THE SCOPE OF S.C.O.P.E. III: THE CITY [M, 2-28-22]

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

[Third of a four-part series for Black History Month]

 

Albany, Georgia in 1965 had a population of 90,000, about 38% black. Early in the summer, Sisters of Providence Mary Jean Mark and Alma Louise Mescher made the rounds of merchants in town, getting donations of chairs and paint and tubs and buckets and other items the Freedom Center needed. The SCOPE folks were pleased that white merchants would be so generous, especially considering why the Freedom Center was there, so that black folks could be full citizens.

 

Turns out that all some people saw when a nun approached in those days was the full black habit. “Those habits got things done that other people couldn’t do,” Bob Mullins said. The nuns were always in full habit in those days.

The full black habit was one reason SNCC thought the nuns would not last two weeks. Albany in summer is 90 degrees of heat and another 90 of humidity. Those black habits were heat catchers without ventilation. And little children, wearing almost nothing because of the heat, made it worse by constantly running up to them and hugging their legs and hanging on their arms.

Physical discomfort, though, meant nothing to those Sisters of Providence. The local Catholics offered them space in a convent, but that would have taken them out of the ghetto where they were working. They knew they had to live with the people they were serving. They stayed in the falling-down building with the broken windows.

 

Those black nun habits were especially useful when they encountered “the Albany system,” that gave the city a false reputation for racial progress. The Albany system was to wear people down with constant harassment. For instance, Georgia did not require folks who were going to be there for only ten weeks in the summer to get new car license plates and driver’s licenses, but Albany did. SCOPE workers and local demonstrators were arrested regularly, sometimes more than once a day. The SCOPE workers were not a big problem. They were white. Bob Mullins just went down to the jail and paid their fine.

 

Black demonstrators were a different problem. The sheriff didn’t want to let them out, and often sent them to jail in other counties. In one instance, some demonstrators were arrested “for blocking the sidewalk” while picketing a grocery. Some were as young as eleven. They were kept in jail. Their parents found out they weren’t being fed and took food to the jail. The sheriff wouldn’t let them in. So the aptly named Sisters of Providence took the food to the jail. The sheriff took one look and decided he didn’t want to deal with the fallout from them. 

 

They local newspapers praised the Dougherty County sheriff for his handling of the “nigger demonstrators problem.” [Yes, the newspapers referred to black folks as “niggers.”] He described “the Albany strategy” as “meeting non-violence with non-violence.” He just arrested anyone who looked like they might be about to demonstrate and sent them to jail, often in other counties.

 

The strategy was not to do violent things that could be reported in the northern media, but to do minor things that seemed like cooperation when people were looking, and do lots of harassment in private—arrests, fines, isolation, hunger, bureaucratic nonsense—the rest of the time.

 

And Albany was considered racially progressive in 1965!

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

THE SCOPE OF S.C.O.P.E. II—THE NUNS [Sat, 2-26-22]

[The 2^nd in a 4 part series for Black History Month. Be warned—it’s twice as long as usual.]

 

[Sisters Alma Louise Mescher and Mary Jean Mark in Albany, GA in the summer of 1965]

I met Sister Mary Jean Mark first. She taught history at the Catholic girls’ college, St. Mary of the Woods [SMW], a few miles west of Terre Haute. It was the time of Pope John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council, which he had called in order “to throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the Spirit blow through.” To do that on the Terre Haute level, Sister MJ was tasked with providing an evening of ecumenicity for her colleague teaching nuns and their students. Since I was the new Methodist campus minister at Indiana State U and Rose Poly Institute [now Rose-Hulman U], she invited me to speak to the assemblage, to provide them with the perspective on the church and world for all of Protestantism. It took me about twenty minutes. But the Sisters of Providence became our friends personally, and our colleagues in higher ed ministry and social justice professionally.

In a note much later, Sister Alma Louise said, “Since I have gotten to know you, I understand why Sister MJ treasures your friendship.” That was delightful to hear, because MJ and I were buddies, despite the great differences in our ages and theologies. I think it was helped early on by then three-year-old Mary Beth, who answered the phone one day when I was indisposed and Helen was gone. To my dismay, I heard her saying, “Now you just wait a minute. He’s on the potty, but you just wait…” By the time I got to the phone, I heard this hysterical laughter coming out of the mouthpiece. It was Sister Mary Jean. She was the first nun I ever met, and I was probably the first Methodist minister she had met, and, yes, we did treasure each other. 

When the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] asked for help for the 1965 “Freedom Summer,” to register black folks to vote, we had both Wesley Foundation students and SMW students and nuns who wanted to be part of it. Sisters Mary Jean and Alma Louise, went, along with our Wesley Foundation kids, headed by Bob Mullins, an IN State U journalism student from Hammond.

Nuns were not respected outside their own precincts in those days. They were women. They wore funny clothes and didn’t have sex and weren’t allowed to drive cars. How could they know anything about the world?  Also, they were old, especially in the radical slogan of the day, “Trust no one over thirty,” and SNCC was a youth movement.

Mary Jean was in her 60s and Alma Louise was 49. Two highly competent women, old enough to be mother or grandmother to Bob Mullins, but not even allowed to ride in a car with him, or any other man, including Sister Mary Jean’s brother, unless there was a chaperone.

