CRITICAL OLD PEOPLE [F, 1-31-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—CRITICAL OLD PEOPLE [F, 1-31-25]

 

Old people like to help younger people learn the truth, by criticizing them for not having the truth already.

There was a campus minister at my university who liked correcting people. I’ll call him Floyd. I didn’t go to many campus ministry programs, because I was already preaching at three little churches, but I was madly in love with the secretary of the student cabinet [officers] of that campus ministry, so I hung around the building whenever I thought she might be there. Thus, even I did not escape Floyd’s corrections.

I think he saw saving people from their mistakes as part of his ministry. That is not how others saw it. They just saw a guy who liked to find fault.

Correcting a factual mistake might actually be helpful to the person corrected. For instance, if I thought that Illinois Wesleyan U is in Indiana, I could be saved some travel problems if someone corrected me.

I had gone to chapel once at ILWU to hear a well-known high-ranking church guy from NYC. But he called Chaplain Bill White just before chapel time to say he wasn’t going to make it. He was calling from Bloomington, Indiana to say he had flown there instead of to Bloomington, Illinois. Why in the world he thought Illinois Wesleyan was in Bloomington, Indiana he never explained. Some correction would have benefited him.

But Floyd didn’t really correct you, even your factual mistakes, in a useful manner. Instead, he belittled you for not already having the correct knowledge. He would have said, “What? You thought IWU was in IN? Where did you go to school?”

Correcting others for matters of opinion is even more problematic. “The trees are pretty,” some student might say. Floyd would reply, “Maybe to you they are, but to someone who has just lost a loved one to a gruesome death, nothing is pretty, and it’s an insult to them to say the trees are pretty.”

People just stopped talking to him, or in front of him.

Nobody really likes being corrected. As Mark Twain said, “I love learning, but I hate being taught.” Yet old people seem to think that since we acquired so much knowledge over our many years, we should impart it whether folks want it or not. Especially, we should correct their mistakes so they don’t make them again.

Being corrected is belittling. Young people lump it into a category called “judgy.”

Correcting a person’s factual mistakes can be helpful, to keep them from looking stupid in front of others. But there is a limit to how helpful that might be. If you split an infinitive, I could correct your grammar, but hardly anybody would care, and you probably wouldn’t, either.

In my retirement, I served as a sort of unofficial, unpaid Assistant District Superintendent. Our DS sent me out to little churches to hear new preachers and help them learn to preach better. I was glad to do so, but I told him, and them, that I would report to him only the things they did well. I saw my job not as correcting mistakes, but as building on their good points.

The job of old people is to help young people get better at living. Criticism rarely, if ever, does that. Affirmation of what we’re already doing okay at, I think, is what works best. [And don’t even think about correcting my placement of “at” in that sentence.]

John Robert McFarland

January of 2025 is over. It has certainly been a momentous month. I pray that your new month of February will be a good one.

 

 

 

 

 

MOTHER AND DEI [W, 1-29-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—MOTHER AND DEI [W, 1-29-25]

 

We’ve heard a lot recently about DEI, mostly from the people who are opposed to diversity, equality, and inclusion. My mother, though, a long time ago, was a DEI advocate, although she thought of it as just being a good person.

Because my mother was so inconsistent in so many discombobulating ways, I don’t think I gave her the credit she deserved for being consistent—for her time and place—in one very significant way.

We lived in the working class near east side of Indianapolis from 1941-1947. Our next-door neighbor, at 232 N. Oakland Ave, was a woman known only as Mrs. Dickerson. I think she was the only African-American in all of Englewood, certainly in the Lucretia Mott PS # 3 area. I knew the area well, up and down Washington St. [US 40 at the time] and New York St. I walked to the Tacoma Theater, East Park Methodist Church, the Blue Ribbon Ice Cream store, various Mom & Pop grocery stores, Vic’s Drug Store, Cub Scout pack. In all those forays, I never saw anybody who was not white.

Except there was a black woman right next door. Why she was there, in the midst of all those white folks, I don’t think anyone knew.

I don’t recall anyone treating her badly, or even saying rude things. Partly, I suppose, because she never left her house, even to go into her yard. Occasionally, though, she would be on her screened back porch when my mother was hanging up clothes in our yard. That was when Mother would go over and stand beside Mrs. Dickerson’s porch and chat with her. They became friends, of a sort, the sort that called each other Mrs. Dickerson and Mrs. McFarland.

Sometimes Mrs. Dickerson would ask permission of Mother to let me run an errand to a store for her. I was only eight or nine, but I ran those sorts of errands for Mother, and Indianapolis was not the gun-murder capital of the world, as it is now, so Mother always gave permission. I think I was the only white person who was ever in Mrs. Dickerson’s house, going into her porch to deliver a loaf of bread or bottle of milk, and her change, from which she gave me a nickel. I wasn’t about to be a racist!

Mother wasn’t without prejudice. Even though she was Democrat enough to be a poll worker, she refused to vote for Adlai Stevenson because he was divorced, and she was sure the divorce was his fault, for anything that went wrong in a marriage was the husband’s fault.

