SILENT FILMS [T, 10-2-18]

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

I think I have written before about the first movie house [not theater] in Oakland City, IN, but since granddaughter Brigid started film semiotics graduate study at the U of Chicago yesterday, I wrote this up for her, and so I’m sharing it with, you, too…

My Grandpa Mac [Arthur Harrison McFarland] was, with a partner, the owner thereof. This was in the early 1920s.

I think it must actually have been a rental arrangement, with Grandpa and his partner owning only the movie equipment, because their theater was the opera house, which I’m sure they did not own. “Opera house” sounds grander than it surely was, because it was upstairs over a feed store.

Aunt Helen [Helen Beatrice McFarland Bell] was more-or-less the proprietor. She was a young teen then, and was never over four-ten even full-grown, so she probably was not very scary as a fourteen-year-old, but one of her jobs was to get the kids to leave after the show so they could get another batch in to pay for the second show. The kids did not want to leave, and so she threatened that she would let the locomotive actually come through the screen the next time to really run over them.

That locomotive engine scene--coming closer and closer, rushing faster and faster, right up to the front of the screen, right into the surprised eyes of the viewers--is the source of many stories of people thinking those early films were real, sort of the IMAX of its day, along with fear of cowboys and Indians riding their horses through the screen, etc.

The opera house did not have a movie screen, of course, so Grandpa and Aunt Helen used a sheet. They hired the local piano teacher to play during the films.

I don’t think this venture lasted long. Few of Grandpa’s ventures did. He was professionally a stationary engineer, a skill he had learned through a correspondence course, and a bit of an entrepreneur and inventor. He rigged up a bicycle with train wheels so he could ride it on the tracks from their farm house to the coal mine where he was the engineer. When the railroad company learned of it, though, they made him quit that. Since his last job was in a paper mill [in Hamilton, OH], I guess he was also a stationery engineer.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

 “All we ask [in old age] is to be allowed to remain the authors of our own story.” Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, p. 140.

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.

REMEMBERING THE STORY [R, 9-27-18]

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

This will be my last column for a while, since we will be tied up for the next several days in daughter Mary Beth’s wedding to Bill Napolillo. Added significance for me, since it’s my final clergy act.

We’ll be seeing old friends and meeting new ones, so I’ve been thinking about names, particularly, remembering them.

Last Sunday morning, eating breakfast at church with Bryan Walters [our church serves a really good breakfast each Sunday], he asked me what techniques or mnemonic devices I had used through the years, since I had to learn so many names. I have used mnemonic devices only rarely, because most names don’t lend themselves to them very readily.

I have always tried at the moment I met someone to learn not just their name but some of their story. My early years were in campus ministry, and I had to learn the names of a couple hundred new students every year. I found that if I asked them for their home town and their major when I met them, they were not just a name, but a story.

Your name is just a shortened form of your story, and a story is easier to remember. If you’re Ron Wetzell, the poly sci major from Tampico, you’re much easier to remember than just Ron Wetzell.

So this weekend I’ll be with Chris Rander, the chemist who saves basset hounds from mean masters, and Jennifer Jackson, the Gospel singing MIT engineer who fights with broad swords and runs races up the stairs of sky scrapers, and Diane Jeffers, who directs summer camps for space cadets, and Sheila King, who does public relations for the city of Chicago, and Randy Estes who…is Randy. I’m looking forward to learning more of each of those stories, because they’re really interesting. That’s one of the good things about having interesting children; they have interesting friends.

John Robert McFarland

A problem with this business of how to remember is that I am old. As I wrote, I could not remember Bryan’s last name. I knew he was Dawn’s husband and Owen and Graham’s father and a great guitar player, but Walters simply eluded me. I knew the story, but could not remember the name. However, it’s more important to know the story than to remember all the title.

THE REASON HAIRS ARE NUMBERED [T, 9-25-18]

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

After a certain age, a woman should not be allowed to change her hairstyle. Like high school graduation. Yes, I’m all for women being in charge of their own bodies, but hair is different, because it’s not exactly part of the body, and because that’s the way we identify a woman, the way we can tell one of them from the others.

The same should be true with men changing, also, but with height instead of hair. I remember the first class reunion Jack Drury attended. Who was this tall guy? When we graduated, Jack was about five-six. This man was 6 feet tall. He had grown over half a foot after high school! How are people to deal with something like that? Yes, he was wearing a name tag, but we were all looking for that name tag six inches too low.

If a man grows more than one inch taller after high school, he should be required to change his name and move to a foreign country, like Texas. At class reunions, we’d say: “What ever happened to Jack?” “I don’t know, but I remember him well… five-six.”

Now at class reunions we say: “Who are all these old ladies?” It’s not because their backs are bent and they’re wearing sensible shoes. We liked their straight backs and their high heels fine, but we didn’t identify them by those. Our confusion is because they all have the same white-bonnet hair-do, even the ones who are supposed to have the kinky brown curls, or the flowing red tresses, or the black flip-dos over their ears.

Yes, sometimes women lose hair because of cancer, but wigs can be made to replicate the lost hair. What’s more important, a fancy wig or being recognized at the reunion for who you really are?

The rules for old age are few, but important: Stay in the moment. Do the right thing. Start at the end. Don’t mess with your hair style. There is a reason why the hairs of your head are numbered. [Mt 10:30, Lk 12:7]

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

“All we ask [in old age] is to be allowed to remain the authors of our own story.” Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, p. 140.

I tweet occasionally as yooper1721.

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP], where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] Having met and married while at IU in Bloomington, IN, we became Bloomarangs in May of 2015, moving back to where we started, closing the circle. We no longer live in the land of winter, but I am in the winter of my years, and so I am still trying to understand Christ in winter.

HINGE BOOKS- THE IMMENSE JOURNEY [M, 9-24-18]

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

[Repeated intro] I have been thinking about the “hinge” books in my life, those books that open a door in a unique way. There are hinge occasions that are not books, of course—people, events, places, movies. Books have a special niche of hinge importance, though--especially to people of my generation, who did not have access to more modern forms of input when we were in our hinge years--because they take time. If a book has hinge importance, you don’t just glimpse it, you ingest it. And you may go back to it time and again. The whole list of my hinge books is at the bottom. That is too long a list to explore at one time, so I’m going to do only one book per column.

Today’s hinge book is… THE IMMENSE JOURNEY by Loren Eiseley

In my campus ministry days, I read a lot of books, including things like The Hobbit, by Tolkein, because the students were reading them for their classes, and I wanted to understand what they were talking about. That was the only reason I started skimming through a copy of The Immense Journey that some sophomore had left in the lounge. Wow!

First, I had no idea that a scientist could write so well and so interestingly. I was scared to death of science in high school, mostly because you really had to study it, rather than just get by on writing ability, and also I was bored by it, probably because our physics text book was written by the aptly but unfortunately named Charles E. Dull. The edition we used was published in 1922, already 30 years out of date. Science was just a bunch of facts and theorems—no stories. Eiseley showed me how wrong I was about that! The Immense Journey read like a novel.

Second, I got my first introduction to the theory of story, which would become the center of my own academic work, from Eiseley, a scientist, and not from theologians. [1] Eiseley said: We live in story, not in facts and theories. The story is just there. It doesn’t have to have a point or purpose.

As I began to write narrative theology I began to say: Let the story tell itself. Leave it open so that people can find their place in it. Don’t tell them what it means, because you don’t know. It will mean something different for each person. If they want to know what it means, God will tell them.

Third, I began to see God as the great story-teller, the one not so much creating the great story, from outside, but living the immense journey, creating—telling the story--from within, living/telling it with us.

I don’t think Eiseley intended my third point, but that’s okay. By opening my eyes to the wonder and immenseness of the universe, he helped me better see God, and the job of any scientist is to help us see farther, deeper, and better. Eisley did that for me.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] I did, of course, profit from the work of many theologians, also, as I worked on narrative theology, especially folks like Hans Frei in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.

TRAMP, THE SHEEP DOG by Don Lang, pictures by Kurt Wiese. 9-10-18

THE PREACHER AND HIS AUDIENCE, By Webb Garrison 9-11-18

JESUS OF NAZARETH by Gunther Bornkamm. 9-12-18

MAN’S NEED AND GOD’S ACTION by Reuel Howe 9-13-18

IDENTITY & THE LIFE CYCLE by Erik H. Erikson 9-14-18

THE IMMENSE JOURNEY by Loren Eiseley 9-24-18

GUILT, ANGER, AND GOD by C. Fitzsimmons Allison

PROFESSION: MINISTER by James Glasse

LOVE, MEDICINE, AND MIRACLES by Bernie Siegel

JESUS, A NEW VISION by Marcus Borg

BIOGRAPHY AS THEOLOGY by Wm. McCutcheon

My novel, VETS, about four handicapped and homeless Iraqistan veterans, who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will never be on anybody’s hinge list, but, for a limited time, it’s only 99 cents, so what have you got to lose? It’s published by Black Opal Books and is available from the publisher as well as the usual suspects--Barnes and Noble, Amazon, BOKU, Powell’s, Books on First, etc.

SEPTEMBER LIGHT-poem [Sat 9-22-18]

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

September days are cooler

I walk in the woods

while luncheon dishes

wait

In summer I walk as early

as my body and the day allow

for then the days are wet with

sweat

I puff and wheeze

I grow weak and am not steady

Summer days say that I am

old

In autumn I can wait

to walk below tall pines

until the sun is

slanting

Thru yellowing birches

neither sharp nor mottled.

I move smoothly

tacking

only slightly

from side to side

to keep the world from

tilting.

John Robert McFarland

CLOSING THE NORMAL CIRCLE [F, 9-21-18]

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

In the CIW column for August 29, I wrote about my old friend, Wally Mead, who was a political science prof at ILSU when I was campus minister there, and how he did not get married until he was 80. Last Saturday, we went to his memorial service. Things were mentioned there that I failed to write about in that August 29 column.

I did tell about his dog, Kleid, and how she accompanied Wally to class each day. Bob Hunt, Wally’s poly sci faculty mate, added to the tale of Kleid Saturday, noting that Kleid had enough credits for a degree, but she kept taking the same classes over and over. Also, he reminded us that she used to clean the blackboard at the end of class. And he confessed that since he and Wally looked a lot alike, and people often got them confused, they would sometimes wear each other’s name tags at functions just to bedevil folks.

Jim Bortell, who was Wally’s pastor and friend for many years, said “Wally was the kind of person who made it easier for others to believe in God.” What a nice thing to have as your legacy.

He also reminded us of Wally’s close relationship with Michael Polyani, and how they both insisted, against logical positivism and general scientific atheistic/agnostic skepticism, that all knowledge has a personal element for which each of us is responsible.

Once when Wally went to visit Polyani in London, the famed chemist/philosopher was recovering from a car accident. His defense when hauled before the magistrate was that it happened because “I forgot that I was driving.” Now, there is a guy who thinks deep thoughts!

When I was appointed as minister to The Wesley Foundation [the Methodist campus ministry] in Normal, Illinois State Teachers College was becoming Illinois State University. The school had originally been called Illinois State Normal College, “Normal” meaning teachers college, and hence the name of the town, since the college was there first, simply an outpost train stop from Bloomington. In the 1960s, ILSU was still a premier teacher training institution, but to accomplish the change to a full academic enterprise, that move from teachers college to university, a lot of bright young professors with newly-minted PhDs were brought in. It changed not only the college but the whole of Normal-Bloomington.

Those young professors and the campus ministers—also young and new—formed a progressive cohort, advocating for civil rights and social justice, modern and inclusive ways of teaching and learning, thinking and doing, in this new academic and civic atmosphere. We challenged one another at the same time that we supported one another.

They are all gone now. Wally was the last one. So being there, at Wally’s memorial service, was a closing of the circle.

I don’t need to get back to Normal anymore now. That union of like-minded souls no longer exists. But what a great gift it was, to be part of it. I hope you have or have had a group like that.

