A WARNING... SORT OF...

There are almost 40 comments now on my CIW of T, 7-3-18 in a language I don’t read but looks to me like Arabic. Many have shown up quite recently, although some have been there for several months. I can’t read them, but some are just a few lines, some many lines, so apparently they are different messages.

I have worried that some group with bad intentions is using my blog as a way of communicating “secretly,” since few people, and none of power or influence, read CIW. I contacted Blogger about this several months ago and received no reply.

So, I guess this is a warning, but I’m not sure to whom, or about what…

JRMcF

IS THIS YOUR FIRST TIME HERE?

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter -- IS THIS YOUR FIRST TIME HERE?

I did not know Dwight E. Loder, although he was the president of Garrett Theological Seminary, at Northwestern U, the whole time I was a student there. I occasionally heard him preach in chapel, but I never met him personally.

I used Loder Hall quite a bit, though. It was Garrett’s newest building when I matriculated, named for the president himself. It had several floors of dorm rooms, plus a cafeteria, and lounges, and a book store, and a ping-pong room, where I spent a great deal of time trying “to go on to perfection,” as John Wesley said Methodists, especially his preachers, should. If a table tennis backhand is the measure of perfection, I fear that I fall far short of Father John’s exhortation.

From the Garrett presidency, Dwight Loder was elected a bishop.

After he retired from the bishopric, several years beyond his presidency there, he had gone back to Garrett for a conference. He signed in at the desk and was assigned a room. In Loder Hall.

The woman working the desk said to him, “Is this your first time here? If you don’t know where Loder Hall is, I can have someone show you.”

Apparently she did not consider that there might be a connection between the Loder on his name badge and the Loder on the front of the building.

The former president just told her “No, that’s okay. I think I can find it.”

He said, “How totally appropriate. My day is over. At Garrett now, I’m just another person who comes to a conference. That’s the way it should be.”

I have been one of those assigned to help people find the way. I have walked many a person over to that house of many rooms that our Father has prepared for us. I think there is even a path, hopefully straight and narrow, that is named for me. But as I get to the door of that house of many rooms myself, it’s okay for the registrar to say, “Is this your first time here?” because it is.

But as I come closer to the “room at the end of the hall,” I’m inclined to say, should anyone offer direction, “I think I can find it.”

John Robert McFarland

“If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.” Harriet Tubman

THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter – THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY

I’m really sorry I made somebody pay $30 to get me Michio Kaku’s The Future of Humanity. Fortunately, I can’t remember exactly who gifted me with this book, at my request, or I would feel even sorrier.

Old people are not easy to gift. We have too much already. Basically our gifts are things we can consume and read, meaning White Castle gift certificates and books. We read the books while recovering in the hospital from the White Castle sliders.

I read a lot of brain science stuff anymore, for I’m interested in how the brain creates the mind, or vice versa. I think that’s important for incarnational theology. In fact, Helen and I will soon be subjects in an IU study on “aging and cognition.”

I don’t read original research, of course. That’s way beyond me. But I get a lot from the synthesizers, like Malcolm Gladwell and Oliver Sacks and Daniel Schachter and, especially, Michio Kaku’s The Future of the Mind.

So I asked for the Future of Humanity as a gift, assuming it would be in the general category of Kaku’s Future of the Mind. Not so.

Its basic premise is: The world is coming to an end, because it will burn up, so we’ve got to get to Mars and other places in space as quickly as possible so we can survive. 

The book is basically a synthesis of current research and theory about how we can colonize space. And a lot of faith statements like “Mars will be easy once we have learned how to terraform it.” Yes, and I’ll make the big leagues once I have learned how to hit a curve ball.

The only future for humanity, Kaku and his ilk are convinced, is in space.

The book should be called The Future of Billionaires, because Kaku is quite enthralled by the billionaires who are financing space exploration. And, of course, they are the only ones who will ever get to go live in space. I mean, when the earth burns up, it’s going to take all the rest of us—who don’t have a billion for a rocket--with it. [Then the billionaires can repeat on Mars all the original sins that have made humanity unhappy and the earth uninhabitable.]

I have some inside information on this. Chris Voorhees, a little boy from one of my churches—the son of our choir director and organist—is working with the billionaires even now, primarily to mine useful metals in planetoids. When his dad and I talked on the phone a while back, I asked how Chris was doing. “Oh, he’s a rocket scientist,” Larry said. “He designed the Mars rover.”

“But he can’t do that,” I cried. “He’s only six years old, and our daughter babysits with him.”

The future of my mind doesn’t look so good. Somebody needs to synthesize Einstein and the space-time continuum for me!

As we celebrate, properly so, the anniversary of Apollo 11, it might be good to remember that if we can’t conquer the inner space of humanity here on earth, just transporting it to a different outer space isn’t going to do much good. The future of humanity has to include the love of humanity, or there will be no future, on Mars or anywhere else.

Don’t waste your money or time on The Future of Humanity. We must, however, expend our money and time on the future of humanity.

