Iron Mountain ski jump

Iron Mountain ski jump

Monday, July 21, 2014

Leading a Romance Life

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

Black Opal Books has a sharing group for its authors. Since BOB will publish my novel VETS in 6 to 8 months, I’m in the group. BOB has up to now published only romance novels, but they are expanding into other genres, hence authors like me [or I, according to which sounds better to you.] Many of the most active contributors and tweeters in the group write paranormal romances.

I am acquainted with some romance writers, including Merline Lovelace --her real name, but one a romance writer should choose if it were not her real name. [She was a colonel in the Air Force before retiring to write romance.] I don’t, however, read romance novels because I don’t need to; I live a romantic life.

Twitter doesn’t understand that, though, and since I “follow” the other authors in the BOB group, Twitter is constantly suggesting non-BOB paranormal romance authors, and romance writers in general, for me to follow.

“Following” sounds a bit too much like stalking, although young people use “stalking” as any attempt to gather information about someone, such as I’m “stalking” Thomas Jefferson if I Google Monticello.

In many ways, it makes sense for Twitter to suggest that I follow paranormal romance writers, but not for the reasons Twitter assumes. I am a Christian, a follower of Jesus, a communer with God, a mystic experiencer, absorbed in the Holy Spirit, a child of the world for which God provides and continues to create, a follower of one who has risen from the dead but is still among us in Spirit. That is surely a paranormal romance.

So I guess the first writers of paranormal romances were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In “following” them I am “stalking” Jesus. I’m sure he’s cool with it.

John Robert McFarland

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where people are Yoopers, a word in the new Merriam-Webster dictionary, and life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to return here. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the top of the page.

I have also started an author blog, about writing, in preparation for the publication, by Black Opal Books, of my novel, VETS, in late 2014 or early 2015. http://johnrobertmcfarland-author.blogspot.com/


I tweet as yooper1721.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The Significance of Numbers 13 & 18

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

Today is the All Star game, and so, a baseball CIW…

Helen and I were in Cincinnati to see Ted Kluzewski’s # 18 retired. Our trip to Riverfront Stadium was a sort of pilgrimage. “Big Klu” had been a hero of my youth, when I, too, was a slow hard-hitting first baseman.
           
We were dressed in all our Reds regalia–caps, shirts, sox, all extolling professional baseball’s first team. I was in line to get tickets when Helen tugged at my arm.

“This man says he’ll give us tickets,” she said.

She waved her arm toward a rather scrufty looking young man standing a few feet away. He looked like the kind of guy who would be asking for something rather than giving something. He slouched sideways, like the sullen gunsel in The Maltese Falcon.

He wasn’t highly articulate, but the bottom line was that he had a pair of tickets, and he had just been looking around for the right people to give them to.

All this was highly suspicious. Standing behind him, Helen indicated, non-verbally, that she didn’t think we should take this offer, that it had the odor of scam about it. I agreed. I mean, what if…

…he was a dope dealer and he had mistaken us for someone else and the tickets were a signal and a shifty-eyed woman with too much cleavage would hand us a paper bag and suddenly whistles would blow and cops would appear. Maybe he was an undercover agent investigating scalping and as soon as we took the tickets whistles would blow and cops would appear. In either scenario, we would spend the night in jail with low-life types, Dodgers and Yankees fans.

At the very least, if these were free tickets, they would be high up in right field, where the seats were red because of all the noses that had bled on them, and this being Big Klu’s big night, we had decided to break the budget and get green seats, or maybe even yellow seats, for the first time in all our trips to Riverfront. [Riverfront Stadium is no more. The Reds now play in The Great American Ballpark, where all the seats are red.] But he stuck the tickets out, and I, rather ungraciously, took them, with only a mumbled word of thanks.

We took our pathetic tickets and trudged up, up, up, past the young people who were lounging comfortably on the lower concourses, drinking beer and looking at the river and saving their breath for cheering Big Klu . We presented our tickets to the last usher, who looked like he was about to pass out from altitude sickness. He looked carefully at them, looked again.

“I don’t recognize these numbers,” he said.

Great! We had been given counterfeit tickets. Now we would be thrown out and an ignominious photo of us would appear at the gates of all major league ballparks with the notice to watch out for these old people because they are frauds who use counterfeit tickets.

