UNDENIABLY TRADITIONAL

There is a lot of talk about “tradition” at this time of year, as schools and churches gear up for another year. But tradition is not nearly as traditional as traditionalists would like us to believe it is. Tradition always starts with me.

I made a very short contribution to Undeniably Indiana, the IU Press book published to celebrate Indiana’s 200^th birthday, by pointing out that the word “Hoosier” was applied to Indiana folks because the traveling evangelist, “Black Harry” Hoosier, often called “The Greatest Preacher Ever Forgotten,” was so popular in the state. His "groupies" were called "Hoosiers," sort of like Grateful Dead groupies were "Deadheads."

The book is 274 pp, and many of the remembrances of Indiana have to do with basketball, of course. For instance, on p. 133, Grace Waitman-Reed refers to “…the basketball tradition that Coach Knight had built over his nearly three decades as the ‘Hurryin’ Hoosiers’ head coach.”

Knight coached at IU for 29 years [1971-2000] and won 3 national championships.

Grace assumes that the IU basketball tradition started with Knight, because she went to IU during his years.

But it actually started with Branch McCracken, who was coach in my IU student years. In fact, Waitman-Reed is guilty of an anachronism. “Hurryin’ Hoosiers” is not part of the Knight tradition. It was applied to the Hoosiers first in the McCracken years.

McCracken coached at IU for 24 years, in two stints, [1938-43, 1946-65] interrupted by military service in WWII. The national collegiate basketball championship tournament started after his first year as coach, and he won two national championships in 23 years.

But wait! Did the IU basketball tradition start with McCracken, the coach of my years? No, it started much earlier, with Everett Dean, who was IU’s first All American player, in 1921, and coached from 1924-1938, winning 64% of his games, before the NCAA tournament, but he did win a national championship later when he coached at Stanford.

So when did the IU basketball tradition start? Like all traditions, with me, and my generation. Tradition always starts with “me.”

Grace thinks IU basketball started with Knight, because he was “her” coach. I think it started with McCracken, because he was “my” coach. And there is no one left alive for whom Everett Dean was coach, so he gets left out entirely, even though he is the one who is really responsible for the whole IU basketball tradition!

John Robert McFarland

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Usually attributed to Albert Enstein. That’s the traditional attribution, at least. It probably started with Ugh, the cave man.

SINGING THE OLD SONGS

When I pastored in Charleston, IL, we had several students at Eastern IL U from Ghana. Most were Methodist. I don’t know how Ghana students got started coming to EIU, but once international students get established in a particular university, others tend to come to the same place. So we had a fairly steady stream of them. One of my favorites was Sam Asamoah.

Sam and I became close when I “cured” him of a strange disease. He was in the hospital. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. I made a pastoral call on him, as I did with any of my members, and prayed with him. He was out of the hospital the next day, feeling fine. I still have the dashiki he gave me as a gift. “It was your prayer that cured me,” he said.

Sam was not a caricature of some primitive African. He was an established educator, at EIU working on a master’s degree. But he had the African understanding of the spiritual wholeness of mind and body, and so he was able to incorporate my prayer into his healing.

There was a new edition of the Methodist hymnal at the time, and it included a number of hymns from non-European sources. One was an African hymn, with a very irregular beat. I thought we should sing it in worship so Sam especially, but Clement and our other Ghanaian students, too, would feel at home. Our organist and congregation struggled through it one Sunday morning, not well, but hopefully. As Sam came by me at the door, I said, “Well, did you like that hymn?”

He was horrified. “Oh, no. that’s terrible church music. I grew up in an English mission church. I like “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” and “Holy, Holy, Holy!” He went away humming “O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

Worship is coming up again, as it does every week on Sunday morning, and I’m worrying about what we’ll sing. And what we won’t sing.

I like “contemporary” church music. Some of it. I don’t like “praise” music much. It sounds too much like singing a grocery list, plainsong fashion, without the excitement of plainsong. It’s rightly called “count down” music: five words sung four times to three chords on two screens…hmm, I’ve forgotten what the “one” is.

I like hymns, however, from composers like Natalie Sleeth and Marty Haugen and Brian Wren and Ruth Duck. But like Sam Asamoah, I grew up in a different church. I grew up in a southern Indiana hillbilly country church. I need Charles Wesley and Helen Laemmel, Fanny Crosby and Alfred P. Brumley, too. A steady diet of Wren and Duck makes you think the church has been around only twenty years. Maybe thirty.

Throughout my sixty or so years of preaching, old people always complained that “we never sing the old songs.” They weren’t right. I always put the “old” songs in. but I put some new ones in, too. Their problem wasn’t that we did not sing the old ones but that we did sing the new ones. They just didn’t want to waste any singing time on “Lord of the Dance” when we could be “Standing on the Promises.”

I understand those old complainers better now, even though I’m not one of them. Yet. But if we go another year without singing about morning gilding the skies…

John Robert McFarland

“Sing lustily and with a good courage.” The start of # 3 in John Wesley’s directions for hymn singing.

