Iron Mountain ski jump

Iron Mountain ski jump

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

The Integrity of Keeping Quiet

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter…

About two years before he died, at age 96, when I was an old man of 68 myself, my father called me on the telephone. He was crying, a very unusual activity for that extremely tough and totally independent man.

“Are you the one who was born in Ohio?” he asked in a breaking voice.

I acknowledged that I was. My sisters and brother were born in Indiana.

“I hate to tell you this,” he choked out, “but you’re not really my child…”

My first reaction was to think: If I’m the one who is not your child, how come I’m the one who takes care of you all the time instead of your non-bastard children? [1]

Then I felt guilty because it was really my wife, Helen, who did the bulk of the caring for him. By the time I had gotten that settled in my mind, he had choked up and could not talk anymore and hung up.

He never said anything about it again. Neither did I, at least to him. I told Helen and our daughters, though. After Helen stopped laughing, she said, “That’s so ridiculous. Just look at you and your brother and father together. Except for the height difference, you’re three peas in a pod.”

I never said anything to him about it, never asked him about it, both because it was a tearful subject for him, and because Helen and I agreed that it must have been some sort of old-age forgetfulness or crossing of brain wires, maybe something he had picked up from somewhere else and mistakenly incorporated into his own memories. I also figured that it was his subject to raise, not mine.

There was just one problem with the “One of those old age memory-dementia things” theory. It was the one and only time that Dad ever exhibited an “old age-dementia” problem. Up until the day he died, both before and after that call, he was very sharp mentally.

So what was going on when he called that day? Probably nothing that had anything to do with me, something internal to him. From time to time, though, when I remember that my mother always insisted that I was named for her brother, John Hubert Pond, instead of my father, John Francis McFarland, or something reminds me of Dad--I hear the birds sing, or look at a garden, or at a piece of furniture he made--I wonder…

The memory of that telephone call does not haunt me. Sometimes, though, I recall my mother explaining that I was the least favorite child because I was the only one Dad had actually seen born, in that era before fathers were routinely in delivery rooms. I know that seeing a birth would probably jaundice my view of a kid, too.

There is no question that he was my father and I his son, in all the ways that really count, but could it be that…

If so, do I really need to know? No.

I didn’t need to know the day he called, either. If there were something about his relationship to me, or to my mother, then deceased, that was bothering him, it would have been best for him to talk to someone outside the family about it, or just to be as quiet about it as he had been for all his other years.

The task of our last years is what Erik Erikson called Final Integrity vs Despair. We think back over our lives and ask, “Was it okay to be me?” To be able to say yes, sometimes we have to acknowledge mistakes. Sometimes we have broken relationships that we need to mend to make life whole.

Sometimes, though, honesty becomes a breaker instead of a healer. As we try to put things right in winter, there is a good tendency to try to be honest, to tell the truth about the past. Sometimes, though, it is best to tell that truth where only we, the tellers, and God, can hear it. The deciding rule should be, Does telling this not only make me feel right about my life, but does it also benefit the ones who hear, or does it hurt them?

If I hurt someone as I try for final integrity, it will lead instead to despair. Sometimes, integrity is just keeping your mouth shut.

Once, when I was 2 or 3, Dad ran away. It was the Great Depression. He didn’t have a job. He couldn’t support his family. We lived with his parents and several siblings. It was too much. Many young men left home and wife and children during the Great Depression under those circumstances. He had gotten a lot of miles away when, he told Mother, who told me many years later, he saw a little boy playing in a yard. “He looked like Johnny,” he said. He turned around and started back. Maybe he thought I wasn’t really his child, but I was the reason he came home.

JRMcF

1] It wasn’t that my siblings were unwilling to care for our parents, but they had moved to CA, FL, NM, Canada. I was in IL. Dad was in IN.

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

You are always welcome to Forward or Repost or Reprint. It’s okay to acknowledge the source, unless it embarrasses you too much. It is okay to refer the link to older folks you know or to print it in a church newsletter or bulletin.

{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

(If you would prefer to receive either “Christ In Winter” or “Periwinkle Chronicles” via email, just let me know at jmcfarland1721@charter.net, and I’ll put you on the email list.)

Friday, April 6, 2012

A Thought for Good Friday, The Touching Time

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…

I wrote the following in 1990, after my first oncologist told me I’d be dead “in a year or two.” It appears on page 108 of the second edition of NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel, 2007]

My friend Bill came to see me, a week after I got out of the hospital. He drove a hundred miles each way to spend an hour with me. We’ve been friends for almost thirty years. Between us we’ve had three wives and seven children. We don’t see each other often, but we don’t need to; our friendship is always still there. Bill’s first wife left him ten years ago. Just told him one day she was leaving. No previous symptoms, even in retrospect. Just like my cancer. We share that kind of surprised grieving—he in his marriage, me in my body.

When he was ready to leave, he sat on the sofa beside me and put his arm around me. I held onto his leg, the way a little boy might wrap his arm around a father’s knee. We prayed together. He told me he loved me. I tried to tell him I loved him, too, but I couldn’t get it out. I believe he understood, though. Other than shaking hands, I think that’s the first time we’ve touched, in thirty years.

