SOME OF US WRITE-a poem

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter

Some of us write to scare

away the unknown things

with the glowing eyes

in the darkness

just outside our reach,

as though a scribble

on a page can be a wall

a wolf can’t jump,

an avalanche can’t top.

Some of us write.

Some simply pray.

JRMcF

FORGIVING THE ACCEPTABLE

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

Forgiveness is the most difficult task for humans, and thus it is the thing Jesus talked about more than anything else, except for money. I think he talked about money so much because most of us especially need a lot of forgiveness for the way we relate to money.

Forgiveness is hard, and we don’t want to do it, so, in order to avoid having to forgive people, we choose their unforgivable qualities to discriminate against them.

For instance, if Donald Trump asks forgiveness for lying, for hypocrisy, for greed, for cheating, for fraud, for sexual promiscuity, for divorce, for meanness, for chicanery, for being a bad citizen, for refusing to pay his share of the taxes for the common good, for demeaning the poor and handicapped, for willful ignorance, for duplicity, for taking advantage of the poor and gullible while claiming to be a Christian, for taking bankruptcies so he would not have to pay the small business owners to whom he owed money while claiming to be extremely rich, for disrespecting all who disagree with him—any or all of those--I have a responsibility as a Christian to forgive him. After all, Jesus taught me to pray, “Forgive me my sins as I forgive those who sin against me,” and I pray such every day.

I cannot forgive Trump, however, for his parents, for his place of birth, for being white and old and straight and male, just as Hillary Clinton cannot be forgiven for her parents or her place of birth, for being white and old and straight and female, because they have no control over those attributes. There is nothing to forgive. They are unforgivable.

Something about which we have no choice cannot be a sin, and thus cannot be forgiven. It can only be accepted, and Jesus only put into that prayer about forgiving the forgivable, not accepting the unacceptable [Unless maybe you count Thy kingdom come and Thy will be done and lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil and Thine is the power].

It’s a clever arrangement, in order to avoid having to obey God and forgive—be against only those qualities which cannot be forgiven. Once again, God, who is remarkably naive at times about these things, underestimated our human ability to find a way to be unkind to one another.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The problem with writing a blog for old people, CHRIST IN WINTER, is an ever-diminishing population, of people who cannot remember to go to the blog site.

I tweet as yooper1721.

Here I come to save the day! No, not Mighty Mouse. Yuri Strelnikov, the boy genius of Katie McFarland Kennedy’s delightful Learning to Swear in America. Buy it or borrow it, but read this book! [What do you mean, you’re not old enough to remember Mighty Mouse?”

WHO IS MY MOTHER, WHO IS MY BROTHER

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter

This morning I came across a delightful piece of poetry by Shirley Erena Murray, called “Who is My Mother, Who Is My Brother.” It is based on that intriguing story about Jesus’ relations with his relations. [Mt. 12:46-50; Mk. 3:31-35; Lk 8:19-21.]

His family thought he had gone berserk. After all, who goes around claiming to be the Messiah? That wasn’t exactly what he was doing, but close enough. So they went to get him and take him home, hide him in the attic, so he wouldn’t be embarrassing them anymore. A whole lot of family life is based on trying to escape embarrassment by relatives.

He was inside, teaching, and they didn’t even want to be seen with him, so they sent someone in to ask him to come out where they could grab him and secret him away. Folks told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside. They want you to come out for a little chat.”

Jesus saw it as a teaching moment, as he saw most moments. He asked, “Who is my mother? Who is my brother?”

Shirley Murray wrote a poem about it, and Jack Schrader put music to it, so it’s also a hymn, # 2225 in The Faith We Sing.

I haven’t gotten permission to reprint, because that takes so long I’ll be dead by the time it comes through, but you and I are the only ones who know I’m doing this, and if you don’t tell, I won’t.

Who is my mother, who is my brother?

all those who gather round Jesus Christ:

Spirit blown people, born from the Gospel

sit at the table, round Jesus Christ.

Differently abled, differently labeled

widen the circle round Jesus Christ:

Crutches and stigmas, cultures’ enigmas

all come together round Jesus Christ.

Love will relate us—color or status

can’t segregate us, round Jesus Christ:

Family failings, human derailings

all are accepted, round Jesus Christ.

Bound by one vision, met for one mission

we claim each other, round Jesus Christ:

Here is my mother, here is my brother,

kindred in spirit, through Jesus Christ.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

I especially love the images of “Spirit blown people” and “human derailings.”

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith [and, occasionally totally unrelated musings and mutterings] for the Years of Winter

FIRE THE COACH

Wives need something to complain about. That is a major part of their job. If your husband is perfect, though, or at least “going on to perfection,” you can’t do your job. Consequently, while I watch football games on the TV in our living room, Helen does things on her computer, so she’ll have stuff to complain about. Computers are a wonderful source of complaints.

Our joint football/computer living room is the reason Helen is one of the few persons outside the SEC and ESPN who cares about the recent firing of the LSU football coach, because between her mutterings about the computer, she occasionally hears something from the TV.