MJ and AL were college professors. Sister Alma Louise [nee Marjorie Anne] had a PhD from Notre Dame and was a research biologist who had mosquitoes bite her own arm so that she could study the effects. But they didn’t count for credibility, because they were just women, and the most out-of-it women of all, nuns!

So Bob Mullins, age 21, was the head of the group, renting a headquarters [229 &1/2 S. Jackson] and sleeping rooms, and managing the budget and shopping, and getting chased and shot at. He was the escort and body guard for the nuns and the girl students. It didn’t strike me as unusual at the time. I was doing that sort of thing at 21, except for getting shot at. Now I realize how remarkable Bob was. And how remarkable those nuns were.

Nuns were always in full habit in those days. Later Sister Mary Jean was much distraught when they “came out of the habit.” It wasn’t really “out” at all, but it seemed so to Sister MJ. The St. Mary of the Woods Sisters of Providence got full habits in dark blue and light blue as well as black. That was their idea of “modernizing.” Sister MJ said, “It’s just so hard. Every morning I have to decide which color to wear.”

Sisters Mary Jean and Alma Louise told me in a letter how the local “Negro” undertaker had asked them to take food to their grandson in jail. He and a dozen or so of his friends had been arrested for picketing a super market. Those arrests were usually of the “blocking the sidewalk” type. The undertaker, Mrs. Barnum, was sure they were not being fed in the jail. When the nuns went to the jail, they found out that she was right. Her grandson was eleven years old!

They returned to the jail with food. Not even the sheriff was foolish enough to turn those habits away. Yeah, those nuns were fragile, wouldn’t even last two weeks, the SNCC folks said.

They were the only nuns to participate in SCOPE. “Look” magazine did a five-page spread on them.

Many years later, when nuns were out of the habit, I was at some conference and spied a woman across the room. She was wearing a nice dress and high heels. And a neck cross.  I went up to her and said, “You’re a Sister of Providence, aren’t you?” “Yes,” she said. “How in the world did you know?” “That cross,” I said. “Only SPs wear one like that. Also, you don’t look like someone to underestimate.”

John Robert McFarland

Thanks to good friend and Emeritus IU professor Dr. Anthony Mescher for research on Sister Alma Louise Mescher.

 

 

 

 

THE SCOPE OF S.C.O.P.E. I: THE PROJECT [A column for Black History Month.] [R, 2-24-22]

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

Renata Justin, a Terre Haute MD, loaned her station wagon to our SCOPE Chapter for its voter registration work in the freedom summer of 1965 in Albany, GA. Twenty-one year old IN State U rising senior, Bob Mullins, the summer driver, was afraid to face her when they returned. The wagon was punctured with several bullet holes, the result of a chase by a bunch of rednecks in a pickup truck. “I’m afraid the pistons are probably shot, too,” Bob confided to Dr. Judson. “I was pushing it pretty hard.” Dr. Judson said that she would take care of the pistons, but the holes would remain. “I want everyone to see them," she said. "I want people to know.”

The Indiana State Legislature today would probably make her cover up those bullet holes, because their reality “would make people uncomfortable.” That’s the reason they are trying to pass a law that not only can parents opt their children out of any “uncomfortable” history and social studies lessons, especially about race, they want to make it illegal for teachers to teach those lessons in the first place.

In fact, Sprunica Elementary School, in Brown County, Indiana, has gotten a head start by telling parents that they can opt out of letting children read this column. Well, not exactly. They’ve told them they can opt out of all black history lessons, and this column is the start of a black history lesson for Black History Month. [After sending a letter to parents announcing that policy, they have now backtracked on it.]

 

John Lewis founded The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] in 1960 to further the civil rights movement that so many people, including state legislatures, now want to ignore. Throughout the South, the written and unwritten laws insisted on “separate but unequal,” and, especially, no voting by black people.

 

SNCC went about the work of voter registration throughout the South through a project called SCOPE. SCOPE was short for “Community Organization and Political Education.” Students on many university campuses founded SCOPE chapters, to send students South to participate. That included The Wesley Foundation [Methodist campus ministry] at Indiana State U, and students and nuns from St. Mary of the Woods College, who formed a Terre Haute chapter.

So it was that we had gathered at St. Mary of the Woods in June of 1965 to send off six students and two nuns to spend the long, hot summer in Georgia, registering black folks to vote, and teaching illiterate adults to read so that they could be informed voters, and trying to get children from inferior schools caught up with their white counterparts. I was holding two-year-old Katie in my arms as the priest came along, shaking a censor of holy water on everybody present. The highly indignant Katie made a great show of wiping the holy water off her Methodist personage. That got a great laugh from all the nuns, which only encouraged her.

With the students from all the other university chapters, our nuns and students spent a week of orientation at Morris Brown College, in Atlanta, and then were sent to Albany, Georgia. SNCC thought it would be the easiest place, because Albany had a reputation for forward thinking about race relations, at least compared to the rest of Georgia, and because “those nuns won’t last two weeks.” Boy, were they wrong! About Albany, and especially about those nuns!

 

John Robert McFarland

This is the first of a four part series for Black History Month, remembering the Terre Haute Chapter of SCOPE, in special defiance of all those who want us to ignore and forget the history of race relations in this country.

 

 

 

ALL THE LIGHT WE DO SEE [T, 2-22-22]

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

Ray Judd was a distant cousin of my mother. Ray was a judge, which I thought rather neat. He was “Judge Judd.” That could be happily confusing. Even at twelve, I loved language play.