Now that I have cancer, there seems to be an unspoken word of permission for people to touch me, for me to touch them. It’s funny, that a broken body should somehow be more touchable than one that’s whole. Or am I more touchable because my spirit is broken? “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” [Psalm 51:17.]

It is interesting that in all the stories of Jesus, there is only one instance of anyone touching him while he was alive in the body. He, of course, touched many. A leper, a hand to raise Simon’s mother-in-law or Jairus’ daughter up from beds of illness and death, deaf ears, blind eyes, the feet of the disciples, children. The woman with the hemorrhage reached only as far as the hem of his robe. The woman who broke the alabaster jar of ointment on his feet wiped it off with her hair—no touch. The only time anyone reached out to touch Jesus was to betray him, Judas with a kiss, the authorities of his own faith and people with a slap.

Maybe that’s why “doubting” Thomas insisted on his famous touch-and-feel session after the crucifixion. Maybe he was really “knowing” Thomas. Because no one had touched Jesus while he was alive, Thomas knew the real proof of the resurrection was that he could be touched, his body was broken. It’s only after the breaking of crucifixion that resurrection, the touching time, comes.

Somehow we seem able to touch one another in our brokenness in ways we never can in wholeness. God likes to use broken things: broken bread, broken ointment jars, broken bodies, even relationships broken with a kiss.

My body and my spirit have been broken by cancer. That means I can touch and be touched. I’m thankful for the cancer.

JRMcF

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

You are always welcome to Forward or Repost or Reprint. It’s okay to acknowledge the source, unless it embarrasses you too much. It is okay to refer the link to older folks you know or to print it in a church newsletter or bulletin.

{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

(If you would prefer to receive either “Christ In Winter” or “Periwinkle Chronicles” via email, just let me know at jmcfarland1721@charter.net, and I’ll put you on the email list.)

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Worm Theology

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter…

WORM THEOLOGY

John Kiltinen is a Renaissance man, if the Renaissance is mathematical and Finnish. John is a Northern MI U math professor, retard, which is how we pronounce “retired” in the UP, or at least that’s what we tell him, and a translator of Finnish hymns, and the driving force behind the brand new Finnish/American opera, “Rockland.”

John suggests that a good Holy Week topic would be self-flagellation, since “feel good” religion started when Luther did away with the practice, which is not wrapping one’s self in the flag and elatedly [flag-elation] screeching that your flag is better than theirs, as Sean Hannity seems to think, but its opposite, the proclamation that you know you are no more than a worm, and that thus God’s grace [acceptance] is always a gift, never earned.

To remind themselves that we are just worms, Christians used to beat the hell out of themselves, especially during Holy Week, with ropes or chains or small tree limbs. Mrs. Kiltinen points out that the Finns, reluctant to abandon such a practice entirely, for obvious reasons, at least to Finns, still practice a minor-league form of it in the sauna. Thank God I’m a Celt. Our idea of proper worship is self-flagon-elation, which is to drink another flagon and dance elatedly.

Worm theology probably dates from a favorite Holy Week hymn, Isaac Watts’ Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed, which contains the line, “Did he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?”

Worms have always had a place in Christian Theology. There was, of course, Luther’s famous Diet of Worms, which may account for his constipation and certain parts of his theology. [1] Without worms there could be no wormwood to accompany gall in bitterness and despair. [Lamentations 3:19] That, of course, gave the junior demon in C.S. Lewis’ "The Screwtape Letters" his name of “Wormwood.”

And we know that our bodies are destined to be worm food, as we learned in that hymn from childhood, “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.” It’s hard to work that into a feel-good theology.

There is, however, a different sort of worm theology. Remember the story of Jonah? He didn’t want to go to Nineveh, to be a prophet, to forth-tell the truth [2] to the people there, that if they did not repent and change their ways, they were doomed. That sort of truth-telling gets a prophet into all sorts of trouble with people of high self-esteem, who feel good about themselves, who think they are good enough already, and Jonah was sure he wouldn’t get his own reality show and the celebrity and popularity that went with it that way.

So he went up on a mountain overlooking Nineveh and sat in the shade of a huge gourd vine so he could watch everybody go to hell in comfort. But God wasn’t about to give up on Nineveh because of a balky prophet. “But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered.” [Jonah 4:7.] Without his shade, Jonah had to get on with the job, and quite to his surprise, when the folks of Nineveh were confronted with the truth, they believed and changed their ways and were saved. The real prophet in this story is the worm, who accepted God’s appointment and got rid of the comforting shade so that the truth could be seen.

Yes, I’m just a worm, but that means that God has a job for even me. “Did he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” You bet. Amen.

JRMcF

Thanks to the Kiltinens, who may feel that even though they are Finns, reading this may be adequate self-flagellation.

1] Yes, to all you historical theology addicts, I do know that Luther did not eat worms, but that a “Diet” was actually an imperial conclave and that Luther was called to such a diet in the town of Worms to answer charges that his theology was heretical.

2] Real prophets don’t foretell the truth, they forth-tell it.

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

You are always welcome to Forward or Repost or Reprint. It’s okay to acknowledge the source, unless it embarrasses you too much. It is okay to refer the link to older folks you know or to print it in a church newsletter or bulletin.

{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

(If you would prefer to receive either “Christ In Winter” or “Periwinkle Chronicles” via email, just let me know at jmcfarland1721@charter.net, and I’ll put you on the email list.)