No, not just her marriage; everybody’s! When Helen and I were stopped dating for a short time during college, Mother wrote to her demanding to know what I had done to cause the “breakup.” [Ironically, it was because I did not think that I could both marry and take care of my parents and young siblings.]

Despite that prejudice, Mother always insisted that people should be judged on their individual merits, not according to race or religion or any of the other categories we use to discriminate. It was the one thing about which she was totally consistent.

Her inconsistencies in all of the rest of life drove me crazy to the day she died, but I will always value what she taught me about how to treat people who were denied equality and inclusion.

John Robert McFarland

 

BEFORE THE FIRE GOES OUT {M, 1-27-25]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Forgetfulness of An Old Man—BEFORE THE FIRE GOES OUT {M, 1-27-25]

 

When I was in college, a common exclamation was, “Forget you!” I suppose Keota, Iowa—at least the Presbyterians there—might want to say that to me.

“Keota” in the Native American language of eastern Iowa means “the fire has gone out,” which is highly appropriate, for the fire has gone out in my memory about Keota. I don’t have even a glimmer of memory about Keota, or the Presbyterian Church there, even though I apparently preached there almost every Sunday for three months in 1972, when I was a PhD student at the U of Iowa.

I know this because I have been going through files—many, many files—of old stuff I have saved through the years, recycling most of it so that my children will not have to mess with it when I’m gone. One of those files is full of Sunday morning worship bulletins from the Keota Presbyterian Church, bulletins that list my name beside “Sermon.” Not only my name is listed beside “Sermon,” but there is a title each week, too. They sound a lot like my sermons; every title has “story” in it!

I was a Presbyterian preacher during my U of Iowa days because the Director of the University School of Religion was James Spalding, an ordained Presbyterian himself, and the de facto “bishop” of Presbyterianism in eastern Iowa. Whenever a church was between or without a preacher, it would call up Jim and ask him to send out somebody to fill the pulpit. I was technically Jim’s Teaching Asst, but neither of us did much teaching. I was more of an assistant director, doing whatever he assigned me, which was often going to meetings of the trustees or potential donors, since he didn’t like meetings. I didn’t, either, but I needed the money. Both from being Jim’s assistant, and from filling at little churches where he sent me. Including Keota. I guess.

The next year, I pastored, not just preached, parttime, at two Presbyterian Churches, Red Oak Grove and Stanwood, about the same distance northeast from Iowa City that Keota is southeast from there. I remember almost everything about them. So why don’t I remember Keota from the year before?

Forgetfulness is one of the main complaints of old people. Recently one of my former colleagues was very helpful to Helen as she negotiated some tricky insurance paper work. When she thanked him, he said, “Oh, I owed you. Your husband gave me the best advice I ever got.” Now I’m trying to remember what I told him. I could use some good advice. But…

I recently figured up that I have known almost ten thousand people by first and last names. In sorting through old files, I have found notes from many of them. I don’t recognize most of the names, or if I recognize the name, I have no memory of the person who goes with it. That’s probably not surprising. Most of us can’t relate to more than a few dozen people at a time, keeping them sorted out in our minds. That’s for a good reason. It would be overwhelming to me to remember ten thousand people. My brain protects me by dropping out those that seem least important right now.

So, as you do some old-age forgetting, remember that it’s because you have so much more stuff to keep in your memory vault now, but you have no more storage space that you ever had. Your brain is just protecting you by dropping out the irrelevant stuff.

I hope I can remember that, at least more than I remember Keota.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

 

BEACON PEOPLE: LYNN RINGER [SA, 1-25-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Sometimes Relevant Memories of An Old Man—BEACON PEOPLE: LYNN RINGER [SA, 1-25-25]

 Lynn Ringer died recently. 87 years old. They said she would die at 20.

Twenty is when she got ovarian cancer. The survival rate then was 1 [one] %.

She and a friend had moved away from their small town in North Dakota to live together in a city and have careers. Instead of a career, she got cancer. One night, in the hospital all alone, she spoke to the cancer. “Well, one percent means somebody will live, and it might as well be me.”

The next day a new oncologist came to see her. Not only new to her, but new to oncology. Paul Hamilton had been a pathologist but decided he didn’t want to deal with diseases only. He wanted to deal with people. He said to his new patient, “Well, one percent means somebody will live, and it might as well be you.”

The tall, beautiful young woman and the short, wily old man formed an immediate bond. Their story is told in the book, I’m a Patient, Too, By Albert Fay Hill. Paul understood that a cancer patient might listen better, and feel more supported, by a fellow patient than by a doctor. He began to take Lynn with him on his rounds. From that beginning came Cansurmount, the cancer support program, patient to patient.

That is common now, but it was novel in the 1960s. It was still new when Helen and I went to Iliff Theological Seminary in Denver in the summer of 1990 for a course called “Empowering the Cancer Patient,” lead by Lynn and Paul and fellow-survivor and theologian, John Anduri.

Only six months before, the pale oncologist had told me “A year, or two.” I needed empowering.

