THE NOT-ANYMORE STAGE

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

I am in the “not anymore” phase of life. I say things like, “I don’t prepare anymore,” and “I don’t edit anymore.” Helen said, “You can get away with this until you say, ‘I don’t shower anymore,’ and then we’re going to talk.”

I often say that the key to living well in old age is to live within your limits but not be limited by them. To live within limits as we age, but not be limited by them, we have to give up certain things, but not give up others. I suggest giving up worrying and awfulizing and complaining, but not loving and praying and singing. Oh, and showering…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

RIP, BILL WHITE--THE TOUCHING TIME

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

The Rev. Dr. William Luther White, Bill, always lived in the present moment, but in that constantly present moment, he was a citizen of all of time. We were friends through almost 60 years of that time. He ended one of his last emails to us with “Life is fun.”

We were students together at Garrett Seminary, at Northwestern U, when I was working on what was then called a BD degree and Bill was gaining his PhD. We were among the brown bag commuters who ate lunch together, including grad students like James Cone and Ron Goetz and Tom Tredway, who, like Bill, went on to distinguished careers melding theology and church and university as college and seminary professors and presidents.

We were young ministers to the university together in the 1960-70s, Bill to Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington and me to Illinois State University, a mile down the Franklin Street in Normal. He had gone to IWU as chaplain in 1962, and when Don Ruthenberg, the president of the board of The Wesley Foundation at ILSU told Bill that the WF was looking for a new minister, Bill immediately said, “You need to get John McFarland.” So we became colleagues in ministry in Bloomington-Normal, often sharing student retreats and chapel worship services.

My career took me many other places after I left ILSU, but Bill remained a steadfast intellectual and spiritual presence at IWU and in Bloomington-Normal. Throughout that time, we remained close and grew closer, attending conferences together, visiting in each other’s homes, even traveling overseas together.

He died on Sunday, June 28, 2015, just nine days short of his 84^th birthday. His funeral will be in a few weeks, when far-flung family can all be present. Ann has asked me to do that funeral, and so I shall write more then. I do, though, want to tell now what I learned from Bill about touching.

We were Great Depression boys, from Southern Indiana. Unlike today, when everyone hugs everyone, for any reason or none, in that era and place, people did not hug. Especially men. A man hugged no one, except his wife, on special occasions, when no one was looking. If you had no wife, you were out of hugging luck. I like today a lot better.

Bill came to see me after emergency surgery revealed I had cancer, and after my first oncologist told me “a year or two.” Here is what I wrote in my book, Now That I Have Cancer I Am Whole: Reflections On Life And Healing For Cancer Patients And Those Who Love Them, pages 108-9:

***

My friend Bill came to see me, a week after I was 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 that she was leaving. No previous symptoms, even in retrospect. Just like my cancer. We share that kind of surprised grieving—he in his first 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, like a little boy might wrap himself around his 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 believe 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’s 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 edge 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. Perhaps 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 the 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 uses 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.

***

Helen and I went to see Bill for the last time the day before he died. He was in hospice care, on a strong morphine drip, and unaware. I touched him, though. I sat beside his bed and held his hand and told him how fortunate I had been to have his friendship all these years. Friendship is always a touching time, even when it’s not.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter.

I tweet as yooper1721.

IT IS FOR ME-A poem about peculiar sins

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

Most mornings, I write a little semi-poem just to find out what I’m thinking. This morning I was thinking about the peculiar, in the sense of “individual,” nature of sin, because I have recently been in the company of a couple of addicts, one an alcoholic and the other a gambler. There are some sins that are quite general—murder, rape, etc. It is hard to imagine a time when those acts are not sins. But drinking beer or taking a pain medication is usually not a sin. It becomes one, though, through addiction. The same is true with playing church bingo. If you cannot “use successfully,” then using at all becomes a sin. An addict knows that regardless of what others can do, they have to avoid that act. They cannot “use successfully.”

