ODDS & ENDS XV: Advent Greetings, Public Pianos, Land Lines, Random Order [M, 11-29-21]

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

[To get to the column about PATH, you need to scroll down past this one.]

A GREETING FOR ADVENT

There are greetings for all holidays/seasons, except for Advent. Merry Christmas. Happy Birthday. Etc. Advent is just neglected. So I have been trying to establish a new tradition by saying to people, “Have an Average Advent.” That would be about the most we can expect from Advent. I mean, it’s not supposed to be “Merry” or “Happy.” And it coincides with “The Christmas Shopping Season,” which is a much more hallowed period. However, my new greeting doesn’t seem to be catching on. 

 

PUBLIC PIANOS

Curiously, for a place that boasts the best university music school in the world, Bloomington has not had a public piano program. Until now. Partially in response to pandemic isolation, The Jacobs IU School of Music has placed ten pianos in public places around town. In addition to playing them, anyone who wants to decorate one is invited to do so. A lot of people have taken piano lessons, but it’s the rare home, the rare apartment especially, that actually has a piano. Now an old scales player can just sit down at BuffaLouie’s or Soma Coffee or the library and see how much of Fur Elise they remember. Live public music automatically builds community, with social distancing pretty much built in.

A WAYWARD LINE

When the crying and the gasping were all done, and every phone had butt-dialed 911…In my notes… I guess it was the start of a poem… I don’t know why…

 

THE LAST LAND LINE

From the time we moved from Indianapolis, to the farm, I have never been without a land-line telephone. We never had a phone before, in Oxford or Indianapolis. Used the neighbor’s if there were an emergency. Our crank phone [no, not for making crank calls, although that was done occasionally] was already in the house when we moved to the farm, or we probably would not have paid for it. Fourteen families on one line, a “party” line, which was well named, since most of the partying done by neighbors was through listening to the conversations of other people. There was a phone in my room at college, too.

We still have one. I think we are the only people in Bloomington who still have a land line. We land line people are considered by mobile-only people to be so out of it. But a land line is important, so that we can call our cell phones when we have mislaid them, to trace them to their hiding places by following their ring. Also, God prefers the security of a land line when calling on people for secret missions. If you are a mobile-only person, that may be why you haven’t heard from God for a while.

THE RANDOMNESS OF ASTROBIOLOGY 

I’m always surprised that scientists like astrobiologists are surprised at the randomness of life—if I’d sat at a different desk I would have met a different boy and then… if I’d been driving down a different highway… if the earth had one more helium atom… if I had taken the road more traveled… 

 Of course, life is random. Theologically thinking, which scientists like astrobiologists usually don’t, we are surprised at randomness because of the writer of Genesis: God created order out of chaos. But just as you can’t have faith without doubt, you can’t have order without randomness. Randomness is a type of order. An omnipotent and omniscient God, an orderly Creator, is not at odds with randomness in human life at all. In fact, I think she rather enjoys it.

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

 

 

CREATING “HELP” [Thanksgiving weekend, Nov. 26, 2011]

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

I was always better at thinking up ways to get stuff done than I was at actually doing it, so on this Thanksgiving weekend, I give my own thanks for all those, especially Helen, who took my ideas and turned them into reality.

In continuing to cull old files, so that my children will not have to when I die, I went through the folder that had newspaper clippings from our days in Normal, IL, when I was the campus minister of The Wesley Foundation at IL State U. One of the clippings announces the formation of a new social service agency called HELP, and names me as the director. That was a bit of a surprise. I know that I started HELP, and I guess I sort of acted as director in the beginning, but I only remember getting the idea and calling some people together and… letting them do the work.

Now it seems so audacious of me. Well, it was. I guess I was just too young and inexperienced to understand that.

Students came to me with all sorts of problems—psychological, financial, social. Everything from “I’m pregnant” to “My dad is in the hospital and I need a ride to home” to “I’m hungry and I’ve got no money for food,” to “The cops just arrested me and they’ll let me go if you’ll come down and take me home.” [All real examples]

I knew there were a lot of people with problems who had no preacher they could call on. So, I thought of HELP.

My idea was to create a database of volunteers who would be on call for various kinds of needs—a ride to the doctor, finding a place for a homeless person to spend the night, getting a battered wife or abused child to a place of shelter, etc. We’d have a 24 hour help line, for any kind of help. Hence, the name, HELP.

There were social service agencies, but the average person in need, especially emergency/immediate need, had no idea how to access them, or even that they existed. We needed a central place where a person could make one call and not just get a referral, but get help, now.

So I started asking around among clergy friends if they had folks in their church who might be interested in starting such a service. Eventually I had a dozen or so names. I called them up and asked them to come to a meeting. I outlined my idea to them. They liked it and said, “Let’s do it.”

There were telephone booths in those days. I envisioned all of them with a sticker on the phone saying, “Need help? Call 252-HELP.” But on campus we already had a 24-hour suicide counseling service called PATH, Personal Assistance Telephone Help, started by our sister campus ministry of the Presbyterians and Disciples. I hated to give up the name HELP, because it said it all, but it made sense to use the PATH line, because it was already in place and staffed.

The elegant Karin Bone, wife of retired ILSU president, Robert, for whom the ILSU Student Center is named, gave HELP instant credibility at the start by being our first volunteer driver, ferrying old ladies to the doctor, going out at night to rescue stranded students.