We lived in the country, without modern conveniences, like in-door plumbing and air-conditioning, but one hot summer night, Ray and his wife, Dorothy, made the trip to have supper at our house.

Yes, we were poor and non-convenienced, but in the summer we ate well, because of our huge garden, and chickens that sacrificed their eggs and their lives for us. And Mother was a good cook. It was worth the drive and the sweating.

Ray and Dorothy did not come alone, of course, because they couldn’t drive. Both were blind from birth. So their two tall, handsome, late-teen sons, Russell and Donald, were with them. Russell was the eyes for their mother, guiding her through our yard and into the house and onto a chair. At table, he filled her plate and told her where each item was. Donald did the same for their father.

From the time the boys were little, they had just fallen into that routine. Russell was the interpreter for their mother, and Donald for their father. They interpreted the world of sight to those blind parents. I was fascinated by that.

My father was almost blind, and Mother saw the world so differently from others that she needed an interpreter. I was only twelve when the Judds came to our house, but I already felt that I was responsible for interpreting for my parents. I wanted to know how Russell and Donald did it, and so well, so seamlessly. Could I do that?

Of course, my parents wanted to know how two blind people managed to raise two children, and do it so well. But that was old-hat to Ray and Dorothy. They just brushed it off. “It got easier when they could talk,” Dorothy said, “because they tattled on each other.” Russell and Donald pointed fingers at each other, and Dorothy said, “I can see you,” which got a good laugh from everyone, especially those boys, but I wasn’t quite sure where the funny was. Being an interpreter for the blind seemed rather overwhelming to me.

I’m sure Mother must have kept in touch with Ray and Dorothy in some way after that, but I didn’t ask her about them, or those impressive sons. I was starting the teen years. I had so much “me” to interpret. Then I became a preacher. I had so much “you” to interpret. Then I got married, and had children. I had so much “us” to interpret.

I’ve thought often, though, about that one night, seeing those boys interpreting the world of sight to their parents. I began, even then, to realize that we are all blind in some ways. We need people who can interpret to us the world we cannot see. And we need to interpret all the light we do see, to others.

Physical sight often fades in old age, but we still see light that others do not, and the world needs our interpretations.

John Robert McFarland

Since I like coincidental numbers [see my column on the odometer of my first car turning up 55555.5 miles] I should make something of this being 2-22-22, but… I’ve got nothin’.

ODDS & ENDS: Brain Science, Living Books, Heroes, Legalistic Churches [Su, 2-20-22]

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

YOUR ANTERIOR CINGULATE IS FULL OF PREVENIENT GRACE.

How’s that for combining the least comprehensible words of brain science and theology? Perhaps incomprehensible, but true. [1]

 

TOO NORMAL FOR THE LIBRARY

I am just so normal that they won’t even let me be a human book! Our local library is catching onto the “human book” idea, where a “reader” can “borrow” a person for a conversation, to learn first-hand about their lives.

 

This being Bloomington, though, the local library wants you only if there is something about you that other people consider abnormal, like being a transgender person, or an amputee, or a felon, or an addict or an ethnic. The idea is for these conversations to challenge stereotypes. Well, “straight old Methodist curmudgeon?” I’ll bet that’s a stereotype to lots of people. They have no idea just how straight and curmudgeonly I can be!

 

WHAT IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE BOOK?

Our librarian/author daughter decided she would volunteer for one of those thirty-minute sessions as a living book in her town. One of her “friends” asked, “Can I take you back early?”

 

THE WIND BENEATH MY WINGS [AND IN MY FACE]

Our February weather has been up and down, zero for a couple of days, and then 60 for a couple. Today it was zero. I walked by a house where a thirtyish woman came out in non-outdoor clothes to fill her bird feeder. She saw me trudging into the wind and called, “You’re my hero!” That was nice. Of course, as soon as she went back in, I turned around and went home, because it was SO cold, and I’m sort of a cowardly hero. Still make me smile when I think about it, though.

 

CHURCH AS LEGAL SYSTEM

We had to go see Father Thomas Kovatch, the priest at St. Chuck’s RC Church, to answer questions about our older daughter, to prove that she exists, so that she can get married in an RC church up in “Da Region.” [Gary-Hammond and environs] I asked if he couldn’t ask the questions over the phone--so we could avoid going out in public, because Indiana is full of anti-vax, mask-less people--because it was just stuff like “Is she baptized?” but he said no, their canon lawyer said these are legal forms, so we had to answer the questions in person. I’m glad we got to meet Tom [He said I could call him that.]. He’s a nice guy, and a fellow IU alum. But there is something wrong when a church becomes a legal system, like the Roman Catholics and the Amish and the Methodists.

John Robert McFarland

If you’re not too busy checking living books out of the library, try How God Changes Your Brain, by Andrew Newberg, MD, and Mark Robert Waldman.

A PERFECT BAPTISMAL RECORD [NOT] 2-18-22

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

I love babies. If I had started as a Baptist preacher, I would have had to go over to the Methodists so that I could baptize babies.