I never edit my little morning poems, just let them stand as they come out of my heart and pen, so, it’s not a great poem, hardly a poem at all, but perhaps a start to thinking about actions that might not be a sin for others but are for me or you.

It Is For Me

For someone else

it might not be a sin

to ignore the smell of new turned land

to forget the feel of a tiny hand

to lose the hope in a wedding band

            but it is for me

For someone else

it might not be a sin

to pass a beggar on the street

to fail to dance to a ragtime beat

to leave the kitchen when there’s heat

            but it is for me

For someone else

it might not be a sin

to walk in the way that’s not narrow and straight

to turn away when encountering hate

to skip on the edge just to tempt fate

            but it is for me

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

BELONGING TO TABLAB

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

I returned the Donald Westlake book about Dortmunder today. I didn’t really need it when I took it, but I so much wanted to take a book, because I wanted to belong.

It was the day I walked the other way. I had been walking the same 32 minute loop around our new neighborhood each day, admiring the homey houses and rosy roses, so I had not noticed it before. When I was walking the other direction, there it was. I had heard about them but never seen one.

On the corner of Allendale and another street that is not Allendale, there was a post, with a wooden box atop it, with a slanting roof and a glass front. It was quite nice but clearly not of commercial manufacture. It was decorated with painted vines and the words, Take a Book, Leave a Book.

Sure enough, when I peered in, there were two rows of books, paperbacks on top and hardcovers on the bottom. I did not need a book. We do not have room for even one more book. We have just moved into a condo and brought too much stuff to fit in at all. But it is such a wonderful and intriguing concept. I wanted a book. No, not that I wanted a book, but I wanted to take a book. I want to be part of the kind of group where we don’t even know one another but we leave books for one another. I want to be part of the TABLAB community.

We need that in old age. So many of the communities we’ve been part of automatically no longer have room or need for us. Or else we are without communities because we have moved to some place new, to be near the children, or to get away from them.

If you are old and without community, look around. You may find some group to belong to right there on the street corner. TABLAB fits me perfectly. I can belong to a community without ever going to a committee meeting. And whenever I need to get rid of a book…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I’m sure I started writing about TABLAB some place, but cannot find it now, so if I have already posted it, I apologize.

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

LOVE THAT SAVES FROM PUNISHMENT

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

I get excited when I learn something about the scriptural world that throws light on something Jesus said or did, so that I can see him better, understand HIS world better so that I can understand better how to live his way in MY world. [Whee! That’s a lot of “betters” for one sentence.]

Last Sunday I got to hear Bob Hammel, the great Hall of Fame sports writer, preach. He always preaches on Father’s Day, at the Presbyterian church where he has attended for over 40 years, and where he is an Elder. He did a wonderful job, in the aftermath of the church shootings in South Carolina, in a sermon titled “A Father’s Plea for Peace.”

Bob and Julie’s daughter, Jane, did the “children’s time.” In it, she told of something she had just learned about the Prodigal Son, whose name was Todd. [No, that wasn’t the new fact. I just think all Bible characters should have names, so I provide them. The Prodigal Son is Todd. Peter’s mother in law is Mavis. Etc.] Jane said that one of the reasons Todd’s father watched for him so anxiously, and ran so quickly to meet him, was to protect him.

There is something in human nature that wants to punish those who break the rules. Not rehabilitate them, but punish them. Not get them to straighten up and fly right, but punish them. Not educate them into better ways, but punish them. It’s not about the rules, it’s about the satisfaction of punishing. Only psychologists acknowledge this. Those of us who do the punishing claim it is rehabilitation, that it is for the good of those being punished, that it hurts us more than them, or we do it because we are good citizens, or because justice demands it, but the truth is, we just like punishing others. It makes us feel important and powerful and righteous. So we think up rules we can apply to them so we can punish them.

