The Fall of the Latin America Mission.
John Stam, Apostle to Central America,
Ricardo Foulkes, Friend of the Muse,
Seminario Biblico Latinamericano /
JFK in Costa Rica
 |
| 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.
Rhinotomy of the church.
The Mother-in Law of the Church.
The Elders of
Infamy, of military, corporate background.
Collusion with corporate/state opinions
The Theology of Liberation
Ascension and Resurrection Life in the Spirit
Usurper
Jesuit Disorder of Central America?
The Beast
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.
I
learned Spanish and customs in the publishing house by day and roomed at
night in the empty men’s dorm of the seminary. Classes did not begin
till March. The amenities were cots, cold water showers, toilets without
seats and a washboard to wash clothes. Some weekends I read Dostoevsky
nonstop, Crime and Punishment in 18 hours, Tolstoy, War and Peace
in a day and a half, listening to a portable radio. When the pastoral
students returned I played ping pong into the night with the enthusiast
Ciceróne Cárdenas. Sometimes
I would go shopping for ping pong balls and get them on
first try, but other times, not having the right name, even though the
shop keeper knew what I wanted he would stand unknowing while I enacted
a game in the air to our entertainment, then I would
get them, two at a time for we used them up with vigor, Cicerone crying out
great yells of the score. Once the cafeteria served boiled eggs in cream sauce,
but nobody died. Breakfast was bread and coffee, but the coffee was the
best in the world, the only comparison being the coffee served on the
Left Bank in Paris, the freshest possible. Lunch was rice, every now and then mixed with sausage. One
classmate brought his bottle of olive oil to the table. The rice and
sausage, olive oil, a kind of yellow saffron rice sometimes, cooked in
big pots with black pepper were as good as the coffee.
Seminario
Students from Harlem, Puerto Rico, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador,
Chile
(roommate Antonio Renifgo), Boliva, José María Abrëu from Caracas,
three Kuna from the San Blas islands off the coast of Panama and
others arrived to begin the new term. The further south the origin, perhaps the greater the animus to
North America. In the beginning in January the students were on break and I had the Annexo all to myself, the first visitor was a Panamanian
pastor one weekend with wrists as thick as ankles from cutting cane. We prayed together in a mixture of languages, but he said later that I
was the first norteamericano he had ever prayed with!
 |
| Students, 1963 |
 |
| 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.
The first effect of that sojourn was I threw over the degree of Industrial Management for literature, linguistics and aesthetics and walked on to play D1 tennis as a senior. At Iowa this aesthetic judgment developed thanks to Rhodes Dunlap,
Geoffrey Hartman, Donald Justice, Rosalie Colie, Murray Kreiger, John
Huntley and more. Especially Rhodes Dunlap in addition to three
seminars and remaining in contact throughout the years was my pass into
the Folger Library later when, while employed at NASA in the summer of
1967, I could not stand NASA and walked into the Folger for readership
on the spur of the moment. Asked for a name I gave Rhodes Dunlap and got
immediate entry. He had been a resident fellow in 1951 after editing The Poems of Thomas Carew for Oxford Press in 1949. Geoffrey Hartman, among the most eminent literary scholars of the century was at Iowa for
two years then, and in his class in the depth of winter, among the boots
and heavy coats, but unbeknownst to him, in that first assignment of a
free paper, Blake's Tyger discovered to me the insight that now plays
itself out in every text. After that I presented a sheaf of poems to George Starbuck to walk on in the poetry
workshop and drew the Donald Justice section, whose "poems
weren't just good; they were great." He gave a valuable instruction:
"these lines are good," he said, "why aren't the rest?" He was writing Night Light then. Archibald Coolidge Jr. was the first to urge that paper on The Tyger be published. Murray Krieger taught me the first principle of poetry from Vida, "come, strip the ancients." To him literature was the "primary means of freeing ourselves from the constraints of ideology and arbitrary beliefs." He was composing his Ekphrasis at that time. Rosalie Colie's
presentation of science and imagination in the Renaissance was
unforgettable. She was then finishing her magnificent Paradoxia Epidemica then. They were at the top of their game. Literature at Iowa had a poetic feel. Attracted to these people of dignity and imagination, as
if all I had to do was to be in their presence to receive their gifts to
activate my own, all these events I take now as a down payment of what
might happen when the
lights discover that unknown birthright as a new
creature. John Huntley, consummate teacher of Milton, gave an announcement in one class of a clearing house recruiting for black colleges that landed me a job at Fayetteville State and so I was off.