I looked at the online PATH page just now. It includes click buttons for United Way [where the telephone is answered now], Human Services Online Database, Homeless Services, Adult Protective Services, and Suicide Crisis Service. The database has links to over 20 different groups and agencies.

I saved the newsletter of Jan, 1972, one of the last before I moved away to do doctoral study at U of Iowa.  It was still called HELP, and had a telephone number of 452-5945, so, apparently, we had not switched over to the PATH number yet. The newsletter notes that services rendered were 27.5 % higher than in the same period the year before, and transportation included 425 medical, 148 MARC center [“developmental disabilities”], 12 school, 6 to Girl Scouts, and 25 Other, for a total of 616. “Additional services rendered: accompanying case workers out of town, visits to the elderly, tutoring, babysitting, information.”

The newsletter goes on: “Miss Grace Ackerson, one of our HELP recipients, wrote this shortly before she died:

            Mrs. Cohen drove me down the path I so much needed to go

            For in my aftermath, I am as poor as Job’s turkey

            Took along her girl and boy named Neal

            Whose curly head and mischievous eye would

                        steal your very heart away

            Are God’s children on this earth

            And there is no dearth

            Of one’s wanting the right life

            May they never know strife.”

 

John Robert McFarland

“In that you have done it to one of the least of these, you have done it unto me.” Jesus of Nazareth

 

 

 

GIVING THANKS FOR FRIENDS: MISSING JEAN [W, 11-24-21]

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

When Thanksgiving comes around, I remember with thankfulness friends who graced my life. So it is with Jean.  When Jean, my friend and colleague, died, after two bouts with cancer, she was only 44. She was already, though, the senior minister at a large and prestigious university church.

Despite our age and gender and experience gaps, Jean and I were close friends, for three primary reasons. 1] We had worked on a number of denominational programs together, including a mission trip to Nicaragua during Ronald Reagan’s Contra war there, and we had learned to respect each other. 2] This was a time when women were still fairly new in the ministry, and not everyone was accepting of female clergy. I had a reputation as being a supporter of women in church ministry. I became a campus minister only eight years after the Methodist church agreed to ordain women, and I immediately started encouraging girls in my campus ministry groups to consider the ministry. Some went to seminary and into the clergy ranks. I treated my women colleagues as equals, and they appreciated it. 3] Most importantly, Jean and I went through cancer and cancer treatments together. That’s a special bonding experience. We pastored each other.

Nobody knew how to deal with her death. Pastors don’t usually die in harness, and if they do, it’s when they are getting close to the end of their career. So nobody, including me, had any experience with helping a church through that. With no one better available, the bishop and cabinet [all the District Superintendents together] asked me to do grief work with Jean’s staff and congregation.

What I found at her church after Jean’s death was confounding dysfunction. The congregation wasn’t too bad. The members just had to grieve the death of their pastor. The staff—about a dozen people-- was a different matter. They were children bickering about the inheritance when the parent has died. I finally blurted out, “This is the most dysfunctional staff I have ever seen. Don’t you have any respect for Jean at all?” That got their attention.

 

The worst was the associate pastor, an ambitious young man who had transferred from another conference shortly before because he wanted to be in a university church. Despite the bishop’s instructions, he didn’t even want to let me into the pulpit to talk with the congregation. It was his turn to preach, and he was going to do it!

I had some slight sympathy with him. I was a campus minister for a lot of years, and was usually allowed into the campus church pulpit only a couple of times a year. That’s hard on someone who feels “called to preach.” Associates are usually a little better off. If they have an understanding senior pastor, they get to preach once a month or so.

But this was a special circumstance. His senior pastor had just died. But he had prepared a sermon that had nothing to do with that, and, barely mentioning Jean, he went ahead and preached it. The congregation sat there in disbelief. I had ten minutes at the end of that service to try to deal with the only thing that really mattered right then. I don’t know what happened to that young man, but he was not in our conference very long after that.

There’s no point to this column. It’s just that I miss Jean, and I’m thankful that she was my  friend, and I’m still a little bit angry at myself, for not being a better friend to her, by being a better grief counselor to her church, so I am taking my lingering grief anger out on her dysfunctional staff, especially her hapless young associate. We all share in the dysfunction and displacement that comes with the death of someone we love or count on.

 I miss Jean, so I wanted to tell you about her. She was so talented, so committed. She could have done so much more good had she lived. As we sat in the backs of committee rooms together, making each other laugh when we shouldn’t, it never occurred to me that she, so much younger than I, would go first. Any memory of someone who made you laugh is a gift, and a sign that death, regardless of its seeming finality, does not conquer love. I give thanks for friends.

John Robert McFarland

“In choosing what is difficult, we are free.” Wendell Berry

 

THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP--BRUCE & EUGENIA JOHNSON [M, 11-22-21]

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

“You look lost,” the tall, handsome young man said to me. “I am,” I replied. I’m new here.” “Follow me,” he said. “I’ll get you where you need to be.” That was when I began to learn the difference between good advice and a savior. [1]

Bruce Johnson was the first person I met at Garrett Theological Seminary, at Northwestern U, as I wandered in the hallway looking for the registrar. [2] We graduated together in 1964, and he was appointed to Armitage Ave. Methodist Church, on the near north side of Chicago. On Sept. 29, 1969, Bruce and Eugenia [nee Ransier], his wife, were murdered in their home, stabbed many times, Bruce sitting in his rocking chair and Genie in bed. Their three little children asleep in their beds. The murders of their parents were discovered the next morning, when the letter carrier found the two-year old sitting on the porch steps with blood on his bare feet.