Todd’s father ran to meet him to save him from punishment. Punishment in Jesus’s day was severe. The good citizens of Todd’s home village had the right, yea, even the responsibility, to punish Todd for what he had done. He had broken a major commandment. He had not honored his father and mother. Indeed, he had totally dishonored his father. It was his father’s money he had spent on booze and whores. It was in the clothes his father had paid for that he slept with forbidden and unclean pigs. As soon as they saw him coming, out came the stones, the big ones, the ones that meant death. Todd’s father ran so hard, so fast, to save his son from death.

Jesus was talking about extreme love by the father, outrageous love, unrighteous love, saving love, love that runs not just in joy but to save from punishment.

Love does not always work, not in the sense of getting people to change their ways, but punishment doesn’t always work, either. In fact, punishment rarely works. But punishment is always just punishment. Love is always love.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I don’t know why I put that copyright symbol after the title. I never say anything original, or anything worth stealing. Oh, well, it’s there…

I tweet as yooper1721, because when I started this blog I was a Yooper. Now I’m a Hoosier.

FATHER'S DAY SILENCE

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

[Because it’s Father’s Day, a repost from 4-24-12]

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. I spoke recently with a man whose wife confessed transgressions to him just as she was dying. There was no time to process it together before she was gone. It took him a long time to get over it.

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.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

SOME GOOD MEMORY

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

Yesterday we went to a family mini-reunion. Lots of good conversations with 2 aunts and 15 cousins. We shared lots of memories. It reminded me of this post from 2010…

When we are old, we have a great deal more past to remember than we have future to anticipate. [There is a future beyond death to anticipate, but no way to imagine it.]

I like remembering. Some days I just run through the list of all my good friends and relatives, many of whom are no longer in this world, just enjoying the memories of them.

Memory is a great gift of God.

So why, when we have so much to remember, does God also arrange to have our brains go numb in the winter of our years, just as they get numb with cold in the winter of the year? Just when there is the most to remember, our rememberers begin to stutter and backfire like old cars.

Jo Hershberger has written a lovely story of four young girls who become friends in junior high and continue to support one another in old age. [Jo’s mother was one of my all-time favorite church members and used to stay with our girls when Helen was away tending to her own mother as she died.] The story is set in the imaginary town of Rockwell, IL, but it certainly looks a lot like Hoopeston, IL, where Jo grew up. The title is Some Good Memory. [1]

It’s a quote from Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.

“You must know that there is nothing stronger, or higher, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the personal home…If a man stores up many such stories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.”

There are many methods by which old people are supposed to keep our memories working. I’ve most recently read that the best memory help is three brisk forty minute walks per week. I like that, since I already walk and have no intention of doing Sudoku or learning Chinese.

I suspect, though, that God gives us these failing brains to make us work harder at bringing back those good memories, so that we’ll appreciate them more. As you take that walk, run those good memories through the screen behind your eyes. Even if only one remains, that is enough.

Isaac Watts, in the third verse of “I’ll Praise My Maker While I’ve Breath,” writes “the Lord supports the fainting mind”

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

[1] “Some Good Memory” is published by Outskirts Press. Its ISBN is 978-1-4327-2513-6

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721

The Penultimate Move-a poem

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

The rain is steady and hard this morning, and promises to be that way all day. We are going to drive two hours for a family mini-reunion. Given the realities of age and distance, it will be the last time we see some of those folks who have been so important to us for so long. It makes me think of this little “poem” I wrote as a “daily” poem last February…

FEBRUARY 19

We bought the final place today.

Not the one that’s in the ground.

called our final resting place.

The one just before it.

The place where life is pleasant,

“not far from the pool,”

where no little children pester,

or memories intrude.

It’s surely “close to shopping”

and far from all that matters.

the place to wind it down

until we hurt so much

we are willing to move on…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

THE RIGHT PICTURE

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

Our daughter, Kathleen “Katie” Kennedy, is choosing an author photo for the jacket of her upcoming YA book, Learning to Swear in America, published by Bloomsbury, which also publishes J.K. Rowling. She asked us to help her choose which photo among the many proofs should go on the book. Her mother chose # 32, because “It looks most like you.” Katie protested, “That’s not what we’re going for.”