I loved baptizing babies. I would hold the baby in my arms while I put the water on its head and “said the words” over it. Then I would walk up and down the aisles with the newly baptized baby, so that all in the congregation could see it up close, and I would say: “This is the newest member of the Body of Christ. This child is now our responsibility. When it doubts, we must help it trust again. When it is sad, we must help it laugh again. As it grows, we must push it forward, but if we see it going to close to the edge, we must pull it back to safety. This child is baptized. This child is our child.” [1

Sometimes I thought about just going on out the back door. Just leave all those other people back there in the church while the baby and I had a good time. Then I would remember that a diaper change would be coming up, so I handed it back to its parents.

I baptized babies over a span of forty years. I wish I had kept a record of those baptisms. Each one is recorded in the records of the congregation I was pastoring at the time, but I have no record of my own.

Except a general observation, that went by gender, which I recognized early, and which remained consistent all that time. In those forty years, there was never a girl baby who gave me any trouble. They never cried or fussed or objected to the water. They were little angels who were happy to be there. On the other hand, there was never a boy baby who did not give me trouble. They cried, they kicked, they pulled my beard. They were little heathens who did not want to be in the Body of Christ.

I joked that those little boys knew that I was the father of daughters and so distrusted them. Despite the joking, it bothered me. This was my type of person. I thought I had a special connection with babies. I would often take a fussing baby in some sort of social setting and it would immediately calm down. Some parents threatened to call me to come to their house at two a.m.

It wasn’t that boy babies were unhappy with me the rest of the time. [This was before I had a grandson, so that doesn’t count.] They sat on my lap and chortled when we played “Trotty Horse” or “This is the way the farmer rides.” But when baptism came…

Except my last month before retirement. I had two baby baptisms, a girl, and a boy. The girl was a hellion who would not stop screaming. The boy was a placid spirit who cooed the whole time.

My perfect record was destroyed!

I did not realize how much pleasure I took from the perfection of that baptismal record, that sprinkled consistency of heavenly girls and hellish boys. I could no longer entertain at parties of clergy types by telling of my strange watery baptismal perfection. I was emotionally devastated. It was the only consistency in my long career, and it had been demolished by two tabulas rasa.

It's been 25 years since those two infants destroyed my perfect record. I’ve had time to ruminate. I think I’m wiser. Such a much better story with those last two little outliers in it.

Sometimes it is the imperfections that make perfection.

John Robert McFarland

[1] I did not do this as impersonally as it sounds, saying “it.” I used the baby’s name, and the pronouns of “she” or “he.”

 

WEAPONIZED PRAYER [W, 2-16-22]

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

We have started watching “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window.” {Yes, that’s its name.} The woman in that house is emotionally distraught from a close personal loss and acts erratically. She overhears a friend saying unkind things about her and confronts her. They have a set-to and the friend says, “I used to pray for you, but I’m not going to anymore.” It’s an interesting approach to intercession—weaponized prayer.

The reverse of that sort of weaponized prayer was in a Young Sheldon TV show. His super-pious mother has a set-to with a neighbor and says angrily, “I’ll pray for you.” Meemaw, her mother, is embarrassed and says to the neighbor, “She doesn’t mean that.”

You can threaten people either with praying for them or with not praying for them. I can understand why some people dislike the whole idea of intercessory prayer.

I ran afoul of The Intervarsity Christian Fellowship [IVCF] when I was a college student, but I didn’t realize it at first. I knew they were upset about my “liberal” tendencies, such as using “reason” when reading the Bible. “Reason” was always said with a sneer. But when they told me that I was on their prayer list, well, that sounded nice. Who can’t use more prayer?

Except it was kind of embarrassing. One of the methods of “evangelism” by cultic religious groups is to “confront” the mark in public. On campus, that means learning their routes between classes in order to show up and “encourage” them. In my case, this meant calling to me, “We’re praying for you.” I’d be walking along with some guys from my dorm or with a girl from one of my classes, and here would be these people yelling, “We’re praying for you.” My friends would look at me like, “What have you done that you need that much prayer?”

So I went to Loyd Bates, the Methodist campus minister at The Wesley Foundation building. Loyd was always surprised at my naiveite. “Their prayer list,” he informed me, “is their excrement list.” [Not his exact words]

There are folks who weaponize prayer without the side-door tactics of IVCF. They don’t threaten, either to withhold prayer or to put you on the list. They just pray outright for destruction.

Rachel Held Evans told of a woman in her home town in Tennessee who would warble “Amazing Grace” at the Sunday night hymn sing at the McDonald’s there and follow it up with a fervent prayer for the death of President Obama.

Does intercession, either for good or for ill, work? Larry Dossey, MD, the author of Healing Words, says that if we hold, as he does, that positive prayers for people can do them good, then it might be possible that negative prayers for their harm, voodoo prayers, might work, too.

Who knows for sure? Regardless, I’m going to keep praying for you, the same prayer I pray for Donald Trump: “Oh, Lord, may all that he says and does be pleasing in your sight.”

Of course, the problem is, if you really don’t want to do what is pleasing in God’s sight, I guess that a prayer for you to please God IS a reverse prayer, a voodoo prayer, a destruction prayer.

Sam Asamoah came from Ghana to Eastern IL U to do graduate work. He was smart and funny and a great addition to our church. But he got some mysterious disease the doctors could not figure out. I called on him in the hospital and prayed for him.

The next day he was out of the hospital and showed up at my office with a gift for me, a beautiful dashiki, which I still have. “Your prayer cured me,” he said.