It was a fascinating class. I was the only one with cancer, so Helen became almost another instructor, for she had insights as a cancer spouse that no one else had. Most class members were Iliff students, but mature, second career people: A retired school superintendent. A minister whose wife was dying from cancer. A professional bounty hunter, who plied his trade on the weekend while he was in seminary. A few in addition to us who were there just for the one class: A nun. A reclusive woman in a wheelchair. An accountant.

The accountant, Judy, was fun. She said, “Accounting is so boring. One day I was driving by here, and saw the sign and thought, ‘Theology school. That looks interesting, so I just came in to sign up. When I told a friend, she said, ‘But shouldn’t you do something else first… like go to church?” She ended up marrying a preacher she met in that class.

Helen and I became fast friends with John and Paul and especially with Lynn. We stayed in touch. She was a pilot and would fly from Denver to Illinois to see us.

One day toward the end of the summer, John asked us each to say where we wanted to be in twenty years. I said, “I want to be sitting in the chair Lynn’s in now, and say the same thing she said twenty years ago. ‘Somebody’s going to live. It might as well be me.’”

I got to do that.

There are people in this life who are light house beacons. For me, one of those was Lynn. One of the joys of old age is getting to see the life of a friend in wholeness, from start to finish. “Well done, good and faithful servant.” I give thanks for Lynn, for her inspiration, for her friendship, for her life.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

HONOR THE SABBATH, TO KEEP IT MERCENARY [R, 1-23-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Complaints of An Old Man—HONOR THE SABBATH, TO KEEP IT MERCENARY [R, 1-23-25]

 

The silence-obliteration guys were doing their thing, with great success, for two weeks before Christmas. For some reason, our condo HOA cannot stand having even one leaf anywhere in our six or so square blocks. We pay to have every leaf blown over into Illinois.

But Sunday is a day of rest, right? It’s the sabbath. Not really, but we call Sunday the sabbath, which means it should be a day of peacefulness and quiet. Especially in the Christmas season. Not so, if there is even one leaf left. To people with leaf-obliteration equipment, Sunday is just another day.

One Sunday afternoon, as they scouted for miscreant leaves, they decided to park ALL their equipment, for a very long time, on the sidewalk five feet from the front of our house, all of it running, because it is never turned off. We were on sofas about six feet apart. We quite literally could not hear each other.

Yes, I was and am irritated, but more on behalf of those poor leaf-blowing guys than for myself. They had to have that noise in their heads ever since the first leaf hit the ground, even with those ear-muff things on their heads, because with that machinery, it’s not just the sound. You can feel it as well as hear it.

No Sunday sabbath, no day of peace and quiet, for them.

When I worked at Moe’s while in high school, his was the only gas station/grocery store open on Sunday in Oakland City. Moe did not like to get up early, and he liked to visit family on Sundays, so I got to open up and close up and work all day.

When we moved to Normal, IL in 1966, there was only one gas station that stayed open on Sundays and holidays. Bob Hohenstreiter was a nice man who kept his Marathon station open. He said he did it because somebody had to provide service for the folks who got caught without enough gas, or needed a start. It was a ministry for him, even though he would not call it that. He never charged for his labor on those days, only for the gas or battery or such.

 I never thought of pumping gas and slicing bologna at Moe’s on Sunday as a ministry. I made fifty cents an hour; I was rich. I was definitely in favor of everyone else observing Sunday “blue laws,” so that I could make money. When I became a preacher, I was still the only guy working on Sunday. Until… when did we decide that everybody needed to be able to shop any time, all the time?

We didn’t actually decide it. When Ronald Reagan destroyed the middle class, it became necessary for every family to have two incomes to survive. With everyone working, there is no time for shopping…unless the stores stay open, and the loop continues.

 

One of the reasons so many businesses are understaffed are the current 24/7/365 open hours.

We need a sabbath, both from working and from buying, a day that really is “a day of rest.” Those workers need a sabbath, a day of rest, a day without noise and bad vibrations. But nobody gets a sabbath anymore, and it shows in the vulgarity and crassness and rudeness and ugliness of our culture.

The culture is no longer going to provide a sabbath day, so it is up to each one of us to create a sabbath of our own. That’s just the way it is. Not Remember the Sabbath…but… Create the Sabbath…

John Robert McFarland

Bonus Observation: “With God, time is eternity in disguise.” Abraham Heschel

 

HELPING THE PUNY & FEEBLE [T, 1-21-25]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—HELPING THE PUNY & FEEBLE [T, 1-21-25]

 

Helen and I have been sick with colds for a couple of weeks. Friends have offered to help us, and they’ve gone ahead and done it. That’s tricky, helping old people, because we really do need help, often, but we usually don’t want to take it, because it cuts into our independence. So, here’s what I’m thinking about that…

Most of my life was spent with church people, but I also got to be part of other communities--theater, music, social justice, coffee house, cancer… For a long time, the running community was important to me.

I enjoyed running companions. Sweating and panting are great equalizers. In the running community, I wasn’t “the preacher,” just another guy struggling to survive. Dick and I lived in the same neighborhood, so often ended up in a group of three or four who encountered one another on the streets and then ran together.

