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

The Academy of Parish Clergy starts its annual meeting today. Yesterday I wrote of Granger Westberg and the founding of APC. I was supposed to be in Racine, WI today to give the opening remarks, reflecting on the fifty years of APC’s existence, but it became impossible for me to attend in person. So, here is what I was going to say. It’s about four times longer than my usual columns, so you might want to refill your coffee…

MY YEAR WITHOUT THE PRACTICE

John Robert McFarland, FAPC

[Not every member of APC is Christian, and certainly not Methodist, but the only language I have to tell this story is Christian and Methodist. I do not mean to exclude anyone, just tell the story as it was and is.]

I. A PRETTY GOOD BOOK

Almost fifty years ago, James Glasse spoke at an APC conference. Glasse was a distinguished pastor and educator of pastors, the dean of Lancaster Theological Seminary, and his father was a well-known, respected, even revered pastor in their denomination.

Jim’s new book was out, and he asked his father what he thought of it. But his father had not read it.

 “They tell me it’s a pretty good book, if you like that kind of book, but Son, I don’t like that kind of book.”

The elder Glasse had not read the book, because he didn’t need to, to know he didn’t like that kind of book. Its title was, Profession: Minister.

Those of us who are old enough can sympathize with Glasse’s father. For him, the ministry was not a profession. You didn’t choose it just for the high status and big bucks and low hours. The ministry was a vocation, a calling, not a profession. You didn’t choose it, it chose you. You were called--by God, no less. As my bishop told me, “Don’t go into the ministry if you can do anything else.”

That was one of the ways you knew you were called to the ministry--you didn’t want to do it. That was one of the reasons I thought I was called.

II. THE STRANGE CALLING

          When I was fourteen my older sister became mysteriously and desperately ill. Her heart and kidneys and lungs were all failing. The doctors said there was nothing they could do and that she had only three hours to three days to live. I knew from Sunday School that if you want to get something from God you had to give something to God. The only thing I had to give for my sister’s life was my own life, and the only thing I could imagine God might want from me was my life as a preacher. So I made the deal. Immediately, at the very time I told God I would make the trade, my sister got well, as mysteriously and completely as she had gotten ill. The doctors, of all people, actually used the M word: “It was a miracle,” they said. And only I knew why. [1]

          But was that a call? It was a deal, a trade, and as an honest as well as promising young man, I was obligated to keep it. Or was I? You had to be called to be a minister. Was a deal like that really a call? That was my out. I wasn’t really called. Unless I really was…

III. BEING A PROFESSIONAL XN

          I had to start thinking theologically, a fourteen year old hairy legged farm boy. Did God make my sister sick to get me into the ministry? Would God have let her die if I had not made the deal? Will God come back and kill her if I don’t keep the deal? Is a God like that worth serving? I decided to give it 50 years and if I couldn’t get answers by then I’d try something else.

          I received my first appointment as a Methodist preacher when I was nineteen. Three points—Solsberry, Koleen, and Mineral, about 200 folks all told. I was ready. After all, I had been thinking about God since I was fourteen. And ever since.

          Then I hit a birthday that ended with a zero. Not a double zero as some have suggested, but significant, nonetheless.

          All those years before, from nineteen on, every book I read, every story I heard, every incident I saw, I put it into my ministry. It went into my preacher brain, which was a shoe box full of 4x6 cards. My brain got very big through the years and became several shoe boxes full of 4x6 cards. I never read a word or had a thought or said a prayer that wasn’t directed at helping my people grow in faith.

I’m considerably sorry to say that in addition to helping my people grow in faith, every word I read and thought I had and prayer I said was also directed to helping me to get ahead. I especially wanted to impress my colleagues with how good I was at our shared profession. My life was lived to help others and maximize my status. Nothing about it was designed to help me personally be a real honest-to-God regular Christian. I lived with only one question about everything, Will it preach?

          There is always some spillover, of course, if you’re thinking about God and talking about God and helping others be open to God. You can’t help but get some of it on yourself.

1V. THE PROFESSIONAL XN FAST

          That, however, was beside the point. I was 80 and I had never been a real Christian. I knew I needed to fast. I needed a professional Christian fast—no professional thinking and acting at all, only Christian thinking and acting. So I did the Lenten study on Jonah at our church the way I was asked to do, as my last hurrah. The rest of Lent I would fast from the profession of ministry.

