Communion 2024

For Believers, Atheists, Agnostics and Spirits

April 2, 2024

[Cosentino Farm, Silicon Valley 3/30/2024]

Days before my Roman Catholic father died he had my mother, a Protestant, call a Franciscan friar to come to their house and give him Last Rites as he faced a surgical procedure to prolong a terminal cancer.  I doubt my Dad had set foot in a Catholic church or taken communion in many years.  

The friar came. Bearded and wearing “civilian” clothes. Before he left I could hear him and my Dad laughing together uproariously.  Dad asked me to fetch two bottles of red wine from the basement. “The best stuff!,” he said. After the friar left, Dad told me he knew the friar lived in a local small Franciscan community, they take most all their meals together and thus two bottles would be ideal.  The friar told my Mom privately on the way out her front door that Dad truly had “peace at the center.”

Later that evening, Dad told me he didn’t know for sure if any of the Catholic doctrine was true but, winking, said he wanted the Last Rites “just in case.”  He was sure, he told me that evening, there was an afterlife of some kind but that we humans “had no vocabulary for it.”  He told me he’d try to send a message to Mom and me after he died.

He asked her if she wanted any “favors” if he could ask “the Holy Mother of God” for something for her.  She immediately blurted out, “I want a buyer for that [X] listing!” A Jewish family of clients’ home she’d been trying to sell for over a year.

He died around 1 am in the morning a few days later.  As soon as my Mom and I made all the funeral arrangements, I took the family dog on his first walk of the day.  A Tibetan dog of the breed known often to be reincarnated failed monks having another go at life to try to get it “right.” That dog would never let his eyes rest for a millisecond on any open book. He'd immediately turn away. I always suspected he’d a past life with his or her nose buried too long in books.

After he finally pooped after walking two blocks I picked up his poop in a plastic bag, knotted it and took one step forward to continue the walk.  My cell rang for the first time that day. An up-call out of the blue for someone wanting to see that listing in under 2 hours who had to be on an airliner later that day. “OK!,” I said.  They bought it within days and even came up in price after my Mom and I persuaded the sellers to counter with a higher price.

A few years after my Dad died, my Mom had a full cardiac arrest in an ICU.  She said Dad appeared to her. Told her she had a choice to join him and see everyone dead she loved again or go back to life.  She decided she still had things to do on Earth so she chose to return.

After my Mom passed away several years later, the old family house was put up for sale.  One of the very first set of prospective buyers to walk through the door were the current married residents of our old family home in Sunnyvale, California. I’d never met them before. They were both born long after my parents sold that house.  We swapped stories in person and photos online of their house.  An old paint stain on the front porch steps was still there, made by the builders before my family moved in as the home’s first owners.  I could so easily see the spirit of my Dad looking out for them as a guardian angel.  He loved that house.  I urged them to remodel it and keep their young children in the local schools. A better bang for the bucks they had at that time.

Another prospective buyer couple. I could see the wife wanted the house but not so much the husband. They were new in the market and not yet sure about local remodeling costs and time. A few weeks later day before my birthday, I got a call from their agent wanting to make an offer.  Superb good faith dealing from that agent and her clients in the negotiations and escrow.  I felt that was all a birthday message and present from both my parents.

***
When I was very young my Dad’s favorite brother, R., died.  They were “Irish brothers” born 11 months apart. The family joke was their mother’s Catholic priests told her the wrong information about the rhythm method of birth control. 

Constant jokers were Dad and R with each other. Both married WASPs which did not make their Catholic mother happy.  I knew by the time I was a teenager she told my Protestant grandparents my Dad would, “Burn in Hell” for marrying my Mom.  My Dad had already gently taught me many years before when I met his mother she had been a wonderful mother to him but she had developed a few severe mental issues such as what was diagnosed as manic depression around the time she went through menopause.  She was persuaded by her doctors in the 1950’s to have many electroshock treatments which did not help and fried her brain. She also was not much of an ecumenecalist.

My Catholic grandfather liked to go to Catholic mass on Saturdays and spend Sundays talking with a Jewish friend “solving the problems” of the world.  That grandfather was very friendly to my Mom.  In his younger days he published a kind of newspaper/literary magazine in Brooklyn.