What we’re going for, of course, any of us, is something that makes us look better than we are.

I recently had to provide a jacket photo for my upcoming novel, VETS, about four homeless and handicapped veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor. I suggested they use a photo of Robert Redford. Much to my surprise and chagrin, they took it seriously, and explained all the legal ramifications, but suggested they could have an artist do a rendering that would look like Redford but not so much that we could be sued. I don’t know why that would be a problem, since Redford always uses my photo.

I recently read the obit of a woman I knew well. She had written the obit herself. If I had not seen her photo and name, I would have had no idea it was she. [I know “she” sounds wrong there, but it’s a predicate nominative.] Her achievements were burnished, and her failures were omitted. Even in death, she did not want people to know the real her. [Okay, now she can be “her.”]

I once heard an interview with Robert Redford. He wanted to be Paul Newman. “He’s a great actor, he loves his wife, he does good works, he’s got all the money in the world. Who wouldn’t want to be him?” None of us, even Redford, is satisfied being who we are.

We want people to think we are better looking, better educated, and better connected than we are. I understand that. Maybe they won’t like us, won’t respect us, if they find out we’re just… well, ordinary. I think God understands it, too. God doesn’t rat us out, point at us with that celestial finger and say, “Hey, everybody, he’s only pretending to be Robert Redford.” God knows the truth, though. That is the good news, that Someone knows us exactly as we are and loves us anyway. I do worry a little bit, though, because I’m told on good authority that God uses Newman’s picture.

 John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE

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

[In the aftermath of moving, I am looking over a lot of old stuff. This old meditation was first posted 9-21-10.]

In the years and places of winter, life becomes both simpler and more complicated.

That is my one true sentence for today.

Helen and I just returned from a cruise that started in NYC and ended in Quebec City, so I’ve been away from my computer for two weeks. We’re not cruise people, but this was a special cruise with the Chad Mitchell Trio, our favorite folk group from the 1960s. We got off the ship each day and poked around in the places we docked, Bar Harbor and Halifax and such, but our reason for shipping out was to hear the CMT in concert [they did two] and to sit around with them in the evenings after supper and sing folk songs.

When folk music gave way to rock and roll in the late ‘60s, the trio broke up. The previously unknown John Denver had taken Chad Mitchell’s place when he left the trio for a solo career earlier, and he went on to a remarkable solo career of his own.  Mike Kobluk, the bass, went back to Spokane, where the trio had formed out of the glee club at Gonzaga U, and directed cultural events for the city for 35 years. Joe Frazier, the baritone, went to Yale Divinity School and became an Episcopal priest. In recent years, Joe and Mike and Chad have reunited occasionally for concerts, especially those reunion concerts you see on PBS.

Joe likes my book about ministry, “The Strange Calling,” and asked me to help him get started writing a similar book of his own, so we worked on that most afternoons on the cruise.

One afternoon I told him that it is my habit to write one sentence, hopefully one true sentence, as the first thing I do each day, to remind me of who I am.

Hemingway said that is the secret of writing: write one true sentence, and then follow it with another.

Today, my one true sentence was: In the years and places of winter, life becomes both simpler and more complicated.

Perhaps later I’ll follow it with another.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

PHOTOS OF ANCESTORS

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

We went to see Bill [1] in the hospital. He was on his back, hooked up to many machines, weak. Nonetheless, he recited for us one of his poems which was recently published. The first lines were, “One of my ancestors was a fish, I’m told, but I have no photographs…”

It’s hilarious and insightful, in many ways. Most of us have photos of various ancestors, but the technology, even for a painting, let alone a photo, does not go back that far. We carry the genes of ancestors long gone, but we have no direct evidence that they even existed.

