THE NOT-ANYMORE STAGE

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

I am in the “not anymore” phase of life. I say things like, “I don’t prepare anymore,” and “I don’t edit anymore.” Helen said, “You can get away with this until you say, ‘I don’t shower anymore,’ and then we’re going to talk.”

I often say that the key to living well in old age is to live within your limits but not be limited by them. To live within limits as we age, but not be limited by them, we have to give up certain things, but not give up others. I suggest giving up worrying and awfulizing and complaining, but not loving and praying and singing. Oh, and showering…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

RIP, BILL WHITE--THE TOUCHING TIME

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

The Rev. Dr. William Luther White, Bill, always lived in the present moment, but in that constantly present moment, he was a citizen of all of time. We were friends through almost 60 years of that time. He ended one of his last emails to us with “Life is fun.”

We were students together at Garrett Seminary, at Northwestern U, when I was working on what was then called a BD degree and Bill was gaining his PhD. We were among the brown bag commuters who ate lunch together, including grad students like James Cone and Ron Goetz and Tom Tredway, who, like Bill, went on to distinguished careers melding theology and church and university as college and seminary professors and presidents.

We were young ministers to the university together in the 1960-70s, Bill to Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington and me to Illinois State University, a mile down the Franklin Street in Normal. He had gone to IWU as chaplain in 1962, and when Don Ruthenberg, the president of the board of The Wesley Foundation at ILSU told Bill that the WF was looking for a new minister, Bill immediately said, “You need to get John McFarland.” So we became colleagues in ministry in Bloomington-Normal, often sharing student retreats and chapel worship services.

My career took me many other places after I left ILSU, but Bill remained a steadfast intellectual and spiritual presence at IWU and in Bloomington-Normal. Throughout that time, we remained close and grew closer, attending conferences together, visiting in each other’s homes, even traveling overseas together.

He died on Sunday, June 28, 2015, just nine days short of his 84^th birthday. His funeral will be in a few weeks, when far-flung family can all be present. Ann has asked me to do that funeral, and so I shall write more then. I do, though, want to tell now what I learned from Bill about touching.

We were Great Depression boys, from Southern Indiana. Unlike today, when everyone hugs everyone, for any reason or none, in that era and place, people did not hug. Especially men. A man hugged no one, except his wife, on special occasions, when no one was looking. If you had no wife, you were out of hugging luck. I like today a lot better.

Bill came to see me after emergency surgery revealed I had cancer, and after my first oncologist told me “a year or two.” Here is what I wrote in my book, Now That I Have Cancer I Am Whole: Reflections On Life And Healing For Cancer Patients And Those Who Love Them, pages 108-9:

***

My friend Bill came to see me, a week after I was out of the hospital. He drove a hundred miles each way to spend an hour with me. We’ve been friends for almost thirty years. Between us we’ve had three wives and seven children. We don’t see each other often, but we don’t need to; our friendship is always still there. Bill’s first wife left him ten years ago. Just told him one day that she was leaving. No previous symptoms, even in retrospect. Just like my cancer. We share that kind of surprised grieving—he in his first marriage, me in my body.

When he was ready to leave, he sat on the sofa beside me and put his arm around me. I held onto his leg, like a little boy might wrap himself around his father’s knee. We prayed together. He told me he loved me. I tried to tell him I loved him, too, but I couldn’t get it out. I believe he understood, though. Other than shaking hands, I believe that’s the first time we’ve touched, in thirty years.

            Now that I have cancer there seems to be an unspoken word of permission for people to touch me, for me to touch them. It’s funny, that a broken body should somehow be more touchable than one that’s whole. Or am I more touchable because my spirit is broken? “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit. A broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” [Psalm 51:17]  It is interesting that in all the stories of Jesus, there is only one instance of anyone touching him while he was alive in the body. He, of course, touched many: a leper, a hand to raise Simon’s mother-in-law or Jairus’s daughter up from beds of illness and death, deaf ears, blind eyes, the feet of the disciples, children. The woman with the hemorrhage reached only as far as the edge of his robe. The woman who broke the alabaster jar of ointment on his feet wiped it off with her hair—no touch. The only time anyone reached out to touch Jesus was to betray him, Judas with a kiss, the authorities of his own faith and people with a slap.

