THE SECRET OF A LONG MARRIAGE [Sat, 5-30-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Man—THE SECRET OF A LONG MARRIAGE [Sat, 5-30-26]

 

It was time for our every-five-years high school class reunion. I think it was the one for 35 years. I say “our” reunion, even though it was only I, not Helen, who had been part of that class. Even though she had been valedictorian of her large high school class in Gary, IN, she didn’t really feel a part of it, didn’t identify with it. And she had been to so many of my class reunions, and was so totally accepted by and popular with my classmates, that she said, “If anyone asked me where I went to high school, I’d probably say, ‘Oakland City, Indiana, Class of 1955.’”

Hovey and Sally Hedges had invited Helen and me to spend the week-end with them. Sally said, “Everybody in the class gets so excited when they know you are coming, because you’re not divorced. All the rest of us are divorced, so we know forever vows aren’t forever. But you show that they can be.”

It seems a bit strange, now that we have been married 67 years, that our friends were impressed back then, when we had been married only about half this time.

Sally was Hovey’s third wife, but she always introduced herself as “Hovey’s last wife.” Even put that on her name tag at the reunion banquet. Alas, she was not.

For many folks, once the divorce bowl starts rolling, it’s hard to stop it.

Helen and I are probably among the last long-term marriages, 67 years tomorrow. Marriages are shorter now, not just because of the prevalence of divorce, but also because folks get married later. The birth control pill makes it possible to have sex without marriage, so why rush things?

The biggest reason, though, for divorce and later-life marriage, is this new-fangled idea that both people should be involved in choosing how to decorate a house. Helen says, “I like the old method, where I just did whatever I wanted and you didn’t notice.”

See? Marriage today doesn’t have to be more complicated, even if it’s shorter. The secret to a long marriage is staying out of each other’s way.

John Robert McFarland

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond of them. You have to be fond of them to love them. Otherwise, they’re simply unbearable.” Marguerite Duras.

 

 

PIZZA JOINT MEDITATIONS [R, 5-28-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Pizza from an Old Pepperoni Sort of Guy—PIZZA JOINT MEDITATIONS [R, 5-28-26]

 

To me, the purpose of meditation is to get in touch with God, and with your own true self. Most people usually define meditation along those lines.

Generally, folks like to do that “getting in touch” sort of meditation in quiet settings—a worship building, nature, listening to a guided-prayer tape, the patio first thing in the morning, the bath room when guests are in your house… A quiet oasis away from the hustle and bustle of the every-day world.

I like all those ways, but I’m not very successful in trying to meditate in quiet and sacred places. I do some of my best meditating in pizza joints.

Well, one pizza joint in particular.

It’s just a mile from our house. We could have them deliver. Or I could call them with our order and go get it 15 minutes later. But I like to drive down there, and park in the place that the whole town reserves for me, and walk in, and be greeted happily by an overly efficient college student, and state my order, then sit on one of only three high backless stools at the narrow counter overlooking the strip mall parking lot, and stop thinking.

My eyes are open, but I’m not observing. My ears are open, but I’m not listening. My nose is open, but… well, yes, the aromas are part of the meditation. I don’t try to make sense of the sights and sounds and smells. I’m not processing them, to feel certain emotions, or to gain any life lessons, or to understand Kant’s “categorical imperative.” I just let them take me into the presence of God.

I meditate well enough that the college students don’t call my name from the counter anymore when my pizza is ready. They bring the pizza box to where I’m sitting and quietly stand there until I notice them.

Frankly, I’m not a good meditator. I’m not even a good pray-er, except for intercessory prayer. I can pray for others all day. Usually do. But praying to get in touch with God…no, within 30 seconds my mind is off wanting to do something.

After many failed attempts at practicing “the spiritual disciplines,” I finally accepted my limitations. I’m just not a very spiritual person. I’m a religious person. A church person. But not really a spiritual person, a meditating person. No use fighting it. especially not in old age. Too old a dog to learn new ways.

Until Helen got tired of cooking one day, and I began to go to the pizza joint. Not very often. Only every two or three weeks. But if you’re having trouble meditating, waiting for a large pepperoni is just the right amount of time to get in touch with God.

John Robert McFarland

 

  

OUTLASTING THE DEMONS [T, 5-26-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… OUTLASTING THE DEMONS [T, 5-26-26]

 

I suppose there is a literature in fundamentalist circles of how the author used to be an open-minded “liberal,” tolerant Christian or Muslim, but had an encounter with the true God and now knows that the only correct way of serving God is the narrow way, that not only shuns those who are not true believers but actively works against them, either to convert them or to subvert them.

I don’t know those books/testimonies, but I suspect they are there, because I know their opposite.

Their opposite is the former fundamentalist who had an encounter with the true God and now knows the only correct way of serving God is the open way of tolerance and acceptance and love, working to allow into the fold those who are shunned and vilified by their former fundamentalist brethren. Folks like Frankie Schaeffer and Brian McLaren and Philip Yancey come to mind.

