A diamond of another kind

I am in no longer in Arkansas, but I am going to write about it anyway. Aside from being the land of the Clinton's Arkansas boast several other claims to fame. They have natural hot springs there which naturally cost a good deal of money to experience. They have the world's only diamond mine open to the public (read "not economically viable"). And, they have a baptist church on every street corner.

I am not meaning to imply that they have many street corners, they do not, but they do have an inordinate number of baptist churches. Every once in a while (five miles or so) something goes awry and you find a Methodist church; usually the first one ever. This idle rambling is actually quite important. You see, I was there over a weekend and a catholic church is what I required. I was beginning to think that I was going to have to drive all the way back to Virgina to catch a mass.

Thankfully there is a wonderful little website that helps with these sorts of conundrums. I was able to find a parish not 15 miles from my campsite (it was more like 16). Apparently there are 50 Catholics in rural Arkansas, enough for a very small parish hidden on a back road of a small village. Now for the great part. When I arrived a small group of devotees were praying the rosary.... in Vietnamese! Vietnamese is a tonal language and as such the prayers had a very musical quality. About the one third of the parish was Vietnamese, one third European, and one third Hispanic. The Mass utilized all three languages with the sermon being delivered in English then Spanish. Now for the kicker; the priest was from Africa.

How an African priest ended up in rural Arkansas, serving a multilingual and multicultural congregation none of which are remotely his by birth, is far beyond me. He handled it with an astounding adroitness. It was amazing to see the universal nature of the church demonstrated so thoroughly in a little back country town. In the bear hug of earth that Christ gives the world through his church, little Nashville, Arkansas is where the fingers meet in the back.

I spent the rest of the day poking through a slimy mud field for diamonds but the real find was St. Martin's of Nashville.

Sam's Summary

• I was in Arkansas looking for diamonds
• I am now in Texas
• If I was baptist I would feel right at home
• I am not baptist
• I feel right at home anyway
• St. Martins has four cultures in the span of 50 people
• I found no isometric-hexoctahedral crystal lattice allotropes of carbon.
• I saw a living armadillo (they are usually born as roadkill)