BEYOND THE HALLS OF IVY [R, 5-14-26]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Old Trouble Maker—BEYOND THE HALLS OF IVY [R, 5-14-26]

 

Methodist annual conferences will soon meet. The pastoral appointments for the next year will be read out. When I started going to Conference, in 1957, no pastor knew until that reading where they would be the next year. I assumed, though, that my appointment would always be to some congregation.

I never intended to become a campus minister, even though I held campus ministry in high regard. After all, I met Helen at The Wesley Foundation at IU. And I liked universities in general. I loved learning. I loved songs like The Halls of Ivy and Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.

While I was a college student, though, in my sophomore year, I became a parish preacher. Church was as important to me as campus. I assumed that life as a local church pastor would be my career.

Campus ministers were not respected much back then. They were called “student workers.” They were trouble makers who preached about social justice and were always wanting “change.” They were guys [all men, then] who didn’t fit in local churches, so they weren’t real preachers. Many times during my campus ministry years, colleagues would ask me, “When are you going to come back to the ministry?”

Their question was not criticism, but concern, because as a campus minister, you lost your place on the appointment ladder. The “ladder” meant that, as long as you didn’t cause any trouble, each time you were moved to a different church, it would be a little larger and more prestigious. Campus ministry years didn’t count on the ladder. If you “came back to the ministry,” you had to start over at the bottom of the ladder.

Because no one wanted to lose his place on the ladder, the bishop had trouble finding someone willing to be a campus minister.

But I owed Bishop Richard Raines, for getting me out of trouble numerous times, and he knew that I owed him, so when he asked/told me to be the campus minister in Terre Haute [Indiana State U and Rose Polytechnic], I figured I should do that, for a year or two, as payment to him. Also, I was never very smart about anticipating the consequences of my choices.

Campus ministry, though, turned out to be a more significant ministry than I would have had as a local church pastor, for two primary reasons.

First, my influence was much wider than it would have been as a parish pastor. Every year some of my students graduated and scattered to various jobs and towns and churches. They took with them the ideas they had gotten on campus. Even while they were still in school, they went home on the weekends and vacations and enjoyed upsetting their parents and pastors with all the radical stuff they got through their time on campus—stuff about civil rights and voting rights and women’s rights and gay rights and saving the planet and Viet Nam and situational ethics and “contemporary” worship and prayer and faith and Bible interpretation and sacrificial service and the church as the place to have a really good time.

Second, I learned before anyone else what was going to happen next. Whatever society was going to do next, college students were already doing it.

So, if you want to know what’s coming up, look on campus. Strangely, the social observers say that students are going to church more and drinking less. That doesn’t sound right…

John Robert McFarland

UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Ramblings of An Old Man—UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

 

It was our soph or junior year in high school. As I approached a group of boys in the hallway, Louis Simpson looked up and said, quite good-naturedly, “We’ve got to stop telling dirty jokes now; John’s here.”

I don’t think they were actually telling dirty jokes. It was just a way of acknowledging me as an untouchable, someone who didn’t belong in the real world.

Of course, the very fact that to this day I think they were not telling dirty jokes may tell you why I was an untouchable. Untouchables are naive. That’s part of how we are set aside from the real world.

Some real-world people try to take advantage of untouchables, use our naiveite against us. But—if you’re lucky, as I’ve always been—folks protect you, because they know you need it 

I remember seeing movies and TV shows called “The Untouchables,” about America in the 1920s, when politics and the economy were much as they are now, when enough bribe money can get you anything, regardless of the law. Enter Eliot Ness and his special police, called unofficially “The Untouchables,” because they could not be bought or bribed.

I guess I was that sort of untouchable, in a minor way, except no one ever tried to bribe me, anyway. No, I wasn’t an Eliot Ness sort of untouchable. I was not pure of heart, like Ness. I didn’t even need to be pure of heart. I was untouchable because people protected me. I was in a tiny niche of society that not only did not get its hands dirty but that didn’t even know how to get dirty hands.

I am part of the 2%. Not the way that is usually used, the 2% that has all the money and power, and abhors the rest of us as untouchable because we are, compared to them, poor and powerless.

No, I’m in that 2% that has always, without knowing it, led a charmed life. Because others protected us from the real world.

That does not mean, of course, that we two-percenters have no bad days. I’ve had cancer. People I love have had cancer. Good friends have suffered, and died too soon. I’ve had to be a comfort in tragedy when the tragedy was so bad that comfort wasn’t even possible; that’s hard.