            Maybe that’s why “doubting” Thomas insisted on his famous touch-and-feel session after the crucifixion. Perhaps he was really “knowing” Thomas. Because no one had touched Jesus while he was alive, Thomas knew the real proof of the resurrection was that he could be touched, his body was broken. It’s only after the breaking of the crucifixion that resurrection, the touching time, comes.

            Somehow we seem able to touch one another in our brokenness in ways we never can in wholeness. God uses broken things: broken bread, broken ointment jars, broken bodies, even relationships broken with a kiss.

            My body and my spirit have been broken by cancer. That means I can touch and be touched. I’m thankful for the cancer.

***

Helen and I went to see Bill for the last time the day before he died. He was in hospice care, on a strong morphine drip, and unaware. I touched him, though. I sat beside his bed and held his hand and told him how fortunate I had been to have his friendship all these years. Friendship is always a touching time, even when it’s not.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter.

I tweet as yooper1721.

IT IS FOR ME-A poem about peculiar sins

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

Most mornings, I write a little semi-poem just to find out what I’m thinking. This morning I was thinking about the peculiar, in the sense of “individual,” nature of sin, because I have recently been in the company of a couple of addicts, one an alcoholic and the other a gambler. There are some sins that are quite general—murder, rape, etc. It is hard to imagine a time when those acts are not sins. But drinking beer or taking a pain medication is usually not a sin. It becomes one, though, through addiction. The same is true with playing church bingo. If you cannot “use successfully,” then using at all becomes a sin. An addict knows that regardless of what others can do, they have to avoid that act. They cannot “use successfully.”

I never edit my little morning poems, just let them stand as they come out of my heart and pen, so, it’s not a great poem, hardly a poem at all, but perhaps a start to thinking about actions that might not be a sin for others but are for me or you.

It Is For Me

For someone else

it might not be a sin

to ignore the smell of new turned land

to forget the feel of a tiny hand

to lose the hope in a wedding band

            but it is for me

For someone else

it might not be a sin

to pass a beggar on the street

to fail to dance to a ragtime beat

to leave the kitchen when there’s heat

            but it is for me

For someone else

it might not be a sin

to walk in the way that’s not narrow and straight

to turn away when encountering hate

to skip on the edge just to tempt fate

            but it is for me

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

BELONGING TO TABLAB

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

I returned the Donald Westlake book about Dortmunder today. I didn’t really need it when I took it, but I so much wanted to take a book, because I wanted to belong.

It was the day I walked the other way. I had been walking the same 32 minute loop around our new neighborhood each day, admiring the homey houses and rosy roses, so I had not noticed it before. When I was walking the other direction, there it was. I had heard about them but never seen one.

On the corner of Allendale and another street that is not Allendale, there was a post, with a wooden box atop it, with a slanting roof and a glass front. It was quite nice but clearly not of commercial manufacture. It was decorated with painted vines and the words, Take a Book, Leave a Book.

Sure enough, when I peered in, there were two rows of books, paperbacks on top and hardcovers on the bottom. I did not need a book. We do not have room for even one more book. We have just moved into a condo and brought too much stuff to fit in at all. But it is such a wonderful and intriguing concept. I wanted a book. No, not that I wanted a book, but I wanted to take a book. I want to be part of the kind of group where we don’t even know one another but we leave books for one another. I want to be part of the TABLAB community.

We need that in old age. So many of the communities we’ve been part of automatically no longer have room or need for us. Or else we are without communities because we have moved to some place new, to be near the children, or to get away from them.

If you are old and without community, look around. You may find some group to belong to right there on the street corner. TABLAB fits me perfectly. I can belong to a community without ever going to a committee meeting. And whenever I need to get rid of a book…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I’m sure I started writing about TABLAB some place, but cannot find it now, so if I have already posted it, I apologize.