One day I said I had to quit early to go to one of daughter Katie’s cross-country meets. I said it had been difficult, but in 12 years of having children in school, I had never missed one of their school events—academics, band, drama, sports, etc. I knew that Dick’s daughter ran on the cross-country team, so I asked him if he were going to the meet, too.

He rather self-righteously, or so it seemed to me, pronounced that he had never seen his daughter in any school event. That was her world, not his. She needed to learn how to negotiate in her world by herself. [I was probably projecting the self-righteousness, since I probably sounded self-righteous in bragging about going to the activities of my daughters.]

The meaning was clear: he was a better parent than I, because he neglected his children. That’s the way I heard it, and it both angered and confused me.

I’m still confused. Did Dick really think that was best? Did he think any psychologist would agree with him, that being that absent in a kid’s life was good for them? Did he do it to help his daughter, really, or just to make it easy on himself? Did it actually work?

I don’t know the answer to that last question. She and my daughter were nominal friends. She seemed like a nice girl. But we moved away before I got to see her as an adult.

My guess, though, is that she was okay. My pastoral counseling professor, Carroll Wise, used to say that if your kids know you love them and know that you are well-intentioned, they will forgive you a lot of parenting mistakes.

I once called on an elderly lady in a church where I had just been appointed pastor. We had a nice conversation. She told me how much her adult daughter helped her, how well the daughter was doing, despite some difficult circumstances, including the death of her husband. “But,” she said, “these days you never know how a kid is going to turn out.”

The “kid” was fifty-three years old, and a university professor.

There is some relationship truth in what Dick said. Even as old people, we sometimes need to step back and let folks do things for themselves, admit that it’s their world.

What’s the right mix, though, of helping and backing off? Who knows?

I’m old enough that I need help, but not too much help. I need to be able to do some things for myself, from getting my coat on to preparing to die.

Do the best you can. I know you’re well-intentioned. I’ll forgive you if you overhelp.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

I’M IN THE POOR HOUSE NOW [Sun, 1-19-25] Inauguration Special

BEYOND WINTER: The Somewhat Relevant Songs of An Old Man—I’M IN THE POOR HOUSE NOW [Sun, 1-19-25] Inauguration Special

 

To the tune of He’s in The Jail House Now.

I used to be a young man

Everything was oh so grand

I thought I would be good forever more

But I found out on Monday

That I got real old on Sunday

And now I’m so weak I can barely stand

 

I’m in the poor house now

I’m in the poor house now

Whatever could I do

They said it’s Shady Pines for you

I’m in the poor house now

 

My wild oats have all been sown

Every time I move I moan

I’m getting’ ready to face that final door

But I could still be neat and cool

I could move it like a dancing fool

If I could just get up from off the floor

 

I’m in the poor house now

I’m in the poor house now

I stagger when I try to walk

The words escape me when I talk

I’m in the poor house now

 

Remember the last election

Everybody was in action

Trying to find themselves a president

Now the country’s full of tension

There goes my old-age pension

Only rich folks make it now

 

I’m in the poor house now

I’m in the poor house now

If you elect yourselves a dope

You better trust in God and hope

I’m in the poor house now

 

John Robert McFarland

The “poor house” was the way society took care of the infirm old people before Social Security. In many ways, it was a good system. You lived in a big house with other old people, under the supervision of a younger couple, and helped with gardening and cooking and whatever you could. You had shelter and food, and most importantly, community.

Jimmie Rodgers wrote He’s In The Jailhouse Now. Many others also recorded it. You can hear most of them on You Tube. It was sung by the Soggy Bottom Boys in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I’m indebted to Blind Blake [Arthur Blake] for the inspiration for my last verse.

 

 

 

 

 

RAGE WITHIN [F, 1-17-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Psychology of An Old Man—RAGE WITHIN [F, 1-17-25]

 

There is a rage deep within each of us. It is because we know life is futile, because we shall die, so what’s the point?

That undifferentiated rage is down at the bottom, below a lot of other layers, but it is there. It is what motivates everything else we do. Without conscious knowledge of it.

It is not just anger. Anger is at the upper levels. Rage is at the foundation. We recognize anger, can even “manage” it. Rage is beneath consciousness.

Adler said all that we do is motivated by the desire for power. Freud said it was sex. Jung said it was the collective unconscious.

 

Adler is right. The desire for power is the attempt to counter the deep rage. If I can just get power, I can hold death off. My world of power might be very small, perhaps just one other person, but if I can have that power, I am invincible. This is the source of rape, especially the most common rape, men against women. It is from the wombs of women that life, and thus death, comes. If I can have power against the life source, even in the life source, I can have power against death.

 

Freud is right for the same reason. Sex is the power to create life. If I can create life, I can hold off death. This is why poor people refuse to stop having babies, even when they cannot afford them. This is why pro-birth advocates are so often paradoxical, being only pro-birth, not really pro-life. They are also pro-gun and pro-capital punishment, sources of power over death.

 

Jung is right. In the collective unconscious is the deep rage against the futility of life.

 

John S. Dunne, SJ, says there are three strangers that come to us in life: the world, sexuality, and mortality. We experience “the world” mostly in other people, but it is also nature and its ways. Come puberty, sexuality jumps on us like a tiger. Mortality is always lurking. Dunne says that life depends upon whether we make friends or enemies of these three strangers.

