NOTE: HOW TO NAVIGATE THIS SITE, FEB. 2025

I am in the process of publishing several older essays and other materials written from 2011-2019. These will occur as posts as they are published. Readers may find these essay organized in chronological order on the page: Essays 2011-2019.

Essays and posts related to the pilgrimage to Beauraing will also appear as posts on the Home Page first, but these will also be organized in chronological order on their own page (in progress).

Media, including photos and videos of Joe and other things, is also in process.

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I am Donald Felipe, the author of the posts and articles on this Site. The Site is dedicated to my brother Joseph Felipe Jr.. Joe passed away on January 29, 2019. I write this in late 2024. He has been been gone for almost 5 years. I miss him.

Joe suffered from severe schizophrenia for almost a half century. From the perspective of a reasonable observer, you could say that Joe lived a tragic life of horrible misfortune. But Joe would be shocked and perhaps disappointed that anyone could see him that way. He told me once not long before his death that he had never suffered. I could not fathom what he meant. I still cannot, and in his later life I probably knew him better than anyone else.

On a gurney in ER, shortly after one of his lungs finally gave way, a Catholic priest about to administer the sacrament of The Anointing of the Sick, Joe told us, through desperate gasps for breath, with a smile and a laugh coming from somewhere, that he wanted to go to the corner and have a smoke. Was he joking? Was he trying to tell me something? He knew he was about to die. I will never forget him lying there hardly able to breath. I looked at the monitors. His heart was beating wildly, all over the place, oxygen low. He didn’t care. He wanted to party.

In my many encounters with Joe, I believe the truth, the meaning, hides behind a veil waiting for loving attention.

What you will find on this Site is, in one way or another, related to and inspired by Joe’s remarkable life and faith. In the ICU when he was dying, Joe tried to tell me a story. He intended it as advice, I think, about writing songs; love songs are popular, he said, but they are all the same. They are just arranged differently. You could write hit songs and get them played on the radio, he said. Giving advice about how to start a business and make money or how to help others was a habit of Joe. I have borrowed the idea of songs from what he told me. I present here songs dedicated to Joe on a kind of radio station. I do not expect these songs to be hits. I do not think that would really disappoint my brother.

My brother and I make an odd, unlikely pair. We are ten years apart in age. I left home for school when I was 17. Joe had his breakdown and moved back into our family home the year I graduated from high school. I did not live at home and interact with Joe much from the late 70s to the early 90s, and I did not experience day to day life with Joe, except for extended visits at home, and I did not have much to do with his affairs. That changed in 2009 when our mother passed away.

Joe’s voices were with him from his teen years, and he did not graduate from high school. I remember him taking a correspondence course to get his diploma when he was in his early 20s. I do not know if he ever succeeded. Joe’s voices made schoolwork very difficult. He kept a Bible under his bed in his later years, but I do not think he ever read it. The only things I ever saw Joe read were menus at restaurants on our weekly sometimes bi-weekly lunch dates, and he was very good at that. I managed to get a PhD in philosophy and I have been teaching for over 25 years. I am a professional philosopher, I suppose you could say. But when it comes to some of the most fundamental questions of philosophy, I consider Joe is my teacher.

I began writing about Joe in 2011. I presented a few essays about him at conferences from 2011 to 2019. I will publish some of these essays here with other work that continues to evolve. These are our ‘songs’. Joe would want anything dedicated to him to inspire, make better, do good. That would be the wish of both my brother and his friend, God, who spoke to him and was with him everyday. Joe claimed to work for God. If I am to honor him, I believe I must accept that same offer of employment and see where it leads.

If the two of us share the same employer, we certainly work on very different levels in the divine enterprise. Joe said he talked directly to God. He lived with God. I have found faith, but faith is not easy for me. I wrestle philosophically with doubts and all sorts of issues. Joe had no doubts at all. He said he knew God as he would know a regular person. The philosopher Kierkegaard thought this kind of knowledge of God would not be good for human beings because it destroys faith, the choice and act of believing. If we knew that God exists, then our choice would change–our options would not be faith or disbelief, but obedience or disobedience. God as dictator would be inconsistent with God’s benevolence. Hence, Kierkegaard argues, God gives us a choice.

I have heard Joe tell stories that conclude on the same note, “God is not a dictator.” And yet Joe was blessed with intimacy and a knowledge of God that seems to marginalize faith. I live on the edge of divine companionship. Distance from God naturally brings sadness and suffering. The puzzling and sad notes of some songs belong to me and not to my brother. Joe did not know how to sing a sad song.