PLAYING FAVORITES [M, 6-30-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—PLAYING FAVORITES [M, 6-30-25]

 

Ten years ago today, two of my closest friends died.

 

Ann White scheduled Bill’s funeral for September, and Terri wanted Mike’s funeral right away, so I was able to preach at both of them. 

We had moved from Iron Mountain, Michigan to Bloomington, Indiana only a month before, so it wasn’t a good time to fly to Arizona, but there was no way I would miss Mike’s funeral. I was his favorite friend.

 

At Mike’s funeral, there was a time for people to get up and say whatever they wanted to about him. I never put that into a funeral when I was in charge; too easy for things to get out of hand, especially to get long and boring. But I wasn’t in charge of Mike’s funeral, just the preacher.

The first man who spoke introduced himself by saying he was Mike’s favorite brother-in-law. There was an appreciative ripple of laughter. Then a woman spoke and introduced herself as Mike’s favorite sister-in-law. More laughter. By the time all of Mike’s favorites had spoken, we were having an uproarious good time. The message was clear: everyone was Mike’s favorite, because that’s how he made you feel.

It's tricky, claiming to be someone’s favorite, especially if they haven’t said anything about it. Mike never told anyone that they were his favorite; it’s just the way we felt.

I wrote recently of how I told my doctor’s new nurse that I was Dr. V’s favorite patient, by accident, when I was trying to say that she called me perfect because of the way I presented symptoms to her.

It was very embarrassing when Olivia told me that she had asked Dr. V if I were, indeed, the doctor’s favorite. I mean, that’s so arrogant, so hubristic, to claim to be the favorite.

It’s okay, of course, to claim the favorite spot, if there is no competition. Brigid can rightly claim to be my favorite granddaughter, Joe my favorite grandson. [Just to be sure, I often tell them that.]

It took me a long and somewhat fretful time, though, to understand why Grandma Mac no longer referred to me as her favorite grandson. That happened when I was ten and my cousin, Paul, was born.

We all want to be favorites, don’t we?

Remember how James and John asked to be the favorites when Jesus became king? They wanted to sit on either side of him at the banquet table. [Mark 10:35-45]

 

Sometimes we want a favorite status for someone else. In Matthew 20:20-28, it is the mother of James and John who asks Jesus to give her sons preference, the favored status of sitting beside him at the kingly banquet.

Jesus, of course, said that he came not to have the status of favorite, to be served. He didn’t claim to be God’s favorite, even though he was The Christ. “Even the Son of Man comes not to be served but to serve.” [Mark 10:45]

We all want to be favorites, and we are. Jesus didn’t claim to be God’s favorite, because he knew that you are God’s favorite.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

THE FIXING AND HELPING DILEMMA [Sa, 6-28-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Reflections of An Old Man—THE FIXING AND HELPING DILEMMA [Sa, 6-28-25]

 

Rachel Naomi Remen makes a useful distinction between fixing, helping, and serving. I call it the FHS dilemma. It’s a dilemma for anyone, but especially for professionals in helping professions.

Indeed, by referring to doctoring and nursing and pastoring and teaching and social working, etc as “helping” professions, we are setting up ourselves and our patients/clients for failure.

Not total failure, of course. Most of us are better off-- at the physical level of need--if we are fixed and helped. But fixing and helping also diminish us at the spiritual/human level of need.

Remen is an MD, and has Crohn’s Disease. She had an ileostomy when just a young woman, and the bag ever since, of course. She makes the FHS distinction both as a physician and a patient.

 

She notes that as a physician, she is constantly tempted first to fix and help. As a patient, she understands that what we need most is service.

Fixing and helping are efficient. They make the fixer/helper feel good. “I have done something worthwhile.”

Fixing and helping make the “patient” feel weak and diminished. “I cannot be a person on my own; I require someone else to fix and help me.”

Like Dr. Ramen, I had intestinal surgery, for colon cancer. Unlike her, I did not end up with a colostomy and the subsequent bag. Neither of us could have done our own surgeries or recovery regimens. We needed fixing and helping… no. We needed doctors and nurses. But as they work on us, doctors and nurses can serve us instead of fixing and helping us.

