THE PRESENCE [Sun, 2-22-26-]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—THE PRESENCE [Sun, 2-22-26-]

 

I was aware of the presence of God even as a child. It wasn’t eerie, or scary. I was also aware of the presence of the devil; that was the scary one.

With God, it was like someone in the room with me, a little behind and to the side, just out of sight, but looking out the window together.

The window changed from time to time, and so did the scenes outside, but God’s non-anxious presence remained.

There were plenty of times I forgot about it, didn’t notice it. Indeed, that was most of the time. I stared out the window alone. But I always knew the presence was present.

That’s the point, I think—knowledge. I did not feel the presence, experience it; I knew it. Not just in a brain way, but a life way, the way people say “I knew it in my bones.”

God’s presence was always there, not as an emotion, but just as… well, presence. Knowledge. That’s why Jesus said we should love God with all our mind as well as all our strength and heart and soul. [Mark 12:30-31.] None of those categories of loving—mind, strength, heard, soul-- are belief; they are being.

That’s why “upheld by the everlasting arms” has always been a powerful image and phrase for me. [Deuteronomy 33:27]

That’s why I never thought of Jesus or Christ, or certainly the BVM or saints, to be necessary mediums to God. If God is just there, here, well, you don’t have to cross some bridge to get to God.

I am not telling you this to suggest that it is the “proper” way to understand and relate to God. Or as some “proof” of God. Or anything else. It’s just my experience.

It’s why I never felt much need for theology, which is a strange thing to say for a man who went to the trouble to earn a doctorate in theology. I did so much study of theology just because I felt it was not legitimate to ignore all the thinking and speaking about God that came before I knew the Presence.

So I never really preached theology, beliefs or doctrines about religion. I never believed in what Marcus Borg called “salvation by syllables.” I tried to explain beliefs from time to time. But mostly I just told the story of how God is present, standing there, looking out the window over our shoulder, seeing the world and its needs, watching Christ at work in that world.

I guess I never did do theology. I just experienced God’s presence and told stories.

It this revisionist history? Well, of course, but if you’ve lived as long as I have, you have a right to understand life from the end. That’s the point of the Resurrection; we understand life only from beyond it. Oops… did I just do theology?

John Robert McFarland

“It is a mistake to assume that God is only, or even chiefly, concerned with religion.” Wm. Temple

 

WALKING THE POWERS ROAD [F, 2-20-26]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man--WALKING THE POWERS ROAD [F, 2-20-26]

 

This is Lent, which means spring, which means gardening…also, remember that I no longer write for edification, just for the fun of memory…

Any gardener, farm or town, would have laughed at this joke 75 years ago, when Mrs. Powers [Esther] told it to me, because they would have understood it without explanation. Perhaps you are old enough that you need no explanation, but…

In 1876, W. Atlee Burpee, at age 18, persuaded his mother to loan him $1,000 in “seed money” to start his business, in the agricultural center of Philadelphia.

An old lady got on the street car in Philadelphia. There was only one seat left, beside a distinguished looking man. She sat down. He tipped his hat and said, “Good morning. I’m Burpee.” She replied, “Oh, that’s okay. I’m that way sometimes myself.”

 

No explanation needed, 75 years ago, even about street cars, or who Burpee was, or where his seed company was located, because every gardener, vegetable or flower, sent to Philadelphia each spring for their seeds.

And 75 years ago, anything having to do with gas emissions was naughtily funny, especially to a ten-year-old who had walked a mile over dirt roads [dirt, not gravel] to get a cookie. Because Mrs. Powers always had cookies.

I’m sure the errand that took me to the home of Ray and Esther that day was not specifically for the cooky, but the cooky was my reason for going, regardless of what my mother or father had sent me there to do, which was usually a borrowing exchange, to pick up or return a tool or kitchen utensil.

Our closest neighbors were Homer and Hazel Heathman, about a quarter mile south, up the gravel road we lived on. The gravel ran out at our house, but the road continued north, through “Punch” Knowles’ woods, to where it deadened into the famous Seedtick Road. [Famous for its name. The one in IN, not TN or NC.]

A quarter mile north of our house, an unnamed dirt road took off to the east to IN highway 57. I always called that dirt road, from the woods to the highway, the Powers Road, because that was where it took me, after a quarter mile north on the road in front of our house, and a half-mile of dirt to “the hard road,” Hyw 57, then a quarter-mile south, negotiating the non-existent shoulder of Hwy. 57, to come to Ray & Esther’s house.

