THE STOPPER [W, 9-30-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

As the baseball playoffs begin, I am reminded of the pitcher called “the stopper.” If the team is in a losing streak, they need a pitcher who can win one game, someone to stop that losing streak, and give them a chance to go in the other direction. Someone like Luis Castillo or Sonny Gray, if you’re a Reds fan.

 The political playoffs are starting at the same time as the baseball playoffs. That’s one really long losing streak that needs a stopper.

I am fortunate to have several stoppers on my team, and I need them, for I get into lots of losing streaks.

First, there is the “argument with people who don’t even know I exist” streak. Boy, is that ever a loser! I muster all sorts of great arguments against said person, string together many imprecations, get my uniform all sweaty and dirty… and they don’t even know we’re having a game.

Second, I see an article or statement about sports and think it’s important.

Third, I hear a conspiracy theory about how the virus is a hoax, or the aliens have taken over Mitch McConnell and replaced him with a gorp [Actually, that one makes some sense] and get all worked up about the stupidity and gullibility and hypocrisy of people.

Fourth, I rehearse all the evil things anyone has ever done to me. I tell myself that it is so that I can forgive them, but it’s really so I won’t forget any of the steps of each stab in the back, so that I can trot them out again some time when I’m feeling ornery. There is nothing as satisfying, and nothing as destructive, as rehearing and rehashing an old slight.

So, when I realize what a losing streak I’m in, I call on the stopper. Not quite like Trevor Bauer, but right for my game…

…laughing babies and cute puppy dogs. I actually call up whole pages of images of these on my computer and just look at them.

…music. I’m old, so I listen to CDs, and watch YouTube. Also, I sing a lot on my own. Music is a great stopper. All kinds of music.

…happy memories. Family. Friends. Church. Travel.

…a walk in the trees.

…a book. Especially something like Good News from North Haven by Michael Lindvall or something by Phillip Gulley or Garrison Keillor. Or the Christmas pageant scene from A Prayer for Owen Meany.  

Well, you probably have some stoppers of your own. On with the game!

John Robert McFarland

 

I STILL ANSWER [M, 9-28-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Sometimes there comes a message

from somewhere far beyond

that tells me

I’m still here

that tells me to

lengthen my stride

hold up my head

look near and far

for laughter and joy

 

I used to revel in that call

I straightened my shoulders

and went for the barricades

 

Now I know the limits

of the summons to be brave

These voices never last

but for a moment

 

Yet the Spirit is eternal

The calls still sound

in echoes far and distant

And I still answer

 

Perhaps only from the memory

of battles past and lost

But still I answer

 

John Robert McFarland

 

SEPTEMBER JOYS [SA, 9-26-20]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

As I sat on our patio this morning, I watched the leaves rustle above our roof. This morning the leaves were more yellow than green. It made me happy. It means the fulfillment of the baseball season and the start of the school season.

I think moving to the farm near Oakland City was what gave me my love of baseball and of school. And why I’m happy when I see the leaves turn from summer to autumn. They mean the World Series, the fulfillment of the baseball season, and school, the end of a long hot boring summer.

Until age ten I had been a city boy in the near-east inner-city of Indianapolis, running from bullies, walking to the store to do errands for Mother or Mrs. Dickerson--who lived next door, the only black person for blocks around--and riding the street car downtown to Cadle Tabernacle with my sister to see some “uplifting” drama or concert.

Then we moved to a farm with no indoor plumbing but with a whole lot of chores that my parents thought were perfect for a ten-year-old boy-mowing, milking, hoeing, feeding [chickens, pigs, etc], chopping [wood, weeds], chasing [cows, pigs, chickens—anything that got where it shouldn’t be], throwing [hay-up onto the wagon, or down from the loft], plowing, picking [vegetables, berries, fruit], gathering [eggs], carrying [water in, used water out], shucking [corn], harnessing [horse to plow or wagon], plucking [feathers off the chicken so it could be fried]…

Is it any wonder that I decided I’d rather play baseball or go to school?

I never became much of a baseball player, although I am pretty reliable as a fan. I never became much of a scholar, although I got some degrees. But I gained an everlasting love of September, and that is as good a gift as I need. That, and not having to shovel manure.

