HAPPY SAINT PATRICK'S DAY!

 My husband asked me an interesting question the other day.  He wondered why St. Patrick's Day is such a big deal.  "Who was St. Patrick?" he asked.  From the history I've heard, Patrick was the son of a wealthy family in Gaul (now France) who was captured and sold into slavery in Eire (now Ireland).  This happened hundreds of years ago, even before France, England, or Ireland were nations.  After a time, he managed to escape, returned home, and was converted to Christianity.  Then comes the surprising part.  He returned to Eire to witness to those who had enslaved him.  What a great example of loving your enemies!

It is said that the shamrock became an emblem of Ireland because Patrick used the three-leafed clover to illustrate the Holy Trinity.  And since it was green, and the moist climate of this island keeps the fields green most of the year, green came to be identified with the Irish, as well.  

Now, this was all before there were Protestants and Catholics.  There was one Christian church.  The word catholic actually means "one unity", and in the days before the Protestant Reformation, it actually meant just "Christian".  I believe after the reformation the Roman Catholic Church held onto this term as a way to show they believed they were still the 'true church.'

Enter the English, descended from Germanic and Norse (Norman-French) stock.  For centuries they battled and worked to subdue the original inhabitants of the British Isles, the Celts--who we know as the Welsh, Irish and Scots today.  Of course the bloodlines are merged in many places, and it's a fortunate person who can trace any pure line of ancestry now.  For myself, I've found evidence that I'm a mixture of all these bloodlines, with ancestors scattered throughout the British Isles, Germany, and Denmark.

The next stage of Irish history is still in evidence today, with the northern counties of Ireland, called Ulster, still part of Great Britain, while the rest of the island is the independent country of Ireland, called Eire by the pure in heart.  The Irish flag is orange, green, and white--an attempt at unifying the two forces represented by green and orange.

Green is the color Ireland loves, and it's associated with their patron saint--Patrick.  (By the way nearly every day in the calendar commemorates at least one saint.  For example, February 14 is the birthday of St. Valentine, a bishop in the early Christian church.  December 6 is St. Nicholas Day.)    Over the years green came to represent the Catholics of Ireland.

But orange?  This came about because in 1607, King James of the United Kingdom of Scotland and England, who was Protestant, began luring Lowland Scots over to Ulster, offering free land to those who had none.  Thus Ulster is largely Protestant, even to this day.  In the mid-twentieth century there was much sectarian violence between Irish Catholics and Protestants in Ulster.  The legacy of King James outlived him by over 300 years.

The orange came about because a nobleman named William of Orange (in Holland), a Protestant, became King of England because he was married to Mary, a descendant of King James.  I won't go into all the other fighting and strife linked to this, but there's plenty.  We see this pair in the names of our own American colonies, including Maryland, named for this Mary.  There's a college in  the east named William and Mary.  And the town of Williamsburg, Virginia is named for him.

Therefore, since the Irish Catholics had green, the Protestants decided to wear orange.  And there are Societies of Orangemen to this day.  During some periods in the nineteenth century when England was still trying to rule Ireland, the wearing of green was banned.  Some of you may have heard the song, Wearing of the Green, which depicts this.  Similar things were done by England in Scotland, such as the banning of wearing the tartan or plaids, which stood for each Scottish clan.  They also tried to suppress the speaking of the native tongue Gaelic, but in the late twentieth century we've seen a resurgence of  people speaking Gaelic.  Welsh, too.

Now of course, Ireland has finally gained independence from Britain, and the strife in Ulster has abated.  Many descendants of Irish immigrants live here in the United States.  I have ancestors from both Ulster and Ireland.  Rather than a religious observance of an early saintly man who came to share the Gospel with his former enemies, St. Patrick's Day is another day to party, much like St. Valentine's Day.  

I'm glad neither of these saints has been completely forgotten, though.  And today, on Patrick's supposed birthday, I'm wearing green.  I have to add one more note here, though.  My mother, bless her soul, didn't care much for the color green. Her favorite color was orange.  I wonder now if this was some unconscious family heritage she had, for many of her ancestors were among the English and Lowland Scots who emigrated to Ulster and later to America.  But she's gone now, so I'll never know for sure.