And many other people I have known personally, who have told me their personal stories. That includes one friend who is skeptical about our new pastor, because he occasionally asks for an Amen as he preaches. She shudders as she says, “It reminds me too much of the church I grew up in.”

In these cases, and in any other where a person has changed her mind [i.e., I used to be a Bears fan but now I love the Packers], the assumption, at least by the one making the testimony, and by their admirers, is that the latter position is the correct one precisely because it is the latter, the one changed TO instead of FROM. We are a future-loving people. If we have changed from something of the past, the newer position has to be better.

There is a whole culture of Christians who lived dissolute lives and then were saved so now know how important salvation is, and we should believe what they say because of the difference. Folks laughingly refer to the dissolute life part as building a testimony. “I was just doing bad stuff so I could be a witness later to how much better it is to be sober and saved.”

I appreciate folks like Anne Lamott because they write well, and because they don’t sugar-coat the present [the demons are still with them, but so are the angels], and because they help others to realize it is okay to come out of the darkness into the light, where they can get help.

I also envy people like Lamott. They are able to get such good testimonies from their dissolute pasts and ragged presents. I envy them, yea, even get angry at them at times, because I can’t get the sort of accolades they do, because I don’t have an adequately sordid past to live down.

Or maybe I’m just not willing to acknowledge my demons, the way the “I’m better now” folks do. Through sixty years of listening to people talk privately about their demons, I’ve learned that not everyone is possessed by demons, like with the life-change testimony people, but almost everyone is beset by demons. Many people would have great testimonies about their former addictions and dissolutions, but they can’t talk about them openly, because of the damage they would cause, not just to themselves, but to others.

I am sure that being open about your demons is a good and health-giving thing. I admire people who can do that. but some cannot. If you’re one of those folks, don’t worry about it overmuch. One of the great things about getting old and decrepit is that your demons are puny and feeble, too. Another thing I’ve learned from sixty years of pastoring is that demons get tired. Your demons are as fed up with you as you are with them. Just walk away. Shake the demon dust off your feet. They’re too tired to run after you.

“I bored my demons into giving up” is a good testimony, too.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WELL, IT WAS A QUIET WEEK IN… {Sun, 5-24-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Radio Listener—WELL, IT WAS A QUIET WEEK IN… {Sun, 5-24-26]

 

“Well, it was NOT a quiet week in the Bible…” That’s the way I began sermons back in the halcyon days of the Prairie Home Companion radio show [PHC].

In the 1980s, when Prairie Home Companion went national--so that folks outside the range of Minnesota Public Radio could listen--like many other people, I became fascinated with Lake Wobegon, “out there on the edge of the prairie, the little town that time forgot.” Garrison Kaillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon” became must-hear radio at our house. I insisted that everyone in the house observe “radio silence.”

That happened in a lot of other houses in our church, too. PHC was on the radio on Saturday night, so it was still in our minds come Sunday morning. That’s when I began to introduce my sermons with, “Well, it was not a quiet week in the Bible…”

Not “a quiet week,” as it always was in Lake Wobegon, because the happenings in the Bible were rarely quiet.

Keillor always started his monologue with, “Well, it was a quiet week in Lake Wobegon…” Yes, it was quiet, except the happenings there were quietly hilarious.

We knew from the goings-on there that Lake Wobegon was the same town in which we had grown up, and probably where we still lived. One of my members claimed that he knew all the people in Lake Wobegon, and he had grown up in Chicago! More than one of our members would give their addresses on the Sunday morning attendance sheet simply as “Lake Wobegon.” That was the appeal of Lake Wobegon. We all belonged there.

So I began to try to get my congregation folks to see the Bible as their Lake Wobegon, the place where we all belong.

Today is Pentecost, and today’s lectionary readings are Acts 2:1-21, John 20:19-23, and I Corinthians 12:3-13.

So, if I were preaching today, I would start by saying, “Well, it was not a quiet week in the Bible. The disciples of Jesus were just sitting around, wondering what was going to happen next, now that Jesus has gone off to heaven, when their heads got really hot, and this big wind hit them, and they all began to preach the Gospel in languages they hadn’t even gone on Duolingo for. That started a big argument in the church about whose language was best, so Rev. Paul, of the First Methodist Church of Corinth, had to remind folks that no one’s way of talking was any better than anyone else’s…”

People liked it, but my next appointment was to a church where folks didn’t listen to the radio, at least not Public radio, and they didn’t know about Lake Wobegon, so that particular attempt at biblical interpretation faded away.

I still read the lectionary scriptures each week, though, and I always think, “Well, it was an interesting week in the Bible…” If you’d like to see what an interesting week it was in the Bible, just do a search for “common lectionary.” Or go to: https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/faq/downloads/2025-2026/Year%20A%202025-2026.pdf

John Robert McFarland

 

 

PERILOUS PROM [F, 5-22-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—PERILOUS PROM [F, 5-22-26]

 

Yes, I’ve told this story before, but it’s prom season, and, as I have also said before, this column no longer makes any pretense of being useful to anyone but me…

I think it was Mike who first told me that I was taking Judith to the prom at Ft. Branch, 20 miles from my home town of Oakland City. It was news to me. I had never heard of her.