Just so you know, the author of this new creature is the Son of the
Highest, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. There is a picture of the
families gathered to honor Henry Mack at his 90th. I am sitting on the
first row, age 2 or so. I seek to see in the faces of my grandchildren
at their early ages the same reckoning of families that it has been mine
to receive and give. To be given a place in this transmission with a woman of Texas whose family of the west is equally strong has been an honor. That these children are the
same to me as I was to Henry is beyond expectation. The adventure of
discovery that is our life has no title high or low that equals being
human. You cannot know and others cannot say what you are made of until
you do. The hedge of elite society is only a web to be broken. I am
not a part of any of these mutual admiration societies.
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.
In
the interim after that time the Presbyterian
Church of the Covenant in Bala-Cynwyd folded. It is now a day care
center in an old stone building but with no mission
furniture or pews. Fayetteville State College became a university and
was
absorbed into the U of North Carolina World system. Bishop College,
where I was given tenure in 1985 closed in 1986. The University of
Texas and Austin became a new war college center, honeycombed with Dell
and Intel. The Experimental Drug and Herb Garden was bulldozed. The Latin America Mission
was deconstructed and absorbed into the United World Mission.
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.
II. Demythology. Limon.
The
biggest detraction of
theologues when they invite you into their circle is their acceptance of anti-historical thinking which they call analysis. They are elsewhere called Little Types.
I say that from the point of view of first becoming a poet and working
inside words and faces so long I eventually knew the secrets (of the words)
firsthand. Hence I know that the words of
scripture are way past finding out, way more profound than can be
explained even by
poetic means, which are the highest of all. In the many
far-fetched critical interpretations and emendations of text presented in Taking Down the Elder, "rabbinic
exposition...will be found in repeated instances to remove difficulties
for the solution of which the modern critic has had resort to textual alteration" (Ezekiel. Soncino Press, xvi). I wrote A Poetical Reading of the
Psalms of David to show, without the baggage, what comes down to
the child
mind-view of the obvious, for the child's praise will still the enemy and the avenger.
Who
but
the child would think in Psalm 8 that since the fingers are a part of the hand over which the man is given dominion that is a promise of space exploration? The word is always in the likeness of a man. Two notions of speech and
silence may occur: At times they are silent, at times they speak," which indicate speech without sound" (Note to Maimonides, Guide, III, vii, 22 [See also The Burnt Book. Marc-Alain Ouaknin]. To know the word is a matter of this haste-pause, swiftness and pause, speech and silence which
is the point of departure of the Chariot and Creation, of which
Maimonides says, "do not expect or hope to hear from me after this
chapter a word on this subject...for all that could be said on it has
been said, though with great difficulty and struggle (II, vii, 23), for the matter of our faith involves the "wheels, the living creatures and the wheel-work." (Ezekiel. Soncino Press, xii). So see why Wittgenstein says it cannot be said.
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).
The Jesuits who ruled the evangelicals and feminists were not going to fight against the empire of the reformation Protestants gone to hybrid seed or the novus orbis empire or the World Council of Churches. They planted them! Catholic leadership became one with Protestant, if superior. Peasant Protestant
charismatics had to be made subject to the same controls as Catholic peasants and then they got to go the Vatican and get their pictures taken with the Pope.This was presaged by the Foulkes before the Elijah List of 2016 when charismatics went in
droves and got pics with Pope Francis. Teaching de Chardin at the seminary was
prescient too, for Bishop Ratzinger, Francis' predecessor, that is, Pope Benedict XVI, had taken Teilhard's
vision of the cosmos
as a "living host" and begun lighting the Vatican with solar
panels! [Ha.] An even better take on the inherited teachings of these crazy fallen angels was Paul Tillich [who] wrote that "all
institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic." Chris Hedges comments, "Reinhold Niebuhr
asserted that no institution could ever achieve the morality of the individual.
Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when confronted with collapse,
will swiftly betray the stances that ostensibly define them. Only individual
men and women have the strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the
threat of death. And decaying institutions, including the church, when consumed
by fear, swiftly push those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from
their ranks, rendering themselves obsolete." (Truthdig. The
Suicide of the Liberal Church (2016).
