“I’LL PRAY FOR YOU…” [T, 8-31-21]

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

After Maggie explained to me how she was crippled from a fall, and had to be on oxygen all the time for COPD, I told her I would pray for her, and began to explain what NOT to expect from my intercessions, for, although we have known each other for 60 years, from when I officiated at her wedding to my school friend, Dave, we don’t know each other well, and I didn’t want her to think I was promising some sort of magic. But she waved me off, as much as one can wave off a do-gooder on the telephone. “I don’t care about that,” she said. “It just makes me happy when people tell me they’re praying for me.”

I think there is much more to intercessory prayer, but that part is always there, if we know people are praying for us: we are not alone in our problems and misery. We can take any pain much better if we know we are not going it alone.

I mentioned in the column of 8-29-21 the colleague group of The Academy of Parish Clergy in the Quad Cities, that cluster in IL and IA across the Mississippi River. One of the members was a Roman Catholic priest, Marv Mottet, the social action ministry director for the Davenport Diocese. As we shared our stories, Marv told about his cancer.

He was in his 40s, and the cancer got worse and worse. The doctors said there was nothing they could do, until it got bad enough, and then they could send him to M.D. Anderson in Houston, where they could use an untried therapy on hopeless patients. His strength declined so much that he was appointed to hear the confessions of a convent of cloistered nuns, since that was not strenuous, at all. There Sister Catherine told him that she would do nothing but pray for him until he was cured. He thought it was sweet but irrelevant. The cancer kept getting worse.

Finally, he was bad enough to go to M.D. Anderson. They did the intake tests and the doctor called him in. “Father Mottet, why are you here? We can find no cancer in you at all.”

He was stunned. “I was walking the sidewalk outside the hospital, unable to grasp it, when I suddenly realized that in the liturgical calendar, it was St. Catherine’s day.”

That story sustained me when, 15 years later, I got cancer. I did not know Sister Catherine, but I had lots of sisters and brothers in the faith who prayed for me. I was not alone.

Some people scoff at such stories. I mean, what could prayer have to do with it? “Spontaneous healing” we call it when we can’t understand it, as though that answers, and dismisses, the question of the spiritual dimension of healing. But it’s a given now that there is a spiritual element to all of human life, including healing, and that intercessory prayer has a part in that.

When I was doing Clinical Pastoral Education with David Belgum at the U of IA hospital, Larry Den Besten was Chief of Surgery. In those days, patients spent the night before surgery in the hospital. Larry called on each one the evening before their operation and prayed with them. The nurses said, “Most of them, they could home right then. They didn’t even need the surgery anymore.”

But, some protest, often people pray for healing and it doesn’t happen. Well, of course not. We also use chemo and surgery, and often they don’t produce healing, either, but we don’t stop using them because they are not 100% effective.

No cure lasts forever. Everybody dies. Even Marv Mottet died, in 2016, at the age of 86. Indeed, death is the final cure.

We probably should not use “healing” and “cure” interchangeably, the way we usually do, the way I already have in this column, for there is a difference between cure and healing. I think it is Bernie Siegel who says, “Not everyone will be cured, but everyone can be healed.”

Maggie is 80. She doesn’t need my prayers for cure. But she needs my prayers for healing, and I need to pray them. Both the one who prays and the one prayed for receive a gift in prayer, the gift of healing, which is the gift of knowing that we are not alone, we a part of life and death together.

John Robert McFarland

 

ETERNAL PRAISE FOR TRANSITORY GIFTS [Su, 8-29-21]

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

When I finished years of campus ministry plus doctoral work, it had been a long time since I had pastored a congregation. I knew a lot had changed in the church since I was serving student appointments during college and seminary. I knew I needed help in making the transition back to the pastorate. The Academy of Parish Clergy was brand new, and it sounded like just what I needed. It was.

Granger Westberg founded the APC as a continuing education community for pastors, in which we would learn from one another by “sharing the practice.”

I was preaching at Orion, on the IL side of the Quad Cities area [Davenport and Bettendorf in IA, Moline and Rock Island in IL], and I was so enthusiastic about APC that I formed a colleague group, with about a dozen members from most Protestant denominations and at least one Roman Catholic. One member was Bob, pastor of a large Baptist church in Moline. He was an enthusiastic member of the group. Bright, young but not new in ministry, personable, good-looking, well dressed.

We met on Tuesday mornings to do case studies and then went to lunch. One Tuesday Bob came in looking bedraggled, a way he never looked, and very sleepy. He said, “Sunday, after church, we had a regular board meeting. Somebody made a motion to fire me, and it failed by only one vote, my wife’s. I had no idea anything was wrong. I haven’t slept since.”

I was so pleased that he had that group. We’d been meeting long enough that we cared about one another personally, not just professionally. We went into “how can we help” mode. We decided to offer our services, meaning me [after all, I had just done a doctorate in theological communication], to the congregation, for learning a better process for congregation and pastor to communicate and work on problems. I actually did that, and it helped. They created a whole new pastor-parish format. [1]

The APC was “an idea whose time has come,” but its time wasn’t very long. Soon after it was founded, seminaries began to offer continuing education, too. Most congregations don’t like for their pastor to go far afield, even to get better at the job, but they understand if you want to go back to seminary for a conference once in a while. They certainly think it’s a waste of time for him/her to be hanging around with preachers from other denominations, though, and even synagogues and mosques, the way we did in APC. You got no pastoral points for APC.

But I mourn the demise of the APC. It had the brightest and most committed pastors I have ever known, and we really were able to be better pastors, and make the church better, by “sharing the practice.”

