CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith
from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…
I
didn’t know that Helen has a bucket list, but apparently she does. It’s the
only way I can account for her desire to enter the grape stomping contest at
Iron Mountain’s Italian Fest next month.
We’ve
belonged for several years to the LIFE group of Bay de Noc Community
College-West. LIFE stands for Learning Is ForEver. Its programs are designed to
help old brains build new connections. Helen and I have gone and sat there each
month, resisting brain mushiness, but otherwise inactive, as we are mostly in
all things. Last month, though, in a spasm of desperation, the group elected me
president. It changed Helen’s relationship to LIFE more than it did mine.
All
I have to do is tell the secretary which person made a motion. Since I was not
in leadership of LIFE before, though, I have not bothered to learn the names of
my fellow LIFErs. I was good at that in churches. I made a point of it. By the
third week in any new church, regardless of size, I could call 90% of the
members by name. But since I don’t know LIFErs, I just make up names for them
to tell the secretary. “Moved by Senator Tollefson. Seconded by Myrtle
Krepsbach.” If they don’t like their names, they can complain to Garrison
Keillor.
Helen,
however, went into preacher’s wife mode. She welcomed guests. She got name tags
for people in wheelchairs and on walkers. She found more paper plates. She had
a bunch of old people singing “We are marching to Pee-oria” as she led them
down the hall to the restrooms. [One item in that list isn’t completely
accurate, factually.]
I’ve
mentioned before the glamorous young Lutheran pastor’s wife of some years back who
told me she hated Helen, “Because she makes being a preacher’s wife look so
easy, and it’s not.” Here’s the thing: Helen never tried to be a good
preacher’s wife. She just tries to be her best self.
I
was once called upon to be an interim in a church where the bishop had removed
the pastor, for good cause. The people, however, thought that was government
interference. When the bishop came to explain things to them, they chanted “We
want our pastor,” and threw hymn books at him. The District Superintendent
called me and said, “We think this would be a good place for you to pastor for
a while.” The first Sunday I said to Helen that perhaps she should stay home.
“No way! If they’re mean to you, I’m going to beat up on them.” I’m happy to
report that Helen didn’t have to beat up on anyone. I do feel more at ease,
though, in my LIFE presidency position, knowing that if anyone tries to run
over me with a walker, she’ll be there to block it.
Which
brings us back to Italian Fest. In competition, old people have an advantage. We
have more experience than anyone else. I think Helen will win the contest. She
has experience. She has spent her life stomping out the grapes of wrath.
John
Robert McFarland
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!
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are always welcome to Forward or Repost or Reprint. It’s okay to acknowledge
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{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/}
I tweet, occasionally, as yooper1721.
I have nothing to do with those double
under-linings Blogger puts into the body of these posts, randomly, it seems, to
lead you to advertisements, and I wish they would stop that.
CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from
a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter…
After
supper, Tom Atkins said, rather casually, “I have to go to a political meeting
to try to get support for my candidacy for city council. You might as well come
along.” His wife, Sharon, suggested Helen stay and chat with her.
Turned
out that the meeting was a black power rally. All male. I was the only white
man there. The others were not at all happy about my presence. I wasn’t very
happy about it, either. I think every white person should spend some time as
the only one at a minority power rally. It gives you a very different
understanding of what minorities experience regularly.
The
black power guys seemed to think that Tom had betrayed them not just by
bringing me to the meeting but my associating with me at all. But Tom, as
always, was thinking ahead. He didn’t want just to get elected; he wanted to
build a foundation for basic change in the ways we treat one another. He wanted
them to support not just his Boston city council candidacy but his approach to
people who were different.
Because
we have just celebrated Independence Day, and because of the recent Supreme
Court decision that the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary, I’ve been
thinking about Tom Atkins, and the nature of power.
In
1957, Thomas I. Atkins enrolled at Indiana University, part of the elite Residence
Scholarship Plan, for poor and bedraggled but bright and motivated students who
could not afford to go to college otherwise. We called ourselves Ahaywehs,
after Dante’s sign over the gate to hell: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. The
“elite” status was mostly in our own minds. Tom and I spent a lot of time in
Linden Hall-East borassing with the likes of Tom Cone and Jim McKnight and Max
Eubanks.
[“Borass”
is almost exclusively an IU term. Its meaning has changed a little from time to
time over the years, but in our day it basically meant sitting around talking.]