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

LOVE THAT SAVES FROM PUNISHMENT

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

I get excited when I learn something about the scriptural world that throws light on something Jesus said or did, so that I can see him better, understand HIS world better so that I can understand better how to live his way in MY world. [Whee! That’s a lot of “betters” for one sentence.]

Last Sunday I got to hear Bob Hammel, the great Hall of Fame sports writer, preach. He always preaches on Father’s Day, at the Presbyterian church where he has attended for over 40 years, and where he is an Elder. He did a wonderful job, in the aftermath of the church shootings in South Carolina, in a sermon titled “A Father’s Plea for Peace.”

Bob and Julie’s daughter, Jane, did the “children’s time.” In it, she told of something she had just learned about the Prodigal Son, whose name was Todd. [No, that wasn’t the new fact. I just think all Bible characters should have names, so I provide them. The Prodigal Son is Todd. Peter’s mother in law is Mavis. Etc.] Jane said that one of the reasons Todd’s father watched for him so anxiously, and ran so quickly to meet him, was to protect him.

There is something in human nature that wants to punish those who break the rules. Not rehabilitate them, but punish them. Not get them to straighten up and fly right, but punish them. Not educate them into better ways, but punish them. It’s not about the rules, it’s about the satisfaction of punishing. Only psychologists acknowledge this. Those of us who do the punishing claim it is rehabilitation, that it is for the good of those being punished, that it hurts us more than them, or we do it because we are good citizens, or because justice demands it, but the truth is, we just like punishing others. It makes us feel important and powerful and righteous. So we think up rules we can apply to them so we can punish them.

Todd’s father ran to meet him to save him from punishment. Punishment in Jesus’s day was severe. The good citizens of Todd’s home village had the right, yea, even the responsibility, to punish Todd for what he had done. He had broken a major commandment. He had not honored his father and mother. Indeed, he had totally dishonored his father. It was his father’s money he had spent on booze and whores. It was in the clothes his father had paid for that he slept with forbidden and unclean pigs. As soon as they saw him coming, out came the stones, the big ones, the ones that meant death. Todd’s father ran so hard, so fast, to save his son from death.

Jesus was talking about extreme love by the father, outrageous love, unrighteous love, saving love, love that runs not just in joy but to save from punishment.

Love does not always work, not in the sense of getting people to change their ways, but punishment doesn’t always work, either. In fact, punishment rarely works. But punishment is always just punishment. Love is always love.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I don’t know why I put that copyright symbol after the title. I never say anything original, or anything worth stealing. Oh, well, it’s there…

I tweet as yooper1721, because when I started this blog I was a Yooper. Now I’m a Hoosier.

FATHER'S DAY SILENCE

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

[Because it’s Father’s Day, a repost from 4-24-12]

About two years before he died, at age 96, when I was an old man of 68 myself, my father called me on the telephone. He was crying, a very unusual activity for that extremely tough and totally independent man.

“Are you the one who was born in Ohio?” he asked in a breaking voice.

I acknowledged that I was. My sisters and brother were born in Indiana.

“I hate to tell you this,” he choked out, “but you’re not really my child…”

My first reaction was to think: If I’m the one who is not your child, how come I’m the one who takes care of you all the time instead of your non-bastard children? [1]

Then I felt guilty because it was really my wife, Helen, who did the bulk of the caring for him. By the time I had gotten that settled in my mind, he had choked up and could not talk anymore and hung up.

He never said anything about it again. Neither did I, at least to him. I told Helen and our daughters, though.

After Helen stopped laughing, she said, “That’s so ridiculous. Just look at you and your brother and father together. Except for the height difference, you’re three peas in a pod.”

I never said anything to him about it, never asked him about it, both because it was a tearful subject for him, and because Helen and I agreed that it must have been some sort of old-age forgetfulness or crossing of brain wires, maybe something he had picked up from somewhere else and mistakenly incorporated into his own memories. I also figured that it was his subject to raise, not mine.

There was just one problem with the “One of those old age memory-dementia things” theory. It was the one and only time that Dad ever exhibited an “old age-dementia” problem. Up until the day he died, both before and after that call, he was very sharp mentally.

