A Transformative Journey, Out, Beyond, and Back: My Evolving Relationship with Tradition
This book of my memoir was published in January 2018, at Maryknoll New York.
The Preface of this book is as follows:
PREFACE
A Transformative Journey, Out, Beyond and Back:
My Evolving Relationship with My Tradition
This is my memoir from a missionary life. I have used this latter phrase “from a missionary life” in the title of several compilations of my earlier writings. It seems good to include it here also, by way of emphasizing the continuity of my purpose in this writing project of my mature years, namely, to continue to share with folks the fruits of my rich missionary life, as many describe the contents of my letters, stories and communications.
I trace the origin of my missionary life from an unusual calling in my adolescence at twelve years of age to be an overseas missionary. By a restrictive set of circumstances in the Catholic Church of the decades of my youth, I could not become a missionary without entering the seminary, which is a formation center for those becoming priests. So, in order to become a missionary, I had to become a priest, thus creating an existential tension in my heart and spirit, due to the overwhelming preeminence given to the latter over any other role for a male in the Catholic Church. Thus my missionary calling got relegated to a secondary position by the Church’s Tradition, when it was primary in my own heart.
This memoir will span my entire life, seen as a journey of transformation and maturation. To this day, I continue to live out these same two roles in several new ways in my mature years with greater harmony and integrity than in my youth.
I have a keen awareness of my roots in the New York Irish Catholic Tradition of my birth, inherited from my Irish immigrant parents, James and Mary (nee O’Donnell) Martin. This is the milieu in which I was born and raised, and it will have a dominant voice from the beginning of my memoir. In fact, the whole memoir will be encased in the shell of Tradition, with the peculiar voices of the various religious and cultural environments where I have lived and worked as an overseas missionary priest. So as the memoir progresses, I will be seen to live out my various roles and functions with a wide variety of peoples, as a priest and friend in Catholic Mexico, and as believer, brother and friend in Muslim Bangladesh and Hindu India. I will be interacting, implicitly, with the peculiar voices of Tradition of these several milieus.
I recall hearing these voices speaking to me over my shoulder, as it were, all my life.
“Out” in the title refers to the development of my personality and my life as a missionary-priest, with some normal rebelliousness going on from my youth, and some hard to explain.
My personal story will be told from within this overlay of Tradition, so that the purpose of the memoir is to illustrate my evolving relationship with Tradition.
Over time, as I have been composing this memoir, I have been become aware that our American culture, in some manifestations, does not share my conviction of the prominent role of one’s Tradition in the development of one’s life. It seems that many folks prefer to focus on their individual or egoic development while paying scant attention to the persons or values or customs of their dominant birth Tradition. Not hanging on to one’s Tradition and moving on into an individualistic assimilation of modern society’s values seems to be a dominant theme in society.
It has occurred to me that unconsciously in writing this memoir with my focus on the preeminent role of Tradition in my life, I may have written a book that could be described as counter-cultural. In effect, I mean to say that it is possible to retain one’s attachment to Tradition, however that manifests in one’s life, and also move on into an assimilation of the values and customs of the other encircling milieus of one’s ongoing life.
I recognize that I have retained a great attachment to my birth Tradition, as parochial as it was, and have opened my mind and heart, body and spirit to the assimilation of the values of several cultural and religious Traditions. There is a great paradox in all of this, and I firmly believe that my lifelong adherence to the values of my parochial birth Tradition, literally and figuratively speaking, has enabled me to become a person of the world, a brother to all people, an evolutionary believer in god, with a universal perspective that transcends but does not denigrate my parochial birth Tradition. “Beyond” in the title refers to this movement in which I transcend the peculiarities of my early life Tradition to create “my own tradition”.
