a bald but good-natured man who is close to my age - has some issues with micromanaging, and recently it came to a head with him.  Due to what happened a couple of weeks ago when a fentanyl-addled fool who had no business behind the wheel of a car hit our house, we have been seeing a lot more of our landlord over the past couple of weeks. Now, while I understand that a property owner does want his properties to be in good shape (I would too if I owned a property), there are also some boundaries that a person like him should not cross, and yet he did.  He started by rifling through our recycle bins (which is odd in itself) and then leveled a bunch of "do this" and "do that" concerning the way we live in our house we pay rent on.  It was not related to the structure of the house either, but was directed against us simply living life.  I finally had to put my foot down and tell him "enough," and although he acknowledged this, it will only be determined how much he took us seriously when he visits again.  So, let me give a couple of observations.

Micromanaging a person is one of the greatest violations to their personhood that there is.   It reduces a person to a means rather than an end, and it does not regard that a person is a full-grown intelligent human being capable of taking care of things themselves.  It also assumes that a person's God-given gift of life as an individual is something worthless to the micromanager, and that frankly is insulting.  Even God, who created the universe, doesn't micromanage - he gave us free will to decide for ourselves, and we choose to follow God although he desires we do so because he loves us and created us in the image he has of us. This is why a Catholic - especially a faithful Catholic - is committing sin when they try to micromanage another person.  We as human beings are not pets of others - we are persons who are subject to the rights and freedoms God gives us.  That is what persona est sui iuris is all about. My landlord needs to learn this lesson, as does every radical political hack who loves to emulate one of the most oppressive nations on earth, China.  If we don't respect the dignity of personhood in regard to others, then our faith lacks.  Enough said.

Any rate, this was my rant for the week, and just remember, if you have to deal with a person who gets his jollies off on micromanaging others, then know who you are in Christ.  You are an end unto yourself, not a mere means.  You are a whole unto yourself, and not a mere part.  And, as a human being you are entitled to certain universal rights under the natural law a supernatural God created.  When we realize this, it will be liberating. 

Thanks again, and will see you next time. 

Smooth Jazz is Not True Jazz

 This has been a week of celebrities dropping like flies - from rock and roll icon Ozzy Osbourne, to Malcolm Jamal Warner (who played Theo on the old Cosby Show) to wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, it just seems surreal that these individuals, who were practically household names in my younger years, are gone.  Yet another I found out about was "smooth jazz" pioneer Chuck Mangione, who passed away a couple of days ago.  While Mangione was a virtuoso flugelhorn and trumpet player, he was not a classic jazz musician in the mold of legends like Theolonius Monk, Duke Ellington, or Gerry Mulligan.  The music Mangione was noted for - which in itself was not unpleasant, but was just not true jazz - was a continuation of a form of instrumental music that started in the 1960s with people like Herb Alpert and would later evolve into what is called now "smooth jazz."  However, in comparison to hacks like Kenny G who came later, Mangione had a level of taste and sophistication that could be appreciated, as he was a talented musician.  May rest eternal come to him, and Light Perpetual shine upon him at his passing at the age of 84.  

I know of Chuck Mangione's music somewhat when I was younger, as my uncle Junior listened to a radio station of soft rock at night which often played other things too, including the one Mangione record I am familiar with, "Give It All You Got."  This hit the pop charts sometime around 1978 or 1979, and while not as well-known as his other famous recording, "Feels So Good," it was pretty well-known for its time.  Most of the junk that played on Junior's radio at night - his bedroom was next to ours, so you could hear his radio all over upstairs in my grandmother's house - was stuff I frankly hated.  However, for some reason, when Mangione's "Give It All You Got" came on, I sorta liked it, although I was not by any means a fan of what was essentially glorified Muzak.  It took a number of years before I even knew the name of that record, but I found out later what it was.  Mangione's record was an early foray into flirting with the sounds that would later be considered jazz, but once I was exposed to real jazz, Mangione fell by the wayside with me, and I don't frankly have any desire to like him anymore in all honesty.  When one tastes a filet mignon, you don't go back to eating hot dogs, in other words.  And, compared to classic stuff like Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, there is no comparison to the knock-off stuff Mangione played. So, the question arises - what is the difference between classic jazz and "smooth jazz?"  For starters, let's give a little music history of the latter.