I like prayers that are weapons that destroy disease.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

HELEN, THE FALLEN WOMAN [M, 2-14-22]

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

Helen slipped on the ice at the end of our street and fell backward and, as granddaughter Brigid said when she was little, “bonked her noggin.” She is in concussion protocol.

She lay there until Heather and Jack came along. Heather and Helen get together on Tuesday mornings for coffee. She was very helpful. Jack is a blind and deaf Yorkie. He wasn’t as helpful. Helen called me. I got there in about 3 minutes and got her home.

The triage nurse said to put ice on her noggin, which seemed contradictory, and adding insult to injury, since ice was what caused the problem in the first place.

After that, the first thing she did, knowing that a concussion sometimes takes away your senses, was to bake brownies, to check on her taste and smell. They seem to be okay. So are her priorities.

The first thing I did was email Glenn to tell him. He’s sort of shut in, so I always email him when some disaster befalls. Helen says the first thing she’ll do when I die is email Glenn to find out why I died.

She was dizzy the first night after the bonk and bounced from wall to wall in the hallway on her way to the bathroom. Well, that’s what old people’s walls are for, to bounce off, so we don’t fall down.

However, she hit the thermostat and unknowingly turned the furnace off. That’s not good when the temperature is 9 degrees.

She’s acting sort of different in other ways, too. Our church is hoping that more of us can come to worship in person, now that it seems the pandemic is beginning to wane, so our pastors are encouraging people to wear name the name tags that the office makes for us and puts out on a table for us to pick up as we come in.

Actually, name tags are probably more important when we are masked. I have a better chance of knowing who a person is if I can see their face, with or without a name tag. [Yes, I, too, hate using “their/them” when it should be singular, but it seems to be necessary these days.]

Anyway, Helen remembered that several months ago, when we were still going to church in person instead of worshiping via livestream, she had brought her name tag home to put a rainbow ribbon on it and hadn’t had a chance to return it to the name tag table at church. So, wearing her nightgown, drinking coffee, she wore her name tag for worship this morning. Probably a good thing; I’m not quite sure who she is these days.

Also, her memory reasoning seems to have sharpened. In 1965, when I was the Methodist Wesley Foundation campus minister at INSU in Terre Haute, we bought a pink kitchen set for our little girls. It was really neat. Unfortunately, it was made of especially endurable cardboard, and dowel rods, and had to be put together. From 18 pages of instructions!

We could not start construction when the girls might have found it, so we had to wait until they went to bed Christmas eve. Helen and I together spent Christmas eve, from when the girls went to bed until when they got up Christmas morning, putting that kitchen together. [Probably the greatest strain our marriage ever had to survive.]

Just now she said, “I just thought of something. We could have taken those pink kitchen parts to The Wesley Foundation before Christmas, and worked on it there where the girls wouldn’t know about it. We could even have paid students to put it together!” Only 57 years too late.

One response of her noggin getting bonked is a reduction in the complexity of her dreams. She says it’s quite nice. “My dreams are so simple now. I wake up feeling refreshed instead of distraught, the way those complex dreams make me.” Maybe we all need a noggin bonking.

John Robert McFarland

Happy Valentine’s Day.

APPRECIATING E. STANLEY JONES: The Methodist Thich Nhat Hahn [Sa, 3-12-22]

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

“The Current,” publication of my Methodist conference, The Illinois Great Rivers Conference, recently printed a retrospective appreciation of E. Stanley Jones [1884-1973], as we approach the 50-year anniversary of his death.

Jones went to India as a traditional missionary, but he became a Christian Thich Nhat Hahn. The spirituality that he found in India brought forth his Christian spirituality and created a new path toward God. He led ashrams [Indian name for a spiritual retreat] all over the world, especially India and his native America. His books of daily devotionals became best-sellers. He was the iconic Indian missionary spiritual evangelist of the twentieth century

I had two significant encounters with him.

The first was at an Ashram Jones led, at the church camp-ground at Santa Claus, Indiana, only 35 miles from my home.

I was 19. I was pretty sure I was going to have to be a preacher, against my will, because of a deal I made with God when I was 14, to save my sister’s life. I thought that maybe if God saw that I was so religious that I even went to an Ashram on a hot and sweaty southern Indiana night, maybe that would be enough.

It wasn’t. Unfortunately for me, Jones included an altar call for those considering ministry. I had taken my friend, Dave, along, because he was thinking about the ministry, too. Also, I was scared to go alone. I nudged him and said, “I guess we’ve got to go up there.” I was all the way to the front before I realized Dave was still back on that hard wooden bench. [1]

When Jones put his hand on my head and prayed, I felt like I was where I was supposed to be, and very much alone.

My second encounter was in Dallas, TX. I was a student at Perkins School of Theology, at Southern Methodist U, before I got thrown out of Dallas for integrating the community center where I was Director. Helen and I visited a different church each Sunday morning. One Sunday we went to First Baptist Church, where the infamous W.A. Criswell was the preacher. [2]

This was during the time when the young white Methodist preacher, Lloyd Foreman, was taking his first-grade daughter, Pam, to Wm. Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, even though all the other white parents were boycotting the school to protest integration. There were so many threats against little Pam and her family that they had to move out of their house. The little black girls, like Ruby Bridges, were rightly lauded for braving the hostile mobs that tried to keep them away from that school, but Pam Foreman was a symbol of an even greater wrong in the eyes of New Orleans segregationists, white people who “betrayed their race.”

