SURPRISED BY COURAGE [R, 8-28-25

BEYOND WINTER: The Surprised Revelations of An Old Man--SURPRISED BY COURAGE [R, 8-28-25

 

Daughter Katie Kennedy, the author [1], recently told of how impressed—if that is the right word—her pastor was when she learned that I had started preaching at 19, and went on until I was 87. Pastor Dani had the good sense to wait until she had graduated seminary, and had grown up a little, before she started to preach.

It is true that I had not intended to start preaching at 19, with a regular, every-Sunday, appointment. It is true that when I told the District Superintendent that I was thinking about being a preacher, that he said, “Good. You can start next Sunday.” It is true that I started preaching just because I did not know how to say “No.”

As I have thought about it these 70 years later, though, I realize that by 19 I had learned that I was competent. Growing up on the farm, and the affirmations of my Oakland City schoolmates, had shown me that even though I was too young to know how to do something, that I could learn how. I could learn by doing, and from those who were with me in the doing. [2]

I said this to Katie when she told me about Pastor Dani’s look of shock, upon learning how young I was when I started, and she said something that surprised me: “Yes, you knew you could learn, and also you did it because of your natural courage.”

Natural courage? I have never been a courageous person. I have been afraid most of my life—afraid of pain, of embarrassment, of failure, of judgment, of being rejected, of hurting someone’s feelings...

I have been courageous on only one front: unfairness.

I don’t mean equality. People who want to be unfair always accuse us fairness people of wanting equality. “Equality is not possible,” they say. “People are born with differing amounts of brain power, and physical power, etc.” Of course. Everybody knows that.

But despite different personal inborn speeds and different spots on the starting line, everyone can be given a fair chance to run the race. Fairness is always possible, even though equality is not.

I started early in my war on unfairness. I was barely four. We were living with my grandparents, because of The Great Depression. My four-years-older sister, Mary V, was allowed to eat white bread, because she was a mature eight-year-old and did what she wanted anyway, but my mother required me to eat brown bread, because, she claimed, it was healthier for a growing boy.

That was unfair. If Mary V got to eat less healthy bread, I should, too. I decided to protest, to demonstrate. I pushed my head into a niche of a wall, since that was the obvious way to protest brown bread. It got stuck.

I learned that protesting had a price. But I also learned that there are those who will join you if you protest. My five-foot grandmother pulled at the wall, content to tear the house down to save her favorite [only, at that time] grandson.

That disgust with unfairness never left me.

When I was growing up, racial prejudice was the great unfairness. I did not think that all black folks and all white folks were equal. Goodness, those big black ball players and sprinters were way more than equal to us skinny white boys. And it was manifestly unfair to say that they should not be allowed to play and race because they were “inferior.” Clearly, they were not.

Equality of opportunity, and treatment--by the law and the school and the church and every other public institution--are matters of fairness.

Racial unfairness is still with us. So is economic unfairness, and gender unfairness, and tax unfairness, and…

Unfairness still rankles me. Always has. I guess it brought out courage in me. Still does. But I like brown bread now.

John Robert McFarland

1] Katie’s most recent book, Did You Hear What Happened in Salem? will be out in about a week. Workman Press, so available wherever books are sold. All her other books are still in print, of course.

2] I have often said that I learned more about ministry from Catherine Adams in 3 months on the Chrisney Circuit than I did in seminary in 3 years. 

UNCLE LOVE [T, 8-26-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Family Musings of An Old Man—UNCLE LOVE [T, 8-26-25]

[Continuing my musings about having a brother…]

 

I think I wanted a brother so much because I had seen the way my father and his brothers lived together…quite literally.

Dad had five brothers…and one sister, Helen. When I married Helen Karr, Aunt Helen [Bell] told her, “I enjoyed being Helen McFarland. I hope you will, too.”

Aunt Helen was second in birth order, Glenn was first, and my father, John, was third. After him came David, Bob, Randall, and Mike.

In addition, they had a sister, Bob’s age, who was actually a cousin. Genevieve was four when her mother died and her father married a woman who did not want her. I doubt that Grandma Mac even blinked when her brother asked her to take Genevieve; she just sent her husband, Harry, to fetch her, with my six-year-old father along for the ride in the Model T. My father said she was wearing a pair of overalls, and that was all she brought with her.

That family survived the Great Depression by living with Grandma and Grandpa Mac in a big old farm house on the edge of Oxford, OH. My mother named it Cedar Crest. The younger boys—Robert, Randall, and Mike—could not get jobs, so they couldn’t marry, and thus were still at home. So was Genevieve.

