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| View from the Mission east. Eruption of Irazú at JFK visit, 1963. Cenizo, ash in Spanish, means ill omen. Viva Calderón Guardia is written on the wall. President of Costa Rica 1940-44, he ran again in 1962 and lost. Calderón turned his back on the conservative coffee elite to address widespread poverty and poor health conditions among the working poor, became the first Central American president to primarily focus his attention on poverty and deteriorating social conditions. |
Contents
I. Personas
II. Evangelicals. John Stam. (Blog: back up) Karl Barth. Hugo Assmann.
III. The European Liberal Mind. Ricardo Foulkes. Feminist Hermaneutics.
IV. Fall of the Evangelical.
V. JFK in Costa Rica
VI. Addenda. Nancy Cardoso Pereira, Ivone Gebara, Aquino Maria Pilar, Elsa Tamez, Ignacio Ellacuria. Ignatius Loyola.
VII. Epilogue. Spirit Transfer. Big and Little Doses. The Vatican took the Mission. The Theology of Liberation. The Beast: Malachi Martin and Ellen White
I. Personas
At the time of the Peace Corps I made my own, went to San José Costa Rica from Philadelphia to work for Editorial Caribe,
a publishing house of the Latin America Mission. It used a fish as its
logo. This was overtaken by larger events, JFK’s arrival and the
parades for the Alliance for Progress, his reception at the Embassy, the eruption of the volcano Irazú, the beginning of Semana Santa
three weeks after JFK’s visit, the death of my brother, buried May 22.
These also include three trips to Limón on the Atlantic, another to
Puntarenas on the Pacific, another to Turrialba where I stayed at the
Agricultural Institute, attending Puccini’s last opera at the
National Theatre with the concert pianist Ricardo Foulkes. I first met
Ricardo in classes at the Seminario Bíblico. The Mission was
also overtaken by the larger event of liberation theology, but its
visionary ideas, farms, orphanages, fish hatchery, bookstores,
publishing house and seminary were not totally surprised. Things take a
while to understand. Sky shadows above, reflect beneath their own
awareness.
Eruption
So
the volcano was erupting and the president was streaming in the
firmament, decorated with crepe. It was the celebration o f a lifetime,
but Good Friday was coming and Holy Week, tradition of a thousand
years. The Kennedy visit and processions of Good Friday blend together, statues already burnished. The alabaster skin rose over the
shoulders of the crowd like the road to Golgotha. I exchanged glances
with the Mother and Joseph. The same face appears in the Lady Chapel of
the Glastonbury ruins above the altar and holds his arms wide. But backs
were ready to bear their burdens, and of course later in town they said
the volcano was an ill omen. Only now I realize the word for ash in
Spanish, cenizo, means ill omen. Everybody alive at his
assassination remembers where they were when they heard the President
was killed, November 22. There were more sky shadows in that journey,
mirroring the surface. I wrote a first story that April symbolically
predicting the President’s death, which occurred seven months later,
things time cannot mitigate. The ash didn’t get to San José till after
he had left.
Attending Drexel Tech after classes in the day I pursued work two nights a week at the Philadelphia College of Bible. Being an overwhelming component of all 16th and 17th century English poetry, this knowledge qualified me later for graduate work in Donne, Herbert, Traherne, Milton, Spenser, even Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, not to speak of Shakespeare replete with biblical citation and reference. Poetics, criticism, mythology I learned along the way. As a business major I had few prerequisites for this work along side the summa cum laudes of Princeton, but found anyway enough Isaiah in the moral allegory of the Faerie Queene that Rhodes Dunlap asked about whether I found these on your own? Attending mission conferences at Grace Chapel and prayer meetings for foreign missions after classes at night at that Philadelphia College of Bible suggested to me that, as the co-op period of six months employment was approaching again, I might seek employment in some foreign mission, since my course was in business.
This naive inquiry began in September and got the aid and recommendation of Dr. Arthur Glasser, then North American director of the China Inland Mission, who served in China the last six years before the Revolution. He of course had more than an acquaintance with the Stam family who were much involved with the Latin America Mission, since he served in China a decade or so after the murder of John and Betty Stam of affiliated with that same China Inland Mission. In any case Arthur Glasser had children in this Church of the Covenant that my father mandated we attend, following a preemptive move back to Philadelphia after more than a decade in Pittsburgh. Arthur Glasser knew of my intent, and with his assistance I got an invite to work as a accountant with the Latin America Mission of San Jose Costa Rica, obviously with no pay
That the mission would open itself to just someone they didn't know is due to that letter from Arthur Glasser that paved the way. I had conceived this notion and I think he wrote to three mission orgs in its behalf. He attended the same church as my family, along with Russell Hitt, editor of Eternity and Waldo Nelson of Nelson's Textbook of Pediatrics. My father became friends with these last two in later life. This life among the Mainline of Philadelphia was a heavy contrast from the life I had lived among the coal fields, creeks and proletariat mountains of Pittsburgh, although even there distinguished people attended that Presbyterian church our family attended. Church life among the privileged of the Mainline was the most intense life in community I ever knew, compared only to the Mennonite. It lasted six years when I was young, 17-23, then I was gone.
If it is important to understand how families and relations created the many networks of that Mission then, see David Stam, What Happened to me: My Life with Books, Research Libraries, and Performing Art. One thing an outlier can know, who speaks the language of civilization's glories, but rejects them, there is a cure for high office and for 5 PhD s in a family of 5 sons. All you have to do is walk under the stars at night. Distinction as well as dysfunction sometimes travels in families, cohorts, stelliums. Wittgenstein’s father was as rich as Rothschild. Ludwig gave his inheritance away to Rilke and his brothers, who killed themselves. Unlike the distinguished he sought seclusion. Tolstoy in his pocket, sections of the Brothers K in his head, he was a POW and outcast sufferer with the arrows of St. Bart sticking from his chest in childhood, but among the cohorts of Russell and Moore he proof read the Principia and corrected some errors. When he walked into Russell's tea and would not acknowledge that there is not a rhinoceros in the room he denied the empirical of their way. That gospel.
At that time the LAM was streamlining its accounting practices in the
publishing house, book stores and beyond and had just obtained a cost
accountant who could use my services. I landed in San Jose after coming down
the Pan Am highway by air, the backbone of Central America, Merida, Guatemala
City, Managua, San Jose. That the aftermath of this led to
graduate study at Iowa in Elizabethan studies and then to a doctorate in
American voyages, serving on the faculties of two black colleges and
universities compares with the difficulties the Mission pained. My family had
joined that Church of the Covenant, I with the whole family, but at that time I
had no knowledge of the Lord of Lords. We had moved back to Philadelphia after
12 years in Pittsburgh and as my father selected this church to attend we all
lined up before the elders to confess that we had a saving knowledge of Jesus
Christ, in which I concurred either fraudulently or prophetically. Everything
changed in a moment's flash and suddenly that summer, at 17, after graduating
high school, the Presbyterian church that had been praying for its young people
to "catch fire" got a reply.
Practicing evangelism everywhere with honest intent, genial spirit and
enthusiasm, winning at least to strangers riding the train back and forth,
pamphleting universities, street meetings, testimonies, philosophical
deliberations everywhere reading out of scripture, it was honest, which is rare
enough. I traveled with American Viscose as an auditor then and walked the City
round as an evangelist. When my father entertained his fellows from work I
engaged their souls. One debated with me the Shakespeare Codes, but when I continually
urged the New Testament upon him he said, "why don't you think for
yourself?" Edith Sitwell also loved the
literal-minded Americans who think the rhinoceros is not in the room. After
returning from San Jose I had input into a Business Day Event at Drexel that helped
arrange the appearance of Jose Figueresf past and future president of
Costa Rica, a populist and visionary leader. I arranged for Edward Young the
brilliant Old Testament scholar at Westminster and Cornelius Van Til
both to speak at events that term. The strangely invested experiences of this
life, including the Latin America Mission, are a result of what before seemed
accidental, but afterward providential. A life is a combination lock whose
first tumblers must align before the second and on open the safe to obtain its
contents.That safe being opened, here we are.
Editorial Caribe
--The previous years I had kept books at Merrill Lynch and been an internal auditor at American Viscose. I worked in the publishing house,
Editorial Caribe, and saw a lot of Hal Cocanower, Bill Dunn, John Rasmussen,
went with Ladoit Stevens on multiple auditing trips to Limon and by myself, and stayed in Ruth
and Steve's home for two weeks, went on paseo with them and their family to
Cartago. Since I lived mostly in the student dorm and ate in the cafeteria too I knew a
great many people.
Maybe since I too was an athlete I knew those of athletic distinction best. Hal Cocanower confided once that he played at LaSalle during the Tom Gola era, '52-'55, was recruited as an enforcer, the "hatchet man" to protect Gola. Once on the street in downtown San Jose a woman had her purse taken and Hal ran the offender down, immobilized him and disappeared when the police arrived. He said, it's better not to be known. Before he worked at Editorial Caribe he had operated a ladder or painting business in Puerto Rico. Ladoit Stevens had represented Wheaton in the NCAA tournament in wrestling, which means he won the conference. Entry in an NCAA end of the year event shows great skill and talent. It is by qualification and an honor.---[Ladoit and Ruth (Stam) Stevens pastored both churches from 1951-1952. Pastor Stevens had a very effective ministry especially to young people. He urged dedicated Christian service. His messages turned inward as the Stevens’ felt led to become missionaries to Latin America. By the time Ladoit Stevens left the area, both the Leonidas and Factoryville churches felt they were each strong enough to proceed alone, each having its own pastor and program. The separation was amiable. When Pastor and Mrs. Stevens left the churches to minister in Costa Rica under the Latin American Mission, Factoryville took on a considerable amount of their support.] https://factoryvillebiblechurch.com/church-histor
Many likeable talented people there were scholars and activists of different kinds. Dit (Horace L.) Fenton was a voracious reader and author with 17 titles to his name. Ken Strachan, son of the Mission's founder, was not much in evidence then as he was declining. Dayton Roberts, Hal Cocanower, head of Editorial Caribe, the publishing house, and Ladoit L. and Ruth (Stam) Stevens,
involved with maintenance, supervision and administration of
orphanages, farms, bookstores and clinics and salubrious natures. Unless
you know them there are few biographical details of these people.
Seminario
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| Students, 1963 |
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| The Latin America Mission 1963 |
Missionaries there suffered burglaries just because they were so comparatively well off. I had two sport jackets, to which my Nicaraguan roommate remarked, "Andrés tu tienes mucho sacko." When I paid his way into Ojo de Agua it went a long way toward Donoso Escobar's friendship. I had been given $600 from that Bala-Cynwyd church for that half year and only used half. The Spanish I heard early was endearingly simple, a kind of cayendose in el camino. After the students returned the male students would gather evenings where we lived in the Annexo to link arms and sing. I played a lot of basketball and more ping pong, but saw the business side too, since I worked with missionaries in the publishing house, incompetent as my accounting skill might have been. One time I was asked to teach a Sunday class composed entirely of black ladies at the mission and chose the subject of suffering, which effrontery is beyond bounds, except that I would get to know and fear black ladies subsequently on the faculty of two different black colleges, where I later served. Another time I was asked to address the Sunday night Church of God in Limon, for which I chose the subject of "If any man be in Christ he is a new creature" (I Cor 5.17). Suffering and the new creature go well together.