Their murders are still not solved, in part because Chicago officials have shown little interest in doing so.

 

Bruce was a controversial preacher. His congregation was mostly conservative Cuban refugees from Castro. But the neighborhood had a lot of Puerto Rican folks. They did not mix well. Bruce became a friend of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican street gang that had become an agency for equal justice and opportunity in Chicago. Bruce said, “I’m trying to make them Christians, and they’re trying to make me a communist. We’ll see.”

 

Together, the Young Lords and Bruce protested Mayor Daley’s forcing seventy thousand poor and non-white people from the Lincoln Park area, so that developers could make big bucks by “gentrifying” the area, and so that institutions like DePaul University could expand at little cost.

As part of their attempt to stabilize the neighborhood, the Young Lords wanted to set up a day care center at Armitage Ave. Church. Bruce agreed. The congregation balked, though, and asked the city to evaluate the building as inadequate. The city agreed, citing $10,000 in costs to bring it up to code for day care. Against all odds, the Young Lords raised the money, but… two of the leaders of the Young Lords were shot by the police, even though unarmed…and, well, especially now, in the wake of the Rittenhouse and McMichael trials, you know the story.

This was in the turmoil of the 1960s—the turmoil of school desegregation, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Selma, the assassination of MLK, Viet Nam... Bruce and Genie were murdered when they were only 31 years old, shortly after the Chicago police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Chicago police had earned their reputation as a white supremacist force that enforced “the law” any way they wanted, on any one they didn’t like. They didn’t like the Young Lords.

 

At the 50 year anniversary of their murder, it was not their seminary or their church that organized a memorial celebration for Bruce and Genie, but the Young Lords.

 

Bruce Johnson had every advantage in American society. He came from a wealthy family. He was tall and handsome and straight and white. But he took Christianity with utmost seriousness. Jesus was his model as he tried to live out what it meant to be a Christian pastor in a difficult neighborhood in difficult times. Just like Jesus, he was on the side of the dispossessed…even if it meant crucifixion.

When Thanksgiving comes around, I give thanks for Bruce and Genie and their witness. I try to find some thing I can do for someone who struggles, as a living memorial to my friends. The cost of my discipleship is rather small compared to theirs, but it keeps their memory alive, at least for me.

John Robert McFarland

1] There is a story of a minister who had been appointed to a community just like Cedar Lake, IN, where I lived and pastored during my years at Garrett. All the streets had funny water-themed names, and dead-ended into the lake, so it was hard to find your way to where you needed to go. One lost day he asked a man in a pickup truck for directions. “Follow me, and I’ll take you there,” the man said. The preacher said it was on that day that he learned the difference between good advice and a savior.

2] I had been thrown out of Dallas, TX, for integrating the Methodist community center Helen and I directed, and so left Perkins School of Theology, at SMU. In 1961, I started preaching at Cedar Lake and Creston, in the Calumet District of the Northwest Indiana Conference of The Methodist Church, getting ready to do the 65 mile [each way] daily commute to Garrett.

 

 

 

 

I WASN’T WHO I THOUGHT I WAS [Sat, 11-20-21]

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

 

[Self-indulgent navel gazing again, and too long, so caveat emptor.] 

One of the tasks of old age is looking over your life and accepting it. Yes, that’s who I am, “warts and all.” I never understood myself very well. I thought I did, but…

Up to old age, I probably would have described myself as calm, patient, cerebral, logical, careful. In truth, I was hasty, impatient, emotional, and foolhardy. It has been a wrench to get turned around to see my life as it really was. I was primarily an impulsive and audacious guy.

My impulsiveness and audacity sometimes made trouble for me and for others, but I have to accept it—that’s who I was. I guess it’s who I am still, except I have fewer opportunities for rash actions now.

It started when I was 14. Impulsively, I promised God I would be a preacher if “He” would save my sister’s life. What followed wasn’t entirely my fault; I mean, who would think God would take a deal like that?

Then, after trying to ignore that deal for five years, I went to the District Superintendent and told him I might want, maybe, someday, to be a preacher. He said, “Good, you can start next Sunday.” Any sober, careful person would have said, “Wait a minute!” Instead, impulsively, I said, “Where?”

Having been married for three months, I dropped Helen off at class one day [She was a college senior when we married.] and picked her up an hour later, in a brand-new car, because it doesn’t take me long to decide to buy a car, and it never occurred to me that one should mention that to a wife before doing it. She explained to me, patiently, why that would never happen again, but it didn’t stop me from buying cars for others, like family members, that way.

When I was campus minister at Indiana State U, I saw a bunch of little kids at the Hyte Community Center hanging around on a dusty playground with no equipment and nothing to do. I didn’t ask anybody’s permission or advice. I just put out a call for INSU kids to be tutors at Hyte. I expected six or seven at the first meeting. There were 80. We had a program! But that required a new board and a new budget and a new building. I didn’t have authority to form any of those, but so what? I didn’t ask the current board. I got my friend Andre’ Hammonds, and we formed a new board and built a new building.

