CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter…
Dennis Heller telephoned
Saturday night after the IU basketball team’s improbable defeat of the U of MN.
He has little interest in basketball in general or IU in particular, but he
knows that my mood waxes and wanes with IU basketball. He just wanted to call
to congratulate me on the win, knowing that the instructions I shouted at the
TV during the game must have been the turning point.
It may also have been
because he was at a baby shower and wanted to take a break. His wife, Mary Jo,
and Jim Keifer’s wife, Jenny, were throwing a baby shower for a mutual friend.
That was hard to do, since the Hellers live in Seattle and the Keifers in San
Francisco. The Hellers and Keifers are former students, who do us the honor of
caring about us and what is important to us.
We first met Denny when he
was a sophomore at Illinois State U. I had just become the Methodist campus
minister there, and he was part of a large and excellent group of sophomores
that I inherited. There was a scattering of seniors and juniors, but it was the
sophomore class that carried The Wesley Foundation that year, and the years
following, too.
We had no freshmen yet that
first fall, of course, and we had to prepare for them fast. Most of the
sophomores didn’t even come back in time for freshman orientation, so we had
only a small cadre of returning kids who came back early. They had to prepare
our orientation pitch to the frosh. Mary Albers was in that group.
She had started at
Illinois Wesleyan U, a mile up Franklin Street from ILSU, because she wanted to
be a minister. It had been ten years since Methodists had agreed that it might
be possible for God to call a woman to be a preacher, too, just like men, but
folks at that Methodist college were so surprised and unsupportive of Mary’s
plans and hopes that she was totally discouraged. She decided she might as well
pay less to go to college and wind up as a teacher, the way she was told she
should, so she transferred to ISU. She was beautiful and smart and talented.
One of her talents was
musical. She played guitar and sang. So as our freshman orientation session
started, she was on one side of the chancel and Denny was on the other, getting
ready to sing to each other.
This was in a different
era. Freshmen students were told that they should go to the evening orientation
period of their religious denomination, so they did. The large sanctuary of
First Methodist Church was full of new students, eager—or at least willing—to
see what their campus ministry group was all about.
We had “adjusted” the
Smothers Brothers song about cowboys [1] to use at the orientation. Mary sang, a capella, to Denny: “I see by your
lapel cross that you are a Christian.” They began to walk toward each other. “I
see by your lapel cross that you are a Christian, too,” he sang back to her.
“We see by our lapel crosses we are both Christians.” At that point they met in
the middle of the chancel, turned to the assembled freshmen and assured them,
in two-part harmony, “If you get a lapel cross, you can be a Christian, too.”
We spent the next hour
explaining to those poor kids why that song was not true, and how they would
have to shape up and actually act like Christians instead of just looking like
them, if they wanted to make a difference in the world, if they wanted to cause
“thy kingdom come” instead of just praying it.
Mary never got to be a
preacher. She went into the Peace Corps after college and died of cancer there,
in the Philippines, when she was twenty-five. But she made a difference.
So did Denny and Mary Jo
and Jacquie and John and Ron and Roland and the three Lindas and Craig and the
other Marys and the Jans and Joyce and Wes and Carolyn and Bonnie and Chuck and
Donna and Bill and Eleanor and both Jims and Phil and Sydney and Cherry and
Dick and Steve and Arlette and Larry and Colleen and Bruce and Kathy and
Jeanette and Vicki and Colleen and Mary Ann and Julie and Francine and Cindy
and Cyndi and Mike and Danny and Carol and Wendy and Glenda [Inky] and Ann and
Stan and Danette and Bob and Marian and Penny and Carla and Dave and Paul and
Claudia and all the others.
They are old retired
people now. Some of them no longer go to church, but you will still not need a
lapel cross to know that they are Christians.
JRMcF
1] “I see by your outfit
that you are a cowboy. I see by your outfit that you’re a cowboy, too…”
Reader Alert: If you have
read this column in the last 3 months, all that follows is old news:
I tweet occasionally as
yooper1721.
I stopped writing this
column for a while, for several reasons. It wasn’t until I had quit, though,
that I knew this reason: I did not want to be responsible for wasting your
time. If I write for others, I have to think about whether it’s worthwhile for
you to read. If I write only for myself, it’s caveat emptor. If you choose to read something I have written, but
I have not advertised it, not asked you to read it, and it’s poorly constructed
navel-gazing drivel, well, it’s your own fault. Still, I apologize if you have
to ask yourself, “Why did I waste time reading this?”
The full story of how God
tricked me into becoming a professional Xn is in my book, The Strange Calling, published by Smyth&Helwys.
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