Actually, I started this as a letter to my old APC colleague, Fred Skaggs, just reminiscing, but a writer hates to get only one use out of his/her scribbles, so I’ll come up with a principle to justify making you read it, too: all church sub-groups and side-groups have limited life. Women’s circles, prayer groups, men’s breakfast groups, Bible study groups, mission organizations. That’s okay. It’s the nature of social life. But it’s okay to celebrate those groups that have given us a clearer identity within the sometimes vague reality of the church in general. [Same goes if you’re not a church person. No matter how often you sing “I love this bar,” it won’t last forever.]

John Robert McFarland

1] Bob and his wife were an excellent singing duo and did a special concert for my congregation as a thank-you to me.

 

THE INCIDENT AT SHADY REST [F, 8-27-21]

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

THE INCIDENT AT SHADY REST    [F, 8-27-21]

 

As a writer, or a preacher, or a person… when you question if you should tell a particular story, you probably should not. But this is Biblical [See Psalm 18:7] and an almost accurate account of an incident involving my father at his next-to-last nursing home… so don’t blame me!

 

I like to fart the old man said

And as he did his face turned red

Miss Primly almost dropped her crumpet

At the sounding of the trumpet

As tectonic plates went to quaking

And the foundations started shaking

But the children gladly giggled

As in his chair the old man wiggled

After all, it was their teacher who

asked him what he liked to do

 

The Gleaners Class was at Shady Rest

To bring cookies to each feeble guest

To sing a song of Jesus true

And ask them what they like to do

Which was quite clearly a mistake

As the room began to shake and quake

With reverberations loud and rumbly

That caused the cookies to get quite crumbly

 

Miss Primley cried, “Children, out of here,”

But they laughed so loud they could not hear

They pointed at her and made noises farty

Like she herself was the guilty party

For even if a teacher is pure and true

Pointing fingers is what kids do

She ran for the door with a cough and a hack

And to Shady Rest she never went back

 

So if the preacher acts real cool

And says, Would you teach in our Sunday School?

Remember the lesson of Shady Rest

And tell her you think it would be best

If instead you slit your wrists

Or hit your face with doubled fists

But if you’re stupid and if you’re new

At least don’t ask old men what they like to do

 

John Robert McFarland

There was an incident at an annual conference where a dog got in, ran up onto the stage and bit the bishop, then ran down the aisle and bit three lay people on its way out. The usher asked why it bit all those lay folk, and it said, “I just had to get the taste out of my mouth.” If you need to get shed of the taste of this CIW, you can go to glennsreflections.com. It was suggested to me by colleague-in-ministerial-mayhem and friend of CIW, John Shaffer. Glenn’s reflections are not real exciting, but they are righteous, enough to balance the incident at Shady Rest. [Also, he’ll send his columns to you via email if you sign up for them.]

 

 

 

 

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR [W, 8-25-21]

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

I received a nice note from the columnist, thanking me for my letter to the editor, correcting his mistake. He had written that it was Reinhold Niebuhr who composed what has become known as “The Serenity Prayer.” God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

That wasn’t the mistake. I thanked him for giving Niebuhr credit, for often folks act like that prayer just appeared out of nowhere. But he had gone on to say that Niebuhr had been a Nazi U-boat captain who had later become a theologian. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In his thank-you note to me, W. Lee Truman acknowledged that he must have gotten Niebuhr confused with someone else.

That was one of my several “correcting” letters over fifty years or so of “letters to the editor.” I even once corrected the Hebrew of a Bible professor! [And the editor noted under my letter that I was right.]

I know all this because I’ve been going through my file of clippings, and copies of those letters, that I wrote to a lot of different editors. It’s a thick file, but as I count them up, I see that I was not as prolific a letter writer as I remembered. Only two or three letters a year. Of course, I had a lot of other outlets for my ideas, as a preacher and speaker and writer, so Letters to the Editor was not a primary way for me to go.

Sometimes, though, it was the best way. A letter to the editor gets your idea to more people than a sermon does. And to different people.

I’m only slightly surprised that I never wrote about specific politicians. My concerns were not people but issues—apartheid, race relations, Viet Nam, the treatment of veterans, guns, booze, dope, capital punishment, abortion, Nicaragua, funding for education and children…

And approaches, especially hypocritical and illogical approaches and arguments. I never ranted in my letters. I learned that a bare statement of the facts was often the most powerful witness against injustice.

I did, however, occasionally use sarcasm, you know, taking the other side to its logical extreme so that it is shown to be hypocritical and illogical. Considering how often I think and say things to my friends sarcastically, I’m surprised it was so infrequent. My guess is that the letters that got printed were my second [or fifth] drafts.

I often wrote to commend the writer of an article, or to support a public figure who was under fire—a school principal or another clergy person. I sometimes wrote to disagree with a theological or social stance, stating complete reasons for my disagreement. Editors sometimes “edited letters for brevity” when they printed them, and I sometimes thought they changed the meaning—one time they changed a word and made it the exact opposite of what I was saying—and that required another letter.

Sometimes I wrote to the editor to question the journalistic ethics or even grammar of the publication and was surprised and pleased when editors would print those. Occasionally, though, they would say, “We stand by our story.” That’s a “weasel word.”  I learned that “stand by our story” did not mean that they still believed their story was accurate; it just meant they didn’t intend to admit they were wrong.

Most of the letters went to the editors of religion or clergy periodicals or local newspapers. Some appeared in regional or national newspapers or magazines.

One letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated started a spirited—and printed—debate with Hall of Fame writer, Frank Deford, about whether girls should play five on five basketball instead of the traditional six on six, three on offense and three on defense, and never shall they cross the center line. You may be surprised that I was on the traditionalist side. It had nothing to do with thinking girls could not play the boys’ game well, or that their bodies couldn’t stand up to it. I felt that the 6 on 6 was a more wide-open, and thus more interesting, game, and also something girls could claim as their own, rather than just being “Johnnie come latelys” to the male version of something. Needless to say, Deford’s side won, just as Bob Hammel’s will—spoiler alert-- when the Designated Hitter becomes standard in The National League, too.

I’m glad I wrote to those editors. As I read those letters now, I doubt that they made much difference, but I am reminded that at least I tried to witness to what was right.

It’s like when Uncle Jesse, a hundred years ago, scored the winning goal for the wrong team in a basketball game. I asked him if it didn’t bother him when people teased him about it. “I always knew which side I was on,” he said.

That’s what Dr. Robert Eckley, President of IL Wesleyan U, said about me as he introduced me at a conference: “You never have any trouble knowing what side this man is on.” I liked that. I think he must have read my letters to the editor.

John Robert McFarland

“Language is the only homeland.” Czeslaw Milosz

 

 

ODDS & ENDS V: SCOTS, WORK ETHIC, ETC [M, 8-23-21]

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

THE KER-HANDED CLAN: Daughter Katie Kennedy, the author and historian, came across a reference in a Scottish history book to “fighting ker-handed,” which means left-handed, for Helen’s clan, the Kerrs, were left-handed. Kerr in Scotland is pronounced Karr, as with Deborah Kerr, the actress. Helen’s family named is spelled Karr so everyone will pronounce it the right way, even though that spelling is the wrong way.

Helen isn’t left-handed, but she’s proud of her heritage. Her mother didn’t give her, or her sister, Mary, middle names, since their father, “Tank” [Earl] Karr was the last male in his family. By using Karr as their middle name, they extended the family name one more generation. Alternatively, Georgia Heltzel Karr, my great mother-in-law, says that she kept their names simple so if they turned out stupid, “they could at least spell their name.”

When we were in Scotland once, when I was doing some work for my doctorate at St. Andrew’s University, we learned that the Kerrs built their castles backwards, so if they were invaded, and swordsmen were trying to come up the stairs, the invaders would have their right hands against the stone wall while the left-handed defenders had their swords on the free-swinging side. Pretty smart for simple-named people.

CONTINUING TRADITIONS: Daughter Katie Kennedy, the author and historian, bought a new mattress this week from a store called McGregor’s. She explained that since the McFarlands and McGregors used to go marauding together, stealing cattle and such, she thought she should continue the tradition of cooperation with them. She said they seemed… surprised.

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE LIVER: I saw that Seymour Halford died. We ran around with Seymour and Beverly a lot when we lived in Sterling, IL. Later, when we lived in Iron Mountain, MI and traveled to central IL and southern IN to see family and friends, we’d stop to see them, either coming or going. So I started to do my usual, notify mutual friends so we could grieve and remember together. Then I realized… Paul Blankenship, GL & Bettie Story, Larry Dunphee, Fred Congdon… all who knew both us and the Halfords are also dead. There is no one left to tell, no one with whom to share the grief and the memories… This is the first time this has happened. I suspect it won’t be the last.

WORK ETHIC: HOF College Football coach Tommy Bowden recently died at 91. In obit type comments, he was universally hailed as one who always had time for his players and other coaches. But I once heard his son say that the only high school game his father saw him play in was when he came to scout a player on the other team. American society, in general, lauds the “work ethic” of success, especially in sports. But the work ethic can work against other values.

SINGLE GIRLS: I got a Facebook friend request from someone claiming that her name is Rebekka Streicher and who says she has started a WhatsApp group [whatever that is] for “single girls who want good sex.” I’m sort of nostalgic for the olden days, when single girls who wanted good sex just kept quiet about it. I feel sort of bad for not accepting her request; I think she might profit from reading Christ In Winter.

NEW MOUSE: There’s nothing like a new mouse to make you realize how bad your old one was working. Talking computers, of course, although I guess it would apply to a psych lab, too. My mouse in Psych 101 had a green bottom, because it was lethargic and wouldn’t run the maze or do the other tests, so my lab partner, Gunther Lengnik, kept poking it in the behind with his fountain pen that had green ink. The mouse died, disrupting out lab reports considerably. I always suspected it had ink poisonings.

John Robert McFarland

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them but to be indifferent to them. that’s the essence of inhumanity.” George Bernard Shaw

 

 

 

MOVING ON FROM CANCER [R, 8-19-21]

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

“I read somewhere that people who went to support group had a 50% better chance of getting well. I read somewhere else that patients who kept a journal of their feelings had a 50% better chance of getting well. I’m no dummy. That’s 100%! So, I kept a journal of my feelings, and I went to support group.”

That was always part of my talk at cancer groups and conferences. I wanted to encourage cancer patients to keep journals and go to support group.

My journal became Now That I Have Cancer I Am Whole. My support group at Carle Cancer Center in Urbana, IL, became the source of so many inspiring friends. “Cancer survivor” became my identity.

When I started going to support group, it had been running for twenty years, started by Everett and Rae Endsley, when Everett was a lung cancer patient. With only a few necessary absences, they had come to every meeting for all those years, even though Everett had been declared cured long before. They always came, they said, just in case a new patient had come and no one else was there that night. They wanted to be sure every bewildered survivor had someone who would listen to their fears and hopes.

I was inspired by their commitment, their continuing part of the cancer community, their continuing identity as cancer survivors.

But I was also inspired by Lynn Ringer--the co-founder of CanSurmount, and the subject of the book, I’m A Patient, Too--who became a personal friend through a summer Helen and I spent at Iliff Theological Seminary in Denver. Lynn told us that summer that there had been a time when she had to step away from the cancer community, when she had to learn to be a person without that cancer survivor identity.