While campus minister at Illinois State U, Dr. Jim Collie announced his retirement as basketball coach. I wrote Milt Weisbecker, the AD, and told him to hire Will Robinson, the hugely successful black high school in Detroit, as the first black coach at a white university, which would give us a great recruiting advantage. In old files this week, I discovered a letter from Milt saying that per my “request,” he was sending Will application materials. Milt and Will made history.

Also while campus minister at IL State U, in Normal, IL, Charles Morris got his PhD in math from the U of IL and was hired at ILSU. He was told he would have to live in the twin city of Bloomington since blacks were not allowed to live in Normal. That was clearly wrong, so I started an “Open Housing” campaign to change the law. It was successful. Charles bought on the block behind ours—the big houses, we lived in the servant quarter houses-- and eventually became VP of ILSU.

When I pastored in Charleston, IL, I read a bunch of articles that said the big churches in the UMC were failing and nobody was doing anything about it. So, I started SADMOB, Senior And Directing Ministers Of Bigchurches. Just called up the pastors of the 20 biggest churches in the conference and invited them to a meeting, so that we could share ideas. Every one of them came, every month.

When I turned my cancer journal into a book, I didn’t know I had to have an agent to submit it to publishers. I had read a cancer book published by AndrewsMcMeel, so I figured they liked that sort of thing. I didn’t send a query; just sent them my manuscript. I got a call from Donna Martin, the VP, who said, “We really want this. We’ll send the contract to your agent.” “I don’t have an agent.” “You mean… we deal with you?” Well…yes.

When I wrote my reminiscences about ministry, The Strange Calling, I sent it to Dave Barry, the humorist, and told him he should write a blurb for it. He wrote me a note, by hand, “How’s about, John Robert McFarland is a wise and funny man?” I didn’t realize he should have said, “John Robert McFarland is an audacious and annoying man, who thinks he should be able to approach celebrities and ask them for favors.” But Dave is like that.

Well, there’s more, but that’s more than enough to get the point across.

Now, I tell you all this in part, of course, because I’m proud of all these things. Because I was impulsive, since I didn’t know any better, I was able to accomplish some good stuff. [I’ll tell you about all the impulsive stuff that went wrong in a later column-not!]

The point, though… I think… is this: if you learn in old age that you were somebody else all those other years, different from the person you thought you were, both of those persons are okay.

John Robert McFarland

Being Christian isn’t trying to be good, it is trying to be real.

 

 

 

TOMORROW [From my poetry journal] [R, 11-18-21]

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

I do not think it is

either laziness or negligence

[two rather unpoetic words for a poem]

that makes me put it off

It is just that I am so comfortable

here on the sofa

with my still-warm coffee cup

and tomorrow’s schedule is not at all

That day called tomorrow is

free and open, no marks on the calendar

plenty of time to do it then

One of the good gifts of old age, it is,

that unscheduled, open tomorrow

it would be churlish to refuse it

[No, “churlish” is a good word for a poem]

But is it that I am trying to deny death

thinking that I can delay it, too,

by putting all these other “its” off?

A good question, that needs attention

Soon

But my cup is not yet empty

and the sofa is still beneath me

There is plenty of time

to think about that

tomorrow…

 

John Robert McFarland

ODDS & ENDS XIV: Choosing the Duck, Obits & Books, SEL, HOF [T, 11-16-21]

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

CHOOSING THE PURPLE DUCK

Helen’s grade school friend, Shirley, has a dog named Mr. Prince. She recently shared a photo of Mr. Prince with his toys on their 9x12 rug. Each day he puts one of his toys on each corner of the rug and then chooses one to play with that day. But, says Shirley, “He always chooses the purple duck. Every day.”

            I wish I were still preaching. I could get a sermon out of that. Not quite sure what the [pre]text would be.

OBITS AND BOOKS

I get obits by email from newspapers in the towns where I know people who might show up in those obits. For some time now, the ads on those pages are for books. Not high-level lit, like Marilynne Robinson, but entertainment reads, like Lisa Jewell. Why book ads with the obits? I surmise that they assume that people who read obits are themselves old and thus some of the few remaining readers of print books. Whatever the reason, if there must be ads, may they all be for books.

SEL

There is apparently a controversy over SEL in schools—Social Emotional Learning. What exactly is the issue? Isn’t there always social emotional learning in school? I’m sure the most important learning I did in school was not academic but social and emotional. The problem then, and, I assume, now, was that the teachers were not those with the most knowledge about social and emotional skills but those with the least—other kids. 

SECRET HALL OF FAME

            I never thought when I was a kid enjoying Grandma Pond’s cylinder records phonograph, and then 78s, then 45s, then LPs, then cassettes, that I would be considered old and out of date because I get my music from CDs. But… yes. Sorting through them, I came across Joel Mabus’ “Parlor Guitar Christmas,” so I played it for our morning coffee-conversation-music time. It’s a really nice CD.

            We met Joel when we lived in Iron Mountain, MI. He came up occasionally from Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to play and sing at the Upper Peninsula Second Sunday Folk Concert, hosted by Dean and Bette Premo, who perform as “Whitewater.” Dean introduced Joel by noting that he is in the Michigan Music Hall of Fame along with Aretha Franklin. 