In the 1960’s, Dad in California saw his brother R’s death outside Boston through his brother’s eyes at the moment he died instantly in a car accident.  After R. died my Dad had uncanny luck always getting a fabulous parking space when parking lots were full. He also always got a pit in any slice of cherry pie. R’s widow says R. has always been a Guardian Angel for her after he died.

Decades later, Dad had a huge feeling while driving in California he had stop immediately and call the house of a high school friend living in the countryside near the Hudson River in New York. RIGHT NOW! Turned out that friend’s wife had just committed suicide after many years of substance abuse. The friendd had been trying for a long time to help her stop. With a rifle she blasted bits of skull, blood , and brain matter onto his home library books. He was alone for a short time after her body had just been removed for a Jewish burial within 24 hours of death. He, also Jewish, was devastated and alone waiting for a sibling to drive to his home. Dad was able to get hold of their Jewish high school classmate Ira R. who was a psychiatrist and got to that home well before the sibling could arrive. First lesson from Ira: it is OK to be angry at anyone who commits suicide, especially without warning. There’s also a lot of good to be said about the power of Jewish prayers and burial traditions after deaths.

Previewing a house for sale in Atherton, I walked down a first floor corridor and suddenly I felt I was losing my peripheral vision as a gray fog seemed to descend. Not really losing my vision in fact but mentally. I turned left into an empty room overlooking a backyard pool. Opened the closet door to see how big it was and spotted a champaign colored mink fur coat carefully covered in a plastic bag with a clear plastic window. I touched the bag and instantly nearly fell to my knees with a wave of internal pain. I saw a women’s face writhing in pain and then beautifullly coifed in her best days. Knew instantly: the dead lady of this house suffered i/from cancer n this room during her final days. I chatted with the sales agent, a high school classmate. She’d told me she’d been having a hard time getting anyone to make an offer on the house. Told her my experience and that I felt the lady’s heirs ought to acknowledge her pain a lot more and then install new carpet and freshen the paint in that wing of the house to let the lady rest in peace. Once that happened the house sold fast.

I’ve been primed about “messages” from the recently deceased. Here’s the most obvious one. The moment my Protestant grandmother died several miles away from where I lived I suddenly started singing aloud before I knew she’d died “I Got Rhythm" with the line “I’ve got my gal who could ask for anything more.” Written by George and Ira Gershwin, published in 1930 when my grandparents were dating. They loved having “record parties” in the Great Depression with friends. They’d push back their living room carpets and dance to records.

So, I firmly believe in an afterlife of spirits but I have little vocabulary to describe it and no way to prove it. In my experience, doing good things for others seems to be the easiest way to connect to … well, I have no vocabulary for this.

***

After my Dad died, I felt a nudge a few times to go to the Saturday evening Easter Vigil Mass at a Palo Alto church staffed by the Franciscans.  St. Thomas Aquinas, the old carpenter Gothic church in downtown Palo Alto seen in the movie “Harold & Maude.”  I mostly went wanting to listen for the first time to the St. Ann’s choir which for many decades has been singing Gregorian music at two Palo Alto churches.  I arrived a bit late to find the church in total darkness but for people holding real lit candles. l’d never before been to such a mass.

A few children were bedded down in the back pews for what I realized from the printed program would be a long service.  I listened and watched. Very dramatic when the lights were switched on, the priest said, “Christ is risen!” and the congregation blew out their candles.  A reenactment of the dark time when Jesus lay in his tomb, his followers depressed beyond belief, and then HUZZAH!, the Sun/Son rises and the tomb is found to be empty. The bare altar gets candles again. Incense is burned. Small bells are rung. A communion of wafers and wine is offered. Simple and plain. No Easter clothes, lilies, decorated eggs nor chocolate Easter bunnies. The core credo of Christianity in under 2 hours.  A sound, light, smells and tastes show of crystal clear meaning. YOU are there experiencing the whole credo from Last Supper to the Empty Tomb and Christ is Risen!

Jesus’ empty tomb was seen first by women who are then not believed by any of the male disciples. One of those first witnesses was Mary Magdalene, said to be “the” or one of “the most loved” of Jesus’ disciples. Her Gospel book did not make the cut in the later Christian big church male-dominated hierarchical decisions on what texts would be in their official Bibles.