I didn’t quite understand that then. Cancer survivor was my identity! I didn’t think I could survive outside that community. It wasn’t just the support, but the affirmation. Going through old files now, I’m amazed at how that identity consumed me. Good grief, I saved a lot of cancer stuff!

I have whole file drawers of reviews of my cancer book, in all sorts of periodicals, from local to national. Whole pages from that book were often reprinted in newspapers and magazines and other books. Articles were written not just about the book but about me. I was interviewed on radio and TV stations from Texas to the Carolinas. It was translated into Czech and Japanese, and HarperAudio did a spoken edition. They were going to get Jerry Orbach to read it, but I felt it needed to be read by a cancer patient, specifically the author, and so sent them a tape. They agreed and flew Helen and me to NYC to record it.

 

I was invited to speak all over the country, and looking at the number of programs I saved from those conferences, apparently I never turned one down! There were so many that I don’t even remember some of them, but I know I went, because I also saved the airplane ticket stubs. Most of that was due to my book, but also I was listed in the speakers bureau for National Cancer Survivors Day.

I got hundreds of letters from patients, nurses, doctors, ministers, social workers, family members, writers--telling me how helpful my book or some conference presentation was, telling of their own experiences, asking me for prayers. Some were from well-known people in cancer circles: Bernie Siegel, Rachel Remen, Jim Valvano.

As time went by, I began to think more like Lynn than like Everett & Rae. My survivor identity would always be important to me, but I couldn’t live in it alone forever. I needed to move on from a cancer identity that was so exclusive of everything else, and I did.

I still needed to be in community, for we have identity only in relationships, but no community goes on forever.

Part of being old is fading out of the communities that had meaning for us in earlier times, both so that younger people can have their turn in those places, but also because it is a gift.

For a long time, I identified as a cancer survivor. I look at all the articles and fliers and programs and letters I saved, and I am reluctant to put them into the recycling bin, because that was such an important part of my life. But they don’t represent who I am now.

Now I’m a life survivor. It’s a good community to be part of. I don’t need mementoes, reminders, because I live in the eternal now.

John Robert McFarland

My pattern is to post a column every other day, but I’m not sure if I’ll be some place that I can post on Saturday, so…

 

DO YOU LOVE US AS MUCH [T, 8-17-21]

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

“That hurts my feelings,” I said, making a petulant face.

“Good,” she said. “I want to hurt you.”

Her name was Jasmine, and she was 8 years old.

The occasion was letter-writing session for the 7 to 9 year old girls at Howell Neighborhood House in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Jasmine, like the other girls, had written letters of thanks and appreciation to all the other social workers at HNH. Unlike the other girls, she had omitted me. She made sure I knew it.

I had the 7 to 9 boys, too. They called themselves The Wahoo Indian Tribe, and you could always tell where they were by their ringing cries of “Wahoooo!” The girls were quieter, and refused to give their group a name, and yelled only within our club room, but they were meaner. To one another, and to me.

I’d forgotten about how mean they were until I read the daily reports I had to write for Jon Regier and Ellsworth Shepherd, the head guys at HNH. I discovered my copies of the reports in an old file I hadn’t looked at in 63 years.

Those little girls hit me all the time. Never my face, but I think that was because I was over six feet tall and they couldn’t reach it. But they would hit my back, my arms, my legs. Whatever we were doing—making crafts, reading stories, playing table games or hopscotch—whenever one was close enough, she would take a swipe at me.

It didn’t seem to be a game or competition. They weren’t trying to one-up each other: “I can hit Mr. John more than you can.” It was just what they did.

The boys didn’t hit me. They were a wild and unruly bunch, but they evoked no particular desire to hurt, either me or one another, although they were always willing to fight if provoked.

The girls also fought one another, with great passion and nastiness, with personal animosity. It didn’t seem like they personally disliked me; they just wanted to hurt me. Why I didn’t know.

They were so mean to one new little girl that she cried and never returned. She was white, but I don’t think that was it. Lily, 9 years old and the undisputed leader of the group, was black, as was Jasmine, but there were 3 or 4 other white girls, and an equal number of Mexican and Puerto Rican girls, and another black girl occasionally. They were an equal-opportunity insult & injury organization.   

I, of course, did my best to protect that little girl that day, physically and emotionally. I tried to protect them all from one another, to foment peace, to teach them to respect one another, and everyone else. But I was only 21 years old, a farm boy college student summer social worker. Those little girls were far more experienced in the ways of the cruel world and mean streets than I was. If they wanted to hurt you, they knew how to do it.

This went on the whole summer, our little club meeting for two hours each day--mostly having fun, playing games and going places, disrespecting newcomers until they fought their way in—and me going to bed each night in my third-floor room with no air-conditioning or fan or window screen, but lots of bruises all over my body.

Then my last day. Time to return to my luxurious dorm room at IU, luxurious because there was a window screen, and nobody there tried to hurt me—except for girlfriends and professors, but their hurting did not include hitting.

 Jasmine handed me an envelope as she left that day. In it was a note. I am discarding most of the items in my old files. This one, though, I need to keep for a while. It said, “I love you. We all love you. Do you love us as much as we love you?”

John Robert McFarland

The photo above is HNH in the summer of 1958.

THE ONLY RATIONAL ACT [Sun, 8-15-21]

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

All I ever needed to know I learned by dying.

That is what I thought as I completed the second year after my cancer diagnosis.

My first oncologist told me I would probably be dead “in a year or two.” It was just a casual statement, a general idea, an approximation. But I seized on the idea of two. Two years sounded like so much more than one. I really wanted that second year.