            Joel said that it was news to him!

            Turns out he was inducted into the Hall several years before, along with Aretha, which is pretty impressive, but nobody had told him!

            Makes me wonder what HOF I’m a member of but don’t know about because no one has told me. Makes me wonder about what HOF you’re in secretly, too, and who is in there with you. You should probably check around.

THE LONG SEARCH IS OVER, & IT WASN’T INDIANA JONES

            Ad in the paper today: “Holy Grail mascara, now in deep blue.”

I HAD A STORY THAT PROMPTED THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH,

I do not write because I think my stories are better than yours, or that I can draw out some pithy point for us to embroider on the footstool in our spiritual living room… 

BUT BY THE TIME I GOT THE COMPUTER OPEN…

I have truly entered the wonder years. I wonder what that story was… I kind of like the idea of a footstool in the spiritual living room, though. 

John Robert McFarland

As they say at the raffle, “You must be present to win.”

 

 

 

 

ODDS & ENDS XIII: Snacks Unaware, Editors Amok [Su, 11-14-21]

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

BUT I WANT TO LOSE MY MEMORY!

Halford Luccock was a professor of homiletics at Yale Divinity School. I so much enjoyed his wry columns in “The Christian Century,” under the pseudonym of Simeon Stylites, that I seriously considered going to Yale for seminary. Unfortunately, for me and all who appreciated his writing, he died just as I was getting ready to graduate college.

The original holder of the Simeon Stylities name lived in the 400s, 37 of them on a tiny platform on top of a pillar. It was the kind of thing you did back then if you wanted folks to think you were a saint. I guess you couldn’t get into much trouble just living on top of a pillar.  I think Luccock took the name for his humor column because of its total irrelevancy.

The column that I remember best was entitled “Macaroons Unaware.” It seems that he loved macaroons, but had a bad memory. So he hid macaroons all over his study—in a book, behind a photo, inside a vase, etc. Then, from time to time, as he was looking for something else, he would come across a macaroon unaware, and be delighted by the surprise. That always fascinated me. I thought it would be wonderful to find snacks unaware. I could hardly wait until I got old enough to forget stuff.

Not macaroons, but the other things I crave, like carrot sticks and cottage cheese. Certainly not chocolate chip cookies or Snickers bars. [Just in case Dr. V is reading this.] Wouldn’t it be neat to come across a Hershey’s Kiss unaware?

Finally, last year, I was at the point, I was sure, where I could start forgetting where I hid the peanuts. I mean, I’m really old, older than 2/3 of the folks in the obits list in the paper, so it should have worked, right?

Not right. Turns out that the ONE thing I can remember is where I hid the treats, so they are always gone before they can get to the “unaware” stage. I may be the only old man in Christendom who is disappointed that he is not losing his memory. 

EDITORS RUN AMOK

            Suddenly I am getting dialog boxes on my MSW documents that say: “Someone else is editing this document also. Do you want to merge their work with yours?”

This is getting out of hand, people. If someone else is working on these columns, why aren’t they any better?

Reminds me of friend Kathy, who was in the middle of a dream when the dream editor came and told her she was dreaming wrong and would have to start over.

In my own editor dream, every draft, she tells me it has to be shorter. I finally get the whole manuscript down to one word. She says, “Can’t you find a shorter word?” 

John Robert McFarland

BONUS THOUGHT: “We are here for a single purpose: to grow in wisdom and learn to love better. We can do this through losing as well as through winning, by having and by not having, by succeeding and by failing. All we need to do is to show up openhearted for class.” Rachel Naomi Remen, p. 80, Kitchen Table Wisdom

 

THE EFFECACIOUS LIFE OF JOE DOOLEY [F, 11-12-21]

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

When I needed a priestly presence for the marriage of the United Methodist Katie McFarland to the Roman Catholic Patrick Kennedy, at St. Patrick’s in Urbana, IL, naturally I called on my Academy of Parish Clergy buddy, Father Joe Dooley, to come over from Macedonia…err, I mean, Indianapolis, to help me. [Acts 16:9. Yeah, the roles are sort of reversed, but you get the idea.]

It is hard to believe that Joe Dooley died way back on March 29 in 2004. Unfortunately, his obit, provided I’m sure by the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, where he was a priest for 59 years, did not mention his membership in The Academy of Parish Clergy. [APC]

The APC is a professional organization of pastors, of all denominations, and Joe was one of its first and most faithful members. It is composed mostly of clergy in traditional Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and such—but with several Roman Catholics, including nuns, and even a few Jewish rabbis and Islamic imams.

The one and only purpose of APC is to help one another become better parish leaders, by “sharing the practice,” which is the name of the APC journal. We don’t talk about theology or society. We talk about ministry. By sharing our practice of ministry with one another, we learn new and better ways of leading professionally, and also we support and encourage one another emotionally and spiritually.

Joe was one of the best at that. He attended every annual conference, walking from a bus or train stop, in his black clergy suit and clerical collar, carrying his small black valise. That valise contained all he needed—his missal, a change of socks and underwear, and his famous blue knit golf shirt, which he wore on the second day of the conference, while his traveling socks and underwear were drying after their wash in his room. Since Indianapolis was centrally located for the Midwest Chapter of The APC, he invited us to his home for chapter meetings, for sharing the practice.

