CHRIST
IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…
I think Helen still has
not forgiven me. Not for taking her to Cape Cod; she liked that. But we got there
because I was the “outside” theologian at a New England theological gathering
of the United Church of Christ. [UCC], “outside” meaning I was Methodist,
Midwestern, and theologically “narrative” rather than “systematic.” There have
always been story-tellers in Christianity, starting with Jesus, but as a
theological approach, narrative was in the 1970s new, exotic, and of
questionable repute. [It wasn’t “rigorous,” and you didn’t need a Harvard
doctorate to do it.]
[The UCC was formed in
1957 by the merger of The Evangelical and Reformed & Congregational
Christian denominations.]
I had a pretty good time.
We were in a long-time UCC campground, with nice cottages and a big tabernacle
and a spacious eating hall. I got to walk around the beautiful grounds and
drink coffee and teach a workshop and bop into the tabernacle once in a while
to “address” the plenary assembly.
Also my first theological
mentor, D.J. Bowden, my professor of The History of Christian Thought at IU,
was a Congregational Christian from the Northeast who got his PhD at Yale. I
could well imagine him as a boy singing camp songs in the tabernacle, or later
being a presenter himself at such a conference. It was quite inspiring to think
that I was following in his footsteps.
Since Helen was a
“participant” instead of a presenter, she was required to be a member of a
theology work group. She was assigned to the bunch that was writing a new faith
statement for the UCC. It was composed mostly of academic theologians and
preachers, who argued endlessly about whether “of” should go before or after
“parousia.” Or maybe it was “from” instead of “of.” She wasn’t keen on the
details. Her participation was mostly rolling her eyes, making snoring sounds,
voting “No” on everything, and hitting me on the head, hard, when we were
alone.
Sometimes the presenters
hung out together, but I didn’t hang if I knew Dr. Austere would be there.
[That wasn’t his real name, although it should have been.] I stayed as far away from him as I could, for
several reasons. For one thing, he was a professor of systematic theology in a
UCC seminary, and I was running the Gospel through Marshall McLuhan and Hans
Frei instead of Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. For a second, I had a wife who
was doing her best to sabotage the entire belief system of the UCC.
More importantly, before
my plenary presentation each day, he gave a theology lecture, austerely, with
footnotes and bibliography. Next to him, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Soren
Kierkegaard looked like simpletons. His lectures were like the marching band in
a parade, every line in step, each instrument playing its own part, only its
part, and playing in tune. My presentation was like the clown in the parade,
sitting in the back of a pickup throwing candies by the handful and hoping
someone caught a peppermint, hoping a root barrel didn’t take out somebody’s
eye. During my presentation, Dr. Austere would stand--never sit--in back, with
his arms folded over his chest, looking stern. I was intimidated and
embarrassed. He was so scholastic, and I was so… well, just a story-teller.
One night, though, the
director of this theological institute took the presenters and their wives out
to a seafood place. I was trying to avoid both Helen and Dr. Austere, so
naturally the director seated me between them, where she could reach across me
and tell him what she thought of UCC theology, and he could reach across me and
tell her what he thought of MY theology.
I had a mouth-full of crab
when he turned to me and said, “How do you DO that?”
“Do what?” I mumbled,
thinking that now I had further embarrassed myself by eating crab like a
Hoosier hillbilly gnawing a pork-chop.
“Tell those stories,” he
said. “I work and work to try to get people to understand, and then you just
tell a story that pulls the veil off all my words and makes people see what I
was trying to say. I’d love to be able to do that.”
All I could think to do
was grab his hand and put it into Helen’s and say, “You two should talk.”
JRMcF [John Robert
McFarland]
It’s tempting to pull a
“moral” out of this story, such as “Don’t assume you know what a person with
crossed arms is thinking,” but grandson Joe [then 13] says the problem with the
kid lit stories that win prizes is that “…they have morals. Kids just want good
stories.” As Jesus said, “If you want to enter the Kingdom, be like a kid who
just wants a good story.”
The “place of winter” was
Iron Mountain, in MI’s Upper Peninsula.
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