The end result physically is usually the same, but the attitude is different, and so the emotional outcome for both server and served is different.

The difference is in approach and attitude.

Remen tells of a doctor friend who had delivered hundreds of babies when one day he had to make an emergency delivery. Even before he could hand the little girl to her mother, she opened her eyes and looked straight at him. He suddenly realized that he was the first person in the whole world that she had seen. He would always be that person. It was a spiritual bond. It felt like he needed to welcome her to the world. He said that she was really the first baby he ever delivered, because she was the first he delivered through serving, welcoming her to the world, rather than fixing and helping.

I have always been a fixer/helper. That’s why I wasn’t a very good pastoral counselor. People who come to a pastor don’t need fixing; they need pastoring. When I stuck to pastoring rather than counseling--listening and being, instead of providing solutions--I did better.

Most of us who are old now were trained, by parents and culture and education and life, to be fixers and helpers. But we don’t have to be. Now, even in small every-day exchanges with people, we can choose to serve rather than fix or help.

By serve, I don’t mean being a servant, as in a maid or hired man. Serving is the attitude of: I’m not better than you. I don’t have something you don’t have, something I can give you out of my superiority. We are spirits together in this mysterious life, and we can fix each other, and help each other, without fixing and helping.

Jesus, in announcing his purpose in the world, said: “I am among you as one who serves.” [Lk 22:27.]

John Robert McFarland

GORDON MORRISON IN IRAN [R, 6-26-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Friends of An Old Man—GORDON MORRISON IN IRAN [R, 6-26-25]

 

The old song of “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” becomes more relevant every day. We finally got around to doing it.

That song was written by Fred Fassert in 1979, and set to the familiar and popular and simple tune of Barbara Ann, which made it easily singable. Fassert himself had written Barbara Ann 20 years before. Bomb Iran hit the airwaves in a recording by Vince Vance and the Valiants.

As I hear Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, I think of Gordon Morrison. Gordon was a year behind me in high school, so I did not know him well then. In high school, you pay attention only to the kids who are older than you, except for pretty girls.

But while we were students at Indiana University, we got better acquainted, enough so that we kept up a steady and deep correspondence when he graduated and went to Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years, with a later three-year stint as the director of youth work for The Episcopal Church for the whole nation.

He was a Methodist prior to Iran. I think he became an Episcopalian just because he wanted to study Islam up close and personal, and so took that job with the Episcopalians so he could go back to Iran. One of the few things his 2013 obituary says beyond the usual listings of jobs and survivors is that “He was a deep thinker about the theological connections between Christianity and Islam.”

During our IU days, he thought that he might be called to be a preacher, but wasn’t quite sure. By the time he returned from Iran, however, he was convinced of his call, and a convinced Episcopalian. He spent the rest of his life as an Episcopal priest in several different congregations.

As he moved first to Alabama and on to Kentucky and then to Maryland, we lost touch, the way you do as life gets in the way. He was 73 when he died after an automobile accident.

Now I wish that he were alive and available. I’d like to hear what he thinks of our current program of Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.

In 1953, an Iranian “regime change” was engineered by the US CIA and the British MI6. It deposed the democratically elected prime minister and reinstalled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as absolute monarch, the Shah. The problem? Iranian oil. US oil companies wanted its profits [40%] and the British wanted the rest. The elected government of Iran thought the profits of Iranian oil should benefit Iran. The Shah was quite happy to let Westerners have the oil in return for putting him and keeping him in power.

Gordon’s years in Iran were during “the white revolution,” which wasn’t a revolution but a program by the Shah to modernize Iran. He enlisted the minority Sunni Muslims to help him create it. The Shite Muslims and Sunni Muslims have hated one another for a thousand years for reasons that make no sense to anyone on the outside, so the Shah was inviting the majority of his citizens to rebel. They did, especially the clergy. [Clergy are notorious for opposing change!]