John Robert McFarland

WORD PERFECT [R, 9-24-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Stephen Fry tells of how he read all the Harry Potter books for audio editions. Along about the third book, there was one phrase he just couldn’t say right, “Harry pocketed it.” He could say “Harry” and “pocketed” and “it,” but he couldn’t put them together. The audio engineers and everybody in the studio had a great and continuing laugh at his expense as he tried, unsuccessfully, again and again.

He knew that JK Rowling insisted that each audio book be an exact replica of the print copy, for some children followed along in print as they listened, learning to read. But Fry called her and demonstrated for her how he said “Harry pocket-ed-ed it” instead of “Harry pocketed it,” and asked if he could change the line to “Harry put it in his pocket.” He said there was a long pause, and then, “No,” in her best witch voice.

So he worked at it until he got it right. Or at least close. Except that in every book after that one, every book he read, at some point, she included the phrase, “Harry pocketed it.”

It reminds me of my daughter, Katie Kennedy, the great YA author [1], and her cousin, Kira Vermond, Canada’s leading kids book writer [2]. They challenge each other. “In your next book, you have to include ‘She found a crushed rose in her blue jeans,’ or some such.’” It makes the creative process even more creative.

It also reminds me of a story the engineers at HarperAudio told me when I was in NYC recording my cancer book. [3] They said that Tony Hillerman, the author of the great Southwest mystery novels featuring Navajo police officers, had been in the week before to record one of his books. There was a sentence he just could not get right, having to do with discovering body parts in a black plastic bag. So, they said, he just grabbed a pen, rewrote the sentence on his manuscript to one he could say, and recorded it that way.

If you’re the author, you can do that.

I had to do that with the audio of my cancer book, not because there was stuff I couldn’t say correctly. In fact, the engineers praised my abilities on that front. But the cassettes used in those times had limited space. Even though they brought the book out on two cassettes, there was not enough time for the whole book. So they made me rewrite to make it shorter, which also shifted some chapters around. Fortunately, though, that was done before I got into that studio in New York!

I did, however, have to do some rewriting on the spot. In the book, I had “rewritten” songs to be cancer-fighting anthems. When I would start to sing one at HarperAudio, the engineers would go ballistic, and cry, “No, no, that tune belongs to Richard Rodgers,” or some other composer. So, on the spot, I had to switch them to old folk songs or spirituals, tunes in the public domain. I’m not sure but what they didn’t come out better that way.

I don’t know why I am telling you this. Except the Fry story is terribly funny—that devilish Rowling. And the Hillerman story is funny, too, in a different way. And I like to tell about the experience with my book. Mostly, I think, I just wanted to plug Katie’s and Kira’s books. So, to be sure you haven’t wasted your time reading this, you need to go buy their books! You might even send a copy of Katie’s Constitution book to your Congress Person.

John Robert McFarland

1] Katie usually writes YA science fiction like Learning to Swear in America or What Goes Up [From the same publisher of Harry Potter], although her newest one, just out, is The Constitution Decoded: A Guide to the Document That Shapes Our Nation [Published by Workman]

2] Kira mostly writes books that answer the questions kids have about the world, such as Trending: How and Why Stuff Gets Popular.

3] Now That I Have Cancer I Am Whole [Print versions by AndrewsMcMeel]

 

THE YEARNING OF THE DARKNESS [T, 9-22-20]

 

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

The darkness lingers

longer now. It has

waited all the summer

for this chance to claim

the day. I can hear

it chuckle in the night

bird as it sees me

shuffle with blind feet,

feeling along, not seeing,

the way it is in day

light, the darkness

not hoping I will fall,

just happy to be included.

Even the darkness

wants to be a part

of the day…

 

John Robert McFarland

THE BROWN BEAR OF REPENTANCE [Sat, 9-19-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

I switched the brown bear in my left pocket to the right pocket as I walked, because I realized I needed to write about repentance. But as I walk, I see so many dogs and trees and flowers that I don’t remember am idea for a CIW column, unless I use a mnemonic device to bring it back to mind. When I found the brown bear in the wrong pocket, I remembered to write about repentance.