THE CALL TO PREACH RAG

In my post for August 18, I noted that I am no longer writing but put that particular post up for the sake of some poor history grad student who needed info for a thesis on preaching in the olden days. [Actually, it was just something I wanted to write and I used history grad students as an excuse.] Nina Morwell said, in response, that I should include some music, since she is now a music history grad student and needs an excuse to neglect her studies. So, here, for Nina, is a song that combines the history of “preachers in the olden days” with the history of Vietnam War protest…  [Below the song is the explanation of why and how an adolescent boy is trying to avoid God’s call.]

THE CALL TO PREACH RAG

[To the tune of “The Draft Dodger Rag,” by Phil Ochs. You can get it on YouTube, by Ochs himself, or The Smothers Brothers, and also in what I think is its best version by The Chad Mitchell Trio.]

I’m just an ordinary Methodist boy

From a hillbilly liberal church

I believe in God, that God’s temple’s your bod

And leaving Old Scratch in the lurch

I don’t smoke or chew or go with girls who do

I’m regular at Sunday School

But when God called me to preach I let out a screech

‘cause I ain’t no religious fool

I believe in kindness, against spiritual blindness

Want all of god’s children well fed

But I pick my nose and go to movie shows

So this is what I said…

Lord, I’m only fourteen, I’m caught in between

My hormones and my brain

If I have to pray, every day

I’ll probably go insane

You’ve got nothing to gain

I’m just too plain

To make your Kingdom come

So call some other, from a neglectful mother

‘cause I ain’t gonna be that dumb

I believe in the testaments, old and new

And the spirit that always flew

Down from heaven, with feathers and leaven

And manna all over like dew

I believe in Noah, the whale and Jonah

And parting the Sea of Red

But if preaching I try I’ll surely die

So this is what I said…

My sore throat’s getting worse

I forget the third verse

In church I can’t stay awake

Weddings I hate, to funerals I’m late

I’m really just a fake

It will be more fitting, if you get someone sitting

In the pew that’s way up there

Cause here in the back, in the doofus pack

This is all we’ve got to share…

Lord, I’m only fourteen, I’m caught in between

My hormones and my brain

If I have to pray, every day

I’ll probably go insane

You’ve got nothing to gain

I’m just too plain

To make your Kingdom come

So call some other, from a neglectful mother

‘cause I ain’t gonna be that dumb

It’s been sixty years of laughs and tears

Since I started to preach for God

My hearing is dicey, I can’t eat it if it’s spicy

And I’m getting tired in the bod

If you’re called to go to lead God’s show

On a cloudy or sunny day

Be it fast of slow you’ve got to go with the flow

It won’t do you any good to say…

Lord, I’m only fourteen, I’m caught in between

My hormones and my brain

If I have to pray, every day

I’ll probably go insane

You’ve got nothing to gain

I’m just too plain

To make your Kingdom come

So call some other, from a neglectful mother

‘cause I ain’t gonna be that dumb

This is explained more fully than anyone needs in The Strange Calling, but in brief… When I was 14, I told God I would be a preacher if “He” would save my sister’s life. He did, and I was stuck… except, I knew you have to have a “call” to be a preacher, and was a deal the same as a call? If it wasn’t really a call, then I didn’t have to go, did I? I wasn’t sure, so I decided to give it sixty years, and if I didn’t know by then…

John Robert McFarland

AN ACCIDENTAL PREACHER, IN AN ACCIDENTAL TOWN

AN ACCIDENTAL PREACHER, IN AN ACCIDENTAL TOWN

I have totally retired now, no more preaching, pastoral prayers, writing, blog posts, etc. I have told only five people directly about that, and if any of them stumbles across this, they might well say, “But you promised not to do this anymore!” Well, this is only for some poor master’s degree student who does an internet search for material while working on a thesis about country preachers back in the olden days. I know, “Why would any respecting scholar pick such a topic?” Well, because all the good topics are already taken. I’m glad you’re reading it, but it may mean you have to enroll in a history grad program.

On Sunday mornings, I think back to my first churches, when I was a 19 year old sophomore at IU, first preaching at Chrisney, Crossroads, and Bloomfield, 100 miles south of Bloomington, in Spencer County, in the fall of 1956. It was a surprise appointment. I had gone, at Aunt Nora’s insistence, to see Dallas Browning, the Evansville District Superintendent, to tell him I was thinking about maybe, perhaps, some day being a preacher. He said, “Good, you can start this Sunday.” [I have written about this more extensively in The Strange Calling, but history grad students might not have access to either of the extant copies.]

It was to be a temporary appointment, only three months, until Ellis P. Hukill, Jr graduated from Asbury Seminary in January and was appointed there fulltime. Dr. Browning said, “It will be good experience for you.” There were all sorts of problems and hitches in this scenario, but, like everything else in my life, I just assumed they were all my problems to solve.

First, I did not have a car. Fortunately, my brother-in-law’s 1947 Oldsmobile was up on blocks in our barnyard because the navy had sent him and my sister to Antigua. So I arranged to buy it from him for $50. I had saved that from my summer’s work at the Potter and Brumfield factory in Princeton. My father was blind, but he could make anything run, even an Olds on concrete blocks, so I had a car.