The Julliard-trained concert pianist, Ricardo Foulkes was easy to get to know because he had a hankering for the muse, as he put it. I used to go weight lifting with him at a local gym and attended his class in the New Testament and his wife Irene's in Greek too.John Stam, a genuine intellect, was at that time writing his dissertation at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, Episcopacy in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, partly in association with Karl Barth, then at the end of his career. Later at Texas in the oral exam I did what Karl Barth told John Stam, "Herr Stam, I'm not going to make you answer a multitude of questions. To find what you do not know; I'll put a subject and let you talk about it, so that you can show us what you know. I introduced to Willis Pratt a subject we had consided before in Shelly's Adonais, to follow up on the death of Keats. and talked for half an hour unabated. Episcopacy is cogent writing, only 120 pages in extent. Its subject is that the proper form of church government "presents no fixed and explicit form." Since the New Testament and the Fathers reference only "tangential to other concerns, such as schism, heresy, or Christology," Stam summarizes three sources of divine politics in the ancient church orders of the "corporate Christian community," three pertinent sources of divine politics which instead of being reunited by ecumenism, have been more shattered. In writing and thinking so in such a compelling way he points that government itself and its interior relations of factions will kill you if you disagree with them over the proper form. For example the opposite of coming together is exemplified in Apology, Confession, Remorse in Peace Reconciliation of Lutherans and Mennonites where the rapprochement they make looks like the roof of an old cider gin. John Stam remained stalwart in his A Radical Evangelical Perspective (1985). I was in San Jose in 1963 and by 2014, fifty years, the Mission as an entity had ceased.
Bio: Any knowledge of faith, church,
missions and life might appear in a chapbook of poems at Parousia Reads (2020) called The True Light That Lights, on Amazon and by download at the Parousia site. Otherwise credentials are slight. A doctorate in English renaissance
literature UT-Austin with additional study at the Folger Shakespeare
Library and the British Museum, and two previous years for the M.A. at the Iowa among Geoffrey Hartman, Rosalie
Colie, Murray Krieger, Donald Justice, Rhodes Dunlap and others. I taught at two Historically Black
Colleges and Universities, Fayetteville University as Instructor and
Bishop College as Associate Professor in literature, language and linguistics, served the
University of Texas in horticulture by administering
the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden of the College of Pharmacy, have been a sculptor exhibiting Forms of the Formless and with other family members founded a long standing
family medical practice. I compose in a voice of this time, the latest being Recon (2021)at Trainwreck Press.
Given the privilege to walk among these made me more of what I was inclined to be. In the joy of knowing those in the picture below, and all over the country, in Limon, Puntarenas, Turriabla, on the trains, walking the streets, I puzzle the demise of the Mission after the much generosity offered me, and seek to reason the cause. Sunday dinner in the Seminario cafeteria brought many together for the noon meal who were to have their mission dissented from within and severed in the next years, absorbed into the United World Mission in 2014.
These contradictions enter John Stam's reflections on Karl Barth and on Cardinal Romero of El Salvador, and might as well Dietrich Bonhoeffer of Germany. But theologians never cite Charles Bowden for his involvement in half dozen books on Juárez, Blood Orchid, or Barry Lopez on the agony of the animal, or the social framework of the word in Howard Norman's Where the Chill Came From, The Wishing Bone Cycle, or in Edward Dorn, The Shoshoneans, or Haniel Long, Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca, or John Farella, Wind in a Jar, or Ken Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin, or Jared Christman, Grave Pawns. Literature is the calling of theology about human suffering and the new creature. Sandinistas or antis, the evangelical governor of Guatemala, Rios Montt, or other tortures are the celebrated cause of liberation theology (see Stam's justification however, Radical Evangelical Perspective 1985). The seminary already had classes in Teilhard de Chardin, that noumenon of New World Order theology. It offered courses like The Bible and Political Systems” (1972) and “Black Culture and Christian Faith” (1973). Drs. Foulkes went to Rome for a year in 1983 under Assman's aegis. They did postdocs at the Pontifical Biblical Institute where Assmann took his doctorate in theology in the Pontifical Gregorian University (Coeller, 100). As John Stam says, "The seminary (Seminario Biblico, SBL) had had some positive contacts with Hugo, and, along with three other SBL professors I joined the DEI [Departmento Ecuménico de Investigaciones] team and published some articles in DEI volumes" (c. 1976, My Pilgrimage).
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| Apostacy, Error & Deception |
We are not going to escape the antitheses of social justice as a cover for more patterned thought. As said, I first encountered the idea that the Savior of World may not have lived in a bible school in Costa Rica! Yes, I mean Renan, Schweitzer and Bultmann. In Bible school where the students from all over Latin Americ come to learn to minister faith? Is that quelquechose or what! The justification of all these American missionaries with European Ph.ds was to "make their seminary among the best in Latin America!" Is that laudable or what? This means course work in the same ideas from which the ten headed European is about to lose a couple heads.Alterity! This arena is filled with poseurs of every stripe. It is too easy to impugn Dana Sawchuk's Costa Rican Catholic Chuch, Social Justice and the Rights of Workers, 1979-1996, another Ph.D., from Toronto. The entire subject of her analysis in the Preface is based upon her white female fears of abduction, naive reassurances and emotional exaggerations merely to begin her scholarly-seeming account of "the other Costa Rica," that being Limon, the most extensive place in the country of personal faith. She paints it like a Vietnamese war zone dropping Agent Orange: "I witnessed the difficult living conditions the solidaristas often endured on the plantations: the planes flying overhead and dropping yellow clouds of pesticides that floated far beyond heir intended targets, the crime, the prostitution, the diseases among workers" (xiii) . The emotion is intended to sway your mind.
Limon
Limón, Puntarenas
I got to know Costa Rica from walking in the mountains at
Roblealto, San José de la Montaña, coming suddenly on whole families of
people, little children, grandparents, living in wild fields picking
shade coffee, then seeing the bright beans crushed, spread over the
highway to dry, cars skirting them. Walking in Limón to catch the 6 AM
train through barrios I saw a man badly beaten from prison. Little
enough the offering made to him where families mourn children and
conduct funerals with handmade coffins and heartbreaking grief. I spoke
this to Ricardo, catastrophe the trigger, strangeness the detail, a one
eyed pirate in the hotel of Puerto Limón, where the wide wind
blows the coast so strong sometimes ships cannot dock, but the wind
blows as it will. Many of the people of Limón are from Jamaica, which is
to say they are robust. On that initial visit Paul asked me to speak to
his Church of God congregation Sunday night about the new creature.
Afterward George and some friends suggested we go for a late night walk.
There are no streetlights in Limón. Coming down a gravel slope toward
a street of houses, after sudden cries and a scream, lights came on.
Not ten paces in front of us was a young Latin male in a white
undershirt being chased by a woman with a long knife, the mother of some
daughter. He sounded like he was trying to placate her as she tried to
carve him. He leapt into the air like a cat and kicked the knife out of
her hand. George, the leader of this expedition, said, “that’s why we
travel in a group.”
On the other side of the continent, Pacific Puntarenas, the wind
blows equally hard. You hear the sound of it in evening and feel the
force, but it totally stops at night. I was awake, watching cockroaches
run the floor when an allegory of politics sailed toward me, a satire of
journalism, society and education as much of the legislature, the
“Cockroach Congress,” and the executive. Where do come from, where go,
these winds that were also blowing the Mission. About 1968 the Spiritual Exercises of
St. Ignatius, meditations of the suffering of Christ, came to the
Americas in the world of the crucifieds. I knew these, but not the
doubts of St. Paul’s intellect. This was the end of the idyll before
Liberation. The cenizo ash at my feet was heavy with it, but Irazú’s
eruption was a divine deliverance the night I took a notion to sketch
prostitutes in the streets of the San José square, and to take another
student from the seminary with me, the student body president! Thick
falling ash prevented that. President Kennedy was not so fortunate.
Young men are volatile, even presidents.
Sawchuk is just another rung of the patter that landed in San Jose and took over the Seminario. At pains to defame any folk who do not hold her politics, especially Pentacostal solidarismos, she argues to discredit the Pentacostals of Limon by alleging they
receive preferential treatment from the banana companies, that they are
dupes, paid off for their Christian pacifism to betray the pretended
social justice of the sindicalismo strike movements. The
implication is more than clear, as it is in all Liberation thought, that
simple biblical beliefs of people are tantamount to enslavement. So the
sophist grants a kind of reality to untruths, falsehoods and lies. Trade in this
falsehood of falsehood for that is its truth, since falsehoods must be false to
be true. This is standard consumption for habits of the dialectical
mind. The beginning and end of this Jesuit theology is delivered by Malachi Martin
on Latin America (The Jesuits, below) and by Hugo Assmann in the dissolution of the Seminario (also below).
I first stayed in a hotel in Limon and there got the amoeba turista thing out of the way. The hotel was inhabited with one eyepatch ship captains and other roughnecks of the sea. This must be the exotic Limon the white critic stays at. Every other time I stayed at the Church of God, where one Sunday night at their urging I spoke in the evening service. Being one, I had something to say about the New Creature, but not what I have learned since, that God partners with his creation, Creator with created, partners with them over the course of their lives together.
My own experience among the stevedores of Limon where I stayed several times is full of personal experiences of affection and mutual trust shared with the dozen or so such people I knew there. These give the lie to those suspicions and divisions suggested by Sawchuk who knows nothing personally of the "high rates of crime, poverty, and substance abuse...where the idealized image of Costa Rican development and stability is even more of a fable than elsewhere" (140). Where in world can you go except Scottsdale where that is not the case?
"High rates of crime and poverty?" Not in any university town, but in Limon there are, or were, no street lights. No TV etc. either, so after walking the tropical coast among the coconut trees and rocks in the day, at night, as George and his fellow stevedores suggested, let's go for a walk. There were at least six or more of us, which allowed George to mention later, "that's why we travel in a group." We were coming down a dark path or road when suddenly lights burst ahead and we saw a woman, a mother, chasing a young man, her daughter's novio no doubt, with a huge knife. She was also on him, a pace away, when he leaped in the air and kicked the knife out of her hand.
One morning early I was walking through Limon to catch the train back to San Jose before dawn. It was a little cold and muggy. At one corner I came upon a most destitute soul crumpled over in sitting position on the sidewalk. I stopped. He had just gotten out of prison he said. He looked so far from hope I believed him and staked him at least for that day. I was moved the same when I saw from another train a father, mother and their children carrying the funeral bier of another who had died. It was a small coffin, carried aloft on their shoulders but with nada mas for support.
The vendors who swarm the train when it stops, selling foods, are true souls. I knew a young black man a little younger than me around Turrialba, very bright and full of life, who said he wanted to be like me! I was shocked by those words, told him to be himself. What am I anyway, but another on the road of Isaiah 35 who might hope to meet another those "wayfaring men, though unacquainted" who pass therein, meaning himself. Believe me I got a rude reception when I repatriated Philadelphia and could give no account of myself, but carried the lives of all these people along.
The same distrust of scholars of the traditional who want to install their modern business practices from above like scholars extincting the historical Jesus affected the accountant I worked for. He was much perturbed by what he called the dishonesty in the several bookstores the publishing house supplied. Pilfering! One time in one store I was cleaning the shelves and found the world's largest nest of cockroaches. I later read Burroughs' Exterminator and found I acted correctly. Cockroaches were pilfering the display case in Limon where I bought a raisin loaf before catching a cargo plane back to San Jose on my last trip, in a hurry, a hurry to get to the Western Union to receive notice my brother had just died, and then catch Pan Am out that night to return, but with succor, for in the Panama airport waiting for the flight to Miami, Jose Donoso, to be one of Chile's most distinguished wtiters, said down next to me on that wooden bench like a church pew, and not referring to my obvious state of mind suggested we hire a cab to tour the Canal and while away the six hour wait! Who is an ocean to bathe the world's sores in? And so it began. Or so it has continued, for there was little difference between the pageant and the real, which shows in the massive parades of Semana Semana and the JFK episode. When all was said and done that year I threw over my course in business for the joy of the highest and best thoughts, as far as I could understand them. Several of those first poems occurred in the lit mag Gargoyle, which I joined but submitted some work anonymously, a habit I took up again in 2020 at Neon Garden 7. I realize now these lines are an expression of the anger I felt at people suffering in these conditions. It seems to validate the crime targets of the critic, the prostitution, the diseases but it is a corrupt view. I felt the same anger four years later when after Iowa I taught at Fayetteville State.