So, with optimism, I worked on a two-year plan. Everything I needed to do to get ready to die had to be done in those two years. There were things I could not control. I had not walked my daughters down the aisle. I had not played trotty-horse with my grandchildren. But what I could control, I had to accomplish in only two years.

There were things I needed to do, first to deal with cancer, like chemotherapy, and then to deal with life, like taking out the garbage.

I did not have a bucket list, visiting Timbuktu, or sky-diving, or writing a novel. In the two years I had left, I needed to get ready to die by learning how to live.

Learning to live is the opposite of a bucket list. It is learning to be rather than to do.

That ran counter to everything I knew. You deal with life by doing. If that doesn’t work, you do other stuff, you do harder, you do more. You do. Even learning how to be instead of do—aren’t there routines and activities and disciplines you’re supposed to do to learn to be?

I can’t really tell you what happened that second year, except that I became aware of God’s presence, not God’s action. I didn’t need God to do something for me, I just needed God to be with me.

I think I had been misled into doing by the doctrine of “the substitutionary atonement,” Christ dying in my place. If God loves us, why does anyone need to die to satisfy the holiness? Christ on the cross is not a sacrifice, it is a symbol. God is saying, I love you all the way, not just through life, but through death. I’m not doing for you; I’m being with you. Love does not stop with death.

So, at the end of that second year, I died. Because I didn’t need to live any more. I died to the need to control, to understand, to accomplish. I had nothing more to do to make my peace with life. Everything in those two years taught me this: Love is the only rational act. I didn’t need to know anything else.

That was twenty-nine years ago. I still don’t need to know anything else.

John Robert McFarland

“Love is the only rational act” is attributed to Stephen Levine, but probably comes to most people through Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie, when the dying Morrie Schwartz quotes it.

 

STUCK IN THE WALL… FOREVER [F, 8-13-21]

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

My grandchildren, in their 20s, are too polite to say it, but they must get disgusted with me when I talk so much about when they were little, times that they can’t even remember. After all, that’s not who they are now. But, for me, it is. Yes, they are these bright young adults, but also, always, those delightful little laughers who sat on my lap as we read stories.

One day, back when we had only line phones, I called my friend and colleague, Jean Cramer-Heuerman, at her church building. There was an answering machine that announced she wasn’t there, but went on to give me their Sunday morning schedule, which included “Sunday School for persons of all ages.” I told the machine that I was a person of all ages, but I was busy on Sunday mornings so could not come. Jean, being a smart preacher, used that in a sermon, about how each of us is a person of all ages.

I was thinking this morning about getting my head stuck in the wall at Cedar Crest when I was about 3, maybe 4, because I am still a person of all ages.

Cedar Crest was the big old farm house on the edge of Oxford, OH where we lived off and on with Grandma and Grandpa Mac, and sometimes Uncle Glen and Aunt Mable and their girls, Patty and Joan [pronounced Joann], and sometimes Uncle Harvey and Aunt Helen, and their daughter, Elizabeth Ann, and the 3 bachelor uncles, Bob and Randall and Mike, who couldn’t get jobs because of the Great Depression, and so still lived at home, and slept on the sun porch. Whenever my father or Glen or Harvey was out of a job, we’d move back in to Cedar Crest.

Grandpa and Grandma supported everybody. Grandpa was the stationary engineer at Western College for Women, which is now part of Miami U, and Grandma was a maid and salad cook there. We kids would fix up a store in the old barn and stock it with stuff we took from Grandma’s room and make her come shopping at our store when she got off work and buy back her own stuff. She was an amazing woman.

Mother was busy being Grandma’s helper, for cooking and cleaning, so Uncle Randall was my main playmate and care-giver. He would ride me on his shoulders into town and back, and he taught me to play baseball.  He was then in his early 20s, about the age my grandson is now.

When I got my head stuck in the wall one day during Sunday dinner, it wasn’t exactly the wall. There was a niche for the ice box, with just enough room on one side of the ice box for a little boy’s head. “My nose was out of joint,” as the saying went in those days—soon to be really out of joint—because my sister, Mary V, four and ½ years older, got to eat white bread, the kind with all the nutrients processed out, while I was consigned to “brown” bread, for my mother declared that I was still growing and needed the nourishment. At 3 or 4, you so much want to be treated like you’re older. [Not so much at 83 or 84.] So I got up and stuck my head into that opening beside the ice box, to express my disgust with the ways of the world, and twisted my head sideways to see if anyone was watching. Then, when nobody seemed to care about my existential angst, I couldn’t get that sideways head out.

When I started wailing, everybody jumped up and tried to get me free, especially Grandma, who decided to free me by tearing the wall down, all five feet and 80 lbs of her pulling at the wall. Uncle Randall tried to calm everybody down while they figured out the best way. Mother, of course, just grabbed me and yanked me out, which, as I said, was how my nose got even more out of joint. She always teased Grandma about how silly she was to think she could move the wall. I was totally on Grandma’s side.

When the first edition of my cancer book was published, Aunt Gertrude found Uncle Randall crying as he read it. “He’s okay now,” she reminded him. “I just didn’t know he hurt so much,” replied Uncle Randall.

I’m sure he wasn’t thinking of that 53 year old man on chemo, but remembering the little boy stuck in the wall.

John Robert McFarland

Western College for Women

 

ODDS & ENDS IV—DON’T TELL THE OTHERS [W, 8-11-21]

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

In his book about driving a school bus for 15 years in retirement, old college friend Bob Parsons quotes Garrison Keillor when he was asked if Lake Wobegon actually exists: “Yes, it does. It’s Minnesota that doesn’t actually exist.”