I started carrying little hard rubber bears 25 years ago, when our grandchildren were coming into the world. If we got caught somewhere without toys or other distractions, I’d just pull out bears for us to play with. Then I began to notice other little ones in public who were having a hard time, sometimes because of the big ones they were with. It brightens up a child’s day to get a new bear, and it reminds the adults they are with that other people notice how they are treating the children, without giving them a lecture or threatening to call the social worker.

It’s very unlikely that I shall encounter any little children when I walk at dawn, but I always have bears in my pocket anyway, so when I saw The Loping Man coming toward me on the sidewalk this morning, I knew I needed to repent, and I put the  brown bear of repentance into the memory pocket to write about it. [Some of the regular walkers, I know by proper name, but most I don’t, so I give them appellations according to their walking style.]

It’s a true cliché among theological and biblical scholars that Hebrew is a “concrete” language, and that Greek is a “theoretical” language. Thus, the Hebrews lived a concrete history [slavery in Egypt, wandering in the desert, Moses and Jesus, etc.] while the Greeks developed a philosophical, theoretical approach to life [“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates and Plato, etc.].

Greek, however, has its concrete moments, too. “Repentance” is one of those. It originally meant simply to turn around and go the other way.

So, this morning, when I saw The Loping Man coming toward me on the sidewalk, I repented. I turned around and went the other way, because he doesn’t wear a mask, and he won’t cross to the other side of the street. In fact, I repent whenever I see another walker on “my” sidewalk. It’s the easiest way to avoid someone who might be carrying the covid19 virus.

This is the point at which I should use some analogy about walking through life and repentance and avoiding spiritual viruses, but repentance walking usually makes me go farther than I intended, since I have to keep doubling back, so now I’m too tired to do that. The Brown Bear of Repentance and I are going to have a snack and say “Arggh, Matey, shiver me timbers,” to each other, since today is Talk Like a Pirate Day; I’m sure you can do the analogies and spiritual lessons for yourself.

John Robert McFarland

CAMPUS HOME COMPANION [W, 9-16-20]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

As I re-read my column of last Sunday, about the death and life of my friend, Bob, I realized for the first time that at no point did I give his last name. So, today’s poem is dedicated to Robert Yates Butts, my 1960s campus ministry colleague.

CAMPUS HOME COMPANION      [W, 9-16-20]

In rows of glad array

they come walking toward me

bright in eye and smooth of cheek

the boys of summer and the girls of spring

 

but as they near I know

my eyes have, yes, betrayed me

gently, for brows are wrinkled

hands darkly mottled, legs slow, uncertain

 

still, I beckon, and I turn

now with them close behind me

I lead these old and ragged hopefuls

to the ash grove, their campus home companion

 

and there we pray

John Robert McFarland

 

BOB IS DEAD [Sunday, 9-13-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Okay, I said it just the way he always wanted it. “Don’t say that I passed away, or passed on, or went to be with the Lord. Just say I’m dead.” 2:30 a.m. this morning, peacefully, with Kathy holding his hand. That’s a gift. In these pandemic days, so often people die alone. I give thanks that my friend did not have to.

Bob is dead. That’s not the end of the story, that’s the beginning.

Bob said, “Just say I’m dead,” because he was a no-frills kind of guy, a football kind of guy, a focused guy. That may seem strange to say about a guy who was always looking out the window and mumbling something incomprehensible, and humming the same tune over and over, and who seemed surprised that you were in the room.

His first wife, Sharon, was so convinced he was hard of hearing that she had him tested. No, the doc said, Bob didn’t ignore her because he was deaf, but because he was focused. His brain dealt with one thing at a time. If he were reading or thinking, that was it.

That focus came to fruit in his values. When Jesus said, “walk the narrow way,” Bob took him seriously, all the while being a cool guy. Not many can walk the narrow way and be cool at the same time, but Bob did.

I told him once, both in our 80s, that I admired his coolness. He didn’t deny it, just smiled a little. “Yes,” he said, “I don’t quite understand why people think I’m cool, but I sort of like it.”

Both personally and professionally, Bob’s focus was family.

He was a Mississippi boy. That Mississippi family defined him in so many ways. When he and Sharon divorced, it was to “Mammy,” his beloved great-grandmother to whom he retreated.

