A Mother's Love

Every year, during the first weekend in August, tens of thousands of Vietnamese-Americans descend on the small town of Carthage, Missouri to honor the Virgin Mary for helping Vietnamese boat refugees safely reach the United States more than thirty-five years earlier.

One of those refugees was Michael Vu, who now lives in Dallas, Texas. He was “eight or nine years old” when he fled Vietnam with his family. “My dad orchestrated our escape. My oldest brother left first, trying to go before us and prepare for us. His name was Vu Quang Thanh and unfortunately the China Sea took his life. He was on a boat with about 100 people, and they all perished, they were never found. His name is on the wall in the Prayer Garden. My dad is still looking for him, still hopes to find him, but I believe he’s dead.” Michael Vu shared this story while searching for his brother’s name among thousands of others on plaques in the Prayer Garden.

“When the priests here at the Carthage Congregation say daily mass, they pray for these names in this Prayer Garden. They are both the dead and the living. People who need prayer in their lives. For people still in Vietnam who live under hardship, who weren’t fortunate enough to be able to come here. This is the best place to come and pray for them. Family members gather here every year and pray for one another,” Michael said.

The Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix organizes and hosts the gathering each year on their grounds in Carthage for one simple reason: the Congregation shares the same harrowing story as do the attendees. In Vietnam in 1975, under orders from their superior, this group of priests and brothers jumped into boats and headed out into the open sea. In the midst of chaos and gunfire, all the members of the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix escaped and eventually made it safely to the shores of the United States.

Though members of the Congregation were scattered in refugee camps and on military bases, they were eventually reunited on an un-used seminary campus in Carthage, Missouri. In 1977, a couple of hundred Vietnamese from nearby cities like Kansas City, St. Louis and Springfield gathered on the seminary campus in Carthage for a day of recollection to express devotion to the Virgin Mary. The numbers began doubling each year, until now approximately 70,000 Vietnamese-Americans make the pilgrimage to Carthage to honor the Virgin Mary along with the Congregation.

“We have a very strong devotion to the Virgin Mary,” Michael Vu agreed. “As we left Vietnam, we prayed to Mary to take care of us. We had a priest on our boat. We had two boats of people. There was a curfew in Vietnam, so we left at dawn. As we left, sirens started going off. North Vietnamese soldiers stopped us. There were about 60 to 70 children below, including me. The soldiers came aboard and questioned us. The priest said, “We’re hungry, and we’re going fishing.” There were fishing nets on the boat. The soldiers let us leave. We believe that praying to the Virgin Mary helped us escape Vietnam. Everyone on the boat believes it was a miracle we escaped. We arrived in Huntington Beach, CA We moved to Wichita Falls TX and we heard about Marian Days there. We felt like we had to go. We go every year. We’ve never stopped. We will definitely be here as long as they have it. It renews our spiritual life. Everyone who comes here has the same unity in their heart, one goal, devotion to Mary. It helps us through the year. It has helped us adjust here in the U.S. We didn’t know anyone, we didn’t know English. There are seven surviving brothers and two sisters in our family, and every one of us received a four-year college degree in the U.S., except for the youngest son who has Down Syndrome.”

Over time, “Marian Days” has become a cultural event attracting parishes, families, and communities from all over the United States. Included in the festivities are Vietnamese food, both traditional and contemporary music, open-air confessions and masses on sloping lawns, speakers scheduled over several days, and a procession through the town with a statue of Our Lady of Fatima. And although the Congregation hosts the event, volunteers from parishes across the United States do much of the work, including staffing the endless restaurants and food stalls sprawled beneath tent awnings.

Marian Days, while growing from 200 to 70,000 attendees, has evolved over the years and included some growing pains. At one time, wall-to-wall people elbowed for a space to sleep on the seminary grounds and spilled over into the small, bewildered town--and at times the socializing aspect threatened to overshadow the spiritual one. But many of the social tensions have been resolved and the facilities expanded and upgraded, including the addition of showers, restrooms, a Prayer Garden, Stations of the Cross, and the Vietnamese Martyrs Auditorium. In addition to camping out in tents on the seminary grounds or filling nearby motels, attendees also set up tents on the lawns of welcoming locals, some of whom invite the same families into their backyards year after year. Jim Kerr is one of the locals who likes to attend every year “so we can eat something exceptional. I just ate pork intestines and it was very good. We love the Vietnamese iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk.”