Lent is very long when you’re a professional Xn but very short when you’re just a regular Christian, and when it was over, I knew it wasn’t long enough to do me any good. I extended the fast for a year. I told our pastors that I would do nothing professional for a year—no pastoral prayers or serving communion, no study group leadership, no weddings or funerals, no hospital calls. They were willing to honor my fast. In fact, they seemed unduly happy about it. That year, that professional fast, ended on a day celebrated both as Easter and April Fool’s Day.

It was a total failure. 

          After all my years as a professional Xn, I was a complete bust as a real Christian. Oh, I did real Christian stuff. Our old colleague, Father Joe Dooley, always said that the responsibility of lay persons is to “pray, pay, and obey.” I tried. I prayed. I paid. I obeyed, mostly.

I worked food repack nights at the Food Bank. I took the Backpack Buddies food from the church building to the Community Kitchen. I invited people to come to church. I greeted newcomers and sent them notes. I bought prizes for Jail Bingo. I criticized the preachers and the hymns. All the things real Christians are supposed to do. [2]

Mentally, though, I put every one of those things on a 4x6 card and stuck it in a shoe box in the back of my brain.

V. THE YEARS OF APC

1968 was the year that ministry went from calling to profession. Yes, it was the year Abingdon published James Glasse’s Profession: Minister. It was also the year Granger Westberg proposed The APC in the pages of The Christian Century.

          Westberg had been talking about an academy for parish clergy before 1968, however. I heard him do so when he came to Bloomington, IL to speak at the Lutheran church where he had pastored years before. He made an academy for professionalizing the ministry sound so exciting—continuing education requirements, a code of ethics, a journal for sharing the practice of the profession. I wanted to join, even though it didn’t exist yet. But I was bereft. I would not be allowed to join. It was for parish pastors only, and I was a campus minister.

          I wasn’t ever going to get to join APC, because I wasn’t ever going to be a parish pastor again. I was going to honor my deal with God but not exactly. I would get a doctorate in communication theory and become a seminary professor of homiletics. You don’t have to be called to be a preacher to teach others to preach.

          By the time I finished doctoral work, though, all the homiletics positions were filled, or at least that’s what they told me, and like so many other would-be parish escapees before me, I took a congregation because I needed a job.

By that time, APC had moved from a gleam in Granger Westberg’s eye to a Lilly-funded reality. It had not existed very long, but it was there, and the first thing I did following the Methodist annual conference when I was appointed to Orion, IL was to join the APC.

What with campus ministry and graduate work, I had not been pastor of a congregation for ten years. I knew I needed the help of experts to make the transition, and who could be more expert at pastoring a congregation than other pastors, pastors who weren’t just flying off the seat of their pants, living off an incident of calling from years before, but real professionals who would share their knowledge, share their practice, with me?

For twenty-two years of fulltime ministry and twenty-two more of part-time interims and occasional ministry forays, every word I read and every thought I had and every prayer I said was enhanced by sharing that practice with my APC colleagues.

VI. THE OLD MAN ON THE CURB

When I was twenty, I went to my first clergy continuing education conference. It was called the School of the Prophets, for all the Methodist ministers in Indiana, at Depauw University. I had been preaching at Solsberry and Koleen and Mineral for a year already, with no education for the job except Speech 101.

This was my first opportunity for education as a minister. I was enthralled. There was a Cokesbury display, with all the books and Jesus junk any preacher could ever possibly use, or misuse. I heard sermons by Bishop Richard Raines and Ralph Sockman of Christ Church in NYC. I got enough sermon illustrations to last a month, the only reason preachers go to these things anyway.

Most importantly, I was in a preaching workshop led by Webb Garrison. His teaching was practical. We were to put sermon “illustrations” [3] on 4x6 cards, because they fit into a shoe box. We were to use rubber cement to affix clippings to the cards because it did not dry out the way Scotch Tape did.

At lunch I went downtown. To buy 4x6 cards and rubber cement. I also bought a pair of shoes I could not afford, but I really wanted the box. By the time I got done, I was running late for the afternoon session. I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to miss a single minute of that conference. In the distance, from the auditorium in Old Main, I heard the after-lunch singing start. What a sound. 100 tenors. 100 baritones. 100 basses. One soprano, Clara Mae Ripple, the only woman clergy in Indiana Methodism.

As I rushed along, ahead of me I saw an old man, bald and with a white beard, standing on the curb. He was wearing a black suit, shiny at the knees and elbows, with a yellowed white shirt buttoned up at the collar, but no tie. I was dressed like the cool university student I was, Kingston Trio style vertical stripe shirt, Ivy League chinos, argyle sox, tan buck shoes. The old man looked at me, hurrying toward the sound of the prophets, my shoe box under my arm, and as I got to him he said, “Are you a preacher?”