Bob was a Southern boy, a good, old boy, with a higher education. If I wanted to compete with Wm. Faulkner and Reynolds Price and Walker Percy, writing about southern men, I would just write the story of Bob’s life and call it a novel. It was easy for him to be a Hoosier, for IN is the MS of the north.

I think that focus of his, was part of his Mississippi background. He did things in the pace of Mississippi. With Bob, it was not so much about what, but how. Pace doesn’t mean slow pace, the way Southern pace is often characterized. It is about the right pace. Bod lived that pace automatically, a part of who he was.

One of his brothers once said that it was really their father who got the call to preach, but God tarried too long, and their father got busy with school teaching, so when the call finally came, it hit Bob.

All of us who were campus ministers in the 1960s wondered if we had mistaken the call, and many of us, including Bob and I, did graduate work, thinking about another profession. Bob found that other profession, teaching family studies at Eastern IL U, but he never lost that commitment to faith, commitment to the church, commitment to God.

He was still thinking and reading about matters of faith, and discussing them with the other renegades of The Green Room Sunday School class at Nashville UMC, right up to the end.

We met because he was a faithful member of Wesley UMC in Charleston, IL, when I pastored there. The friendship continued, even though we often lived hundreds of miles away. We often stayed with Bob and Kathy, first in Charleston, then in Brown County. We didn’t go places or do things on those visits, just talked…and regardless of how long the visit was, we never got all the talking done. Of course, part of that was because we told the same stories over and over.

He just enjoyed friends—fellow faculty members, fellow church members, tennis buddies. He wasn’t the jolly friend type. He was the faithful friend type, the kind who would load up my father and all his belongings in his pickup and drive him all the way from Bloomington, IN to Mason City, IA, just because we needed him there so we could take care of him, but were unable to get him ourselves because we were also taking care of grandkids.

Bob just never got quite enough football. Or justice. He cared about football for himself, which also meant the MS State U Bulldogs. He cared about justice for others, which meant those who got the least of it.

The obits will probably say that he was 87 years old, but he was closer to 88, so that’s what I will claim. I don’t want some obit writer to cheat him out of any of the time he was alive.

We have shared life for forty years: The end of his marriage to Sharon and the start and continuation of his marriage to Kathy. News about, prayers for, and sometimes the presence of, children and grandchildren. Overnight visits, sometimes for several days. Memories. The church-complaints and hopes. Discussions about faith and doubt. Hope and action for justice and inclusion of all. Food, usually prepared by Kathy or Helen, but sometimes by Bob—biscuits, chili, pecan pie. Laughter. Countless college football games.  

Bob is dead. That’s not the end of the story, that’s the beginning.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

AS WISE AS SNAKES [W, 9-9-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

The Gospel lesson for last Sunday was Matthew 18:15-20, Jesus’ words about how to reconcile with a fellow church member who has wronged you. It reminded me of…

In the mid 1970s, I was appointed to be the pastor of a neat church in a big town. I knew it was a good appointment. Many of my friends spoke well of it. I was pleased to go there.

In the first month, the church treasurer came to see me, ostensibly to talk about church financial business, but really to sound me out on theology.

At that time, Jerry Falwell was just coming to national prominence. He was the leading voice for taking religion into politics. Not just any religion, but his particular fundamentalism. It was the only true, Christian, American way, and it should become the law of the land.

People were taking sides, either for or against this brand of religious patriotism. It was important to know who was in and who was out. Some folks, like gays and lesbians, had no chance to be in at all.

My church treasurer never mentioned Falwell. He came at it sideways, talking about his son, who was a university student, and how he had gone to a “Bible” church in his university town, and learned the truth. It sounded like he was wondering about his son. It didn’t seem like a real theology discussion. We didn’t talk about Falwell. We had what I thought was a nice conversation about many things. I did not know I was being given a test, which, apparently, I failed.

At the next meeting of the board, in his treasurer’s report, he pointed out that I had made some long-distance calls to places in Mississippi that he thought were questionable. He couldn’t think of any reason for a minister in IL to be calling someone in MS on church business. In other words, he was accusing me of stealing from the church by making them pay for my personal calls. [This was in the days when every long-distance call had an individual charge, not like the blanket programs now.]

He was measured about what he said, trying to sound objective, but there was real tension in the room, because it was clear that he was telling the board that their new minister was a thief. And he had not done what Jesus advocated--what made common sense, even--by asking me first about those calls.

