AMBULANCE AT THE RECTORY DOOR, a poem [T, 7-2-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings and Memories of an Old Man—AMBULANCE AT THE RECTORY DOOR, a poem [T, 7-2-24]

 

When I attended Garrett Theological Seminary at Northwestern U, I pastored the NW Indiana churches at Cedar Lake and Creston. It was a crazy arrangement. I was a fulltime pastor and a fulltime student at the same time, meaning I didn’t do either job as well as I wanted to, but I needed the salary of a fulltime church [which wasn’t all that much] for we had two little girls to raise, and my parents to help.

So I drove forty miles each way, up around Da Region [1], and through Chicago and Evanston, so I could be home each evening, for child-rearing and husbanding and churching. Somehow, it worked, primarily, I think, because Helen and I were young and energetic and didn’t know we couldn’t to it.

These were the days before expresssays and interstates through Chicago. I worked hard to find the easiest and quickest city streets to use. One day I caught a scene down a side street. An ambulance was parked in front of the rectory beside a Roman Catholic church building. Attendants were carrying a stretcher from the rectory to the ambulance.

As though I didn’t have enough to do, I wrote the following poem. I did not usually write poetry then. I was too much into day-by-day reality for that. I would change some words and line breaks now. But this was the way I felt it back then. It was published in “The Christian Century.”

AMBULACE AT THE RECTORY DOOR

 

White frocked and sterile

men of muscle, bone,

brainlessly familiar with

life’s margin space,

intruding they come

upon carpet worn by feet

bringing those in need:

the wretched,

poor in body mind and hope

“How beautiful are the feet…”

upon the…carpet…

 

They view the dusty corners

of the room, while you search

nooks of mind for some

lost coin of deed to hurl

against hard history’s page.

Long before the search is done,

they wheel you out upon the busy

street…and no one sees.

 

The key turns

in the collar’s lock and you are free

to go where no one calls you “Father”

but where the Father calls you “son.”

 

John Robert McFarland

The Hammond-Gary metroplex on the Indiana side of “Chicago Land” is The Calumet Region, known in the local patois as “Da” Region.