Joe was retired when I first met him, and I was immediately attracted to him. He was a Hoosier Irish man, short, white-haired, twinkling eyes. You immediately thought of Barry Fitzgerald playing the older priest in a Bing Crosby movie. But you dared not be fooled by his “just another parish priest” routine. He did his seminary at St. Meinrad and then earned a doctorate in theology from Catholic University in Washington, DC and a PhD from the University of Ottawa. Before his career in parish ministry, he taught college, at St. Mary of the Woods in Terre Haute and at Marian in Indianapolis. He was known in APC not only as Joe but as Double Doctor Dooley.

That was part of the problem at Katie’s and Patrick’s wedding. The priest at St. Patrick’s, Father George Remm, was an old acquaintance of mine. He was okay with me doing the service, because he knew I would leave out the handling snakes part. But he had to be out of town on their wedding date, which is why we needed Joe.

We had it all worked out. I walked Katie down the aisle, wearing my tux. Then, while Father Joe welcomed the assemblage, I ducked into the vestry and exchanged my tux jacket for my pulpit robe and came back out to officiate the wedding.

Joe, though, was overcome by his great learning, and this opportunity to address a group that had a large number of Methodist preachers in it. His welcome included a dissertation on “efficacious signs,” of which marriage apparently is one, or something like that. But the congregation was still standing. And Joe, like many a preacher on any subject, could not find a place in the explanation of efficacious signs to quit.[1] The people were beginning to sag, when I heard some anonymous preacher in the congregation, whose name is Paul Unger, mutter, “Stop is an efficacious sign,” and I thanked Joe in the middle of a sentence and told folks to sit down, and we got those two well married.

Joe was smart in many ways. He worked out a method where a congregation had to listen to him all the way through: he said mass each week at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, in both Spanish and American Sign Language.

Joe was active in Archdiocese activities, such as Defender of the Bond and member of The Priestly Secular Institute of the Heart of Jesus. In the winters, he taught in a theological seminary in Costa Rica.

All that was listed in the obit the Archdiocese provided for him. His membership in APC was not. That pains me, for I know how important that ecumenical dimension was to him.

I suspect, however, that the “great cloud of witnesses” we like to talk about has an ecumenical wing for “sharing the practice of angeling,” even if The Archdiocese of Indianapolis doesn’t know about it.

John Robert McFarland

1] Joe Dooley had a good and clear subject that day, but the event reminds me of the fill-in pastor at Lake Wobegon Lutheran who, Garrison Keillor said, “was able to talk until he hit upon a subject.”

 

 

 

YES, I SHALL BE “JUDGY” [W, 11-10-21]

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

Yes, I shall judge you

No matter how many times

You recite your arrogant

Rationalizing

Self-centered

Self-righteous

Meme

 Your attempt to avoid

The responsibility

For your grabby and grubby heart

 

Your attempt to proclaim

Yourself the victim

Because your darkness

Has been brought to light

 Proclaiming the faults of others

To excuse your own

 

No, I shall not agree

To disagree

That lust and love

Are equal choices

 

Nor are forgiveness and revenge

Greed and sharing

War and peace

Sloth and usefulness

Falsehood and truth

Civility and rudeness

Profane and sacred

Pornography and art

Violence and persuasion

Selfishness and generosity

Anger and calm

 

I don’t care what your reasons

For choosing evil over good

It is still evil, and I shall judge it so

 

I shall not agree

That it is normal

That it is just the way it is

That it is okay

 Because everybody does it

 

No one has ever said

“I’ve got to be me”

To explain good behavior

 

I refuse to let the world die

Because I did not

Take my stand

To proclaim

That love is

Better than hate

 

We sinners love one another

Only by calling sin by its true name

Yes, I shall be “judgy”

Always

On behalf of love

John Robert McFarland

“…Jesus consistently radicalized the Torah by applying it to the inner self rather than just to behavior. What was needed was a new heart.” Marcus Borg, Jesus, A New Vision

 

 

 

 

  

DISAGREEING FRIENDS [M, 11-8-21]

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

A friend recently recommended, quite effusively, the TV show, “Maid.” Our friend is very smart, an artist and writer and genuinely good person, so we trust her instincts. “Maid” is on Netflix, and since we just bought a smart TV that has Netflix built in, we feel so with-it when we get to watch a show like “Maid,” that formerly would have been verboten to us. We lasted almost one whole episode.

The title character is likeable enough, although rather monotonous, but all the other characters just make you want to throw up. It’s like watching the news--the stories are different, but all the characters make you want to bang your head on the wall. Good acting, which makes the characters even more disgusting. Apparently that’s what the director wants. Go figure.

How could Anita be so wrong? Well, because she isn’t. Liking or not liking a particular story is extremely subjective. Most of us are even subjective and changeable within ourselves about such likes and dislikes. I often start a book only to lay it aside because it’s no good and then find, when I pick it up again because nothing else is available, that I like it just fine. Go figure.

But surely people are not subject to such variables, the way TV shows and books are, are they? Are we? I mean, if I like a person, won’t everyone else like that person, too? At least—and here’s the crux—won’t all the people who like me also like one another?