After my family and friends, I certainly would have the members of my Catholic Tradition in mind as potential readers. Then also, readers from any branch of the Christian family of faith. In addition, I would foresee the dynamic that I have revealed about my own life, consisting of being born and raised in a particular Tradition, then detaching myself from the strong bonds of my childhood with a resounding rebelliousness to carve out my own individual “tradition” and then to see this tension resolved in a non-dual embrace, may only be my illustration of a more common dynamic in the lives of many other folks. Their dominant “birth” Tradition may be social, cultural, ethnic, political or religious in nature, and thus their story line would differ from mine, but not in the essential underlying theme that I have outlined, or so me thinks.
“Back” in the title refers, in part, to my present goal of sharing the fruits of my missionary life with other folks, after moving into a phase of integration and harmony in my relationship between Tradition and “my own tradition”.
This evolving relationship will be illustrated as an implicit dialogue between these two voices, that of Tradition and my very own. I envision the dialogue as between myself and the non-embodied voices of Tradition. Since I never have countenanced a complete separation from my Tradition, in the bold text of the voices of Tradition, there will always be at least one voice that is open to understanding my development or overtly affirming of me, even when I seem, in my story line, to be bucking Tradition altogether. My story will be in normal text, and my inner voice or understanding or reflection will be in italic text.
I must explain why I have chosen to use the capitalized word “Tradition” in such an exceptional way.
The Tradition in which I was born and raised in the 1940’s in New York City partook exclusively of that of the Catholic Church with her stress on the bishops and priests being the divinely ordained channel for us faithful to be instructed and nourished and healed in our faith, principally through obeying the dictates of those hierarchical personalities and receiving the seven Sacraments and going to a Catholic primary school, with a Friday fish diet ever! (Catholics were expected to obey the weekly penitential rule of abstinence from eating meat on every Friday, to remember the day that Jesus died.) The Sacraments were the Church’s ritual life par excellence, so that participation in these rites came to define a good Catholic. Well, come to think of it, obedience did play a good part too. Going to a Catholic school only added honey to the mix. This occurred for me in the Parish of the Ascension in Manhattan’s Upper West Side (of Central Park, that is) in the decades of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Only stock prayers from a book were around and lots of images of the saints, who had made it all the way. Reading and owning a Bible at home were not encouraged nor widely practiced. That’s what Protestants did.
As a young adult, I learned why Tradition played a key role in the makeup of the life and thinking of the Catholic Church. In the centuries after the European Reform Movement in the 16th century, adherence to this element by the Church’s hierarchy became highly accentuated precisely because those Reformist churches rejected the dominant importance of Tradition over against that of Reading and Preaching the Word of God in the Bible, whether by clergy or laity. The latter became the Reformers’ leitmotif to counteract the deterioration of its role in the Church up to that time, amid the intimation that only clerics and not the laity could have direct access to the Word of God. As a caricature, the Catholic Church heralded the supremacy of Tradition, while the Reformers that of the Bible as a true source for their Christian faith. Without a doubt both churches gave due importance to the Bible and Tradition, respectively. While the Roman Catholic Church emphasized the indispensable role of the hierarchy in channeling the Tradition to the faithful, the Reformers emphasized the direct accessibility of the Word of God to the ordinary believer.
Adherence to the Tradition of my Church was unquestioned and I along with my family became faithful members of our parish. Adherence to that Tradition and faithful participation in our Church’s sacramental life did not guarantee that we would be growing in understanding and taking responsibility for our daily lives, but no one ever talked to us then in such terms. Our universal human condition meant that we were bound to be tempted to bypass these moral and spiritual boundaries or to act in defiance of them, as we forged our personal journeys, under our own personal responsibility. The constant harping for us all to be sure to go to confession regularly was eloquent testimony to the Church’s understanding of our universal human condition. The harping here below was meant to assure we would be ready to enter those pearly gates when our time was up.
So … they knew I was going to fall off the wagon, they did! There was an expectation that I would commit sin just like anyone else. And I did. Could they have known how far from the wagon I would fall?
There was scant expectation and greater fear that I would grow up and away from their paternalistic pastoral ways. And I certainly did.