Helen was so taken with the poem, though, and with Bill’s ability to be himself, the thoughtful and lyrical man we have known for oh, so many years, even in the crucible of weakness and pain, that she decided to honor him by getting out one of the pretty, tiny fish-shaped bowls she prizes, no small feat just to find it in the aftermath of a house move, to use for her teabag. Bill is part of her life each day, back to his earliest ancestor, even though he himself has no photographs.

We did not spring full-grown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. We are the result of a long line of folks who struggled to live. By their struggle, they have made our lives possible. I am the photo of my ancestors. Perhaps that’s what the writer of Genesis is reporting when God says, “Let’s make people in our image.” [1:26] Even before the fish, God had a photo of you.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] More properly, The Rev. Dr. William Luther White, Chaplain and Professor of Religion, Illinois Wesleyan University, Retired

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

AT-ONE-MENT

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

[I posted this the first time on 8-15-10.]

In the last few years I have begun to reread books that were important to me when I was new in the ministry. Some have held up very well, like Paul Tillich’s books of sermons. Some have been very disappointing, like Wm. Stringfellow’s Free in Obedience. [The title is still good, though.]

One in particular has been very humbling, Reuel Howe’s Man’s Need and God’s Action. As I reread it, I find that every good idea I’ve had along the way, that I thought was mine, actually comes from that book. The language is a bit formal and stilted, typical of its time. [The copyright is 1953. I read it in seminary in the early 1960s.] The insights, however, are, if anything, even more accurate today.

I had the good fortune, some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s, to be in a continuing education seminar with Reuel at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary. He was retired then, but just as insightful, and quite delightful in person.

In that seminar, he told the story of how, when he was a teenager, his father decided to take the family into the forests of Washington state to homestead. They went deep into the forest with their tents and supplies. Before they had really gotten started, a fire wiped out everything they had. Reuel and his father walked back out to get more supplies, leaving his mother and younger siblings behind. When they returned, they saw that his mother had found a rusted old tin can, picked wild flowers, and placed the bouquet on an old stump. The little children were playing “ring” around it. “She took a tragic incident and recycled it to make something beautiful,” he said. “I learned what was perhaps the only lesson I would ever need on that day.”

All this is leading up to his reflection on atonement in his book. It is the perfect word for what Christ is all about, at-one-ment, to make us at one with God, with the world and our neighbors, and with our own true self.

I, and all the people who have heard me say almost daily for the past 50 years, “Christ came to make us whole, with God, with self, and with the world,” owe a great debt to Reuel Howe.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

[There was no English word for this Biblical idea of making whole, so one of the early English Bible translators created “atonement,” to get across the idea of being restored to wholeness.] (I think I learned this from In the Beginning: The Making of the King James Bible, by Alister McGrath.)

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

Staying in the Moment-a poem, sort of

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

The reason it is good

to stay in the moment

is that there is so much more

in the moment

than just me…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

MASTERING THE USER OF THE TOOLS

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

A hardware store flyer came with the newspaper today. I looked through it carefully. I don’t need or want anything from a hardware store, but I do it to honor and remember my father.

My father loved tools, and so he loved hardware stores. In his later years, when he had given away all his tools because he had to go to a senior citizen apartment or was living in a nursing home room, he would have me take him to a hardware store, ostensibly to buy a light bulb or a cleaning cloth. Really it was so he could browse the shelves, to see what was new. The only eyesight he had left was about ten percent in one eye, but he would get that eye right up against the shelf. He loved to see those tools.

I had no interest in tools myself, not his kind of tools. He lost his eye-sight in an industrial accident when I was five. Shortly thereafter I entered into the fourth of the eight stages of psychological-social growth, as outlined by Erik Erikson, industry vs inferiority. It’s basically when you learn to use tools, or fail to learn how to use them. Dad organized his tools so that he could still find them and use them, even with his minimal eyesight.