I was raised to know in Old Ireland women used to be Christian priests as could be married couples.  In high school, my English class was assigned Hawthorne’s 1850 “Scarlet Letter” about the persecution of some women in Puritan Salem, Massachusetts. I’ve walked around Salem and the vibes there by the old waterfront houses are creepy. A crazy time of mass hysteria with many people believing in witchcraft. Human can so easily act like sheep herds. Prey animals easily frightened into a fear, fight, or flight reaction. Easily taken advantage of by anyone who wants to hurt them.

After my Mom died and then the Pandemic lockdowns started, I felt an urge to go to my first ever Catholic Christmas Eve vigil mass. Back to St. Thomas Aquinas. Very nice to sit for a service in the quiet evening dark when a married couple long ago the story says was trying to find “room at the inn” to birth a baby.

Flipped through the prayer books and other written materials in the pews. Found one suggesting if one is not Roman Catholic or in a sect not in communion with Roman Catholics but Christian please sit during communion and pray for Christian unity. If not Christian, please pray for world peace. Be calm. Pray. Meditate. Radiate good vibes for your fellow humans.

About 25 years ago, I once took communion in Washington, D.C. at St. John’s Episcopal church next door to the White House. The pastor made a big speech about how “all” are welcome to have it regardless of one’s religious faith or lack thereof. OK! “When in Rome…” I walked up to the altar rail, knelt with the small congregation on a needlepoint cushion and had some carbohydrates. Baulked at the offered wine because it was presented only from one big chalice and so far I’ve only taken the liquid part of communion as Welch’s grape juice from individual serving glasses. A clean white cloth repeatedly wiping the metal chalice rim did not strike me as very sanitary at that time. I wasn’t the only one there declining the wine. Besides, I’m not interested in alcohol before cocktail hour or without a meal. I’ve never liked watching a priest polish off a communion chalice of wine with a smug look on his or her face.

On Christmas Eve 2021 at the door leaving St. Thomas Aquinas, I happily shook my hand flesh-to-flesh with someone who was also unmasked and smiling at me. Flouting shamelessly near midnight our County lockdown “mandates” in place since St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2020.  It was locally “mandated” by our County, that is legally only “recommended” not an enforceable law.  “Good” people then did not go unmasked or touch hands without liberal use of stinky hand sanitizer made of denatured alcohol while away from one’s six person bubble. Certainly no communing of any kind with lepers, a.k.a. the selfish and evil unvaccinated. That brave young American hand shaker was a priest at St. Thomas Aquinas. I noticed few in the evening mass wore masks.  Almost none among the Gregorian Chant singers were masked. The conductor, Professor Phil Mahrt, was not masked. Some are good shepherds to their flock of sheep.

***

Easter 2023 rolled around.  I felt like going to a daylight Easter service for the first time since childhood. Made a tourism-pilgrimage of it by visiting the two oldest Christian churches in my county and one I drive by often.

For Maundy Thursday, I went to St. Luke’s, a little chapel in Los Altos Hills following an old Anglican ritual.  Arrived having never before been inside it not knowing what to expect.  I was thinking Queen Elizabeth 2 with her Maundy Day flower posey and Maundy Day specially minted money she’d give out to “worthy” people. There were about a dozen of us there. The lead reverend did some foot washing. I was left wondering how he keeps the lights on with such a small and mostly very elderly congregation. Many wore masks there. The reverend appeared very uncomfortable shaking anyone’s hand at the door after the service. Maybe there is never hand shaking at the end of an Anglican Maundy Thursday?  Is that why QE2 always clutched her Maundy flower posey with both hands?

Good Friday 2023 at St. Thomas Aquinas for Gregorian chants.  Easter Vigil at Mission San Jose in Fremont across San Francisco Bay.  The Vigil mass started in the outdoors after sunset on the steps of the reconstructed 1797 church.  A fire was lit, the flame passed by candles to all present, and a walk together to the modern church next door. Lots and lots of families with children.  Many children and adults were baptized midway through the mass. 

