California Missions

In anticipation of a possible visit to several of the northern California missions I'm reading up.  On my shelf I had some old stuff, purchased years ago when I went to San Juan Capistrano; this was intended for the tourist trade and presented a rather rosy picture along with the some old photographs.  There is however more recent scholarship, such as Steven W. Hackel's Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis, that I'm finding informative and fascinating.

Converting California by James Sandos offers this useful characterization of earlier portrayals as either Christocentric Triumphalism or Christophobic Nihilism.  He attempts to steer a third course that gives credibility to both the Franciscans and the people they encountered.  This approach parallels recent developments in mission history more globally and will be useful to my teaching about missions and Christianity in the India those explorers were looking for.   Of particular interest for my courses on Christianity is his highlighting the differing meanings members of these two groups attributed to baptism and the distortions that arise from assumptions that baptism was a sign of total conversion. (I also learned quite a lot about venereal disease and the development of musical notation.)

I'm also interested in the function of the missions in the mythos of California.  Sandos points out that once California became part of the United States the history of the missions provided a past for the region, a past that was neither British nor Protestant but that nonetheless could be told as a romantic encounter between Europeans and Native People.  Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, Ramona, did this work.  So too efforts to restore the ruins of the missions in the early 20th century, sometimes from practically nothing, provided Californians and other Americans with cultural destinations akin to other historical sites.   Hence that Sunset Magazine book I bought at San Juan Capistrano and what I suppose that I would have learned about the missions if I'd been an elementary school student in California in the early 1960s. 

Are these also sacred sites either in some universal sense or for American public/civil religion?  Along with the effort to canonize Juniperro Serra, the founder of the first nine missions, that is a provocative issue but one I'm fascinated by as I ruminate on what would constitute a sacred site in the USA.  Certainly these are locations were Franciscans intended to do holy work and there are spaces there designated for religious ritual.  The question, however, is a larger one about how these places are regarded a century-and-a-half after their secularization.  Are they analogous to battlefields?  Certainly some sort of battle was done.  Are they places that enshrine our national values?  Which ones?  Are they places where we are still brought face-to-face with the transcendent or with the realities of our own humanity which is both noble and limited?  Even harder to answer but well worth contemplating if we are to have a way of thinking of our past (and our future) that is neither triumphalist nor nihilistic.  

getting cool

St. Paul, MN July 1935

A radio news story reports that in a major American city efforts to restrict the visible presence of homeless people (notice: not to address the fact of homelessness) include laws prohibiting sleeping in public, eating in public, and feeding people in public.  The public policy issues related to how we address homelessness deserve to be commented upon, but that is not the point of this post.  Rather, in the midst of an intense and prolonged heat wave this story recalls how people coped with heat in the pre-air conditioned era: they slept outside, sometimes in public places, they jumped in bodies of water, they wrapped themselves in damp sheets.  Generally hot weather drove people into places where they saw more of each other rather than into the refuge of their own houses.  Now the cost of getting cool is not only a higher utility bill and the environmental side-effects of increased energy usage, it is also reduced social contact.

I write this, of course, sitting in my newly air-conditioned office in a newly refurbished 130 year old building.  And I don't wish to sleep outside with the mosquitoes.  So I wonder how my predecessors reacted when the days and nights were hot.  Did they keep working as if the temperature were mild?  Did they stop often for a long drink of water?  Did they give up cooking and eat only raw vegetables?   Did they repair to the Canon River or Heath Creek for an afternoon of wading and splashing?  Were those the days when Boe sat in Rolvaag's back yard smoking cigars and planning for a Greater St. Olaf?

Observing the 4th of July

Sometimes in 101 we have assigned a personal essay about observing the 4th of July.  Most of the students wrote about family celebrations with a few references to parades and community fireworks.  There was a domestic, happy quality to these tales.  That is the sort of event on the surface of the poem, "Immigrant Picnic," by Gregory Djanikian, though the poem also hints at the personal loses involved in even the least traumatic relocation. 

The custom of public orations for the 4th seems to have fallen out of practice.  Only at Holden Village have I experienced a public reading of the Declaration of Independence such I have read about in descriptions of historical and fictional Independence Day observations in the 19th and early 20th century.  A powerful example, surely one of the great American speeches, is Frederick Douglass' "What to the American Negro is the Fourth of July?"  He lauds the nation's ideals, honors its founders, and points directly at its failure to enact its best commitments.  Here is James Earl Jones' reading the speech. VIDEO LINK

Even if slavery is outlawed, there is much in these words to inspire us decades later, to remind us that even as declaring independence was followed by a war to achieve it, so too proclaiming equality and freedom requires daily effort to make those ideals into reality.

where we live

If you are wondering how to describe where you live, here is help from The Brookings Institution, Census.gov, City-Data.com, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Endhomelessness.org, Federal Bureau of Investigation, StateoftheAir.org

Credit: Nelson Hsu, Natalie Jones, Melanie Taube, Tanya Ballard Brown / NPR

The opposite of all. . . .

Is having nothing the opposite of having it all?
Is having enough the opposite of having it all?
Is sharing the opposite of having it all?