NAMING THE DECADES [W, 10-19-21]

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

Beware. This column is a self-indulgent look at the years of my own life. My justification is that it might serve as a model or motive for you in understanding your own years. Besides, it’s Helen’s fault.

Our IU Wesley Foundation and SMU theology school friend, Bob Parsons, recently asked for a recommendation for a book on the Holy Spirit [HS], because someone else had asked him for one. There are not a lot of books specifically on the HS, so we recommended to her volume 3 of Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology.

 Helen, who is famous as the creator and chief practitioner of “Home Ec Theology,” asked me to summarize the 1500 or so pages of Tillich’s systematic theology “in a sentence or two.” So, I did: God is the ground of being. We are accepted, even though we are unacceptable, because we are a part of that ground.

Which got me to thinking about the ways of the HS in the different volumes of my life…

When I was in college and campus ministry, Tillich was having a renaissance, especially because of his book of sermons, The Shaking of the Foundations, especially because of the sermon there entitled simply “You Are Accepted.” For college students, yearning to be accepted but sure they were unacceptable, that was truly a word of grace.

There were other religious thinkers who had a significant impact on us in those years. Martin Buber’s I and Thou was a work we all read, or tried to, or claimed we did. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was just as important and easier to read, because it was more narrative and heart-grabbing. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic was forty years old, which to students is an eon, but out in a new paperback, and his critiques of church and society were as accurate then [and now, in 2021] as they were in the 1910s, when he was a young, single pastor of the German Evangelical Denomination, in the newly burgeoning industrial city of Detroit. C.S. Lewis pulled us in with The Screwtape Letters and the Narnia series and then led us to Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy.  

Well, I’m at 400 words, and I try not to go over 500, so I’ll just give a brief look at the life stages and then fill them out more completely in the next column…

The Kingdom Years [ages 0-10] because Jesus says one must be like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The Yearning Years [ages 10-20], longing for a place to belong. The Learning Years [20-30], learning to be a father and husband and preacher. The Adult Years [30-40] Leaning to be an adult while a campus minister and grad student. The Running/Professional Years [40-50], running faster and longer as a professional as well as a road runner. The Cancer Years [50-60]. The Family Years [60-80] care-giver for parents, wife, grandchildren, etc. The Soul Years [80…] soul work, preparing to die.

Each decade is not clearly defined, sometimes starting early or spilling over late by a year or two. But what name would you give to each of your decades?

John Robert McFarland

“To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.” Albert Camus