THE MYSTERY OF BANKS [M, 5-7-18]

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

THE MYSTERY OF BANKS    [M, 5-7-18]

I got my first car loan when I was 19 years old, from the First National Bank in Oakland City, my home town. I was going to school at IU and preaching at three little churches, 16 to 35 miles from Bloomington, I needed reliable transportation. My brother-in-law’s 1947 Oldsmobile, which I had bought from him for $50 while the Navy had him and my sister stationed in Antigua, was barely limping along, using a quart of oil every 50 miles.

The banker in Oakland City knew my family was poor, but I had checking and savings accounts in that bank. Neither ever had much money, but I was a customer. He took a risk. I got a loan to buy a used green 1952 Chevy.

From that time on I got lots of loans from bankers, for cars and houses. I never questioned the existence of banks, though—how they got there. They were just there, on the corner, like the police station or the school. I knew they were a business, but it never occurred to me that somebody owned them. I mean, they were sort of like the government, just there, a public service, doing their thing so life could go on.

I did not find out about bank owners, I’m embarrassed to say, until I was in my late 30s. My excuse is that while I knew bankers, and even had some as church members, I was not in the social class to know bank owners.

Until I met Vic Pavlenko.

Vic and I were doctoral students together. His parents had been quite wealthy, his father the Caterpillar sales director for Russia and vicinity, and that’s a pretty big vicinity. [1] Vic’s parents were killed together in a car wreck. Vic and his brother each inherited a whole lot of money.

Vic was a Lutheran pastor. He used his inheritance to start and fund a regional ministry for poor rural people in the Dakotas. He brother bought a bank.

When Vic said that as he told us his story, when he said “My brother bought a bank,” I had my financial Eureka moment: “So that’s where banks come from; they have owners, just like flower shops.”

It’s like pulling back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. There are some things we’re better off not knowing.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] An interesting side note is that Yul Brynner was Mr. Pavlenko’s Mongolia salesman before he went into acting.

EXPIRATION DATES [Su, 5-7-18]

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

EXPIRATION DATES                        [Su, 5-7-18]

A woman was explaining to me why she was leaving the church I pastored. We were not “prophetic.” By that she meant that we did not try to predict the end of the world.

That’s the way “prophesy” is used in “evangelical” circles these days. It means foretelling the future, specifically when the world will end. That definition does not come from the Bible but is imposed upon it. Biblically, prophets don’t foretell, they forth tell. They don’t foretell the future but tell forth the word of God.

Which is right in the wheelhouse of Jesus, who shot down the idea of prophecy as predicting the end of the world once and for all.

“But about that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Matthew 24:36.

So I quoted those words of Jesus—THE WORDS OF JESUS!—to her. As I said, Jesus had settled the matter once and for all. Not exactly.

She replied, “But he did not say we could not know the month or the year.”

In some ways, I wanted to cut her some slack. In the first place, I liked her. She was a new faculty member at our university and had not been in our church very long, but she was nice. More importantly, her PhD, and thus her teaching field, was food science. Nutrition and such. Expiration dates are important in that field. So I could see why she might be interested in the expiration date of the world.

But the intentional perverseness of what she said left me speechless. Anybody with even an elemental acquaintance with the Gospels knows that Jesus spoke metaphorically, not as a scientist or news reporter. Clearly, by “day or hour,” Jesus meant any time at all—month, year, decade, millennium, whatever.

For someone who claims to be a follower of Christ to dishonor him so completely by twisting his words in order to believe and do the exact opposite of what he was trying to accomplish is mind-boggling.

Yet people keep doing it, especially about predicting the end of the world. We know of about two or three thousand such predictions over the years since Jesus spoke his words. They were all wrong.

Except were they? 99% of those predictors are dead. For them, this world has ended.

I think that is what Jesus was concerned about, the end of the world for each of us. Yes, this world will end for me, and for you. With the help of modern medicine, we might predict fairly accurately when that will happen, as oncologists do when they say “You have six months.” To which we reply, “But Doc, I can’t even pay your bill in six months.” To which they respond, “In that case, you have twelve months.” Predicting the end even for doctors is kind of iffy.