Friend Kathy Roberts says that she has a face that says, “Tell me weird things.” I think I have a face that says, “Don’t tell me bad things.”

Now, again, that isn’t literally true. Indeed, my profession was listening to people tell me bad things. But it was bad things about themselves. it wasn’t bad things that involved me. I was just a listener, not a participant.

That distance, though, was one of the traits that made me a fairly good pastor. In that sense, I was a Ness type of untouchable. Since folks knew I wasn’t going to get lost in the jungle with them, I might be able to show them a way out.

Sometimes I feel a conflicted about being an untouchable. I didn’t like being excluded from that group of laughing boys, the ones telling the dirty jokes. But I feel grateful that they protected me. Being an untouchable has made my life so easy. I hope you are an untouchable, too.

John Robert McFarland

“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.” Fred Astaire, via The Writer’s Almanack.

 

 

MOTHER’S’ DAY [Su, 5-10-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reflections of A Doddering Old Man—MOTHER’S’ DAY [Su, 5-10-26]

 

Today is Mother’s Day, or Mothers’ Day, according to how many mothers you are trying to honor. Both singular and plural were always a problem for me. Not a life-shaking problem, but a problem I had trouble solving.

Mothers’ Day I dealt with primarily as a preacher. I looked out on the congregation on this special day and saw mothers whom I knew were not going to have a happy day. And I saw others, of so many ages, who felt guilt or anger about their mothers. If I were sensitive at all, I didn’t plow ahead with a Hallmark Mothers’ Day sermon. But what else to do?

I was relieved of my guilt, slightly, in my early churches, because the women of the church who were in charge of such things--either by tradition or acceptance or audacity—decided how we would celebrate the day.

I was disconcerted at my first Mothers’ Day Sunday, when I was 20 years old, when flowers were passed out to the mothers at the door following the service, but only mothers. I mean, all churches back then had lots of women who were not mothers. They were reminded of that as they left the church without a flower.

By the time I retired, usually flowers were pressed into the hands of every woman as she left worship on Mothers’ Day, whether she wanted one or not. An adequate solution… well, not really. They/we justified that on the premise that every woman has a mother, even if she is not one. But so does every man there, so where does that leave us? Still kind of up in the air.

As far as Mother’s Day is concerned, I never had any trouble honoring my mother. I loved her. She loved me. But she was a puzzle and trial to me all sixty years we shared. The problem was inconsistency. As a child, the rules of conduct changed all the time, sometimes within the minute. As an adult, she would ask for help and then at the last minute veto everything we had agreed on, always for some fallacious and ridiculous reason.

Don’t worry; I know she did the best she could to be a good mother, and I did the best I could [with a lot of help from Helen] to be a good son.

The mother-child relationship is fraught with… well, everything. No relationship more important, or more difficult and complex. A flower hardly does justice to the depth of that relationship. Neither does Red Lobster shrimp. But they are good symbols. They represent beauty and nourishment. Those are the things that are necessary for life. Just as mothers are.

John Robert McFarland

LUTHER’S REVENGE [F, 5-8-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Ramblings of a Finally Humble Old Man—LUTHER’S REVENGE [F, 5-8-26]

 

Whenever I trudge my daily mile, I always think of Luther White, the father of my great, late friend, Bill.

Bill and I were campus ministry colleagues. We often met to drink coffee and talk about our work. And our families. I never met Luther, but Bill used to brag about his father, specifically how he still walked a mile each day, even though he was 90. I would nod my head in affirmation, but secretly, I was thinking, “A mile? That’s nothing. Anyone should be able to walk a mile, at any age.” That was 60 years ago.

I wasn’t quite as ignorant as that sounds, nor as arrogant. But I had been a walker all my life, especially when we lived on the farm and had no car. I walked many miles, all the time, in all kinds of weather. Walking a mile just didn’t sound to me like an unusual achievement.

Now, in my 90^th year, one of my major ambitions is to walk a mile on my next birthday, and then look up at the sky [Yes, that’s where heaven is; didn’t you go to Sunday school?] and say to Luther White, “Okay. Now I understand.”

I call it Luther’s Revenge, this new humility that old age has brought upon me. [It would be a good book title, too, except that most folks would think it refers to the 16^th century church reformer instead of the 20^th century high school music teacher.]