Smooth jazz evolved out of what was called "light music" in the 1940s and 1950s, especially that played by large orchestras such as those of Mantovani and Andre Konstelanetz - in other words, it was sort of sterile background music that was at the time passed off as "classical."  By the early 1960s, it turned into the later recordings of Ray Conniff, as well as individuals such as Peter Nero, Ferrante and Teicher, and Bert Kaempfert.   This would later become what was known as "elevator music," or in more mass-produced forms by obscure ensembles, Muzak.  In the midst of this were a series of instrumentalists who capitalized on this genre, and after adapting pop rhythms and even cheap knockoffs of well-known songs, they consisted of individuals such as trumpeter Herb Alpert and his group called the Tijuana Brass.  While some music historians would dispute it, I would have to credit Herb Alpert with being the grandfather of what would become "smooth jazz," because it was a somewhat inferior imitation of the real stuff.  From Herb Alpert, and as the 1960s morphed into the 1970s, what became known as "smooth jazz" began to be picked up by performers such as Spiro Gyra, Al Jarreau (who frankly sucks as a musician), and of course on the better end, Chuck Mangione. From that, "smooth jazz" grew into a genre, and new and even less-impressive individuals like the notorious saxophonist Kenny G would come later.  So, in essence, "smooth jazz" has become Muzak with a backbeat in recent decades, and why on earth entire radio stations would be devoted to broadcasting it.  In recent years, "smooth jazz" has devolved further into what is essentially a more toned-down, instrumental form of R&B, and there is really no difference between "Soul" music and "Smooth Jazz" except the latter is more prominently instrumental.  And, true aficionados of classic jazz have nothing to do with this stuff called "smooth jazz," as they are different animals altogether.  There are some who try to link "smooth jazz" with jazz fusion made popular by individuals such as Freddy Hubbard in the early 1970s, but there is no comparison - even with the more rockish flavor of jazz fusion, it is still jazz, and even Freddy Hubbard's 1970 classic album Red Clay is still part of the classic jazz idiom and in no way is remotely similar to schlock like Kenny G. And, except for perhaps being both Black, "smooth jazz" artist Spyro Gyra has nothing in common with even the most outlandish jazzmen like Sun Ra - as eccentric and hard to figure out as Sun Ra can be sometimes, he is still definitely part of the jazz legacy. Spiro Gyra, on the other hand, is basically a failed soul singer who could not make it with the big dogs on Soul Train, so he rebranded himself to make a fast buck playing bland, boring, and frankly silly junk in the idiom of "smooth jazz."  So, what does this have to do with Chuck Mangione?  Let's circle back to that.

Despite being identified with the sterile, soulless "smooth jazz" idiom, one thing that stood out about Chuck Mangione is that he is actually a top-notch musician.  The difference with Mangione was that he started his career playing with one of the most stellar jazz legends, drummer Art Blakey.  Therefore, unlike so many of these "smooth jazz" hacks, Mangione at least had a background in real jazz.  So, what in hell happened then?  I think the question can be answered by one word - money!  My guess about this is that Mangione clearly had the talent, but let some tone-deaf record producer talking him into selling out, much in the same way many pop musicians have done in the past 50 or so years.  Had Mangione stuck with classic jazz instead of "going commercial," I think he would have had the potential of being a legend ranked with Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Dizzy Gillespie, Harry James, and other true jazzmen.  The more music becomes synonymous with money, the more integrity it loses.  That is what makes Chuck Mangione a tragedy in American music history.  The potential for being a jazz legend was reduced to just being nostalgic background music now at the local Walmart (this was spoofed by Mike Judge in his hit animated series King of the Hill, as the faux sophisticate Peggy Hill thought Chuck Mangione was high-class music - I mean, her character was so bad that she even butchered the Spanish language by uttering "poor favor" at Mexican-Americans!).  So sad!

Admittedly, it seems as if Mangione did try to summon his classic jazz roots in recordings like "Give it All You Got," as that recording became the theme song of the 1980 Winter Olympics, which also may explain its huge popularity later.  The recording does have a decent level of sophistication, and the potential is there for it to have possibly become a classic recording had it not become overly commercialized.  Oddly, it was a sell-out like Mangione who became the music icon, while his mentor, Art Blakey, was a true legend who is only remembered by dedicated classic jazz fans like myself.  But, that is the world we live in - we sell out to things that look so polished and shiny that often we overlook the real treasures in front of us.  We are built on a society that worships outer qualities but ignores or belittles more internal, lasting qualities.  So, instead of paying a few dollars more for authentic craftsmanship even when we look for items to buy, we settle for inferior shiny, plastic junk that is made in China by slave labor for pennies on the dollar.  There is a more subtle reason for this which makes even more sense though, so let me spell it out.