I, of course, was fascinated by his tools, so I would sometimes get one out to “use,” which meant to play with. And I would sometimes leave it in the yard, where he couldn’t find it. In my psyche I heard him say, “You can’t use tools.” I think he probably said some variant of “You can’t use MY tools,” for good reason. I, however, internalized the idea that I could not use any kind of tool. I still can’t use his kind of tools. I settled for inferiority over industry.

Sort of.

I did, however, take up another kind of tool, words.

I wanted to be a journalist. That’s the trade of one who uses words as tools. I loved stories and wanted to tell them. Just as importantly, I wanted to tell them honestly. Everyone said that Ernie Pyle told the story of WW II the way it really was. I wanted to be an Ernie Pyle.

There is, of course, more than one way to use tools. Some use my father’s kind of tools to make the instruments of war rather than to build a cradle for a little child. Some use words to misinform, to propagandize, to lie.

Many people in the winter years take up new tools or new tool tasks, for wood-working or knitting or pottery. That is a good thing. Mastering a tool, though, isn’t the only task. Perhaps more important is the opportunity we have in the years of winter to master the user of the tools.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

SECRET SUPPORTERS

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

We went to see Bill this week. We’ve been friends for 55 friends. Found out he was in the hospital. Just dropped everything, packed an overnight bag, and went to see him. Got to see Paul & Sharon while we were there. We’ve been friends with them for 49 years. We have learned that at our age one should not dawdle in going to see old friends.

While there, though, I started thinking back to when I was the campus minister in that town, and got so much unlikely support from Ruth & Margaret. They were retired college professors. One of them—Ruth, I think--had been Miss America along about 1923. They were unlikely supporters for my style of ministry. This was in the days of Civil Rights and Vietnam, and I was in constant trouble with the authorities, both civil and church, for my advocacies. One couple came to church one Sunday, found out I was preaching, and immediately left. That probably happened more than once, but my wife happened to be hear them discussing their departure, so I know about that one.

Ruth and Margaret were sedate gray-haired church ladies, always nicely and classily dressed, very gentle in all ways, and my firm supporters against their fellow church members. More than once Ruth sought me out along the fringes of some group to assure me I was doing the right thing.

I know the reason for their support now. They were a lesbian couple. There was a bit of talk around the edges that their relationship might be more than just housemates, but who is going to accost a kind and gentle elderly retired professor church lady and accuse her of practicing the love that dare not speak its name? Nobody did that. But those ladies knew how the town and the church felt about homosexuality. They knew that if they “came out,” they would not be accepted. So they kept their love to themselves.

I was like a lot of others back then. If they had come out, I would have been nice to them, privately and publicly, but I would have thought there was something wrong with them.

But being outliers, the unacceptable, they were supporters of rights for others who suffered discrimination, even if that discrimination was not against their particular point of rejection. They were supportive, also, of a fiery undisciplined chaotic unacceptable young preacher who was supporting them, even though he did not know it, by advocating acceptance for the unacceptable.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

SUPERMARKET ACCEPTABILITY

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

I soloed at our new super market yesterday. No, I was not part of a Hallelujah Chorus flash mob. It’s just that I went by myself. I have been there with Helen, but then I only had to push the cart, one of those big long freight car carts. This time I had to find only a few small items, so I was pushing a little caboose cart, the kind that is really just a shopping basket on wheels.

I was dressed in my usual summer way—floppy white hat, t-shirt proclaiming the virtues of pickleball, shorts displaying the virtues of skinny legs. All the people who worked there--from the manager who looks a lot like “the most interesting man in the world” in those TV commercials, to the middle-aged stockers to the young women who are always going somewhere in a hurry—were suspiciously solicitous of my health and my hunting skills. I was not surprised. An old man in a floppy hat, pushing a caboose cart and alternately looking from a small piece of paper to the signs above the aisles, none of which ever mentions lemon juice, is bound to invoke concern. What am I supposed to do if he dies right here?

I appreciated the concern and attention. I was not about to mention the lemon juice problem, though. My geographical disorientation would only confirm their assumption that I was an escapee from the dementia ward and cause them to call the little men in the white coats, which is supposed to be “the men in the little white coats,” but everyone always says “the little men in the white coats.” [When you’re old and on a solo flight, you get a bit paranoid.]