I add a fourth stranger. I call that stranger Christ, but I do so knowing that other people call that stranger--the Word of God in the world, the Presence of God in the world--by other names.

 

If we make friends with God through Christ, all else follows into wholeness, including the world and sexuality and mortality. If we are enemies with God, the deep rage conquers, and we are enemies with the world and sexuality and mortality, enemies of the world and other people and our own true selves.

Jesus said, “I call you friends.” [John 15:15]

The Wisdom Literature of The Bible [Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon] says Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. I was quite taken with the Wisdom Lit when I was young. Now that I am old, I am not sure that the Wisdom Literature is all that wise.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity? No, all is God.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

I’VE BEEN SICK IS NO EXCUSE [W, 1-15-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—I’VE BEEN SICK IS NO EXCUSE [W, 1-15-25]

 

I think I’ve told before of the lion who went through the jungle beating on his chest and yelling at each animal, “Why aren’t you big and strong like me?” The zebras and giraffes ran away. So did the tigers and rhinos. He finally came to the monkey. “Why aren’t you big and strong like me?” the lion roared. The monkey replied, “I’ve been sick.” [It’s better if you can hear me do it in my pitiful, pathetic monkey voice.”

I’ve been thinking of that ever since the column of Jan. 9, where I tell about my adventures at Morgenstern’s book store and Krogucci grocery store, because I picked up some germs at one of those places, and my body has been coughing and sneezing ever since, trying to get those germs to vacate the premises. Naturally, when the germs left me, they took up residence in Helen, so the sounds of coughing are heard throughout our small home, even though I started sleeping on the sofa to try to keep the germs away from her.

We are over the hump. The coughs now sound only like left-over coughs. We aren’t scrabbling for the cough medicine bottle in the dark. But it was such a surprise that we got sick at all.

But now I’m old. Apparently, I should have worn a mask on my old man’s day out, even though no one else was in the venues I visited. Perhaps especially because no one else was.

 

We haven’t entertained germs, not the kind that let you know they are there, for several years. The covid shutdown kept us from germs, but even before then, we had done all the vaccinations and germ precautions, like hand washing.

More recently, we’ve just not had much contact with germy people, because we’ve had little contact with people at all. We order groceries and pick them up in the Krotucky parking lot. We go to church via livestream. When people want to visit, we give them the wrong address.

It seems that our current germs are only for a cold, but there are worse germs out there, including RSV and bird flu. If you’re old and vulnerable, or your natural immunity has waned because your body is not used to dealing with germs, better double your efforts at mask-wearing and hand-washing.

But back to that monkey… The point of that story is that if you are a monkey, you can’t be big and strong like a lion, because you’re not a lion. If you’re a monkey, you don’t have to come up with an excuse for not being a lion.

If you’re a teen, you don’t need an excuse for not having the wisdom of old age. If you’re old and slow, you don’t’ need an excuse for not being young and nimble. Just be the best monkey you can be. If that involves a barrel and some other monkeys, wear a mask.

 

John Robert McFarland

 

SAFE IN THE DARK [M, 1-13-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—SAFE IN THE DARK [M, 1-13-25]

 

Now that the light is lingering a bit longer each day, I’m not sure that’s a good thing. As a child, when it was dark, I was not as afraid. Oh, yes, I knew there could be dangers hidden in the dark, but I was hidden in the dark, too. In the light, it was easier to see the dangers, but they could see me, too. I was safer in the dark. There were dangers in the darkness, but the darkness itself was a friend

So I roamed the dark, winter streets of Indianapolis, when I was 8 and 9, extending trips to Cub Scout den meetings or to a grocery, staying on familiar streets, but going where no one knew me as the scared little kid. It gave me control in a world that seemed out of control. Later, as an older child and as a teen, I walked back and forth to Oakland City from our farm, in ditches beside the highway, on narrow dirt roads, afraid but confident. I could see the lights of town in the distance, but I was safe in the dark.

In the light of town, I could say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing. In the darkness, I might not be safe from the monsters that hide in the dark, but I was safe from my own discomfort and inadequacies.

I have gone to several psychological therapists over the years. Usually because I was unsure of my call to ministry. I wanted someone to tell me it was okay to quit ministry so that I could actually make some money. I think the counselors saw through that, though. I had no skills for anything but preaching, so they weren’t willing to agree to the illusion that I could do something else.

When I had cancer, Vernie Barnett, the head of our pension and health system, said that there was provision in our health insurance to get counseling, so…why not?

I had a friend who was a therapist, and I enjoyed talking to her, so I went. She didn’t enjoy it as much as I did. “You are so good at using words to avoid… I’m exhausted by the time I’ve spent an hour with you.” I took that as a compliment, because I had managed to stay in the dark. I don’t think she meant it that way.

It was kind of like the time we heard one of our young daughters say to the other, “I was so bad Mommy had to get out the child psychology book.” Something to be proud of.

The point of therapy is to get you to come into the light. Looking back, I realize my modus with counselors was to try to make them think I was spilling my guts while telling them nothing. I felt safe in the dark.