Cry Lemon
On a tropic coast 'neath a tropic sun
There’s an old port town where foreheads run
With cares and death mixed with tangy sweat,
And the ski’s pores work like they owed the debt
To feed the family and aunts, and clothe the landlord’s son,
Enabling his entrance in the courts of fun;
And the bugs, ants, and beetles crawl across your scalp,
And there’s no sense in water cause a bath won’t help,
And you look at the sky and can’t see a star
And you look at the future and there’s nothin' but bars,
And the babied cry cause there’s no milk,
And the woman cries cause she can’t wear silk,
And the burden grows and it wears you down
Till there’s no way but to go to town
And roll a drunk or rob a store
Or plunk down a dollar and love a whore;
The days roll on and the night cocks crow
And the rain comes down in a tropic blow
Till there’s a night where there’s no light
And cause of the dark you can’t see the right
And you’re standing on a man with a knife in your hand
And all you smell is bloody red sand,
And the sea breeze low and the palm trees wave
And ‘murder’ breathes the sweat, and there’s no grave
Is deep enough to hide that smearin stain
That scars the soul in this hurricane;
And the mind goes back to what mama said
To a little boy cryin at her final bed
When fever and fearin and dyin was real
And the heart was heavy and couldn’t feel
Anything else but tears and grief
Cause death rolled up like chicken thief;
”boy,” she said slow, with her eyes all closed,
Her wrinkled black skin like an old red rose,
“Boy, I know the mean days ahead,
The heat got fangs where your mama is dead,
But you be strong and pay mind to the law,
You follow the truth and heed the lord’s call,
And when you change places and lie down an old man
You’ll then be glad you obeyed the Lord’s plan;”
But my mind came back to the terrible deed,
My eyes saw clear how I’d made the man bleed,
My feet started runnin over the moonlit sand,
And that weird light fell like the devil had planned
The night, the heat, and my mama’s death,
It go so I felt I could smell his breath,
He was laughin and cursin, and hard on my tail,
And I ran, crawled, and scraped cause I’d rather face jail;
When the sun came up I turned myself in.
That feeling in my stomach like a starving coal bin’
wouldn’t leave nor go, even sweat wouldn’t come,
I couldn’t find peace in a gallon of rum;
A man dies hard in the humid heat,
And takes the stand at his judgment seat,
To be judged by his faith in God’s only Son,
And to give an account of the race he’s run.
Now the whole thing’s over and I’m sentenced to die,
And my wife and babies forgot to cry.
So now the rope is ready, I got to go hand,
And all the righteous sinners await the gallows sing
Of death, of poor, of heat, of sweat,
And that forsaken chorus will bare my dying treat,
Because that still remains a slave who walks a tropic coast
So guard your steps real careful, cause he’s a savage host.
This poem of Limon was written in memory of the event after traumatically returning in the middle of the night to Philadelphia to attend the funeral of my brother. There was another writing however written in April on the opposite coast, at Puntarenas on the Pacific, of an entirely different sort, predicting the death of the president, JFK. That it was predicted in the fiction of the story, a satire, even as its protagonist politician was so unflattering portrayed, was clearly identified as JFK, killed by a series of actions we won't state here. Modern renditions exist at Camel Saloon Nabu! Nabu! and Frigg, Hamogamous Johnny that derive from the first account written that Saturday night in Puntarenas in a house on stilts near the beach when the wind, strong in the whole night, ceased and woke me up. The full of account of the allegory of this tale and its complete unfolding has not appeared, but in manuscript approaches dozens of pages.II. John Stam (1928-2020) Difficulties of Governance. En loco parentis. Latinamericanization. Evangelicals. Karl Barth. Hugo Assmann.
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| Blake, Great Red Dragon Beast from the sea. |
The quotation here is altered to show the greater context. "Roman" is removed from empire, "imperial" from cult and "against the church" from last desperate assault." Brussels, the Beltway, the London Imperium are the bigger empire, with Rome. How do these empires accommodate devil worship? They are centers of civilization, unless the over told story of Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History (1936) that all institutions are demonic is in play. |
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| Bosch, detail, Adoration of Magi, inscrutibe enemy. |
that religion and seminary need to teach people "how to think," meaning to conform. Why is that necessary? When I read Dante in the second year of college in a class, we covered the text and wrote about it however we seemed fit, were graded on the intellignece of our arguments. In seminary you are taught how to think and what to think, so no wonder there was rebellion. Why aren't they studying the text instead of arguing about killing it their own way? Blame Darby blame Wheaton, blame Fuller. Nuts. Piety kills.
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| Hugo Assmann feeling his tooth |
Governance
Local governance became an Achilles heel of church and school. Forget about praxis, the prongs of the Mission demise were irrelevance and relevance, discipline and group thought. It expressed itself as the imposition of standards that authorities had imposed upon themselves back at Wheaton, conceived as normal, necessities: en loco parentis, hours in a dormitory, how people could date, a little hard to produce in a population of young men domiciled together, that is if one wants to inculcate "spiritual" behavior. These regs are not universal standards but uptight ones. Up and down the corridors authority stumbles. It is not possible to enforce morality conduct on another, even on children. There was no sign of any of this rebellion in 1963 when I spend every evening in the Annexo, but there was a lot of passion beneath the surface, at least in some The mistake was in making a man without grown sons be a dorm parent. The difficulties of being dorm parent, even the concept fails, must have illustrated to him in miniature the episcopacy of his dissertation. Probably he didn't connect the history of the churches with the dorm. Too bad. Since his juanstam.com website has been scrubbed among the few things available in English by John Stam online are his dissertation. There I read of the explicit claims of dignity and authority asserted regarding the authority of the Bishop (66). And while he would never say so, these rituals of authority are the same embodied by all governments, whether they impute divine right to themselves or not, which is anything but washing of one another's feet and substituting humility for authority held by the only one who matters. The kiss of peace offered at consecration of a bishop is a kiss of submission, a kind of mystical mafioso. In elite circles it is the kiss of death where a good smile is like a hard blow to the face. It is hard to connect the high and the low, the bishop and the parent, but they share principles in common. So if "archon" is an implied title for the bishop, it is "political-governmental title incompatible with concept of priesthood" (69). We do not find brotherhood in these authoritative structures. I can't wait to be confronted by the doubting query, what then should we do? I'd be tempted to offer Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack in that regard, "probably the strongest leader in the Franconia Conference during the nineteenth century" (Wenger, History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference, 281) but a man of outstanding powers of conciliation and humanity among strong minded people, "a man of sterling character, a born leader of men, and a successful farmer. He favored missions before the Franconia Conference did, and approved the organizing of the Mennonite General Conference, even though the majority of his conference did not. He aided in the 1874 Russian immigration to Kansas, and followed the fortunes of this group with interest for his entire life. He was moderator of the Franconia Conference for many years while the German-English transition was occurring and also the transition from no missions to the organization of the Franconia Mennonite Mission Board in the year of his death. He was probably the strongest leader of his day in the Conference. He died 29 October 1917" Mennonite Encyclopedia.
I grant the problem is insoluble and relative to one's age in the process. You have authority in your life over yourself and those in your care, your family. You think you must save their lives by your orders. You confront them as Andrew Mack did his own son Noah, (Noah H. Mack: His Life and Times 1861-1948, 7-8), but by the time they reach maturity, which was the age of students in the dorm, you are not the coach. I doesn't matter too greatly if you let them go or they go on their own. You won't even know what happens in the short run. Still you want to assist them in every way that will not harm them or dimish them. I was involved with my two sons in intensive training and practice for national competition, which abated their moral testings some what, but they immediately afterward undertook all those forms of behavior Wheaton would have proscribed, and perhaps John Stam did them too. Mr. Stam's obit relates his difficulty c. 1957 with student dating and imposing penalties for breaking the 10 p.m. curfew, but I stayed on the first floor of the Annexo and when a roommate would tap on the boarded up window at midnight I would let him in. These are not theological questions. So much for Christianity Today's problem with student dating. When did authorities begin to think they were listened too? When Jacob did what he was told? When Abraham traveled with his sister? If dating prohibitions were a joke, the abstracted talk of empire and liberation,
faculties, convictions and ethics, en loco parentis were the exercises of
power, with a smile or not. Rebellion against the father/mother mission that gave them birth,
"one former graduate, invited back as a professor, turned enemy and spread
false accusations... a rift divided conservative professors and our “radical
evangelical” group...." The arrival of liberation theology increased the
gap, but offered a hip style, as if anybody owes any loyalty to any thing,
externally applied, the failing of the mission, seminary, college. Any
parent knows you cannot teach your sons to be what you are. The radical evangelicals
proposed too late a “Plurality and Criticism in the SBL,” ... argued that, by
tradition and conviction (and even its name), the Seminario Bíblico was
evangelical and biblical. Then the concord of "political-ideological
options and theological perspectives" failed. The paradox is that
in doing the right thing they annihilated the point of view that gave them existence, as there there were a Valsalva Maneuver that would stop the irregularities of the body politc's heart. The self righteousness of judges was greater than the sins of
the judged. But further up the pyramid, to enforce or not enforce law, prejudice
and favoritism, class and race justify any and every Marxist or Capitalist truth. The
rungs disappear into the clouds that hide the giant. Don't forget, when the parents are out, big
brother is in charge.
It brings up the social tensions of all kinds, for I was both the ages of all these young men, and a student, and an employee of the mission publishing house too, so I went to work every day. But I was also a gringo northeamericano, so there was political animus beyond us all. Many of the majority Indian students treated me with suspicion at best, and why not, considering what had been done to them. My students at FSC and Bishop gave me some sort of honorary status after the first semester because I so openly cared for them, but they told many heartrending tales of what had been done to them even in the Dallas high schools of the 80's. We shared these things openly. It was not open in the Seminario, but tense on all fronts, for majority white men were just that and I had been raised in their societies up north too, but sure did not imbibe of the attitude privilege. I got my points off my feet, as Will and Bernard said in a visit when we produced some of their plays on a trip to Austin. They had basketball scholarships to FSC from BedSty and we played a lot of 1 on 2 basketball in between performances. There always is and should be a normal reserve among men, except on those rare occasions of intuitive friendships.
For all that the mission governors treated me with grace, which I account to Ladoit Stevens and Ruth. One time I was walking to breakfast from the dorm with two students from Puerto Rico, one who I liked and we played a lot of one on one even up, the other was a lewd fellow expelled the next year, but who then insulted me with his selection of mother cuts. I told him and told Enrique to tell him that if we were in my country I'd beat his head in. But some weeks later he was horsing around with one of my roommates, Antonio R. and without thinking, taking the fooling as a pretext, I took him by the collar and belt and threw him out of the room. When I delivered him to the door he rebounded even though it was a perfect swish when he went through, didn't touch the sill at all. The second foul is the one that's caught. He came back with a torrent of abuse so loud he shook the hall while I stood impassive in the entry. He returned and roared at me from the door but raised no hand. This inflamed some of the Indio leaders and the looks got stormy and dark so Steve announced the next day that I was coming to live with him and his family on their ranchette, which was a fabulous experience of finesse and made them friends for life, but nothing was ever said to me about this imbroglio except what I later read in B. Traven. That was before the Open Veins of Latin America came out.
