Wednesday, February 1, 2023
In bed @ 9:15, up at 4:10, half-awake, perseverating on 'Children Go Where I Send Thee.' 7 degrees out, high of 24, a clear cold day ahead, with a current wind chill of -9, ranging between -10 and +12, winds 10 to 14 mph, and gusts up to 26. Sunrise at 7:07, sunset at 5:03, 9+56.
Children, Go Where I Send Thee
Children go where I send thee,
How shall I send thee?
Well, I'm gonna send thee one by one
One for the little bitty baby
Who was born, born, born in Bethlehem
. . .
Ten for the Ten Commandments
Nine for the nine that dressed so fine
Eight for the eight that stood at the gate
Seven for the seven who never got to heav'n
Six for the six that never got fixed
Five for the five that stayed alive
Four for the four that stood at the door
Three for the Hebrew children
Two for Paul and Silas
One for the itty bitty baby
Who was born, born, born in Bethlehem
Anniversary. On this date 16 years ago, we received a call from Kitty telling us that our Dad was in the hospital and would not survive. Geri and I got airplane tickets and flew out to Phoenix to be with him, and with Kitty. As it turned out, he was probably already gone, kept alive by a heart-lung machine until we could get out there. The next morning he was taken off the machine and died, with Kitty and Jim, Geri and me, and, as best I can recall, Chrissie at his bedside. I kissed him before they disconnected him and let his body die. He was 86 years old, I was 65. What a long, fraught history both Kitty and I had with him. How we missed him when he was gone. How I miss both of them now. RIP
Hindu vigilantes carry out wave of anti-Christian violence in India: Christian evangelicals have been stepping up conversions, creating a backlash — and a political opportunity for Hindu nationalists. From an article from this morning's WaPo: "Since December, Hindu vigilantes in Chhattisgarh state in eastern India, enraged by the spread of Christianity and rallied by local political leaders, have assaulted and displaced hundreds of Christian converts in dozens of villages and left a trail of damaged churches, according to interviews with local Christians and activists and as seen during a recent trip to the area."
In April, 1998, I flew to Paris for the long Easter weekend, Holy Thursday through Easter Monday. I asked Geri to join me but she declined, not wishing to follow me from church to church all over central Paris. As I usual did on trips to Europe, I kept a journal during my visit, including notes from my flight home, of which the article I cited above reminds me:
"My seatmate on the flight home is a 37 year old evangelical missionary from Bristol, Tennessee, who lives and works in Lihool (phonetic?) India in the foothills of the Himalayas. It's near Punjab and Kashmir. The people she lives with are about 50/50 Hindus and Buddhists, no Muslims, and a couple of Sikh businessmen in the town. The Christian community is apparantly fewer than 20 in her mountain valley. She's lived and worked there 5 and 1/2 years out of the last 9. When not in India, she was home working in Tennessee, first as a UPS package handler and then as a painter - businesses, not canvasses or homes. To the Indian government, she is a "tourist," because you cannot get a visa to do missionary work. For a person to be baptized a Christian requires a government permit, with the initiate taking an oath that he or she is acting of his or her own free will. There are other Westerners living in her valley as "visitors," most in the hashish business. She is evangelical, pentecostal, charismatic, born again, and happy. She lives in a remote valley where the people gather wood for cooking their rice. She gets no mail or visitors from home. The mail is sent; it just doesn't get delivered. She does have a laptop computer and can send and receive emails. To do that, she walks 4 miles to the nearest telephone that can connect with Delhi. She has had rocks thrown at a car she was riding in with other Christians and has had poisonous plants (like poison ivy and sumac) thrown at her and some people she was talking to about Christianity. The people she was talking to were threatened by militant Buddhists (seems like an oxymoron) with having their throats cut if they forsook the Buddha for the Christ. She grew up Catholic and her family are still Catholics. Apparently it was her experience in the charismatic movement that led her out of the Catholic Church into evangelical Protestantism and to a mountain village in North India. Her name is Jolie Schunke. I was struck by what a curious coincidence it was - others would say Providence - that after 3 full days and 2 half days of pilgrimming about the Catholic churches in one of Catholicism's and Christendom's oldest seats, after spending more than 3 hours at the Easter Vigil with the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris in Notre Dame Cathedral and 2 hours with the seemingly bloodless other bishop at St. Eustache on Easter morning, and a few hours with the mysterious robed priests (?), brothers (?), and sisters (?) of the Fraternites Monastique de Jerusalem at St. Gervai-St. Potais on Good Friday & Holy Saturday, after hours and days of chasubles, suplices, mitres, croziers, monstrances, chalices, thuribles, ciboria, monumental statuary, icons, and so on, I end my journey talking for at least a few hours with a charismatic who trooped into a valley of the Indian Himalayas with little more than her Bible and her guitar. I will think of her many times in the futre and of the contrast between her and her relationship with Jesus and what I saw in Paris and see in Milwaukee. I will think of her and of the Paris trip for a long time and think of them together and as related, not separate and unrelated. She will be a part of the Paris pascal experience as, in a very different way, the decadent life of Sosua is an integral part of the Dominican Republic retreat experience. It does seem providential."
Volva to Andy today. Picked him up at the car repair shop on Richards Street. Will get the car back when Andy gets his Subaru back, hopefully, today. . . . he picked me up at 4.
Wisconsin Death Trip is a lengthy article in the February 2023 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. It describes the author's experiences driving around Wisconsin viewing and sometimes visiting homes of people with Right Wing signs on their property. It struck home not only because of the scary subject matter of which he wrote but also because I'm so familiar with the places he describes. He wrote extensively about, the Brumm family in Marinette, on the top of Lake Michigan next door to Menominee, Michigan on the UP. Sarah and Andy and I drove through these cities on our way to Traverse City to visit the McChrystals and the Keenans years ago. He write about Shawano County which I've driven through more times than I can remember on my way to Oconto County and Three Lakes on the Eagle River chain of lakes, where we fished each fall for muskies. Shawano County is where I was introduced to fishing by Ralphie Brandshaw's father when I was a child, probably as an act of mercy after the notorious sexual assault on my mother in 1947. In the early 1980s, the Posse Comitatus, a 'sovereign nation/Christian Identity group, had a presence in the Shawano County village of Tigerton. And he writes about a leftist group of young people in Black River Falls north of LaCrosse, where I handled a multi-million dollar engineering malpractice suit by the city against Black & Veatch. He even focuses on Waukesha, WI, the largest of the Republican and White WOW counties around Democratic and largely non-White Milwaukee: Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington. Finally, he writes about the little town of Mountain, Wi where I used to go camping and fishing at Bagley Rapids on the Oconto River. What all these places have in common is residents who believe that revolution is and ought to be in America's future, a diehard belief that they are doing God's will and that doing it requires guns, lots of guns. The cultural chasm between rural and urban is palpable More evidence of 2 separate Americas, one in the cities, the other outside the cities. Disbelief in Democracy seems everywhere. Are we living in Weimar? I said so to Kitty for years, to her distress. The evidence abounds.
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