I’d been to the Summer 2022 fiesta fundraiser on a grassy lawn by the Mission church.  Groups of fathers and mothers ran food stalls to celebrate their families’ heritage.  Mexican tacos, Asian foods of all kinds, Italian (wine!) and German (beer!) in abundance.  A stage with live music and dance performances.

Easter Sunday 2023 under blue skies, I entered the back of a packed Mission Santa Clara founded by Franciscans in 1777.  Lots of Santa Clara University students.  Jesuits, not Franciscans, run today the university and its Mission church. Stood in the foyer in a tight scrum. Watched the procession of priests, deacon(s), and acolytes start the service. Went outside to get some air. Walked over to the graveyard where there are countless unmarked graves, listening to the service through the open Mission windows.

Heard church bells ringing a block away and walked to another Catholic service starting in the parish church.  A fire truck was outside as I entered the church while a big flow of police cars began arriving. None with emergency lights or sirens. A clear sign someone had already died. I could hear singing inside.

A parishioner had just suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack or stroke just as the mass started. The chorus director had the whole congregation but for the family members of the stricken man working on the tricky bits in the songs on the program as a distraction while the paramedics worked on the downed man in a far corner.  He was a beloved City of Santa Clara retired employee and longtime parishioner.  About half way through the mass, the lead priest announced his death. R.I.P. Together, we all gave him a prayer.

My Dad often said, “None of us get out of here alive!”

***

In 2013, I went to the Huntington Museum in Southern California to see an exhibit about Junípero Serra, the Franciscan missionary who founded Catholic churches between San Diego and San Francisco.  Here was the actual baptism record of his birth from a tiny town on a poor, dusty and dry island in the Mediterranean.  Pictures of the church school he went to as a smart small child. On pre-teen railroad tracks to become a priest to escape his childhood poverty.  Off to Mexico with dreams of being a missionary in places still blank on maps.  Hubris? Seeking fame? Or a genuine believer who thinks anyone unbaptized is doomed to an afterlife in purgatory or Hell?

With a never healed ulcerated leg (likely from an infected Mexican spider bite) he walked and rode a mule from Baja California to Monterey Bay in 1769 on the first Spanish military mapping and religious expedition to Alta California. He was horrified when a Spanish soldier shot the first Indian seen in the dense redwood forests north of the newly founded town of Monterey. The soldier insisted that was for “safety” to make all the locals fear them as they marched on uncharted territory. On the expedition’s walk back south to San Diego they picked up an injured donkey they’d left behind with indians south of the future Los Angeles. The Indians healed and took care of the donkey. Too bad Serra didn’t get medical help from those indians.

Serra made sure his mission churches were a good distance away from any military presidios. Monterey pueblo (town) and its port got a presidio (military fort). A walk over a low hill towards the south he founded Carmel Mission church. He rode mules and walked on his ulcerated leg twice to Mexico City to ensure the Spanish King’s viceroys gave the Franciscans all control over “his” indians, not any soldiers or settlers keen to use them as slave labor.

Under a glass case at the Huntington were his journals and reports while being a member of the Spanish Inquisition working near Mexico City. Odd to read his investigation of a women accused of witchcraft. Original written records from the late 1700’s in Alta California by him and his fellow missionaries about the local people dying in scarily tragic massive waves of deaths they could not stop. Name after name carefully written down. A genocide. A holocaust.

New European diseases were a cause but also don’t human immune systems crash when mentally depressed? If forced by stress to have adrenaline pumping 24/7 for months on end? Like being a WW1 soldier in combat in French trenches for weeks and weeks then struck by shell shock unable to talk. Stuck in a POW camp with rotten food destroying the lining of your entire digestive system, slowly wasting away from dysentery? A civilian being bombed day after day in a vicious war then one morning wakes up stark raving mad?

Imagine what happens to a human gut’s biome when suddenly one’s diet becomes rich in animal meats from tame domesticated cattle, goats, sheep and pigs? Discouraged from using the foods, drinks, salves, poultices, and prayers administered by your local medical healers and shamans? 