The Year Before
I had been jacked out of a childhood of oil rigs and fires and train wrecks among strip mined hills, and all the social situations that might imply from the age of five, into an all new circumstance of my last year of high school where this elegiac ground of being sank to the marrow. It came right down out the sky and settled on my shoulders that i did not want to kill. That was the first vision in the outer world. I did not open my eyes to others. I saved opening until the moment prepared to receive Jesus, the Blessed, the only eternal man People shake heads at the idea of the only true man who have not felt it. Those who worry they will not be taken, cannot compete with the real horrors I knew before sixteen On the Way Out of Sheol. It’s a question of magnitude. What do I care about Rapture when carnivals, bordellos, bars, seductions, fights, appalling challenges, and huge literal giants wanted me? It was said they didn’t like the way I walked. You don’t think children are going such places. You don’t think the underbelly is hid everywhere in the middle class fat that lurks in your neighborhood leaders, institutions.
The aplomb, the audacity, or the love that sustained me in all these ventures was a native enthusiasm unleashed by the certitude of the Redeemer., for before this venture I had passed through many others, first the proletariat coal towns, rock slides and polluted creeks of Pittsburgh and the Italian, Polish, Irish, French subclades I met in the streets and factories I worked before 16. The contrast of this rough life with the Philadelphia Mainline my father's transfer took us to, was stark. I entered senior year of high school among the children of elite, then back to prole Drexel and its co-op program where I first worked in the Cage at the Philadelphia Merrill Lynch office, My first specific job after the white light was a white collar job at Merrill Lynch when all transactions were posted by hand, a Bob Cratchit right out of Dickens, if you can believe it. That fellow was happily monitored by superiors in the "cage" so did not ruin too many trades with his bookkeeping. The chief memory of that is coming to work in downtown Philadelphia before eight in the morning, up the train station steps with the commuters and wandering at lunch around bookstores off Market and Chestnut streets handling versions of Kierkegaard, what else, continuing to puzzle whatever it is that puzzled them.
The next co-op job was auditing American Viscose plants with a small team, but you were on your own in the huge plant, whether to conduct the Stores audit or hand out paychecks to see if all the workers were real. It was awe inspiring to stand there in a white shirt and tie and look in the face of all these men who passed in front of me. I was callow and they were noble and realized in their humanity. I can see their faces now and the worst part was they called me sir. This experience of human community happened in four different plants, the year prior to going to San Jose. Back and forth, back and forth between the poles, to add up all these serendipities, added to that summer by the loss of a medial cartilage and ACL in a football game at Valley Forge, then conceiving this mission idea, it looks like I was chosen to be there, placed in midst that place and time for the whole preceding year, 1962, for the travel and audit of the four major industrial plants of American Viscose, one, Lewisberg, later destroyed by flood, and Parkerburg and Meadville closed, with the human environments in the spinning rooms and caves of the plants were tantamount analogies and actualities for the exploration of the soul .
In the second so-called white collar job, I found myself at all hours wandering through these plants on no particular assignment, as if it were a cave. I would get caught up in the spinning rooms, large warehouse sized rooms filled with rows and rows of spinners that spun the rayon out of sulphuric acid baths to the clack, clack, clacking sound of the spinners, the smell of the acid and an acid mist that hung over it all. The viscose solution forced through a spinnerets from a scaled-up version of a butter churn turns them into strings of fibers. The acid coagulates and solidifies the filaments, called regenerated cellulose filaments. They called it jet spun, emitting zinc and hydrogen sulfide.The filaments are passed through rollers and wound on spools, washed, bleached, rinsed, dried, and wound again. This acetate was pretty far from dipping a needle in a viscous solution of mulberry pulp and gummy rubber, as it all began. The early product called Chardonnay would burn like gasoline.
When you get to the spinning rooms, as the correspondence goes, all kinds of formats and forms appear. Whether you should believe rayon that goes up in flames or not, I take it as an species of Christian atheism, the kind so called that declaims that all the gods are frauds. Name a god and it is a fraud, but there is therefore only one, known as Yahweh, Yah Yahweh, and all the rest are presumptive idols, admittedly of much attraction if they could get men to kill their children in front of them and debase themselves in sheer materiality of being only. The Christian atheist would speak like Abraham, Daniel, Job, Noah, you know the list goes on, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Elijah, and overthrow these impostors. I suppose that's not a synthetic fiber at all, but pure linen.
Vats
I wandered all hours through these viscose plants like caves, on no particular assignment, would get caught up in the large warehouse-sized spinning rooms filled with rows and rows of spinners that went clack, clack-clack as they spun rayon out of sulphuric acid baths, the smell of acid mist in the air. The viscose forced through the spinnerets from these scaled-up versions of a butter churn turned them into strings of fibers. The acid coagulated and solidified the filaments, a regenerated cellulose jet spun, emitting zinc and hydrogen sulfide.The filaments wound on spools, passed through rollers, washed, bleached, rinsed, dried, and rewound again, pretty far from dipping a needle in a viscous solution of mulberry pulp and gummy rubber, as it all began. The early product called Chardonnay would burn like gasoline.Viscose fiber is spun to create the illusion of the world. There is nothing beside the tanks but Dinglichkeit, thingness, materiality alone, a magnificent state, but without cognition. The vats are metaphors of the acetate that makes the world, the explosive gasoline world fiber made to burn. Of old they gave their jewels, gold and silver and made them into images of men, sacrificed oil and flour and honey, crowns, earrings and burned incense to it after the images were made and when that was not enough they gave their children in oblation. It is not what the man wears who leads into and sees these things dressed in linen.
The vats were huge, thirty, forty feet tall remembrances of eternity in time. Attracted by the stillness, implicit being and power, they meant instruction and the compulsion of patterns mediated through time, held open by belief. Sheets of purified cellulose steeped in caustic soda, dried, shredded into crumbs, aged in metal containers. What’s going on in and around the vats in me as it is among the sons of God whose election was before, but unknown. Poetic repetition seeks the mediated vision of the fathers, the recovery of origins before, as though prior instruction. The closer he gets, the further he is away it seems, but then also, the further he has come.
Large vats of raw viscose seasoning are pulled up to make the thread, nitrocellulous and saponified. It was as cool and dark in this underground as a word spoken in first grade. Nobody was ever there. Then, when the world set wrong could not be righted, and birds before a storm in an age that lost its history fell upon the masses, the only reality an individual could reclaim was himself, a last basis on which reality could appear.
Spinning
Rayon from Cellulose means wood fiber of course, but altered, wood chips, spruce or pine, bleached with sodium hypochloride (NaOCl) to remove color, soaked in 18% caustic soda for 1 to 2 hours producing sheets of alkali cellulose broken up into crumbs aged for some days, changed into cellulose xanthate by addition of liquid carbon disulfide, then dissolved in a weak solution of caustic soda and made into honey-like viscose. This is what is pumped through spinnerets into a bath of sulfuric acid that “regenerates” the cellulose and makes fiber. It is called viscose to describe the liquid state of the spinning. As a regeneration of wood it is a perfect metaphor for soul spinning. In Pot Spinning, after the acid bath, the filaments are stretched on a series of offsetting rollers called godet wheels which reduce the diameter of the filaments and make them uniform in size, which gives filament strength. They then go into a rapidly spinning cylinder called a Topham Box, resulting in cake-like strings that stick to the sides. The strings are then washed, bleached, rinsed, dried, and wound in spools. In these trips to the plants we would stay at hotels in the area. I remember sitting in the bars of these places drinking coffee, writing whatever it is I wrote then, something of the alienation of life, the longing for intimacy, anything but sit cooped up in a room. So you don’t need to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead after all.
The experiences in these four American Viscose plants in 1962 stands behind much
of my concept of the making, the spinning, the incarnation of souls. I audited
plants in Parkersburg, Lewiston,
Meadville and
Marcus Hook, a very odd thing, for This has to be how the souls were spun in
brave new world I thought before I reread it, but it certainly was the notion
behind Transporten
Norton. It was humbling too, for the previous years I had worked in
factories as a worker and been treated with no respect, but here I had a tie
and part of the job was auditing the work force, so at one point I was handing
out checks to employees to see if they were real people. All these men came
with their wizened faces and dirty overalls calling me sir. It was as
disturbing as when the next year I found myself in San Jose and was called Don Andres.
See Viscose Rayon.
Pics from Plastics Historical Society, The Manufacturing Process for Viscose Rayon
See also: http://www.parkersburgviscose.com/viscose_plants.html
www.parkersburgviscose.com300 × 204Search by image
Bless thou the LORD oh my soul and all that is within me bless his holy name. I found myself wandering the basement of basements in the Parkersburg, Lewiston and Meadville American Viscose plants, large vats of raw viscose seasoning waiting to be pulled up to make the thread, nitrocellulous and saponified. It was cool and dark in the underground, like the underpass, the first word I spoke in first grade. There was never anybody there. Then, where the world set wrong could not be set right, we found ourselves like birds before a storm in an age that lost its history and fell into bondage of the masses. The only reality the individual could reclaim was himself, a last basis on which reality could appear. Existence is above all else a personal reality in these trials As faith that had no future, for its past was destroyed, honesty was left as the only indispensable condition that the world might be true. That God revealed himself in a convicted criminal in this world of poverty, in lowliness, and complete renunciation, in the most absolute dissimilarity from the nobility, through a complete reversal in consciousness, the individual after the second birth sees that the preceding life was not properly existence at all. Complete surrender of understanding against reason, this Appearance reveals its humiliation! Faith outside and opposed to human truth, not asleep within to be reawakened, needed to be deceived anew in an age when literal reality was rejected. Generations of teachers had taken up counterfeit by corporate science in labs, re-baptized you know. Evil had stopped being absurd, scandalous and beyond reason.
2. Individuals yes, associated with human heroes, not divine, as the Greeks, but Noah, Daniel and Job, and all the major English writers Herbert, Hopkins, Donne, had a history not only in my family but as individuals who stand against the civilizations of the world. That question in Philosophical Fragments (1844) asks whether an historical point of departure is possible for an eternal consciousness. The longer one lives the more history grows wide, but the eternal stays the same. And here I make my confession, remembered inaccurately as the elder serve the younger, but apropos of all of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous text, words spoken as ventriloquists, psychological experiments made with the consciousness of pseudonymity or polynymity, in which the written is surely mine but only to the extent that I have put into the mouth the words of the individual who produced him, this autobiograph, first person third person, came to look at Kierkegaard as an attempt to refute him. At the time, if correct, this predated all the basement readings of Postscript. Alex O. served on the board of Kings College, undergoing a challenge to its rules by the neo-orths, which heresy, was attributed to K. I volunteered to examine this, and saw the great leap, the father's yelp and on and presented notes for that next board meeting to refute the K! But the only refutation of Kierkegaard is himself, a constant, which might be said of them all, for he had many psuedonyms. You could say he was a polymath of pseudonymity, fueling his energy with the sublimate created with his notions of love that made him deny love to fulfill it, turn a woman into a concept of the highest denigration possible, for a a woman is to be loved above all else. He's not alone in this, Mackey cites Wilde that "there is only one real tragedy in a woman's life, The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband." This from one who was the opposite of a lover of his wife. I considered this all part of K's fraud and dishonest. Since when does a fraud fuel an artist's work? These two, love and honesty about which he wrote the most, he lives the least. Bly! The Shadow! Because Regina couldn't undertake doubt he must spin himself a seduction. Kafka used to weekly visit courtesans in Prague in his youth. You think this has anything to do with his inability to marry? Artificial silk resists moisture and can be dyed the most garish colors.
In her first therapy Freud's chow-chow saw through the surface, not that one face lay inside the other, but a special eye saw beneath, and cared. The chow nature like the cat can see, and care. Any inquiry into the cause of sorrow however will be met with antagonism, a bite to cover the pain, and thereafter seeking to remember, it will test witnesses, interrogate a hundred souls. The outer expression of sorrow removed, the inner detected by looking through the facade remains, but there is nothing of the present in the past, "not joy," says K, "for that is always present" and earth.