John Robert McFarland

“The future isn’t what it used to be.” Yogi Berra

“If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Anne Lamott

DESIGN FLAWS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter – DESIGN FLAWS

I’ve mentioned Jennie Edwards Bertrand before. She was in my church in Arcola, IL, a high school junior when I was appointed there. She recently did me the honor of saying that because I was her pastor then, when she went to seminary, after a brief foray into special ed, she didn’t have to unlearn any theology.

She is now the Director of The Wesley Foundation at ILSU, as I was in the 1960s, although she is not now the campus minister there also, as she was for several years. They have another campus minister, under Jennie’s supervision, so that her main job of the last 3 years or so is starting Hope Church, a church for the unchurched.

Jennie recently mentioned that she has discovered a basic design flaw in her ministry—a church for the unchurched. People are unchurched for a reason. They don’t want to come to church. A church for the unchurched is an oxymoron at best.

The unchurched in her city are willing to accept pastoral care, even seek it out. Bar owners and other unchurched types have come to know her, as she does “evangelism,” and not only talk to her about their problems when she comes around, but actively seek her out, and point her to other people who need care. All the unchurched folk in Bloomington-Normal say, “Oh, yes, Hope church. That’s a great place. They take in anybody.” Except them. They like the idea of a church like that, but they don’t want to come to it.

So, she says, how do we overcome the basic design flaw? I have no answers for her, of course, but I thought you’d like to ruminate on that.

It occurs to me that design flaws afflict us in other areas of the church. Church unity, for instance. Is it a design flaw to assume that unity means organizational unity? Might we do better if we have a different design than a church for everybody when not everybody wants to be in that church? That’s certainly as far as I have gotten with that.

I’m a little farther along in figuring out the design flaw of a blog for old people: They are too old to remember to look at it. They are too blind to be able to read it. They are too obtuse to care what someone else thinks. They die a lot. Well, each one only once, but as a group, they are ever diminishing.

I wonder if it’s too late to start a blog for young people? They like up-to-date written word media stuff, like email and blogs, without any of those distracting “images,” and they love to listen to old people tell stories about the olden days. Surely there could be no design flaw in that…

John Robert McFarland

“All wars are planned by old men in council rooms apart.” Grantland Rice, sports writer

UNRECORDED, A Poem

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter – UNRECORDED, A Poem

[After reading Mary Oliver’s poem of the same name.]

I would love to stand

at the door at dawn

notebook in my hand

to write the scene

birds backlighted

in the sky

sun beginning its smile

creatures of the night

returning to safety

but I live

where concrete grows

beyond my door

waiting for me to slip

and crack my head

bricks beside my window

remind me to stay put

birds shout angrily

at the requirement

to eat worms

squirrels uproot

flowers to hide

their greedy hoard

best to leave

the notebook

in the drawer

leave this scene

unrecorded

John Robert McFarland

“The thing about great poetry is that we have no defenses against it.” David Whyte

STAYING HUMBLE

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter – STAYING HUMBLE

Jimmy Moore, our pastor, told a Fred Craddock story last Sunday. Craddock was a magnificent narrative preacher, in an understated style. He was one of the major influencers of preaching from 1970 to 2000 or so, and continues to be an influence through his books, even after his death in 2015.

I heard Craddock preach in conferences from time to time, and read most of his books, but this was a new story to me.

While he was Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, Wm. Sloane Coffin, the pastor at Riverside Church in NYC, the most prestigious pulpit in the country, asked Fred to come preach one Sunday when Coffin had to be away. He told him he could stay in his apartment.

On Sunday morning, though, when Fred went to the refrigerator, he found only a note that said, “There’s nothing to eat, but there’s breakfast at the church.”

Craddock thought that was nice. Breakfast had been arranged. Probably with the staff—Riverside was a huge church with a large staff—or perhaps with the members of the board. But when he got to the church, he just found a long line for breakfast. It was the homeless people of New York. Fred got in line, and got a tray with one section that he was pretty sure was eggs. He found a place at a table. He asked the man seated across from him why he was there.

“I was a stock broker, but I got to drinking. I lost everything. My daughter said I could live with her and her family if I gave up the bottle. That went okay for about six weeks, but then… here I am.”

The man asked Craddock what he did. The humble and unprepossessing Craddock did not want to brag, and say that he was the most popular professor of preaching in the country, and would even that morning preach in the most prestigious pulpit in the city, so he just said, “I’m a preacher.”

“Ah,” the man said, “the bottle gets even the best of us.”

John Robert McFarland

“Somebody suffers with every sermon. Either the preacher as s/he prepares, or the congregation as they listen.”

THE COFFEE HOUSE OF UNPENNED POEMS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter -- THE COFFEE HOUSE OF UNPENNED POEMS

Surely there must be a place

where unpenned poems go

to talk to one another

about their fate

A coffee house of the soul

Complaining about authorial

perfidy, how some soggy morning

brain took the time

to place their words in line

then deemed them too unworthy

to be seen on screen or paper

Or perhaps, being poems,

they would say

“On screen or paper to be seen”

Perhaps they write their own

being themselves

poets in a coffee house

I hold it true, what’ere befalls

I feel it when I’m but free verse

Tis better to have rhymed and lost

Than never to have rhymed at all

Then they laugh

and stare into a mirror
behind the pentameter barista

that reflects nothing

John Robert McFarland