Daughter Katie Kennedy is upset by the deplorable parenting today. “They aren’t teaching their children how to make a prank call right. We had one today at the library. They said there was a dead rabbit in the restroom. I knew it was a prank because our cleaning lady hardly ever leaves dead rabbits in the restroom.”

My niece, Kira Vermond, the great Canadian writer, has been staying on vacation in the Monsieur Jean Hotel in Quebec. She says there is a machine in the lobby where, when you press a button, a short story pops out!

[From my poetry journal for 8-4-21]

They say to trust the moment

Which is, I think,

The same as trusting God

For if God is here at all

It is not in the minutes

Ticking time away

Or the movements

God’s unknown actions passing

But in the moments

When time stands down

When God is

The still point

In the turning world

 

Helen looked up from her crossword puzzle at the TV screen and was not surprised to see a baseball game featuring the Cincinnati Reds. “The Pirates… isn’t that the team we saw the Reds play on our honeymoon?” [I was always a romantic.] “Yes, dear,” I said. “Just think," she said, "the players on the screen now, they weren’t even born at the time of our honeymoon game… wait, their fathers weren’t even born then…” That kind of puts age into perspective. [BTW, in that honeymoon game, we saw the Reds hand Pirates’ pitcher, Elroy Face, his only loss that year, when he went 19-1.]

Author and former CIA operative, Cindy Otis, wonders how some people are able to believe that the pandemic is a hoax and also a sign of the second coming of Jesus.

We have a friend who has twice cancelled social events because some of the guests refused to get vaccinated. That is necessary for all of us to do, I think, both as a safety precaution and as a witness.

I cringe a bit when someone follows the Bible reading in worship with “This is the word of God.” Unless it’s the Gospel reading; that IS the Word of God, because for Christians, Christ is the Word, God speaking to us. But what about some Hebrew Bible pericope where the Israelites are told by God to go into some non-Hebrew village and kill everybody there, including the children. Is THAT the Word of God? Just because it’s in the Bible? That’s how right-wing so-called “evangelicals” justify all sorts of evil—It’s in the Bible! I’ve always used, after reading scripture in worship, “May God bless to our understanding this reading from the scripture.” I like that better than calling it “the word of God.”

I look at the obits each day in three different newspapers online. I like to see the photos of people who have “gone to their reward,” and read about their lives. So often, I feel sorrow at their passing, even though I did not know them, because they look happy, or thoughtful, or, ironically, full of life. I think “the communion of saints” includes far more folks than I know.

When she was a nun, scholar Karen Armstrong went to her mother superior and said, “I’m sorry, but so much of what we say we believe is just wrong.” Mother Superior replied, “I know, but don’t tell the others.”

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

SHOES & LOVE [M, 8-9-21]

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

[If you came to read the column on the “Pray Away” movie, just scroll down.]

We heard an elderly couple talking about their new, smaller, one-story house. “It’s our ‘shuffle’ house,” they said.

Yes, old people need a house where they can do “the safety shuffle.” [I don’t know why I put that in quotes, since I just thought it up myself. But a quote seems to have more credibility.]

I don’t pick up my feet very well as I walk. Mostly I shuffle and scrape. It’s not just because of old age. I never was good at picking up my feet, even as a child. I know because I remember well my parents saying, “Pick up your feet! You’ll wear out your shoes! We can’t afford any more! You’ll have to go barefoot.”

I liked having shoes. I never enjoyed going barefoot. In part, that was because my mother often told the story of her uncle, Ellis Dill, who stepped on a rusty nail and died of tetanus. So I didn’t mind taking care of my shoes. Thus I tried to pick up my feet. I really did. Never got any good at it, though. Even in basketball, and baseball, and pickle ball, and long-distance running. When our daughters were in high school, their friends called me “The Red Phantom,” because they saw me in the park, wearing red running shoes and just gliding along, barely above the ground.

I never wanted a lot of shoes. Because I learned early to take good care of my shoes, they last a long time. Some that I wear regularly now are more than 40 years old. So, I never was a “shoes horse,” although we had a horse, Prince, that got new shoes more often than I did growing up. He deserved them; he picked up his feet very nicely, especially when he saw my father coming with the harness. Then he would pick up those shoes and run to the middle of the pond, where Daddy could not get him. [Yes, we always called him Daddy, even when we were in our 60s.] Of course, Daddy would get mad, and wade in after him. Prince would wait until he was almost there, then pick up those feet with a great splashing and run out the other side of the pond, where I was supposed to dodge those flashing metal shoes, and his big yellow teeth, and grab him around the neck and hold him. Needless to say, that didn’t work, and then Daddy was mad at both of us.

 

There was an inconsistency there that befuddled both Prince and me, since Daddy wanted low stepping for Prince and high stepping for me.

I preferred to think of my low-foot gait not as laziness or inability but as efficiency. Maybe that’s why personal efficiency has always been a hobby for me. I try to button my shirt and tie my shoes and put stuff in my pockets in just the right order and manner for minimum outlay of energy and use of time. No, it’s not OCD--or CDO, the way it should be—but a hobby.

Love is hardly ever efficient, which is why God, who is Love, is so hard to understand. We humans want efficiency, even when it looks like the opposite, such as more effective booze and drugs that will help us escape our own lives in the most efficient way. God, Love, does not come in orderly fashion, just pops up whenever our efficiency—in either righteousness or profligacy-- has broken down. When our souls have gotten holes and we need new shoes.

“When I get to heaven, gonna put on my shoes, gonna walk all over God’s heaven…”

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

PRAY THE GAY AWAY?