No longer encouraged to eat your regular source of carbohydrates anymore. No more daily oak acorn porridge or seed cakes with your hunter gatherer family.  No, become a “loyal” subject of the Spanish Crown eating wheat, oats, rye or corn from Europe and Mexico. Each a commodity storable food easy to tax unlike acorns which go rancid fast once shelled. End your seasonal migrations from winter to summer camps. Live in tightly packed Roman Empire-style fortified buildings per plans drawn up by the Spanish Crown’s Office of the Indies in Toledo, Spain. 

What would happen to your psyche - your spirit - if aliens arrived and EVERYTHING you knew or believed to be true, solid and good from what to eat to how to live was turned upside down by what seemed to be vastly superior life forms? Who had a stick to blast a bullet into grizzly bears and wolves which frequently ate your own children! Would you get on your knees and do anything they told you to do? Or, run to the hills, wait, watch and learn, and then decide what to do?  See the Spanish soldiers dismount from those amazing and tasty tame creatures (horses!), put down their magical steel killing spears and blazing sticks, and then kneel in front of those men wearing sandals and see those magical killing supermen horse riders kiss a cross!!!

You likely would kiss that cross, too, get water poured on your head, and then go to the new mission church every day at sunrise and sunset as compliant mental-child-seminarian/convert/neophytes.  No more need for women to grind acorns or seeds every day by hand.  Use a donkey-powered flour mill! No more cooking with hot rocks and baskets made of reeds and grasses. Use a metal cooking pot! Want clothes? You are issued fabric from ship stores and taught how to make thread from flax and wool. and use a Spanish loom.

Chase and lasso beef cattle riding a horse instead of walking all day trying to sneak up with a bow and arrow to kill a deer or elk. Don’t bother spending all day making delicate cordage from marsh grasses for fish nets. Grow hemp for ropes for bigger nets.

In a generation or two or maybe three, the loyal God-fearing neophytes if they learned well how to farm, raise cattle, or became an expert in a town trade skill to be good taxpayers would be given a grant of land by the Spanish King. A Franciscan Utopia where only Roman Catholics were allowed to set foot ashore but for on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay. Santa Clara Mission quickly had the most cattle of all the Alta California Missions. Free ranging, raised for meat, hides and tallow. Traded for everything from shoes to door knobs brought by East Coast Yankee sailing ships.

Each big California town got a presidio (a military fort), a church (temple) nearby, and a market plaza (forum). Clean and fresh water for irrigation and drinking with acequias (water ditches) and other water works. Only the most loyal subjects (citizens), usually retired soldiers, are allowed to have haciendas (villas) in the countryside with big farms where slaves and poorly paid peasants do farm and livestock work. It’s the Roman Empire’s method of subduing and then ruling conquered peoples. Didn’t work for the Romans long term nor the Spanish in California.

Very strict hierarchical systems.  Royal sovereigns have enforcement armies.  Annointed with holy oils as gods. Kings in Spain. Cesaers with golden laurel wreaths and then Popes in Rome with their triple crowns.  Primogenitor is used to keep large land parcels together in ruling families over many generations.  

A state religion fills church coffers with tithed coins and its storerooms with commodity crops paid in lieu of coinage. Taxes flow to the crown. Generations of donors give their favored churches land deeds and cash bequests such as the Pious Fund for the Californias created in large part in 1697 a Borgia lady from Italy to fund the first Catholic missionaries to (Baja) California led by an Italian Jesuit. 

By the first Mexican revolution, its War of Independence, 1810-21, the “eternal” and “universal” Roman Catholic Church owned the most land of anyone or any institution in all of Mexico after being there nearly 300 years as a state religion. Today after pne more Mexican war against European aristocracies, another against an invading USA, and another revolution in 1910-20, Mexican law allows the Roman Catholic church only to own its churches, religious workers’ housing and some schools but no agricultural land. It also is a strictly nonaligned nation in international military squabbles.

To give an idea of the power of the Catholic church in Latin America, one of the last documents US President Abraham Lincoln signed was a partial settlement agreement with the Catholic Church over some of its Alta California land seized illegally by squatters and others after California became a US state in 1850 as well as some of that 1600s Borgia cash US officials seized illegally after the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. The final USA, Mexico, and Catholic settlements on that land and cash occurred in 1902 by an international court at the Hague.