Where did I get this “other challenge” to go off and become a professional missionary? Family and church and school and street had no such phrase. They embraced me and kept me indoors, safe to grow. Too young to look outdoors and beyond! By the 8th grade, how could l look to China?
The specifics will come out in the description of me accepting to forge my tradition and living with it and out of it.
The Tradition was just there; my drive for my own tradition was making me all the time.
I have discovered that my own personal journey had some unusual origins in my early adolescence when I could not have had any appreciable influences from outside of my Tradition. The first of many dissonances it became. Two tires up, two tires down. My search for reasonable answers to my questions led me to delve into my family history and culture that my parents brought with them from rural Ireland.
A significant sub-theme of this memoir is my journey of searching for my father who raised me, never having become my friend, but ending up as a strong presence of faithfulness and good humor.
I intuited that a strict adherence to the norms and boundaries of the Tradition that saw me born and raised in Ascension Parish would never have allowed me to become the mature integrated person that I am, were it not for my insistence on carving my own tradition out of the initial dictates of Tradition in my upbringing. Could I have been influenced yet by that Protestant tradition of allowing for direct individual inspiration? What a laugh!
It seems like Tradition/tradition will be the theme of this work. It roots me in my past history and it projects me forward as my life unfolds. I have reveled inside at being a liberal and a maverick, and certainly with great pride in my traditional roots of being Irish, a New Yorker, Catholic and a Maryknoller priest.
They never do part company altogether. No way for it to happen. Not even if I chose to. Not really good to allow a fight to go on forever. No smiles. No fun. No joy. No way.
Yes, I have insisted on carving out “my tradition” from the teachings and inclinations of that Tradition. I prized being a maverick and non-conventional for many decades, gliding under the radar screen of those in positions of authority for the Tradition. I preferred to lie low, to go unnoticed, and to live within my own veil-space of the good life heavily idealized for sure.
The irony of it is that I have become more conscious of the dominant role of my own ego to suggest ways to go and things to do and boundaries to overcome. And so I have come to see the invaluable role that these “illicit” meanderings also played in the formation of my personality and role in life and level of happiness. Could I or anyone get beyond an infantile or an adolescent level of faith without them? God knows we could not, inviting us to laugh too at our perfectionistic and judgmental attitudes that could stunt our innate drive for living more and better according to God’s Spirit-in-us.
PREFACE
A Transformative Journey, Out, Beyond and Back:
My Evolving Relationship with My Tradition
This is my memoir from a missionary life. I have used this latter phrase “from a missionary life” in the title of several compilations of my earlier writings. It seems good to include it here also, by way of emphasizing the continuity of my purpose in this writing project of my mature years, namely, to continue to share with folks the fruits of my rich missionary life, as many describe the contents of my letters, stories and communications.
I trace the origin of my missionary life from an unusual calling in my adolescence at twelve years of age to be an overseas missionary. By a restrictive set of circumstances in the Catholic Church of the decades of my youth, I could not become a missionary without entering the seminary, which is a formation center for those becoming priests. So, in order to become a missionary, I had to become a priest, thus creating an existential tension in my heart and spirit, due to the overwhelming preeminence given to the latter over any other role for a male in the Catholic Church. Thus my missionary calling got relegated to a secondary position by the Church’s Tradition, when it was primary in my own heart.
This memoir will span my entire life, seen as a journey of transformation and maturation. To this day, I continue to live out these same two roles in several new ways in my mature years with greater harmony and integrity than in my youth.
I have a keen awareness of my roots in the New York Irish Catholic Tradition of my birth, inherited from my Irish immigrant parents, James and Mary (nee O’Donnell) Martin. This is the milieu in which I was born and raised, and it will have a dominant voice from the beginning of my memoir. In fact, the whole memoir will be encased in the shell of Tradition, with the peculiar voices of the various religious and cultural environments where I have lived and worked as an overseas missionary priest. So as the memoir progresses, I will be seen to live out my various roles and functions with a wide variety of peoples, as a priest and friend in Catholic Mexico, and as believer, brother and friend in Muslim Bangladesh and Hindu India. I will be interacting, implicitly, with the peculiar voices of Tradition of these several milieus.