I first heard in Ricardo Foulkes Jesus
demythologized New Testament class in 1963 of the upwardly mobile
praxis and nexus of accepted thought as it was revered, but he and Irene didn't get to the Vatican until 1983. As completely absurd as the Documentary Theory of Genesis, which Herman Wouk defines as an Ubu implant in This Is My God,
all demythology is a deconstruction to weaken scripture. Efficacious
ideas did came out of Strasbourg, where Ricardo took his doctorate in 1968, but I doubt he was aware that Emmanuel Levinas finished there in 1929. Levinas wrote on the distinction of intuition, lay bare the self in the other.
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.
It is probably not too much to say that John Stam was an apostle to Central America, especially if we observe the modern latitude of the term. It was all the more a loss therefore when it seemed his website Juanstam.com was taken down after his death but it seems it is being reloaded. His blogs showed a conversational and politic side of his expression. It is to be hoped in future that these will all be restored. That said, that anyone who would give a lecture or speech relating any aspect of modern theology as he relates in My Pilgrimage in Mission is ghastly in my view. It's all second hand.
 |
Blake, Great Red Dragon Beast from the sea.
|
"This is when the devil decides to create the [ ]
Empire and the [ ]cult as his last, desperate assault [ ]. Thus John clearly
demonizes Empire and those tempted to accommodate that if they join in
that worship, they will be involved in devil worship."
|
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. |
This
backgrounds our tale. But the odd thing is  |
| 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.
But the inscrutable enemy is not shy in presenting its personifications of vanity. Compare the two assertions pictured here.
In My Pilgrimage in Mission Stam reports that
"the seminary’s credibility in evangelical and Pentecostal circles
declined to almost zero."
 |
Hugo Assmann feeling his tooth
|
"In June 1978, Hugo and the team asked me
to design and edit the next DEI book. I chose as subject the conflict between
Yahweh as God of the exodus and the surrounding idols of oppression, and I
proposed a plan for the book...[but] a God who acts in history Hugo argued,
this would be an “interventionist,” like the imperialists. I responded that
this was precisely the Gospel message and that to deny this would land us in
deism...For Hugo, Yahweh is the god who does nothing; the real god is the
revolutionary spirit of the proletariat. All this, I said, did not sound like
Latin American liberation theology but rather like European
liberalism...Meanwhile, in the seminary major changes were occurring, very much
influenced by Hugo Assmann. I tried to resist in faculty meetings, memos,
and conversations but found little support. Colleagues who a few years before
had endorsed the school’s historic evangelical convictions now promoted the
opposite and did so not through any serious theological or ethical debate, but
by a takeover of power, organized in the corridors of DEI. In early 1980 Plutarco Bonilla resigned from the seminary, and I began to consider also
taking that step.
All Who Get Its Favor Serve Its Ends
Of course this did not happen in a vacuum but was
prepared by circumstances like desiring
"To put our seminary at the academic level of the
best seminaries on the continent" which meant incorporating social ethics,
moral issues, "“The Bible and Political Systems” (1972), “Black Culture
and Christian Faith” (1973) Women in Biblical Thought (which then became a
regular course), Teilhard de Chardin....Some of the theses for the Licenciatura
degree were equal in quality to those of the best seminaries anywhere
in the continent" (John Stam, My Pilgrimage in Mission. "The Seminary
Becomes Latin American").
I got John Stam's dissertation, Episcopacy in the
Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (Basel 1964, 1969), written a whole
decade before I wrote my own, and appreciate its cogent expression. His blogs are politic, and there's
much to be said for collegiality of faculties and movements, except they form a
pecking order where chickens line up for approval. Thinkers are herded into
prominent positions by powers. Compare the Yale faculty when Bloom,
Hartman, De Man, etc were all in residence together, maintaining their own
points of view, discoursing even while Bloom was molesting coeds and De Man
hiding his Nazi sympathies. Hartman however escaped the Rothschild reunion of the Kindertransport boys who they had hosted, citing collegial duties. Assmann (think what a difference were he named Asman instead)is photographed with an index finger
in his mouth and must have been charismatic to lure both Foulkes and
Stam. Once however you learn the finger in the mouth and other signs of initiates they self
identify. Both conservatives and liberals support radicals, like Wm. Buckley threatening to punch
Gore Vidal on TV. Wink at it, they're on the same team. They're
all on the same tearm, no matter who you yoke violently together.