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

Helen and I watched the “Pray Away” film last night, about Reparative Therapy [RT], the attempt to convert gay people to straight. Our church is going to show it this weekend, but we couldn’t wait. Well, okay, we just got a smart TV, with Netflix built in, and we wanted to use it. Took only four hours--two for smart people to figure out a smart TV, and two to watch the film.

As a student of story-telling, I have some quibbles with the way this film goes at telling the story of Reparative Therapy, but that’s not the issue. Besides, Ken Burns can’t do every documentary.

The film focuses on the stories of former leaders of the RT movement who realized that what they were doing was both harmful and unnecessary.

First, the great harm that RT does. Young gay people who have undergone RT are twice as likely to commit suicide as those who have not. RT tries to make people into something they cannot be, tries to get them to live dishonest lives. Reparative therapy doesn’t work because it can’t work. Our sexual identity is no more a choice than our race is.

To their credit, the RT folk do not claim that homosexuality is a “choice,” like choosing which shirt to wear. They agree that it is a psychological necessity. They have developed a pseudo-scientific, circular psychological profile of gay people—distant fathers, smother mothers, childhood abuse, etc. If a gay person protests and says, “But my parents are nice and supportive, and I was never abused,” the RT people say, “Well, you must have forgotten or misunderstood.” But now you have a choice, they say: you can leave that past behind and come to Jesus, “just pray the gay away.”

I agree that we always have the choice to come to Jesus. As Paul Tournier, the Swiss physician said, “You are never too young or too old to give your life to Christ. After that, what else is there to do to get ready to die?”

But giving one’s life to Christ is salvation to our true identity, to who we really are, to the way God has made us—black or white, tall or short, gay or straight, smart or simple…

That brings us to the second main point: RT distorts the Gospel, the Good News, of Christ. As I watched, I envied the fellowship and support that RT gave to the people it was trying to “help.” I almost wanted to declare myself gay so that I could join in their prayer circles and fellowship. I kept thinking how wonderful it would be if those same RT people were trying to help lost people be found people rather than gay people be straight people. Lostness afflicts everyone, straight or gay. We need salvation not from our sexual identity but from our lostness. I loved the fellowship and support the RT folks gave, but it was bound to fail, because it was directed to the wrong ends. People can be converted from lost to found, but not from gay to straight.

The center of the film, the turning point, was when the RT leaders sat with and really listened to the stories that gay folks told of how badly they had been hurt by RT. The leader of Exodus International--the main, megaton RT organization--was so moved that he decided to close the Exodus organization rather than do more harm. [That, of course, did not end the RT movement. Other RT organizations are still quite active.]

The ex-RT leaders featured in the film, those who have repented of the harm they did, were not vengeful or mean toward their ex-colleagues. They pointed out that RT people are not evil or malicious, in their hearts or intents. They really believe that they are doing good, while they are doing harm.

That’s a real dilemma for those of us who need to confront RT and its supporters. How do you do reparative therapy on a wolf in sheep’s clothing who doesn’t even know it’s a wolf? How do you help people understand that sexual identity is not a choice, and not a psychological condition because of the way you were raised, but simply the way you are? That’s difficult, because RT people need to believe that gay people can be changed. It gives them purpose.

Having a purpose for life is a good thing. It’s such a shame that the considerable energies and sympathies of the RT people aren’t used to pray us toward one another and toward our own true selves instead of trying to “pray away.”

I am hopeful, for I know many people, young and old, who have been converted from homophobia to acceptance, from passion to compassion, from “pray away” to “please stay.”

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

ODDS & ENDS III [R, 8-5-21]

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

We heard of a woman we’ll call Patty. She moved to a new city and had to go through that awful ordeal of finding new medical people. Her new gyno was running down her list, and at one question, Patty said, “Well, it’s not too bad.” The doc looked befuddled, and it took them a while to figure out that when the gyno asked, “Are you in a monogamous relationship?” Patty heard, “Are you in a monotonous relationship?”

Do you do this, too? If I get an email headed “Read this. Don’t delete,” I automatically delete it.

Going through old files, including programs and bulletins and news articles from occasions when I was the speaker, I’m pleased that I was often referred to as “a great story-teller.” As pleasing as it is, it’s not really accurate. I wasn’t a good story-teller; I just told good stories.

I always reminded myself [and sometimes other preachers]: If you’re telling a good story—and there’s no point in telling any other kind—get out of the way and let the story tell itself.

Nikki Giovanni: “Writers don’t write from experience. If they did, they’d get maybe one book and three poems. They write from empathy.” I think in any relationship—God, spouse, child, friend--it is important not so much to trust what we have learned through experience about what makes a relationship good, but simply to trust to empathy.

“As we get older, heroes are harder to find, but we still need them.” Ernest Hemmingway.

Following up on that Hemmingway quote… the remarkable Rita Moreno, a super-ager at almost 90, said that as a girl growing up, she had no role models. When she got to play Anita in “West Side Story,” though, Anita became her role model. Anita was who she wanted to be. If you need a hero, play the role.

“If a gospel is preached without opposition, it is simply not the gospel that resulted in the cross. It is not, in short, the gospel of love.” Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves From the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic

Working your way out of poverty either makes you compassionate toward or contemptuous of others in poverty.

“In a religion, the savior dies for the people. In a cult, the people die for the savior.”

Daughter Katie heard of an academic department that was hiring a new professor. They had it narrowed down to three candidates to interview personally. The first went fine, until supper, when the candidate’s plate of spaghetti was finished, and he lifted the plate and licked it. The second went fine, until the candidate asked if the university had a policy against having sex with students. The third went fine, until the candidate asked if the local black people behaved themselves. When the committee met, the chair said, “Well, I guess we’re hiring the plate licker.” Everybody else just nodded.