I explained that I was the director for the traditional senior high youth conference at Epworth Springs church camp over the Labor Day weekend, with students from all over central IL participating, and I was telephoning two bright young brothers, ministers in neighboring towns in MS, making arrangements for them to lead that gathering of our youth, and after it was over, the conference would reimburse the church for any expenses I incurred in running the retreat for the conference youth. [Bill and Chuck were great, and it was a huge success, by the way.]

All the board members thought it was fine that their new pastor was working with youth from all over the conference. I mean, who in a church is ever against doing something for the teens? It was also clear to all of them that their treasurer was trying to make trouble for their new pastor, and that he should have followed what Jesus said to do in Matthew 18:15-20: if you have a beef with a fellow member of the church, discuss it privately. If that doesn’t work, it’s only then that you take it to the board. If he had asked me personally about those calls, the issue would never have taken up board time.

Apparently, though, unknown to me, he had decided that I was on the wrong side of the growing theological divide and that he should do something that would… what… maybe make them go to the bishop to try to get rid of me? At least point out that non-Bible church-fundamentalist liberals could not be trusted. Instead, he pointed out that he could not be trusted. He lost all credibility. He humiliated himself. Embarrassed, the next month, he resigned in a huff, as though he were the one who had been wronged somehow. He and his wife started attending the Southern Baptist Church on the other side of downtown.

Falwell introduced a whole new dimension to politics—the “evangelical” notion of God. Once you have claimed that God is on your side, there is no room for compromise. I mean, you can’t compromise the truth of God. That is once and for all. But compromise is the only way politics works. Politics without compromise is simply war—winner take all. The losers are left with nothing.

You can be “evangelical,” all or nothing in religion, in the way the word “evangelical” is misused now, as long as it’s not in politics. The same is true with liberal or progressive or conservative or any other “brand” of religion. If you don’t like the theology of your church, you go to another church, or start your own. As many churches or religions as you want. But there can be only one government. Everybody has to work together or nothing works at all. That is pretty much where we are now-nothing working at all.

Jesus had lots of good advice on how to deal with one another, in order to reconcile, but if you really don’t want to reconcile, if you really want to draw lines to keep others out so that you know you are in, there is not much anyone can do about it.

Oh, yeah, that old poem about drawing a line that will take them in… but they have a right to stay outside the lines, and go to hell in their own self-righteous exclusivist way. As an includer, I’d rather reconcile, but until both sides are willing to work at that, the only thing includers can do is to keep excluders out of power, so that they cannot enforce their exclusivist hatred on the whole church. Or nation, as the case may be.

That is being gentle as a dove, but as wise as a snake. Another piece of advice from Jesus. [Mt 10:16]

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

BUT THAT’S NOT LOU, IS IT? [M, 9-7-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

I have several signed photos of baseball players. They are all Cincinnati Reds, like Edd Roush and Joe Morgan, except for one. On top of my file cabinet is a photo with Lou Brock’s signature. Strangely, the photo is not of Lou. It’s of me, saying the opening prayer at a conference where Lou was the speaker. Todd Lindley, who had organized the event, knew I was a baseball fan, and arranged for a photographer to take the picture, and for Lou to sign it. Just why he and Lou thought it was a good idea to sign my picture with Lou’s name I’m still not sure.

For that conference, I was a quasi-Cardinals fan, especially since I was seated between Lou and his wife for the meal. I was excited. I was going to talk baseball with one of the best players ever. I could ask him questions no one had ever thought of before, like “What did you think of that Ernie Broglio trade?” [1] Except his wife had just become an ordained woman of the cloth and wanted to talk church stuff with me. I wanted to yell, “No, Jackie, I don’t care about church stuff! I’m a preacher just for the big bucks! I want to talk baseball!” But, of course, I didn’t. I did the polite thing. We talked church stuff. Actually, it was a pretty good conversation.

But I missed my chance to talk baseball with a real player. The only other MLB player with whom I’ve ever had a whole conversation was Dave Parker, when he was with the Reds. We were in the right field bleachers, and when Dave came out to take his position, I yelled, “Hi, Dave.” He turned around and waved and said, “Hi.”