I did not appreciate the most interesting manager in the world, though, for his concern was of the dismissive sort. “How are you, young man?” I am not a young man. I don’t look like a young man. He would not address a young man that way. He was saying, “Old men are not acceptable, so we’ll pretend you’re a young man.” That was not what he intended, of course, but it is what that really means.

Old men, and old women, are acceptable. So are teenagers. That’s why young people and old people are so often in collusion; both are treated by others as unacceptable because of their age. Oldsters and youngsters understand and sympathize with each other because of their shared unacceptability.

The point, though, is that you are acceptable, regardless. Your actions may not be acceptable. If you bonk someone on the head and grab her purse or cheat on a mortgage and put a family on the street, that is not acceptable. But it’s not because you are white or black or gay or straight or Sottish or Mexican or young or old or rich or poor, it’s because you’re a jerk.

This is the good news: God accepts you and loves you as you are. So stop being a jerk. You don’t have to take someone else’s money or sex or home or dignity to prove that you are superior and thus acceptable. You’re even better than acceptable, you are accepted. Just as you are.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

TRUTH AND STORY

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

We are excited. Aunt Rosemary is coming back from AZ for a visit. Given health and age, it will probably be her last. Cousin Kae will bring Aunt Rosemary over from OH. We’re hoping Aunt Edna can come over, too. Those three are the last of “the greatest generation” of my family, these now-nineties women who seventy years ago stepped out in faith to marry three soldiers just returned from the war. We’ll get together and tell stories…

I like the one about Uncle Bob and the Plymouth best. It was old, and sort of blue, and when Uncle Bob, from whom I get my middle name, went off to the army in WWII, he sold it to his next brother, Randall, who when he went off to the army to fight in the South Pacific, sold it to the next, and youngest brother, Mike, who when he went off to the army to fight, up from Sicily and Anzio, sold it to Bob, who was back from the army. By that time you can imagine how old and less blue it was. One day it stopped and refused to go anymore, right in front of the Plymouth dealership in Oxford, OH.

Uncle Bob went in and said to the dealer, “How much will you give me for that Plymouth out there?”

“I wouldn’t give anything for that Plymouth,” said the dealer.

“It’s a deal,” said Uncle Bob, and he laid the keys on the counter and walked back to Cedar Crest, the name of the big old house on the edge of town where Grandma and Grandpa and almost all their eight children, and the spouses of married children, and grandchildren, lived off and on during Depression and WWII years.

I told Uncle Bob, when he was in his late 80s, how much I enjoyed that story. “I don’t remember anything like that,” he said.

What a letdown! It’s important in a family to tell the stories, to keep them alive, but what if they are not true?

Another family story that my father told was that Grandma Mac, his mother, got cancer when he was a teenager. That was in the early 1920s. There was no cure, hardly any treatment for cancer. The oldest child, Glen, was gone from home, so Daddy and Aunt Helen, the only girl, number two in birth order, divided up between themselves the duties they figured would have to be carried out, who would be responsible for which of the five younger children and so forth, when Grandma died. She went to Louisville for treatment, although Daddy was a bit vague about the place and type of treatment, and lived to 96, so their planning did not have to be put into effect. It’s a remarkable story, one that would enhance even more the powers of the already remarkable Grandma Mac, but what if it’s not true?

Aunt Helen was already dead when he told me this story, and I can find no one else in the family who has ever heard anything like this. Daddy, however, always had a good mind and a good memory, and was not the type to make things up.

I’m going to keep telling about Uncle Bob and the Plymouth, and Grandma’s cancer, with the caveat that they might not be factual, because I think they are true. There is a difference between factual and true. That Plymouth and its wanderings and final resting are McFarland sorts of things. Preparing for a possible tragedy, even as a kid, is a McFarland sort of thing.