Tom
came down to Bloomington from Elkhart, where he had been the first black
student body president at Elkhart HS. His father was a Pentecostal minister and
his mother was a maid. He became not only the first black student body
president at IU [while making Phi Beta Kappa] but at any Big 10 school. I was
active in Tom’s campaign for IU student body president, as were Ahaywehs in
general. Tom campaigned hard and well. We got him into almost every housing
unit, including sororities, to speak. We weren’t able to get him into
fraternities. Anybody who heard him and saw his winning smile—half of it saying
that we have a secret, you and I, half of it saying that the secret is that “we
shall overcome”—wanted to vote for him.
There
were two political parties on campus, Organized [OP] and Independent [IP].
Organized meant fraternities and sororities. Independents were everybody else.
The OP always won every election, general or by class, because they were
exactly what their name said--organized. The frats and sororities required
their members to vote. Only a few Independents bothered to run for office or to
vote.
It
was a divisive campaign. Tom won, though, partly because we managed to motivate
more Independents than usual, and partly because a surprising number of those sorority
members who heard him speak actually voted for him. There were stories of a
number of girls who were unpinned [1] by their fraternity boyfriends because
they had voted not just for an Independent but… well, you know why.
After
IU Tom went to Harvard, where he earned an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and
went to law school. He stayed in Boston. Like so many other firsts in his life,
in 1967 he was the first African American elected to the Boston City Council,
in one of the most viciously segregated cities in the country, including the
South. Most of the vitriol came from Irish-Americans, whose forebears had been
treated just like they were now treating African-Americans. Tom went on to
become one of the leading civil rights attorneys in the nation.
1967
was a volatile time, the nation angrily and hatefully divided over civil rights
and the war in Vietnam. That was the summer I started doctoral studies at
Boston U. [That degree eventually accumulated over eight different
universities.] That was the time when Helen and I had supper with Tom and Sharon.
I knew Sharon also from IU, because we had shared classes as majors in the
History Dept.
Many
years after Linden Hall, the run-down home of the Ahaywehs, no longer existed,
Helen and I were back on campus when his university honored Tom with the
creation and dedication of the Thomas I. Atkins Living-Learning Center. They
had him scheduled up so completely that we didn’t get to spend any time with
him, but we happened to be walking from the Union Building [2] to its parking
lot when his limo pulled up in the circle drive outside the main doors. When
Tom saw us, his eyes lit up, and he ran over and gave Helen a big hug before
the suits pulled him away to keep him on schedule. Over his shoulder he flashed
me that winning smile, half a secret and half what the secret was, and I
remembered what he had said at that black power meeting back in 1967. “Power is
like water. You can drink it, or you can drown in it.”
Tom
drank of that water, but unlike so many others, then and now, he refused to let
it drown him.
I
think Chief Justice Roberts was right when he said that the times have changed.
I think he was wrong that the change means we no longer need a Voting Rights
Act. The times changed BECAUSE of the Voting Right Act. Times change, but human
nature doesn’t. People don’t share power voluntarily. There will always be
those who seek to prevent voting by persons and groups that they fear will
diminish their power.
Sometimes,
in the years of winter, when it seems like we’ve worked hard all our lives to
make the world better, but it’s still the same old hateful place, then it is good
to remember people who overcame, like Tom Atkins, who by his presence and his
work helped us change the way we treat one another.
John
Robert McFarland
Dec.
1, 2010, the Thomas I. Atkins apartments in “Southie,” his Roxbury section of
Boston, were dedicated. It is a “green” unit. It adds 48 affordable apartments
and 3600 square feet of commercial space to the neighborhood.
He
died in 2008, of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Tom
and I were usually the only two car-owners in our dorm, not counting Frank
Merli, our Residence Hall Director. Ahaywehs couldn’t afford cars, but students
in general were not allowed to have cars in those days. An exception was made
for those, like myself, who needed one for work [pastoring three churches in
the hinterlands] and for the handicapped, like Tom, who had one short leg,
requiring a built-up shoe, and making it difficult for him to walk long
distances]. Mine was a serviceable 1951 green Chevrolet. Tom’s was a ponderous
black Packard, circa 1937.
1]
If a guy gave his frat pin to a girl, she was “pinned,” which was between
“going steady,” and pre-engagement.
2]
When Alex Haley spoke on campus, he noted that no one ever spoke of the Union
Bldg without reminding him that ”It’s the biggest student union building in the
world.”
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 or Broadway musical.
{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/}
I tweet, infrequently, as yooper1721.
