ORIENTATION TO LIFE [M, 9-20-21]

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

66 years ago today, I started classes at Indiana University, following a week of orientation. [Yes, we started late in those days!]

In many ways, that day concluded the best week of my life. That’s a dangerous thing to say. What about the week I got married, the weeks when my children and grandchildren were born, the week I was ordained? I didn’t say that it was the most important week, just the best! Because I felt freer than I ever had before. During orientation week, I was free of all other responsibilities.

Oh, yes, I had to go to meetings, and register for classes, and walk over to the Rogers Center dining room to work as a bus boy, but those were all new, and fun. I did not have to try to make my parents happy, or meet the expectations of people who had known me before. I was a new and free character--a college man. I could be whoever I wanted to be. That orientation week marked the time when I came out of a cocoon and learned that I had wings.

Recently someone, probably Charlie Nelms on Twitter, pointed out that black people use a huge amount of energy trying to keep white folks from feeling uncomfortable. When white people are uncomfortable with black folks, we act out, trying to get back to a comfort level, in ways that are not good for black people.

It reminded me of how I did that with my parents. Throughout their lives, really, but especially when I was a kid living at home. I used so much energy trying to keep them from being uncomfortable, trying to make them happy. I even dropped out of high school to go to work in a factory to make money for our nonexistent budget.

I didn’t think of it then as particularly onerous. It was just life, the way I had always known it. A lot of black folks are like that, too. It’s just more comfortable for them to keep white people comfortable. Uncle Tom.

Then, one day in mid-July, I ran into classmate Jim Shaw, who said, “Let’s drive up to IU and see if they’ll let us in.” It sounded like something to do.

So there I was, standing in lines in the field house to register for classes, picking up my ROTC            uniform, borassing [1] in Linden Hall with my roommate, Tom Cone, and Max Eubanks and Jon Stroble and Jim McKnight, going to a mixer with the girls at Cedar Hall, buying books at The Nathan Hale Store, walking downtown with my new friends to the Princess Theater to see “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing…”

It was a week that would change my life, orientate me to a whole new world. It’s a world with more questions than answers, more problems than solutions, but it’s a world where I am free to look for the answers and to work on the solutions.

The key word there is “free.” Freedom is scary, but it is what finally makes us comfortable.

John Robert McFarland

1] Borassing is a term much-studied by linguists. It simply means sitting around talking. No one knows its provenance nor the reason for its persistence. Strangely, it is confined almost entirely to Indiana University.

[The Tom Atkins column is the next one down.]