Cheap junk can be mass-produced, quickly sold, and is marketed widely to appeal to our desire for "convenience."  However, we find out soon that the cheap junk doesn't last long, and needs to be replaced within sometimes a matter of months.  This is by design, as the more of a product a greedy corporate oligarch can sell, the richer they get, so who gives a damn about quality?  The word is quantity, and as a Baptist minister named Marshall Maglothin said many years ago in a sermon, we are a society built on the "Nine M's of Yuppieism" - money, microwaves, minivans, and more, more, more for me, me, me.  Another Baptist minister I remember from my college days, Dr. Jerry Spencer, expressed this sentiment in a humorous but highly accurate quote - "It's a day of sex thrills, pep pills, crooked deals,  and you can't tell the Jacks from the Jills!"  The idea of both of these quotes is this - we live in a society that compromises greed for grace, and common sense for convenience.  The music industry these days is rife with this garbage, which is why in the past 40 years or so much contemporary music is bad - it is tasteless, useless, artificial, and frankly garbage, and that includes the junk called "smooth jazz."  Even some of my friends that like rock music notice it - they lament the fact that Ozzy Osbourne died not just because he was a pretty decent person (and surprisingly he really was in real life) but because that is what they say was "real rock" - they view Taylor Swift with the same degree of disdain that many of us jazz fans view Kenny G, and for the same reason.  I see it also with many friends and relatives who love classic country music too - they hate Garth Brooks because he is no Hank Williams Sr. or Johnny Cash.  People who have an ear and genuine taste for a certain genre of music tend to know the difference between cheap knockoffs and genuine talent, and for many of us who collect records, it is even more evident - modern music of all genres has lost something, namely its soul. The sad fact is that artists like Chuck Mangione were immensely talented, and had they valued their talent more than their bank accounts, it would have made a difference.  Chuck Mangione - God rest his soul and comfort his family as he was a fellow human being - was a musical sellout, and while technically not near as bad as his successors such as Kenny G, it is still tragic.  So, while we mourn his loss as sign of human decency, his music was a disappointment. 

I have went off on this soapbox before, and hope I did not repeat a lot of my long-held sentiments here.  However, if Western Civilization is to thrive, we need to respect our roots and not sell them out to the highest bidder for wealth and fame.  Thank you for allowing me to share with you again today. 

Mid-Summer Musings

 I am not writing about anything in particular this week, as a lot has been going on as far as house repairs, doing some online certification coursework, and catching up on some other things that desperately needed done and I can finally get to them.  So, rather than focusing on a weighty topic this time, I am just going to observe and improvise what needs to be said. 

I was thinking about summers in the past.  There were times when summers were the best part of the year, and other times I was glad when they were over.  Thinking back over many years, there are some things about summers that are worth reminiscing and reflecting about.  I am going back to summers in Kirby, when I was in my late childhood years and early teens, and a couple of things really stick out.  I have talked about some of this before, but there are stories still worth telling.  So, let's begin.

Since I was very young, I learned the fine art of wildcrafting, and during my summers in Kirby I had lots of opportunities to do so.  In the large field, for instance, behind the Grassy Lick School where I had gone to in my 5th and 6th grade years, there were berries.  The field stretched like what seemed eternity behind the school as it approached Grassy Lick Run in the background, and along the creek banks were tangles of briars and brambles, among which a lot of wild raspberries, blackberries, and dewberries grew.  I would harvest a lot of those then, and the berries were often utilized later in small pies a crazy neighbor lady named Goldie would bake for me.  In the grass in the field bordering the path that led down to where the back of our house was, there were also an abundance of wild strawberries growing.  A wild strawberry is technically not a strawberry but is what are called mock strawberries or snakeberries.  They looked like a dead ringer for a strawberry but with minor differences - for one, the taste was somewhat bland and required more sugar if you cooked with them, and also unlike actual strawberry plants, snakeberries have yellow flowers.  I didn't care, because as long as they were edible and didn't kill me, I was OK with harvesting them.  Now, thinking about it, I may have a new recipe to add to my kitchen blog - snakeberry pie!  Although I didn't know the difference between the two (turns out both actually grew in the area, and I may have harvested both together), they were still fun to pick and they did taste kind of good in those mini pies Goldie would make me.  Years later, in Hagerstown, we ended up having a yard full of snakeberries as well there too, and being old habits die hard for me, I picked some and even cooked a little with them too.  You don't see as much of this in Baltimore now, although I have noticed some growing in yards along with my favorite wild garlic I found - there was even a small patch of the latter in the school flowerbed where I teach, and our principal told me to help myself. However, as an adult now, some of the old mystery has gone now with gathering this stuff, although I still enjoy it.  That was a joy of summer I always looked forward to.  