How could it not be, for joy fills sky. "So individuals with exteriors as firm as a rock have safeguarded an eternally hidden life of sorrow," * sorrows spun in many men's asexual lives tainted against the women who made them: Kierkegaard made a fetish of seduction, Freud stopped marital relations in 1895, Ruskin fled the sight of his wife on their wedding night. Just to prove that modern extremes have precedent, millions of men have been poisoned by synthetic testosterone and growth hormones in meat and milk. Why is the entrance to life so shunned and what has this to do with the tripppling of the world in a lifetime? As if they did not want to be born, and sought to demote themselves, their mothers, wives and all women pushed into mythic degradation? The inner is visible from the outside if seen. Only the most careful observer can expect to reveal reflectivesorrow.
Yes, I am trying to deceive you into being a Christian when you cannot be and God appeared to the world in the person of Jesus the Messiah in opposition to all human truth. How can I deceive you? I was overtaken, snuck up on, but far from resisting the best of the best. Later I resisted, taken upon the way, but the diaspora was incomplete, interrupted, rescued from al Qaeda. The most interesting thing is how the memory plunges into change, not just remembering the times or results but the actual events. I plunge everything experienced into the eternity of remembrance, everything finite and contingent is forgotten and erased. The short of it is that at 17, going down that hill, shortly after, I embraced the thing Kierkegaard desired the most, the thing Kafka read K to find out, and what Borges found at the end, in Geneva, the transparent ground of being promised in the True Light, that lights everyone who comes into the world. I finally found it out to say, riveted there, as my eyes watched the high heels of women on the streets flap up and down as they walked, hips and booty swinging, bare arms reflecting the neon signs in the smell of buses idling their diesel engines.
You can say, it gave a point of view, transported to the first heaven, Chestnut St. No gods but buses and trains sat in this assembly. And then I went to second heaven, the Tesla library basement, with its complete collection of all Kierkegaard in all languages and editions where I wandered continually those years as if it were a supermarket of goods arrayed to draw further to where the really big money spends. Returning, it was as pleasant to stand in the silence with Concluding Unscientific Postscript as it was beside the vats, leaning against the stacks, understanding nothing. Neither was I accorded the favor of a wish, as Kierkegaard in Either/Or, but a series of circumstances like riding the rapids of a river from which you cannot or would not extricate yourself is enjoyable as designated. I only had to choose one thing as the currents swirled and I was jacked out of one life into another, which beginning came in response to that question, a mutual attraction. I knelt before the Blessed One. This is not theory. Forces unmask themselves to children, and the children keep silent. If they speak it is doubted. Who's going to believe a child against a priest, adult, a cop? Children hold the notion they are powerful anyway. Amnesia sets in and endorphins kick, and one goes on, right? "Because, because." Woody Guthrie. Here's A Sense of Reality. So with this wind at my back it was pure salvation to embrace the Blessed One, which brought a change of nature and all intellect and higher training that emerged. I'd hate to have to pay for it, the literal exchange of natures before the beginning, a shadow of what preoccupied after. Maybe from reading the books of the martyrs and the New Testament where the only outcome is death by a hundred means as Hebrews 11. Let me never, never, outlive my love to thee, says the Sacred Head. Saved From the End of the World, it doesn't do justice to a 17 year old to tell him he's part of the old dying god syndrome and that Osiris started it. Counterfeits. There is only One true. Sure my Mennonite background could be called to account, but before, it was the fear, betrayals, and angers of demons against children that made me run to the Word that never stops flowing, to as many as received him--to them gave he the power. Now the world is afraid of the child.
O wheel roll on was a plea from a loved one who had a 70% blockage of the left ventral heart artery, who asked whether he should have a stent installed. How should I know? I meditated that and sought counsel from the True Light. Was sitting in the hot tub some days later where I train, oblivious, when a swim teacher came over and ensued discussing what happened to Ginger to the one other person in the tub -- I like to be there when it's empty so had waited till just one remained. This resulted in her delivering sotto voce, as though by script, that Ginger had had a stent put in, but didn't need it, and she should have gotten a second opinion! Which is exactly what transpired. I take it as a big joke that this Intelligence sees fit to communicate with me this way, with a dumb show, not to speak of all the precognitions received, therefore known before. Take the examples at Today If You Would Hear and laugh! And there is of course the glasses!
Whatever arguments about properties in review, genre shrinking, Buckminster Fuller’s idea of miracles, mine, belief in God, pattern matching, what prayer might do, what is remembered, what forgotten, the glasses were in two pieces, the whole beach wiped out by the waves. Just one side of a buried lens caught the sun and flashed in my eye. Our daughter couldn’t see anything without them. Then after a while one of the kids found the rest of the frame and the other lens buried some distance off. Prayer enabled a belief that they could be found, which seemed impossible, so we looked. So prayer enables you to look for the impossible, and faith is the will to believe the glasses can be found? To prove their finding not a probability, but a certainty caused by prayer, not based on selecting cases to prove the point, seems like that would require proving prayer changes the probability of events. Would such a successful experiment convince a skeptic that prayer is real and it works, that prayer is larger than probability?
I am wearing a heavy shirt, a large eagle lands on my shoulder. A
smaller female lands in my lap. A profusion of eagles found the carcass
gathering. A baby eaglet snuggled into my fur as if to the manner born, the
mother preening it the while, the father perched with claws next to my neck, a
look out, as we four sit to begin our wait. Each person, a fact unwritten,
burns in cognition before the text, warning, as if those as St John, heard a
cappella, Kyrie Elieson
under the casement, emaciates come to call, each point of light swimming
underwater with a blessing.
This Post scientific postscript is Post scientific since science became science fiction, what with artificial intelligence and singularity etc, which entry see here, but take this as Kierkegaard's correction of the human, now lost to artifice and manufactured souls that Blake predicted, the crux of the superman:
"Could you wish that that beautiful law which for thousands of years has
borne the human race and every generation of the race through life, that
beautiful law, more glorious than that which keeps the stars in their courses
across the vault of heaven, could you wish that law breached--more dreadful
than if the law of Nature lost its force and everything was dissolved in
terrible chaos?"
Either/Or, end of The Edifying.
This is the place before you go and after the escape. No need press faces against windows, on panes. Your reflection is in other faces that pass, carrying what they can into the beyond. He actually carries John Gower's Voice of One Crying, as if description warms the difference between the smells and sounds of the crowds shuffling. Is he alone as the ear that hears, no passengers or refugees yet, before the fact, if you like to put it so? If you don't know what this means it explains his pocket Gower, filled with apprehension I shall sing of true dreams whose import disturbs the depths of my heart. May he whom the Isle of Patmos received in Apocalypse, and whose name I bear, guide this work. So tell o muse, unstaunched in the solitude, unstaunched and luminous, what has been promised these thousands of years, return of world without end, with end, not told from above but from a stand in the eyes and hands and a beating heart, entertainment for Father and Son, and the sons, that root in the home that melts in compassion for their state. Blessed is the man with four letters, aleph, lamed...what ever what beauty we desire thus who join with Him no form not comliness, gather your sorrow, bear your grief to one pierced breast of love, the Lords's for there we lie, but for his pain and our iniquity, save for a good man one one dare to die. Christ died for us while we were yet in sin and there our peace and victory begin.
As then that summer just before the idea of the mission occurred I tore the medial ligament of one knee and obliterated the ACL so was literally on crutches that fall in planning the trip to San Jose and taking off. WHAT SURPRISES ME IS THAT ALL THIS AND SO MUCH MORE COULD HAVE HAPPENED BY THAT AGE AND NONE OF IT SHOWED ON THE OUTSIDE. It takes a while to germinate, but fellow students the next fall in Geoffrey Hartman's Romantics class were affronted that in the first paper, a free exercise of our own choi where the words of TheTyger showed me their secret and he gave it an A.
There was another secret, this time with a missionary, my boss, a most irritating effeminate who insisted on putting his hand on my arm whenever we crossed the street began to jawbone on the way to various places of what he considered Steve's lax attitude and his "slowness," on and on with a constant drip drip of the social wisdom he had gained at Bob Jones Bible. He harangued "Ricardo" Foulkes for weight training at a local gym, to which I accompanied him several times: "how can he dare to risk injuring those hands?" The accountant raced across the patio to save the concert pianist again and again. He was not the only missionary to sustain backward social injuries. I was from Philadelphia, so this was a geographic thing. In Philadelphia the synagogue of Satan bows at our feet. I began to show Bill contempt. They must have needed his accounting badly to counter the frequent artist mentality of the Mission, a little disorganized, but it came at a price. Production and inventory rooms bordered the editorial offices there. One day all unbeknownst I was working on the inventory for shipping, and happened to be standing at the last shelf that bordered the office of the boss, Hal Cocanower, when I heard Bill complaining of my behavior and attitude to him through the wall, the whole thing, which I never mentioned. Sounds like Ezekiel a little (8.7). The next morning, mid day, Hal came up on me in the seminary/office patio, and put both hands on my shoulders to force me to my knees. His way of enforcing. Remember, he protected Tom Gola. As he did this the whole thing passed in front of my mind and I saw 1) that if I stepped to one side he would fall to the ground, but 2) if I did that I would greater worsen the situation, so I took the knee. I didn't blame him. He was set , but this is an example of the petty backbiting that John Stam and Ricardo suffered in attempting to instill equal treatment in the mission. If the students had an attitude problem so did many of the superior grads of the Christian colleges up north and when you add in those from the south you can conceive of the forces that oppos not only loosening student discipline, but in transfering leadership.
The vats were huge, thirty, forty feet tall remembrances of eternity in time. Attracted by the stillness, implicit being and power, they meant instruction and the compulsion of patterns mediated through time, held open by belief. Sheets of purified cellulose steeped in caustic soda, dried, shredded into crumbs, aged in metal containers. What's going on in and around the vats in me as it is among the sons of God whose election was before, but unknown. Poetic repetition seeks the mediated vision of the fathers, the recovery of origins before, as though prior instruction.The closer he gets, the further he is away it seems, but then also, the further he has come.
I am your sign, so that as I have done so shall it be done to all. But there are wheels within wheels. Kierkegaard asked for one favor from the gods, chose for himself laughter and they all began to laugh. That's his telling. The essential thing posits an opposition between inner and outer that makes its representation impossible when the effect of every vision is evident, full of eyes round about.
But Eliyahu had no desk except the count books, books and plants to grow monarchs from chrysalis, to check the progress of the sycamore for carpenter bees, black buzzers that inhabit the cracks, where tortoise and Gambel quail take refuge. But there are wheels within wheels. The essential thing posits an opposition between inner and outer that makes its representation impossible when the effect of every vision is evident, full of eyes round about. I am your sign, so that as I have done so shall it be done to all.
To have laughter on one’s side for this Elijah, native to the setting, was either all joke, humor of high and middle kinds, or elección. Yet shall he not see it. We won’t know until the vote is in. To laugh seems hard wired on the foreheads of men that sigh and cry, as if they looked through a hole in the wall. Never say truth without a caveat, not Orphic ambiguity, but tease truth a season. The spirit rats will have a hard time getting their tails out of that. What rats? For I know the things that come into your mind, every one of them. Never start at the beginning, just open at random and begin. Prepare stuff for removing. Dig through the wall. Kierkegaard asked for one favor from the gods, chose for himself laughter and they all began to laugh. That’s his telling. Call it humor because the first thing I read in Either/Or at the end of my own diaspora, when I picked it up again after 40 years, was Kierkegaard’s paragraph at end of the Diapsalmata about his audience with the gods in the seventh heaven. If you want in on it just laugh along. Existence above all else is a personal reality in these trials Honesty remains as the only indispensable condition in the world that might be true.
The Account.