Yes, the world will end for me and for you, and we don’t know when. Why not just get ready and stay that way?

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

A PARENT CONSIDERS COLLEGE-poem [Sat, 5-5-18]

A PARENT CONSIDERS COLLEGE-poem    [Sat, 5-5-18]

[I wrote this poem as our younger daughter headed off to college. Today her daughter graduates from college. In the fall, her son starts to college. The worries of parents don’t change much from one generation to the next.]

Will some long-armed cult

Reach out and pluck her

From depression’s barren limbs?

Or simple, mindless boredom

Press her flat like concrete

Minus pattern, texture, tone?

Will booze engulf her

In a fog of unremembered days

Spent staggering into empty doors?

Or mindless PhDs beat

On her with their rounded, rubber

Mallets ‘til her brain is perfect…

Symmetrical, spherical, “parameters

Impacted by environments

Confronted with events” unfinished?

Will boys called men when their names

Are seen in crime reports

Whisper sweet nothings

That are much more nothing

Than sweet, and love is unrequited,

Unfulfilled, unfull, finally

Unhoped for, even

Or by some miracle of God

Will she be like me?

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

CIW BONUS: “Only in poetry is a word that means only one thing dysfunctional.” Billy Collins

GOOD ENOUGH TO BE IN THE CATALOG [F, 5-4-18]

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

GOOD ENOUGH TO BE IN THE CATALOG                      [F, 5-4-18]

I love college catalogs.

            I was standing beside our old gray Chevy, in a gravel parking lot, outside Oak Grove Church, in the open country, on a humid summer day, waiting for my little sister, to drive her home from Vacation Bible School. It was the summer of 1954, before my senior year in high school.

            The windows on the car beside mine were down. On the front seat was the catalog—five by seven, plain white, with a round seal in restrained red, which I later learned was crimson, and underneath, in simple but elegant type, Indiana University. I reached through that car’s window and pulled out the catalog.

            As I leafed through it, I knew my life had changed forever. I saw those pages a world where no one in my family had even visited, but I knew it was a world where I wanted to live. If I could get into that catalog, I would no longer be a simple country boy. I would be a college man.

One of the greatest sacrifices I ever made was putting that catalog back into that car when Margey came running out the church door to show me the picture of Noah and his ark and his strangely shaped animals that she had drawn.

            The idea of me going to college made no sense. My father was blind. We were on welfare. There were three other children. No one on either side of the family had ever gone to college. I was already working part-time to help support my family. But when Iva Jane McCrary, our high school Home Economics teacher, asked me what I would do after high school, I said, “I’m going to IU.”

            Iva Jane was a large and forbidding woman. In addition to Home Ec, she taught biology to the girls. Because of scheduling problems, I had been in her biology class, one of two misplaced boys. She looked at me strangely and finally said, “Yes, I suppose you are college material.”

            Suddenly I was not sure about that catalog. Iva Jane had given me her imprimatur, said that I was college material, more or less, but I had never before considered that I was not. Sure, I knew that I did not have the right clothes or the right money to go to college, but I had not considered that I might not have the right stuff.

            I had been class president for three years. I was editor of the school newspaper. Only James Burch did better in class than I. But maybe I wasn’t college material. Ann Turner, the doctor’s daughter, was going to IU. Bob Nation, who was going to be a doctor, went there. So did Shirley Black, the cheerleader, whose father had his own business. Was college for the likes of me?

            When I heard that the factory in the next town was hiring, I applied, set the record on their aptitude test, [which James Burch later broke], and quit high school to go to work.

            My forewoman said that I was their best adjustor of electrical relays and got me a date with her very attractive daughter, but I think she knew my heart wasn’t in the factory. They didn’t have a catalog.

            Because classmate Jim Shaw said to me, in the middle of July, “On your day off, let’s drive up to IU and see if they’ll let us in,” I did go to college. I went to graduate school. I got a doctorate. Altogether, I did ten years of higher education. All the way, though, Iva Jane’s grudging acceptance of me as “college material” pulled sideways on me, trying to get me to write dim and shaky answers on the pages of life’s Blue Book.