And, as part of the only stratum of the family that stands between death and the younger folks, I’m the only one who can tell these stories, for I’m the only one who knows them. That’s one of the jobs of winter in a family, telling the stories that remind us of who we are.

As Chinua Achebe, the great African author, has the village wise man say in Things Fall Apart, “There is no story that is not true.”

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

PUNCHING HOLES IN DARKNESS

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

One of the things I look forward to most in moving from Michigan’s UP [Upper Peninsula] to SoIn [Southern Indiana] is lightning bugs, fireflies. I have missed their cheerful presence in summer. I remember chasing them as a child, putting them into jars so I could take the light inside with me at night.

One of the reasons the Bible is so important is that it does not sugarcoat reality. The constant presence of evil is well-known in the stories and meditations of that book. One of the most important themes of the Bible is that even though, as poet William Stafford puts it, “The darkness around us is deep,” “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” [John 1:5.] That is not pop-psych bumper-sticker “everything’s okay, god is good all the time, all the bad stuff happens for a reason” religion. The Bible acknowledges that the darkness is real. It also says that the light is real, and the light shines in the darkness.

There was a time when street lights were gas lamps. To light them, someone with a flame on the end of a long taper, the sort of thing that acolytes use to light candles in church, would reach up and set the wick of the street lamp to burning. I am too young to remember the lamplighters, but the song about “the old lamplighter” was popular when I was a kid. The refrain said, “He made the night a little brighter, wherever he would go, the old lamplighter of long, long ago.” [1]

That has always been a background theme song for me. I have always wanted to be the lamplighter, the one who, in the words of a child who saw the lamplighter for the first time, said, “That man is punching holes in the darkness.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever been tall enough in faith to be a lamplighter, but I think anyone can be a firefly, a lightning bug. Either way, that is what following Christ means, I think, to acknowledge the depth of the darkness, but to keep punching holes in it with the light.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] “The Old Lamplighter” lyrics were by Charles Tobias, music by Nat Simon, published in 1946.

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.

MOVING-a poem

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

Even with careful planning, and giving over two tons of stuff to the St. Anthony DePaul store and the Habitat for Humanity Restore, after a 600 mile move, we are struggling to fit into a condo that lacks the large two-car garage and the full walk-out basement. We have a garage, but it is a very narrow, one-car affair, and there is no other storage. We had the movers unload almost everything into that garage so that we could unpack one box at a time without gridlock in the house itself.  But, of course, that gridlocks the garage. The boxes are three deep and stacked over head-high, and every one that looks like it has something we need is behind others that just glare at us and dare us to move them and find some other spot to set them in the gridlock of the garage.

It is difficult to get my mind onto writing or anything that is not an effort to unpack boxes and repack cardboard and paper in the bundles required for recycling here. I did manage to find some of my favorite books, including Wm. Stafford’s The Darkness Around Us Is Deep. In it he has two poems about moving, from two different moves of his own, entitled “From the Move to California” and “An Oregon Message.” They inspired me to write a moving poem of my own. It is not like Stafford’s, of course, since he was one of the truly great American poets, but I thank him for the impetus.

It is true that breathing is much harder

when buried beneath a pile of boxes,

cardboard resting soft but hard upon the soul.

But the rumors of our demise by moving

are not true, at least not yet.

We feel our way between the piles of stuff

and wonder why it was not left behind.

Long and narrow pathways in rooms

that do not gladly welcome strangers.

Boxes that will not surrender

until the last flap dies.

Chairs and lamps and tables

we have lived with for sometimes

almost fifty years surround us.

but we do not know them, nor

do they know us. Where they belong

in this new plan we cannot say.

It makes them uneasy.

They depend upon us

to help them find their place.

I wonder about the place

called heaven,

if it is filled with boxes crammed

with stuff that would not fit

our bigger barns on earth.

This place is new, and filled with fright

and full of hope…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand and follow Christ in winter.

I tweet as yooper1721.