Iron Mountain ski jump

Iron Mountain ski jump

Monday, July 23, 2012

MY HALL OF FAME


CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…
 
MY HALL OF FAME
 
Walt Wagener called a month or so ago. He does that every once in a while, when there is some special baseball achievement to discuss. Since we were on the subject of achievements anyway, we talked about our careers, what we had achieved and not achieved. Old people do that, trying to assure ourselves that our lives mattered.
 
Walt and I were roommates at Garrett Theological Seminary [at Northwestern U]. Not for very long, but we were the only Garrett roommates either of us ever had. In fact, I was the only roommate Walt ever had. He lived at home to attend U of WI at Milwaukee, and then was married during Garrett years.
 
He graduated Garrett in 1962, and was appointed part-time as campus minister at the Wesley Foundation at Whitewater State and part-time as pastor of the Methodist Church in Milford, WI, which meant he had two full-time jobs. However, he was one course short at the 1962 commencement and had to return for a four-week summer session to make his diploma stick to the wall. I normally commuted, four to six hours a day, from Cedar Lake, IN, 30 miles south of Gary, to Evanston. That worked alright for courses that were a whole semester long. But I was a transfer from Perkins School of Theology at SMU, and so there were courses I needed at Garrett that I could get only in the summer. With a four-week summer course, there wasn’t time to study at all if I commuted daily, so I stayed at Garrett during the week.
 
Walt and I, being the two oddballs who were in the dorm for only one summer course, were assigned to the same room in Loder Hall. We actually were in residence together only about 15 days, since we both went home for extended weekends, but from that chance assignment to the same room came a life-long friendship. We have visited in each other’s homes in at least five states. Most recently I got to visit with his son, another John Robert, while he was becoming a fellow colon cancer survivor.
 
So Walt and I talked baseball and careers for an hour or so, and I felt better about my life, as I always do when I’ve talked to Walt. But when the phone rang the very next day, and Walt’s name appeared on the caller ID, I feared that something bad had happened. But, no, it was just Walt reminding me of something I omitted when we had talked of our career achievements. “I got to thinking about it,” he said.  “You didn’t mention that you wrote books. Good books!”
 
Being baseball friends, Walt and I watched the Hall of Fame inductions this weekend, of course. In a snippet from his induction speech in 1999, George Brett said, “We live with our friends, not with our achievements.”
 
You know you’ve had a good life when you don’t even need to keep track of your achievements because you have friends who do it for you.
 
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 folks you know or to print it in a church newsletter or bulletin, or make it into a movie or TV series.
 
{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/}



Sunday, July 8, 2012

Anne Lamott & Jealousy

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



I am considerably ill at ease about this, but I am enormously jealous of Anne Lamott.
 
Before she became a Christian, and sometimes after, it seems, she got to live a dissolute life of drugs, affairs with married men, booze, abortion, more affairs, single motherhood, more booze… It’s what’s called in conservative Christian circles “building a testimony.” After you’re converted, when you’re too old for dissolution anymore, you get to tell about all the cocaine and affairs and booze and how Jesus has saved you from all that, and people say, “Isn’t that dramatic?” and they buy the books in which you give your testimony, and give you more money to come give it in person.
 
I would have built a testimony, but I never got the chance. At age 14, I traded my life for my sister’s. She was desperately ill, and I told God I’d be a preacher if “He” would keep her alive. It was mostly selfishness; I just didn’t want to do without her. God came through, despite my motive. [1] Mary V is still alive, notoriously healthy, and works fulltime, even though she’s still four years older than I. How can you build a testimony when you have to start living like a preacher when you’re only 14? Oh, sure, some churches think it’s neat to have preachers who build a testimony on Saturday night and preach about it on Sunday morning, but Methodists are picky about that sort of thing.
 
To be fair to Anne Lamott, she lived in CA, I lived in IN. That may explain it all.
 
She was the state tennis champion in her age group. I never even saw a tennis ball except the one we used to throw through a hoop on a barn side when a pig ran off with the basketball.
 
I desperately wanted to be a cocaine-crazed, booze-swilling, sexually promiscuous, unwed parent, self-loathing former sports star, but I had no choice. I had to live the life of a coffee-sipping, tee-totaling, totally married husband, doting father and grandfather, personally sensitive, hillbilly liberal. Who wants to pay to read or hear a story like that?
 
I can’t even say, “Yeah, but I’ve had a better life, because health is better than illness, and faithfulness is better than promiscuity, and wholeness is better than brokenness,” because that would sound self-righteous and holier-than-thou and mean-spirited and small-minded and intolerant and judgmental and unforgiving. It would make me sound like the elder brother, or the workers who spent the whole long damn hot day detasseling corn at Princeton Farms and only got the same pay as the slug-a-beds who didn’t show up until the last hour. Everybody knows those are the worst kind.  Jesus said so.
 