I recall hearing these voices speaking to me over my shoulder, as it were, all my life.
“Out” in the title refers to the development of my personality and my life as a missionary-priest, with some normal rebelliousness going on from my youth, and some hard to explain.
My personal story will be told from within this overlay of Tradition, so that the purpose of the memoir is to illustrate my evolving relationship with Tradition.
Over time, as I have been composing this memoir, I have been become aware that our American culture, in some manifestations, does not share my conviction of the prominent role of one’s Tradition in the development of one’s life. It seems that many folks prefer to focus on their individual or egoic development while paying scant attention to the persons or values or customs of their dominant birth Tradition. Not hanging on to one’s Tradition and moving on into an individualistic assimilation of modern society’s values seems to be a dominant theme in society.
It has occurred to me that unconsciously in writing this memoir with my focus on the preeminent role of Tradition in my life, I may have written a book that could be described as counter-cultural. In effect, I mean to say that it is possible to retain one’s attachment to Tradition, however that manifests in one’s life, and also move on into an assimilation of the values and customs of the other encircling milieus of one’s ongoing life.
I recognize that I have retained a great attachment to my birth Tradition, as parochial as it was, and have opened my mind and heart, body and spirit to the assimilation of the values of several cultural and religious Traditions. There is a great paradox in all of this, and I firmly believe that my lifelong adherence to the values of my parochial birth Tradition, literally and figuratively speaking, has enabled me to become a person of the world, a brother to all people, an evolutionary believer in god, with a universal perspective that transcends but does not denigrate my parochial birth Tradition. “Beyond” in the title refers to this movement in which I transcend the peculiarities of my early life Tradition to create “my own tradition”.
After my family and friends, I certainly would have the members of my Catholic Tradition in mind as potential readers. Then also, readers from any branch of the Christian family of faith. In addition, I would foresee the dynamic that I have revealed about my own life, consisting of being born and raised in a particular Tradition, then detaching myself from the strong bonds of my childhood with a resounding rebelliousness to carve out my own individual “tradition” and then to see this tension resolved in a non-dual embrace, may only be my illustration of a more common dynamic in the lives of many other folks. Their dominant “birth” Tradition may be social, cultural, ethnic, political or religious in nature, and thus their story line would differ from mine, but not in the essential underlying theme that I have outlined, or so me thinks.
“Back” in the title refers, in part, to my present goal of sharing the fruits of my missionary life with other folks, after moving into a phase of integration and harmony in my relationship between Tradition and “my own tradition”.
This evolving relationship will be illustrated as an implicit dialogue between these two voices, that of Tradition and my very own. I envision the dialogue as between myself and the non-embodied voices of Tradition. Since I never have countenanced a complete separation from my Tradition, in the bold text of the voices of Tradition, there will always be at least one voice that is open to understanding my development or overtly affirming of me, even when I seem, in my story line, to be bucking Tradition altogether. My story will be in normal text, and my inner voice or understanding or reflection will be in italic text.
I must explain why I have chosen to use the capitalized word “Tradition” in such an exceptional way.
The Tradition in which I was born and raised in the 1940’s in New York City partook exclusively of that of the Catholic Church with her stress on the bishops and priests being the divinely ordained channel for us faithful to be instructed and nourished and healed in our faith, principally through obeying the dictates of those hierarchical personalities and receiving the seven Sacraments and going to a Catholic primary school, with a Friday fish diet ever! (Catholics were expected to obey the weekly penitential rule of abstinence from eating meat on every Friday, to remember the day that Jesus died.) The Sacraments were the Church’s ritual life par excellence, so that participation in these rites came to define a good Catholic. Well, come to think of it, obedience did play a good part too. Going to a Catholic school only added honey to the mix. This occurred for me in the Parish of the Ascension in Manhattan’s Upper West Side (of Central Park, that is) in the decades of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Only stock prayers from a book were around and lots of images of the saints, who had made it all the way. Reading and owning a Bible at home were not encouraged nor widely practiced. That’s what Protestants did.