These ideas, called minimalist and abstract expressionist, arise in conversation like Legends of the Unconscious, not written exactly, with many sources of vacancy and presence, vacancy of the design and designer, presence of the flows of the natural. But making and repeating patterns to identify work as recognizable of a certain style is a betrayal of vacancy. Making by erosion, breakage, eruption, gravity, is vacancy. The world is before us, but remains after. Ask what he will do tomorrow if he had success today. The answer is there is no time and what is done is done before, during and after. The Account is a series of laminations that arch from form, bowed in the telling, so daylight appears between the cracks. The mind tries to understand what it sees when folds and curves make shadow. It constantly plays over to create familiarity as if recasting the image, which seems to be moving, to understand it. This establishes the statement, it depends on your point of view. But it is not mere image. Taken in a planetary and geological sense, history is catastrophe overwritten by scarping of scallops. I won a blue ribbon in sixth grade for a pic of characters on a stage off set by scallop markings.
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Torso.
Fall of the
Evangelical. The Elders of
Infamy, of military, corporate background. Collusion with corporate/state opinions.
Adultery punished by cutting off the nose. The fate suffered in Ezekiel 23.25, of the ancient practice in Egypt mutilating the adulteress or disfiguring captives.Ev. And I will set my jealousy against you, and they shall deal furiously
with you: they shall take away your nose and your ears; and your remnant
shall fall by the sword: they shall take your sons and your daughters;
and your residue shall be devoured by the fire. Ez. 23.25 | |
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Liberation Theology<br>- Blogs de Juan Stam
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Ricardo had just gotten a masters in theology from Princeton when I was in his New Testament studies class, studying Greek in Spanish with his wife Irene while he broke down Bultmann, Schweitzer and Renan. I did it myself, taught the avant-garde to freshman and sophomores at Fayetteville. Literature follows theology in the death of the author. Decades before Barthes, Schweitzer sought history. History is Memory’s son! At night in the seminary library I would urge those German critics out of their case and puzzle over them in Spanish as much as I ever had over Kierkegaard in the basement of my college library. Sometimes Ricardo would pass through the library in the evening with other professors. Once he said, “let’s go to the opera at the National Theatre.” He had performed there himself and felt like he owned it. To the question, “do you have tickets,” he said we’d just sneak in the back and go up in the balcony. It was Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, and whether you say the final “t” or not, it is the one interrupted when the maestro died. Although finished by Alfano, when it was first conducted by Toscanini in 1926, the conductor laid down his baton in the middle of Act III where Puccini had stopped writing and said, “here the Maestro died,” ending the performance. It fits with the unfinished business of this journey. Ricardo bandied about the Asian riddles and considering my love of the game I joined him with the admonishments of ministers Ping, Pang and Pong, who urge Turandot not to lose his head. As all operas and lives it was dark light, red curtained, maroon mauve tapestries, flashes off glasses, box seats. I was more interested in what was in the cup and why the point of the lance bled, which however I did not yet know. The semester ended for me before the dorm counselor had finished his Tolstoy, but after the Panamanian pastor who cut cane, with wrists as big as my ankles, prayed. That is, I never finished the class, wrote to Ricardo after my untimely exit to pose the riddle, why should you continue to exist. He was composing a long answer in his head, he said, when he realized I was kidding. Now I get his letter out, it is postdated the University of Strasbourg, 1968, five years after, during the period of his dissertation Defense.
Babylon City/Woman
A continuing conversation with Ricardo came into my mind Good Friday
2007 with a vision of what his letter would have said had he replied. I
didn’t know there was a T. in his name until I saw the death notice on
the Julliard website. Taken seriously, his answer was that the
liberation of people to which this vision led was equally in its
articulation of feminist/indigenous theologies and imaginative
participation in the wounds of Christ. These were identifications with
people against the oppressor, wounded with the oppressor’s
transgressions, bruised with its iniquities. Ricardo’s Apocalypse of St. John appeared in 1989 just about at the tipping point
where liberation theology started toward ecological feminism. His ideas
with others contradicted the North American view that oppression didn’t
matter because the church was going to be raptured out before the
events in Revelations 18 occurred. I didn’t want to read Rev 18. It
promises a blessing, but I knew people who read it and came to a bad
end.
It is a catalogue of sea captains, gold cargoes, frankincense and
souls, the city of Babylon compounded as a woman to represent global
capital and world domination. These multinational corporations,
commentators tell us, traduced to poverty the nations and people of the
world. Babylon City/Woman is a picture of bond traders and merchants of
world capital, global internationals unmasked in the intercourse
of traffic. Their fortunes make “an idolatrous cult of Mammon, a cult
that can only merit the name ‘fornication,’” said Ricardo. (El Apocalipsis De San Juan, 189). Extending the prophecy of St. John
to contemporary global capital and multinationals, the Americas were
polarized and crucified (Callahan, Ortega, Kidd on Wainwright). It was
the same enemy Ruben Dario saddled as Alejandro-Nabucodonosor,
Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar. Liberation theologies transferred the
sufferings of Christ to the people of the Americas and then to the
earth, to those exploded mountaintops and broken rivers, smitten of Man
and afflicted. These exist, but poets flee philosophy, theology and
politics. The rivers clap their hands, the mountains sing.
Ricardo died the year before I composed this answer. It seemed to
materialize out of that theology of enriching the body, memorialize
anyway. How the concert pianist became a new testament scholar, that’s
not a straight line. Both pianist and scholar were weight lifters; one
prophesied against empire. He knew the word for muse among people who
were shocked. But you know that must be overlooked. They gossiped: “how
can someone with such trained hands lift weights? What if he hurts
himself?” Cost accountants! He took me with him to the gym sometimes, me
already dressed in those legs weightlifters would die to get. They
asked, “what did you do to get those legs.”
Much experience is unthought in advance, as was Costa Rica in the year of JFK's assassination, written of in Sky Shadows (June 2010-archive) and Remembering Jose Donoso. The bulk of the memoir here was written in 5777 [2017] and added to in remembering. Conclusions aside, who would have thought the fall of the Latin America Mission could resemble the call for the putative fall of the United States. How can we say this? Cases always to their natural conclusion, hence Washington D.C. must change its name, that's clear, and so many other American cities and institutions be purged, also implicit in the Yabu Mayu of native feminism, which used to be called eco-feminism, which even though it hurts to say so, was foisted and fostered by proxy upon native women by Jesuit Marxists, which doesn't make it false, just odd. How ridiculous is that? Dominated by the male again but made to pass it off as their own also the case in every civilized endeavor. So not only did Bible stories, narratives, characters need to be redefined, they needed to be replaced along with the businessmen- elder, oil rig executive digital salesman pastors and government agents who infiltrated, fingerprinted and installed their people to run the churches, American and European civilization and all of science. Sorry about that.
Theological wars wage rage on every level of religion in the west at least, more virulent than political wars, and long lasting, 2000 years with changed participants, but always end up the same, like the white liberal Ph.D.’s Noblesse obliges alleviating ignorance, poverty and inequality in Latin America and thereby strengthening it, which goals would require the overthrow of every vested opposing force, elite, governmental, religious, social or whatever faux Marxist offered. The infestation of these roaches and roof rats need El ángel exterminador of wars so deeply embedded in scabies pose and bedbug counter pose as to make every consideration of moth and thief and flood and fire seem prejudicial, since they also own the whole field of inquiry. This would be true of the establishment forces, whether Presbyterian, Vatican World Council, government or industrial, which forces seem antithetical to each other all the more to eat you. Embedded antitheses are always meant to void engagement with the reality that people have the right of self determination, a right preempted when their traditional institutions are destroyed.
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Jesús victorioso |
Review of John 1:1 as Prooftext: Trinitarian or Unitarian
The real talk in Fayetteville and everywhere, except among the elite, is of the creation of the human and of black paradigms such as Charles Chestnutt who lived and worked in Fayetteville. The liberal mind pretending to empathy affronts as much as the racist, but perpetuates its stereotypes against fundamentalist tyranny to justify itself, just the next stripe over from the racists on the flag of infamy. It is impossible to answer Riccardo's questions, to say what the goals of Black Power are, or were, but I would never refer to Dr. King solely by his last name. The questions are crass, the outsider, the journalist. It would have been as impossible to answer then as it would be now to tell how you feel about a catastrophe before and after. The only response is a finger. There is a letter I wrote to my father about this time that says with some passion the anger that I didn't want to air. "Come ready to talk," was what Louie Wright, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, called me to his office when he learned I might have special knowledge of the route to Central America. His son was about to drive it, 1967, and he wanted to know all about the circumstances I could relate. Then I was dismissed. As to Ricardo's questions no body can or should answer them. What are the goals of Black Power? Is there any vitality.... Want to know the Gullah? Piney woods? DC streets? Bed Sty? Newark? The anger I suppressed. Just about the week of his letter's arrival most of us learned we had been sacked, non renewed. We had been headed for Germany, but taking the summer to reorient I ended up in Austin at the height of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Undoubtedly another act of deliverance unforeseen. Irene Foulkes had not yet pursued the body as a hermeneutic category, deconstructing the Biblical androcentric at that time, truly useful to understand.
Ricardo is so transparent in his letter because he thinks he has a believing audience, but I don't believe or disbelieve what people say. Why bother? His letter is the same as the artificial prose of Dayton Robert's glossed Step, or Harry Strachan's Finding a Path which ends with a duality between the male and female, Harry the evangelist and Susan the nurturer. It was the woman who initiated all the fine agencies that justified the mission in the first place, from orphanage to farm to hospital and on. These provide a real service and built the infrastructure of San Jose measurably, but academic communities breed conformity. Conformity of the right kind is a survival mechanism and a technique for advancement (if you're a slave). You are expected to be innovative in the details but conforming over all. Communicable diseases in these environments include radical ideas from Chomsky to Assmann or de Chardin but surfing the intellectual wave and immersion in it is opposite of creativity. Illumination itself is entropy among those terminal degrees. Read that again.
The philosophy of liberation activates a thirst for power that attracts them. All such fads act. To borrow from sculpture, Peter Voulkos was undoubtedly the bright star of ceramics and much imitated in forms of wood fired texts, but seeing this, Kurt Weiser refused to follow with all the imitators and ended instead in low fire china paint on precast globes that pretended to be worlds on which he projected his myths of Eden. (Peter Held. The Ceramic Art of Kurt Weiser, 18). The point is that in art, imitation is a lesser. Even considering the school of Rubens or Titian or the influence of Picasso, there is nothing like the original. What was original about Liberation was its posing a way to join theology and sociology with a kind of mental Marxism, which played its reinterpretation of the biblical text from many peppery revisions of the Old and New Testaments and notions of editorial theory that spread to all of literature in redefining authorship, author, text. The weak, so called, who follow these trends, do so with some reward, since their peers will review their work and grant them recognition for following along, getting grants, especially when the grantor is the empire of Rome in all its glory.
Postscript
Over and over evangelicals say they are inadequate, self doubting on one hand, refer their beliefs to the approval of their fellows, ape the latest European divine, but are second hand in faith and action to the only way that “when you arrive at such a stage that you remove Him from your thoughts and senses (ie, give up the possibility of conceiving or imagining His essence) because he is not thus to be apprehended, and you realize Him in the evidences of His activities, as though He were inseparable from you, you will have reached that limit of the knowledge of Him which the prophet exhorts us to attain in the text (Deut 4.39 “Know this day, and lay it to thy heart, that the Lord, he is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath; there is none else” (Bahya, Duties of the Heart, I).
