Circular No 920

Newsletter for alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.

Caracas, 22 of June 2019 No. 920

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Dear Friends,

Recent emails follow.

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Kazim Abasali  <empowerwithart@gmail.com>

Jan 25 at 10:45 AM

Thanks George and Prior Jordan for the updates.

Thank God Abbot John's surgery went well.

George we pray for your brother-in-law, Alejandro Perez, as well as Fr. Augustine, Abbot John, and Robert Dumas.

God bless,

Kaz

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On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 1:59 PM

GEORGE MICKIEWICZ <amickiew@att.net> wrote:

Thank you very much, Brother Pascal, for your prompt response, support and the updated news on Abbot Pereira and Father Augustine.

I would like to extend this prayer request to my brother-in-law, Alejandro Perez, who has been suffering from the same problems as Abbott Pereira and undergoing similar surgery in a few weeks,

George

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From: Paschal Jordan

Sent: Friday, January 25, 2019 6:32 AM

Thank you, George.

We will continue to pray about Robert Dumas' situation.

Abbot John's prostate surgery yesterday was successful.

He is resting comfortably.

He will remain in hospital for four days so that the doctors can check on prostate and bladder functions returning to normal.

His doctors estimate that, if all continues to go well, he could be back in Trinidad by the third week of February.

Heartfelt thanks to all for your prayerful support.

Bro. Paschal

Fr. Augustine continues to hold on bravely. 

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On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 7:42 AM

GEORGE MICKIEWICZ <amickiew@att.net> wrote:

Dear Father Harold & Pryor Jordan

We ask you to please add Robert to your thoughts and prayers.

Father Augustine – am proceeding on the premise that “no news is good news”; our dear old teacher is holding on strong; amazing. 

We thank Our Lord for continuing to assist him.

Abbot Pereira – how did his surgery go? 

We continue to pray for his prompt and permanent recovery.  Please let him know of our prayers and keep us posted of his recovery and return.

Thank you very much for all you do for us,

George  

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From: Joseph Berment-McDowald

Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2019 9:34 PM

Subject: Robert Dumas

Dear Fellow Old Boy,

Dr. George Laquis "Pud" called this evening about Robert Dumas (72) who went to Abbey School around his time. I am enclosing an article from the local newspaper about his family's efforts to raise funds to pay for some of his medical expenses.

This is not the first time that he has had a major illness: when we last spoke about a year ago, when I called him about the possibility of contributing to the venezuelans he described having to drastically alter his lifestyle to pay for treatments for two previous major illnesses - - click on article below.

Despite his circumstances, he still promised to "see what he could do".

Fate has dealt him another blow.

Possibly, some of you may want to make a pledge towards his son's participation in a soon to held 26.2 mile marathon which is intended to raise $175,000 towards his expenses. Maybe some may want to arrange to spend some time with him or support him otherwise.

Sincerely,

Joe

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GEORGE MICKIEWICZ <amickiew@att.net>

Jan 25 at 9:59 AM

Dear Monsignor Mike

Just got your email address as the one in our AS MSB database was no longer active.  

Hopefully you are doing well yourself and in your ministry.   A half-century plus has passed since we last saw each other in December 1962 when I left the Mount for the last time.

Please add your prayers to this global prayer group for Robert.

May God continue to bless you and your ministry,

George (Shish, Yury, Jorge) Mickiewicz 

AS MSB 1956-1962

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Don Mitchell <idmitch@anguillanet.com>

Jan 25 at 9:45 AM

Thank you, Prior Jordan for the update.

Best wishes to all,

Don

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On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 7:42 AM

GEORGE MICKIEWICZ <amickiew@att.net> wrote:

Dear Father Harold & Pryor Jordan

We ask you to please add Robert to your thoughts and prayers.

Father Augustine – am proceeding on the premise that “no news is good news”; our dear old teacher is holding on strong; amazing. 

We thank Our Lord for continuing to assist him.

Abbot Pereira – how did his surgery go? 

We continue to pray for his prompt and permanent recovery. 

Please let him know of our prayers and keep us posted of his recovery and return.

Thank you very much for all you do for us,

George  

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From: Paschal Jordan <paschaljordan@gmail.com>

Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2019, 9:51:31 a.m. GMT-4

Subject: Update re Fr. Augustine

Dear All,

I alerted an Alumnus of the Abbey School to Fr. Augustine's condition and asked him to let the Alumni know and so pray for him.

Well, there has been such a torrent of e-mails of gratitude to him; many of them sharing memories of how he encouraged them to read (he was in charge of the library), how he taught them French, how he smacked their backsides when he caught them stealing the mangoes, how he showed them films on a Saturday night! 

Bp. Clyde Harvey and Fr. Harold Imamshah visited him yesterday and he was happy. Fr. Harold called the names of many of the Abbey School Alumni, and Fr. Augustine remembered them all!

Kindly continue to pray for him. thank you.

Paschal

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WAYNE BROWN: IN OUR TIME FOR DECEMBER 29^TH

TITLE: THE OLD SONGS: IRAQ

‘In life, sorrow tends to last just a little longer than joy. So we try to just touch the joy to alleviate the sorrow.’