Judith was the only child in a wealthy family. Her father was a judge. Her parents had given her a new Chrysler convertible at the start of the school year. That guaranteed that no Ft. Branch boy would date her, since no Ft. Branch boy had a car that could compete. So as prom time approached, she was dateless.

Judith’s mother was a friend of Ann’s mother. Ann was in my high school class. Judith’s mother told Ann’s mother of the prom date problem. Ann’s mother asked what Judith was interested in.

“Journalism. She’s editor of the school newspaper.

“Have I got a deal for you,” said Ann’s mother. “My daughter is in class with the editor of our school newspaper. He’s a nice boy.”

That’s the curse all the mothers always put on me: He’s a nice boy.

So Ann’s mother and Judith’s mother decided I would take Judith to the prom. The irony is that I was poorer and further out of my league than any boy in Ft. Branch. My family didn’t have a car of any kind.

Judith’s mother told her that she had a prom date with me, a boy she’d never heard of. Ann’s mother told Ann, and Ann told Mike, and Mike told me.

I had no way to get to Ft. Branch, to take Judith to the prom, so the mothers arranged for Mike and Ann to get invitations to that prom, too. How, I have no idea, but in a small town, the mother of the judge’s daughter can usually get whatever she wants.

I had nothing to wear to a prom, so my sister, who had graduated and was working fulltime, bought me a suit, and a pink and gray tie, which I still have. [You don’t outgrow ties.] Ann’s mother, of course, knew all about Judith’s dress, so she bought a corsage that would coordinate with it.

When the great night came, Mike and Ann drove down the gravel roads to our farm to pick me up, and I rode to Ft. Branch in the back seat of Mike’s two-door hardtop Pontiac. Since Ann’s mother had bought the corsage for Judith, it rode in the front seat beside Ann. When we arrived at Judith’s house, Ann scrunched up toward the dashboard so that I could push the seat down to get out…forgetting about the corsage, which got flatly crushed.

It was a big house, fronted by a high porch with a dim light. I carried the crushed corsage up the long walk and climbed the creaking steps to the shadowed front door. I knocked. The door opened. A classy blond girl in a formal stood there. I spoke one of the best opening lines in the annals of blind prom dates: “It looks like I’ve come to the right place.”

I pushed the crushed corsage at her. She looked at it and was speechless. An older blond appeared over her shoulder, took the corsage away to the kitchen, where she performed voodoo on it. Judith and I stood there and tried not to look at each other. “That’s my father,” she said, indicating a man sitting in a dark corner of the living room, peeling an apple, with a butcher knife, one long peel sliding off the apple with surgical precision. He didn’t say anything.

Judith’s mother returned with the sort-of repaired corsage, and taking no chances that her daughter might get crushed, too, pinned it on Judith herself. She handed Judith a boutonniere. Judith tried to slip it through the button-hole of my new lapel. It wouldn’t go. The mother tried. “It’s not cut,” she said. [What farm boy knows you have to slit the buttonhole in a new suit yourself?]

“I’ll take care of him,” her father said, jumping up and advancing on me with the butcher knife. He grabbed my lapel and began to saw at it, the knife an inch from my throat. He was really good with that thing. The slit was perfect, and Judith slipped the flower into it.

I don’t remember much from that point. I assumed my job was to make the Ft. Branch boys jealous, since Judith must have gotten such a much better date, because she had to go out of town to get one, and out-of-town is always better, so I acted mysterious, which meant I spent the evening telling Judith stories of editing our school newspaper, while Mike and Ann danced. The only thing I remember for sure was that I mispronounced the word “intricate,” while explaining my reasons for eschewing all dances but the “bunny hop.”

I never saw or heard of Judith again.

It’s important when looking back on such experiences to find the good in an otherwise disastrous event. I have done so, and it’s this:  I’m sure Judith won the contest among the Sisters of Perpetual Responsibility for who had the best reason to become a nun.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

AFTER THE PILL [W, 5-20-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Old Optimist—AFTER THE PILL [W, 5-20-26]

 

Of all the major changes/inventions of the last 70 years, I think that the birth control pill is the most significant—yes, more than computers and the internet and nuclear bombs and toaster ovens. The birth control pill changed the very basis of society—marriage and family.

I was a campus minister when the Stonewall Uprising occurred in 1969, and gay folks began to proclaim, “We’re people, too.” It didn’t make much difference to college students. They were too busy with sex in general to care about gay sex.

Everybody got all hot and bothered in 1975 when Loretta Lynn sang her paean of praise to “The Pill,” but that was fifteen years behind the times to college students.