Most of us assume that we won’t get any more decrepit than we are right now. Yes, we know we’ll grow older. Yes, we even know that our bodies are going to keep sliding down the slippery slope [sometimes literally!] In our brains we know better, but we assume that we’ll forever be able to do whatever we are doing today. More slowly, yes, but surely the day won’t come when we can’t even get up off the toilet by ourselves. And, yet, we all know someone for whom that day did come. So, why do we think we shall be spared?

When my father was close to the end of his life, at age 96, Helen and I took him to his favorite restaurant, for his favorite steak and gravy. He ate less than half of it. As we helped him out the restaurant door after we had finished, he could not get his legs to work to make the one small step down from the door to the sidewalk. One of us on each side, we had to lift him down. He sighed and said, “I didn’t know you could get this bad off and still be alive.”

As Luther White walked one morning, he was hit by a passing car and killed. Some folks would say that God directed that car, to save Luther the indignity of getting too old. I’m not one of those people.

But if you are driving in the Sherwood Green neighborhood someday, and you see a nattily dressed old man trudging along in shorts--even though it’s 20 degrees, but the belt was already in his shorts, and he didn’t want to go to the trouble of changing it to his flannel-lined cargo pants--it’s okay to offer him a ride. He’s now humble enough to accept it.

John Robert McFarland

No, that's not a photo of me. I use a black, wooden cane that once was Uncle Ted's.

GROWING UP IS A DISEASE [W, 5-6-26]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of A Failed Grown-Up—GROWING UP IS A DISEASE [W, 5-6-26]

 

My highly competent and distinguished colleague, Rev. Randy Robinson, told me, as he was getting to retire, that when he was a young pastor, he looked up to me as one of “the fathers of the church.” Oh, if he had only known.

Makes me think of a continuing ed conference I attended. The main speaker was a newly elected bishop. The president of the near-by seminary had gone to the airport to pick him up. They had been students together earlier at a different seminary. “Hello, Bishop,” said the president. “Hello, President,” said the bishop.

The seminary president said, “Then we laughed like hyenas and finally said, ‘Where are the grown-ups when you really need them!’”

When you get to my age, you know that there are only two kinds of people: Those who think they are grown up but aren’t. And those who know they are not but are still trying to become grownups…

…or maybe a third type: Those who have given up on ever growing up.

As the saying goes, “Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is not.”

When I was a nineteen-year-old, preaching at three different churches every Sunday, I thought I was quite grown up. After all, I had the backing of the church. Why would the District Superintendent subject those poor people to my pulpit ponderings if I were not grown up?

Growing up is a disease, and I had an early-onset version of it. I had to grow up young. I became a major financial support of my family in my teens. I dropped out of high school to work in a factory to get my family off of welfare. Older people in those days respected that sort of thing. They praised me, and talked to me like I was one of them, like a grown-up . I had no way of knowing then that most of them were not grown up, even though they looked and talked like they were.

There were hints. Old men who whistled at young girls. Old church ladies who laughed at fart jokes. Old preachers who told those jokes.

But I assumed those were anomalies. When I got old, I was sure that I would not do things like tell waitresses and store clerks that I qualified for the good-looks discount, because I did not do that sort of thing when I was young.

I was a grown-up for a long time.

I finally got over being grown-up. I think it was my cancer surgery and year of chemotherapy that did it. My first oncologist predicted that I would live no more than “a year or two.” That sort of sobers you up. I realized how much of my life I had wasted, being a grown up.

So, I’ve given up on growing up. It’s too much trouble, and not much fun. As Jesus said, “I’m here. Let’s party.” [John 10:10.]

John Robert McFarland

“Let us read and dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.” Voltaire

SECRET DOWNSIZING [M, 5-4-26]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—SECRET DOWNSIZING [M, 5-4-26]

 

It’s spring-cleaning time, which includes getting rid of stuff we don’t need.

A daughter told us of some people who wanted to downsize. They hit upon a novel approach. Whenever they went to someone’s house, for a meal or party, they would take along something they wanted to get rid of and leave it secretly with their host. It was a slow process. They could take only small items, like silverware. While innocently in the kitchen, ostensibly just to get a drink of water, they would slip a table knife into their host’s silverware drawer. If they went to the bathroom, they’d leave an extra tooth brush in the medicine cabinet. While browsing the book shelves, they’d slip in a copy of The Declaration Decoded, by Katie Kennedy. [No, it’s an excellent book, but small format—easily smuggled.]

