Robin's 35 Wedding Anniversary: A Memorable Insight (Holy Ghost Blog)

1. Will your unbaptised child burn in hell?

2. Will your uncertified laptop burn in Agbogbloshie?

The authorities certified my wedlock, and the authorities certify my reuse sales. Massive edifices of cathedrals were built on money from the paid certification of cemetaries, births, baptisms and marriages. 

Thirty five years is most of my adult life.  My partner is a Ph.D in francophone literature and director of the USA's most prestigious language institute. She also set up the Middlebury College language program semester in Yaounde, Cameroon (where I did my Peace Corps service from 6/1984-12/1986).  I'm enrolled in the Middlebury College Escuela de Espanol ahora mismo.  It's a small world.

When we were married in July 1990 in Toulouges, France (her parents Catalan hometown, outside of Perpignan) it was a long haul for a lot of Americans who attended, including my parents and my grandparents - Clarence and Lauradean Fisher of Ridgedale, Missouri.  Clarence is the inspiration for the chapter of Adam Minter's Secondhand - "A Rich Persons Broken Thing" - about the value repair can add. It was the thesis of  my international career, that knowledge to repair what someone else doesn't know how to repair is an honest economic tool, and the nations which exited poverty most quickly despite the "Resource Curse" were countries that repaired and refurbished and remanufactured at a mass scale.

But today's memorable insight from the wedding was another visitor from Columbia, Missouri, where I grew up until age of 5 (as my dad got his Ph.D in Mass Communications and Journalism).  I didn't know Pamela in Columbia, but met her in 1984 when we were both assigned to TEFL posts in the north of Cameroon (she was in the far north, Maroua, I was in the close north, Ngaoundal - 3 hours south of Ngaoundere by train. 

Pamela was my "best man".

So the anecdote from the wedding was about Pamela, an African American woman from Missouri, and her meeting my Mom, daughter of Clarence and Lauradean, who were all from Taney County Missouri.  And how much Pam and my Mom had in common from attending a Midwest/Southern American church.  Black church in the USA and Pentecostal Church from rural USA had a LOT in common.  Fire and brimstone, emphatic preachers, songs and clapping, interruptions of Hallelujah. From Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn we have a snapshot of the roots of these Churches....

"He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see. But it warn’t surprising; because he warn’t only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too, and had a little one-horse log church down back of the plantation, which he built it himself at his own expense, for a church and schoolhouse, and never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too. There was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South."

In particular, I remember my Mom and Pam both laughing about their earliest doubts about the church their parents were so intent on baptizing them into. In particular, the common practice of the "Holy Ghost" or "Holy Spirit" to inhabit the soul of a churchgoer who would rise, possessed, and speaking in tongues.

Mom and Pam both laughed about the same moments they asked themselves... "Of all the people in our congregation, why does God and the Holy Ghost always choose Mrs. Anderson to possess?  And why doesn't it ever 'possess; me or my parents??"

This was not a mustard seed of faith, this was the mustard seed of logic and reasonable doubt... and helps to explain why neither Pam (who also married a French citizen, Laurent, who also continued working in Africa for decades after they met during our PC service in Cameroun) nor my mother raised their own kids in a fire-and-brimstone church.

There's a pattern here, and it has a lot to do with E-Stewards and R2 Certification and the Charitable Industrial Complex - which this blog has always associated with temple of authority.

The Institution nurtures a culture of fear and concern - the amygdala.

1. Will your unbaptised child burn in hell?

2. Will your upgraded laptop burn in Agbogbloshie?

The Institution offers a solution - burial in a church cemetery, baptism, communion to solve #1.  And E-Stewards and R2 / SERI offer solutions to exercise the environmental demons from your e-waste to assuage any doubts about #2.

My belief is that within the Church and Organized Religion, very good people understand and - like Pamela or my Mom - have doubts about the money-changing-tables in the system (reference to what Jesus Christ was most upset by at the temples).  So they find themselves in a position, if they are a leader in the Church or the Environmental Certification Authority, to try to do good things. Help the poor being number one for both Authorities.

But both Authorities also have an attraction to the Possessed, Tongue-Speaking, Shaking and Dancing Ms. Anderson, possessed by the Holy Spirit of the cause.

I'm not anti-religious.  I'm very religious in my own respectful way, and have written about my beliefs from time to time on the blog (most recently around the passing of my Mother, Janeth K. Ingenthron - nee Fisher - who lived from 1942 to 2025). 

But like Mark Twain's Huck Finn, or Mom, or Pam, I know that Authority attracts weirdos. From the money-wringing Jimmy Swaggart (who got money from my subsistence farmer Grandfather) to the Ayatollah of E-Waste, authority is power. Claiming authority, building a case for authority, depends on Faith of the Masses.

The challenge is not to abandon faith while not ceding authority to those who do not know what they are talking about (speaking in tongues) and making it up as they go along.