I have been a Cincinnati Reds fan since birth, mostly because Grandma Mac was a Reds fan, and partly because I share a home town, Oakland City, IN, with the Reds HOF center fielder, Edd Roush. His twin brother, Fred, was commissioner of the church league when I played on the Methodist team. The then-retired Edd sometimes came out to hit line drives to us.

The Cardinals, though, was the team you got on the radio in Oakland City. KMOX. Harry Caray. It was also the closest team geographically, so if you got to go to a major league game, it was in St. Louis. Thus when Benny Albin invited me to go with him and Bob Keeton and Bill Burns to see the Cardinals play the Dodgers at Sportsman’s Park, when I was a high school freshman, I jumped at the chance. We went primarily to see Gil Hodges, the Dodgers first baseman, since he was from Petersburg, just up the road from Oakland City, and had started his athletic career, basketball as well as baseball, at Oakland City College.

Benny’s old Chevy had trouble on the way home, late at night, so we had to spend the night in The Star Hotel in Flora, IL. We had only enough money for one room, with two beds, and we had to sleep in our underwear. The fire escape was a big old gnarly rope, like the one for climbing in gym class, tied to the radiator. I was sorry the place didn’t catch on fire; I thought sliding down that rope in the heart of Flora, IL in our underwear, would make a good story, and Benny was the editor of the school newspaper, and I was the—in my own mind—star reporter, so we’d have a scoop.

Well, I’ve gotten away from Lou. He, of course, was still in school himself that night we went to Sportsman’s Park, listening to KMOX, learning how big league players stood at the plate from Harry’s descriptions, playing in the Collinston, Louisiana version of the church league, a fan of the Dodgers, because of Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, but of Gil Hodges, too, I’m sure, even though Gil grew up in “the Mississippi of the North.”

From the radio and every place he went, Lou learned the ways of “the eternal game” so well. He was a joy to watch, even for those of us who cheered for other teams. And he was kind enough to put his name on a picture of me—that ought to confuse ancestry.com!

John Robert McFarland

1] Lou said, “I love Ernie Broglio. Without him, I would have been Ernie Banks, a life-long Cub who never got into a World Series.”

 

 

 

YOU CAN’T DO ONE THING [Sa, 9-5-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

In this current pandemic era, an old man gets strange ideas, like, “I have lots of time on my hands; why not rearrange my study/office room?”

Because, you cannot do one thing.

The reason for the rearrangement was to get easier access to the drawers in my four-drawer metal file cabinets. Now I don’t know why I thought that was necessary. There are just old journals and copies of old correspondence in there. Not stuff one needs very often, maybe not at all.

I used to have four four-drawer file cabinets and one two-drawer cabinet. 18 file drawers. That was when we lived in bigger houses and my study was a bigger room. It was also before computers, a time when everything was kept on paper. If you wanted a lot of file folders for sermons and letters and half-baked manuscripts and such, you needed a lot of file cabinets. Now all that stuff fits on a computer push drive the size of a stick of Juicy Fruit. Nobody needs a metal file cabinet. I don’t know how I’m going to get rid of my two remaining four-drawer file cabinets when they take me to “the home,” or to the pyre. Nobody wants those anymore.

Before we moved here, the desk in my reading/writing room was always arranged so that I could just swivel in my chair and get into any of my file drawers I needed. When we moved into this condo, though, my room was not big enough for that. So that my back would not be toward the window when I sat at the desk, I had the movers put the file cabinets in the corner.

I was disappointed. I had to get up and walk around the desk to get at those drawers. Once or twice a year.

Then pandemic isolation. Lots of time. No more half-hour trips to the library or $ Tree to interrupt my nap schedule. And in five years, nobody has snuck up to my window to look over my shoulder at my computer screen, to try to plagiarize what I was writing, so why not rearrange the room so that I could get into those file drawers, even if it meant having my back to the window? Why not, indeed!

I’ll tell you why. I had to take off of the desk and put into a big box all the photos and the mementoes and the lamp and the stapler and the roll-a-dex that I don’t use anymore, because all the people in it are dead, and the pen holder, and the paper clip holder, and the radio, and… you get the idea. Lots of stuff gets on a desk top in five years.