The usher pulled a wrinkled stadium map from his back pocket. He looked at it for a long time.

“These are way down there,” he said, pointing in the direction of third base. “In the blue seats.”

Blue seats? But the blue seats were the best. We would never be able to afford blue seats, and even if we could, the tickets to them were all sold out before the season even began. Surely nobody had given us free tickets to the blue seats.

It was easier going down than coming up, but it was still a long way. The healthy-looking blue seat usher got us into our seats without demur, just as Big Klu’s widow walked onto the field. The scrufty young man was seated a couple of rows in front of us, with a stunning young woman and three bright and beautiful and well-behaved children.

By asking our neighbors during the game, we learned that we were in the reserved section of a local corporation. On nights when there were not enough of their employees to fill up all the seats they had paid for, they gave them to others. Our young scammer, who moon-lighted as a vice-president of the corporation, had been waiting around to find just the right people to receive his extra tickets. When he saw two old people all dressed up like Reds groupies, he decided we were the ones.

As we sat there, so close we could see the seams of the baseball Mrs Klu used as the first pitch, one of the many announcements over the loud speaker was: “Children, senior citizens, and handicapped persons who become separated from their parties will be taken to Gate 13.”

Senior citizens? Well, yes. Old people lose their bearings and get lost sometimes, just like children. Gate 13 does not sound like a very lucky spot to be taken, but it’s nice to know there is a place where you can get back to your party. It’s in the blue seats, and the tickets are free.

John Robert McFarland

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where people are Yoopers, a word in the new Merriam-Webster dictionary, and life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to return here. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the top of the page.

I have also started an author blog, about writing, in preparation for the publication, by Black Opal Books, of my novel, VETS, in late 2014 or early 2015. http://johnrobertmcfarland-author.blogspot.com/


I tweet as yooper1721.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

THE UNFORGIVABLE SIN

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

The nurse thought I should “look in on” Gladys. To be sure I did, she took me by the nose and led me to her room. Her body was still okay, the nurse said, but her mind was troubled. Worse, her soul was in anguish.

It was really my arm, not my nose, but it felt like my nose, and leading me was a wise move. I did not want to stay in that nursing home a minute longer than required, and Gladys was not part of my congregation, so I was not required. At least I didn’t think so. The nurse thought otherwise. I’m sure Jesus did, too, something about “If you’ve visited even the least of the sick and imprisoned, you’ve done it unto me.” [Mt 25:31-46]

Because I did not like to call in nursing homes, I was very faithful about it. I knew that if I waited until I felt like doing it, it would never get done. Because I really wanted to rush in and make quick visits so I could mark them off the list, I made sure I walked slowly down the halls, took my coat off when I got to a patient room, sat down, crossed my legs, and listened carefully as long as my parishioner wanted to talk. But once I reached the end of the hall, I was out the door. Except that Nurse Ratched had hold of my arm.

Gladys was embarrassed in the company of the strange pastor. The nurse, however, assured her that I could help her. Apparently she wanted to know something about the Cincinnati Reds or IU basketball, those being my two main areas of expertise. But no, it was “the unforgivable sin” that troubled her. She was sure she had committed it and thus would go to hell. It had something to do with sex, although she didn’t spell it out.

Gladys was about thirty years older than I. She had committed said sin some fifteen years before I was even born, so she had carried the burden of the unforgiven for almost seventy years. Now she was approaching “the door at the end of the hall,” and she knew it would lead down the stairs to the flames of hell, forever.

She felt like a fraud. All those seventy years she had masqueraded as a faithful wife and mother and church member, a Baptist, for heaven’s sake, a responsible member of the community, all the time knowing she could not be forgiven.

