Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea

absent mother, Martha Mae, opened her

      in sympathy to the sorrows of others and she was robust

      and happy and she wanted to bring others into her graced joy.

      Already in the womb mother identified with the very feelings,

      moods and attitude of her upbeat, strong, pioneering mother.

      The very hormones and nervous system of Leona Mae

      were identified with by Joneva Mae as the mother’s blood

      and lymph system and mucosity became also the daughter’s.

      Leona Mae’s preconscious feelings and passions and moods

      and her unconscious attitude which evaluated and motivated

      all of her conscious thoughts, words and deeds became also

      the very fabric of little Joneva Mae and when she was born

      and nursed through that first year at her mother’s breast

      they bonded in a special dream and vision that would let

      little Joneva Mae live out the life that Martha Mae lost.

      Martha Mae, Leona Mae and Joneva Mae were one in Mae-love.

      I.1.2 In the Attitude of Complacent Agape

      Leona and Levaur came together in very positive times.

      The First World War was ending and the Roaring Twenties

      were already beginning their expansive and manic build up.

      The Republican Party made life good for American farmers.

      They had claimed their free land and the banking system

      helped them get a herd of sheep and a pick-up truck and

      all they needed to make the whole wonderful outfit work.

      As a young girl between five and eight Gramma went through

      very difficult times that would strengthen her throughout life.

      In her memoirs Gramma Coates writes: “Father and mother

      had misunderstandings so mother took me to Montana with her

      where we lived for a year. Later father came out and got me

      and I lived with his sister, Ida Blair, near Bellevue.

      My mother passed away from a heart attack.” Gramma’s

      mother was only seventeen when she married and all

      of her trials must have been damaging to her immune system.

      For her eight years of grade school Gramma grew up

      in Bellevue, right there in the center of Blaine County, Idaho,

      in a thriving mining town which was the State’s third largest city.

      Already as a child Gramma loved her school and her church.

      Two of her relatives from back in Kentucky were Bible scholars.

      She loved reading and writing and listening and speaking and

      those liberal arts opened her in her dreaming and thinking to

      a desire for ever further learning, knowing and understanding.

      The Anglican Church was very community minded and

      searched out ways to be of service to any who were in need.

      She learned the Our Father and it became her favorite prayer.

      It helped form her inner-most attitude in a spirit of loving

      forgiveness as she prayed each morn and each night: “Forgive

      us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

      Baby Joneva Mae identified with Leona Mae’s forgiving heart.

      I.1.3 In the Mood of Concerned Agape

      During her first and second year mother had her mother

      all to herself but within eighteen months Gramma

      was already carrying Aunt Mid and mother was weaned.

      Even though as a young mother in her early twenties

      Gramma Coates had a fundamental attitude of complacency,

      literally, of being pleased with all of existence, she was still

      a person of great concern for not only was she anxious

      about having lost her mother but she had identified with

      her young mother’s anxiety that brought her to run away

      with her baby and then saw her baby taken away from her.

      After becoming settled in Bellevue her father then up rooted

      her again and sent her to relatives in Spokane, Washington,

      a city of much greater opportunity for her high school study.

      Out of anxious concern her complacency was built up

      just as it was out of the World War that the great jubilation

      of the Twenties came frolicking forth all happy and free.

      Gramma Coates’ mood of complacent concern was

      a preference for some values over others in an hierarchy.

      She learned of intellectual and spiritual values and in

      her mood she felt and preferred them over physical and

      vital values which could perish and pass away as did

      her physical mother and the physical town of Bellevue

      even though spiritually they could be vitally present within.

      Just as mother as an infant totally identified with her

      mother’s mood so she became a child concerned about

      things that might remain and not be taken away.

      And complacency and concern balanced each other

      in a logic of mixed opposites that did not let

      good complacency become bad, satisfied complacency or

      let concern become worried and consuming concern.

      I.1.4 In the Sense of Proactive Sensitivity

      As a young girl Gramma Coates learned to control

      her reactions so that she did not at once fall into

      negativity out of the force of habit that increases habit.

      In Spokane Leona identified with Aunt Sadie who was

      only ten years older than herself and the good Episcopalians

      taught the young ladies many proverbs to build character

      such as: “Count to ten before you get angry.” And Leona

      reflected upon and worked upon affirmative proactive responses

      instead of negative reactions which could taint everything.

      St. Paul clearly saw that the good I intended to do I do not

      but the evil that I resolve against, that I often do.

      St. Paul was given the grace to be free to serve others

      and the Anglicans taught their young to pray for that grace.

      And even at the age of four mother began to care for

      baby bum lambs who lost their mothers in late winter.

      Her love for them taught her patience and peaceful positivity.

      She