Thus a year or so ago, she suddenly shouted at the TV, “FEWER miles, not less miles.” It really bothers her when folks on TV get the words for volume and number mixed up.

I said, “But, Honey, the coach’s name is Les Miles.”

“Well,” she retorted, “they should have named him Fewer.”

So she is quite pleased that she won’t have to overhear about Les Miles anymore. Unless he gets hired at Purdue. That will be a real problem.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

LAYING ON OF HANDS, ON BABIES & PREACHERS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

It’s Sunday morning, so as I always do, I’m thinking about and praying for my preacher friends, including Ed Boase. I hadn’t thought about Ed for a long time, until Helen and I started talking this past week about my ordination. It reminded me that Ed was one of the two pastors who, along with the bishop, laid hands on me at my ordination.

The other was Otis Collier, my District Superintendent, a kindly man, close to retirement. He baptized our younger daughter, Kathy as we called her back then, in our church at Cedar Lake. [1] Otis kept me out of trouble, as much as possible, so I felt it appropriate to choose him as one of my ordainers. I chose Ed because I owed him since I got him into trouble.

“I didn’t know you and Ed were that close, to choose him as an ordainer,” Helen said.

We weren’t close, in general. He pastored in Lowell, a small town several miles from Cedar Lake, where we lived, a small town but one with a reputation for turning out performers, including Florence Henderson and Jo Anne Worley. [2] Ed was forty years older than I, like Otis, ready for retirement, and, like Otis, kind, and willing to talk to and be seen with a wild young radical at District meetings when most others there were afraid it would hurt their reputation.

That was the extent of our relationship, until the woman from our church left her new baby on his porch.

She wasn’t really a member of our church, but her son, about sixteen, came to our youth group, so they were my pastoral responsibility. It was the teen boy who invited me to their house to talk to his mother, because she was close to forty, and pregnant, and they had no job or money, and she was embarrassed about the baby so wouldn’t talk to anyone about what they should do once the baby came.

So I went. The boy initiated most of the conversation, but his mother talked, too, and it was clear that she was intelligent, but in denial. Nothing was said about a father for the new baby, so it looked like there would be no help from that source. I did the usual things, trying to connect her to social agencies. Mostly, though, she remained in denial about the whole thing… until the baby came. That was when she began not only to accept but to expect help from Helen and me.

Our daughter, Mary Beth, was into her second year, so we had baby things that she had outgrown, or duplicates, that we could give. We tried to help in other ways, but Helen was at home, without a car, with a baby of our own, while I was gone all day to Garrett Theological Seminary, at Northwestern University. So I told her if she got into some emergency, she should call Rev. Boase at Lowell.

She did, except it was more than a telephone call. Ed said there was a knock on the door. He opened it. There stood a woman he had never seen before. “Here’s the baby,” she said, pointing to a box on the floor. “I’ll be back soon.” She left.

Soon turned out to be a couple of days, which was a long time for a bewildered old couple that had not laid hands on a baby in a very long time. They were beginning to think they’d have to give the baby to the social workers when the mother returned, walked in, thanked them, picked up the baby, and left.

That was the end of the story. She had apparently made some living arrangements elsewhere while she was gone, for we never saw her or either of her children again. The end of the story, except for me asking Ed to lay hands on my head at my ordination.

He squeezed much harder than was really necessary.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Older daughter Mary Beth, was baptized by Bishop Richard Raines at annual conference at Purdue University.

2] The 1960s urbanized the entertainment industry. After that, you couldn’t just be a kid from a small town that had a good drama teacher, go off to Hollywood or New York and make it on musicals-in-the-barn talent. You had to grow up in a place where professionals were already producing. Before that, though, a small out-of-the-way town like Danville, IL, could produce Dick and Jerry VanDyke, Bobby Short, and Gene Hackman.

I tweet as yooper1721.

Here I come to save the day! No, not Mighty Mouse. Yuri Strelnikov, the boy genius of Katie McFarland Kennedy’s delightful Learning to Swear in America. Buy it or borrow it, but read this book! [What do you mean, you’re not old enough to remember Mighty Mouse?”

FRENCH FRIED BAPTISTS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

We ate last night with a bunch of retired people. We were there for the speaker, not the food, which was a good thing.

To the management there, food service is a necessary but undesirable backpack to their main business. So it is treated like an unwanted step-child. They change cooks and menus and modes and mottoes with some regularity, but not their attitude, so the result is always the same— mostly passable food with extremely slow service and ever higher prices, because, if you have a fancier slogan and prettier water pitchers, you can charge more.

One thing remains constant: French fries. Well, almost constant. They used to come with the cleverly named burgers. [1] Now we are strongly encouraged to order French fries, but they cost extra. That’s “progress.”

I was once in a group of young people who were talking about how so much of our food talk has French names. Soup du jour, éclair, soufflé, etc. “Don’t forget French fries,” Larry said.

That’s the motto of most restaurants: Don’t forget French fries.

Except that the Baptist Church in Monon, IN, when Helen was growing up there in the early 1940s, forgot.