Jesus talked about money more than anything else. Unlike the proponents of the “prosperity Gospel,” one mega-church of which actually proclaims above its open doors to hell, “The Word of God is the Way to Wealth,” Jesus was not an investment counselor. Indeed, he warned against money, reminding us in many ways that you cannot serve both God and money. [Mt 6:24, Lk 16:13]

Next to money, though, he talked about forgiveness the most. According to Jesus, any sin can be forgiven, even the sin of wealth. Except one, and it has nothing to do with sex, drugs, or rock & roll. The unforgivable sin is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the spirit of God in the world and in your own life. [Mt 12:31-32]

Sin is brokenness, separation--from God, from neighbor, from world, from our own true selves. To heal that brokenness, God sends Jesus into the world. Jesus is no longer here, however, in the flesh. The point of the resurrection is not that a body got out of a grave, but that Jesus is still here, not in the flesh, but in the spirit, the spirit of God, the same spirit that indwelt the incarnate [in the flesh] Jesus, the Holy Spirit.

The sin against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable because it is through the Spirit that we are forgiven. If we refuse the spirit, we refuse forgiveness, and so we cannot be restored to wholeness. [1]

Gladys, though, did finally accept forgiveness, on a dreary nursing home afternoon. She had not sinned against the Spirit. Indeed, the Spirit had been with her all her life, guiding her into ways of righteousness. She just didn’t know it yet.

John Robert McFarland

1] That is why politicians and political pundits [and a lot of other folks] can never admit they are wrong, regardless of how often the facts prove otherwise—they cannot accept forgiveness.

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! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to return here. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the top of the page.

I have also started an author blog, about writing, in preparation for the publication, by Black Opal Books, of my novel, VETS, in late 2014 or early 2015. http://johnrobertmcfarland-author.blogspot.com/


I tweet as yooper1721.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Bud the blacksmith is dead--a poem

Bud the blacksmith lies so still.
A crazy quilt of sunburned leaves
and hedge balls, warts and all,
spreads thin upon September grass
around the slick-faced granite.

On Bud’s stone there should be peanut hulls
old jokes and fishing tales—
perhaps a picture of the one that got away—
straw hats and overalls
horseshoes leaning on a stake,
artifacts of those who gathered
at his forge.

Now the forge is cold as Bud.
The doors are held with a hard steel chain,
product of Bud’s skill now turned against us.
Late summer rays bounce off the dirt-art windows
until the darkness overcomes.
Black within equal with the black without.

Late from the graveyard comes the ring of hammer
clank of chisel, ghostly tools at work
and in the haze of autumn morn we see
the final words for Bud upon his stone…

Bud the blacksmith is dead.
Where will the old men go now?

John Robert McFarland




Tuesday, July 1, 2014

DANCING DAISIES

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


            The daisies are dancing wildly. They should, since they are wild daisies, even though they are in our yard.
            The wind is helping them to dance. Our yard is surrounded by thickets of low bushes and tall trees—oaks and birches and especially pines. In the thickets live squirrels and birds and chipmunks and rabbits and skunks. So we have owls and foxes and an occasional coyote.
And deer. They have paths through the thickets and into our yard. I have tried to teach them to help me maintain the yard by eating dandelions. These are not Carhartt deer, however. They are Waldorf-Astoria deer. Nieman-Marcus deer. They eat only expensive, cultivated flowers—roses and hostas and such. But at least they leave the wild daisies.
The wind comes in from the top, over the trees, from every direction at once, so the dance of the wild daisies is a constant swirl. In their wild dance they mock the manicured and poisoned lawns they see lying limp around them.
            It’s a little more difficult to mow our yard each year, because we have a few more daisies each year, and they patch in different spots. Sometimes Helen gathers a vase of daisies for our table. Mostly, though, they just hang around in the yard. I mow around them. In the wind, our yard is a daisy dance hall.
            As I watch them, I remember times when I danced like that—at the weddings of our daughters, with our granddaughter after she scored the winning basket in a fifth grade game, when Keith Smart hit the shot that won the 1987 NCAA basketball tourney, when the doctor declared there was no cancer left in our grandson.
            It is said that we should dance like no one is watching. The daisies don’t care if anyone is watching; they just dance. I say: Dance like a daisy.

John Robert McFarland

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where people are Yoopers, a word in the new Merriam-Webster dictionary, and life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to return here. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the top of the page.

I have also started an author blog, about writing, in preparation for the publication, by Black Opal Books, of my novel, VETS, in late 2014 or early 2015. http://johnrobertmcfarland-author.blogspot.com/

I tweet as yooper1721.