I can’t remember what I made as the weekend preacher at those three little churches, but it wasn’t nearly enough to cover the oil bill on that Olds, so a few months later I bought a 1951 Chevy. That kept me going through the rest of college.

In December, I was transferred to the Solsberry Charge, another three churches, because it was only 16 to 30 miles from Bloomington. Chrisney was to be over in January anyway, but Dr. Browning was gracious enough to protest “losing” me and proclaimed that Bloomington District Superintendent F.T. Johnson had “stolen” me.

This is where disappointment comes in this story, because the only reason I have told you all this is to explain the name of Koleen, one of the two other churches on the Solsberry Circuit, along with Mineral. All three of the churches were in Greene County, Mineral and Koleen being just east of Bloomfield, the county seat, not the one on the Chrisney Circuit.

When they had enough folks that they could have a post office, they had to have a name for their settlement. Because they were Irish immigrants, they told the Postmaster General, or whoever took care of such things, that their village name was Colleen. It must have been folks of French or German extraction working that branch of government, for when mail started coming, it was to Koleen. And that was the way it remained.

Accidental name. Many years later, an accidental preacher. But the folks in the Koleen church were unreasonably kind to their young and inexperienced preacher. They supported me without taking me too seriously. That was no accident, but intentional Christian mercy.

John Robert McFarland

THE SIDETRACKED REPORTER

I have often said that my desire to be a newspaper reporter came from listening to The Big Story show on radio. That makes sense, because internet research points out that The Big Story debuted on radio April 2, 1947, right after we had moved from Indianapolis to the little farm [“Five acres and independence…”] three miles outside Oakland City on March 21, and continued to 1955, when I graduated from high school. It was also on TV from 1949 to 1958, but I don’t recall ever seeing it on TV. We had no car and no TV. Radio was our contact with the outside world.

But I may have given radio and The Big Story too much of the credit for my journalistic ambitions. Some goes to The Evansville Courier.

I’m a little surprised now that we used money for a newspaper subscription. We had so little money, and a newspaper could be considered a luxury, especially since you could get news from the radio. On top of that, living in the country, the newspaper came by mail, and so was always a day late. Even more, Daddy could not read, except with a bright light and a big magnifying glass, so his reading was reserved for things like instructions for assembling the brooder house. But Mother was a literate person, and older sister Mary V was a consummate reader, although I think she preferred books. For whatever reason, we had a newspaper subscription.

I think I was the main beneficiary of the daily newspaper, because I was able to keep up with baseball talk on the school bus and playground by reading the sports pages. I could contribute the stats of my beloved Reds, a love bequeathed to me by Grandma Mac, against those bandied about by the Cardinals fans on the bus. The Cardinals were major in southern Indiana because of the reach of Harry Caray on KMOX radio out of St. Louis.

Keeping up with the news in general, though, seemed to be a part of my life from an early age. I recently discovered by old report cards. My grades were always best in social studies, and my Indy teachers—grades 1 through 4—commented on how much I seemed to know about current affairs. That, of course, makes sense for a newspaper reporter, too.

I think it was from the newspaper baseball pages that my love of lists comes; I pored over the batting and pitching statistics lists that the paper printed. Since I could not count on the newspapers staying around long, because  newspapers were useful for many things on a farm, such as starting fires in the stoves, I made my own paper and pencil lists.

And, of course, the newspaper was important because of a feature you couldn’t get on the radio, “the funny pages…”

I have written, including in The Strange Calling, that one of the reasons my friends and I went to church was because it was the quickest way to get the news of our comic strip hero, “The Phantom.” There were only 3 or 4 of us in Mary Louise Hopkins’ Sunday School class, but we would hurry down to our corner of the basement at Forsythe Methodist Church [named after an early preacher there] after “opening exercises,” before Mary Louise managed to get down the narrow stairs, to find out from John Kennedy [not the one who was president] what was happening with The Phantom.

John’s bachelor uncle, Jim, lived in town, where he didn’t have to wait for newspaper delivery. With the right change, he could buy one out of a box right there on Main Street. He came to breakfast each Sunday morning to his sister’s house in the country, with the newspaper, and nephew John was able to make a quick read of “The Phantom” before leaving for Sunday School, where he breathlessly passed the Phantom news along to the rest of us. That led to quick and endless futuring by our “committee,” anticipating what might happen next to The Phantom and his adversaries, even continuing on the school bus the next morning.

I don’t regret the detour that took me away from a career in journalism. I had a good time. I do appreciate that journalistic goal that kept me going from ages 12 to 19. It gave me focus, and a love of words.

John Robert McFarland

A WARNING... SORT OF...

There are almost 40 comments now on my CIW of T, 7-3-18 in a language I don’t read but looks to me like Arabic. Many have shown up quite recently, although some have been there for several months. I can’t read them, but some are just a few lines, some many lines, so apparently they are different messages.

I have worried that some group with bad intentions is using my blog as a way of communicating “secretly,” since few people, and none of power or influence, read CIW. I contacted Blogger about this several months ago and received no reply.

So, I guess this is a warning, but I’m not sure to whom, or about what…

JRMcF