So, we have a new phrase at our house, for accepting the realities of old age: I guess we’re hiring the plate licker.

John Robert McFarland

INSPIRATION FOR STARTING SCHOOL [T, 8-3-21]

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

I was walking by Mattie’s house Monday morning, a little before 7:30. She was pulling out of her drive to go to the school where she teaches 4^th grade. First day of school for teachers. Kids report tomorrow [W].

I said, “I hope you don’t have to hear an inspirational speaker.” She lilted back, “Oh, I do. Someone who’s never taught…”

She’s young, but she’s been through first days before. She knows the drill. So do I, because I am married to a woman who was a classroom teacher.

It’s bad enough when you have to teach during a pandemic--in a state that thinks teachers like Mattie are overpaid and underworked, and that no one should get vaccinated or wear a mask—but it adds insult to insult to have to listen to an inspirational speaker on your first day, when there are a hundred things you could be doing in your classroom that would be more productive of good education. At least, that’s what Helen always said when she came home from that first day.

The most inspirational speaker at Helen’s high school was the otherwise not particularly noticeable social studies teacher, Pierce Pickins. The teachers would gather in the office in the morning before school, getting coffee, checking mail, chatting. Anything to avoid going to their classrooms. Finally, they knew for whom the bell tolled, and Pierce would say, drolly, “Well, let’s go stamp out ignorance.”

So they would go off, each alone, to a separate classroom, but also as part of a team, the team that would stamp out ignorance.

Paul Baker is now a Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, at IL State U, but he started there right after he finished his PhD at Duke, just as I started there as the Methodist campus minister. We’ve been friends all these years. Paul’s field was the sociology of education. He says, “Teaching has the highest dropout rate of any profession. It’s so very hard, and so undervalued and appreciated. But there is one thing that keeps teachers in—the comradeship of their fellow teachers. Better pay is nice, supportive administrators are nice, but they won’t make the difference. If teachers feel like they’re on a team, that does it.”

Helen was blessed with a teaching partner for the last 20 years of her career, the years she taught high school. She was 20 years older than Kathy, who had just started teaching. Helen had lots of experience, but it was in university teaching, which is quite different from high school, especially Home Ec, where you are also a social worker, dealing with all the pregnant girls who are afraid to tell their parents, and the boys who have been thrown out of their house by their mother’s new boyfriend. It was a highly productive partnership. Kathy furnished the enthusiasm, and Helen furnished the experience. Together they were a formidable team. There was no problem that together they could not solve… until the school day started. But each time they ran into a brick wall—recalcitrant parents, uninterested students, neglectful administrators—they would look at each other and say, “We’re still good people!” They were a team.

I think I’ll see if Mattie can get me on as the inspirational speaker for her school next year. It will be a short speech. I’ll say, “You’re still good people. Now go stamp out ignorance.”

John Robert McFarland

 

THE EMERGENCY SERMON [Sun, 8-1-21]

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

It’s Sunday morning, so, as always, I am thinking about my emergency sermon. Not actually preparing it, since I don’t know what the Bible text or the title are for the sermon listed in the bulletin, but simply getting ready, just in case. I have done this every Sunday morning when I was scheduled to sit in the pew rather than stand in the pulpit for… I’d say fifty years.

It started in Rutland, Vermont, on a family vacation, when our daughters were quite small. It was Sunday morning, so we had sought out the nearest Methodist church. The worship service starting time came and went, with all the worshippers waiting in the pews while the organist played the longest prelude ever heard in The Green Mountain State. The ushers formed a scrum and whispered urgently to one another. I figured out the problem. I went to the ushers and told them I was a Methodist preacher and willing to preach, since it was clear the expected preacher had not shown.

They were relieved. The regular pastor was on vacation, and a guy from another town was supposed to fill in, but he had not shown, and hadn’t answered his phone. [No cell phones then.] They took me to the pastor’s study and got me outfitted in a pulpit robe and stole, which I felt was unnecessary, but that was a time when men, especially preachers and ushers, wore suits to church, and I was in vacation clothes.

I didn’t have any particular idea about what to preach, but I was always working on a sermon in my mind. I figured I’d just start with the Bible reading listed in the bulletin and go from there.

That’s when the fill-in preacher finally showed. He hadn’t answered his phone at home because he was on his way. He thought he was early. He had forgotten that the Rutland church had gone to a summer schedule, an hour advanced. Another good reason why churches should never change worship times. It was the only time I was defrocked.

I was disappointed. I wanted to see what the spirit would come up with for me to preach. As I listened, I was pretty sure that what that late preacher came up with after a week’s preparation was no better than I would have come up with then and there.

I’m older now, not nearly as sure of the quality of my preaching as I was when younger. Then I was sort of like the young preacher who said to his wife on the way home after church, “I wonder how many really great preachers there are.” “One less than you think,” she said.

Still, every Sunday of pew sitting, I have considered what to do if the pulpit were suddenly vacant, if the preacher got sudden-onset laryngitis. That happened only once, the last year before I retired--at a rather large, formal Saturday wedding--when the wife of the pastor in the next town called me in a panic and said, “They’re in the church and Mike suddenly lost his voice. How quickly can you get here?”

That wasn’t really a challenge. Just read the service from the Book of Worship, which I knew from heart from doing it so many times. Weddings don’t usually have a sermon [homily] anyway.

So, they seemed quite surprised when the preacher they’d never even seen before launched into one. Everybody there said it was really good for spur of the moment. Spur of the moment? Ha! I’d been preparing that sermon for fifty years. The one about love.

John Robert McFarland

“There is no marriage in heaven, but there is love.” Sarah Brown in Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.