In addition to foraging wild berries, I did sometimes try to take a crack at gardening as well.  With that, I had minimal success - I did manage to grow some small melons and even a small onion patch on occasion, but it was modest efforts.  In my teen years when I lived over on Salt Lick Road just south of Terra Alta, I took real pride in cultivating a small garden just above the back of the house on a slope overlooking the spring.  I remember prepping that soil with removing rocks, and then mixing horse manure from Earl Masters' old barn on the property to make it more fertile.  Then, I planted both onions and potatoes.  However, during that year I decided to spend a couple of weeks with my dad in Georgia for the summer, and I asked Mom to look after it while I was gone.  Mom never took anything I did seriously, and when I got back the poor plot was overgrown with weeds and I got very little harvest out of it.  I was frankly ready to hang my mother for letting that happen.  But, my teenage years would prove to be some of my best summer memories regardless, so we'll talk about that some now.

As a teenager, I was somewhat isolated - we lived a few miles outside town in the country, so basically my entire social life centered around three things: summer parades with the high school band, church activities, and then a couple of weeks visiting Dad.  In the interim, I kept occupied with other things, such as cooking - I was experimenting with a lot of recipes, especially involving a stew I made - as well as working on my music collection and other things.  I am trying to recall a bit of what I did when I made that stew then, and best I recall it sounded like this:

I would take a pound of lean stew beef, and begin boiling it in a pot of water infused sometimes with chicken or beef stock/flavor cubes.  Then I would add a spice concoction - salt, black pepper, Italian seasoning, cayenne pepper, chili powder, parsley, celery flakes, and on occasion wild garlic I harvested - and I would let that stuff cook until it reduced to a gravy.  No one really liked it that much except me, and it was spicy - I cannot fathom the amount of spice I used in those early days, but I recall things being hot!  In the ensuing years as I got more culinary experience and was exposed to new ways of cooking stuff, I would get better, and that stew I used to make ended up just going by the wayside.  It was so easy though that to this day if I wanted to play around with it I could probably recreate it, but I doubt I would have the fortitude to eat that anymore now. I also experimented with other things too - I made homemade bagels, pizzas, and other things as well. Today I still make some of those, but not in the way I did then.  Again, as I learned things my culinary skills were refined, and today I can cook more like a gourmet.  Any rate, cooking and hunting wild plants and fruits were two of my summer passions.

There is not a whole lot more to say today, but you get the idea that summers have changed for me over the years.  I do wish I could return at times to simpler days like those, as there are many fond memories, but it isn't going to happen.  In my late 50s now, it is an adventure to just shop at the local Italian market I like visiting now.  Thanks again for letting me share, and will be back soon. 

Crashing the Home

 Things happen, and that's life.   However, yesterday an unprecedented thing occurred at the house that really caused a bit of a shift, even in a literal sense.  Let me tell the story.

Yesterday was a normal Monday - we ate an early dinner, and I had a class project to work on while Barbara was working from home.  At around 4 PM, there was a huge crash that rocked the house.  Thinking something crashed, I came out of my room exclaiming "what the hell was that??"  Barbara then said, "Something just hit the house!"  When she looked out the window, she saw a small gold sedan driving off, and the neighbors were gathering.  When we went to go outside, we noticed the foyer floor had partially collapsed, and that the front door was a bit challenging to open.  Upon opening the door, we were both shocked to see a huge hole where the basement windows used to be, and Barbara's car was cracked up as it had been pushed into a neighbor's car.  A couple of our neighbors, including a middle-aged eccentric White guy with close-cropped blonde hair who lives next door, pointed to the gold car parked around the corner and a cop parked in the middle of the street.  This is where it got interesting. 