That was the question, for sure. But it was too complicated to explain, so I just said yes.

“I used to be a preacher.” He looked toward Old Main. “Is that the preachers singing?” he asked. I assured him it was.

I thought he would come with me, to the School of the Prophets, but he didn’t. He only stood there, gazing toward Old Main, his ear cocked toward the singing. He seemed content just to be close to “the goodly fellowship of the prophets.”

Now I am the old man standing on the curb. In the distance, I hear the voices raised in song, such much richer harmony now, with all those sopranos and altos.

In that harmony I hear the voices of Perry Biddle, Thor Bogren, Earl and Martha Davis, Joe Dooley, Ed Friedman, Kim Egolf-Fox, John and Dottie Freed, Roger Imhoff, Granger Westberg, and so many others.

I hear the singing of the prophets, and I know where I belong: I am called, and I am professional.

John Robert McFarland, FAPC

1] I tell this story more fully in The Strange Calling, published by Smyth&Helwys.

2] I was like one of the football players on a team I heard their coach describe. He said, “They are good at running around the field, doing football-like activities, but they don’t really play football.” I was okay at doing real-Christian-like activities, but I wasn’t a regular Christian.

3] I resist calling the stories we tell in sermons as “illustrations” because I think the experiences we tell about are the points. The things we say about those stories are the illustrations.

PAYING ATTENTION TO YOURSELF [M, 4-16-18]

I heard Granger Westberg speak long before I met him. It was the late 1960s, and he was back to speak at the Lutheran church in Bloomington, IL where he had pastored before he became famous as a chaplain/professor/innovator who did ministry in medicine.

In his speech, he told of how he had learned of the need for continuing education [CE] for pastors by watching how doctors continued to learn. Indeed, you could not stay in good medical standing if you did not acquire CE credits. He proposed to form an Academy of Parish Clergy [APC], modeled on the American Association of Family Physicians, in which clergy would have to accrue regularly a certain number of CE units to be in good standing.

I was bereft, because I really wanted to be a member, and I would not be eligible.

I would not be eligible for APC because I was not parish clergy. Westberg was clear about that. He said that the real experts in parish ministry were those who practiced it, and that they could learn a great deal from one another by sharing that practice. If, however, they admitted seminary and college professors, and denominational officials, and chaplains and other ordained people who were not actually parish clergy, those worthies would take over, because the church thought preachers could learn from anyone who was not a preacher but had nothing of educational value to contribute to other clergy, or to anybody else. So to be sure that did not happen, only real working clergy could be members.

I had been a preacher, a parish pastor, for eight years, but I was then a campus minister, and when I finished my master’s in communication theory at IL State, where I was Director of The Wesley Foundation, and got a doctorate in theology at Iowa, and applied communication theory to theological methodology to create my own narrative theology, I planned to be a seminary preaching professor.

I knew, though, that I needed to be in the company of every-Sunday preachers as much as possible, to keep being renewed in what those folks needed to learn to be good preachers. APC seemed like a good way to stay in touch with real preachers, but I would be the very type the APC would be most unwilling to accept.

In addition to needing to relate to preachers as a professor of preaching, I just loved the company of other preachers, the “goodly fellowship of the prophets.” I felt so blessed to be in the company of thoughtful, educated, compassionate, open-minded men-all men then-who took Christian faith seriously, not just culturally.

Those weren’t just “liberal” preachers. I knew many pastors who were conservative, and several who were fundamentalist. We disagreed about “taking the Bible literally,” but not about being Christians literally. They insisted on the literal interpretation of the virgin birth and the resurrection, but also on the literal interpretation of “feed the hungry” and “clothe the naked.” We were in one accord on Christian behavior, and that was before Hondas even made it to the USA. [1] We were denominational then, but not tribal, as we are now.

I recall having coffee one afternoon with one of my conservative friends. He almost cried when he told me he had just learned that people called him and his ilk “fundies.” He was proud to be a fundamentalist, but he thought “fundy” was disrespectful. I told him I thought so, too, and vowed to myself to stop saying it.

Things did not go as I planned, of course. I had some chances to be on a seminary staff for administration, but nobody wanted me as a preaching professor. I went back to parish ministry. The good thing about that was, I got to join APC! I became a Fellow. I was even the President for a term. The sharing of the practice and the fellowship were even better than I had thought they would be!

