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Navy not renewing contract with Catholic priests? What the heck is going on in my Navy? 22 years on board ships and submarines & this is how my fellow Catholic shipmates are being treated. This is more than discrimination! Navy was using tax $$$ to teach about white privilege but won’t spend money to have a priest on base. This is pure BS & needs to be corrected today.
Chaplains! Website is up. Let us know how we can help, care package wise. Opdeployed.org
Will tell ya what we can and cannot do. Greatful for you. Salt and light in a fallen world.
Give without remembering, receive without forgetting. Those who aim at reward lose it. Those who forget reward, find it.
For the Kingdom. God and Country
I wonder if there any CHCs who attended the first Navy PREP training held at the University of Denver in July 1990 still on active duty. I organized that training as a member of the Family Support Program (Pers-66 at that time). Since we were just down the hall from the Chief of Chaplain's staff at the old Navy Annex I made sure that Chaplains were invited to the training.
(I remember inviting Capt Wally Turner, CHC, who had been the facilitator of the Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) that my wife and I took at NTC Great Lakes in the mid-70s).
We did FAP-funded PREP training around the world in the 1990s for FSC staff and CHCs. Also, I was a trainer for a couple of PDTWs and would make a quarterly presentation at the Chaplains Sch in Newport.
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I've kept up with Scott Stanley and Howard Markman at PREP. Their training and programs not only continue but have expanded. See
https://www.prepinc.com/ and
https://www.facebook.com/prep.relationship.education
God Bless all Navy Chaplains
V/R
Bill
https://nano.site/billcoffin
My name is Ray Jackson, a retired Chief Petty Officer , having served in the Navy from 1972 to 1992. However, it is not myself that i would like to talk about. The person that i desire to mention was my father, Buster Ray Jackson. The reason i wanted to talk about him is that he passed away 19 years ago on 27 June 2001 in Longview, Texas. Dr. Buster Jackson, at one time, was known as Chaplain LT Buster Jackson And held the distinction of being the first C=Navy Chaplain from the Missionary Baptist Association (BMAA). In 1968, after finishing his education requirements he entered the US Navy Chaplain Corps. During to the summer of 1968 he entered Chaplain School in Rhode Island while his family, including myself, stayed in El Monte, California. According to what he said, he held the highest scores possible at the school. In fact, he did so well that when he came up for his first set of orders, which was an assignment to a Seabee outfit in California. Due to the fact that it was heading straight to Vietnam, he decided to hand in his resignation right off. He received a personal call from the Chief of Chaplains at the time and after a discussion, was assured of a new assignment, with Great Lakes Naval Hospital as his first stopping point until a new set of orders could be cut for him. Another example of his abilities as a Chaplain, instead of the normal commissioning rank path, when he was fully commission, he bypassed Lt j.g and went straight to LT, la distinction that we were all very proud of.
By March of 1968, Chaplain Jackson reported to his command, DESRON ONE, Naval Station, San Diego, California. The move to San Diego excited us all and a new adventure began. Since i was five years old i want to be in the Navy and this began my adventure as well. I distinctly remember the many Sundays when we would go aboard the various vessels that were assigned dad. We sat in small rooms and had great services. He became very popular amongst his crew mates and fulfilled the Spiritual Needs that they had. He even set example for his people. One story goes that while he was in, the men were allowed to grow mustaches in the Navy, but the commanding officer of his assigned ship refused to allow his men to do so. So my father grew one just to upset the Commanding Officer’s status quo. I truly think that he would have made the Chaplain Corps and the Navy a career if an accident had not changed things. The Summer of 1969, while playing football at a s=church social event, he had a touch football accident that affected him the rest of his life and ruined his Naval career. He had an operation prior to the command headed to the coast of Vietnam. While off coast, the weather became turbulent and it had an ill affect on him while transiting to the Mess Hall. He said the ship went one went one way and his leg another. They had to ship him off to Subic for numerous surgeries and six months later, back to the Naval Hospital in San Diego. There he had more surgery and was handed a discharge.