Thinking of being left behind in the rapture and looking for evidence of divine intervention, like Henry James, seeking to recapture faith they have been losing (Harry Strachan, Finding a Path, 7), handed down, not measuring up to the past, subject to doubt and Wheaton College, often among the children of "pioneer" fathers, Harry Strachan, Gil Dodds, for all that they are human in their doubting, which stirs compassion, but this only in the men, the predominant leaders. The call for liberation of the masses of peasants by Ellacuría or Assmann, or whoever the masculine dominant considers to liberate while subjugating the women, is a contradiction in terms. Evangelicals, radicals, feminists, skeptics are all dupes of the elite. None of whom are peasants. Effeminate professors who teach their classes passively seated behind desks must do so, for the real authority in these institutes lies with the women like Irene Foulkes who runs in the context of Elsa Tamez, Mercedes Brancher, Ana Maria Rizzante Gallazzi, Nancy Cardoso Pereira, Rebeca Montemayor, Alicia Winters, Luz Gimenez, Debora Garcia, Violeta Rocha, Josefina Caviedes, Maribel Pertuz, Veronica Rozzotto. Therein much of their writing is provocative and appealing where, as Nancy Cardoso Pereira says "the feminist hermeneutics of liberation is not our exclusive discovery. It is the fruit of a dialogue between feminist and liberation movements of Latin America and other continents. We want the land of the Bible to be converted into an Abya Yala for men and women, into an enriched and abundant land and soil, fertile for the liberating word: land which is no longer sterile and dead, land where new fruits of faith and spirituality can be harvested." "Abya Yala" means "Continent of Life" in the language of the Kuna peoples of Panama and Colombia. The Aymara leader Takir Mamani suggested the selection of this name (which the Kuna use to denominate the American continents in their entirety), [Turtle Island] and proposed that all Indigenous peoples in the Americas utilize it in their documents and oral declarations. "Placing foreign names on our cities, towns and continents," he argued, "is equal to subjecting our identity to the will of our invaders and to that of their heirs."
- "Ignacio Ellacuría moved to El Salvador, to teach at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), where he became rector in 1969, a position he led until 1989 when he was assassinated by paramilitary. Praxis, their practical engagement with the world. The praxis of human, however, is also always the expansion of the horizon of action. Praxis gives rise to more possibilities for the engagement of historical reality. The telos of praxis is thus greater liberty. His incomplete magnum opus Filosofía de la realidad histórica (1991) aimed to develop a philosophy of history that celebrated the “historical intelligence” that is the sediment of praxical beings taking charge of their historical reality that aims at greater liberty." Stanford Encyclopedia
In
the unspeakable psychic depredations of war, removing noses, destructing manhoods, with the ears of enemies slung across jeep
windshields in bandoliers (Bowden), all the presidents give the devil
sign. With a smile. This is dictated under cover of
freedom and liberty, where the best are the worse. They are so far the worst that
they are held up as hero cartoons of the new order, give lip service to Christian and
American truths while they betray them everywhere. These are the Elders of Infamy in the church too, of military, corporate background who
will evict any pastor who does not meet their prejudices.How many sermons allude to ice age/global warning, CERN, Chem trails, Monsanto hybrids, which amounts to collusion with corporate/state opinions enforced by the whole societal, philosophical, religious structure. In the church
where the following edict (of the elders) occurred, anyone who wanted to volunteer, even
for usher, was required to fingerprint and have a background check against data
bases. A pastor who opposes these beast
tactics would be let go:--
FEMA has
appointed thousands of evangelical pastors to herd the flock into camps
and centers, Fusion Centers, in a crisis. But churches were already
infiltrated with controls masked as patriotism and of course tax relief.
Fourth of July rivaled Halloween maybe or Christmas. Ex military
tradesmen long conditioned to Sempi Fi were loyal to death even when
crash investigators died of lung cancer, Navy commanders from asbestos
poisoning, airmen from swollen hearts. These are just family members.
They were expendable, not even given purple hearts, to support a preset
of attitudes not so different from Stuart England, Victorian England,
Windsor reptiles. Requirements have long been in place preventing free
political/social speech in churches if they want tax exemption. So Hillary announces she
thinks of becoming a Methodist pastor. As a control our investigators went to the generic opposite of the reformed, the Mennonites, where "the
prayers and preaching never said the name of Jesus, only euphemisms,
"God's son" and "the son of God." They had a slogan on the wall that
said they were "God's Troublemakers." Their cousins the charismatic prophets were supplanted waiting for the return of Christ 
for waiting for the signs of
anti-Christ. In modern terms the Old Testament and Egyptian practice of cutting the nose and ears off captives to humiliate and destroy them is symbolic. The loss of the ears indicates the loss of intuition, one who cannot hear and the amputated nose one who has lost the scent of discernment. They were already blind. These symbolical vestiges of the Code of Hammurabi are called Rhinotomy, ancient punishments for adultery of the unfaithful woman, hence applied to captive Israel and the captive evangelical prosperity church. When Russian premier Putin calls Pope Francis "not a man of God. At least not the Christian God. Not the God of the Bible" he shows the pot calling that kettle black; the Pope called President Trump not a Christian because he would build a wall like the one that surrounds Vatican City, the most ensconced fortress in Europe.
The name Evangelical in 1821 in The Evangelical Instructor: Designed for the Use of Schools and Families takes the version of Dicomedia of Diocletian (c.
300) as its common lot: "some were tied up by their heels and
suffocated over slow fires...others under a pretext of clemency had
their ears, their noses and their hands cut off" which was sanctioned by
Bishop Laud in 17th century England. Remember that as far as we know water torture was first invented by the Reformed elders torturing Mennonites. That Book of Martyrs is not full, constantly added to by Jacobo Timerman's, Prisoners, and Frankl, to the current Ghost Plane inventory of CIA rendition, see the Prologue.
It is a polity of the prog-lib-evangel to not name the thing. Too fundamentalist. Hugo Assman provides a symbol of all this in his name and function. But the seductions of the church and its mission as Hugo Assman constructs of the Jesuit Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome were visited long before by Hawthorne who made his main practice the sin of the condemned. What is Assman's sin that Evangels practiced? Liberation, which in reverse means slavery to the world.
You think North American evangelicals innocent because they empowered Rios Montt's genocide in the guise of faith. Eradicating communism among the Maya of Guatemala, killing 86,000, dispossessing a million refugees starting about 1982, prepared for by the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala when evangelicals were involved in relief efforts (see Rodney A. Coeller), efforts of the Global Mind to eradicate tribal identity and government for homogenized form adds earthquakes in Haiti's earthquake and the Sandy hurricane as social experimentation betas, group controls caused by the vaunted earthquake machines run by elites, vs. drones and "suicides," missing microbiologists, which prepare and follow Montt's conviction of genocide, set aside judicially, but not retried because of mental incompetence. Ev's support presidents whose special forces cut the bullets out of Afgan villagers after killing them, the new tool for stability (Jeremy Scahill). FEMA also trains and recruits pastors for these planned emergencies. Even Lutherans had repatriated themselves to Rome and all looked ready for the mounting of the Beast. By 2015-16 nearly every evangelical leader had been to the White House or to Pope Francis to swear allegiance: Joel Osteen, Nick Hall at Together 2016; Kenneth Copeland, James Robison all Reset. An ecumenical wave swallowed the Southern Baptists. It's no effort to track these hussys for heresy not Hussites burned at the stake. Powers were so strong that the Dutch Reformed apologized forgiveness from the Mennonites and the Prime Minister of Canada apologized to the First Nations. The blood that cried out before the throne for revenge: how long before you avenge our blood on those who dwell on earth, is that's why Ev's nose was cut off? Then come the ears.
Divorce from the peasant life in the intellectual makes theologians seek relevance and authenticity, which they try to foster by sociology, engaging what they think are the poor and needy of the world to enlighten them. Evangelicals eager to befriend presidents, politicians and corporations from Nixon to Carter to Reagan to the born again Bill Clinton and George Bush, or accept the Vatican apostles of world government and disestablishment of Protestant seminaries must feel as inferior to those above them as they feel superior to those below. Supported by Billy Graham to ensure the patina of the evangelical, every one of these powerful give Illuminati hand signs of their true affiliation, cover one eye, shoot the goat, make the OK sign, form hands into pyramids. You need to see literally everybody you think well of in politics and entertainment:
Any peasant can believe, but an intellectual hardly can. Sensational claims made against ancient texts seem to require the epithet artificial, like artificial intelligence say, vs. organic intelligence which is the true contradictory human intelligence. Understanding of text is a function of this contradiction. Intelligence divorced from the feeling of being human, as AI, is a crucial element of gaming outcomes of the Future Institutes implicated in controls, considered here at Artificial Intelligence is a Reptilian Brain Function, not something at all clear. Do you understand that Bultmann or Roland Barthes in the original, or Walter Benjamin in a language you know, or Gershom Scholem interpreting Benjamin interpreting Paul Klee's angel is pretty much the way theology works, except this example is in literature and art and nobody has to die for the interpretation? I never got the point of deducing (defacing) the authorship of text from contradictions of style (Taking Down the Elder) one, two or even three thousand years later, whether Genesis, Homer or Beowulf, subjecting text to editors who lack intuition and imagination to be other than what they are, artificial intelligences who spiritualize text out of existence, let alone the characters in the text. This is essentially the conflict in American constitutional law, whether to read it as a historical veracious document or to reinterpret and rewrite into it the license of every sociology the times dictate. Can theologians handle symbolic speech? Did Renan exist? To me the text is given, so get on with life, but as Stephen Spender says of the moods of Weimar Millenials in Berlin, German intellectuals accepted an orthodoxy of the Left which influenced "theater, the novel, the cinema and even music and painting" (World On Worlds, 119).
Political crowns cause errors of judgment, induce custom. All opposition is supposed to forge a compromise middle, right? Isn't that good Hegelian doctrine, analysis by synthesis? Polar opposites? Magnetism? The law of the excluded middle leads to the forced choice middle. Because the two don't get along sanctimony forges a compromise. So what is the source of dissension and opposition of all these ideas? church and world, male and female, or just the good suspense needed to move a plot? Milton had trouble making the good appealing, but not the evil. The source of guilt of the sanctified is their inability to be a good crook, the same as not looking in the rear view mirror or being situationally aware like any cop or athlete. Because if you learn one thing over time it's that the greatest are the least, meaning that our leaders in every walk are so fallacious that they must excel in duplicity. There is none righteous no not one, ho, ho. But bosses don't admit anything. It's the children who suffer. You can find this out from Ezekiel's Vision of Abominations who sees through a hole in the wall the elders lighting incense and worshiping snakes. It says Jerusalem but it is Washington that goes miles down to the mag-lev trains and hybrid warehouses. Evangelicals will say its the Jews, but it's the Evangelicals and whoever else who can fool with the top princes. Those visible like all of us, reveal their contradictions every time they write. This is the Revelation of Language. Who succeeds in truth in writing? The Psalms, Isaiah, Genesis. Perry Miller Errand into the Wilderness, sometimes therefore Jonathan Edwards? But the best and brightest if known are most ridiculous.Yeats while he's writing his best lines in Cuchulain, has adorned blue hair and had an operation to get erections, the same as Freud.
Backing up carefully to cover this drunken nakedness with a robe, what do we find? Evangelicals are not suspicious of intent. Evangelical would want to think well of people but needs a date rape protection in her affairs with government, a fingernail polish to dip in her drink to tell if it has been spiked with rohypnol, GHB, ketamine. Evangelical cannot discern evil when seated at this long table among her neighbors. As the blessing is given Ev looks across and sees how Mr. Loving sits in the center with one arm around his wife and the other around his daughter. Then she feels something slide up her leg and beneath the skirt. Moving uncomfortably in the chair Ev tries to push away from the table, but there is no where to go in the tightly packed rows. That something is Mr.'s stocking foot. He has kicked off his shoe under the table and is sliding his foot up the leg, then between the legs. All the time, he keeps one arm around his wife and the other around his daughter. He jams that stocking foot under Ev's skirt, between the legs. Each time she shifts and gives him a dirty look he smiles a leering and challenging look in return. He keeps poking that foot into this private place protected only by panties and pantyhose throughout the prayer and speech (apologies to a friend to whom this actually happened). What's the cure? The proper use at table of dinner forks for presidents and corporations with their foot in Ev's crotch? Is victim-hood so deep, with such a desire to please, that Ev can't react, or is it just the tax system so that if she speaks she will lose the exemption? Bought and sold into slavery.