Not long before I retired, we had an APC Midwest Chapter meeting at Grace Lutheran in River Forest, IL. That was always exciting, because F. Dean Lueking was the pastor there, and his presence made any meeting better. That particular day, though, it was more exciting than usual, because Granger Westberg himself was there. He was retired and living in Willowbrook, after a distinguished career in which he pioneered almost everything having to do with pastoral care and holistic medicine in hospitals, including creating the parish nurse program, with almost three thousand parish nurses in practice by that time.

We had a lively discussion that day, doing case studies of situations in the parish, in which we helped one another see better ways to deal with certain practical pastoral concerns in our congregations. Granger pulled me aside afterward to say that he was much impressed with my insights and would like to get to know me better. He asked me to come see him some time. I doubt that I was all that impressive. I think he was just lonely.

I thought that it would be great to visit him, though. I was honored. Talk about continuing education, with Granger, himself?! It would not have been hard to do it. I lived only a couple of hours south of Chicago. I was able to drive fast and long in those days. But I never got around to it.

I was still recovering from cancer. I was getting ready to retire. Whenever I had opportunity to leave town, I went south rather than north, to see my granddaughter in Alabama. Then she moved to Iowa and I retired so I could move there, too.

I don’t regret at all going to see Brigid, ever. But I do regret that I did not make time to see Granger Westberg. When you are no longer the innovator and enabler, people honor you but they don’t pay much attention to you. He had read my cancer book and thought we would be on the same wavelength. I’m sure he was right.

Now I am Granger Westberg. Nobody wants my advice. Nobody pays attention to me. Personally, I find that refreshing. It takes a big load off. I need to pay attention to myself, not some young whippersnapper in his fifties. I hope Granger felt the same way.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Preacher joke: Honda is the Biblical car because “the apostles were all in one accord.” [Acts 2:1]

FEAR, AND EASTER REVISITED [Sun, 4-15-18]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…

I face the end now with a surprising absence of fear. Perhaps it is just resignation. After all, none of us has an alternative to the end. Some see it as a beginning. I think I am in that number. I have hope for a fearless life in that new place, whatever or wherever it may be.

If hell is real, I suppose that’s the place I have earned. But I have no fear of hell. I used up all my fears in this place, in this life. Also, I don’t fear hell much because I have more trust in God’s mercy than in Satan’s punishment.

When I say that my fears are lessened in old age, I do not mean they are entirely gone. In this life, there will always be fear, because in this world, there is evil. In this life there is loss and pain and suffering. We cannot help but fear them. Even if I do not fear for myself in this life, I fear for others. But I do not fear death.

The message of Easter is that we need have no fear either of death or of fear itself, because resurrection awaits. Christ does not take away our fears, but shares them with us, and when they are realized, Christ shares with us the hurt. [1]

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland

1] I call that paschaltheism. A Google search can’t find any mention of such a word, so apparently I created it. [Instead Google suggests psychotheism.] Its root is “paschal,” as in Christ being the paschal lamb, the sacrifice. It is the theology of Christ suffering with us and us sharing in the suffering of Christ.  I prefer paschal to the word “passion,” traditionally used to denote the suffering of Christ, because the way we use passion these days is almost the opposite of suffering. Sometimes it’s better to use a word, paschal, we have to explain than a word everyone thinks they already know.

THE PRESENT MOMENT-a poem [Sat, 4-14-14]

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

This bit about staying

In the moment

Is not all it’s cracked up to be

I do not like this moment

There is a pile of mail

In my in-box

If emails can be said to pile

Dishes can for sure

Be said to pile

And the dirty ones

Are waiting there

In a pile

In the sink

I do not like this moment

But as they say at the raffle

At the county fair

You must be present

To win

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

BEST FRIENDS FOREVER [F, 4-13-18]

When I feel the need to let my spirit settle, I listen to Darrel Guimond play hymns on the trumpet. Darrel was my first BFF. We were ten years old. We met on Jimmy Bigham’s school bus just after my family had moved from the working-class inner-city of Indianapolis, 135 miles south to a little farm outside Oakland City.

Before Darrel, I’d had playmates, especially Jimmy Mencin, who lived across the street on N. Oakland Ave. in Indianapolis, but not friends. Playmates and friends are not the same thing.