His wife Amy recalled, “One year it was raining. We were with our three daughters. We were getting rained on. A teen boy called over several of his friends with umbrellas—they escorted us to the food and kept us dry. One of our daughters grew up going to this, and got to know the people at the parish who run this restaurant (Queen of Vietnam Church in Port Arthur TX). After she was grown, she moved to the Port Arthur area and knows the same people there now.” Doug Huynh from Hastings Nebraska fled Vietnam in 1975 when he was eighteen. But he says Marian Days is about more than the past. “When you have a hard time now, you ask Mary for blessing. We come to visit her, to pay our respects and agree to come back. There are Vietnamese from all 50 states, Canada and Australia. We meet other Vietnamese people from all around the country. Some families drive 24 hours—8 hours is easy, we can’t complain. My mother-in-law listens to Bible talks and talks by priests. My kids like to hang out with other kids. There is good Vietnamese food.” Tai Le is one of the teenage boys from Queen of Vietnam Church in Port Arthur who comes every year to work in his parish’s Marian Days restaurant. “Our parish has a sign-up sheet and we volunteer to work here to raise funds for our church. We also come for the experience of meeting other people and to get to know our faith. The elderly here share their stories and they explain we should go back to Vietnam to learn our history. They tell us you should know history or it will repeat itself. My mother is very devoted to Mary. I choose to go to church every morning at 6 am at home. I don’t expect any rewards when I come here. I just come here to serve others.”

Duyen Nguyen from Arlington TX was blinded in a car accident. “Since 2000, my parents have come to pray for me. Miracles do happen. The doctors said I might see again. One day perhaps I will see again and God will bless me with a miracle. We go to mass here and everything. We go to retreats to listen to speakers. We go to pray and bless ourselves with holy water. Our parents volunteer here. Our church runs a restaurant here. Parishioners volunteer, raise funds for church. We also come for fun.” Daniel Tran of Rochester, Minnesota floated in a canoe with 29 people for 20 days before reaching Hong Kong. Although a Buddhist at the time, he now attends Marian Days every year as a Catholic with his wife. Indeed, his wife, Yen-Huong, says many Buddhists come to Marian Days as well. Also posted on Strange Islands

Say whaaat??!!??

Okay, immediately after I posted that last piece, I realized I was possibly pitching the right article to the wrong demographic. I am slowly growing to understand that I have different audiences in different places. Generally, most of my writing online has been rock and roll oriented, but I realize that the world is larger than that. So, let me tell you a little bit about another topic I enjoy thinking about: My lazy man's quest to become a "Spiritual Leader" - I'm not driven or ambitious enough to try and get rich doing it, but it does service my ego fairly well.

I have a creative process as a writer that is neither particularly unusual nor original. A lot of my work comes out as "automatic" or "stream of consciousness" writing - which is not to say that there is no intellectual process involved, simply that any intellectual or analytic component comes later on in the editing phase, when I realize (hopefully) what the heck I was talking about.

On some rare and very special occasions, I am visited by words the source of which I cannot trace. They quite literally come from a location within myself that is unmapped. The poem I wrote to read at my wedding falls under this category (which, if enough people express interest in reading it, I may post here as well). Yeats, among many others, claimed to have accessed some other intelligence or state of being in some of his writing. I do not purport to take a stand for or against the verity of such claims. All I know is that occasionally I have the experience of writing something, then looking at it and going "Where the heck did THAT come from?"

At this point I would like to "out" myself and confess that I am the author of this blog [link] which has heretofore been anonymous. I invite you to partake of this exercise in mostly or somewhat automatic writing as you have leisure to do so. Here is a small excerpt of that writing, to give you a taste of the sort of subject matter it deals with.

Thursday, January 08, 2009

to be loved

possibly every fear, every worry, every sorrow can be traced back to the desire to be loved, or perhaps more succinctly, the desire to feel as if we are loved. feelings are only a partial source of information, and using feelings to map reality is like trying to sew a wedding dress with one's teeth.

love is not a feeling, but an action - this is a cliche that you may already have heard many times. we do not truly understand the implications of what being truly loved is - if we did, not only would we lose completely and permanently all illusion that it is possible to not be loved, we would be consumed by the fire of love that is more ubiquitous than air.

the desire to be loved causes sorrow. it is an unquenchable desire.

the only liberation from that pain is to realize that it arises from an illusion - that we are not loved. still, it's easy enough to talk about abandoning illusion, but every human being who has ever lived has struggled a mighty struggle against their own illusion, as a hunter with a broken spear might struggle hand-t0-tusk with a wild beast.

the only proven way to liberate oneself from the illusory, addictive desire to fee loved is to love completely and totally without seeking to be loved in return.

some confuse not seeking to be loved, with rejecting love. but the rejection of love is also an illusion, like a fish rejecting water. does the fish welcome water? the fish does no such thing. the fish abides in the water. so do we abide in love, whether we see it or not. to love selflessly opens the heart to receive love more completely than any other pursuit.

to fully see reality as it is, may possibly be a great burden. but those who dare great things may dare to see beyond their fears to an underlying reality.

the reality is not simply that we are loved, although we are. the reality is not simply that to love the other is the only way to open the heart to receive love, although that also is true. the reality is not simply that we are surrounded by love everywhere and in everything, although that also is true.

the reality that holds all of these things is that everything is love, and that there is nothing that is not love. the only reality is love. everything else is illusion.