            I think one of the best things I did as a minister was expecting people to be better than they wanted to be. I said, in any way I could, “Yes, you are Christian material.” I was sometimes wrong, but more often, people who had little faith in themselves learned to have great faith in God, because their pastor expected it.

            I suppose I’m thinking about college catalogs because tomorrow granddaughter Brigid graduates from The James Madison College at Michigan State University and starts a PhD at The University of Chicago in the fall. Later this month grandson Joe graduates high school and starts college at The University of Iowa in the fall. I get excited when I think about what treasures are hidden in the catalogs of those universities for them. I know for sure that there is no catalog big enough to contain my pride.

I still love college catalogs. I regret, though, that they are now usually electronic instead of paper. It is unlikely that some poor girl or boy will see a CD on the seat of a car with open windows and pull it out and stick it into the computer that just happens to be sitting there in that gravel parking lot on a humid summer’s day.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I used to keep a careful index of stories and ideas used in CIW. That became cumbersome, though, so I gave it up, figuring that when one writes a blog for old people, they won’t remember if they’ve read it before, anyway.

THE BOOSTER CLUB [R, 5-3-18]

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

THE BOOSTER CLUB    [R, 5-3-18]

Later I found out that some folks thought of O.G. Boost as a joke. At least, they made jokes about him. I thought he was great.

When my father lost his eyesight in an industrial accident, my parents declared bankruptcy. We moved from the working-class near east side of Indianapolis 135 miles south, to a hard-scrabble five acre farm near Oakland City, my father’s home town, five miles from my mother’s home town of Francisco.

Our house in Indianapolis was “modern,” meaning it had indoor plumbing—cold and hot running water, a bathroom with a tub—and a modern kitchen—ice box, gas stove—and central heating—a coal furnace in the basement.

Our house on the farm had none of those. We carried water in in buckets and carried it out in other buckets. We had an outhouse instead of a bathroom. We cooked on a wood stove and “heated” the rest of the house with a coal stove. We carried wood and coal in in buckets and carried ashes out in other buckets.

It was a rougher life on the rest of the family than it was on me. I was ten years old. Sure, I had more chores to do than I ever thought possible—splitting kindling, feeding chickens, gathering eggs, hoeing the garden, carrying water and coal in and dirty water and ashes out, taking to the outhouse the “thunder mug” the females in the family used, putting up hay, picking corn, and all the rest of farm life. That wasn’t what bothered me most, though.

I would never be a Boy Scout. I had been a Cub Scout in Indianapolis. I had a nice den mother and a good pack leader. I had friends. I was advancing in ranks. I had a partial uniform—a shirt and neckerchief and beanie. I had insignia on my shirt. [The shirt is long-gone but I still have the insignia.] I loved being part of a group where you could advance by working hard and getting badges. Most of all, I loved having a uniform. It meant I belonged.

Then, after three years of doing chores and having no club to belong to,  O.G. Boost showed up. I realized later that he wanted to start a 4H club primarily for his own sons, George and Charlie, and because he didn’t get along well with the leaders of the other 4H clubs and the civic clubs in town. But that was a good reason to do a good thing. The Forsythe community three miles out of town, where we lived, so-called because of Forsythe Methodist Church, was an area that did not have a 4H club. So although the Boosts lived in town, O.G. started a 4H club in our neighborhood.

He rounded up eleven misfit boys in addition to his sons, none of us with access to Boy Scouts or 4H, and named us the Lucky 13 4H Club. I knew even at the time that I got elected president because O.G. maneuvered the vote. I didn’t wonder why he did it. I was just delighted to have a club, to belong, to have a uniform [a white t-shirt with the green 4H clover emblem on it], and to be president.

I think O.G. maneuvered me into election as president because he knew I was so eager to have a club that I would not let it fail, that I would work at it. And I did. I got a notebook and kept a record of everything we did and might do, plus lists of potential members. I invited to membership everyone I could think of. I hounded members to start and finish their 4H projects. I called every member before every meeting to remind them to show up. [Not easy on a 13 family party line.] As I showed my pigs and carrots at the county fair, I mentioned casually to anyone within earshot that I was the president of the Lucky 13 4H Club.