So what was going on when he called that day? Probably nothing that had anything to do with me, something internal to him. From time to time, though, when I remember that my mother always insisted that I was named for her brother, John Hubert Pond, instead of my father, John Francis McFarland, or something reminds me of Dad--I hear the birds sing, or look at a garden, or at a piece of furniture he made--I wonder…

The memory of that telephone call does not haunt me. Sometimes, though, I recall my mother explaining that I was the least favorite child because I was the only one Dad had actually seen born, in that era before fathers were routinely in delivery rooms. I know that seeing a birth would probably jaundice my view of a kid, too.

There is no question that he was my father and I his son, in all the ways that really count, but could it be that…

If so, do I really need to know? No.

           

I didn’t need to know the day he called, either. If there were something about his relationship to me, or to my mother, then deceased, that was bothering him, it would have been best for him to talk to someone outside the family about it, or just to be as quiet about it as he had been for all his other years.

The task of our last years is what Erik Erikson called Final Integrity vs Despair. We think back over our lives and ask, “Was it okay to be me?” To be able to say yes, sometimes we have to acknowledge mistakes. Sometimes we have broken relationships that we need to mend to make life whole.

Sometimes, though, honesty becomes a breaker instead of a healer. I spoke recently with a man whose wife confessed transgressions to him just as she was dying. There was no time to process it together before she was gone. It took him a long time to get over it.

As we try to put things right in winter, there is a good tendency to try to be honest, to tell the truth about the past. Sometimes, though, it is best to tell that truth where only we, the tellers, and God, can hear it. The deciding rule should be, Does telling this not only make me feel right about my life, but does it also benefit the ones who hear, or does it hurt them?

If I hurt someone as I try for final integrity, it will lead instead to despair. Sometimes, integrity is just keeping your mouth shut.

Once, when I was 2 or 3, Dad ran away. It was the Great Depression. He didn’t have a job. He couldn’t support his family. We lived with his parents and several siblings. It was too much. Many young men left home and wife and children during the Great Depression under those circumstances. He had gotten a lot of miles away when, he told Mother, who told me many years later, he saw a little boy playing in a yard. “He looked like Johnny,” he said. He turned around and started back.

Maybe he thought I wasn’t really his child, but I was the reason he came home.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

SOME GOOD MEMORY

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

Yesterday we went to a family mini-reunion. Lots of good conversations with 2 aunts and 15 cousins. We shared lots of memories. It reminded me of this post from 2010…

When we are old, we have a great deal more past to remember than we have future to anticipate. [There is a future beyond death to anticipate, but no way to imagine it.]

I like remembering. Some days I just run through the list of all my good friends and relatives, many of whom are no longer in this world, just enjoying the memories of them.

Memory is a great gift of God.

So why, when we have so much to remember, does God also arrange to have our brains go numb in the winter of our years, just as they get numb with cold in the winter of the year? Just when there is the most to remember, our rememberers begin to stutter and backfire like old cars.

Jo Hershberger has written a lovely story of four young girls who become friends in junior high and continue to support one another in old age. [Jo’s mother was one of my all-time favorite church members and used to stay with our girls when Helen was away tending to her own mother as she died.] The story is set in the imaginary town of Rockwell, IL, but it certainly looks a lot like Hoopeston, IL, where Jo grew up. The title is Some Good Memory. [1]

It’s a quote from Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.

“You must know that there is nothing stronger, or higher, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the personal home…If a man stores up many such stories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.”

There are many methods by which old people are supposed to keep our memories working. I’ve most recently read that the best memory help is three brisk forty minute walks per week. I like that, since I already walk and have no intention of doing Sudoku or learning Chinese.

I suspect, though, that God gives us these failing brains to make us work harder at bringing back those good memories, so that we’ll appreciate them more. As you take that walk, run those good memories through the screen behind your eyes. Even if only one remains, that is enough.

Isaac Watts, in the third verse of “I’ll Praise My Maker While I’ve Breath,” writes “the Lord supports the fainting mind”

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

[1] “Some Good Memory” is published by Outskirts Press. Its ISBN is 978-1-4327-2513-6

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721