CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter
Helen and I have been
driving up to Indianapolis the last couple of weeks to see Joan and Tom in
hospital. It’s about fifty miles. To people in their years of winter, in the
middle of the most extreme heat of summer, on a road under construction to make
it into an interstate, it seems like a hundred. Or a thousand. Miles lose their
meaning after a while.
Tom was my college
roommate. We were put in a very small room together sixty years ago come
September, just because neither of us smoked. We had little in common, but we
have remained fast friends throughout that time. I have officiated at the
weddings for his children. He suffered a severe stroke several months ago, and
has recently had several heart attacks.
Joan is the first of my “children
in the ministry.” There were very few women ministers in the Methodist Church
when I was her campus minister at IN State U. Indeed, women had been ordainable
for only ten years at that time, but she was beginning to feel the call to
ordained ministry, and I saw her abilities and encouraged her to go to
seminary. Along the way, she decided she fit better in The Episcopal Church
than with the Methodists, but, as with Tom, we have been fast friends all these
years. She’s officially retired but serves small parishes that cannot afford a
full-time priest, so we encouraged her to come to Bedford, where she would be
close, only thirty miles south of us. After only ten weeks in Bedford, she had
a brain aneurism. She went to a rehab center this weekend, so today we’ll see
her there rather than in hospital.
Fairly early in my
ministry, I saw a pattern to the hospital calls and funerals that I did. The
first couple of years, I called on and buried church members. After that, I was
burying friends.
I don’t have church
members anymore, members who become friends, but I have a lot of old friends in
general, although their ranks are growing thinner on a regular basis. Whenever
I go to a hospital or a cemetery now, it’s for a friend, often a long-time
friend.
That’s the nature of the
years of winter. We care for and then bury our friends. It gets lonely at
times. I feel the absence in my life of George and GL and Bettie and Raydean
and Bill and Mike and Dianne and Darrel and Don and…
We can either feel sorry
for ourselves, that those friends are gone, or we can appreciate how they
gifted us with their friendship for so long.
It’s also a good idea to
make some younger friends.
JRMcF
I tweet as yooper1721.
An idea for making younger
friends: give them copies of Katie Kennedy’s great YA novel, Learning to Swear in America.
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