CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter--
We were visiting a daughter. She had been invited to a gathering of friends and didn’t want to miss it so she took us along, even though we were old and Methodist, and not likely to fit in with a bunch of Roman Catholics in their thirties and forties.
It was a pleasant occasion, back yard cookout on an evening of good weather. We were the oldest people there. Our daughter’s friends were being very careful around us, in a respectful way, for they were all Catholics, and they knew that I was a Methodist preacher. The host had gone to the university where I did my doctoral work, so he even introduced me to everyone as a theologian, not just as a preacher.
At one point I was sitting in a circle of 7 or 8 women. They sort of forgot about me, except for the woman beside me, who seemed especially uneasy as the subject turned to abortion. Everyone had an opinion, an uninformed opinion, an anecdotal opinion, different from every other opinion. They were all quite adamant that their opinion was best because it was backed up by a story they had heard from the friend of a cousin whose brother had been a priest. The woman beside me whispered, “Shouldn’t you say something about this?”
“I’m just a theologian,” I replied. She thought for a moment, then looked a bit sad as she said, “Oh, yeah…”
In this age of internet and social media, we not only ignore the educated, the informed, the specialists, but we don’t trust them. Their opinions count for less than those of the uneducated, uninformed, friends of cousins, and anonymous posters on the web.
Trust is now upside down. We now trust people who are ignorant or even people who are known liars. We mistrust people who are educated about a subject, people who rely on facts.
Trust now is based not on reality but on emotion. Trust is equated with emotional comfort.
It’s all Garrison Keillor’s fault. In his Lake Wobegon, all the children were above average. Those children are grown up now. They’ve accepted for so long that they are above average that they don’t need experts or specialists.
They are those whose gravestones will read, “I did my own research.”
Like the first emotional task of a baby, the last emotional task of an old person is learning to trust. A baby has to learn to trust parents and other care givers, who are stand-ins for God. An old person has to trust some care givers, yes, but they aren’t stand-ins for God. We are faced directly now with God. Shall we trust God for what is real and true, or shall we trust what we get from the internet, or a cousin’s friend?
You can tell the difference between true trust, trust in God and false trust by the way it makes you feel. False trust makes you feel comfortable. Trust in God makes you feel real.
John Robert McFarland
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