Upon stepping out, there was quite a crowd on our normally quiet street, and as crazy as it sounds, at about the same time the car hit our house, a cop was turning onto our street - that was providential, in all honesty.  Turns out the driver was possibly under the influence of something - both fentanyl and crack are epidemic in this area of the city - and he tried to give a flimsy excuse about his foot getting stuck under his brake pedal.  When I talked to one of the cops later - a young guy who was very pleasant and also ready to assist - he suspected the same thing, although he didn't say it on record because understandably he couldn't without proof.  Many of our neighbors had a similar thought about it, and one - an older Black lady named Mary who lives a couple of doors up - caught everything on her doorbell cam. She gladly shared it with our landlord, Andy, as well as with the cops.  Later, when Barbara called the police precinct to get a copy of the police report for her insurance, she was told by a person there that the car was registered to a woman, yet a man was driving.  During the time of the incident though, we had a couple of cops, several firemen, some workers from the BGE (the Baltimore city gas and electric office), and a building inspector immediately getting to work securing the front of the house. The BGE guys thankfully stuck around all night, and this morning they managed to clean up the mess in no time and secured the front of the house for our safety.  The gas line was turned off, and probably that was for the best as it could have been a potential hazard for our whole block. As of now, we still don't have the gas back on yet, but that will probably happen in the next day or so.  The past 29 hours though were perhaps the most intense we have had in a while. 

The building inspector, a down-to-earth guy whose name I believe was Drake, gave the all-clear for us to stay in the house.  He noted that although the car had hit the house with some force, the infrastructure of the house was not compromised and he said no immediate concern was evident.  However, he did recommend that perhaps some work would need to be done on the front exterior wall at some point, and our landlord has his property insurance appraiser coming to assess what has to be done and he will take care of that - thank God for Andy, our landlord!  Andy is a great guy, and compared to our previous place, he is a real blessing.  I will talk more about that in a few moments.

These are photos of the damage to the front of our home

The building inspector took me on a walking tour to see the damage prior to Andy arriving, and he explained in detail what happened as far as the damage.  While for a time I was thinking Baltimore had a sloppy infrastructure, the workers that responded to our situation helped restore faith that there were dedicated public servants still in this city.  The level of professionalism shown by all who responded, as well as the really strong support of our neighbors, really touched me and I have to say I appreciated them all.  And, it also alleviated a lot of potential stress. 

The following day, Andy our landlord came to take care of his aspect of the business, and he did us a huge service by cleaning out some junk that was left out there by a previous housemate who lived here, and he was also very excited about some of the things we are doing to improve the place, such as renovating the steps and organizing the kitchen with new shelving and a few things.  For the first time in a long time, I am feeling like this place is becoming a home. In some aspects, the incident of the car crashing into the front of the house may have been providential in itself, although it still does not excuse the intoxicated fool who did it - he will get his in due time as well.  

I know that this place where we live now is not a forever home - not even close in all honesty.  I think our landlord Andy understands that too, but he is working with us and I think for the first time in a while we can make this work.  It is a place for recovery, opening a new chapter in life, and getting life back on track.  I am starting to rebuild a lot too, and with a renewed teaching contract at the high school I work at, things are looking promising for the first time in a long time.  There are still challenges, and I have even had a few attacks on my work, but God brought me here for a reason so that is what matters when it is all said and done.

I am still not completely sure about a lot of things, but I am in a better place than I was just 10 months ago.  Even a catastrophe such as a car crashing into the front of the house can be turned into a good thing, and there is a lesson in this. What we often see as a tragedy, God sees as an opportunity.  The craziness of the past year, for instance, has led to some good things.  It is therefore still true, the old axiom that "when life hands you lemons you make lemonade."  And, while the recipe is not complete yet, the lemonade in the end will be sweeter.  Thanks for letting me share this week. 

Decommissioning the Missionaries

 When I was a young undergraduate student at a Pentecostal college in Florida, it was a different world then.  In some ways it was more sound, simpler, and it was honestly not necessarily bad.  In those years, I myself was a Pentecostal, and as part of my story now I want to share a couple of things I learned that would eventually place me on the road to being a devout Catholic. 