In addition, Glenn and Mable, and their daughters, Joan [Joann] and Patty; and Helen and Harvey Bell, and their daughter, Elizabeth; and John and Mildred, with Mary V and John Robert; all lived at Cedar Crest whenever they were out of a job, which was most of the time.

No, David, and his wife, Ella Mae, were never in that group. He always had a job.

I think that is why my father never liked David much. He liked all his other brothers, and his sister, but not Dave. [My father was the only person, in family or out, who called him Dave instead of David.] I don’t think Uncle David lorded it over his brothers, that he always had a job and could be independent when they could not, but my father was always aware of it. Daddy was the hardest working man in the history of the world.

To him, hard work and supporting your family was the essence of being a man. It seemed wrong to him that an effete office-work kind of guy--whose wife was always so “frail” that she could not participate in family activity--should be able to support his family while he could not.

Don’t worry. I loved my father, and I respected him. But he was human, and so he had flaws. Some were products of his time, like thinking black folks “should stay in their place.” Another was resenting people he felt had an easy time during the Great Depression.

I never saw my father interact with Dave, since Uncle David never lived at Cedar Crest, or later, since he went off to live in Arizona, for Ella Mae’s health. I did see the way he and Glenn and Bob and Randall and Mike talked together, worked together, puffed their pipes together. There was something comforting, something whole, about that.

So, I always wanted a brother.

John Robert McFarland

I am named John not for my father, but for my mother’s youngest brother, and Robert for my father’s brother, Bob. Uncle Randall felt I should be named for him, since he was my primary care-giver at Cedar Crest, and I would have been fine with that. I did honor him by using his name for the hero in my novel, An Ordinary Man.

 

 

 

BROTHERLY LOVE [Sun, 8-24-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Family Relations of An Old Man—BROTHERLY LOVE [Sun, 8-24-25]

 

August is my brother’s birth month, so I think about him a lot in August, because I really like having a brother. Jim tries to lay low when his birthday comes around, not because he’s vain, but because he doesn’t enjoy attention. He’s a hermit. Married—to the world’s second-most patient woman—but a hermit, nonetheless.

He’s kind of like Daniel Boone—seeing the smoke from his neighbor’s chimney means people are too close, even in the environs outside Santa Fe.

So, he is renewing his passport. He lives in New Mexico and wants to start spending winters in Old Mexico. I guess all the folks from there are now in detention centers in the USA, so he won’t have to deal with people.

I figure if you’ve seen one Mexico, you’ve seen ‘em all, but I’m probably prejudiced because of that bad burrito.

Since he and his wife will be together, he can’t name her as his emergency contact in the US, and they don’t have children, so he’s named me as the emergency contact.

I have looked up the town where they will be staying and gotten a list of “The 15 best things to do in…” I figure when they call me to come down there, I’ll need some stuff to do while they are figuring out if it’s a bailable offense.

It may sound like I’m expecting trouble, but… well, I did decide to watch “The Magnificent Seven,” for pointers, just in case. He’s 9 years younger than I, and you know how little brothers are.

It’s not that Jim intends to be a trouble-maker. In fact, he tries to stay out of trouble, by avoiding people. But people sometimes misunderstand Jim’s silence, think he is planning something nefarious in all that quiet.

It’s the McFarland hermit gene; all McFarlands have it, especially the men. Jim and I haven’t spoken to each other in years. We have a good relationship. We love each other. We even like each other. But we live a long way from each other, and neither of us likes to talk on the phone. We’ll talk, though, if there’s a good reason to say something, like “I’m in jail in Mexico…”

I was the youngest child in our family for 8 years. My sister, Mary Virginia, was four years older. I enjoyed the perks of being youngest. Then Margaret Ann came along. I wasn’t happy about being displaced from the throne of youngest, especially by another sister. [1] If I had to have a younger sib, I wanted it to be someone I could teach baseball, a brother. So I was quite delighted when James Francis entered the world 18 months later. The only problem was that he hated baseball.

I hope I haven’t made you jealous. It’s understandable, if you don’t have a brother. I don’t just love my brother; I love having a brother. When people brag about how much money and fame they have, I whisper to myself, “But I have a brother!”

John Robert McFarland

1] Don’t worry. It didn’t take long to accept Margey. She was awfully cute, and if your little sister adores you as her big brother, you don’t mind being manipulated into doing whatever she wants.

 

 

NEEDY OLD PEOPLE [F, 8-22-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Curmudgeon—NEEDY OLD PEOPLE [F, 8-22-25]

 

We are told that one of the dilemmas of old age is needfulness [not neediness, although that can be a problem, too]. People need to be needed, they say. When we are old, no one needs us anymore. Adult children and social workers seem to think that is a problem.