They looked a bit askance when I said O.G. Boost was our founder and leader. Laughed behind their hands. I didn’t care. Still don’t. O.G. Boost will always be a hero to me.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

THOSE THINGS THAT HOLD US TOGETHER [W, 5-2-18]

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

THOSE THINGS THAT HOLD US TOGETHER                   [W, 5-2-18]

Helen and I went to The Hoagy Carmichael Room at The Archives for Traditional Music, for a concert by Ruth and the Stones, five women graduate students studying traditional roots music in the Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at IU. They named themselves for Dr. Ruth Stone, their professor and mentor. They are scholars, not professional performance musicians, and their amateurism showed, in endearing ways. They made valiant attempts to play the cello and mandolin and guitar as they sang, and were mostly successful. They had nice voices, that blended into pleasant harmonies.

What I remember, though, was an original song by Adah: Blue Skies are Holding Me Together. It has a lovely melody, and additional lyrics, but that line caught me and held me: blue skies are holding me together.

I began to think about the things that hold me together. Blue skies are certainly in the list. Folk songs hold me together, too. So do… well, I’ll let you make your own list. It’s a delightful thing to do, to make a list of the things that hold you together.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

You can hear Blue Skies are Holding Me Together for yourself. Just search for Ruth and the Stones on YouTube.

A CIW BONUS:

The Minister of Visitation in one of the churches I pastored was Max White. Occasionally he gave the pastoral prayer during Sunday morning worship. He always included, “Bless those of us assembled here.”

I always got a special thrill when I heard him pray that. I knew it meant “we individuals who have come here to be one body,” but I also heard it as “we who are being put together here, being brought back from the fragmentation we have experienced in the world this week to be made whole.”

FINAL BENEDICTION [T, 5-1-18]

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

FINAL BENEDICTION                     [T, 5-1-18]

A friend asked me to walk with him this past week. I like him. He is recovering from surgery. But I told him “no.” That’s so unlike me. But this is a very unlike time in my life. I need to walk alone. I didn’t know it until I got his text.

When we moved “back home,” three years ago, we could still do everything we had always done, only slower. About 15 months ago, that began to change. Now we’re not only slow, we are also absent from a lot of things we used to do.

With me, it’s been about the profession. I was “called” when I was only fourteen. [1] I started preaching, a regular appointment as a Methodist pastor, when I was only nineteen. I never had an identity apart from ministry. My personal and professional identities were one and the same.

The last 18 or so months, I’ve had to accept that my former identity is over. Completely. I can’t be a part-time clergy, doing occasional sermons and pastoral prayers and such, because that means I’m only a part-time person. I have to get a whole new identity.

The problem is, I’m not sure yet what identity will come.

This closure of my former clergy/person identity has been coming on for a while. I have written formerly here of doing a year-long “professional Christian” fast to try to be a regular Christian. That didn’t work.

Then we went to Solsberry for church on April 22. The Solsberry-Koleen-Mineral charge was my first pastoral appointment. I preached there for three years, while a college student. We had not been back for 58 years.

Even though I had decided/realized earlier that week that my clergy identity was done and over, and said to myself, and to Helen, and to the pastor of our church, that I would do no more clergy stuff of any kind, the pastor at Solsberry asked me to do the benediction at the close of worship. I knew I was breaking my end-of-clergy vow right off the bat, but it felt okay, even necessary, but I did not know why. This week, when I wondered why I had to walk by myself, had to be only with myself, I understood that the benediction at Solsberry was a total closing of my preacher identity—benediction at the place where I started.

Suddenly that life was over, and it was necessary for me to withdraw from others and the world and into myself to see what my new identity will be. That was a spiritual and emotional decision, not a conscious one, but it feels right, and not a little overwhelming. [2]

I assume I’ll keep writing this column, because writing, more than anything else in my total identity, was as much personal as professional, and you don’t have to be a preacher to reflect on faith and life. But it’s going to be quite interesting, I think, at least to me, to see what identity emerges from these solitary walks in spring time.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] I talk about this more in my book, THE STRANGE CALLING.

2] Some of my preacher colleagues, when their professional life is over, leave the church. I don’t equate clergy identity with church identity. I still want and need the church. That is my primary community in the world. It is where I learn and hear the language that gives me a way to be in the world.