Further down the
pyramid, pettiness and gossip chapter and verse. The cost accountant in
the Latin American Mission in those years, Bill Dunn, demeaned his
associate,
the champion wrestler, for his alleged slowness. Even more absurd, one
missionary couple assured the observer who said he would teach, that maybe high school, but college was out.
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.
In the absence of straight talk about the underlying
causes of political/intellectual affairs Dayton Roberts said, "One of the
first things Ken [Strachan] had done was to activate a policy of
"Latinamericanization" which had attracted a number of potential leaders
from the community into missionary service and had pushed several Latins into
key positions of leadership" (180). This sounds like a long overdue
provision and logical, to transfer ownership to the culture involved, but it is
the contradiction that brought the dissolution. Stam says the "moderate,
intelligent fundamentalism... almost total missionary domination of the
seminary created considerable alienation on all sides, blocked necessary
transformation, and created frequent problems. In the mid-1950s a new generation
of missionary-professors began to take these challenges very seriously."
This however concerned dating policies among students, like the pledge of
Wheaton College, not to drink, smoke, swear, dance, play cards, but that student
discipline was complicated by the fact that the leaders of the seminary were
North Americans. "The formation of a seminary genuinely Latin American in
its leadership, ethos, and thought was a dream to which a group of us were
committed, but a conservative sector of the faculty felt it was too soon for
nationals to take over." A tradition of assigning student-teachers was
begun, "and helped clear the path to a national rector and eventually a
thoroughly Latin American cultural identity for the seminary." These "progressive
evangelicals" fed by a " radical evangelical theology" from
Fuller Seminary were a step more inclusive than the moderate fundamentalists.
"Soon new, brilliant Latin American professors were joining the
faculty." Hence by 1967 a "greatly expanded vision for the seminary...to
put our seminary at the academic level of the best seminaries on the
continent" began, meaning incorporation of social ethics, moral issues.
"“The Bible and Political Systems” (1972), “Black Culture and Christian
Faith” (1973) women in biblical thought (which then became a regular course),
Teilhard de Chardin.... Some of the theses for the Licenciatura degree were equal
in quality to those of the best seminaries anywhere in the
continent."
Like the Luciferian Society of the poet Tony Tost, who ended up writing (Damnation) for TV, the evangelicals seduced by
ritual, money, power and authority were told they were not going to be profound thinkers
without these controls. They had too little
imagination. People seduced by Assmann, he had
P-O-W-E-R from the V-A-T-I-C-A-N, like all the later charismatics had their pictures posed with Francis.
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.
 |
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 | |
|
(NOTE, The links to juanstam.com on ticosnet have been taken down)
Teólogo,
profesor universitario, escritor de varios libros y artículos de blog.
Apasionado por el libro de Apocalipsis. Conoce más ...
Ubicación: Blogs · Blogs de Juan Stam. Publicado por: juanstam, 09/10/2008. docu/Stamblog 1. El método del restaurante 1.5.07 2. Jesús tenía sentido de ...
Blogs de Juan Stam, Por juanstam el 17/07/2020. En tiempos de pandemia, Dios nos llama a la reflexión sobre nuestras vidas y sobre la sociedad en que ...
Publicado por: juanstam, 23/06/2008. LIBERATION THEOLOGY Historical Context and Sources: The theology of liberation was a response to a very specific ...
Juan Stam 3. JuanStam01.jpg (33 KB
El Apocalipsis y las epidemias<br>- Blogs de Juan Stam
Publicado por: juanstam,
17/07/2020. El Apocalipsis y las epidemias. (abril de 2009, actualizado
en julio del 2020). Siempre que ocurran fenómenos trágicos, ...Publicado por: juanstam: 17/07/2020
III. Ricardo Foulkes. The European Liberal Mind. Liberation and Feminist Hermaneutics.
If we call John Stam an apostle in the same token we calll Ricardo Foulkes a freind of the muse. He is obviously that in his musical career and in his befriending along the way those of like temperment. His teaching was personable and enthusiastic and accessible as was his life. He and his wife Irene, an important thinker herself, would entertain his students in their home with much hospitality. If aspects of his life were caught up in the prevailing social mileau in which they both became involved that is practically an axiom of leadership. That it was misguided is only a point of view below, uttered by someone equally or even more caught up the revolutions of thought and action. We judged a man by his heart and therefore call Ricardo a friend of the muse.