At the same time, I would tell a group of total strangers about anything and everything in my life. Even in high school, but later, I’d be at some professional conference, and we’d be divided into small groups, and I’d start by telling about all my fears and hopes. People would be astounded at my openness, but it caused them to open up, too. Soon, they’d forget about me, so eager were they to tell their own stories.

In the early days in those settings, I didn’t know why I was so open. It wasn’t a plan to create a better group experience, even though it worked that way. Being open seemed the opposite of what a person who was safest in the darkness should do. Then I realized that I had created so much light that I was in the dark…and safe.

I concluded that the point of counseling was not to get people to face reality but to help people feel safe, be it in the light or in the dark. It took me too long to stop trying to solve people’s problems for them, but eventually I felt comfortable if the other person wanted to come into the light, but I also felt comfortable just sitting in the dark with them.

If I were to give you counsel, I would say: when things get to be too much, just go to where you feel safe. Not the false safety of addictions and anger, but the real safety of your own darkness.

You don’t necessarily need to “know yourself.” That might be disappointing, anyway. You do need to know where you feel safe.

John Robert McFarland

“The safest place to be is in the center of God’s will.” Corrie ten Boom

 

 

 

 

DEW ON THE ROSES [Sa, 1-11-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—DEW ON THE ROSES [Sa, 1-11-25]

 

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

 

In seminary, we made fun of C. Austin Miles’ 1912 song, “In the Garden.” We laughed and called it “Andy.” “Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me, Andy tells me I am his own.”

Someone told us 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. 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. I was convinced that Christian faith was about blood on a cross, not dew on roses.

Back then, I thought that faith was verified through misery. I had not yet suffered enough to realize that faith is verified through joy.

But in seminary, we thought that “In the Garden” was the worst of self-centered Protestant individualism: “The joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” Talk about exclusive!

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 winter time for Jesus.

In this barren time of our cultural winter, 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. No roses and gardens, just panting and sweat.

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 hands 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

BONUS OBSERVATION: “Living is like licking honey off a thorn.” [Attributed to both Louis Adamic and Holly Black]

 

 

HOW TO ASK FOR A BOOK [R, 1-9-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Adventures of An Old Man—HOW TO ASK FOR A BOOK [R, 1-9-25]

 

Daughter Katie Kennedy, the author, [1] got me Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone on This Train is a Suspect, for Christmas. It is a sequel. The narrator, Ernest Cunningham, claims to be a reliable narrator, but that is the sort of thing an unreliable narrator would say [2], and in an era of unreliable narrators, I decided I should go to Morgenstern’s book store to get Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, to read the first book first.

A book store is a popular place after Christmas. I got the very last parking place, a handicapped slot, as far from the door as possible, which seems an odd place to put the handicapped parking places. I guess it’s because there is a cut in the curb there for folks who can’t do high stepping anymore. Like me.

 

Whenever I can, I practice “possibility communication” rather than phatic communication.  I try to say something that fits the situation but elicits a response that tells me something about the other person. So, I said to the young woman at the counter, “Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone.” She said, “But are you a reliable narrator?”

Which reminds me, of course, of the time I wanted Elaine Palencia’s new book. I went to the Lincoln Square Walden’s in Urbana, IL and told the woman at the counter, “I want A Small Caucasian Woman.” Then I realized she was a large, non-Caucasian woman. She spread out her arms, and said, “Honey, why you want a small, Caucasian woman?”

The Morgenstern’s clerk laughed so hard when I told her about that she almost lost her retainer. It was very gratifying.

Then there was the time when Pages For All Ages was still in the Round Barn Center in Champaign, IL and I wanted the book by my clergy colleague, Dick Watts, written with Dom Crossan. I said to the clerk, “Who Is Jesus?” He perked up and said, “I know the answer to that!” I was afraid he might try to evangelize me, but he led me straight away to the proper shelf. [3]

As I waited for quite a while, as two clerks, communicating on tiny walkie-talkies hung around their necks, looked in every nook and cranny [4] for Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone—no problem, since Morgenstern’s is a great atmosphere, and I was in a red leather chair—I saw a very handsome man [Looks a lot like me] with wispy white hair and beard, on a walker, its basket full of big books, accompanied by a young, 70ish woman, who looked both proud and exasperated and said to me, “That’s my father. He’s 101 years old. He still buys long books.” He smirked a smirk that said, “I buy green bananas, too.”

The peripatetic clerks finally found Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone on the table just inside the front door. I was a bit disappointed. It meant I would have to get up out of that comfortable chair. As the clerk got into her cash register/computer to check me out, she asked, a bit suspiciously, “Is Helen McFarland your wife?” When I admitted it, she said, “Then you get a discount.”

Gotta love indie book stores.

John Robert McFarland

1] Hearts on Thin Ice, What Goes Up, Learning to Swear in America, The Constitution Decoded, The Presidents Decoded, etc

2] In my own books and blogs, I have tried to be a reliable narrator, but my family says I have not always succeeded.