A playmate is someone whose parents put you into the back seat of their car on VJ Day, when you are eight years old, along with their son, and drive downtown, honking their horn all the way, to join all the other honkers and shouters. They told me to bring something to make noise. I was not very adept at understanding how to make noise. I brought a pithy WWI toy helmet to beat on with a spoon. All that beating did not make much noise but did cave in the helmet. Mr. Mencin told me not to worry, that I would not need a helmet anymore. But it meant Jimmy and I could not play soldiers in his basement anymore, either.

Friends and playmates are not the same, and friends and BFFs are not the same, either. You talk with friends, and do things with them. That’s good. With a BFF, though, you go beyond talking and doing. A BFF is someone with whom you share hopes and dreams, fears and doubts.

By definition, there can be only one BFF, for “best” is exclusive, the one above all others. Through the years, though, I’ve had several BFFs, and one did not replace or displace another; they just sort of joined a special club.

As grade school and high school went along, I had other BFFs. Mike Dickey. Don Survant. In college, BFFs were Tom Cone and Jon Stroble. In seminary and through the years of ministry, there were others. It was an amazing and wonderful group.

Your first BFF is special, though, and Darrel was my first. We’d do sleepovers at his house and look at sex manuals he’d slipped out of the school library, via a flashlight, under the covers. There were line drawings that confused more than illuminated, and words that were so technical we did not understand them. But that is the kind of thing you do with your first BFF.

Yes, other BFFs through the years, but that first one has a place, an importance, no one else has, because that is the one who taught you how to be a friend to the others.

In old age, the BFF is someone with whom you share the memories and stories of hopes and dreams, fears and doubts.

Darrel became an engineer by profession, but he was such a good musician, so good on any brass instrument. At the 60 year reunion of my high school class, Butch Corn gave me a CD of Darrel playing hymns on trumpet. It’s nice to spend time with your first BFF, as I am doing now, listening to Darrel’s hopes and dreams.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

NOT BEING THERE WHEN YOU ARE THERE [R, 4-12-18]

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

Sometimes people are not there even when they are there.

Twice I have had experiences in the middle of conversations when people simply stopped acknowledging my presence. I’m not talking about medical situations, like Alzheimer’s, when people forget you’re there, but intentional shunning.

The first was when Richard Bednardsky tried to go to high school. I was the pastor at Cedar Lake, IN. We had our own grade school, but students went to high school in the county seat, Crown Point. Richard showed up at Crown Point HS the first day of his freshman year, along with all the other graduated 8^th graders from Cedar Lake, and was told he could not come in. Richard was black. Actually only half-black. Well, probably only about one-third black.

Richard was a member of our church. I did not know his parents. Neither of them came to church. He was a bright and handsome and personable boy, very popular in the church youth group. When I made an “altar call” one day at the end of worship, for anyone who wanted to join the church to come forward, Richard did so, standing straight, all by himself.

He was a life guard on the lake. He was not allowed to be on property adjoining the lake, though. We found that out when the Bothwells were having a picnic for our youth group in their yard that abutted the lake. “But Richard is a life guard on the lake,” WWII veteran Glenn Bothwell said. He was told, “It’s okay for him to be on the lake [in the life boat that pulled drunks out of the water when they crashed their boats], but he can’t be in the lake, or on the shore.”

I went to the high school to plead Richard’s case with the principal. I told him what a good kid Richard was, how popular he was in the youth group, how smart he was, what a good citizen. The principal said it was against the rules, or the laws, or something, so he could not let Richard come to school. I pointed out there was no place else for him to go. He lived within that district. “He’ll have to go up to Gary.” “He has no way to get there, and, besides, that’s wrong.” “That’s not my problem.”

I continued to press the case for Richard. The principal turned to some papers on his desk and started shuffling them. He simply pretended I was not there. I kept talking. He did not respond. I knew he was listening, because his face kept getting redder, but he did not look at me, did not say anything, just acted like he was working at his desk. I was astounded. I had no idea what to do. I had never experienced anything like that before. I was twenty-five. He was at least forty. Here was the man who was the second-highest administrator in a large county-seat school district and his way of dealing with a problem was only to ignore it? Eventually I got up, stood there for a minute, and left.

Later Richard went to Viet Nam, not for high school, but “to protect our freedoms.”

Fast forward twenty years. A young preacher in my conference was being discontinued, not because of moral turpitude [Don’t you love that word?] or because of incompetence, but because he had not advanced in his theological studies degree in the proper ways in the proper time frame. He had fallen behind on his school work because he was spending too much time on his “part-time” pastorate. I knew him well, both from being on the District Committee on Ministry and seeing him at work in his church and in the district. He was acknowledged on the Committee and by all our colleagues as one of our very best. We were letting him go on a technicality while we were keeping a whole lot of preachers who didn’t come close to his “gifts and graces for ministry.”

