A Memorial Tribute to Gloria Filiault Rowe

 

 



Gloria Filiault Rowe


September 23, 1932

to

January 23, 2011

 

My mother’s religious conversion (circa 1974) was, throughout her last thirty-six years, radically transformative. By 1978 she was the least worldly person I had ever known. Frankly, I (and many others) thought her fringe beliefs were entirely delusional, yet within a few more years I came to respect and greatly admire her life of spirit and devotion, despite her peculiar theology.

 My objective then, for her 2011 memorial service, was to present testimony that would reach two distinct audiences: those who shared her beliefs, and those who continued to believe her religion was simply delusional.

The fact is, a transformative, positive, spiritual practice is not necessarily compromised or diminished just because the encompassing theology or metaphysics are not ‘true.’ Even dogmatic, uncompromising, ‘this is the only way’ theology can still be a vehicle for genuine, authentic, spiritual experience and growth.

 
How do I know? The proof is documented in my mother’s Bible and in her life, as related below:

  

A Perspective from Gloria Rowe’s Bible

 (Memorial tribute by Stephen Rowe, January 27, 2011)

 

I want to share a special perspective with you – the perspective provided by Gloria Rowe’s personal Bible. Everyone here knows something of my Mother’s Christian aspect – that is, the Christian virtues she reflected to the world: her faith, humility, charity, loving-kindness and such - and the joy and grace that radiated from her. This is familiar. What I want to share now is a glimpse into the spiritual journey that brought her to this conclusion, as reflected in the duct taped Bible which her old friend Lillian Meyers gave to her on February 25, 1978, just one month shy of thirty-three years ago. [Hold Bible up and ask Lillian Meyers to wave her hand]

 

The first thing you notice is the duct tape spine needs more duct tape. There is not a page that hasn’t been turned multiple times. Then look at the white-space pages typically in the front and back of books … there is no white space – it is entirely filled with handwritten notes, spiritual reminders, scriptural references, etc. And after the white space was swallowed she continued in the same vein with numerous post-it notes, writing on book-marks, notepad sheets, bank-deposit envelopes … anything she had close at hand became a note between some pages. Then there are hundreds of chapter-verse highlights, underlines, additional references, comments, etc. … and then there are hundreds more … multiple such on nearly every New Testament page and well more than half the Old Testament pages. [Show Bible while speaking - the duct tape, filled-in white space; open to random pages and show highlights, underlines, etc]

These are the footsteps and mile-marks of her journey – and their contents reveal that her journey was in fact an intense and arduous quest. Christianity was not an easy path. She struggled with pride, acceptance, submission, and even faith. And she suffered. And learned along the way, and would write things such as “God often does not remove obstacles, but rather uses our trials to work on us.” And yes, all things are supposed to work together for them that love the Lord, but the interim evidence can seem otherwise at times, and even faith could be hard. But she struggled earnestly, and with Grace prevailed.

 

The most poignant notes in her Bible, at least to me, are those focused on reflecting Christ to others here in this world – the ones where she says “Help me be like Jesus to others” or “Let others see Jesus through me.” What makes these notes especially poignant is that they usually occur in contexts where she is experiencing deep personal suffering … and her prayer is not “Please take these burdens from me” but rather “Give me the strength so that others may see Jesus through me.”

 

So her religion was not all happy-talk about Heaven. The reality is that she lived a deep and profound spiritual life right here on earth, in our own time, and in our very midst. And she succeeded in her quest: I can indeed see Jesus Christ in her life, and I know so can many of you. And this spiritual path - or rather the questing and seeking that shaped that path -  is very much reflected in this Bible with the duct-tape spine.

 

 

Links to two of her favorite hymns:

This is my Father’s World

I Cometo the Garden Alone

Gloria Filiault at age 16

Gloria Filiault Rowe at age 54, approximately

12 years after her religious conversion

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Stephen Rowe welcomes correspondence of all sort at StephenRowe.OriGraphics@yahoo.com

 

The World Starts Anew Every Winter Solstice ...

2010

The world starts anew every winter solstice (in the northern climes), always has, way before anyone ever imagined a calendar, way before there were even people …

2012

So here we are again ...

Eve of the new year ...

                 

We ride the cosmic comet of History together ... no idea where we are going, can only see the recent, bright-seeming trail behind us ...

Cowboy up! Rawhide!!!

  

Nature photos taken with a cheap old Kodak digital camera  on the three acres surrounding my trailer.

The Intrepid Horseman is one of my very best friends from long ago, Michael Grimm.

Stephen Rowe welcomes correspondence of all sort at

StephenRowe.OriGraphics@yahoo.com



Relativity in Cyberspace

Cyberspace is great illusion. People imagine it makes them smarter, and that’s true for some. But I’m guessing  far more gyrate toward cognitive dissonance reducing, prior-belief reinforcing, alternate universes … Weird, reverse-black holes where nothing can truly ‘enter’ unless it is already there! You are guaranteed not to have to seriously consider anything you don’t already believe, because there is so much out there you CAN agree with. Just click on like, and within five minutes or less you can find something else to like again!