Back in the early 1990s, many Evangelicals still were looking for converts (they don't do so as much today), and of course that led to some rather crazy things.  For one thing, a technique that was pushed that I never completely understood or agreed with was popular then, and that was this whole idea of door-to-door evangelism.  Essentially, I learned later that while some of my classmates were sincere about their faith, they were taught to share it wrong.  There were groups of students who knocked on doors, handed out religious tracts on street corners to prostitutes and homeless derelicts, and many of them also tried to use rock music and sterile things aimed to evangelize kids to increase numbers.  This was called "soul winning," and to be honest it was not really all that effective.  Some of us - not just me - felt awkward about even doing this stuff, because it seemed like we were more like vacuum salesmen than future ministers.  It turns out that a lot of it was a numbers game - churches wanted those impressive numbers to show how "on fire" they were, and for those who didn't get the numbers, they were looked at as being either spiritually weak or needing revival.  In the ensuing decades, most mainstream Evangelicals began to abandon those practices, taking a more nuanced approach to gaining converts, and to be honest it actually helped them.  There are still some holdouts - many extreme Fundamentalists for instance - who swear by those worthless "soul winning" programs, but for the most part it was seen as a fruitless endeavor.  As a result, many of those Evangelical denominations are now in decline or they have plateaued, but to their credit they are focusing more on things that really matter, such as apologetics and discipling the people they actually have (that latter thing was something sorely neglected during the mass-conversion days - they were after numbers but not truly seeking to transform souls).  I have been wanting to tackle this for a long time, and now as a Catholic I can without apology.  So, let's begin. 

I recall during my junior year as an undergrad at a very prestigious Pentecostal university where I would graduate from that there was this focus on "missions."  I was a Missions major myself then, but in all honesty I found many of their efforts futile.  I remember one time for instance during a chapel service when the Intercultural Ministries group I used to be part of staged this really dumb presentation.  They marched out holding up signs of groups they wanted to "evangelize," and perhaps two of the most offensive I saw were "Byzantine Catholic" and "Coptic."  They were encouraging sheep-stealing to pump numbers!  I visited some of these with them when I was part of the Intercultural Ministries team, and I even rose to the rank of assistant leader of the team.  However, my focus when I went to another Christian church of some nature was to dialogue, not to convert - to me, these people were already Christians.  So, when we visited a Coptic or an Eastern-Rite Catholic parish for instance, I would wear my clerics as a licensed member of my Pentecostal denomination.   As a result, I made actual friends, and the people were more receptive to me.  I also participated in their Masses and liturgies as well (at least as much as I could, because being non-Catholic then I was not able to partake of Sacraments or anything like that).  This got me some angry reactions from some of the more staunch of my classmates, but others actually would look at me and marvel as to ask "how did you do that?"   My answer was always the same - these people who graciously let us visit and attend their liturgies were not some bunch of heathens, but they were our brothers and sisters in Christ and I saw them as such.  We did visit non-Christian religious groups too though - I recall going to a synagogue, a mosque, and a Buddhist temple for instance.  Some of the more overzealous classmates tried to convert these people in their own temples!  I never did - I was there to observe, dialogue, and learn about who they were, although I disagreed fundamentally with their belief systems.  That likewise gained me some respect too.  I even remember one time they had a group of students visiting an Episcopal church as a potential "mission field," and there are a couple of things to say about that.  For one, I of all people am not a fan of ECUSA, as that body has essentially apostatized from its original faith - the ones who preserved the Anglican tradition better were the Anglican Catholic Church I was once involved with, which was definitely Christian.  Secondly, although a very liberal denomination, Episcopalians still at least had a veneer of Christianity, and in all honesty back in that day many of the local Episcopal parishes were still quite sound and they had good pastors - one was a bit hyper-charismatic, but I was used to that then too. Therefore, I always wondered why on earth our "Intercultural Ministries" group was trying to sheep-steal from other churches they saw as different from them?  That conviction is one reason why I eventually dropped out of it.  By the time I was in my senior year of undergrad work, I had already converted to a conservative form of high-Church Anglicanism and was no longer Pentecostal, the fruit of a long journey via my work with the Convergence Movement then.  I graduated from that Pentecostal college an Anglican, and just over 4 years later I was received into the Catholic Church. Stuff like this is what led me on my journey, but there's more. 

On occasion, in our Missions classes on campus our main professor, a very jolly and energetic Assemblies of God missionary who had served many years in Zimbabwe and who also had a genuine spirit of Christ, would invite speakers to class.  Some were missionaries, others worked with different focus groups, and some were even nationals who for some reason or another were converted by the denomination this college was affilliated with.  One of those people really got my knickers in a bunch one time when he visited, as the guy was frankly a moron.  This man claimed to be a "missionary to the Amish and Mennonites" for heaven's sake!  He was based in Ohio, had no heritage in those movements, and lest one forgets, these Anabaptist groups are the ones that many Pentecostals and Baptists alike claim as their spiritual ancestors.  Yet, this ding-a-ling, who for some reason obtained ministry credentials from the same denomination which our university belonged to, felt like all the Amish were "going to hell" and he felt a "burden" to save them - this was common language used by people like this, especially if they had some sort of vendetta against a group of people or another religious tradition. Normally, I listened to these people respectfully when they came to class, and at times I even showed an avid interest in them, but for some reason this guy rubbed me wrong - his spirit was not genuine, and he seemed to have some kind of axe to grind.  He put me in mind of another professor we had that year whom I will talk about briefly next, as another Catholic apologist named Tim Staples had a similar encounter with this guy. 