At First Baptist in Dallas that Sunday morning, they received new members. The last couple was transferring from a church in New Orleans. Their name, maybe not surprisingly, was Saint. Criswell put his hands on their heads and prayed for courage “for all the saints of New Orleans who are resisting the Communist inspired unamerican race-mongrelizing integration in New Orleans.” With his hands still on the heads of the Saints from New Orleans, he pronounced the benediction: “The South will rise again. We ain’t licked yet. Amen.”

We were deeply disturbed all day. We had read in the newspaper that E. Stanley Jones was doing a service in a neighborhood Methodist church that night. We had not planned to go. We were always tired by 7:30 on any night. E. Stanley Jones and his spirituality seemed to be over the hill by that time. But we needed to hear that simple E. Stanley Jones message of salvation by grace through faith.

It was a quiet service. Not many people there. Jones wasn’t as prominent as he had been. But he was real. His message was simple, and fit well the song we sang to end the service: “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] My friend Dave heard a different voice. He answered a call to a different sort of evangelism. He became the premiere madman of the 1970s, evangelizing for Coors Beer and RC Cola.

2] Strangely, segregationist Wally Amos Criswell and integrationist Clarence Jordan, the founder of Koinonia Farms and translator of The Cotton Patch Version of the Bible, were classmates at Louisville Baptist Seminary.

 

THE PROBLEMS OF CONFESSION [R, 2-10-22]

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

It is getting harder to write this column. Partially because I never leave the house, so there is nothing to write about. Also, because I am becoming better about not saying stuff that does not need to be said.

My new driving license has one of those stars so we can use it as an ID to get on an airplane. It also has a sideview mirror requirement. I told Helen that the next time we got on a plane I would have to ask the pilot if the plane had side view mirrors, since that is a requirement for me. It turns out that is another thing that I won’t be saying. It’s good to have folks who will help you know what not to say.

Several years ago, I was at an out-of-town church event and ran into an old friend. We were never close, but we were always cordial, and it was nice to see him. I knew that his wife had died not long before, and I asked him how he was getting along.

“Not well,” he said. “As she was dying, she decided there were things she needed to tell me. I wish she hadn’t. I don’t want to know those things. I’d be better off without them.”

Yes, it’s okay to take some things to your grave. If you need to confess, do it to a priest or pastor or therapist or someone else who is covered by “the seal of the confessional.”

A funeral director I knew always quoted his father as saying, “Nobody ever got into trouble by keeping his mouth shut.” Actually, that’s not true, but it’s a good reminder.

Keeping quiet about private stuff is not just about staying out of trouble yourself, though. It’s also about not making trouble for others.

That is what gossip is all about. Old people are especially prone to gossip precisely because, as I noted in the opening paragraph, there is not much going on in our lives. So we make stuff up. Or pass along stuff that we ought to know is unlikely, or hurtful.

Some talk about people is just conversation, the passing of information. That can be useful and helpful. “Did you know Harold’s wife went to the hospital?” Knowing that, I might take Harold a casserole.

“Harold’s wife is acting like she’s drunk all the time.” That is not helpful, to Harold or to his wife or to me. That is gossip.

I once inherited a church secretary who was a gossip, about the worst trait a church secretary can have. Several friends would gather in her office each morning to tell tales of others. One day I overheard them talking about competing funeral directors. I’ll call them Don & Rick.

“They don’t get along, you know. I heard that Don threatened Rick, went to his funeral home, backed him up the stairs…” I knew both Don and Rick. It sounded far-fetched to me. So I called Rick. “I understand that Don threatened you, came to your funeral home, backed you up the stairs, etc.” “Good grief, no,” Rick said. “I haven’t even seen Don for months.”

So I went to the gossip office and told them I had called Rick and what he said. They stared at me in sullen silence. I went back into my office. As I did, I heard one of them said, “Well, it’s the kind of thing Don would do…” and they were right back at it.

Gossip is addictive, because it makes life more interesting. It’s good, before we open mouth at all, to ask, “Is this something that really needs to be said?”

“Nobody ever got into trouble by keeping his mouth shut.” It’s a good reminder. So don’t ask me about why the BMV claims I need sideview mirrors.

John Robert McFarland

 

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

THE GIFT OF DEAD-ENDS  [T, 2-8-22]

 

Thinking over the year just past, and its restrictions because of viruses and old age, I have realized that some of the most important roads I traveled in my life journey were the dead-ends, because they required me to turn around and go in a different direction.

I grew up with a shallow, simplistic conception of God and Christ and faith in general. The people and pastors of my childhood churches were good people, who loved God and loved me, and they had real experiences of faith, but they were not deep thinkers.

Prayer was to get what you wanted from God. God “still works miracles.” Everything that happens is part of God’s plan. Ethics is primarily about booze and cigarettes and sex. Everything in the Bible is true [factual], including the flood and the parting of the Red Sea and Noah’s ark and Jonah and the whale. Working on “the sabbath” is a sin. [Try that one these days!] You get “saved” when you have an “experience” and “accept Christ into your heart.” We are “saved by the blood,” whatever that meant.

The folks of East Park and Forsythe churches talked about all those simplisms, but I’m not sure they cared a whole lot about most of them. They were primarily into John 3:16 and The Golden Rule. But this simple faith was all they knew, and so it was all I knew.