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Stephen Rowe welcomes correspondence of all sort at StephenRowe.OriGraphics@yahoo.com

New Year Resolution for People with Garrett Roots

 

Time to conjure up a good New Year Resolution – something attainable, rewarding, and motivating. Here’s one in which many of us might participate together throughout the next six plus months, whether or not you live close to Garrett: Resolve to train for and participate in the annual Garrett July 4th two mile walk or 5k (3.1 mile) run, plus the before-and-after pancake breakfast, plus the Cruise-In, all held at the East Side Park across from the school.

 

The breakfast cost is a donation, the Cruise-In is free, and the pre-registration walk/run cost has been just $5 for many years (which includes a free Garrett July 4th walk/run t-shirt), thanks to the Garrett State Bank’s sponsorship - so it’s relatively easy to bring children and grandchildren to walk and/or run with you, should you and they be inclined.

 

I run in this event every year, and hope that come 2013 you will run or walk with me – and better yet, with ALL the others who come out, including a hoped-for lot of 2013 Resolutionary Newbees.

 

In the meantime, think how much fun it will be to share this common goal with friends throughout the next six months! And think about how much better you will feel after six months of regular walking and/or jogging. This is a “race” you cannot possibly lose.

And if you live far away, and cannot get back to Garrett for the Glorious Fourth … Still, you can be connected in Spirit and in Cyberspace! Find a July 4th event wherever you are, and share your journey and accomplishment through Facebook, Email, and/or Telephone. YOU have MANY interested Garrett friends … Just reach out, participate, and share!

 

 

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The Anti-Christ

©1991   Stephen Rowe

The year is 2000 AD. Hell is the vast urban sprawl of the North-East Atlantic seaboard. Its high priests, Nobel scientists with ties to Satanic cults and financed by government and corporate mega-grants, carry out secret research in giant underground labyrinths suggesting the ancient catacombs.

A continent away, in a secret vault deep beneath the Vatican, lies the mummified body of Christ, who had never risen: none of the disciples or women had possessed sufficient faith. Preservation of the body in anticipation of One with sufficient faith to effect the resurrection motivates the Catholic Church, as it has for 2000 years, though this secret is known only to the Popes and to their very few confidants.

About 1000 years ago a demented Pope had severed a finger of the mummy and secreted it away in a vial which he wore around his neck. The long dead Pope's diary was recently uncovered by a Satanic cult with ties to genetic researchers at MIT. Members exhumed the grave and recovered the vial with the finger. Their plan is to impregnate a virgin with a fertilized egg having the precise DNA structure as Christ, resulting in a virgin birth of the anti-Christ, whom they will school in occult knowledge.

A Catholic virgin of saintly purity is abducted, drugged, and impregnated with this DNA. She believes that she was raped, but nevertheless carries the child and raises him herself. The boy is precocious, and is closely watched by the Satanists as he grows. At age 12 the boy is lured into the confidence of the high priests (scientists with occult connections, possibly professors involved in a program for gifted and talented children). The scientists school him in scientific and occult practices, unknown to Mary, his mother. As the boy matures he bears an uncanny resemblance to familiar pictures of Christ.

Ultimately Mary learns of her son's Satanic involvement and of the finger. She seeks out a Catholic priest - an exceptional man who arranges an audience with the Pope in Italy.

Mary has the faith necessary to resurrect Christ. Christ's mummy stirs, slowly sits up, and tears the ancient bandages away from the face, to reveal the visage of Christ. It is an awful moment.

Christ and the anti-Christ, their resemblance eerie, ultimately do battle against the backdrop of the urban Hell of North-East America. Christ defeats the anti-Christ and hurls him into the bottomless pit - some inferno associated with atomic or sub-atomic nuclear research - where the anti-Christ will be bound for 1000 years. There is an astonishing burst of light and sound as the vault of Heaven opens. Finally, after two millennia, Christ ascends, but of course the ascension is not over ancient Palestine but over a contemporary American megopolis.

But in the background lurks a sinister, almost serpentine figure, the vial with the finger around his neck. As Christ ascends and vanishes into Heaven, the figure with the vial slithers away, vanishing into a seedy, red-light district of the urban Hell beneath.

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 Throughout the above, there is a Faustian identification of science and scientists with the occult. This link spirals throughout 2,000 years of history and culture, the double helix of DNA an objective correlative. This evolution parallels that of the Catholic Church, but is out of phase: the Church ascended earlier and has been declining since the Renaissance; secular humanism is now at its zenith. Even so, nay, for this very reason, the human condition is at its nadir. Thus it is time for the Anti-Christ's birth; thus it is time for Christ's resurrection. While Christ ultimately triumphs, the victory is ephemeral, as the vial with the finger still exists. 

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Stephen Rowe welcomes correspondence of all sort at StephenRowe.OriGraphics@yahoo.com

 

What Does Your Name Signify?

On May 28, 1952, my nineteen and twenty year old parents named me Stephen Allan Rowe.

 

 

 

 

But what did they then know of me today, sixty years later?  

I didn’t even know myself at eighteen or twenty-one! Now, October 2012, sitting down at age 60 to write this reflection…

 

 

 

 

 

 

... I do know, and have thus renamed myself:  Stephen Allan Armand Filiault Rowe.