Dr. Andres Carrodeguas - a native of Cuba, a former Catholic priest in Spain at one point, and although a brilliant man, there was always something a little off about the guy.  Oh, he was friendly enough, but in his class a lecture could easily go off into some anti-Catholic rant.  This guy originally worked with Jimmy Swaggart (also known for rabid and ignorant anti-Catholicism) and he was the guy responsible for translating some of Swaggart's religious writings into Spanish. Dr. Carrodeguas served as what was called a "Missionary in Residence" during my junior year, and naturally I took one of his classes as part of my required coursework for the program I was in.  Initially, I didn't have much of an opinion about the guy - he was somewhat quiet on campus, and he did have a polite smile and cordial greeting when you would pass him in the hall. But, underneath, he was a bitter, hate-filled man who despised even the word "Catholic," and given the opportunity he would launch into a tyrade at the drop of a hat. The back story on him was that he was indeed a Catholic priest at one time - I think he was either Benedictine or Jesuit, I can't recall - and a combination of two things caused him to leave the Church. The first I am somewhat empathetic about, as he talked about some Catholic religious orders incorporating things like New Age spirituality and religious syncretism, as well as espousing Liberation Theology, into their practices.  This really shook him (and understandably so) and I feel for his experience in that regard - I have seen some of that nonsense masquerading as "Catholic" too but it is not true Catholic faith, I will tell you that right now.  His disenchantment with that sort of stuff was justified, but instead of trying to understand that those things were a poor example of true Catholic faith, he began to reject everything Catholic and I understand he even may have been in touch with the con man from the Chick comics, Alberto Rivera.  Instead of transforming him, this new hatred of everything Catholic turned him into a very bitter man who rejected even God's grace, and he became basically a very hyper-fundamentalist version of Pentecostal, which may also have led to his work with Jimmy Swaggart, as a charlatan like Swaggart would eat up that garbage like a maggot in a rotting carcass. That hatred even extended to other Christians who he felt "looked Catholic," including Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans, and even staunch evangelical Reformed ministers like Dr. D. James Kennedy.  The "testimonies" of other anti-Catholic Fundamentalists like him were abundant and resonated ad nauseum from pulpits, religious TV, and even the occasional chapel service.  However, I don't think that was the only reason Carrodeguas left the priesthood - it was odd that less than a year after he left the priesthood officially he actually was married.  Maybe I am reading too much into that, I don't know, but it was somewhat odd that he would renounce the Church and then end up married a short time later - what was that story??  We will never fully know what really makes men like Carrodeguas tick, but I recall when I was listening to Tim Staples one time about his encounter with Carrodeguas back when the latter was still an instructor at Jimmy Swaggart's Bible school in Louisiana.  Tim, who had been raised a Baptist and later was part of the same Pentecostal denomination my college was affiliated with, had a rather tense encounter himself with our man Carrodeguas when he came to the decision to become Catholic while a student still at Swaggart's college.  Upon hearing of Tim's embrace of the Catholic faith, the powers-that-be at JSBC decided to sic Carrodeguas on him, and his account of that meeting will make the hair stand up on your arms.  Carrodeguas actually started to move to the boundary of violence with Tim, and when finally deciding it was a lost cause, he condemned Tim to hell (a classic arbiter of salvation move) and then snapped "You didn't become Catholic - you are Catholic!"  Tim actually saw that outburst - which was meant in a malicious way by Carrodeguas - as a compliment.  To Tim (and I know the feeling myself) this was a badge of honor meant as an insult.  Today, Carrodeguas is retired and in Florida I believe still, but he pops up on social media every so often.  In his final months at the college I was at, he was censured a couple of times by the department chair who thought he was going too far, as the college I went to was very much Pentecostal but not as Fundamentalist-leaning as Swaggart's school in Louisiana was.  Many of the other professors there were actually cordial with Catholics, as some had known many during the years of the Charismatic Renewal, and others were ecumenically active and were on practically a first-name basis with a couple of local priests. So, although Carrodeguas found some fertile ground for his vitriol among the students, he was becoming a bit of a thorn in the side to the school administration, as they tended to be more nuanced about ecumenical relations and frankly Carrodeguas was a spectacle to them.  In time I made my pilgrimage to Rome too, and I actually wrote Tim about my story - I never heard anything from him about it, but hopefully he read it and maybe I can meet him someday and discuss in person.  In summary here with this part of my discussion, anti-Catholicism is not about evangelism, as a deeper agenda often underlies it, and people who act like "soul winners" in reality despise Catholics - to them, a Catholic is a hell-bound sinner who worships the Pope and Mary (neither of which any Catholic I know of does, and I definitely have never done that as a Catholic myself), and thus is an object of ridicule and contempt, all in the name of  "reaching them for Jesus" of course.  Problem is, many Catholics who get hit with that sort of hatred from somebody will rightly have nothing to do with that person, because they know the intent and it isn't anything about loving them or saving their soul - it is about a personal vendetta a Fundie has against anyone they view as different from them.  And, that leads me into some closing thoughts.

