A REALLY BIG BUT… [2-7-24]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—A REALLY BIG BUT… [2-7-24]

 

I really thought that I was going to stop writing with the 2-4-24 column on my birthday. It seemed like the necessary exit, at the right time.

But, and as one of the preachers I heard in my retirement years unwittingly said, at the turn point in her sermon, “And I have a really big but here…”

I wrote to my young Lutheran pastor friend, Rebecca, and told her. I should have known better. Her feedback always makes me think again. That is the purpose of a preacher, to cause a second thought, and why preachers need pastors themselves.

I had several good reasons to think I should exit this column as gracefully as possible:

1] I’m at a life point where I need to focus inwardly instead of outwardly. For 70 years now, every insight, every step toward wholeness, has immediately been put into words that I can say, by speech or writing, to others. It’s possible that I have been so focused on speaking that I have done no hearing. If there are Word words that I need to hear, I must get to them.

2] Not many will fail old age without CIW as a crib sheet. According to Blogspot, each of my columns gets about 100 views, but none of my columns ever go “trending.” There are plenty of blogs that give good advice instead of just telling little stories and then turning you loose to see if you can get anything from them.

3] I have used up all my stories, and my current motionless life does not lend itself to creating more. I’m beginning—continuing, really—to use the same stories and ideas over and over. Yes, most of my readers are old, so I can count on them not to remember, but sooner or later they’re going to say, “This sounds awfully familiar… and it wasn’t that great the first time. Or the second or third.”

4] Increasingly, as old people need to, I muse over events and stages in my own life, to try to understand who I was and who I am. [1] Good writers are able to expose their personal lives and in doing so help the reader get a better look at their own lives. But the self-musings of bad writers just become self-indulgent. I fear doing the self-indulgent thing.

5] One of the appeals of my preaching and writing is that I use language well. Unlike most current talkers and writers, I know more adjectives than the F word. My language abilities, however, are declining. I’m not vain. I don’t feel I have “to quit while I’m ahead,” to avoid embarrassing myself. I’m willing to expose my decline if my words are still useful and interesting, even while stumbling. But I really don’t like inflicting mundane language on others.

But, the “bottom” line is: I need to keep writing. I like it. It keeps me socially engaged. I don’t need hearing aids to do it. [Yes, THAT is a topic you’re going to hear about a lot.]

I know, however, that I don’t write very well anymore, so, please, don’t feel like you have to read my words just to be kind to me—although I appreciate unmerited kindness. When you are not receiving something worthwhile from this column, you have whatever permissions you need to go elsewhere.

Until then, thank you for being in this elite company of Christ In Winter readers. I appreciate your fellowship in this adventure, be your readership named or secret.

Especially since it’s not easy to get into this fellowship. A lot of columns, like The Writers Almanack, will send each new post right into your email box. With CIW, you have to bookmark it and then check every third day or so to see if there is anything new. That takes a special kind of reader, and I thank you for doing the extra work so that we can keep in touch.

“Hope is the conviction that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” [Vaclav Havel] There! You have read one true sentence. Hemingway said that the key to writing was to write one true sentence, then follow it with another… The rest of this column was rather self-indulgent, and if it gave you nothing else, at least you have this one true sentence.

John Robert McFarland

A big thanks to Mary Larson Childs for linking CIW to her Port Wing Passages blog. [You should read it. https://portwingpassages.blogspot.com/]

1] Erik Erikson’s last stage of psycho-social understanding: final integrity vs despair.