 

 

What does your name signify?

 

 

 

 

  

One Christmas, circa the second grade, my stocking presented a bottle of red ink and a rubber stamp, STEPHEN ALLAN ROWE, in capitals.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Using the stamp, reading those letters, felt strange – everyone had always called me “Steve” or “Steve Rowe,” and that is who I had always told people I was.

 

 

 

Of course I knew “Stephen Allan” was theoretically correct, but “Stephen” felt stuffy and pretentious, while “Allan”felt entirely alien, and neither names were ever used.

 

 

Yet there it was, undeniable to a seven or eight year old - bold red block capital letters proclaiming STEPHEN ALLAN ROWE. I was evidently “really” someone different from whom I felt myself to be!

 

 

Finally, many years later, I am who I am: Stephen Allan Armand Filiault Rowe. So what does this name, informed by my life experience, signify?

 

·         Steve was a childhood nickname. Paraphrasing the Biblical Stephen, When I was a child, I spoke (and was spoken to) as a child. But now I am an elder. Stephen connotes the flower of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual maturity wrought throughout a lifetime. Far from perfected, still I feel I have outgrown my childhood nickname Steve; I am Stephen.

 

·         Allan still feels alien, yet paradoxically, feeling alien feels ‘right’ now. I have always heard the yonder drum, have never been in step, all along the way. I wasn’t born to lead, I wasn’t born to follow. If Allan still feels a little odd, I am used to that feeling.

 

·         Filiault is my mother’s family name, so different from the Rowes ... I had always loved  the Filiaults, yet never imagined I was anything but a Rowe. Until my wife Kathy told me so around age fifty, and then it was so very obvious. The Filiaults are deeply spiritual (though not necessarily Christian), exceptionally frugal, non-conforming and non-materialistic. The Rowes … not so much. I am indeed, and have always been, a Filiault.

      

  

 

 

 

·         My Grandfather Armand Filiault was a French Canadian who ran away from a Catholic orphanage as an  adolescent, and migrated to America’s “Live Free or Die” “Granite State” of New Hampshire. He was fiercely independent, absolutely sure of himself, a stubborn, singular codger; and so am I.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Armand (Buster) Filiault’s old workshop; he made do.

 

 

·         So what of Rowe? It is a practicality. No one would know me as Stephen Allan Armand Filiault. And now my son and his children are named Rowe. Finally, I would never forsake my father, Basil Charles [later Charles Basil] Rowe.

Despite an ever-present, insurmountable distance between us, my last words to him were “I’ll remember the good things …”

 

 

 

 

  

And indeed there are many good things to remember.











 

 

Thus it has passed that, legal records aside, I am today Stephen Allan Armand Filiault Rowe. And I know what my name signifies.

 

 

 

 

Gloria Filiault Rowe at twenty

 

Charles Rowe at nineteen

Gloria Filiault at sixteen

  

Charles Rowe at twenty-one

 

 

 

 

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Stephen Rowe welcomes correspondence of all sort at StephenRowe.OriGraphics@yahoo.com

 

 

Facebook: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?

When Shakespeare wrote, some four hundred years ago, that “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” might he have somehow imagined Facebook in the throes of the 2012 elections? So many words, so little truth … So much venom, such little understanding … What confounding furies drive honest, intelligent friends, otherwise full of good will, into this blasted wasteland? Why do we mutilate each other in this Hell?

The answer is obvious, if you consider the source: almost all of these cancerous, toxic political posts seem to be “shared” content originated by partisan ideologues with self-serving agendas. But the word “shared,” in this case, is a misnomer. Sharing is generous and loving. We share personal photos, news, etc; or we share personal hopes and aspirations, often for each other; and sometimes, we even share our personal thoughts.

Most political posts, however, are not shared so much as cloned; witlessly reproduced “as is,” though often augmented with a few scathing words amplifying the cloned core. But given the biased source, something critical is almost always missing, and that is an honest, intelligent, unbiased consideration of the raw content. Were it present – this missing, unbiased analysis – then we would indeed be sharing; but in its absence, we are witless tools of self-serving, partisan ideologues.

Hence the sound and fury, signifying nothing but our own witlessness, our own idiocy.

We are, potentially, better than this, but there are costs: the effort of inquiry and the loss of certainty. Every significant political issue is complex, having not one truth and two sides, but many sides and many truths.

Truth is kaleidoscopic – it depends on how you look at things, and small shifts in perspective can generate very different conclusions. Furthermore, genuine inquiry is usually difficult at best. Lay citizens often lack the knowledge and time necessary to evaluate the complexities, while “the experts” often are, or are paid by, the self-serving, partisan ideologues responsible for our political dysfunction..


So to be honest, we must admit our uncertainty. And since honest uncertainty is better than certain idiocy, might we then, with a measure of humility, simply vote our conscience, and abandon the political sound, fury, and idiocy that have characterized Facebook for so many months?

Out beyond ideas of right and wrong doing, there is a field. I will meet you there ...

(quote by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian Muslim poet and Sufi mystic)

 

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