Oh, yes, and kids at school still try to pinch you if you're not wearing green.  I don't know where this came from, but I wonder if it was reaction by the Irish who'd been forbidden to wear green.  If they did, they got "pinched" by being arrested and thrown in jail.  At least St. Patrick's day is more harmless now. And so far, I haven't heard anyone saying it's not politically correct.

A Hard Pill to Swallow

 

It really bothers me that the Church is at the forefront of persecutions.  In fact, as I look at history it very often has been.

First it was Christians persecuting Jews.  Even the great reformer Martin Luther expressed anti-semitic views.  After the Reformation it added persecution of Catholics.  Of course, the Catholic Church also persecuted Protestants.

The next stage was the enslavement of people of color, with all kinds of prejudice against people just because of the color of their skin.  I’m not sure the Church has ever recovered from any of these problems, though some of them aren’t as vocal or in the forefront now.

One that still appears in some church bodies is subjugation of women, making them second class citizens.  In some churches women cannot be pastors, and in some ultraconservative ones women are still not allowed to vote.

Now some churches are leading the campaign against LGBT, which they call ‘Homosexuality.’  They say this is different, that it’s a sin.  I could be wrong, but I don’t see it that way.  These same churches used to be opposed to divorce, but now a divorced and remarried man may become a pastor.  How is that ‘better’ than a gay person who is in a stable, one-partner, committed relationship?

Jesus associated with all kinds of people, and the 'religious right' of his time said he “…ate with tax-collectors and sinners.”  In our time, this could be translated as hookers and homosexuals.  He commanded us to love everyone, even our enemies.  Sure that’s a hard pill to swallow, but I believe he’s asking me to. 

TIRED OF THE INUENDO

 

I’m getting tired of the right wing trying to take over Christianity.  The message I keep getting from many Christians is that you have to support Trump, whether you like him or not, because he’s a Republican and so is God. 

Really?  I’ve even heard some say Democrats are of the Devil.  A nice young man I know actually posted this on Facebook.  So sad…

The people elected Biden, he’s been inaugurated, but the Trumpites are still waving their huge flags and billboards—all over the Northwest and probably elsewhere.  Even the Democrats didn’t do that four years ago.  They didn’t violently storm the Capitol either and “Fight like hell,” as Trump told his followers to.  Yes that’s one sign of a cult—he doesn’t have supporters anymore; now they’re followers.  Trumpism is showing too many traits of a cult, as they blindly follow their leader, when they need to be following Christ.

I feel like my personal faith in Christ is being attacked by these people. 

I’ve been looking carefully at what the Bible says about how Christians should act:  Love one another, even your enemies; Respect the government, even if it isn’t perfect; Nothing in this world is perfect.  The Bible doesn’t say to lead violent protest marches.  It doesn’t say to “fight like hell”. It doesn’t say to hate and despise your enemies.

The problem I see is most Republicans are afraid to vote their consciences anymore.   Loyalty to the Party is paramount to everything else.  Guess who came up with that idea?  Another Party that still is trying to resurrect itself in Russia, and does rule in China.  Is that where we’re headed?  I pray we’re not.

The enemy isn’t the Democrats, it’s the ones who want us to sacrifice democracy for Party loyalty, who expect us to support a man who has proven to be corrupt and a liar, because he’s the only good choice the Party can come up with.  Come on, Republicans, you can do better than this!  At least I used to think that.  Now I’m not so sure.

 

That Place Folks Call Home

 

HOME SWEET HOME?

 

In my life, home has been an elusive place.  So far I’ve lived in 25 different dwellings in my 68 years of life.  The one I was in the longest was our house in Tawas City, Michigan—19 years.  For nearly all that time, I  thought of it as only a temporary home.

Back then my memories of Rexford, Montana in the 1980s had me thinking of Montana as home.  Now that we’ve been back in this state for almost 13 years, I don’t feel what I thought I would.  In many ways, these past 13 years have been a long downhill slide of change and disappointments.  Maybe it’s just my age.

I envy people who grew up in one place, even one house, and can look back and say, “That’s my home.”  My dad said things like this sometimes, too.  The only place he called ‘real home’ was the house on Eagle Street near downtown Houston, Texas.  He was born in that house and lived there until he moved into a house on Robinhood Street in his teens. (I remember this house as my Feser grandparents’ home.)  At least they still lived in Houston.  What made Dad saddest was how the old house had been torn down to make room for a supermarket parking lot, and later a freeway.