I began to say to anyone who would listen—and there weren’t many who wanted to—that homosexual sex wasn’t the problem. The real problem was promiscuous sex, recreational sex, meaningless sex, disrespectful sex, which was at least as prevalent among straights as gays.

Nothing wrong with sex, I said. Plenty wrong with using and dehumanizing people, including yourself. Plenty wrong with turning sex upside down, and using the quality that nature gives us to lead us to intimacy in order to avoid intimacy.

The church, I said, needed to develop a sexual ethic beyond “no sex at all except in marriage,” because that horse had left the barn, in 1960, when the FDA approved “the pill.”

Of course, the church’s response was, “Let’s ignore that issue and concentrate on gay stuff, because we can all agree on that, right?” Oh, yes, right.

I first tried preaching a sexual ethic of commitment. No, you didn’t have to be married, but you should be faithful and committed to your partner. That was much too narrow for college students, who figured they needed [wanted] time to experiment before committing, so I went through several other stages until I settled, more or less, on an ethic of respect—we should respect sex, meaning respecting ourselves [Your body is a temple, I Cors 6], respecting the temples of others, and respecting the Creator of sex.

That was too complicated. And cerebral. Sex is not a thought-centered activity. College students liked the idea of respectful sex, as long as it didn’t get in the way of casual lustful promiscuous recreational sex.

And, as I said in the column for May 14, if you want to find out what society in general is going to think and do next, look at what college students are thinking and doing now.

I’m not a campus minister anymore, but I live in a town with 48,626 college students. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I get the impression that they are starting to get bored with sexual promiscuity. Maybe they really are the brightest generation…

John Robert McFarland

 

 

COUSINS [Late in the day on M, 5-18-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Family Reminiscences of An Old Man—COUSINS [Late in the day on M, 5-18-20]

 

[We ended up staying at the reunion longer than planned, so I did not post early today because I didn’t have my computer with me.]

As we planned the memorial service for my “little” brother, Jim, I invited all our cousins. I realized that it would be the last time I would ever see a cousin. I’m glad that Natalie, oldest daughter of Uncle Bob McFarland, from whom I get my middle name, was the only one who was able to come.

We cousins, on both sides of the family, have always been close. Now, those of us left, we live too far apart. We can’t get on an airplane. We can’t drive. We can’t walk. We can’t remember which color is ours on the Chinese Checkers board. We shall never see each other again.

That seems so strange, for I once had 26 cousins, ten on the Pond side of the family, and sixteen McFarlands.

I said above that I invited all our cousins, but that wasn’t accurate. There are some for whom I have no address. As our adult years went along, some cousins dropped out of the family, either by death or by geography, or by choice. I mourned each time I lost a cousin, especially those who dropped out, because being part of that generation was so important to me.

We cousins were much involved with one another, from the time we were little kids. We visited in each other’s homes, stayed overnight, slept on the floor because there weren’t enough beds. We played tag and baseball. We played Parcheesi and Chinese Cheekers and never-ending games of Monopoly.

I made no distinction between Ponds and McFarlands. To me, the aunts and uncles and cousins were just one family, where I was accepted, where I was encouraged to be a good person.

That was probably aided by my status as the oldest grandson on either side. I never thought of myself more highly than I should have thought, though, because I had an older sister and four older female cousins who made sure I understood there was no primogeniture in our generation.

When my parents reached fifty years of marriage, I decided that we should celebrate by getting the whole family—both sides—together in one place. I rented a church camp in southern Indiana, the place where both families got their start, and invited all their brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews for two days of eating and talking. Almost everyone came. A lot of good relationships got started or expanded, especially among the cousins, some by Ponds who had little previous contact with McFarlands, and vice versa.

In retrospect, I realized I did that as much for me as for my parents. I never thought of myself as just part of my immediate family. Indeed, our immediate family life was so chaotic that I think I always felt a bit outside it; I felt that I was the social worker who needed to solve the family problems rather than being a part of that family. The family that gave me identity was that conglomerate of McFarlands and Ponds who played that eternal game of Chinese Checkers, who gathered that weekend at Temple Hills.

When I first started preaching, at nineteen, I was not surprised that folks in those churches, even older people, thought that I was a competent preacher, because I had so many relatives who had always treated me that way, from the time I was a child. They assumed that I was a good person—not just a good boy-- who was capable of doing good things.

I’ve had to give up almost all of those aunts and uncles. Only Edna, Uncle Mike’s widow, is left, out of that wonderful phalanx of 24 [counting spouses]. But cousins…those are young people…except, now we are not. No more cousins, but so many good memories.

I think a big extended family is a little like heaven. I wonder if they play Chinese Checkers there. I wonder if God cheats, like Grandma Mac did…

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

MY ‘LITTLE’ BROTHER [Sat, 5-16-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Grieving Remembrances of A Big Brother—MY ‘LITTLE’ BROTHER [Sat, 5-16-26]

 

All in all, my brother, Jim, was a strange man. Weird, even. I like to think that he got that from me.

