FOOTBALL PERFECTION [R, 8-30-18]

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

The college football season is upon us. I have serious misgivings about football in general, and college football in particular, but I do love it. Last night we were in the live audience for Coach Tom Allen’s first radio show of the year, as he prepares for IU to play its first game this Saturday, at Florida International University. It reminded me of another football game in Florida, and so I am repeating this post from 2014…

FOOTBALL PERFECTION

As I watched the Florida State-Notre Dame football game last night, I thought of all the problems FSU has had with star quarterback, Jamies Winston [charges of shoplifting, rape, and public obscenity] and of FSU’s history of such players. That sort of thing didn’t happen under Coach Darrel Mudra.

He had been fired at Florida State after only two years, for not winning enough games fast enough, even though he won more his second year than his first. Eastern Illinois University was glad to pick him up off the coaching scrap heap.

The year before, the EIU Panthers had won only one game. In Mudra’s first year, they won the national championship.

His career record was 200-81-4, 70.9 %. He’s in the national football hall of fame. His nickname is “Dr. Victory.” His expertise and reputation were in taking long-time losing programs and turning them into winners. That’s why FSU hired him. Despite all that, FSU gave Mudra only two years to turn their floundering program around.

Bobby Bowden, who succeeded Mudra at FSU, has said that it was Mudra who really turned FSU football around and made it possible for him to win.

Mark Dantonio, the hugely successful coach at Michigan State U, says that there is no secret to football success. “You recruit one good young man at a time. You help them become better persons, academically, socially, relationally. As they become better persons, they become better players.”

It takes more than two years to turn good young men into better young men. It takes even longer to take young men who have never been expected to be good and get them to see that being a good football player is not as important as being a good person. Dantonio has had his share of problems along that line.

It takes a long time to turn anyone into a good person.

Darrel Mudra attended worship services at my church when he coached at EIU. I was a long distance runner in those days and often used the mile-long woodchip trail around the university athletic fields, including the football practice field. Sometimes Coach Mudra would be standing under a tree, watching practice from a distance, as I ran by. I’d stop and chat and give him tips, the way people who know just a little about something like to advise folks who know a lot about it.

A number of the football players came to church, too. I asked them about Coach Mudra, who was famous for always coaching from the press box, not on the field. “He hardly ever talks to us about football,” they said. “He asks us what we want to do with our lives, what our goals are, who we want to be.”

One of the questions Methodist preachers are asked as they apply for ordination is: Do you expect to be made perfect in this life? It’s from John Wesley’s “Doctrine of Christian Perfection.” We are not expected to be perfect in knowledge or ability, but we are expected become perfect in love, to be good people.

Wesley said that perfection in love is the work of a lifetime, but it is what God expects of us, not just to be good players, but to be good persons.

As this football season gets started, I give thanks for the coaches, in all walks of life, who help us become better persons, and trust that in the process we shall become better players. We’re never old enough to stop working on being perfect, in love.

John Robert McFarland

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where we lived when I started this blog and first posted this column, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] We now live in Bloomington, IN, where we met and married almost 60 years ago, where life is defined by autumn—football, leaves, and all.

I tweet, occasionally, as yooper1721.

TIS BETTER TO HAVE LOVED… [W, 8-29-18]

Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter… 

I hold it true, what ere befall. I feel it when I sorrow most. Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

I actually copied those famous lines of Alfred Lord Tennyson, with a fountain pen, in blue ink, on a 3x5 slip of white paper, along with 3 other “inspirational sayings,” and propped it on my desk in Room 219 of Linden Hall, where I would see it each time I sat down to study. I put it there because of Susie. It was she I had loved and lost.

Yes, the lines are famous, but at the time, I was sure I was the first and only swain who had ever really understood the depths of their meaning. I was a university freshman.

I was sure I would be a life-long bachelor. How could I ever love anyone else like I loved Susie? Especially since she had dumped me for being too conservative. I vowed that never again would I let my heart rule my head, let myself be hurt as I was hurting when I copied those lines. No, I would love “pure and chaste from afar,” as Don Quixote sings in “Man of LaMancha.” [1] I would live my life as an eligible but solitary bachelor, pitied by all who knew how I had been wounded by love.

I was a pitiable bachelor for a very long year [not counting a romance with a girl named Uree in there somewhere, but that’s a different story]. But I was not a lovelorn and lost bachelor for very long. Helen found me and rescued me from my life of solitary confinement… and pathetic romanticism.

Unlike my short tenure in bachelorhood, Wally Mead was an extremely eligible bachelor for a very long time. Really eligible—tall, masculine, outdoorsy, handsome, kind, sensitive, smart, generous, fun-loving. And single…for 80 years.

He didn’t lack for female companionship during his long career as a political science professor at Illinois State U. His dog, Kleid, not only lived with him at home but accompanied him to his classes, sleeping under the desk while Wally lectured.

Then, when he was 80, he met Norma. He introduced her to us at the funeral for a mutual friend. He was just so pleased. The marriage didn’t last long… because he died at 83.

Wally loved, and lost… ? No. I hold it true what ere betide, I feel it when I sorrow most, tis better to have loved just for a little while, than never to have loved at all.

RIL [Rest In Love], Wally. And thank you, Norma.

John Robert McFarland

Wally was originally Waldo, but had his name changed legally to Walter when he was in middle age, probably when his parents died and would not know he had changed the name they gave him. Or when “Where’s Waldo?” hit publicly.

He was one of triplet boys, his brothers being Wayne and Warne. They were a surprise to their parents, and especially their older sister.

Wally was a life-long civil rights advocate. He was arrested at a restaurant sit-in while a PhD student at Duke U and was sentenced to a chain gang, where he keeled over, working under the Carolina sun without water, and almost died. He suffered the effects of that commitment to justice his whole life.

1] [Lyrics to “The Quest,” aka “The Impossible Dream,” by Joe Darion, music by Mitch Leigh.]

POPUP BOOKS {Pathetic Old Preacher’s Ultimate Peace} [T, 8-28-18]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter… 

Novelists do a good job of having old preachers look back over their careers, realize they didn’t amount to much, and make peace with it. Like Marilynne Robinson in Gilead. And Conrad Richter in A Simple, Honorable Man. There are others. As a group, I call them POPUP books, for “Pathetic Old Preacher’s Ultimate Peace.”

As a long-time preacher and an occasional novelist, I resent Robinson and Richter and their ilk. I think they should let actual preachers instead of preacher-observers write POPUP books. Of course, it would help if actual preachers could create those stories and write them as well as Robinson and Richter.

Robinson [born 1943] may be the best writer ever. If you asked me to pick one book only as the best I ever read, I’d have to say Housekeeping. It would not come in very far ahead of Gilead. She doesn’t write much, but, oh, she’s so well worth waiting for.

Richter [1890 -1968] is not as well-known now, but he was a fiction force in his day. The Town won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Waters of Kronos won the 1961 National Book Award for Fiction.

He was a PK. Not only was his father a Lutheran pastor, but his grandfather, an uncle, and a great-uncle were, too. His writing was influenced by parsonage life. A Simple, Honorable Man is a novel, but it’s also the unacknowledged biography of his father.

As a young pastor, I was an avid reader of books about preachers, including POPUPs, and I liked A Simple, Honorable Man. Except…

I certainly wanted to be honorable, but “simple, honorable” sounded like a participation prize. I wanted a blue ribbon. I didn’t want to look back on my career and realize it didn’t amount to much but make peace with it. I wanted to have a career that was so successful no old-age peace-making was necessary. Honorable? Yes. Simple? No.

I remember now only two images from Richter’s book. In one, the pastor has gotten a new suit, his first in a long time, for he was always poorly paid. He thinks, as he walks home after preaching in it for the first time, with satisfaction, how good a new suit feels, how different, how successful. He doesn’t notice that his wife is wearing the same dress she has worn to church for over twenty years.

In the other, he is looking back and can’t remember any positive comment from a parishioner about one of his sermons.

There was a lot of simple and honorable about that pastor in the book, but what I remember is his insensitivity along the way and his despair at the end. It is not accidental. I tried to remember them, as a reminder, to be sensitive to others along the way, including my wife [and it’s very easy for a preacher to neglect his/her family and feel righteous about it] and to accept each comment of appreciation as it came, so that it made no difference if I could remember it at the end.

As I said above, I knew that when I looked back on my career, I did not want it to be simple, but I did want it to be honorable. I was only partially successful. I know now that I was a lot more simple than I thought I was as I went along. And I was not as honorable as I wanted to be.

So, looking back on my career, I realize it didn’t amount to much, but I’ve made peace with it. Damn, I could have written one of those POPUP books!

John Robert McFarland

Doctor Ferrell’s Favorite Student [M, 8-27-18]

Christ In Winter: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…  

Even when Helen and I talked about him in our kitchen, we hardly ever called him Bob, even though he told us to. It was always Dr. Ferrell.

Robert Hugh Ferrell died this month, at the age of 97. He was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history at Indiana University.

He was a scholar. Yes, appreciate the admirable David McCollough, but  Ferrell was the world’s foremost Truman scholar, and an excellent scholar of American history in general, especially presidential and diplomatic history, with a fondness for WWI, his father’s war.

He was a writer. He won awards not just for scholarship but for the writing he used in communicating that scholarship. His style was clear and plain and yet interesting and meaningful. He knew that the first job of an historian is to tell the story.

He was a teacher. He never felt that undergraduate teaching was beneath him, and he was always willing to find new ways to do it, including teaching in dormitories as well as class buildings.

That was the way daughter Katie met him, as he taught a class in the Collins Living-Learning Center, where she lived in the 1980s.

If you’ve read her novels, now under her married name of Kennedy, Learning to Swear in America and What Goes Up, [1] you’ll not be surprised to learn that she was an excellent writer when she started college. Well, way before college. I was the graduate assistant to James Spalding, the Director of The School of Religion at the U of Iowa when I did graduate work there, and so graded the papers in the undergraduate course he taught. As I did so, I thought, “Good grief, my 5^th grade daughter writes better than any of these college students.”

Katie was in one of Dr. Ferrell’s classes at Collins. He was especially impressed with her writing skills. He asked her one day, “Where did you learn to write like this?” She replied, “From my father.” He said, “Well, where did he learn to write like this?” “From you,” she replied.

Understandably, she immediately became his all-time favorite student.

During that time, he taught a summer course at Eastern IL U, in Charleston, IL, where we lived, so Helen and I decided to audit his course. When he found out that we were Katie’s parents, he was delighted, and told the class all about Katie and how wonderful she was, both as a scholar and as a writer.

It was a class filled with students working on their master’s degrees. Apparently they got fed up with hearing about Katie, for when she was starting her PhD work at the U of IL in Champaign, and the new grad students introduced themselves at their orientation meeting, and she said, “I’m Katie McFarland,” a loud voice from the back of the room, in which she knew no one, yelled, “I hate you!” It was Bob Ubriaco, by then finished with his EIU master’s and enrolled for a doctorate at UIL. Bob had been in Dr. Ferrell’s summer class which had ostensibly been about Truman but was mostly about Katie.

Dr. Ferrell kept up with us through the years, until his wife died and he moved to MI to be near his daughter. While he was editing Scribner’s Dictionary of American History, he had me write the article on Protestantism, thinking that perhaps I could write as well as my daughter. That got me involved with Scribner’s, where I then got to write for others of their publications, like American Lives. I am so grateful to him for those opportunities. [2]

Especially when I was in treatment for cancer [3], he would come over to Arcola, IL to visit us, and give us an autographed copy of whichever book he had just finished. We would talk about everything. He even gave us advice, which we followed, on how to buy a car. Mostly, though, he wanted to talk about his all-time favorite student.  

I never told him that Katie was wrong when she said I learned to write from him. It was an understandable mistake. I had been a history major at IU in his early years there. She assumed he had been one of my professors, but I never had a course with Dr. Ferrell. [4]

Instead, I learned to write by not writing. When I told the District Superintendent that I was thinking about becoming a minister, he immediately, and I mean immediately, appointed me as the preacher in three little churches. [5] I was a full-time student and a part-time janitor as well. I had no time to write out sermons. So I did them in my head in the little interstices of time between classes and jobs. I had to learn to be clear and simple and still interesting and meaningful without putting anything down on paper. So when I wrote, it was the same way I preached. People who read my books say they can hear my voice. By learning how to preach, I learned how to write like Dr. Ferrell, or at least as close as I could come. Like an historian, the first job of a preacher is to tell the story.

Dr. Ferrell was not really churchly, but he was always rather proud of me for combining the roles of preacher and scholar and author. And, of course, father.

John Robert McFarland

1] Published by Bloomsbury Press, which also publishes lesser authors like JK Rowling, and available in hardback, paperback, electronic, and audio.

2] Thirty years after my student days, I did the research for my Western novel, An Ordinary Man [Harper-Collins] in the IU archives, using the tools I learned as a history student in what is now Rawles Hall but was then called the Social Science Building.

3] You can read more about this in NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them. [AndrewsMcMeel]

4] I did not have a course as such with Dr. Ferrell because my only American history courses--other than the then brand new folklore courses of Richard Dorson--were the basic survey courses everyone took, and my sections were taught by doctoral student Jack Sosen. Many people belittle courses taught by graduate students, but Jack Sosen was a good teacher, and a good enough scholar that when he got his IU doctorate, Harvard called him to a professorship there.

All my other history courses were in ancient [John Snyder] or European [Leo Solt and Leonard Lundin, a kindly man we all hated because of his execrable map tests] or in the history of Christian thought [D.J. Bowden]. But all the profs lectured in our historiography classes, so I heard Dr. Ferrell there, and he was a subject of discussion among the tight-knit and gossipy undergrad history majors, because he was already known as a stickler for deep research and good writing, and for rubbing some of the older profs the wrong way.

5] You can read more about this in The Strange Calling [Smyth&Helwys]

THE PREACHERS HYMN [Su, 8-26-18]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter… 

In the column for April 17, I told of my first continuing education experience for preachers, “The School of the Prophets,” for all Indiana Methodist clergy, at Depauw University, in 1957, when I was 20 years old and had already been preaching on a three-church charge for a year.

Ministry is a lonely profession. Most of us are solo pastors. Our colleagues may be miles away, and we see them seldom. That first School of the Prophets was a meaningful time for me, because it was when I first realized that even though most of the year I was out there on my own, nonetheless I had colleagues. I belonged to “the goodly fellowship of the prophets.”

That was impressed on me most by the hymn singing those 300 men, and one woman, did there at Depauw that August.

As I thought back to that event, as I do each August, and I heard those colleagues singing again, in my soul, it occurred to me that preachers should probably have a hymn of their own. So I wrote one… to the tune of R. Kelso Carter’s “Standing on the Promises.”

I don’t preach anymore, but I’m going to sing this each Sunday morning, to encourage those who do. You can join in, even if you are not a preacher, for if we all sing loudly enough, it may remind and encourage the pulpiteers in their sometimes lonely work…

THE PREACHERS HYMN: SPEAKING FORTH THE PROMISES

Speaking forth the promises

Of truth and grace

Telling how Christ came

To save the whole damned race

Shouting at the devil

Standing face to face

Telling forth the promises of God

CHORUS:

Preaching, teaching,

Bringing good news to the poor and frail

Preaching, teaching

Telling of God’s promises that do not fail

Shouting down temptations

That can stain the soul

Telling of the broken Christ

Who makes us whole

Bringing in God’s Kingdom

Is our earthly goal

Telling forth the promises of God

CHORUS

Standing in the gap

And pointing to the cross

In the boat with Jesus

Although tempest tossed

We shall join the saints

And bring hope to the lost

Telling forth the promises of God

CHORUS

Laying on the hands of healing

With a prayer

Handing out the bread and wine

In Christ we share

Pouring out baptismal water

With a dare

Telling forth the promises of God

CHORUS

John Robert McFarland

One of my favorite old preacher jokes: We sing “Standing on the Promises” while we’re just sitting on the premises.

Another one: A lot of activity in the church is like a hen trying to lay an egg on an escalator—a lot of moving around but not much getting down to business.

I heard both of those at The School of The Prophets in 1957.

I LISTEN FOR BASSOONS-poem [Sat, 8-25-18]

Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter…

I know not why God chose me

For the bassoon, or why God chose

The bassoon for me

Perhaps because I so easily lead

A double life, which is doubled

By the bassoon’s own double reed

What have you come here to hear?

A bruised reed, squeaking in the desert?

I stand in the middle

An ear for either side

Between the law and mercy

Between sin and salvation

Between the lost and found

Between the human race and amazing grace

I listen for bassoons

JRMcF

Billy Collins on how transient are our lives, and insignificant in the total scheme of things, like “soap bubbles floating above a children’s party.”

ELAINE’S BABY [F, 8-24-18]

Another entry from my recently resurfaced 1970s journal, that I had forgotten about. I was the campus minister at IL State U at this time…

Christ In Winter: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter--

Elaine finally had her baby. Holding her hand in the labor room, I longed to be able to touch her soul as well as her skin, to let her know how much God really does care about her. I suspect God weeps more over a girl of 22 who is having her 2^nd child out of wedlock than He does over most of us pedestrian sinners. [1]

Poor naïve thing. I’m sure she loved both those guys who were mature enough for sex but scared to death of marriage. They ran away. Her parents literally locked her out—changed the locks. My family and I, we’re all she has. For 7 months we have had her with us. [2] During that time she felt that tiny life within her, too. Now it’s out and gone, and we are all she has.

To some lonely, childless couple, she has brought great happiness. But she herself has only emptiness. What will she do? Can she ever trust a man again? Will love ever find her, get behind the ever growing wall of pain?

We’ll know one of these days. When we look out the window and see her leaving us, because we are the past, then our love will have been successful. Others who were supposed to love her turned their backs on her. When she can turn hers on us, knowing we still care, then we shall know that love is before her, as well as behind.

John Robert McFarland

1] In 1970, we—or at least I—had not become sensitive to using the male pronoun for God.

2] Not in our house. She was in an apartment already when her second impregnator brought her to us and said, “Now she’s your problem.”

If you’ve not yet bought a copy of Katie Kennedy’s WHAT GOES UP, or two copies, so you can give one as a gift, now is your chance, for it’s out now in paperback. It’s technically YA, but readers of all ages rave about the descriptions, actions, dialog, terrible jokes, and delightful characters that Katie produces.