Ricardo took me to his weightlifter's gym in a San José blanketed
with black volcanic ash that erupted in the days after President Kennedy toured
the streets, as much outside ordinary time as Ricardo in my memory. I
was still talking to him as a survivor when I wrote this. The President
had traveled to Costa Rica for the Alliance For Progress, to meet with
the heads of states at the National Theatre in San José, but the
extraordinary part of his trip was the motorcade down Avenida Central.
In those days security was light. He rode in a convertible with a
motorcycle escort and about six vehicles in all. It was a beautiful day.
People waved American flags with huge enthusiasm. The crowd lined
both sides of the Avenue, half a million people contained on the sides
by police and guards, but the day had no danger in it, at least from
them. The outpouring of affection moved the President, you can see the
elation on his face, but more so smiles and joy on peoples’ faces. 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.
Ricardo Foulkes
--I knew and liked "Dick" Foulkes, attended his NT class, Renan to Bultmann, went
weightlifting with him, visited in his home, went to the opera with him, and
attended various Bible studies, with conversations along the way, so it is
galling to hear Coeller (Beyond the Borders, 93) describe this
concert pianist graduate of Julliard as a "piano player." I also took
Irene's class in NT Greek. He was the first person I can recall who spoke of the muse to me, which I took for granted since I did even then maybe believed there is no muse or unconscious except perhaps as a way of manipulation and speaking.
Karla Koll, professor of history, mission and religion at the Latin
American Biblical University (UBL), says the threshold for the Foulkes came in
1984—which is "coincident" with their sabbatical year (1983) as
postdocs at the Pontifical Biblical Institute Vatican College in Rome. In
addition to Koll's document of the
“Struggling for Solidarity: Changing Mission Relationships between the Presbyterian
Church (USA) and Christian Organizations in Central America during the 1980s, ”
a Ph.D. diss. at Princeton Theological Seminary (2003), she cites in her Posthumous
letter to Irene Foulkes, that Seminario Biblico became the Latin American
Biblical University (UBL) in 1997 after a call for an end to U.S. intervention
and for support for the self-determination of the peoples of the region was
rejected by the Mission," and the Presbyterians came to the rescue!
"In 1984 you befriended me. At that point you and Ricardo had come to the
conclusion that you could no longer stay with the Latin American Mission, The
Latin American Mission refused to speak out. At that point the SBL asked the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to support you and Richard as mission
co-workers."
No
I did not know any of these things in the moment or after, but
gradually they crept into my awareness from the pain of seeing so many
things undone. Too sensitive to loss perhaps, but loss gives compassion
and understanding. Coeller says that after their years in Strasborg the
Foulkes'
experienced culture shock on their return to San Jose. At that time in
1968 when he was
finishing his dissertation Ricardo had written to me with interest from
Strasbourg where I was teaching at the black Fayetteville State. He
thought I was involved in the very activity those
liberationists call their sacred praxis, "rousing the poor."
His letter was interested in the black revolution and in
the black college. The weakness of liberal and
evangelical purity is to justify themselves, to identify with "the poor" in
order to judge themselves superior to the morality of the world. But from the point of view of the Black students, time after time I was asked if I was going to write a book about them. That was their sterotype. I said no I wasn't. I never have, but I made them write their own statements of their lives( the Red Rose). Who is
corrupt like the biggest idolater on the planet
calling the last Trump a fool, revealing the Illuminati status of both.
We are desperate for an openly vulgar and immoral leader. I had read Kierkegaard's Attack well before these events, had my own copy along with The Phenomenon of Man (1959)
for all the good it did. But the evangelical weakness
and desire for power is part of the large liberal malaise. Charles
Cairns later gave me an A in acoustic phonetics at Texas because he
concluded
me a militant, and James Ayres rendered me a TA two days before classes
began at Texas because when Warner Barnes fronted for me, Ayres said
(of my removal
from Fayetteville), "we have to cover for these guys."
Ricardo Foulkes
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.”
especially Ricardo's performances of Rachmaninoff on Soundcloud.
Ricardo was a theologian in 1963 with the LAM, as described in Sky Shadows.