My parents were rootless in a sense, too.  Each of them lived in 15 domiciles in their lifetimes, 9 of them after they married.  Perhaps this is another reason why I feel like a vagabond.  If we’d been able to stay in El Dorado, Arkansas, where I was born, perhaps it would have become home to me.  But we had to move to Illinois when I was 11, because of Dad’s work.  I didn’t think of Illinois as my true home, even though I call it ‘home’ on my Facebook Page.

I think the settings of most of my novels reveal the places my heart wants to call home—Colorado and Texas.  I’m not saying I want to go live there now.  They’ve just come to fill the need in my heart and mind for a place to call home.

Colorado is home because when I transferred to college there from Illinois, it was a fulfillment of my dreams to live in the mountains.  After the turmoil of adolescence and the uprooting of the move to Illinois, I felt my heart had finally found a home.  It’s also where God ‘found’ me, and my faith began to grow.  And where I met my husband.

But why Texas?  I never actually lived there.  A lot of my relatives did, though, and maybe it’s just in my Feser genes.  Most of the Fesers still live in Texas.  When my parents moved back there, after Dad retired, Texas seemed to start calling to me.  In my mind I imagined Paul and I would move there to help take care of my parents in their old age.  Paul could work on one of the Texas National Forests, based in nearby Crockett.  This didn’t appeal to Paul, though.  Next I wondered if I’d just move there by myself and teach music.

Then my brothers settled in Springfield, Illinois (three hours from our original home in Ottawa).  They convinced my parents to move back to Springfield to be closer to them.  That turned out all right.  Now all my immediate family was in one place, about a 12 hours drive from our Michigan house, so we could visit them all at once.  By then, though, Mom was an antisocial recluse, so there were no ‘homey’ visits.

Nothing in Springfield really said ‘home’ to me.  At that time, I thought our move back to Montana would fill that empty space in my heart.  By then, we’d bought 6 acres in the Flathead Valley we hoped to build on.

In 2008, after Paul retired from the Forest Service, and we’d gotten both our kids through college in Michigan, we moved back and began building.  I even found a job teaching music.  When Dad died in 2010, things changed again.  I left the job, we moved Mom in with us so I could care for her Alzheimer’s.  She passed away in 2017.  I confess that after caring for her here at home for 3 years, I was worn out emotionally and physically.  So her last 4 years were in a Memory Care facility.  One nice thing was my brothers came to visit often during those years.

As of 2021, we’ve lived in our Montana retirement house for 13 years.  The time seems to have flown, and I hope to make it to 20 years in this house.  That will surpass the 19 years in the Michigan house, and will be the longest time I’ve lived in any dwelling in my entire life.

Still, in my heart of hearts, I don’t feel at home here.  It’s a bigger city than I’ve lived in most of my life.  And it’s growing so fast that most of the people I pass on the road or see at the store are strangers.

As I look back on my life, not a single place fills that empty space for me.  Two places I still hold dearest are Colorado and Scotland.  I didn’t live very long in either one, but those were the best years of my youth, perhaps of my life.

I guess I’ve learned in these waning years of my life that ‘home’ is really an illusion.  Maybe the old song is right, “I’m but a stranger here.  Heaven is my home.”

 

By Mary Frances Erler, 2021

Who Gets the Last Word?

 

Whose Side is God On, Anyway?

 

“God is on our side.”  I hear a lot of people saying this lately.  Yes, there is the verse in Romans 8 that says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  And I believe that in the sense that Christ died for our sins--yes, God is now on our side.

But that doesn’t mean we can hitch him to our individual wagons of likes and dislikes—politics, economic systems, cultures, or even our favorite sports teams.

A sobering reminder of this can be found on old Nazi SS uniforms (Hitler’s elite soldiery).  Their brass buttons said (in German, of course) “God is on our side.”

Fortunately for our current civilization, He wasn’t.

My conclusion is that no matter what we claim about whose side God is on, He reserves the right to say, “I’ll be the judge of that.”

God gets the last word.