3] Which reminds me of the preacher who was trying to make a call in a lakeside community where the streets had no names and most of them dead-ended. He asked several people for directions, but they were all like “Go to where the laundromat was before it burned, and take the alley behind the tavern, and…” He remained lost, until one guy in a pickup said, “Follow me and I’ll lead you there.” The preacher reported, “For the first time in my life, I understood the difference between good advice and a savior.”

4] One of our daughters said, “Because of you, I was thirty years old before I found out that it is not true that nooks are for left-handed people and crannies for the right-handed.”

 

 

 

 

 

WINTER SHELTER [T, 1-7-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Preacher—WINTER SHELTER [T, 1-7-25]

 

There was a time when preachers always lived next door to the church building. That’s where the parsonage was. We didn’t always live in a next-door parsonage, but when we did, in winter I would slip over to the church building after dark to unlock the doors. If I lived next door to a church right now, I would have gone over there last night, as soon as it was dark, and unlocked the doors, because here we have ten inches of snow and single digit temps.

I didn’t tell anyone, of course, that I unlocked the doors. I went over first thing the next morning and relocked them.

There was a time, even when I first started preaching, that church buildings were always left unlocked. When our daughters were babies, and we traveled long distances to take them to see grandparents at Christmas, we would stop at church buildings to heat up bottles, change diapers, use the bathroom. No one saw. No one cared. Church buildings belonged to anyone who needed one.

But times changed. Teens went in to make out. Drunks went in to sleep it off. Church buildings were no longer community help centers. Holy people would come in the morning and find unholy things on the floors. So, church buildings needed to be kept locked to keep the unholy stuff out. Yes, church buildings should be sanctuaries if needy people came to them for shelter, but they couldn’t be kept clean that way. And didn’t holy people have a right to a holy building?

Janitors believe church buildings exist to be kept clean. The best way to do that is never to use them, for anything. Trustees believe they exist to be maintained. Religious people believe they exist to be kept holy. No one believes they exist so that homeless people or runaway kids or drug addicts or drunks can get out of the winter cold. But sometimes a drunk or a run-away teen tries a church door in desperation, and if I had secretly unlocked that door, they would find a place to shelter for the night.

Winter is a time when people go outside to get away from what is inside and are then afraid to go back. They need some sanctuary from the cold, but they cannot go home again. I left the doors unlocked for those people, sometimes old, often young.

Winter is a hard time to be indoors if you are young.

One night, two boys, young teens, knocked frantically on the door of our house. It was dark outside. The temperature was ten degrees below zero. They had run two blocks in stocking feet and t-shirts to escape from the violence in their house to the safety in our house. They weren’t part of our church, but they knew who we were. They thought they could find shelter with us. They didn’t know that I had unlocked the doors of the church building, so that they could go there. So that I would not be bothered by needy people coming to my own home.

I had thought that I unlocked the doors of the church building so that people could go there, in the dark, with their winter fears, to escape the winter fright in their homes. I had not understood, until those boys stood huddling inside our front door, in the warmth of our house, that I had opened the church building to them so I would not have to open the Church to them, my own home, my own heart.

John Robert McFarland

“We are always moving toward mystery. So we are much closer to what is real if we cannot see our destination too clearly.” Rachel Naomi Remen

 

JIMMY CARTER [Su, 1-5-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—JIMMY CARTER [Su, 1-5-25]

 

Jimmy Carter was not a great president. In most surveys of historians, he ranks 26^th out of 44, a bit below the middle. There seems to be little doubt, though, that he ranks first as a post-president citizen.

Ever since his death, at a remarkable 100, I have thought I should write about him, but there is nothing I can say that others have not already said better.

I can, though, tell about our trip to Plains, Georgia while he was president.

I had voted for Carter, but not with great enthusiasm. It was more a vote against Gerald Ford. I was not really opposed to Ford, and I admired his wife, Betty for the courage she showed in using her own breast cancer as a means of gaining support for cancer patients, and supporting the ERA, and later admitting her alcohol addiction and publicly getting help for it, and founding her own eponymous rehab clinic. I felt that Ford was a good man and an honorable politician, even though Lyndon Johnson famously said that Ford had played too much football before the helmet had been invented. [Ford had been a football star at the U of MI, which was another good reason for an IU fan to vote against him.]

I voted against Ford, primarily, though, because he pardoned Nixon. I wasn’t particularly interested in punishing Nixon, but I thought that pardoning him was a bad precedent and would lead to other bad consequences. I think that the time since has proved me right on that.

Anyway, my wife and teen daughters and I were on our way to a winter’s week in Florida, because a nice layperson had given us a free week in her cottage there, and we decided to go through Plains.

 

The highlight of the trip was getting cokes out of a machine at Billy Carter’s service station. It reminded me a lot of the service station part of Moe’s convenience store where I worked during high school. It was basically a greasy hangout for chubby, overalled rednecks like Billy, who was not really happy to have tourists coming to gawk at him.

We were planning to use Billy’s rest rooms, but Billy wasn’t very hospitable, and once our teen daughters saw them, that plan went south…to the Plains Baptist Church. It was open, as church buildings usually were in those days, especially in small towns. No one else was there. We used the rest rooms, went to the Sunday School room where Jimmy taught a class when he was in town, sat for a while in the sanctuary. I stood in the pulpit, getting a feel for what it would be like to preach to the president in his home church.