I’m a bit reluctant to tell about this. Most of you live far enough away that we need not fear extra spatulas or cans of tuna or copies of Winning Bigly appearing in our house. Some of you, however, actually do come to our house from time to time. Yes, we appreciate the muffins, and the Billy Collins books, but don’t think you can get away with leaving one of those little jars of cumquat jam, or the autobiography of Kristi Noem!

When you’re in the process of downsizing, it can be difficult to remember what you’ve gotten rid of and what you still have.

From time to time we go looking for something that we gave away. Recently Helen was befuddled by the absence of a spring decoration that she wanted to put out on the mantle, something she puts up every year. No where could it be found. She complained to friend Kathy. “I know where it is,” said Kathy. “It’s on my mantle…”

Helen had given it to Kathy, along with some other stuff she wanted to get rid of, to put into her church’s fall rummage sale. Kathy, though, liked it so much that she kept it. It has now passed back through our house and on to daughter Mary Beth’s mantle. At least, I think that’s where it is now.

Downsizing is a major concern of old people. [Unless you are a hoarder, but that’s a different sort of problem.] We spend so many years acquiring, building up our resources—furniture, books, kitchenware, clothes, suitcases, tools, office supplies... Then, suddenly [it seems like], we have little need of most of that stuff. We try to give it away, but nobody wants good china or silverware, button-front shirts, hard-sided suitcases, pencils, typewriters, lined 3-hole paper…

There’s lots of stuff that even rummage stores like Good Will won’t take, because customers don’t want it.

I guess the only alternative is to take those things to other people’s houses and slip them in unnoticed, like the way those people from the first paragraph did.

If you were going to do this, slip things unnoticed into the homes of other people, what would the items be, and at whose house?

We don’t go anyplace, so we can’t get rid of stuff that way, so I’m trying to figure out what I can sneak into the pockets of people who come to our house. That dining room table is going to be a problem…

John Robert McFarland

 

WHAT WAS YOUR GRANDFATHER LIKE? [Sa, 5-2-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Personal Identity of An Elderly Grandson—WHAT WAS YOUR GRANDFATHER LIKE? [Sa, 5-2-26]

 

Michelle Obama said I was doing it wrong.

Starting in high school, I was pleased with, yes, even proud of, my ability to remember names. This hit its zenith in my campus ministry years.

College kids went to church in those days. Every September, I’d have a thousand new names to learn. I just happened into the plan I used to remember them. I asked their name, asked their major, and asked their home town. And at each answer, I pointed out something we had in common: “Oh, my grandmother’s name is Margaret, too… Jim Kiefer is a special ed major, too. You’d probably like to meet him…” [If the student were a guy, it would be “Ann Wierman is a special ed major…”] You’re from Illiopolis… so Gary Ford is your pastor?” By that time, I was associating their name not just with their face but a standard background important to understanding a student—a major and a hometown.

There is a difference, of course, between just trying to remember a person’s name and trying to get to know them, to know their story. Yes, their name is a short form of their story, and remembering it is a good place to start, but knowing a name and knowing a story are not the same thing.

Michelle Obama, in the film about the tour for her book, Becoming, talking to a group of students, said, “The way you get to know someone is not the surface things, like where they’re from. Ask what their grandfather was like…”

I’m inclined to say, “Well, I’d eventually get around to their grandfather, later, after I got through trying to remember 999 other students…” The truth, though, is that I don’t think I ever asked anyone what their grandfather was like.

If someone wanted to know me, grandmothers would be a better place to start, but asking about my grandfathers would be intriguing, in part because my mother’s father, Elmer Arthur Pond, was dead when I was born, killed in a coal mine cave-in a decade before. I wish I knew more about what he was like.

The strange thing is, he’s been a major part of my life, because I have spent so much time wondering about him, what he was like…and because of three things I do know…

First, my father said that Grandpa Pond was always interested in what other people thought. He would listen carefully as you talked.

Second, my mother was the outlier among his eight children, the “sensitive” one, the one who needed extra attention. He gave her the extra attention she needed.

Third, he was killed because he knew the mine was unsafe, but the owner insisted the miners go in anyway. Grandpa told the other miners to stand back, that he would go in first.

So, yes, you might learn about me by asking me about the grandfather I never knew, because I wanted to be like him.

John Robert McFarland

The photo is generic; not of my grandfather.