As a young adult, I learned why Tradition played a key role in the makeup of the life and thinking of the Catholic Church. In the centuries after the European Reform Movement in the 16th century, adherence to this element by the Church’s hierarchy became highly accentuated precisely because those Reformist churches rejected the dominant importance of Tradition over against that of Reading and Preaching the Word of God in the Bible, whether by clergy or laity. The latter became the Reformers’ leitmotif to counteract the deterioration of its role in the Church up to that time, amid the intimation that only clerics and not the laity could have direct access to the Word of God. As a caricature, the Catholic Church heralded the supremacy of Tradition, while the Reformers that of the Bible as a true source for their Christian faith. Without a doubt both churches gave due importance to the Bible and Tradition, respectively. While the Roman Catholic Church emphasized the indispensable role of the hierarchy in channeling the Tradition to the faithful, the Reformers emphasized the direct accessibility of the Word of God to the ordinary believer.
Adherence to the Tradition of my Church was unquestioned and I along with my family became faithful members of our parish. Adherence to that Tradition and faithful participation in our Church’s sacramental life did not guarantee that we would be growing in understanding and taking responsibility for our daily lives, but no one ever talked to us then in such terms. Our universal human condition meant that we were bound to be tempted to bypass these moral and spiritual boundaries or to act in defiance of them, as we forged our personal journeys, under our own personal responsibility. The constant harping for us all to be sure to go to confession regularly was eloquent testimony to the Church’s understanding of our universal human condition. The harping here below was meant to assure we would be ready to enter those pearly gates when our time was up.
So … they knew I was going to fall off the wagon, they did! There was an expectation that I would commit sin just like anyone else. And I did. Could they have known how far from the wagon I would fall?
There was scant expectation and greater fear that I would grow up and away from their paternalistic pastoral ways. And I certainly did.
Where did I get this “other challenge” to go off and become a professional missionary? Family and church and school and street had no such phrase. They embraced me and kept me indoors, safe to grow. Too young to look outdoors and beyond! By the 8th grade, how could l look to China?
The specifics will come out in the description of me accepting to forge my tradition and living with it and out of it.
The Tradition was just there; my drive for my own tradition was making me all the time.
I have discovered that my own personal journey had some unusual origins in my early adolescence when I could not have had any appreciable influences from outside of my Tradition. The first of many dissonances it became. Two tires up, two tires down. My search for reasonable answers to my questions led me to delve into my family history and culture that my parents brought with them from rural Ireland.
A significant sub-theme of this memoir is my journey of searching for my father who raised me, never having become my friend, but ending up as a strong presence of faithfulness and good humor.
I intuited that a strict adherence to the norms and boundaries of the Tradition that saw me born and raised in Ascension Parish would never have allowed me to become the mature integrated person that I am, were it not for my insistence on carving my own tradition out of the initial dictates of Tradition in my upbringing. Could I have been influenced yet by that Protestant tradition of allowing for direct individual inspiration? What a laugh!
It seems like Tradition/tradition will be the theme of this work. It roots me in my past history and it projects me forward as my life unfolds. I have reveled inside at being a liberal and a maverick, and certainly with great pride in my traditional roots of being Irish, a New Yorker, Catholic and a Maryknoller priest.
They never do part company altogether. No way for it to happen. Not even if I chose to. Not really good to allow a fight to go on forever. No smiles. No fun. No joy. No way.
Yes, I have insisted on carving out “my tradition” from the teachings and inclinations of that Tradition. I prized being a maverick and non-conventional for many decades, gliding under the radar screen of those in positions of authority for the Tradition. I preferred to lie low, to go unnoticed, and to live within my own veil-space of the good life heavily idealized for sure.