Some old people, of course, are still needed far too much. There is an amazing number of not just grandparents but great-grandparents who are raising children. Not just caring for them, but full-time rearing, surrogate parents. I have seen those people in action, both as a pastor and in public settings. Did a funeral for one. One of them is a cousin. I stand in awe of them.

Most of us, though, enter a need vacuum as we age, which is why younger people think up so many volunteer opportunities for us. Either that, or they’re trying to get out of work and assume we’ll be gullible enough-because our brains have become mushy with age-to fall for their constant mantra of “You’ve got to stay active, or…” and thus gladly take on burdens from which we’ve worked long and hard to escape.

As a young pastor, I saw retired people as a wonderful source of church volunteers. They were mature, experienced, competent… and unwilling. I railed at them: “Don’t you need to be needed?”

It was retired math professor Larry Ringenberg who set me straight, as he was declining all my pleas that he accept a place on one committee or another. He said, “Nothing good ever happens after midnight or at a committee meeting.”

 

Having had a lot of committee meetings and a lot of after-midnight calls from hospitals and police, by the time I retired, I understood.

Personally, I’m past the need to be needed. I’m delighted no one needs me. But if you feel the need to be needed, Helen has a list of chores I can hand on to you.

John Robert McFarland

“I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my own life and not be ashamed.” Anne Lamott

 

ONE MOMENT AFTER ANOTHER [W, 8-20-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—ONE MOMENT AFTER ANOTHER [W, 8-20-25]

 

Our HOA sent us a letter: “Get rid of those weeds in the pea gravel flower beds around your house or else!” They also posted a notice on our garage door, so that all our neighbors would know what miscreants we are and could put pressure on us to pull our weeds.

We are old and decrepit. We know that Helen can’t pull weeds, because the last time she did it messed up her knee so badly that she had to have a cortisone shot, and it still hurts. And when I lean over, there is a good chance I’ll just keep going until my face is in the pea gravel with the weeds. So we contacted an HOA-approved lawn service to pull the weeds, for an adequate fee, of course. That was three months ago.

So, to avoid being put out on the street, even with the face-plant fear, I have started pulling the weeds myself. One at a time. Each time I pass by the pea gravel beds, as I go to the mail box, or out to walk.

It’s not really a problem, because I’m an incrementalist.

I put the laundry away one item at a time. Whenever I am in the bedroom, I take one item from the basket and put it in a drawer. Back when I could climb a ladder, I put the ladder up under the gutter and cleaned out what I could reach. Then I put the ladder away and got it out again another day, to put it where I could clean a different part of the gutter. I read many books on any given day, often only one page per book. I do the same thing with washing dishes. I don’t read the whole Bible in one day; why should dirty dishes be more important than the Bible?

I was most famous for incremental lawn mowing, since lawns are publicly visible. Chemotherapy made me sun sensitive, and being a fair-skinned farm boy who grew up shirtless before sun block, I’m prone to skin cancer anyway. So I mowed only in the shade. The shade has various shapes at different times of day. So my yard usually had grass of 5 or 6 different lengths and forms, according to where the sun was the last time I mowed. A neighbor, knowing my profession, once asked one of our daughters if there were a religious significance to the triangles and trapezoids of differently heighted grass in our yard. She said yes, apparently figuring it wasn’t as embarrassing if there were a religious reason.

Other people in my family are not incrementalists. They are projectists-they do the whole project at once, be it mowing the lawn or washing the dishes or pulling weeds. They finish what they start…right then and there.

They are sometimes dismayed by my incremental approach. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to clean the whole length of the gutter once the ladder is out? Yes, but efficiency is not the only virtue.

Sometimes I wonder if it would not be better to be a project person, and maybe it would. But I think I’ll just continue to be an incrementalist. It fits me.

Life is made up of moments, one bite of pumpkin pie, one game of trotty horse, one kiss, one prayer, one walk down the aisle. One final farewell…

John Robert McFarland

I WONDER AS I WANDER [M, 8-18-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Folk—I WONDER AS I WANDER [M, 8-18-25]

 

I heard John Jacob Niles in person when he was 72. I was his reverse, 27.

I listen to him now not in person but on a CD, his high almost ghostly voice wandering along my ceiling, wandering as I wonder.

I wonder, as I wander, out under the sky, how Jesus, the savior, came for to die, for poor, onery sinners, like you and like I, I wonder as I wander…

His voice now is a gift from my daughter, Kathleen, who was only a year old when I sat in the auditorium at IN State U in Terre Haute, listening to John Jacob Niles in person.

The folk music revival was well started then, but only a few came to hear the man who had been singing folk music forever, who was probably the greatest folk singer of them all. Because John Jacob Niles was old.