I had two friends named Bill. [If you removed Bill, Bob, and John from the English language, half the men would be anonymous, but you’ll find none by those names in the NFL.] They were both smart, scholarly, Christian gentlemen. In retirement, one Bill wrote a column for the local newspaper. I liked it, especially one particular column. I asked the other Bill if he had read it. “No,” he said. “I just don’t like the way he writes.”

But these Bills knew each other, and I’m sure they’d had no run-ins with each other. More importantly, they were both good friends of mine. How could they like me and not like each other at the same time? And that’s just the easiest example. I have friends who both like me but despise each other!

That’s been a difficult problem with me from the time I was a kid--people who were friends to me but hostile to each other at the same time. That didn’t make sense. 

My friends were very important to me. I didn’t have much else going for me, so I took great joy in having friends. I wanted all of them to be happy and have a good time with one another, because that’s what they did for me. I took it as a moral failing on my part if my friends didn’t like one another. I was a bad friend if I could not bridge the gap between them.

I’m afraid my observations in these columns are becoming both monotonous and boring, because I’m going to say, again… that’s just the way life is. That’s one thing old age does for us—learning the limits of logic.

Life doesn’t make much sense. It doesn’t have to, at least not where friends are concerned. So, if you like that “Maid” show, please don’t tell me. I already have more non-sense than I can handle.

John Robert McFarland

“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” Alfred Hitchcock

 

 

SALVATION BY KNOWLEDGE [SAT, 11-6-21]

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

Helen is reading Ed Friedman’s Generation to Generation again. She does it every few years. She says it is the best book she’s ever read.

Ed was a working rabbi, and also a family systems therapist in private practice. He wrote Generation to Generation for other clergy like himself, rabbis and pastors, because a church is very like a family. We understand the dynamics of a congregation if we understand how families function.

Generation to Generation was so enlightening to me, both in understanding my congregation and my own family. So when I was president of The Academy of Parish Clergy, I arranged for Rabbi Friedman to spend a day leading our annual convention.

Seeing Helen sitting there in her recliner, reading that book in its familiar gray dust jacket, reminds me of Rhonda [not her real name].

Her family was loosely connected to our church. Well, not the church, but people in the church. We had a lot of bright, thoughtful parents in our church, and Rhonda’s parents hung out with them, in other social circles in town, but they didn’t come to church. And we had a huge number of bright young kids in the church, and Rhonda and her brother hung out with them, but not in church. There are always “constituents” like that, in any congregation, loosely connected, but these folks were extreme. They felt like members of the church, but they never came to worship or church activities.

So I knew of them more than I knew them when they came to see me about Rhonda. She had always been the model child, unlike her brother, four years older than Rhonda, who was a wild child. He had graduated high school and joined the army. They were so looking forward to a peaceful time in the family, without the near catastrophes that he precipitated, but Rhonda, now in 8^th grade, was acting up.

I knew that just explaining how families work, brain-first stuff, was not good counseling, but I had just learned so much from Ed Friedman’s book, so I explained what was happening. Rhonda had always felt like she was the left-over child, because her brother was first, male, and got all the attention because of his antics. She thought she would get attention now, since he was gone, but they just wanted to relax. She acted out to get the attention she deserved.

More importantly, she had to fill the vacuum that his absence now left in the family. Families, like nature, abhor a vacuum. When a member is taken out of the family—and we see this most noticeably in the death of a family member—other members have to expand their roles to fill the vacuum and bring the family back to stability. Rhonda felt unconsciously that she now had to fill not only her family role but that of her brother.

“Oh,” they said, “Would you explain that to her?”

So I did. She said, “Oh. You mean I just have to be myself?” “Yes.” “Okay.”

That was it. Some folks are perfectly able to adjust if they understand the situation. Rhonda never came to church, but she came to see me once a year through high school, her “annual checkup,” she called it, to be sure she was being herself. And she wrote me once a year for a long time after she had gone off to college and moved far away and gotten married. Her last letter said that she was going to have a baby. She thanked me for helping her to understand herself so that she could be herself.

Just understanding a situation doesn’t necessarily allow us to change it. But sometimes, all we need is the explanation of why things are like they are, and then we can apply that explanation ourselves. If you want some good information about your family, or your church, I recommend Generation to Generation.  

My friend and colleague, the proudly conservative Bill Pruett, used to say: “Sometimes, you don’t feel the spirit, or anything else. Then, you have to rely on what you KNOW.”

John Robert McFarland

“If you claim you must know the name of Jesus to be saved, you are talking about salvation by syllables.” Marcus Borg

 

THE FIRST MUSICAL INSTRUMENT [R, 11-4-21]

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

 

No, the first musician was not Zog, who stretched a piece of mastodon gut between two sticks and started plucking on it, while everybody else went out the back door of the cave and waited until he was through with what they called “the bass solo,” so that they could go back to beating on tortoise shells with sticks, and blowing through the mastodon’s horns and hollowed out willow trigs.

For years I have envied Zog and his friends. Well, his friends more than Zog. I thought it would be great to play a musical instrument. Oh, sure, I played several, in high school. But I mean, play an instrument like you know what you’re doing, not just so you can wear a hot, scratchy uniform. Then I realized that people play trumpets and violins only because they can’t sing.

