ROTATING THE BOOKS

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

Moving mixes things up. After eight years in one place, the longest we have ever lived in one spot, my books were all nicely organized and categorized on the shelves in my study and the living room. But moving 600 miles to a condo got the books confused. The condo is much smaller than our northern exposure house, so now my study has only one book case instead of two, and the living room has only two instead of three. The books lost many companions in the downsizing, and they don’t know where they belong.

So now MSWord for Dummies stands side by side with Wally Mead’s Extremism and Cognition. My NRSV Bible is sandwiched between Kierkegaard’s Attack Upon Christendom and John Pollack’s The Pun Also Rises. Elaine Palencia’s Small Caucasian Woman is to the right of Wayne Oates’ The Christian Pastor. I know some small Caucasian women who are Christian pastors, but Elaine doesn’t write much about them. Paul Tillich seems to be strangely interested in Bob Hammel’s books on basketball. The same is true with Reinhold Niebuhr and the history of the Cincinnati Reds. And the United Methodist Hymnal… well, if osmosis works with books, soon we’ll be singing “Go Tell Aunt Rosie On the Mountain That It Was a Very Good Year.”

I think the books are onto something. One reason we make so little progress in human relations is that we stick too much to our own kind, read and see and hear only the books and magazines and blogs and TV radio shows of those who tell us only what we want to know, who enforce only what we already believe, who never challenge us to look at things in a new and possibly better way.

I’m going to leave the books alone, let them take the places they have chosen, with their new companions. It will be interesting to see what grows as the result of this new crop rotation.

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...

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