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.
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