He grew to be two inches taller than I, but he was nine years younger, so, my “little” brother.

He was Jimmy, until he got old enough to be called Jim. I always thought of him, though, as Jimmy. Especially since his death, at the age of 79.

In the photo above, Helen and I are on the left, Jim’s wife, Millie, in the middle, and our daughter, Mary Beth, between Millie and Jim. Notice that Jim is looking at things from a different angle. That was always the way he looked at things.

Even when very young, he showed a different face to the world. We have photos of us four siblings posing together in front of our farm house, for Aunt Dorothy’s box camera, where three of us are smiling, but Jimmy is twisting his face into some contorted mask. Even as a little guy, he didn’t want anyone to see the real him.

That was understandable. He had four “parents,” including a sister 14 years older [Mary Virginia] and a brother 9 years older, telling him what to do, and a sister [Margaret Ann] 18 months older, whose cuteness factor was off the charts. She was hard to compete with for attention. His only chance for individual identity was to draw into himself. He did that his whole life.

His humor was sardonic, a little sarcastic, a little silly, always a bit sideways. He wanted to be different from everyone else, but he didn’t want to be noticed, sort of like a sideline commentator who is off-camera, as is Jim Day on the Cincinnati Reds broadcasts.

He had the great, good fortune to find one of the two women in the world—Milicent Ellard & Helen Karr--who were able to put up with the strange ways of the McFarland brothers, even think those ways were endearing and attractive. Or maybe they thought it was a duty beyond the ability of other women. As the old saying goes, “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.”

Jim died last Nov. 1. Tomorrow, Millie, and Helen and our children and grandchildren, and Margey’s children and grandchildren, will gather for a memorial service, along with the few friends and cousins and nieces and nephews who are still alive and able to travel.

I’ll wear the little wooden cross necklace that I bought at Jim’s health food store. He had a friend who made them. I don’t think Jim believed much about the cross, but he tried to help his friend by selling them at the store.

I’ll read the funeral service from the same Book of Worship that I used when I officiated at the marriage service for Jim and Millie, some 60 years ago. Then we’ll share our memories of a man who never wanted to be noticed, who wanted to hide behind a funny face. We’ll honor that.

John Robert McFarland

 

BEYOND THE HALLS OF IVY [R, 5-14-26]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Old Trouble Maker—BEYOND THE HALLS OF IVY [R, 5-14-26]

 

Methodist annual conferences will soon meet. The pastoral appointments for the next year will be read out. When I started going to Conference, in 1957, no pastor knew until that reading where they would be the next year. I assumed, though, that my appointment would always be to some congregation.

I never intended to become a campus minister, even though I held campus ministry in high regard. After all, I met Helen at The Wesley Foundation at IU. And I liked universities in general. I loved learning. I loved songs like The Halls of Ivy and Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.

While I was a college student, though, in my sophomore year, I became a parish preacher. Church was as important to me as campus. I assumed that life as a local church pastor would be my career.

Campus ministers were not respected much back then. They were called “student workers.” They were trouble makers who preached about social justice and were always wanting “change.” They were guys [all men, then] who didn’t fit in local churches, so they weren’t real preachers. Many times during my campus ministry years, colleagues would ask me, “When are you going to come back to the ministry?”

Their question was not criticism, but concern, because as a campus minister, you lost your place on the appointment ladder. The “ladder” meant that, as long as you didn’t cause any trouble, each time you were moved to a different church, it would be a little larger and more prestigious. Campus ministry years didn’t count on the ladder. If you “came back to the ministry,” you had to start over at the bottom of the ladder.

Because no one wanted to lose his place on the ladder, the bishop had trouble finding someone willing to be a campus minister.

But I owed Bishop Richard Raines, for getting me out of trouble numerous times, and he knew that I owed him, so when he asked/told me to be the campus minister in Terre Haute [Indiana State U and Rose Polytechnic], I figured I should do that, for a year or two, as payment to him. Also, I was never very smart about anticipating the consequences of my choices.

Campus ministry, though, turned out to be a more significant ministry than I would have had as a local church pastor, for two primary reasons.

First, my influence was much wider than it would have been as a parish pastor. Every year some of my students graduated and scattered to various jobs and towns and churches. They took with them the ideas they had gotten on campus. Even while they were still in school, they went home on the weekends and vacations and enjoyed upsetting their parents and pastors with all the radical stuff they got through their time on campus—stuff about civil rights and voting rights and women’s rights and gay rights and saving the planet and Viet Nam and situational ethics and “contemporary” worship and prayer and faith and Bible interpretation and sacrificial service and the church as the place to have a really good time.

Second, I learned before anyone else what was going to happen next. Whatever society was going to do next, college students were already doing it.

So, if you want to know what’s coming up, look on campus. Strangely, the social observers say that students are going to church more and drinking less. That doesn’t sound right…

John Robert McFarland

UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Ramblings of An Old Man—UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

 

It was our soph or junior year in high school. As I approached a group of boys in the hallway, Louis Simpson looked up and said, quite good-naturedly, “We’ve got to stop telling dirty jokes now; John’s here.”