The folk music revival was about young people, groups like The Chad Mitchell Trio and The Kingston Trio, and individuals like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Judy Collins. The Weavers were not young, but they were newly discovered after their McCarthy era blacklisting, and they were in their prime, not old, like John Jacob Niles.

Some years ago, I attended a folk concert at which I was introduced as a folk poet/lyricist. I mentioned John Jacob Niles to one of the young singers. He had never heard of him. That is like an American who has never heard of George Washington.

John Jacob Niles didn’t know he was old. He kept composing and singing for another 15 years. That night, though, in the INSU auditorium, the only light a bare spot on his white head, as he sat by himself on a folding chair in the middle of the stage, I was embarrassed. Not for him, but for all the empty seats that surrounded me, for all the people on that campus who thought he was irrelevant because he was old.

The Chad Mitchell Trio came to town a few months later. Their concert was too big for the INSU auditorium. Helen and I listened to them in the basketball arena, part of a sell-out crowd.

Strangely, and sadly, one of the widest gaps between generations is musical.

I put John Jacob Niles’ voice onto the CD player again now, and I know that music is neither young nor old. I worry about young people who don’t have the opportunity to wonder as they wander. John Jacob Niles will always wonder as he wanders, and so will I.

John Robert McFarland

SING ME NOT [Sat, 8-16-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Embarrassing Memories of An Old Man—SING ME NOT [Sat, 8-16-25]

 

Tomorrow is Sunday, the sabbath, the day of rest, the day I devote to recalling all the stupid church stuff I did over 70 years as a preacher.

I’m sure there is no one besides me who has even the slightest memory of the Sunday evening worship service at Mineral City, IN [1] when I sang “Pass Me Not” as a solo, but when I remember it, I cringe. Literally. Why is that? Why should it still be embarrassing after 71 years, when no one else remembers it, when anyone who could remember it is probably dead?

I was preaching at the Methodist churches in 3 tiny Indiana villages, Solsberry [2], Koleen, and Mineral. They were scattered geographically, so I could get to only two of them on a Sunday morning. That meant an evening service at the third church. So that none of the three would always have the early morning or evening service, the services were staggered. I went to Mineral at 9:30 on the 1^st and 3^rd Sundays of the month, and 11:00 on the 2^nd Sunday, and 7:30 pm on the 4^th Sunday. Solsberry and Koleen had similarly irregular schedules.

The evening service at Mineral was rather poorly attended, so in one of those fits of stupidity that I would like to blame on youth, but which is misplaced blame since I kept doing such stupid things my whole career, I told the Mineralites that I would sing a solo if they ever got 50 people to worship at their Sunday evening service. Why I thought that would be an incentive for people to come to church I don’t know, but I didn’t have enough money to promise them something like ice cream. I wasn’t worried, though; 50 people for evening service was a remote goal.

You can guess the next chapter. I counted carefully to be sure. It was actually 51, not even including babies.

I wasn’t a bad singer, but I was not a confident one. I had a decent voice, but a very limited range. I had gained confidence in my singing ability, though, because of Jim Barrett. Jim was a year behind me at Oakland City High School, and my roommate my junior year at IU. He was a music major. When he did not have other responsibilities, he went to church with me and played piano. When he accompanied me, he simply transposed as he played, keeping my voice in range. I didn’t know that; I thought I was getting better.

On that particular Sunday evening, the Mineral folks had borrowed people from all over Greene County to come up with 51 at worship. For some reason, Jim had not gone with me. Instead, the gracious and sweet 90-year-old lady with no music education but plenty of arthritis was playing piano.

I had not prepared anything, of course, for I did not think they could ever get 50 people to church. Only a year before, however, I had sung in a quartet. “Pass Me Not.” A great hymn, and I sounded pretty good when Bob Robling and Dave Lamb and Bob Wallace, real singers, were covering up my wavering bass. So, I asked the pianist if she knew “Pass Me Not.” She thought that maybe she did.  

I suspect that song was never again selected in that church.

It was a disaster. She knew nothing about transposing to fit my range. I switched, almost word by word, from one octave to another, from key to key, even clef to clef, trying to find some common musical ground between voice and piano.

Well, I started this meditation to try to figure out why that incident is still cringe-worthy. It’s no worse than many other embarrassing moments to which I have subjected myself and those who had to witness them. I really have no answer to that, so I’ll just have to let it go.

That’s one of the real advantages of old age. If there is no one else left to remember the stupid stuff you did, you don’t have to remember it, either.

John Robert McFarland

1] It was usually just called Mineral instead of Mineral City, since a church building and three houses don’t really constitute a city.

2] At the time, I thought Solsberry was just a misspelling of the English Salisbury. Later, when I pastored at Arcola, IL, and Jim Cummings was in the congregation, I learned that the town was named for his grandfather, Sol.