The desk was heavier than it was five years ago. To be able to move it, I had to take all the stuff--like envelopes and those return address labels people keep sending me--out of the drawers and then take out all the drawers.

When I put the drawers back in, the biggest one got stuck and now will not open. So I had to put all the stuff from it into a box I can keep under the desk.

Then I realized that the back of my desk, which is now where people would see it if they walk down the hall, looks like somebody’s back end, so Helen had to make a cover for it. [And why I am worried about anybody ever again being in the house to walk down the hall, I have no idea.] The desk back did not want a cover and kept shedding it, despite Helen’s attempts to keep it mounted, until she used a hammer and railroad spikes on it. Looked very… strong.

Then I realized I couldn’t reach my trash and recycling cans anymore, so we had to take half the cover off.

My printer is on a little table under the window. There is no room for it beside the desk now, so now the printer cord won’t reach my computer.

Then I realized that the little extra table--not the one for the printer, for holding work in process, work that won’t fit on the desk top, along with the computer and all my photos and staplers and such--I can’t use, because one of the wheels broke off in the moving process five years ago, and in the old arrangement, it was propped against a book case, but now there is no room for it there, so it sits at a tilt, on three caster,  and all the stuff I put on it slides off. Including the house phone, which I can’t reach from my chair now, since its battery is weak and has to be on its charger stand.

So, because old men are far more adaptable than people give us credit for, I have decided that I don’t need a desk drawer, or a phone, or a printer, or a table for extra work. Not as long as I can get at those metal file cabinets, for banging my head.

Be careful in this pandemic era. Just because you have time for a new project doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE GUYS IN GLENN’S GARAGE [R, 9-3-20]

 

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Younger friends

in the older years

are God’s gift

of present grace.

They are able

to prop us up

on our leanin’ side,

help us

old doubts and fears

to hide,

keep going

‘til we see God

face to face.

 

John Robert McFarland

 

THREE CHARACTERS FOR A PANDEMIC TIME: Revolutionaries, Messiahs, And Pool Boys [T, 9-1-20]

 

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

First, revolutionaries:

IU history prof Rebecca Spang points out that a revolution occurs when inherited institutions have broken down and no longer work the way they were/are intended, and people no longer have faith in them… like Congress, the judicial system, including the Supreme Court, the White House, the police, the media, the USPS, public education… and what happens in a revolution is that new institutions take their place… either new representative institutions, or new anti-democratic institutions, like a secret police force, a political conformity task force, propaganda TV networks, etc.

Second, messiahs:

Our pastors pointed out that the reason for “the messianic secret,” why Jesus kept telling his disciples to keep their mouths shut about him being the messiah, was because the people then wanted the messiah to be a super hero, someone “faster than a speeding bullet,” who could make everything right with one swell foop. [1]

We think it would be so nice to have a super-hero messiah, that we create them, like Donald Trump, or at least what Trump and his followers think he is or pretends to be, who can “make America great again” just by saying MAGA, a magical incantation, like abba dabba doody.

That’s why Jesus said, “Don’t tell anybody I’m the messiah.” Jesus knew that is not the way of the world, that the only way a messiah would work was by being willing to give, not grab. Even to die, for the world.

Third, pool-boys:

Jerry Falwell, Jr. excuses himself for his hypocrisy and sexual perversions and greed and generally anti-Jesus behavior, including paying a pool-boy to have sex with his wife while he watched, because, “I am not a minister.” But you are/were the president of a university that enforces puritanical [Christian?] sexual mores on your students. If the president of Stanford or Harvard were guilty of being against scholarly research, would he expect to get by on “I’m not a professor?”

Anyway, it makes me glad I’m not a minister anymore. I can get away with all sorts of stuff now… oh, wait, I can’t leave the house… and the condo association pool doesn’t have a pool-boy…

John Robert McFarland

1] One of my favorite spoonerisms. They are named for The Rev. Wm. Archibald Spooner, 1844-1930, of Oxford, whose brain made him switch the first letters of words, so that he said things like “Pass the pigs fleas,” or “a blushing crow” when he meant “a crushing blow.” When I was a student at Garrett Theological Seminary, PhD student Earl Fike, Jr was preaching in chapel one day and announced that “they shall mount up with ings, as weagles.”