I don’t think they were actually telling dirty jokes. It was just a way of acknowledging me as an untouchable, someone who didn’t belong in the real world.

Of course, the very fact that to this day I think they were not telling dirty jokes may tell you why I was an untouchable. Untouchables are naive. That’s part of how we are set aside from the real world.

Some real-world people try to take advantage of untouchables, use our naiveite against us. But—if you’re lucky, as I’ve always been—folks protect you, because they know you need it 

I remember seeing movies and TV shows called “The Untouchables,” about America in the 1920s, when politics and the economy were much as they are now, when enough bribe money can get you anything, regardless of the law. Enter Eliot Ness and his special police, called unofficially “The Untouchables,” because they could not be bought or bribed.

I guess I was that sort of untouchable, in a minor way, except no one ever tried to bribe me, anyway. No, I wasn’t an Eliot Ness sort of untouchable. I was not pure of heart, like Ness. I didn’t even need to be pure of heart. I was untouchable because people protected me. I was in a tiny niche of society that not only did not get its hands dirty but that didn’t even know how to get dirty hands.

I am part of the 2%. Not the way that is usually used, the 2% that has all the money and power, and abhors the rest of us as untouchable because we are, compared to them, poor and powerless.

No, I’m in that 2% that has always, without knowing it, led a charmed life. Because others protected us from the real world.

That does not mean, of course, that we two-percenters have no bad days. I’ve had cancer. People I love have had cancer. Good friends have suffered, and died too soon. I’ve had to be a comfort in tragedy when the tragedy was so bad that comfort wasn’t even possible; that’s hard.

Friend Kathy Roberts says that she has a face that says, “Tell me weird things.” I think I have a face that says, “Don’t tell me bad things.”

Now, again, that isn’t literally true. Indeed, my profession was listening to people tell me bad things. But it was bad things about themselves. it wasn’t bad things that involved me. I was just a listener, not a participant.

That distance, though, was one of the traits that made me a fairly good pastor. In that sense, I was a Ness type of untouchable. Since folks knew I wasn’t going to get lost in the jungle with them, I might be able to show them a way out.

Sometimes I feel a conflicted about being an untouchable. I didn’t like being excluded from that group of laughing boys, the ones telling the dirty jokes. But I feel grateful that they protected me. Being an untouchable has made my life so easy. I hope you are an untouchable, too.

John Robert McFarland

“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.” Fred Astaire, via The Writer’s Almanack.

 

 

MOTHER’S’ DAY [Su, 5-10-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reflections of A Doddering Old Man—MOTHER’S’ DAY [Su, 5-10-26]

 

Today is Mother’s Day, or Mothers’ Day, according to how many mothers you are trying to honor. Both singular and plural were always a problem for me. Not a life-shaking problem, but a problem I had trouble solving.

Mothers’ Day I dealt with primarily as a preacher. I looked out on the congregation on this special day and saw mothers whom I knew were not going to have a happy day. And I saw others, of so many ages, who felt guilt or anger about their mothers. If I were sensitive at all, I didn’t plow ahead with a Hallmark Mothers’ Day sermon. But what else to do?

I was relieved of my guilt, slightly, in my early churches, because the women of the church who were in charge of such things--either by tradition or acceptance or audacity—decided how we would celebrate the day.

I was disconcerted at my first Mothers’ Day Sunday, when I was 20 years old, when flowers were passed out to the mothers at the door following the service, but only mothers. I mean, all churches back then had lots of women who were not mothers. They were reminded of that as they left the church without a flower.

By the time I retired, usually flowers were pressed into the hands of every woman as she left worship on Mothers’ Day, whether she wanted one or not. An adequate solution… well, not really. They/we justified that on the premise that every woman has a mother, even if she is not one. But so does every man there, so where does that leave us? Still kind of up in the air.

As far as Mother’s Day is concerned, I never had any trouble honoring my mother. I loved her. She loved me. But she was a puzzle and trial to me all sixty years we shared. The problem was inconsistency. As a child, the rules of conduct changed all the time, sometimes within the minute. As an adult, she would ask for help and then at the last minute veto everything we had agreed on, always for some fallacious and ridiculous reason.

Don’t worry; I know she did the best she could to be a good mother, and I did the best I could [with a lot of help from Helen] to be a good son.

The mother-child relationship is fraught with… well, everything. No relationship more important, or more difficult and complex. A flower hardly does justice to the depth of that relationship. Neither does Red Lobster shrimp. But they are good symbols. They represent beauty and nourishment. Those are the things that are necessary for life. Just as mothers are.

John Robert McFarland

LUTHER’S REVENGE [F, 5-8-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Ramblings of a Finally Humble Old Man—LUTHER’S REVENGE [F, 5-8-26]

 

Whenever I trudge my daily mile, I always think of Luther White, the father of my great, late friend, Bill.