I use his Spanish name, but he was familiarly called Dick Foulkes,
graduate of Julliard, Richard T. Foulkes, concert pianist, author of El Apocalipsis de San Juan. In his letter of 1968 he writes from Strasbourg and proposes to meet any number of places. I was in his avant garde theology
class, Renan, Schwitzer, Bultmann. It was fun to puzzlingly read Bultmann in
Spanish in
the Seminary library in the evening. Ideologies later curtailed Ricardo's connection with the Mission, as the
Wheaton archives indicate, but I haven't viewed them. Orthodoxies of all
kinds exist. The one most urgent today is not political or social, but
scientific, which our friend Kurk Wold
explores. People in Pop get it and produce films and series that
predictively program all the counterfeit Christian doctrines, the latest being the
Resurrection, that starts Sunday, March 9 on netwook TV. Lucifer is on on Monday night. They beat Tom Horn's prediction and announcement of his asteroid by two years! The biggest apparent
challenge to orthodoxy among the professors of the LAM in 1963
was the announcement in Inter-Varsity's mag that some of its
associates were speaking in tongues. Aside from student Marta Cabrera etc. at the Seminario no
one at the Mission did this, so I raised it with one of the profs and
got a pretty cold shoulder. Among charismatics, tongues is as orthodox as
Bultmann among liberals, Barthes among the nouveau riche in letters,
Melman at the ASU institute for Higher Channeling, and
total depravity among the Reformed. At the charismatic Eagle's Nest of Scottsdale speaking in
tongues was like saying the Lord's Prayer.
If you think
you're not lit, no problem, it's
a
burden to carry light if you think you are. The mantle is heavy, the cloak makes warm.
Anybody can get excited and mock Baal in the anointing of the moment,
but then what? Get out of town? That is the place we will truly meet, Going Out of Jerusalem (p. 17f) unless it is before
takeoff.
In the four intervening years since I had known Riccardo, I had finished the M.A. at Iowa and taught two years at
Fayetteville State. He had completed his doctorate in France. His letter
raised contradictions the first time I read it, and still does for its
offhanded outside/inside connotations of "the Negro college."
The biblical gospel though was held by many students and faculty at Fayetteville in high
regard, except I guess Ricardo would say, the black gospel, which is a
strain. Nobody took or takes racists for anything but what they are in
such communities, to be avoided and resisted.
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.
I think my letter read something like the following which I remember from thinking about these situations once again:
"The confusion of identity in missionaries who live their
adult lives in other cultures, Latin America, and speak of themselves as if
they were Latin Americans, is just that. They are colonial implants who
forever and always represent the land of their birth and education, no matter
what they think they have become. They are not Indian, Mayan, speak Quechua,
or have been raised in those circumstances or anything like it. They are the priveleged. This is not to say
that their message is of colonialism per se, for they are preaching a middle Eastern religion of Jerusalem. So they are more than a step
removed from their own message."
Further in this vein the desire of John Stam and Ricardo to turn fundamentalists into evangelicals is a prescient take on what the American/world government seeks with its FUNVAX,
the vaccine for religious fundamentalism, to turn all extreme
thought into normal channels by virus dispersal. This too with all its
compartments existed in the 60's and woe to those who thought other.
Strasbourg, May 23 [1968]
Dear Andy,
You'd
be surprised - as I was - at the polysyllabic answers I was forming to
your questions in the 1st paragraph of your letter until with relief I
came to "I'm kidding." How much you were kidding I didn't know till the
2nd page.
This
may have to be forwarded to you - what with paralyzing strikes it may
not leave France for a while - but Irene and I want you to know that
we'd be so happy to see you-all. Philly, New York, Strasbourg--it adds
up, and gets interestinger. Especially this Negro college bit and the
polemic paragraph. A North Carolinian was here at the Faculte de
Theologie last yr. returned to his native Methodist Church and resigned
(by request?) after only a few months. What on earth do they define the
gospel as in those Southern churches? If you ask me, the Bible has been
1) buried and 2) ossified in most fundamentalist circles and the trouble
is not with the Bible. Your tyrannical Joseph and browbeaten Job come
from this literalistic, wooden school of interpretation, just as do
"separate but equal" rot and "we've always loved niggers - just a matter
of their knowing their place" talk. What are the goals of Black Power? Is there any vitality in the non-violent movement now that King is dead? What differences in outlook have you observed between Northern blacks and Southerns? Come ready to talk.