***

In 2018, I read the Bible’s Revelations chapter for the first time as an adult. John’s vision, a warning, about truly evil people and things. A woman of Babylon wearing the costly purple and scarlet robes allowed only for Roman emperors and senators.  Made me think of St. Francis born about 1181 to a rich textile merchant family. Threw away his clothes and family riches to wear a rough brown robe and sandals. Founded the mendicant Franciscan order to try to reform Rome by example. Good luck buddy!  Catholic male leaders still wear purple and scarlet silk sashes, hats, and capes.

Perhaps the example of St. Francis’ female follower during his lifetime, St. Claire? The Poor Clares near my home in Santa Clara (St. Clare) County have a contemplative convent in Los Altos Hills on a parcel of the former Gibson family’s country estate. Those nuns take a vow of poverty. Anyone is welcome to join them at their daily early morning mass or pray in their chapel during daylight. Like the Benedictine teaching monks in nearby Woodside, their local diocese forbids them to advertise on their street signage their masses due to the dioceses’ fear of losing out donations to the medicant orders from any diocese parish churches’ Sunday cash donations. I didn’t know til this week any Poor Clares lived near my home nor that they had public masses despite decades of driving by their convent.

In Los Altos Hills a short drive from the Poor Clares is the Province of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton of the Daughters of Charity right across the street from Hewlett Packard company founder David Packard’s home in an apricot orchard. That order was founded in France in 1633 by St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac. They used to wear starched winged veils as seen in the TV show “The Flying Nun.” Founded with working peasant girls instead of noble or rich women at the mostly cloistered convents of 400 years ago. Their mission is serve the most poor and sick, and teach. They run a home for retired religious workers in Los Altos Hills, a retirement community for lay people in Mountain View, staff ten schools in two states, an adult ESL school in East Palo Alto, and run many other service facilities.

***

In the news headlines of today “doctors are baffled” by the rise of turbo cancers, plus strokes and heart attacks in children. People dropping dead of seizures within minutes or days of a novel injection. So many new “sudden deaths” of “healthy” people with usually no autopsy.  Many who took “novel” injections now need more than a week to recover from the flu or a cold. Every day more peoples’ immune systems appear to be trashed.

I look at government charts and tables from around the world.  I read a lot of scientific reports. As a lawyer, I’ve read patents, laws, regulations and executive orders about the 2020 Pandemic. Government contracts and research funding requests. Animal and human test documents pried out of pharmaceutical companies and government agencies through lawsuits. Data the US government and at least one big pharmaceutical company wanted kept secret for at least 50-75 years. Just last month one such company did a court ordered document dump but blacked out nearly 200 pages on heart issues. Shades of the Vatican or CIA’s secret archives!

There are clear patterns patently clear to anyone willing to do their own research.  Deaths rates are rising, just not as fast (yet) as Junípero Serra helped cause inadvertently and tragically in California. At least Serra’s paper trail is not secret.

***

About ten years ago during Holy Week in Mexico, I walked in the steps of both Junípero Serra and the “heathen” people he converted there. Flew in a helicopter from Querétaro to a remote town in the Sierra Gorda of Mexico where Serra before he went to California was sent to lead a conversion expedition at one of the last places in Mexico to resist Roman Catholics. Rugged mountains. Thick jungles. Twisty two lane roads. Easy place for anyone to hide.

Flying in we passed over Sotano del Barro, a famous sinkhole in the mountains, filled with green military macaw parrots startled by the sonic booms of our rotor blades.  Local Mexican Army units are proud to have been able so far to keep poachers and narcoterrorists out of their beautiful and lush Sierra Gorda mountains and valleys.

Serra agreed to go only if the soldiers would always stand behind him and follow his orders at all times.  He planned to convert just by walking in on his sandals, wearing his mendicant Franciscan friar robe, and simply hold up a cross.  To convert only by peaceful means.  If anyone baptized decided to return to their “wild” ways then it’s OK with him to have soldiers return them by force to his new churches. He himself was raised at home and school by beatings. No big presidios were ever needed to be built in the Sierra Gorda.

Serra was a missionary success in Mexico. That’s why he was picked to go to California. All his churches in those Mexican mountain valleys have thriving parishes today. All are UNESCO Heritage Sites with beautiful old churches. I went inside four churches he founded there.  Each had a big painting of him framed in a wide flat frame covered in gold leaf.  The campaign was on to make him a saint. A short time layer, the Pope canonized him on September 23,  2015 in Washington, D.C.