Much of what went on years ago in Evangelicalism in the name of "soul winning" and "witnessing" was never about transforming someone's life - it was about one of two things.  First, it was to curry favor with their religious group, as the more "souls" they "saved" made the church look good and also was like a sales award.  Secondly, some who engage in those activities were not doing so out of love - as a matter of fact some individuals had an axe to grind and they wanted to take it out on any Catholic or anyone else whom they deemed somehow "reprehensible."  I talked a couple of weeks ago about another view of hell that no one ever thinks of, and I want to remind people the purpose of hell again.  Hell is not someplace God is itching to throw us into - as a matter of fact, he doesn't want to, and he never will.  Hell is a place we send ourselves to, as it essentially is willful separation from God.  The imagery of the lake of fire is scary enough, but the real terror of hell is the isolation the person who goes there will feel one day.  Many supposedly religious people are in danger of this, in that they willfully exclude people who don't think and believe exactly like them, and in doing so they think they have superseded the Holy Spirit.  In time, even the person of Christ will end up falling short for them, although they will never come out and say so.  Therefore, if they do not repent and transform before they die one day, God is going to give them exactly what they want - total separation.  They may even at first think that they have made it to "heaven" as it may even look beautiful to them, but then reality will set in, and the fire will be the eternal loneliness and isolation they will have for all eternity.  So no, while the debate over whether or not hell is a literal lake of fire is a valid debate and people do so now, hell is still real, it is eternal, and the worst part of it is not some white-hot magma-like lake somewhere - the worst part of hell is complete separation from God, and the torment of the soul which will result from that.  Many overly-zealous Fundamentalists need to have a reality check about this, because if they don't grow up and have true transformation through supernatural grace, they will face a grim future in a place they really don't want to be but that they asked for. This is somewhat of a revolutionary way to view hell, but in all honesty that is what the Church has taught about it for centuries - we focus on the fire, but perhaps we need to think of what sent us there, and it may not even be a heinous sin.  Hatred and exclusion of others in this life because we had a conflated view of ourselves is the thing that will send us there probably the quickest, as it is God giving us what we hollered about.  This is why he says in Scripture that not everyone who says "Lord, Lord" will enter the Kingdom.  He was not just talking about apostate Episcopalians either; this applies to religious Fundamentalists too.  Let this sink in as you rethink what you have been taught about the reality of hell.

Now, that does not mean that we are so open that we have no ground to stand on either - that type of Christianity is sterile and dead in all honesty, and many who embrace that would be better off as atheists in all honesty.  There is a Tradition, a set body of teaching, and universal law that sets boundaries regarding morality and ethics, and we need to be mindful of that too. Those standards are non-negotiable in all honesty.  However in living out the belief we have, we must also remember that the best witness is a real witness - if you spout a bunch of religious jargon to people, then you are putting yourself under a microscope.  But, if you quietly live out your faith with both conviction as well as making living your faith as natural as breathing or eating, people will notice.  Actions often speak louder than words, and it is possible to be very conservative religiously while having just that quiet witness of living your life - people will eventually come to you then, and you don't have to wave a huge Dake's Bible around and hand out religious tracts trying to get people "saved."  You won't need to in all honesty.  The best testimonies I know as a matter of fact are not testimonies full of religious jargon uttered in a sanctimonious tone - rather, they are testimonies of people being real, quietly living out their faith, and then when they are approached about it they can tell their story to inspire others.  That is the true act of evangelization. 

I am sure I probably rambled too long, but some things have to be said, and I felt seriously that this was one of them.  Thanks for bearing with me, and will see you next time.