John Robert McFarland

I’m eternally grateful to Bill White and Jameson Jones and Don Ruthenberg for persuading me to take the Wesley Foundation position at Normal.

MY SECRET LOVES, [R, 9-20-18]

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

One way to keep a marriage growing is to keep some loves hidden, even for 60 years.

In this column for 9-12-18, I wrote about one of my hinge books, Jesus of Nazareth, by Gunther Borkamm. He pointed out that the New Testament was written by and in a community of followers of Jesus, people of “the way,” for whom Jesus was a present reality. It was an inclusive community. That book was the reason I worked so hard to learn names all the years I was a pastor. “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” If the pastor calls you by your name, you feel like you belong. I want everybody to feel included in the community of “the way.” So I love knowing everybody’s name, even in our current congregation, where I am just a member, not a pastor. Helen said, “All these years, calling everybody by name, I just thought you were showing off, because you could do something that is hard for everybody else.”

So, there are two things that I really love—in addition to my wife, my children, my grandchildren, babies, little kids, puppy dogs, mincemeat pie, coffee… knowing names, and Twinkies.

Our older daughter, Mary Beth, telephones us a lot--because she likes us, and we’re old and she wants to check up on us, and because she has a wedding coming up. That means, of course, that she wants to talk to her mother, mostly. However, sometimes Helen is off at water aerobics or at the grocery store when MB calls, and then I get to talk to her.

Recently Helen got back from Lucky’s with the ingredients for taco salad [it’s been a long, hot summer] while I was talking with MB and overheard me say, “I love Twinkies.”

She later told MB, “You think you know somebody… I’ve been married to your father for 60 years and I never knew he liked Twinkies. I’ve never seen him eat a Twinkie. It must be some secret addiction.”

Well, not exactly. I love Twinkies, but I never eat them, because they are not good for me, or anybody else. They aren’t even food. They are “a food-like substance.” That makes them really good. That’s why I love them.

Or maybe it’s because they were such a surprising first love. At the age of ten, I became a brown-bag kid. When we lived in Indianapolis, I walked home for lunch each day. When we moved to the country, I rode a school bus and so had to take my lunch to school. No school cafeteria, and we couldn’t have afforded school lunches even if there had been one. We couldn’t afford a lunch box, either, so I took my lunch in a brown paper bag, or, if we didn’t have one of those, the long wax-paper sleeve that a loaf of bread comes in. I did have a thermos for milk, which I just carried along with the lunch bag.

It was a pitiful lunch—chicken legs, or pork chops, or ham, home-grown tomatoes, home-baked biscuits, real food, because we couldn’t afford “store-bought” food-like substances. One day, as I gnawed on a pork chop, feeling sorry for myself because the other kids had sandwiches of bologna on white bread, Bobby Joe pulled out of his lunch box a Twinkie! I had never seen such a wonder. [Before the days of TV ads]. It was in cellophane. It was bright yellow. Well, “it” wasn’t just an “it.” “It” was a two. Two short yellow sponge cakes. He gave me one. I bit into it. It wasn’t just sponge cake. Inside was a filling that was sort of like the ice cream we had at “socials” in the church basement. It was sweet and soft and creamy and sugary and… different. I was in love.

To make it even better, at the same time I saw a cartoon about Twinkies in a comic book. [I love old-time comic books, too, but Helen already knows that.] Automation was the new, big thing at the time, and “untouched by human hands” was the way you said something was really up to date. In the comic book, we saw the Twinkies factory, with “Untouched by Human Hands” under the Twinkies name. And inside the factory, in the next panel of the comic, the Twinkies were being made by… monkeys! It was the perfect joke for any ten-year-old boy, but especially for one who had just fallen in love with Twinkies.

Do I have still more secret loves that, unlike Doris Day, I did not “…shout it from the highest hills, even told the golden daffodils?” Well, like every other boy my age, there is Doris day…

John Robert McFarland

The music for “My Secret Love” is by Sammy Fain, with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster for the 1953 movie, “Calamity Jane,” starring the beautiful, lyrical, and slightly-challenged dramatically former Doris Van Kapplehof.