Bill and I were campus ministry colleagues. We often met to drink coffee and talk about our work. And our families. I never met Luther, but Bill used to brag about his father, specifically how he still walked a mile each day, even though he was 90. I would nod my head in affirmation, but secretly, I was thinking, “A mile? That’s nothing. Anyone should be able to walk a mile, at any age.” That was 60 years ago.

I wasn’t quite as ignorant as that sounds, nor as arrogant. But I had been a walker all my life, especially when we lived on the farm and had no car. I walked many miles, all the time, in all kinds of weather. Walking a mile just didn’t sound to me like an unusual achievement.

Now, in my 90^th year, one of my major ambitions is to walk a mile on my next birthday, and then look up at the sky [Yes, that’s where heaven is; didn’t you go to Sunday school?] and say to Luther White, “Okay. Now I understand.”

I call it Luther’s Revenge, this new humility that old age has brought upon me. [It would be a good book title, too, except that most folks would think it refers to the 16^th century church reformer instead of the 20^th century high school music teacher.]

Most of us assume that we won’t get any more decrepit than we are right now. Yes, we know we’ll grow older. Yes, we even know that our bodies are going to keep sliding down the slippery slope [sometimes literally!] In our brains we know better, but we assume that we’ll forever be able to do whatever we are doing today. More slowly, yes, but surely the day won’t come when we can’t even get up off the toilet by ourselves. And, yet, we all know someone for whom that day did come. So, why do we think we shall be spared?

When my father was close to the end of his life, at age 96, Helen and I took him to his favorite restaurant, for his favorite steak and gravy. He ate less than half of it. As we helped him out the restaurant door after we had finished, he could not get his legs to work to make the one small step down from the door to the sidewalk. One of us on each side, we had to lift him down. He sighed and said, “I didn’t know you could get this bad off and still be alive.”

As Luther White walked one morning, he was hit by a passing car and killed. Some folks would say that God directed that car, to save Luther the indignity of getting too old. I’m not one of those people.

But if you are driving in the Sherwood Green neighborhood someday, and you see a nattily dressed old man trudging along in shorts--even though it’s 20 degrees, but the belt was already in his shorts, and he didn’t want to go to the trouble of changing it to his flannel-lined cargo pants--it’s okay to offer him a ride. He’s now humble enough to accept it.

John Robert McFarland

No, that's not a photo of me. I use a black, wooden cane that once was Uncle Ted's.

GROWING UP IS A DISEASE [W, 5-6-26]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of A Failed Grown-Up—GROWING UP IS A DISEASE [W, 5-6-26]

 

My highly competent and distinguished colleague, Rev. Randy Robinson, told me, as he was getting to retire, that when he was a young pastor, he looked up to me as one of “the fathers of the church.” Oh, if he had only known.

Makes me think of a continuing ed conference I attended. The main speaker was a newly elected bishop. The president of the near-by seminary had gone to the airport to pick him up. They had been students together earlier at a different seminary. “Hello, Bishop,” said the president. “Hello, President,” said the bishop.

The seminary president said, “Then we laughed like hyenas and finally said, ‘Where are the grown-ups when you really need them!’”

When you get to my age, you know that there are only two kinds of people: Those who think they are grown up but aren’t. And those who know they are not but are still trying to become grownups…

…or maybe a third type: Those who have given up on ever growing up.

As the saying goes, “Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is not.”

When I was a nineteen-year-old, preaching at three different churches every Sunday, I thought I was quite grown up. After all, I had the backing of the church. Why would the District Superintendent subject those poor people to my pulpit ponderings if I were not grown up?

Growing up is a disease, and I had an early-onset version of it. I had to grow up young. I became a major financial support of my family in my teens. I dropped out of high school to work in a factory to get my family off of welfare. Older people in those days respected that sort of thing. They praised me, and talked to me like I was one of them, like a grown-up . I had no way of knowing then that most of them were not grown up, even though they looked and talked like they were.

There were hints. Old men who whistled at young girls. Old church ladies who laughed at fart jokes. Old preachers who told those jokes.

But I assumed those were anomalies. When I got old, I was sure that I would not do things like tell waitresses and store clerks that I qualified for the good-looks discount, because I did not do that sort of thing when I was young.

I was a grown-up for a long time.

I finally got over being grown-up. I think it was my cancer surgery and year of chemotherapy that did it. My first oncologist predicted that I would live no more than “a year or two.” That sort of sobers you up. I realized how much of my life I had wasted, being a grown up.

So, I’ve given up on growing up. It’s too much trouble, and not much fun. As Jesus said, “I’m here. Let’s party.” [John 10:10.]

John Robert McFarland

“Let us read and dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.” Voltaire

SECRET DOWNSIZING [M, 5-4-26]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—SECRET DOWNSIZING [M, 5-4-26]

 

It’s spring-cleaning time, which includes getting rid of stuff we don’t need.