The irony of it is that I have become more conscious of the dominant role of my own ego to suggest ways to go and things to do and boundaries to overcome. And so I have come to see the invaluable role that these “illicit” meanderings also played in the formation of my personality and role in life and level of happiness. Could I or anyone get beyond an infantile or an adolescent level of faith without them? God knows we could not, inviting us to laugh too at our perfectionistic and judgmental attitudes that could stunt our innate drive for living more and better according to God’s Spirit-in-us.
Below is the Contents of my memoir:
CONTENTS
Title page 1
Dedication 6
Opening story 8
Contents 9-10
Preface 12-18
Acknowledgements 19
Voices of Tradition 21-22
Chapter One: Born and raised 24-31
Chapter Two: From Ascension 33-45
Chapter Three: My Vocation Story 47-58
Chapter Four: Leaving home and Ascension 60-67
Chapter Five: September 9, 1955 69-78
Chapter Six: College at Glen Ellyn 80-95
Chapter Seven: What the Southern Baptists taught me about Tradition 97-105
Chapter Eight: Getting through Maryknoll Major Seminary 107-115
Chapter Nine: First rebellious act 117-120
Chapter Ten: Growing up in Mexico 123-148
Chapter Eleven: Nunez family and I are one 150-161
Chapter Twelve: Moon landing 163-168
Chapter Thirteen: What the Southern Baptists taught me about being missionary 170-175
Chapter Fourteen: The Golden Years 177-194
Chapter Fifteen: I believe in me 196-209
Chapter Sixteen: Maverick Missioner 211-233
Chapter Seventeen: More on Dad 235-247
Chapter Eighteen: Living under a veil in Bangladesh 249-272
Chapter Nineteen: Learning not to see 274-278
Chapter Twenty: Getting back to Sri Aurobindo Ashram 280-297
Chapter Twenty one: Work? You asked. Oh yes, work. 299-313
Chapter Twenty two: And after working hours? 315-330
Chapter Twenty three: Ascension Parish, 60 years later 332-339
Chapter Twenty four: Non-dualism 341-358
Chapter Twenty five: All together now 360
Chapter Twenty six: A word after 362-363
CONTENTS
Title page 1
Dedication 6
Opening story 8
Contents 9-10
Preface 12-18
Acknowledgements 19
Voices of Tradition 21-22
Chapter One: Born and raised 24-31
Chapter Two: From Ascension 33-45
Chapter Three: My Vocation Story 47-58
Chapter Four: Leaving home and Ascension 60-67
Chapter Five: September 9, 1955 69-78
Chapter Six: College at Glen Ellyn 80-95
Chapter Seven: What the Southern Baptists taught me about Tradition 97-105
Chapter Eight: Getting through Maryknoll Major Seminary 107-115
Chapter Nine: First rebellious act 117-120
Chapter Ten: Growing up in Mexico 123-148
Chapter Eleven: Nunez family and I are one 150-161
Chapter Twelve: Moon landing 163-168
Chapter Thirteen: What the Southern Baptists taught me about being missionary 170-175
Chapter Fourteen: The Golden Years 177-194
Chapter Fifteen: I believe in me 196-209
Chapter Sixteen: Maverick Missioner 211-233
Chapter Seventeen: More on Dad 235-247
Chapter Eighteen: Living under a veil in Bangladesh 249-272
Chapter Nineteen: Learning not to see 274-278
Chapter Twenty: Getting back to Sri Aurobindo Ashram 280-297
Chapter Twenty one: Work? You asked. Oh yes, work. 299-313
Chapter Twenty two: And after working hours? 315-330
Chapter Twenty three: Ascension Parish, 60 years later 332-339
Chapter Twenty four: Non-dualism 341-358
Chapter Twenty five: All together now 360
Chapter Twenty six: A word after 362-363
Contact Father John P Martin
johnthep@msn.com
johnthep@msn.com