(Abdul Razak al-Ali, conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra)

In a time of dread, when the gallop of the Horsemen dins ever nearer, until Earth reverberates with it and it can no longer be mistaken for something else (for the rumble of ‘mere rhetoric’, say); when the Horsemen break from the treeline and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can do; then your mind can sometimes go AWOL, and come to itself sitting entranced, just like that, before the return of some whimsical, long-gone memory: an urchin gatecrasher at the inauguration of the world!

So it was that this morning – a cool, bright, breezy morning, with the shadows of the hibiscus sweeping the lawn, and bird chatter, oblivious, in the high branches – while war perched like a crow on the shoulder of every thought – I found myself dawdling, listening to a tape of the Beatles, the old songs.

The evocative power of old songs!

Nothing beats it. Not photographs nor souvenirs nor old diaries, nor the still treasured letters of some long-lost love, the paper fading, yellow along the creases. Not even the sudden, piercing tang of some forgotten scent or smell. None returns the past to us like the old songs.

And that past, as we apprehend it 20 years on, is like an intimation of the angelic condition, of that Future when we shall be – all, that is, but the earthiest of us – like the soughing of wind among trees. It is a past that is given back to us purified and refined, its facts subdued to the respectful quietude appropriate to creatures who are after all capable of souls, so that what we receive instead, and almost palpably, is the texture, the essence, the tonal quality of our lives at that time.

And, like the beauty of the world, or like music heard at night across water, the old songs are forever saddening. On the stage of the spirit, by the soft light of memory, human existence, like great love, is sad.

The Beatles, the 1960s. It was the decade when they killed everybody – Hemingway and Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe by their own hands, and Che Guevara and the Kennedys, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It began with the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis, and swelled to Black Power and the Panthers, and hippies and free love and the cult of marijuana; and it ended with half-a-million American troops mired in the nightmare of the Asian jungle, fighting for no reason they could any longer understand, fighting and dying far from home, cursed by those back home.

It was a decade which was like the philosophical cesspit of the century, where many things died and almost nothing that was born would survive. But we were young, optimistic, self-righteous and ignorant; and we thought – and perhaps it is the glory and gloom of every generation in turn to think this – that to us had been given the task of remaking the world.

And the Beatles, they were our collective Orpheus on that illusory ascent out of the hellhole of history. Like his creations to the deathbed Quixote, they were our ‘choirs of angels’, singing us to our rightful places among the stars. If Elvis a decade earlier had been our guerrilla commander, the lightning rod in whose psyche black and white, black suffering and defiance, and that epochal new white instrument, the electric guitar, met and fused, so that on stage his delivery crackled and his body blazed – if Elvis led our attack on the old order, the Beatles were our poets, they gave us back ourselves, in that moment in which we prepared to take possession of the world.

It is only today, more than 20 years on, and turning, listlessly at first, not so much towards the Beatles as away from the dread thought of war – as a dog sometimes dolefully lifts its head, listening for the sound of, rather than hearing, his master’s car – it is only now that I realize how wistful and elegiac, how eternal and sad and true so many of their best songs were.

‘I look at you all, see the love that is sleeping

While my guitar gently weeps…

With every mistake we must surely be learning!

Still, my guitar gently weeps.’

And:

‘When I can no longer sing my heart

Then I will speak my mind.’

And:

‘Blackbird, fly! Blackbird, fly

Into the line of the dark black night!’

But it passed, the decade passed, and there was Jimi Hendrix and Cat Stevens and Leonard Cohen and Motown, and we grew older, and had our own children, and, like that, began to understand certain things.

And then, all of a sudden, Elvis died.

And then they killed John Lennon.

‘It’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,

We hope you have enjoyed the show…’

I am tempted to go on – one of the late lessons of literature is that we write, in the end, not so much for our place as for our time; and one day I would like to insinuate my mind back into the 60s and really recollect the way it was, and look again at certain things – not the big things, not the blockbuster Michener stuff, but the myriad little things that made us, so unawares, who we were fated to be – because the light leaking from a window on a drizzly night, falling upon the leaves of a sea almond, say, sings differently, premonishes different things, to a 23-year-old than to you and me (though it sings still). But perhaps I am not yet quite old enough.

And in the meantime the jets are ascending to their flight decks, sung heavenward by the Orpheus of Oil, the tanks are wailing like a Hendrix crescendo towards their lines. And it’s all like a conspiracy, making for our children what will be, 20 years from now, their earliest memories of the strange and spooky Otherness of war. (Its light will surely be surreal: inexplicable flashes in the Void.)

Pray for those who will be dead soon. Pray also for their families…

(Footnote: As the alert reader, tipped off by the relative sonority of its style – the difference between a writer in his mid-40s and one in his late 50s – has already suspected, this column was written 12 years ago. Entitled ‘Waiting for the Crash’, it appeared in the Trinidad Express on January 16, 1991: the day before the United States under President George H Bush launched its first attack on Iraq. On the other hand, Abdul Razak al-Ali, conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, only last week made the remark I adduced as an epigraph above. WB.)

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Photos:

18LK0012FAU  Fr.Augustine

19LK0025MERIDIAN, done by a great grandfather of Garnet Diaz an olboy

14UN9740AJPPPJ, Fr. Abbot and the Prior

13LK0339REUNION2013, Reunion in Maturin