In Search of Lost Facts [W, 9-27-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—In Search of Lost Facts [W, 9-27-23]

 

I have always wondered why Proust named that book Remembrance of Things Past. I mean, isn’t all remembrance of things past? Well, it wasn’t his fault. In French it was A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, which is more accurately translated as In Search of Lost Time. I know that because I got 5 hours of A in French my 2^nd semester at Indiana University.

I’m sort of sorry that I told the Methodist District Superintendent about that. I had gone to see Dallas Browning because Aunt Nora said I should find out what steps I needed to take to become a preacher, in case I decided to some day in the distant future. Which is the way I always tell the story, but remembrance of things past is not always factual remembrance of things past.

In telling how I got into the ministry, I went to see Dr. Browning, and he asked me if in school [Yes, IU, I said] and then, “Do you get good grades? to which I say, the way I tell the story, “All As last semester, which was true, but I didn’t tell him about my disastrous first semester, which was over before I found out that in college you can’t get by just be being a nice boy.”

True, but not accurate. I have been going through a box of old stuff from my college days and found my transcript. That “all As” semester was 15 hours of A, the normal course load, but also 2 hours of B, in F100, “Introduction to Teaching.”

I was a journalism major, but friends said I should get a teaching certificate, too, just in case, and F100 was an easy course, wouldn’t interfere with my “real” classes, so why not get started on a backup plan? They were right. It was easy. I was wrong on only 3 test questions all semester. And I got a B!

There were about a hundred students in the course. Our grades were based totally on multiple-choice, machine-graded exams. About 300 questions in the course of the semester. The grading was on a curve. So many of those other students got all the questions right, or missed only one or two, that we three-miss people didn’t make the cut for an A. I hate to think about what happened to the four-miss people.

Anyway, when I told Dallas Browning that I had made all As the most recent semester, in my thinking, it was true.

Unfortunately, he thought it was a sign, to a man desperate to get all his pulpits filled, that I was so smart that I could start preaching the very next Sunday, on a 3-church circuit. I should have told him about F100. It might have saved me from having to go to bed early every Saturday night for 50 years.

John Robert McFarland