 

The thing about Jimmy Carter, I think… he tried to do the right thing, even when he didn’t know how. I think that always deserves a number one ranking.

 

John Robert McFarland

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING FIRST [F, 1-3-25[

 \BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man--THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING FIRST [F, 1-3-25[

 [Not really a repeat, but very similar to a previous column.]

I have seen a lot of PSAs on TV recently about women, especially Black women, who were firsts—the first woman to command a navy ship, the first woman in space, the first woman who never considered murdering her husband, etc. The tag line is something like, “They were the first to make it possible for those who came after.”

The importance of the first one, the one who broke the barrier…not a bad idea to explore at the first of the year…

I used that idea in sermons from early on because it helped me to understand the place and point of Jesus. [Sermons almost always come from some theological life problem the preacher is trying to figure out for himherself.] When I started, I used Roger Bannister as my first. He was the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, a barrier that had been considered unbreakable until Roger came along.

The triumph of life over death, of love over hate… those were unbreakable barriers, until Jesus came along. Forgiveness for everybody? Not until Jesus came along. Companionship with God instead of just fear of God? Not until Jesus came along.

Like any metaphor or symbol to try to explain Christ and God, this one is not sufficient. There were others who preached and practiced self-sacrificial love before and after Jesus. The “firstness” of Jesus is, however, a window to understanding, a window to seeing into a mystery, however dimly, “…like in a mirror, darkly.”

The helpful point, to me, was that there has to be a first, before anyone else can do it. Hardly anyone, even runners, know now who Roger Bannister was, but he was first. A lot of people now who talk psycho jargon about forgiveness and love-conquering-all don’t know who Jesus of Nazareth was, either, but he was first. Like Jackie Robinson in major league baseball, and those women firsts in the TV notices, Jesus was first to make a life of wholeness possible for those who come after.

Yes, the resurrection, the first to show the total inability of death to conquer love…

John Robert McFarland

Irrelevant tidbit: One of my favs: Long before internet days, a reporter needed to know Cary Grant’s age for an article. He wired Grant’s publicist, “How old Cary Grant?” Grant himself wired back. “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”

 

NEW YEAR’S DAY [W, 1-1-25]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—NEW YEAR’S DAY [W, 1-1-25]

 

[I came across this column that I started on the first day of 2014. I didn’t post it then, though, because I didn’t finish it...]

I know of a man, a Quaker, 90 years old, who, when he awakes in the morning, lies in bed a while “getting in sync with the universe.” I would like to do that, but when I awake in the morning, I need to get in sync with the bathroom, without waiting for the universe to come around. Maybe that’s the difference between Quakers and Methodists.

I’m not very often in sync with the universe, and it’s usually my body, or some part of my body, that is the cause of my dis-synchronicity.

It is the first morning of the new year, 2014, as I write this. I grew up with the understanding that what happens the first day of the year will be the agenda for the rest of the year. Grandma Pond always served cabbage on New Year’s Day, for that meant one would have money the rest of the year. If gaseous emissions are money, then she was right; otherwise, not so much.

What I most need to do in this new year of my winter season is to get rid of stuff I don’t need for the future. [And perhaps work on making my sentences less convoluted and obfuscatory.] Maybe that is how one who cannot lie in bed in the morning gets in sync with the universe, by getting rid of stuff the universe doesn’t need.

 

Since the Salvation Army and the recycling center are not open today to receive my excess t-shirts and newspapers, I am looking through file folders, the kind that hold papers, those things that only old people remember, those thin sheets of stuff on which we wrote great ideas in the days of yore, with a thing called a pen, and putting into the “office paper only” basket those paper sheets on which are written literally thousands of wonderful ideas for stories and books and poems and sermons that will never come to screen, and which now do not look nearly as insightful or necessary to share as they did at the time I wrote them down.

Here is where I stopped writing on 1-1-14.

So, has anything changed in these last 11 years? What was the point I was going to make in this column?

Well, in addition to moving from Iron Mountain, Michigan to Bloomington, Indiana, I really have gotten rid of a lot of stuff. You have to do that when you move all your stuff from a seven-room house with a full basement and a three-car garage into a six-room condo with no basement and a shimmy garage. [It’s so narrow you have to shimmy sideways to get past it. We’ve got to get a Morris Minor!] And we’ve continued to winnow. I follow the rule of one in, two out, whether it’s a book or a piece of paper or anything else.

I think I’ll just go back to Grandma Pond’s belief. Well, not cabbage. But I’ll get this day in sync with the rest of the year. I’ll do today what I want to do all the other days. I think that pie for breakfast makes perfectly good sense…

 

John Robert McFarland

Bonus Folk Music Note—An Irregular and Irrelevant Series: Odetta. 

MLK called Odetta “The Queen of American Folk Music.” From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanack I learned that a reviewer once said of her: “She really can’t sing folk, because she doesn’t sound like a person singing. She sounds like The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.” In the 1960s, she often appeared with our friends, The Chad Mitchell Trio, both in concert and at Civil Rights events.