I truly know in my heart it was very tough on him, for after i went through my Naval Career, he told me many stories filled with regrets, but i know that it was a wonderful time for him and a dream fulfilled.
Sadly, things went downhill for him. By 1975 he was a pastor of a church here in East Texas. He love his work, worked on his education some more, but he had some troubling times with church members. He had a nervous breakdown.
However, this did not stop him. By 1977 he went to New Orleans where he completed a Doctorate degree in counseling. For awhile he did counseling in Mandeville, LA, and pastored many churches throughout Texas, though none were large enough to satisfy his accomplishment goals.
By 1984 he took on one of his greatest challenges as a professor in the BMAA seminary in Jacksonville, Texas. There he served faithfully for nearly ten years when the worse scenario transpired. He had more health issues and was diagnosed as Bipolar. Then all Hell broke loose in 1991.
Over the next few years he was very much a integral part of the Seminary, but being bipolar put a crimp in his life and ours as well. Sadly his remaining years became a statistic. He was in and out of mental establishments and his bipolar life became very much a part of our life and had a very profound affect on us all. Needless to say, being the oldest of his five children, i took it on myself to take him as my responsibility. I was stationed in 1991 in Kingsville, Texas, trying to complete my twenty year hitch and things were getting rougher on my mother at home. So about a year prior to the end my my service, i moved my family to Jacksonville and set up residence near my folks just so my wife could keep an eye on everything. None of the other siblings want much to do with his bipolar ways and had family’s and lives of their own and they had spent enough time with him and his issues. So i began to monitory everything that went on and this began to affect my life, as well. I was driving every weekend from Kingsville to Jacksonville and spend the weekend with my family.
Six months before my retirement my mother even left my father because his life became abusive and came to live with us. I had put a request in for a set of hardship orders to care for my father and mother and was located to a reserve center in Tyler, TX. Sadly, it only got worse.
Aside from the havoc it caused me in my own career, my family life had taken its toll. Things were seemingly worse and not better. Then it got real bad when my father tried to come to our house to get mom to come home. She did not want this so I went out to talk to him about it. Unfortunately that turned into a living nightmare and he attacked me. I was able to fend for myself and the police took him off to jail to cool off. Sadly for me, i relieved the nightmare for many years to come.
By August of 1992, i did finally retire. My command basically forgot me and my plight and basically had to rush me through retirement with hardly notice, or acknowledge, though i did get my ceremony. It was a rough way to part company, but such my life had become.
Dad lived off and on in mental institutions, packed his bags and moved to the Fort Worth area, finally talked mom into leaving us and moving back in with him. I was always there to move their goods to the next “duty station”. By the year 2000, dad moved back to east Texas and resided in a nursing home along with mom. Then my January he and mom moved back into an apartment in Longview where he spent his last six months. He had been diagnosed with liver disease and the VA gave him 100% compensation. He passed away at the VA hospital in Shreveport that June. He had his funeral in Bullard, Texas, just north of Longview. There were hundreds that attended his funeral and many had great memories and great things to say about him.
Today i still have sad thoughts about those last years. He and i had a tough relationship, but I dearly loved him. He accomplished a lot in his life time, event bough his early years as a child were very rough. I miss him very much and not many days go by that i dont think about him. Only recently i found out that the father that he thought he was biologically related to turned out to be someone else, but that is a different story.
He was a great man, which is why I want two share this with you. My father loved God and it was his dream to share it with the servicemen. He brought us up to be great patriotic members of this country. Three of his four children served in various branches of this country. Three of my siblings are very much active in the church. Me, i got my degree in History and government and tried my hand at teaching. That, again, is another subject.
Thank you for allowing me this time to share with you. I always made it a point to be active with the Chaplains in my various commands and had some great times.
Take care. Ray Jackson. USN (ret)
Thank you for this all too timley and inspirational message
The official page for the Navy Chief of Chaplains Rear Admiral Brent W. Scott. Scott assumed his duties as the 27th Chief of Chaplains July 23, 2018.