That was my religion when I went to college. Surprisingly, at “the godless state university,” that simplistic faith was rarely challenged. If so, it was from a fellow student, and they were usually more inquisitive than confrontational or argumentative. I think there has always been some protective coating on me that says to others, “Don’t dispute with him about religion; it’s not worth the trouble.”

Until Marie. I was enthralled with the pretty Marie [not her real name]. She would make a good preacher’s wife.

She was simplistically devout, and so was I. To be able to spend time with her, and thus make time with her, I had to go to the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, because that was her “church.”

When it came to simplistic religion, and punishment for straying from it, IVCF doubled down, in spades. If it were in the Bible, it was true, regardless of how unreasonable it was or how contrary to experience. If you didn’t believe in the virgin birth, you were a sinner and bound for hell.

My protective coating didn’t work with them at all. The more they “explained” [harangued] to me that I would go to hell if I did not believe in the substitutionary atonement, the less satisfied I was with simplistic religion. I knew I had to start thinking beyond the Sunday School flannel board for my religious faith. I certainly couldn’t accept the aggressive, antagonistic shallow beliefs and practices of IVCF.

Which was a problem for my romantic hopes, for Marie was a true believer in the IVCF exclusivism that left everybody else “beyond the pale.” Life was about salvation, which depended on beliefs instead of actions, so you could go to heaven… But was that biblical? IVCF had driven me to the Bible, but what they preached didn’t seem to be in that Bible.

Eventually, Marie rejected me “because you’re too liberal for me.” It was one of the nicest things anyone ever did for me, because after that I met Helen, which is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Also important, though, was the impetus my time in IVCF gave me to seek out a wider understanding of God and religion. I did not know then, of course, of what Albert Outler, one of my professors at Perkins School of Theology at SMU, called “the Wesleyan quadrilateral.” He pointed out that John Wesley experienced and related to God by using not just the Bible, but also experience [trust of the Holy Spirit for guidance], and reason, and tradition.

Coming up against the dead-end of IVCF made me turn around and go in a different direction, so that the quadrilateral became my way to God, even though I could not yet call it that. I learned to love God with my “heart and soul and mind and strength,” as Jesus directed.

As this second year of social distancing winds down, it might be worth looking at the dead-ends that turned out to be gifts.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

 

NOT SURE WHAT TO DO? TELL YOURSELF A STORY [Su, 2-6-22]

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

So, you have a conflict, a problem. You don’t know how to solve it. Just tell yourself a story about someone who does know how.

My friends, Tony and Charlie, recently read both my novels. It was sort of a command performance. It’s time for me to get rid of unnecessary stuff, including extra copies of my books, that I have kept around in case someone wanted one. So I gave them copies of An Ordinary Man, a Western, set in the Custer era, and Vets, an action/adventure novel, set in the Iraqistan era, with the proviso that they did not have to read them or keep them, but they did have to take them.

But before donating them for the Hoosier Hills Food Bank’s annual book sale, they did read them.

Charlie said, “It’s amazing how you managed to be totally into such very different eras, so realistic in each.” Tony observed, “That may be because the main character in each bears a remarkable resemblance to the author.”

Well, yes! In part, that’s just necessary writing technique. “Write what you know,” experienced authors always tell us. So, my MC [author abbreviation for main character] knows a lot of the same stuff that I know. It’s just easier, although I marvel at authors like Richard Powers who seem to know everything about anything, so their characters do, too. Research--so that your characters can know stuff you don’t already know yourself--takes a lot of work. I like research, but I really just want to tell myself a story that will help with a “D” I can’t figure out.

The D stands for Decision. Every story has ABCD: Action, Background, Conflict, Decision. When I go to bed and review my life for that day, I see my Ds that did not deal effectively with the Cs. So, I tell myself a story about someone who, even though perhaps like me, is able to make the right D to resolve that C, unlike my real self. I make up a fictional character who is like the real character God wants me to be.

All my stories, except those I have picked up from others, are about a better version of myself. Otherwise, how would I learn how to deal better with the problems I face? “How will they hear without a preacher?” the Apostle, Paul, asks in Romans 10:14. Well, we won’t hear very well at all, unless that preacher is a story-teller, who tells a tale of people who are just like us, but who, unlike us, know how to make the right Decisions for the Conflicts, the conflicts between good and evil, greed and sacrifice, love and lust, in whatever ways—great or small--that they gob-smack us. You can be a better you when you tell yourself a story about someone who is already a better you.

I did a lot of counseling with children, not because I had education for it, but because people knew I liked children, and because I was inexpensive, meaning free. So, parents brought kids to me, and said, “This kid is not making good Ds about their Cs.” So, I would tell the child the A part of a story, and ask them to tell the B part. That led right into the C. It was surprisingly easy then for them to supply the D. I’m pretty sure it worked, because in the stories I tell myself about those children now, they are slaying the dragons instead of being eaten by them.

Anyway, if you’re not satisfied with your story, or mine, just tell a better one. Two days ago was my birthday. To celebrate, I told myself a story of a man who walks a straight line, and remembers why he went to the kitchen, and who can get up off the floor whenever he wants to…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Today is the birthday of our gay “son.” Happy Birthday, Randy!