After all, the voice is the first instrument, the one that everyone plays before any other, the one the nurses on “Call the Midwife” listen for so carefully and rejoice in so happily when a baby wails out its first song. It doesn’t have to play a saxophone before they know it’s part of the music.

One of my most prized possessions is a CD of my friend from age ten, Darrel Guimond, RIP, playing Gospel songs on his trumpet. He was an engineer by education and profession, but he was a musician in heart. I love now to remember him as I hear him play, but what I treasure most is the memory of the way we used to sing together, sitting side by side at Forsythe Church, or in his dad’s jeep, as we roamed the streets of Oakland City looking for girls.

I don’t need to envy people who play cellos and flugel horns. I know that the definition of a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the trombone but doesn’t. I play the first and best instrument; I’m a singer.

Yes, my voice is croaky, and my range is only about four notes, and I get out of breath and have to gasp at the wrong spots, and I think a key is for grading a test or opening a door, and I forget the words, but that has nothing to do with singing. The only thing that makes a singer good is desire. I’m an excellent singer.

When I woke up in the hospital, and realized that at midnight on my birthday, they had taken me into the operating room and cut me open from Los Angeles to Boston, my biggest concern was not that the pale oncologist told me I’d be dead “in a year or two,” but that I thought I couldn’t sing. I had no diaphragm strength. No problem. I could still mouth “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…” That was some of my best singing ever. When it’s early in the morning, and I don’t want to wake anyone, my singing is only in my head, but it is singing, and it reminds me that this is the day the Lord has made, and that I should rejoice in it.

Dennis Heller, my friend of 56 years now [good grief, how did that happen?] is in a Sunday night “song circle.” They have been singing together on Zoom because of covid19. Is that really singing together? Sure, more than ever.

I heard baseball’s Lou Brock tell this story at a cancer banquet: The settlers were huddling together in the fort, with the Indians surrounding them. “I don’t like the sound of those drums,” the fort captain said. A voice came from beyond the walls, “He’s not our regular drummer.”

If all you can do is play an instrument, even a bassoon, that’s okay. We all need to make do with what gifts we have. But even if the regular drummer is away, and the beat is shaky, there is no need to say, “Well, I can’t make music, because there’s no piano here,” or “Some kid stole my clarinet because he heard someone say it’s a licorice stick.” The first musical instrument is always available, and all you need in order to play it is desire. Sing not like nobody is listening, but like everybody is  listening, for we need your song.

John Robert McFarland

The cartoon, of course, is from “The Far Side,” by the great Gary Larson.

 

 

POVERTY, COMMUNITY, AND DOLPHINS [T, 11-2-21]

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

 

In our stewardship season at church, different folks speak for a few minutes each Sunday about some ministry of St. Mark’s. A lot of them involve our building, for we let anyone with a good cause use our building. We supply the bricks and electricity and janitor for free.

Last week one of our members explained why our parking lot is always full, even on Saturday morning. That’s one of the main times that AA and NA and AL Anon and such groups meet.

So many good-cause people use our building that it is hard to get a church activity onto the schedule. Except that they are all church activities.

James and Amy Thomas spoke last Sunday. They are allies to a boat captain in the Thriving Connections program. It’s a program to help folks get out of poverty. Poverty is an ocean of problems, so a boat is a good symbol. 

In Thriving Connections, the impoverished folks are called captains. They are the ones who have to steer and navigate the boat and make the decisions. 

The allies are along for the ride. They never give money, regardless of how tempting that is. They give suggestions and advice, but they never tell people what to do. They are companions and emotional supporters. They provide a connection to the larger community.

Staying with the boat metaphor, though, “ally” has nothing nautical about it. I think allies should be called dolphins. Granted, dolphins don’t get into the boat, except by accident, but they swim along beside and do tricks and make the trip more enjoyable. They are good community.

That is the main point—community. People deal better with poverty and get out of it more easily—if “easy” is ever a word to use about poverty—if they are part of the community. Thriving Connections, and its dolphins, provide community.

From my own childhood experience of poverty, I am sure that is true. My parents had so much trouble with poverty-- not only because Daddy was blind, with an 8^th grade education, and Mother was just unsuited for living in a difficult world--because they resisted community. They stayed on our hardscrabble five acres, three miles out of town. We had no car, so staying home was pretty much necessary, anyway. We had no money, so we had no decent clothes for being seen out in public, and could not pay for tickets or admissions or sodas. We lived in the area where they had grown up, and they did not want old friends to see them in their poverty. They lived in isolation, poverty of people as well as possessions.

I did not know anybody there, though. I was ten years old when we moved from the bustling inner-city of Indianapolis to the farm. I would walk any number of miles, in any weather, to find a pick-up game of baseball or basketball. I joined any school group that didn’t have dues. I was fortunate to go to a school that provided classes and bands and teams and books and even drivers education to every kid free of any charge. The neighbors took me to a church that thought I was special just because I was there. I got out of poverty because I wasn’t in poverty, I was in community.

Yes, the best thing we can do for folks in poverty is to help them know they are part of the community, by being their allies. But… ally for the Thriving Connections program?

Okay, Ally is a nice idea, but it has nothing to do with a boat, and it sounds too much like a bank. Maybe not Dolphins. But… Deckhands? Swabbies? Bosuns? Warrant Officers? …     Humans?

John Robert McFarland