A daughter told us of some people who wanted to downsize. They hit upon a novel approach. Whenever they went to someone’s house, for a meal or party, they would take along something they wanted to get rid of and leave it secretly with their host. It was a slow process. They could take only small items, like silverware. While innocently in the kitchen, ostensibly just to get a drink of water, they would slip a table knife into their host’s silverware drawer. If they went to the bathroom, they’d leave an extra tooth brush in the medicine cabinet. While browsing the book shelves, they’d slip in a copy of The Declaration Decoded, by Katie Kennedy. [No, it’s an excellent book, but small format—easily smuggled.]

I’m a bit reluctant to tell about this. Most of you live far enough away that we need not fear extra spatulas or cans of tuna or copies of Winning Bigly appearing in our house. Some of you, however, actually do come to our house from time to time. Yes, we appreciate the muffins, and the Billy Collins books, but don’t think you can get away with leaving one of those little jars of cumquat jam, or the autobiography of Kristi Noem!

When you’re in the process of downsizing, it can be difficult to remember what you’ve gotten rid of and what you still have.

From time to time we go looking for something that we gave away. Recently Helen was befuddled by the absence of a spring decoration that she wanted to put out on the mantle, something she puts up every year. No where could it be found. She complained to friend Kathy. “I know where it is,” said Kathy. “It’s on my mantle…”

Helen had given it to Kathy, along with some other stuff she wanted to get rid of, to put into her church’s fall rummage sale. Kathy, though, liked it so much that she kept it. It has now passed back through our house and on to daughter Mary Beth’s mantle. At least, I think that’s where it is now.

Downsizing is a major concern of old people. [Unless you are a hoarder, but that’s a different sort of problem.] We spend so many years acquiring, building up our resources—furniture, books, kitchenware, clothes, suitcases, tools, office supplies... Then, suddenly [it seems like], we have little need of most of that stuff. We try to give it away, but nobody wants good china or silverware, button-front shirts, hard-sided suitcases, pencils, typewriters, lined 3-hole paper…

There’s lots of stuff that even rummage stores like Good Will won’t take, because customers don’t want it.

I guess the only alternative is to take those things to other people’s houses and slip them in unnoticed, like the way those people from the first paragraph did.

If you were going to do this, slip things unnoticed into the homes of other people, what would the items be, and at whose house?

We don’t go anyplace, so we can’t get rid of stuff that way, so I’m trying to figure out what I can sneak into the pockets of people who come to our house. That dining room table is going to be a problem…

John Robert McFarland

 

WHAT WAS YOUR GRANDFATHER LIKE? [Sa, 5-2-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Personal Identity of An Elderly Grandson—WHAT WAS YOUR GRANDFATHER LIKE? [Sa, 5-2-26]

 

Michelle Obama said I was doing it wrong.

Starting in high school, I was pleased with, yes, even proud of, my ability to remember names. This hit its zenith in my campus ministry years.

College kids went to church in those days. Every September, I’d have a thousand new names to learn. I just happened into the plan I used to remember them. I asked their name, asked their major, and asked their home town. And at each answer, I pointed out something we had in common: “Oh, my grandmother’s name is Margaret, too… Jim Kiefer is a special ed major, too. You’d probably like to meet him…” [If the student were a guy, it would be “Ann Wierman is a special ed major…”] You’re from Illiopolis… so Gary Ford is your pastor?” By that time, I was associating their name not just with their face but a standard background important to understanding a student—a major and a hometown.

There is a difference, of course, between just trying to remember a person’s name and trying to get to know them, to know their story. Yes, their name is a short form of their story, and remembering it is a good place to start, but knowing a name and knowing a story are not the same thing.

Michelle Obama, in the film about the tour for her book, Becoming, talking to a group of students, said, “The way you get to know someone is not the surface things, like where they’re from. Ask what their grandfather was like…”

I’m inclined to say, “Well, I’d eventually get around to their grandfather, later, after I got through trying to remember 999 other students…” The truth, though, is that I don’t think I ever asked anyone what their grandfather was like.

If someone wanted to know me, grandmothers would be a better place to start, but asking about my grandfathers would be intriguing, in part because my mother’s father, Elmer Arthur Pond, was dead when I was born, killed in a coal mine cave-in a decade before. I wish I knew more about what he was like.

The strange thing is, he’s been a major part of my life, because I have spent so much time wondering about him, what he was like…and because of three things I do know…

First, my father said that Grandpa Pond was always interested in what other people thought. He would listen carefully as you talked.

Second, my mother was the outlier among his eight children, the “sensitive” one, the one who needed extra attention. He gave her the extra attention she needed.

Third, he was killed because he knew the mine was unsafe, but the owner insisted the miners go in anyway. Grandpa told the other miners to stand back, that he would go in first.

So, yes, you might learn about me by asking me about the grandfather I never knew, because I wanted to be like him.

John Robert McFarland

The photo is generic; not of my grandfather.