I went to see the bishop. She was new. I didn’t know her well. But I knew the young preacher well, and so I argued that we should find a way to keep him, that the people in his church loved him, that he was really good at his job, that he was called by God to be a minister. The bishop listened for a while and then, as that high school principal years before, simply turned away from me and started working at her desk. I continued to talk. If she listened, she gave no indication of it. I eventually ran out of words and out of amazement at her… what? I couldn’t even put a name to it. I got up, stood there for a minute, finally left, without her acknowledging that I had even been there. Here was the highest officer in our Conference, and this was the way she dealt with an unwanted problem, simply to ignore it?

I’m a pretty good communicator. But I wasn’t even there, either time.

Public education isn’t doing very well. Neither is the church. I’m not surprised.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

A follow-up on Chap Stick Wars from yesterday: I suspect I started carrying a Chap Stick in high school in the hope some girl would see my moist lips and grab me and kiss me. In college, one finally did, and kept on doing so. Chap Sticks then cost about 19 cents. It was a small investment that paid big dividends.

CHAPSTICK WARS & THE ICK FACTOR [W, 4-11-18]

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

Darrell and I—his wife called him Jim, but she’s the only one who did—had a lot in common, especially a love of baseball. There was a single A baseball team only 30 or so miles away from where we lived. On sunny afternoons, we’d hop in my car and drive over to watch the Lumber Kings. His car was nicer than mine, but he always wanted me to drive. I found out that was because the backstop wasn’t very high and foul balls off a lefthander’s bat arced up and into the parking lot, where a lot of dented cars were parked. No wonder his car was nicer.

That was also because he was a retired medical doctor, so he simply had made more money over the years than I had and could afford a nicer car, which ne naturally did not want dented by foul balls. But he usually paid for our ballpark ice cream, so it evened out.

We did things as couples, too, mostly, as with older folks, going out to eat. There was a riverboat twenty or so miles from us. They served lunch on it. The four of us would go over—in his car for these excursions—and have lunch and enjoy the lazy trip up and down the river. It was like going back in time.

Which suited Darrell fine, because he was quite conservative politically. That was our only real difference, except for Chap Stick.

I can’t recall when I first started carrying a Chap Stick in my pocket and using it whenever I felt the need. In high school, I think. Which meant I had about fifty years of Chap Stick use in my experience when I met Darrell. I got to the place where I tried not to use it in his presence, but sometimes I forgot, or the lip dryness became too much, and I pulled it out and applied it and he went into his gentle rant.

I am aware that I use Chap Stick more than most people. But it’s inexpensive, especially since it’s all I put on my Christmas wish list and so Santa puts some into my stocking. That supply lasts me all year. And why have the discomfort of dry lips when you don’t have to? After all, it’s not harmful.

That’s what I asked Darrel when he would get so upset when I used Chap Stick in front of him. “Is it harmful?” After all, he was a physician. Maybe he knew it was carcinogenic or something. “No,” he said, “but it’s not necessary. It’s just a habit. It’s an addiction. You don’t need it.”

I never did understand why my inexpensive and harmless “addiction” bothered him so much. Did he think Chap Stick was a “gateway drug” to worser epidermal addictions, like hand lotion, or tattoos?

Whatever the reason, it bothered him, and he wasted a lot of energy—both his and mine—on it. I really think that his addiction to objecting to Chap Stick was worse than my addiction to using it.

Darrell always claimed he was objecting to Chap Stick as a physician,  because of his concern for me, but it was really about concern for himself.

It was the “ick” factor, in a very minor way. Seeing someone doing something he thought was icky bothered him. Being socially conservative, he thought it was his duty to change people who were doing icky things, even though my Chap Stick usage was not harmful either to him or to me, and provided employment both to folks in the Chap Stick factory and to Santa Claus. It really was not his circus or his monkeys. It wasn’t even his business. He could have just looked the other way. But the ick factor is just too much for some folks, even if they are nice people.

Anymore, whenever I find myself objecting to anything, and claiming I’m doing it out of pastoral concern—the way Darrell thought he was reacting out of medical concern--I ask myself, “Is this because of the ick factor?” It often is. Body piercings. Tattoos. Quinoa. Cheering for the Cubs. Yes, those are icky, but I am not in charge of those for other people. So I look the other way. I’m better off that way, and so are they.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

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