They were having a supper in the church basement. They ran out of fries. The only place in town with a French fry machine was the tavern. Georgia Karr, Helen’s mother, admitted that she knew the tavern owner. She called and got permission to send someone down to use their machine. The only available person for that mission was Mable, head of the local WCTU, who would not even walk by a tavern, yet along go into one. But like a good Baptist woman, she went when she was sent. After all, it was the Lord’s work.

When the meal was over, and cleanup was underway, the women talked of all that happened. They thanked Mable for doing the unthinkable. “It was not too bad,” she said. “I just walked in the front door, went back to the kitchen and used the French fry machine, and walked out again. I didn’t even say a word to anybody.” As she described the escapade, however, the other women realized that she had gone to the wrong tavern!

Georgia was embarrassed. She called up the proprietor of the “wrong” tavern to apologize. “Oh, it was no problem,” he said. “Nobody had any idea who she was. The drunks all thought it was a vision. It will give us something to talk about for years.”

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Clever names are our undoing. Helen and I ordered a Hoosier Hero to split, even though we did not need or want the bacon which was loudly advertised as part of it. That was a good thing, since the new cook forgot the bacon. We decided not to order French fries, since they are bad for old people, but they came on our tray anyway, in a little silver bucket. Yes, we ate them, and we paid for them.

The problem with writing a blog for old people, CHRIST IN WINTER, is an ever-diminishing population, of people who cannot remember to go to the blog site.

I tweet as yooper1721, because when I started, I thought you were supposed to have a “handle,” like CB radio, instead of a name. I was a Yooper, resident of MI’s UP [Upper Peninsula], and my phone ended in 1721, so…

Here I come to save the day! No, not Mighty Mouse. Yuri Strelnikov, the boy genius of Katie McFarland Kennedy’s delightful Learning to Swear in America. Buy it or borrow it, but read this book! [What do you mean, you’re not old enough to remember Mighty Mouse?”

DOTING ON DAUGHTERS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

I met Harold Sherman yesterday morning, as he walked, with his little dog, Carly. I have known Harold for a year, and each time I met him it took me about half a day to remember his name was Sherman, because I also knew a Harold Sheldon, and…well, confusion. Yesterday Harold and Carly were walking toward the swimming pool of our condo complex, and I realized, “Of course, Sherman’s march to the sea,” in the Civil War. So now when I meet Harold, I see him marching to the pool, which is sort of a sea, with his troops, Carly, and I have no trouble remembering his name.

I use those mnemonic devices a lot.

We used to do overnight stops at a motel in Mendota, IL because it was in the right place, and sometimes hosted cadaver dog conventions. I could never remember how to look up the motel, though, because I could not remember the word, Mendota. Then I got an image of men doting on children in that spot on the IL prairie. I can remember that, because I dote on my daughters, regular and grand.

For instance, Katie Kennedy, best writer ever, whose LEARNING TO SWEAR IN AMERICA you should buy soon, even though you are waiting until closer to Christmas to buy several as Christmas gifts. Publishers judge the success of a book by its sales in the first 8 weeks, and Katie’s 8 weeks are up, so buy now. It’s okay, of course, to buy any time, but why wait when a doting father makes such a plea?

And Michigan State University granddaughter Brigid Kennedy, one of only 20 students, out of 39,000 undergrads, to be invited to a seminar with Ken Burns, and who is being lauded for her research and writing on the ways students and universities and the government are bilked out of billions on student loans.

I’m not even going to mention grandson Joe Kennedy, because he does not fit the category of daughters, and I really like the alliteration of “Doting on Daughters” for the title. Also because his grandmother has pretty well cornered the market on doting on him. Suffice it to say that he has been my hero since he was fifteen months old, for the way he dealt with a year of cancer, and for the way he continues to live life on his own terms, and plays the digeridoo.

Which brings us to the doted daughter of the day, Mary Beth, and the real reason I started this column. Today is the pinnacle day of Birthday Fest, the annual celebration of her birth, which is especially poignant this year, as it comes in the midst of her second bout with breast cancer, third with cancer in general. A lesser woman would have wilted, but she goes gamely on, doing each day what she has to do. I need no mnemonic devices to remember and celebrate her courage.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The problem with writing a blog for old people, CHRIST IN WINTER, is an ever-diminishing population that cannot remember to go to the blog site.

I tweet as yooper1721

Russian boy genius Yuri Strelnikov is a 17 year old with a PhD in Physics. The Americans recruit him when they discover an asteroid is blazing toward earth on a collision course with Los Angeles, where NASA has assembled the best and brightest to figure a way out of this deadly impact. Yuri has only a few days to work the math, find a solution, and then convince those much older to accept his anti-matter plan. He meets the quirky teen girl, Dovie, and her equally quirky family, and finds there are more reasons to save the earth than just winning a Nobel Prize.

So goes Katie Kennedy’s marvelous Learning to Swear in America, published by Bloomsbury, which also publishes lesser authors, like JK Rowling. It has received a rare star review from Publisher’s Weekly and another star review from BCCB [Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books]. It’s on B&N’s, Bustle’s, and PopCrush’s “Most Anticipated” list, and Goodreads “Best New for the Month” list. An IndieNext pick. Available in print, audio, and e-book, from your friendly independent book store, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc.