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.

JAMES CONE’S BACKHAND POINTS [M, 4-30-18]

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

JAMES CONE’S BACKHAND POINTS      [M, 4-30-18]

Recently I saw this statement: “Be the kind of Christian that Paul Rayan wants to fire.” James H. Cone was that kind of Christian.

Jim died last week. We had a few things in common. Same age. Studied at Garrett Theological Seminary, at Northwestern U, at the same time. Played a lot of table tennis.

All of us at Garrett in those student days knew Jim was smart, but he stood out more for his race than his scholarship, one of only two black students in our whole student body. And his back-hand. He could slam with his backhand as well as his forehand. After lunch, he and Raydean Davis and Malcolm MacArthur, from New Zealand, and I would gather in the ping-pong room deep in the lowest recesses of Loder Hall. There Jim would beat us in straight sets, or whatever the table tennis equivalent of straight sets is. When he made a point, it hit the table so hard, you heard it ring around the whole room. Then he would hurry away to the library to do research on his PhD dissertation on Satan.

I don’t know if Union Seminary in New York knew about his backhand, but they hired him to teach theology. At that time, Union was the premiere theological seminary in the country, with Reinhold Niehuhr and Paul Tillich and John Bennett nearing the end of their careers. James was a worthy successor.

Not only did he teach, but he developed what was called Black Liberation Theology, insisting that Jesus is not a theory but an event, an event of liberation. “There can be no knowledge of Jesus independent of the culture and history of the oppressed.” He was not just a professor; he was a prophet.

Over the last 30 years, Marcus Borg and James Cone were the prophets of liberation through Christ, not just personal liberation from personal sin, but social liberation from social sin. Marcus came at that position through Biblical studies, James through theology, and they arrived at the same destination.

James alone could not keep Union Seminary at the forefront of theological education. As the names of Tillich and Niebuhr began to fade, so did Union. But James kept Union relevant. He became the face of Union Seminary. A black face. A liberation face.

He professed and preached and propheted the same way he played table tennis, slamming with either hand, hitting the point so hard that you heard it ring around the whole room.

He has now transferred from the church militant to the church triumphant. I hope those angels look out for his backhand.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet occasionally, as yooper1721.

MAY IS FOR DYING-a poem [Sun, 4-29-18]

Undertakers and preachers know that October and May are the dying months. The prettiest months are the dying months. It’s easier to understand when you are closer to dying. If you don’t want to take another winter, you die in October. If you’ve gone ahead into winter, when it is finally over, and you have endured, it’s okay to die. In May.

MAY IS FOR DYING-a poem            [Sun, 4-29-18]

April is the cruelest month

but May is the month

for dying

when daffodils

and robins feel

the frost go limp

beneath their feet

and the understudies

of maple leaves

propeller down

when snow has finally lost

its last and dirty hope

then we die

to spite the winter

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

A CIW BONUS: I recently mentioned my first pastoral appointment, The Methodist Church in Solsberry, IN. In their membership book, certain people were marked as “puny and feeble” to explain why they did not come to church but should be kept on the membership rolls anyway. I think that should be a standard addition to the membership categories: Full Member; Associate Member; Constituent; Puny and Feeble. 

RADIO TOWN-a poem [Sat, 4-28-18]

This morning’s rain

takes me to a town

that once lived in the radio

A widow lady bakes biscuits

for her boarders, the schoolmarm

dreads the muddy boots

the blacksmith longs

for a drink at the saloon

with the swinging doors

the parson stands behind

the church and wonders why

he ever left the city

the sheriff knows

the rain means trouble

A town that once lived

in the radio

and still lives in my boyhood

dreams of valor in the rain

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

YOUR NAME IS YOUR STORY [F, 4-27-18]

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

[I get an idea, write as much of it as I can, file it where I’ll find it easily so I can finish it up and post it, lose it for days, months, maybe years, and then it pops up and… I can’t remember if I have already used it. So it is with this column. It sounds so familiar, like I’ve posted it before, but I can find no mention of it in the fairly careful indexing I used to do so that I would not repeat posts. It will be especially embarrassing if I forget and repost a column in which I brag about how good my memory is, but…]

I have 23 “children” in the ministry, young people who heard the strange calling because, they said, I made it “look like fun.” They all hate me.

They did, however, name a scholarship, and several dogs, for me, the latter, I think, so they can shout, “John Robert, get your furry bottom off the sofa.” Come to think of it, that’s what Helen shouts, too, except for two of the words. [She doesn’t call me John Robert.]

In response to the column and emails on the occasion of Helen’s birthday, about Helen making it look easy to be a preacher’s wife, [1] Raydean Davis said satirically, “Of course, you make the ministry look so difficult.”

I suppose I did make it look easy at times, because I remembered names. At least, that was my reputation. I’m still fairly good at names, although like all old people, the forgetter demons--the ones that live by eating names--have taken up residence in my brain. [2] I was never really as good at names as my reputation. But I love stories. Stories and names go together. When I knew a person’s story, it was easy to remember his or her name.

A name is simply a shortened form of story. Say “Adele” or “John Lennon” or “Steve Jobs” and you don’t hear just a name, you hear that person’s whole story, or at least as much of it as you know. There are names I have forgotten, but I still know the stories; I just can’t give you the short form of it, the name.

The very nature of life is story. When I say your name, or you say mine, we are saying that we both have a story,

Any name is good if it tells a good story.

Here, I think, is what is necessary for a name: 1] You must have a story. 2] It must be your story. 3] It must be bigger than just your story. 4] It has to be big enough to include everyone.

The tragedy today is that so many want to stop at number three. Oh, yes, they’ll claim their story includes everyone, but it’s inclusion by exclusion. If you don’t agree with them at every point, you are in the story only as evil, infidel, the enemy. That takes all the meaning from a good name.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Barbara Reick, the wife of the Lutheran pastor in Hoopeston, IL, told me: “I hate your wife. She makes being a preacher’s wife look so easy, and it’s not.” I told her, “That’s because Helen isn’t the preacher’s wife; she’s just herself.”

2] Strangely, the first letter of a name and the rest of the name are stored in two different places in the brain, accounting for the oft-occasioned, “Oh, I know his name starts with an S, [or some other letter], but I just can’t think of the rest of it.”

I used to keep a careful index of topics and stories so that I would not bore readers with repeats. But that became cumbersome, and since this blog is primarily for folks in the winter of their years, I figure they won’t be able to remember if they’ve heard it before, anyway.