WELCOME to the Massive Missives

Welcome to my latest adventure with 21st century technology. A cousin of mine was traveling through India - a very young cousin - well, by my standards, young - and he was keeping a blog, which his mother encouraged me to read. Now I had been in Nigeria for this development, and I confess, I wasn't completely sure what a BLOG was. Sounds nasty.

But it seems an easy way for the computer literate to share information. And so, I thought I would put together the collection of Massive Missives, for those who missed them, or wanted to re-read them.

A couple of technical notes:

1 - They're not complete. I found I don't have in my computer or on a disk things I remember having written. I have, for instance, no record of the assassination I found myself in the middle of. I have no record of my trip to Belfast, where I witnessed the attack of the World Trade Towers, or recording my first CD's, or the trip to the US for my mother's funeral or my chieftaincy installation ceremony or the death and funeral of our two young Novices. I KNOW I wrote things to people - so if anyone has any of that stuff, please feel free to share it with me.

And in different texts I refer to drawings or maps or illustration. When I was simply printing and xeroxing, that was easy. Now I have to find a way to scan the item (I am saving my pennies to buy a scanner) and then figure out how I can upload it. You can, apparently, not only import text to this Blog site you can actually include it in with your text - a mystery I have yet to solve.

2 - For reasons I do not understand, I seem unable to be able to keep a list of the different postings so you can see all of them. If you go into archives you get the whole long set - not easy to wade through or access but I'm blessed if I can find a way to organize them better.

3 - I am filled with hope that I can also add more pictures - but the process seems unduly complicated, and I have had the experience of going through a complex process of getting the photo uploaded to the Blog site and then being told by the program that the URL address is too long. It's THEIR address! I'm still working on that.

But having said all that - welcome to the Massive Missives of Father John. I have resisted the temptation to edit, update and re-cast some of my early opinions in the light of things I learned later. The frustrations, prejudices and mistakes are all there, just as they were when they were first written. It may seem in some of the early letters I did not like Nigeria - that was never true, but I certainly was frustrated. If I said anything in any of these letters that offends, please accept my apology, and remember it was probably a long time ago.

I suspect that future Missives will be posted here and a discreet email sent informing you of the event. Let me know how this system works for you - could you find and read and (if desired) save the material easily? Are there better sites? Does anybody care? (That's a line from a Broadway Show - any trivia buffs want to take a shot at which one?)

As always - love and hugs and prayers and stuff like that.