I
have my public defense of the thesis - turned in yesterday - on June
22, then Irene and I break away for 3 wks in Italy without kids. On
Mon.. July 15 we'll be back for 2 wks (except for July 22-25, when I'm
at a conference in Switzerland) and then's when we'd like for you to
come; stay several days if you can stand it. We'll pack and leave for
NYork about the 30th. Then Costa Rica about Sept 5. Things are roaring
there and we're anxious to share French insights with the more than 60
students.
Hope you can write us into your schedule. please come.
Your friends
Dick and Irene.
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.
Collective mind poses as
liberation for the masses, so DEI outlasted LAM. So literal minds apply
their
imitations with wooden ease, as idols say. The syllabus of the new
seminary version for 2015 offered
La esclavitud en la Biblia as a first course, ending with the
theme of the life of the slave in Huck Finn. This abstracted esclavitud
was a long way from the Exodus in that sheepish class of Ramirez-Kidd, the history of the slave in the culture of the west taught to the point of
liberation, but with no reference to B. Traven, Solzhenitsyn, Kafka.
Ramirez-Kidd's scholarship is pretty available online and interesting as a
fiction of the betrayal and devastation of humanity. Everyone
else should be appalled. Ramirez-Kidd's dissertation from Hamburg (1999)
was Alterity and Identity in Israel, the immigrant in ancient Israel but whose
interests include Greek Magical Papyri. So even though he's a native as
colonials used to say, he's been Hamburgized, made over. The French had
Vichy, the Germans Weimar and the Latins get Hamburg, Strasborg, Basel. Alterity is the central
tenet of mind control accessible in NLP, Milton Erikson and Alters in the Monarch Lineup. This
grammatical research on the alien is interested in the particularity of the
word in (German) that higher critics in entirety feed to the collective we call
Zarg, masked always as compassion for the wandering, with no awareness of immigration as a weapon. 2015 also had Daniel
Gloor doing Homosexualidad y Biblia, etc.
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."
We [African Americans] were
always seen as objects. When we started defining ourselves, it scared those who
try to control others by naming them and defining them for them;
Oppressors do not like “others” defining themselves http://www.tucc.org/talking_points.htm And if we had the “tools” to
recon, deconstruct the human text this could be said too for animals, the
foreign names placed upon them. Knowing their speech is only part prerequisite,
the other part is unlearning our own thought paradigms." It's the song in
the night and in the day that's playing all the time even as I write this." How
does it go?
It's going to be difficult
to know any of these questions or answers when the most trusted
public sources are the most corrupt, when institutions are force fed deception
to the point where they then propagate it themselves, when literally every
public, published mainstream voice is bought and paid for with without its
knowledge. Most writing is seductive and affronting in this way, pretentious,
full of posturing, and easily x-rayed. If however anybody still wants to know
the putative answers to these questions, at least what would have said had it
been written, scroll down to Letters From Fayettenam at Methane Intoxication in the World Disappearance,
the introduction of letters to my father of that period that he kept and
returned at his death. Yes I have all the letters my sons have written to me
too. What doting fools we are. Some of these are exceedingly painful outcries.
So many contradictions meet at one place and time.
Note
- "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
IV.
Fall of the Evangelical. Rhinotomy.
The Mother-in Law of the Church.
The Elders of
Infamy.
Military, corporate background.
Collusion with corporate/state opinions
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:
--"Over the past several months it has become increasingly apparent
that the elders’ vision for the
church is significantly different from the pastor’s
vision for the church and both the elders and the pastor are discerning
that the relationships have become
strained to the point that effective ministry
seems impossible and it is best to pursue separate
directions. His last Sunday with
us will be June 18th after which we will have a farewell
gathering. If you have any questions or concerns please contact your
elder."
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?
When you go into evil everything is reversed. So the man is the primary creation of God and then woman, whose affection and inclination from the curse is after the man, but the man is the genetic specialization from the woman and his whole desire is for the woman, so neither can be satisfied without the other or realized without the intent to honor their creation. To that extent the parties are introduced in their relationship, the four elements, Creator, man, woman, evil. So it is all about the woman, her seduction and the seduction of the man that form pictures of political social institutions the way the torso of a woman is sometimes sketched as the kingdom of Logres.
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."
Some Sources
Victorio Araya. God of
the Poor.
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
Elsa Tamez. The
Amnesty of Grace, bio
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....
|
Caveat: this draft is subject to improvement from new
sources solicited from whoever.
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.
 |
| Eruption of Irazu | | |
© copyright AE Reiff 2021
All
photographs below © from distribution, commercial exploitation
of content, transmission, or storage in any other website or electronic
retrieval system without express written consent.
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.
JFK in Costa Rica
Magnify with a click and double click.
"When JFK visited San Jose March 18-20 1963 for the Alliance For Progress, the volcano Irazu erupted. It took the ash some time to fall, but when it did the streets were coated each morning with gunmetal dust. His motorcade down Avenida Central through hundreds of thousands of people compounds in my memory with Easter of that year, a month later, when from early dawn I walked the streets and photographed the immense parade preparations, the crucified Christ carried on the shoulders of people with the Virgin and St. Joseph" (Remembering José Donoso).
San José was later blanketed with black volcanic ash that erupted the day President Kennedy toured the streets. At the base of the wall is written Viva Calderon Guardia, a president of Costa Rica in the 40's.
 |
| 1. Presidential motorcade down Avenida Central |
The extraordinary part of the President's reception in San José was the motorcade down Avenida Central. In those days security was light.He rode in a convertible with a motorcycle escort and about six vehicles in all. It was a beautiful day. People waved American flags with huge enthusiasm. The crowd lined both sides of the Avenue, half a million people contained on the sides by police and guards.
"The outpouring of affection moved the President, you can see the elation on his face, but more so smiles and joy on peoples’ faces. So the volcano was erupting and the president was streaming in the firmament, decorated with crepe. It was the celebration of a lifetime, but Good Friday was coming and Holy Week, tradition of a thousand years.
 |
| 3. The street after motorcade passed |
The Kennedy visit and processions of Good Friday blend together, its 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 who above the altar 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" (from Sky Shadows).
 |
| 2. Motorcade |
The face of the man who appears under Kennedy’s arm during the motorcade has bushy eyebrows, a black mustache, a beard, a kind of top hat. It is not Lincoln. The President’s face is framed by the American flags they were waving.
 |
| 4. Dean Rusk walks to the podium |
 |
| 5. American ambassador's residence. JFK speaks. |
Secretary of State Dean Rusk walks to the podium. The embassy held a reception for the President to greet all the Americans that afternoon in the ambassador’s residence, a large white columned affair.
 |
| 6. Greeting Americans at ambassador's residence after speech |
"A cicada begins to sing two weeks before Semana Santa. They lose their body weight while singing. It signals high seriousness. Driving a car or motorbike on Good Friday is discouraged. Some communities throw nails in the streets to prevent it. The President’s caravan down Avenida Central three weeks before had to go twenty miles an hour to keep from being overrun by two thousand young men in pursuit. The embassy held a reception for the President to greet all the Americans that afternoon in the ambassador’s residence, a large white columned affair. Hundreds of Americans attended" (Sky Shadows). After he spoke President Kennedy left the porch and mingled with the crowd.
The Parades of Semana Santa
 |
| People watch the Virgin pass |
The President's visit and processions of Good Friday blend together. There were even more people out city wide for Holy Week, 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 to every barrio of San José.
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.
There were more sky shadows in that journey, mirroring the surface.
"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.”
Street after a new of ash from Irazu has fallen
Sky Shadows Retrospective /
400 dpi, 4800dpi: 8finishd7400dpi7x7, clouds6
JFK in Costa Rica--as a Magical Realism Tour
 |
| Across from the Church of God building in Limon where George stayed |
 |
| Motorcade 2. above |
 |
| 6. above |
 |
| Street after Irazu |
 |
| 3. Above. Street After the Motorcade |
 |
| After the motorcade, BxW. |
 |
| 3. above, again | | | |
A cicada begins to sing two weeks before Semana Santa. They
lose their body weight while singing. It signals high seriousness.
Driving a car or motorbike on Good Friday is discouraged. Some
communities throw nails in the streets to prevent it. The President’s
caravan down Avenida Central three weeks before had to go
twenty miles an hour to keep from being overrun by two thousand young
men in pursuit. The embassy held a reception for the President to greet
all the Americans that afternoon in the ambassador’s residence, a large
white columned affair. Hundreds of Americans attended. I was traveling
on a tourist card, renewed every three months. The secret service looked
askance at it, said “you can’t come in.” I proved my citizenship by
being indignant, was given a pass. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State, spoke
from the pulpit porch of the residence, but the President left the porch
and mingled with the crowd. It was then I shook his hand. He was easy
to like if you listened to the wit of his press conferences.
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.”