[Serra statue at La Villa, Mexico City. He holds a book and a model of Carmel Mission in California where he is buried. Faces the original Virgin of Guadalupe tilma in her basilica and stands on the hill where she appeared to San Juan Diego in 1531.]

Many Californians today are trying to resurrect and teach to anyone the old knowledge of pre-European contact peoples from languages and medicinal plants to basket making and religious practices. It is a slow road to face all solid facts from the past both good and bad.  “Learn from the mistakes of others,” as one of my grandfathers taught me. I also learned how not to reinvent the wheel by searching out what is good and true.

***

I first heard of the wonderful Posada party tradition inside a home in Mexico.  An elderly lady told me about it.  She was a small girl during the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution.  Grew up on a big hacienda her family owned.  “Land rich, cash poor.”  When an angry peasant army attacked her family home trying to murder every “haciendado” person they could find she survived by hiding for days inside a train car filled with dried corn.

As I sipped a hot serving of fruit punch in an unglazed small pottery cup, she told me how it is a special drink at Posada parties.  Cut up guavas. Whole gooseberries.  Many other fruits into a pot with water.  Sweeten with piloncillo raw sugar.  Cinnamon sticks and whole cloves. Simmer on a stove.  Maybe a splash of rum.  Each serving has more fruit chunks than liquid. An amazing molecular winter boost for any Northern Hemisphere human immune systems.

Posada parties occur over many days in mid to late December.  Family and friends gather in a street and begin walking home to home.  Sometimes a donkey is invited. An ox. An ass. Some sheep. Arrive at the first door.  Sing a song asking to be let inside.  “No room here!,” is sung back as the door slams shut.  Door to door the same routine until one door is opened and the inhabitants have room for you in “the stable.”  A pre-planned party with simple food and drinks. Maybe a piñata for the children.  Next night same thing with a pre-planned party at a different home. Sometimes one does not walk door to door but goes directly to the party.

Who doesn’t know the story of that stable?  Go to a Posada and find out.

Went to my first ever Posada in December 2023 at Mission San Jose.  We started outside the Mission’s gift shop practicing carols. Then we caroled walking to a side door of the Mission. A parishioner led us carrying a small hand carved unpainted wooden creche sculpture. Got the full set of “NO!” then “YES!” scripts from two people inside.  We were invited into the Mission church for a concert of Christmas music.  Hot drinks and simple snacks outside afterwards. Most there were not Catholic but simply wanting to celebrate the holiday season with others in person.  Over the next several nights was a Posada ending at different place each night near the Mission from shops and an art gallery to a non-Catholic church. A local brew pub was either a party host or a sponsor for one evening party. The last night ended at the Catholic church with its school children performing a pageant. Something for everyone.

***

Easter 2024 I was ready to face seeing what has happened to the churches of my childhood. Finally willing as a “new” orphan to wear an Easter bonnet.  Made plans to go to my Mom’s Presbyterian church for Easter Sunday and my Dad’s Catholic church next door for Easter Saturday Vigil.  Had not been inside either one in over 50 years.

Maundy/Holy Thursday at the nearby church where I was baptized and a first visit to my nearest Episcopal church for a physical and metaphorical middle ground for Good Friday.

[My baptismal site, Holy Thursday 2024. St. Joseph’s, downtown Mountain View, California, a post-mass vigil.]

[Good Friday Concert 2024 in Los Altos with choirs from two Episcopal churches, Los Altos (blue robes) and Portola Valley (white robes). Windows by French artist Gabriel Loire.]

My Dad helped start “his” Catholic church founded in 1963 which I knew as a child. He began attending it when its first priest, Father Nicholas Farana, began services in the back of a grocery store which is now a pizza restaurant. My first hometown, Sunnyvale, was expanding like crazy as Lockheed hired every possible missile and space engineer who could get a USA secret clearance to build submarine nuclear missiles, spy satellites, and their launch rockets. The structure today over the church’s altar looks suspiciously like a missile launch tube or fuel tank

[Never saw girl acolytes at my Dad’s Church of the Resurrection when I was young.]