BIRTHDAY IN A BLIZZARD [F, 2-4-22]

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

You may have noticed that my usual posting schedule for this column went haywire this week. That was partly by intention, and partly by blizzard.

Intention: The every-other-day schedule missed my birthday. So, I decided to leave three days between the most recent column and this one. It just seems that an old writer should write something wise and otherwise on his birthday.

Blizzard: Southern Indiana did not get the worst of winter storm Landon. [Landon is a nice name, but for a blizzard? Really?] But we had enough snow and low temps and wind and ice and rain and sleet and power outages to close us down. Travel advisory, meaning unless you are an emergency vehicle, don’t.  

Which upset the plans of the women folk to celebrate my birthday.

My wife and daughters are firm believers in the holy trinity of homemaking: candles, throw pillows, and wrapping paper.

I make it sort of hard, by proclaiming upon every gift-giving occasion, that I already have more than I can use or enjoy, so the only gifts I want are contributions to good causes, or something I can read or eat.

They are okay with giving money in my name to the homeless shelter or community kitchen, but they also want to give me something I can open. Because you can’t really use wrapping paper on a thank-you letter from Shalom Center or Hoosier Hills Foodbank.

This year older daughter Mary Beth finally broke down and sent me unwrapped books. Normally they first come to her so she can wrap them before sending them to me. But this time she just had the book store send them directly, which they did several days ago. Good idea, since no deliveries got through in the blizzard.

Younger daughter Katie Kennedy, although an author herself and thus highly willing to giving books as gifts, decided to go the food route, since that would also cut down on the amount of cooking her mother would have to do.

So, from Iowa she called the Kroger store where Helen waits in the parking lot each week while strangers put some of the things she ordered, plus several substitutes, [well, yes, they’re orange, too, but…] into her car trunk.

First, the telephone was answered in Russian. This would have seemed strange in a small town in Indiana to anyone else, but Katie learned to speak Russian herself right here at Indiana University, which provides instruction in more foreign languages than any other university in the world. Her reaction was, “His accent is really good, almost like a native speaker.” Despite the quality accent, he was not interested in talking about birthday gifts, only about NATO intrusions, and she realized that she had punched in the prefix for Moscow instead of Bloomington, so she said, “Sorry, Vlad,” and tried again.

This time she got the real thing and ordered many fancy sandwiches and salads and trays and such, to be delivered to our house. But, like everyone else, Kroger doesn’t have enough workers anymore to deliver stuff, so they said Helen would have to pick it up. “It’s no problem,” they said. “She can just come to her usual spot in the parking lot and we’ll bring it out.” This is Bloomington; they know these things.

Then the blizzard was prognosticated. Katie called Kroger’s on Tuesday to cancel the order, knowing Helen could not drive through the blizzard to pick it up. They refused to cancel the order. No, not what you’re thinking. This is Bloomington. “That’s so sad,” the manager said, “your father not getting his birthday present. Let’s wait and see. Maybe the blizzard will miss us.”

So she called yesterday. “Yes, we cancelled it,” the manager said. “No traffic moving. I sent the day shift home and the night shift isn’t coming in.” “Why are you still there?” Katie asked. “The National Guard is coming in to pick up a bunch of sandwiches,” he said.

I’m pleased. A tired and hungry National Guard member is getting to eat my birthday present. As good as a contribution to the community kitchen.

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

 

 

DEW ON WINTER ROSES [T, 2-1-22]

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

There is no dew on roses in the time of winter.

In seminary we made fun of C. Austin Miles’ 1912 song, “In the Garden.” We called it “Andy.” “Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me, Andy tells me I am his own.” Someone said that it had been composed as a popular love song but had not made it, so the composer went to the religious market with it, where it became one of the great all-time hits. That was not true, but truth has little weight when we want to ridicule something.

I enjoyed making fun of the hymn, in the same way children enjoy making fun of the odd kid at school. I was a budding theologian, and this did not qualify as theology. It was a love song, not a theological song. It was romantic. It carried nothing of the realism and suffering and sacrifice and scandal of the real Gospel. It was the worst of self-centered Protestant individualism: “The joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” Talk about exclusive! It was dew on roses, not blood on a cross.

Miles intended it as a hymn from the beginning, but it is also clearly a romantic love song. By Miles’ own account, it is a depiction of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, after Jesus’ resurrection, meeting “in the garden,” to share a joy that “none other has ever known.”

It is popular, and not unreasonable, to think that the time after the Resurrection was springtime for Jesus. After all, he was going home, to “reign in glory,” and all that. But if you are the savior of the world, can you sit in heaven and be content with the world as it has been for these past two thousand years? No, this is a long hard bitter two-thousand-year winter time for Jesus.

It is a barren winter time for our culture, too, for we have removed romance from sexuality. Sex is physical contact, only. It has little, if anything, to do with relationship, with love, with romance. People who look at Jesus and Magdalene assume either that they had a conventionally modern physical relationship, or that Jesus was beyond all that sexuality stuff. They forget about romance.

One of the great things about “In the Garden” is its romanticism. Considering this long despairing two-thousand-year winter Jesus has had to endure, mostly at the hand of those who invoke his name as savior, I cherish for him that short romantic time with Mary Magdalene in the garden.

One remembered moment of true romance, of a time when there was dew on the roses, can sustain a body, even a resurrected one, through the cold of winter.

John Robert McFarland