The Fall of Evangelicalism--The Mother-in Law of the Church
Where else can be found such combinations of Hollywood and false beauty? Vashti.
The desecration of woman much refuted by eco-feminism should not detract from the reality this symbol represents. Then there is the claim that evangelicals worship God as America. Using a woman to prefigure a people as a political event, as Ezekiel, who applies the punishment of Egyptian law for an adulteress to take away thy nose, &c. as pretext for saying so shall the Chaldeans deface all the glories and ornaments of Jerusalem, the woman symbolizes the political rape of her people. Something like this appears in the torso above where the right side wrestles with the left, the two breasts, belly and thigh represent two men wrestling for control of the one woman. If it is objectionable to cast the woman in pejorative metaphor to prefigure political events, the whore of Babylon or pillage of Jerusalem, Delilah agent of the Philistine government, Cozbi agent of Balaam, shall we dismiss the texts as animus and prejudice, reinterpret them some ingenious way or ask what they really say, for therein the woman is plagued with all all of civilization's sins.
The woman is the vessel of life. Without the woman there is no life. So what shall we say, that the only way to communicate with a man, whose heart is this hard, this deceived, is to do it through the one thing he must have and cannot do without, a woman? The prophets are that desperate to show a man to himself that they mercilessly deface the only good a man can know in his life, a woman. For truly all the judgments of a woman are against the man, but he would never tolerate the judgment against himself. A man denies everything, arrogates to himself all power and will. So how communicate with him? Through the woman, same way he gets born, lives and dies. Does he get it even when his mad despair destroys the world?
So what is a proper theory of deception, seduction attributed to the woman?
Note: The quotation by John Stam at the top is edited slightly, removing "roman" from empire and "imperial" from cult and "against the church" as the last desperate assault." because the current issue is not Rome and its imperium and it is against more than the church. the proper quote should read:
"This is when the devil decides to create the Roman Empire (13:1-3) and the imperial cult (13:4; 11-15) as his last, desperate assault against the church. Thus John clearly demonizes the Roman Empire and informs all those tempted to accommodate to the religion of the empire that if they join in that worship, they will be involved in devil worship."
October 2016. A Letter to Irene Foulkes. Tony De La Rosa. Interim Executive Director, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Ricardo Foulkes Beery, musical bio
Rodney A. Coeller. Beyond the Borders: Radicalized Evangelical Missionaries in Central America Franz J. Hinkelammert. Liberation Theology in the Economic and Social Context of Latin America. in Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity, and the Americas, 25-52 Tr. Elizabeth Wing.From the 1950s through the 1980s. American University 2012. PDF.
José Enrique Ramírez Kidd. Alterity and Identity in Israel: The [ger] in the Old Testament. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999.
Dayton Roberts. One Step Ahead. 1996.
AE Reiff. Sky Shadows
Randal David Smith. Rethinking the Latin America Mission: Utilizing Organizational History To Inform the Future. Asbury Theological Seminary 2001. PDF
Randal David Smith. Rethinking the Latin America Mission: Utilizing Organizational History To Inform the Future. Asbury Theological Seminary 2001. PDF
Finding the Path. Stories from My Life. Harry W. Strachan
The Inescapable Calling, R. Kenneth Strachan. A Review
Richard T. Foulkes, Evangelical Missions Quarterly (http://www.emqonline.com/), Apr 01, 1966, Volume 2:3, pp. 157-62. "The Cost of Identification." Contemporary Composers in Costa Rica
Ricardo
Foulkes,
a leading pianist in Costa
Rica, has commented that "in it
[String and Piano Trio] Gutierrez demonstrates a talent potentially as fine
as....
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To run afoul of the institutions where people encountered others like themselves conforming should not deny their value on the path wherever it leads. The Presbyterian congregations of Philadelphia afford such reference, for there is the path that leads to the path, even if those on the way only travel apart. The fault must lie with our memories which retain recognition of both. Among families and their foibles redemption discovered by the Spirit of Yahweh reigns and rules to this purpose in the "conflict between Yahweh as God of the exodus and the surrounding idols of oppression" (Stam, Pilgrimage) that Assmann objected to. Arguing that the church is a massive irrelevance would prevent the very intervention that produces the first hand experience that is the end of all human desiring, when Yahweh invests the natural with His spirit. This is the height of intervention. People invested with intervention are not people formed by wherever they went to seminary, law school, med school, business school, those "other children."
Further Note: there were real issues behind all the trivial ones. Below find a short collection of them.
V. JFK in Costa Rica
This was another aspect of that soujourn.
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| Eruption of Irazu |
A Photo Essay of President Kennedy's 1963 Visit to Costa Rica, which complete text appeared as Sky Shadows @ Jack.
The end and sequel of this voyage, Remembering Jose Donoso, is here.
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| 1. Presidential motorcade down Avenida Central |
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| 3. The street after motorcade passed |
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| 2. Motorcade |
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| 4. Dean Rusk walks to the podium |
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| 5. American ambassador's residence. JFK speaks. |
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| 6. Greeting Americans at ambassador's residence after speech |
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| People watch the Virgin pass |
The statues were carried in reverence, as in a vocation. A girl half the size of those around her wears a red scarf, (below) a son in a blue shirt holds onto his father’s hair..."head scarves of women walking with the floats, faces of police protecting them, impassive ushers carrying the images on poles, the Holy Mother’s gown embroidered in gold with vines and flowers, the faces of children in cradles at her feet.."
The Holy Mother’s gown embroidered in gold with vines and flowers, the faces of children surround her in cradles at her feet.
The dozen or so slides lay dormant in archival sheeting more than forty years. The head scarves of women walking with the floats, faces of police protecting them, impassive intent ushers carried the images on poles. This man seems an advance guard.
"Priests in white surplice lead the float of the Savior. Corn plants embroider his robe, garlands of pink lilies and roses at his feet, a diadem on his head. Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die seems to be the message The cross on his left shoulder is enameled in black with inlays, the heads of the priests are bowed, arms folded. A Cardinal in red walks between. A girl half the size of those around her wears a red scarf, a son in a blue shirt holds onto his father’s hair."
Priests in white surplice lead the float of the Savior.The cross on his left shoulder is enameled in black with inlays, the heads of the priests are bowed, arms folded. A Cardinal in red walks between.
Guide ropes, wires. Caps with the guard's badges. Corn plants embroider his robe, garlands of pink lilies and roses at his feet, a diadem on his head. Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die.
"I count myself the fish who took the hook and was caught, Jonah who turned the light off and watched his pupils dilate in the dark. For among people all different I left on this first exploration without the help of God. But even in the sea, darkness dawns. I went natural and when it was done got spit back up. It is dark in the fish where I was made a poet. As they flee the sky shadows above so this fled from me when I did seek. Following this pursuit conceived in the secret place at ten, I would have caught tropicals in the Amazon. The colors that swam in those pools later attracted me to mudslip and turn. But clay does not ask, why have you made me thus? Fish, butterflies, flowers, it could have been stars. As Melville says in chapter one, “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.”
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| Across from the Church of God building in Limon where George stayed |
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| Motorcade 2. above |
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| 6. above |
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| Street after Irazu |
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| 3. Above. Street After the Motorcade |
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| After the motorcade, BxW. |
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| 3. above, again |
There were even more people out city wide for Holy Week than for the President, all close up, the parades, the embassy, the floats, the processions that went 15 miles from San José to Cartago, some people walking barefoot. I started walking early Good Friday at dawn, not to Cartago, but to every barrio of San José. Taking pictures with a Brownie camera elicited dirty looks so I didn’t much. The dozen or so slides lay dormant in archival sheeting, head scarves of women walking with the floats, faces of police protecting them, impassive ushers carrying the images on poles, the Holy Mother’s gown embroidered in gold with vines and flowers, the faces of children in cradles at her feet. These are right next to the slides of the face of the man who appears under Kennedy’s arm, a lucky shot, the President’s face framed by the American flags they were waving. The man has bushy eyebrows, a black moustache, a beard, a kind of top hat. It is not Lincoln.
An ocean of faces stretches the distance. The two parades become one in the slides, half are of each. Priests in white surplice lead the float of the Savior. Corn plants embroider his robe, garlands of pink lilies and roses at his feet, a diadem on his head. Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die seems to be the message The cross on his left shoulder is enameled in black with inlays, the heads of the priests are bowed, arms folded. A Cardinal in red walks between. A girl half the size of those around her wears a red scarf, a son in a blue shirt holds onto his father’s hair. The President and the volcano, parrots in the park at Limón, the pastel shacks and close woven barrios, the mountains around the city, the coffee beans on the road, Ricardo, Ruth and Ladoit Stevens and their children are still impressions bright as consciousness. I stayed with the Stevens family for two weeks after that first Limón trip. They made me welcome among the small sons of the champion wrestler, Steve. His boys could chin 15 times on a bar.
Spit Back
In and among these events I was hunting tropical fish with blue and gold fins at the base of the Irazú volcano. The streams of the national park beneath the mount in Cartago, at the Basilica, are full of them. It was the closest I came to my dream as a ten year old to catch tropical fish in the Amazon, unless I count myself the fish who took the hook and was caught, Jonah who turned the light off and watched his pupils dilate in the dark. For among people all different I left on this first exploration without the help of God. But even in the sea, darkness dawns. I went natural and when it was done got spit back up. It is dark in the fish where I was made a poet. As they flee the sky shadows above so this fled from me when I did seek. Following this pursuit conceived in the secret place at ten, I would have caught tropicals in the Amazon. The colors that swam in those pools later attracted me to mudslip and turn. But clay does not ask, why have you made me thus? Fish, butterflies, flowers, it could have been stars. Vision followed the way alternate accounts of our lives go to the Amazon or Grand Canyon or grow herbs in Tibet, contemplatives in paint, earth and high fire. As Melville says in chapter one, “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.” I‘d have been in Chile for Allende’s depose as much as I was in Dr. King’s black south in 1968 for his. But I don’t chose the tale. It’s dangerous to write of living. Facts can be wrong. Ricardo was 27 at the time, on the thinking side of the mission, as its leaders. After a Bible study in the early days of his acquaintance he said to me, “you know about the muse.” I do.
My return was a regurgitation. I was gone within hours of receiving the news my brother had died. I was now the oldest son. When I got back to the offices, cleaned out my desk, Donoso, my roommate from Managua, appeared suddenly among the looming bosses with immense sorrow and compassion on his brow. I can only liken it to the look of the captain in Crane’s Open Boat as he hung over the water jar. When I returned to Philadelphia, at the church where my brother lay, Fred Phillips appeared in coat and tie, who I ridden back and forth to classes with time and again, who took senior philosophy as a freshman. I was given a hand in the swallowing. During the six hour layover on the first leg of return, in Panama City, told in Remembering José Donoso, the Chilean writer guided me through the outskirts of sheol with a taxi tour of the Canal zone and the locks in the dead of night. Then, the LORD commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land. So that’s how it feels to be born of the spirit. Wind is greater than water.
Cited:
Allen Dwight Callahan. “Revelation 18: Notes on Effective History and the State of Colombia.” In Walk in the Ways of Wisdom: Essays in honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (2003), 279.
Joan Kidd. Wainwright Ch 11. The Transformation of Society.
Ofelia Ortega. “Where the Empire Lies, People Suffer, They Are Exploited, and Life Becomes Death,” 43.
Ricardo, Richard T. Foulkes (1936-2006) graduated Julliard (’50, piano), took a doctorate at the University of Strasbourg, was New Testament professor at the Seminario Biblico Latinamericano, then Universidad Bíblica Latinoamericana (UBL). Two of his books are in print, El Apocalipsis De San Juan: Una lectura desde américa latina: Nueva Creación/Grand Rapids:Eerdmans (1989) and Marcos: Guillermo Cook (1996). He is called “a leading pianist in Costa Rica.”
