A Strange Land

Over the last few years, on my trips home over the Christmas holidays, my nephew and I have started taking trips to Oklahoma state parks. The main point is to travel with the nephew, because, well, it's fun, but the secondary goal is to experience the area in ways I haven't. Growing up, it was easy to think of this area as a land without history and without interest. The first assumption is obviously false, fraught with political and racist underpinnings; the second is just lazy. So, I've slowly started moving around, looking for things that are interesting, different, or unusual.

Last week (at my aunt's behest), I attended Marian Days in Carthage, MO, a city of around 14,000 that lies 130 miles NE from Tulsa. Marian Days is, according to my mostly Wikipedia-type sources, either the largest religious pilgrimage and festival in North America or simply the largest Roman Catholic festival in the United States. Either way, it's big. Over the first weekend in August, it brings over 50,000 Vietnamese American Roman Catholics to Carthage to honor the Virgin Mary and to reunite people from around the country, many of whom have been making the pilgrimage since 1978.

The festivities, which began as a one day retreat, take place on the 28-acre campus of the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix, land that used to house Our Lady of the Ozarks College but which was purchased in 1975 by an order of Vietnamese priests and nuns "who came to this country after fleeing Vietnam in fishing boats at the insistence of their founder, a day before South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975."

Following the fall of Saigon, thousands of Vietnamese refugees ended up at Fort Chaffee in Western Arkansas, including the 170 priests and brothers of the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix who were split between Fort Chaffee and Camp Pendleton in California. Over the next few years, people ended up all across the region, including tens of thousands of people who were relocated to Oklahoma City; Cardinal Bernard Law, then Bishop of Springfield – Cape Girardeau, sponsored all 170 members of the Congregation, allowing them use of a college in his diocese that had been closed for years. That group evolved into the congregation that still worships there today. 

And, for these few days every year, this small area becomes an orderly tent city, housing people in individual tents, large group tents with rows of cots, camper-trailers, and all the city's hotels.

I have to admit, I'm not sure about attending a religious celebration for a faith that I don't follow. I did feel weird at first, wandering through the temporary lanes that wound around the campus. But, while the festival is centered around liturgy, there are also a number of other events that are more open to the general public, such as the county-fair-like atmosphere of the adjacent food/drink/cotton candy area.

And so, I ate.

A lot.

And I walked around.

And I marveled at how much has gone on around me without me paying much attention. And it's not for lack of mention - my grandfather used to tell me about the thousands of people flooding into small-town Missouri, but I dismissed his stories as exaggeration tinged with xenophobia. It just sounded like paranoia and, besides, how big could something in Carthage be? Well, I was wrong, about Carthage, and my grandfather, and my own sense of worldliness that convinced me that nothing that interesting could be happening nearby without my travel-experienced mind paying heed.