The same or a similar artist appears to have made the stained glass windows for the Los Altos Christ Church Episcopalians and Sunnyvale Church of the Resurrection Catholics. Thick chunks of glass with roughly chopped edges set into thick concrete or epoxy.

[Easter Vigil]

My Mom was one of the first members of the next door Protestant church after it opened in 1963.  In my childhood, my family celebrated Christmas and Easter together at the next door Catholic church when all services were in the Catholic school’s gym before its church was built. Then afterwards, holiday meals with the extended family. 

Sunday school for me at the Protestant church.  My parents offered me a free will choice of Catholic catechism, join any other church, or none.  I thought long and hard about it but declined to join formally any church other than accepting a Bible at a Presbyterian ceremony I did not fully understand at the time. Don’t recall taking any oaths at that time. Just standing by the church altar with my summer Sunday school class as the reverend passed us each a Bible to keep. I got the feeling the whole ceremony was a way of letting us know we could join the adults more often during church services.  That we’d learned to read in our public schools. Perhaps about third grade?

Learned a lot during Holy Week and Easter 2024. Saw a lot. Heard a lot. Enjoyed singing in a crowd and seeing smiling faces. I was the only one wearing a decorated hat on Sunday at the services I attended. Got a lot of smiles and compliments for it.  

Lots of name tag stickers on offer for the protestant Easter Sunday service. An LGBTQ+ flag sticker was offered along with pronoun and pandemic “hug” or “elbow bump” contact choice stickers. A Trans Rights flag over the entrance door to the church. I didn’t notice it until looking at my photos hours later.

Watched that Easter evening the Fred Astaire and Judy Garland movie  “Easter Parade” showing at the Stanford movie theater and clapped during the double-feature break for an organist playing the Wurlitzer.  Fred and Judy’s songs by “good Jewish boy” as my Dad would say, Irving Berlin.  Born in Russia in 1888 and gave the U.S. Boy Scouts all his royalties for his song “God Bless America.” I drove home singing that song and songs from the movie.

Amazing to see the impact today in Silicon Valley churches of migrants from Vietnam, China,  India, Philippines, and other French and Spanish speaking countries. Small handfuls from Africa and other European nations. For example, at the site of the oldest Catholic church in Sunnyvale built in the 1800’s on land donated by the first Irish family to settle in Santa Clara Valley here are its collections for March 23 & 24, 2024 masses:

• Saturday 5 pm (English)        $  682

• Saturday 6:30 pm (Spanish)   $1,172

• Sunday 8 am    (English)         $   991

• Sunday 11 am  (English)         $1,186

• Sunday noon   (Spanish)         $3,123

• Sunday 5pm    (Vietnamese)   $  949

I popped briefly into its Easter Sunday noon mass.  Packed. Standing room only.  Within seconds I was offered a seat thanks to my white hair but I preferred to stand in back and watch. Got another sprinkling of holy water for baptism-renewal splattered over everyone. Imagined my Catholic grandmother purring.

Met unexpectedly on Easter Sunday a childhood acquaintance from our old Presbyterian Sunday school. I’d button-holed the evening before a Catholic priest and on Sunday two Protestant Elders (including the former Sunday school classmate) to try to get them to be more ecumenical with each other as their own churches’ founders Father Farana and Reverend Coleman had been in the 1960’s when the Catholics rented classrooms from the Presbyterians and a garden path connected their churches instead of today’s thick tall hedge separating them.

Most of the Catholic churches in Silicon Valley I’ve seen in 2023-24 are exploding at the seams.  The Protestant ones are mostly struggling.  

I hope my childhood churches start joint December Posadas and Summer multi-cultural food, song and dance fiesta traditions. Show what being a “Christian” in Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley is, not just being a member of one sect or one non-profit religious corporation.

Like every other member of the public, I had last Autumn an invite to a Diwali celebration in a public park in the town of Cupertino, named for the Catholic St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Flying Friar, died 1663. Also, I had an invite from neighbors to their home driveway’s Diwali fireworks. Loved standing with them watching their fireworks. Any excuse to gather with people of goodwill with smiles and a sense of humor, and I am there.