As the Shiites resisted the white revolution, the Shah’s regime became more and more brutal in putting them—and anyone else who opposed him--down, primarily through his dreaded secret police, the SAVAK, who were trained and equipped by the US, which was intent on keeping the Shah in power and keep the oil flowing. It’s not all that surprising that the US became known in Iran as “the great Satan.”

As things got worse and worse, the Iranian people became bolder in demanding change. This time, it was the folks inside who wanted the regime change. They especially resented the way America helped the Shah in his authoritarian ways to keep them oppressed and American oil companies rich. In 1979, the US embassy was invaded and the equally repressive Khomeini regime started. The clergy got their revenge. The common citizens, as usual, got disappointment.

All of this fueled Gordon’s interest in Muslim theologies. He never lost his love for the Iranian people, both Sunni and Shiite. He would not think that Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran is the best policy. He thought that the best thing Christians could do was to create a strong church in Iran, as some sort of safely minority middle ground, a place where Sunnis and Shiites could talk to one another.

He was my Oakland City Acorn brother in faith, faith in God rather than in bombs. I miss him.

John Robert McFarland

Whole books have been written about the confusing history of Iran over the last century. Of necessity, I have just recalled a few facts that help explain Gordon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

TALKING TO THE GOD IN YOUR BRAIN [T, 6-24-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Brain Research of An Old Man—TALKING TO THE GOD IN YOUR BRAIN [T, 6-24-25]

 

There’s an old sermon story about the young preacher who got his tongue all twisted around while trying to pray in the worship service. This was back in the day when we used thees and thous in prayer; it was easy to get confused. So an old lady in the congregation called out, “Just call Him Father, ask Him for something, and sit down.” Not bad advice, really, but it leads us into faulty thinking about prayer.

Critics of prayer suggest that prayer is just auto-suggestion; we’re only talking to ourselves. As a believer in prayer, I agree. I agree also because I’m a Christian, also, and so I believe in incarnation, the spiritual in the physical.

Every spiritual dimension, every God dimension of life, has a physical manifestation in this life. That’s simply the way this physical world is. Even prayer. There is nothing in this physical world that isn’t physical. Including the spiritual.

When we pray, it’s not to God out there; it’s to God in there. In our own brain.

There are neural circuits of the brain tied to the periaqueductal gray area of the primal brain stem. [Say periaqueductal three times real fast…] That’s the physical place in the brain where God meets us. That’s the place where prayer communication happens. [Some folks say it’s the amygdala. Same idea.]

Each person has a different brain, so we have different word meanings, even though we think we agree on meanings. Each person has a different view of the world, different memories, different thought patterns. As you read these words, your brain and mine actually have different ideas of exactly what I’m saying.

It’s more efficient for God to use our particular personage, our particular periaqueductal, in the work of prayer, than trying to change us into one size fits all. Praying isn’t like ordering tube sox.

So each of us needs to pray, to talk to God, in our own way, in the language that make sense to us.

Yes, there is a place for common prayer, public prayer, in public worship. And we should use there the language that we have mostly agreed upon for talking to God. When I started doing public prayers, that included those confusing thees and thous and thines. I got pretty good at them, because I was pretty good at using words in general.

These days, not so much. I sometimes have to rehearse sentences, even those to my wife, to get words in the right order, so that they make sense.

When a new nurse showed up at our physician’s office, though, I just had to wing it. In getting acquainted, I told Olivia that I was Doctor Vucescu’s favorite patient. That is not what I meant. Dr. V had once said that I was the perfect patient, because I told her my symptoms in the right order. My brain got favorite and perfect confused. Fairly regular sort of brain work for me these days.

I did not realize what I had said until Olivia returned. She did not know about my problems with words, and so assumed that I knew what I was saying. To my horror, when she returned, she said, “You really are Dr. V’s favorite patient. I asked her.” Now I’m embarrassed. I have to find a new doctor.

Facility with words or getting stuff in the right order is nice in the doctor’s office, or for public prayer, but the God in your brain doesn’t care about that. Just say hello, state your symptoms, and get your prescription.

John Robert McFarland

Why we need to read as much as possible: “All I know is what I have words for.” Philological genius Ludwig Wittgenstein, who helped me pass a graduate statistics course.

 

 

FIX ME. JESUS; NO, NOT YOU, NICHOLAS [Su, 6-22-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Fixin’s of An Old Man—FIX ME. JESUS; NO, NOT YOU, NICHOLAS [Su, 6-22-25]

 

I thought the physical therapy for my hip was going well. The pain had decreased quite a bit. I knew how to do a “bridge.” I had learned how to spell “piriformis.”

Then, one day, Nicholas put me on a balance board and made me rock back and forth on it. It was exhausting. Not satisfied, he made me rock from side to side. I was enervated. [Yes, I looked up a synonym so I would not repeat “exhausting.” The alternative was “plumb tuckered.”] I could barely drag myself to the car, cane or no cane.

Finally, the third day, I said, “How come you’re debilitating [synonym search again] me with this balance board? It’s killing me.”

“Well, you said you wanted better balance.”

“No, I said I have poor balance. I didn’t say a thing about wanting it to get better.”

He thought and said, “You’re right. You just told me about your bad balance. You didn’t say you wanted to do anything about it.”

So, I have learned never to say anything to a physical therapist or a wife that can be construed a request for help. What to you is just information is to them a call to arms, a request that they fix whatever you seemingly have acknowledged is wrong with you. They already have enough ideas about how to fix you; they don’t need other suggestions.

I think about that as I sing “Fix me, Jesus” as one of my break-of-day songs.

Oh, fix me. Oh, fix me. Oh, fix me, Jesus.

 

Fix me for my journey home.

Fix me, Jesus, fix me.

 

Fix me for my dying bed.

Fix me, Jesus, fix me.

 

It’s a slave spiritual, with two meanings that are melded in the word “fix:”

First, there is the old Southern meaning of “fix,” as in “I’m fixin’ to go there.” In other words, “getting ready.” I heard that a lot growing up down in Gibson County.

Second, to go to heaven, one needs to get ready, by having a healed and whole soul. We need Jesus to fix, repair that soul, so we can be fixin’ to go “home.”

Just don’t sing “Fix me, Jesus,” unless you are fixin’ to be fixed, because Jesus takes that sort of thing pretty much literally.

John Robert McFarland

COUNTING DOWN IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD [F, 6-20-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—COUNTING DOWN IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD [F, 6-20-25]

 

 

One of the psychological problems of the covid 19 pandemic shutdown was that we couldn’t count it down… because we had no idea when it would end. That’s hard on us. We are a countdown people. But you can’t count down unless you have a definite time when you know that the present moment—the game, the year, the rocket blastoff—will end.

That is one of the reasons the shutdown lingers on still.  Not just the folks who have “long covid” symptoms. That’s bad enough. But all of us have the lingering marks of the shutdown on our souls. Because we did not get the closure of a countdown.

I remember well the first night I realized I could count down to retirement. I had reason to expect that I would not live long. I wanted to have at least a little time to spend with my grandchildren, and the only way I could get that was by retiring. It was dark. I was taking Waggs for her nightly walk. I knew the date when I could retire. I figured up the number of days until then. So, each night as Waggs and I walked by St. John the Baptist Church, I took a day off that number. Counting down gave me a reason to keep going on, when before the countdown started, the coming days had just been a messy morass without an end.

We use countdowns so often. The last seconds on the clock to end the game. New Year’s eve as the ball drops. Any day the astronauts blast off.

I think it’s why a lot of Christians get caught up in impossible schemes to figure out when the world will end. They just want a countdown to the end. They think it will give meaning to this present time.

We want that, that knowledge of when the world will end, because none of us can count down to the time when our own world will end, when we shall die. We are countdown people, but we have no way of counting down to the day of our own end.