[Even for a hillbilly liberal Christian, some words of Jesus are hard to hear and bear. I prefer Matt. 5:18.]
 
I wish there were something I could say to ameliorate my jealousy, like Anne’s testimony makes me laugh and cry at the same time, and that I read her sentences over and over just for the sheer joy of it, and that any day you get to walk toward God with Jesus at your side is a better day than any other, and that we’re not so different, really, because we both try to walk that walk every day, and we both write little essays, stories, really, about faith and life, but that would remind me that the only thing that separates us is that she’s the best writer in the world and that I write a blog with 20 underappreciated followers, which would make me even more jealous.
 
Tony Bennett said of Faith Hill that “She is the Sinatra of female vocalists, always just a little better than everyone else.”
 
Okay, so in addition to having a better testimony, Anne Lamott is the Sinatra of writers. But I forgive her.
 
JRMcF
 
Anne Lamott’s reflections on faith are in TRAVELING MERCIES and PLAN B. Her book on the art and craft of writing is BIRD BY BIRD.
 
1] There is a bit more to this story. You can read about it in THE STRANGE CALLING.
 
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 folks you know or to print it in a church newsletter or bulletin, or make it into a movie or TV series.
 
{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/}
  

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Living Fancy

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

We were on our back deck yesterday morning, July 4, Independence Day, watching the tiny triplet fawns and squirrels and rabbits use our back yard to go from our south woods patch to the north woods patch. It’s almost like living in the woods, since we can’t see the other houses. But yesterday morning we could hear them. At 6:00 am, on a holiday, very loud and sustained talking and laughing from down the street. It wasn’t very good neighboring. It was almost like living in a fancy neighborhood again.  
 
It was by accident, really, that we once lived in a fancy neighborhood. It wasn’t nearly as fancy as it thought it was, but it was definitely fancy. It was the worst neighborhood we ever lived in, and that includes the slums of Dallas.
 
There were lots of rules. You couldn’t have a garden or a clothesline. You couldn’t park a car overnight on a street. You couldn’t park a truck overnight even in your own driveway, even if it was your truck. There were lots of committees, including one that had to approve the color before you could repaint your front door. You got a nasty phone call if you didn’t pay to have the same half-class lighted Christmas candy canes installed along your sidewalk, the way everyone else did, so that no one would mistake us for an un-fancy neighborhood.
 
Despite all the rules, there was lots of noise. People who had swimming pools would leave town at night, but not take their teenage children with them. Said children would then have swimming parties into the wee hours. It wasn’t very good neighboring.
 
It wasn’t just teenagers, though. One night about 2 am, there was so much ruckus at the house one door down and across the side street that we called the cops to investigate. They reported back. “That’s the governor of the state of Illinois down there.” He was visiting his brother. Since this happened to be in the state of IL, they seemed reluctant to tell anybody to shut up. Except us.
 
The governor’s brother’s wife had been a cheerleader at the local college. She went by the name of Kitty. [Not really, but it was sort of like Kitty, so I’ll use that name for this story.] About forty years after she had led cheers, I was speaking to a group of several hundred cancer survivors in Hartford, CT. My introduction included my place of residence, the city of the fancy neighborhood. After the talk, a fairly large man approached me. “I went to college there, where you live,” he said. “Played football. There was a cheerleader by the name of Kitty. I think she stayed in town there. Do you know her?”
 
I admitted that I knew her. His sixtyish countenance took on a look of rapture. “She was so hot,” he said. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that although she was as loud as when she led cheers, her temperature had cooled off quite a bit, simply because that’s what age does to folks, we cool down.
 
Which is a segue to the point of this meander… as old people, we often end up living in places that are strange to us. We are sent to “the home,” overlooking the IGA parking lot, or to the Ancient Arms retirement center, or some place closer to the children, who have not the good sense to live anyplace we’d like to live. They might be fancy, but they’re not where we want to be.
 
I advise that if you don’t like “the home” or Ancient Arms or where the kids live, just live where you want to, as I do. I live in Bloomington, IN, in 1957. That’s where I met Helen, my personal Lake Itasca [1], from which all the rest of my life has flowed.  It’s not fancy, but it’s quiet. There, the girls are all 102 degrees, and they are all fascinated by a skinny crew-cut guy “doing his tall silent thing.”
 
JRMcF
 
1] The little lake in MN that is the start of the MS River.
 
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 folks you know or to print it in a church newsletter or bulletin, or make it into a movie or TV series.
 
{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/}