Reflections on an Inauguration

 

Thoughts for an Inauguration

By M. Frances Erler

 

Every four years, we swear a president into office.  About half the time, it’s a new one, not the one who served the previous term.  People tend to talk about how our system of democracy works, as each transition passes.

          I’m not going to comment on this year’s transition, though.  My thoughts are being drawn to an inauguration that took place 60 years ago.  Can it really be that long?

    Recently, I came across an old paperback of Robert Frost’s poems and noticed in the back of the book, the poem Frost wrote for the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in January 1961.

          I was eight years old, and in third grade then.  I remember that our teacher brought a black-and-white TV to school, so we could watch it.  Technology was not a classroom fixture back then.  In my mind’s eye I can see the gray-headed Frost reading his poem in the snow and cold wind.  Then the wind blew his papers out of his hand.  But he continued from memory.

Too young to have understood any of the poem back then, I was fascinated to read it with my adult eyes this past week.  In one place he says:

“There was the book of profile tales declaring

For the emboldened politicians daring

To break with followers when in the wrong,

A healthy independence of the throng,

A democratic form of right divine

To rule first answerable to high design.”

 

Years later I read Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, and now I understand what Frost was saying—that we as citizens and politicians in a democracy need to remember we are still answerable to a higher power, a moral compass, if you will.  Our personal needs are not the measure of all things.  There is a greater good.  Frost concludes his poem with these words:

 

“Firm in our beliefs without dismay,

In any game the nations want to play.

A golden age of poetry and power

Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.”

 

Yes, many had high hopes for the presidency of JFK, a new era, maybe even a “golden age” as Frost intoned.  But Robert Frost died in the winter of 1963,  and JFK was assassinated the following November.   Now I think I envy Frost because he didn’t have to live to see the dream die.

In one of those ironies of life, an eleven-year-old paperboy from Gary, Indiana was at that 1961 inauguration.  He and several others had won the trip by selling subscriptions to the Gary Post-Tribune.  That boy would become my husband a mere fourteen years later.

Her Name Was Linnie

 

When I was about seven or eight, my parents hired an African American maid to watch us kids after school when Mom had bridge club.  She also did the ironing while she was at our house.  I remember her running the hot iron over a Colonial Bread wrapper, to get the wax melted on it.  This made it really smooth out the wrinkles in the clothes, I guess.

          My brother was three years younger than me, so he doesn’t remember her.  She was to my childhood eyes an older woman, with maybe a little gray in her hair.  Soft-spoken, but I could tell she was a loving person  If we wanted to talk, she listened.  I don’t think she tended to start the conversation, though.

          Both of my grandmothers lived in other towns, so for those years, Linnie became a surrogate grandma for me.  I never felt uncomfortable around her, like I did with my ‘real’ grandmas sometimes.  I guess I didn’t see them enough to know then well.  

          One evening, Linnie stayed late and made supper for us.  I’m wondering if it was the night my youngest brother was born.  She warmed a can of cream of chicken soup, using water to dilute it.  Mom always used milk, so I thought it would taste strange.  But it was fine.  Every time I make a can of condensed soup with water now, I think of Linnie.

          I don’t know for sure who brought Linnie to our house.  Maybe Mom went to pick her up while I was a school.  It’s odd the things you don’t notice when you’re a child.  She was just there when I got home, and then she went home somehow when her work day was over.

          Once, though, she needed Mom to drive her home, so we children went along.  This was the only time I saw where Linnie lived.  It was in a shabby part of El Dorado, Arkansas, with only dirt streets, and little rundown wooden houses.  It looked rather sad.

          After we’d dropped Linnie off at her house, I remember asking Mom: “Why do the colored people live in such poor places?”  (The N-word was forbidden in my family, even then in the 1950s.)

          “It’s not their fault, Frances,” she said quietly.  “People who are poorer than we are in things are still just as good as people.  Always remember that.”

          I can still picture this entire scene, even though it took place at least 60 years ago.  The words my mother said took on more and more meaning for me as the years went by.  She went out of her way to make sure we didn’t look down on any of the poorer people who lived in our town.  I never knew, until many years later that her childhood had been lived in poverty, too.  Out of it she forged an understanding of all people less fortunate, and compassion for them.  It’s one of the best legacies she left me.