The people who are doing okay in the aftermath of the covid 19 shutdown are those who have figured out how to accept an uncertain future. That’s how we accept an uncertain past, the shutdown that had no countdown, by accepting the uncertain future.

That way we do that is in the words of a phrase I have never liked much, but is useful, anyway: “Let go, and let God.” Or in the words of Charles Albert Tinley, “Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.” In other words: Trust.

Trust is not naivety or escapism. It is the only true realism. As Studs Terkel said, “We’re born to live. One is a realist if one hopes.”

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

ARE YE ABLE [W, 6-18-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of an Old Man--ARE YE ABLE [W, 6-18-25]

 

Lorraine Brugh died recently, much too young, at age 72. I have written about her before. In fact, I’m going to repeat my column of 9-2-10…

Lorraine Brugh teaches organ at Valparaiso University. She has doctorates in both organ and theology. She did the theology doctorate just because she felt she had to know the theology behind the worship music to be able to interpret and teach the music adequately. That’s real devotion.

She led one of the weekends at the Grace Institute, a two-year Lutheran program for learning about and becoming more spiritual. I was one of the few non-Lutherans, and the only Methodist, in the program.

At meals and free times, a group of young women Lutheran pastors, four to six, according to the occasion, coalesced around me. I suspect it was because I treated them as colleagues when older male Lutheran pastors were less receptive to them. Or maybe it was just my animal magnetism.

One lunch period, Lorraine and I were eating together. When the meal was over, my group of young Lutheran women pastors came and joined us.

One of them asked us about Methodist theology. Lorraine has always been a Lutheran, but she got her theology doctorate at Garrett, a United Methodist school, at Northwestern U, while she was doing her organ degrees at Northwestern.

“I’ve always thought Methodism was primarily active theologically, rather than just intellectual,” she said. “You try to do the right thing first, and only then you think about it. It’s a very heroic faith. Your hymn is ‘Are Ye Able.’”

That surprised me for a moment. I would have said our hymn was “O For a Thousand Tongues.” It’s a Wesley hymn, after all. But I think Lorraine was right. For American Methodism of the 20^th century, Earl Marlatt’s “Are Ye Able” was our hymn. [1]

Then Lorraine started to sing it. But being non-Methodist, she began to falter on the words. So I joined in and we sang it together.

Are ye able, said the master, to be crucified with me

Yea, the sturdy dreamers answered, to the death we follow thee.

Lord, we are able, our spirits are thine

Remold them, make us, like thee, divine

Thy guiding radiance a beacon shall be

A beacon to God, to love, and loyalty.

 

Are ye able to remember when a thief lifts up his eyes

That his pardoned soul is worthy of a place in paradise?

Lord, we are able, our spirits are thine

Remold them, make us, like thee, divine

Thy guiding radiance a beacon shall be

A beacon to God, to love, and loyalty.

 

Are ye able when the shadows close around you with the sod

To believe that spirit triumphs, to commend your soul to God?

Lord, we are able, our spirits are thine

Remold them, make us, like thee, divine

Thy guiding radiance a beacon shall be

A beacon to God, to love, and loyalty.

 

Are ye able? Still the Master whisper down eternity,

And heroic spirits answer, now as then in Galilee.

Lord, we are able, our spirits are thine

Remold them, make us, like thee, divine

Thy guiding radiance a beacon shall be

A beacon to God, to love, and loyalty.

 

Heroic, indeed, perhaps unrealistically so. That hymn still stirs me, though. It’s a sung response to Jesus’ call to forsake everything to follow him.

The young Lutheran pastors looked a bit astonished as we sang.

When we finished, they had tears running down their unwrinkled cheeks. The tears were probably the audacity of my scratchy bass intruding on Lorraine’s clear soprano, but I prefer to think it was because, even though Lutheran, they are able.

John Robert McFarland

[1] It’s # 530 in the Methodist hymnal. Marlatt wrote it in 1926. Henry S. Mason wrote the music in 1924. It was my mother-in-law’s favorite hymn when Helen was growing up, even though she was a Baptist.