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