That was one of the most important roads of my childhood, because it took me to the Powers place. Where Mrs. Powers gave me cookies, including some to take home. And old magazines, those wonderful sources of stories.

Late in his life, my father told me that when Ray and Esther were first married, Ray had trouble finding a job. My grandpa Mac, Harry [Arthur Harrison McFarland] got him a job at the mine [Enos, I believe] where Grandpa was the stationery engineer, and picked him up each day to take him to work, because he didn’t have a car. Many years later, when Grandpa’s son and grandchildren moved in beyond those dirt roads, Ray was eager to help us because Grandpa had helped him.

I’m sure that was true. I think mostly, though, Ray and Esther helped us just because that is what good people do. I’ve spent my life paying them back by trying to help others. That’s how neighbor debt works.

John Robert McFarland

I’m a little non-plussed by my memory, or its distortions, because I always thought the Burpee company was in Nashville, TN, and I remember Mrs. Powers telling the joke that way, but Google has Burpee’s location as Philadelphia, and we all know, if you want the truth, as Coach Curt Cignetti famously said, “Google me.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

REMEMBING THE TIMES I SPENT WITH GOD [W, 2-18-26]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Lyrics of An Old Preacher/Song Writer—REMEMBING THE TIMES I SPENT WITH GOD [W, 2-18-26]

 

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, so, here’s a song…

REMEMBERING THE TIMES I SPENT WITH GOD

[To the tune of “Standing on the Promises” by Russell Kelso Carter]

VERSE 1

My brain is full of sawdust

And my eyes are failing fast

My ears are full of noises

And I know my strength can’t last

But I can sing this song of joy

To face the Lenten fast

Remembering the times I spent with God

 CHORUS

Remembering, Remembering

Seeing scenes of happiness

Along the days now gone

Remembering, Remembering

Remembering the times I spent with God

 VERSE 2

I did my best to walk the Way

That Jesus walked before

I studied hard so I could know

The Bible’s ancient lore

I went rejoicing with my friends

Through Church’s open door

Now I’m remembering the times I spent with God

 CHORUS

Remembering, Remembering

Seeing scenes of happiness

Along the days now gone

Remembering, Remembering

Remembering the times I spent with God

 VERSE 3

I’ve heard the voice of angels

When children sang on Christmas eve

I have felt the arms of comfort

When a loved one turned to leave

As I face eternal dawn

There’s no need to grieve

For I’m remembering the times I spent with God

 CHORUS

Remembering, Remembering

Seeing scenes of happiness

Along the days now gone

Remembering, Remembering

Remembering the times I spent with God

 John Robert McFarland

 This meditation/song also appears in the Lenten Devotional booklet [print and electronic] of St. Mark’s United Methodist Church of Bloomington, IN. My apologies to those who see it twice, and to those too young for a brain of sawdust, and who still look forward, instead of spending all their time remembering.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHATEVER STATE I’M IN [Philippians 4:11] {M, 2-16-26}

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Hoosier-- WHATEVER STATE I’M IN  [Philippians 4:11] {M, 2-16-26}

 

I’m going to talk about Indiana, but I’m talking about your state, too. Yes, I know you’ll say that you live in a state of confusion, or a state of dismay. Go ahead. I’ll laugh; it’s the kind of thing I would do if I were just a reader instead of the author, too.

But I am talking about the geographical state you live in. the one you want to live in. In the era you choose.

I do not know where all my readers live. I do know that this column has readers in AZ, CT, TX, IA, IL, VA, RI, WI, MN, WA, and NC. Probably MI and OH. Maybe CA and GA and OR and some others as well. There are some in IN, but surprisingly few. Maybe because the current Indiana is not the one in which I live.

I do not live in the Indiana that is driving gynecologists out of state because it wants to put them in jail for trying to do their job with the patient’s best interest rather than the legislature’s main interest. Or put women in jail for asking those doctors to serve their needs instead of the legislature’s.

I don’t live in the Indiana where the legislature wants to put university professors in jail for not teaching what the legislature wants,

Or put demonstrators in jail for supporting people from whom the trustees don’t get any big donations.  

I don’t live in the Indiana that wants to do away with public schools and use the public-school money for funding private schools that will teach only what the legislators want

I don’t live in the Indiana that wants to put librarians in jail for having the wrong books on the shelves.

I don’t live in the Indiana that would rather builds jails instead of schools.

I do not live in the fearful Indiana of segregation and KKK, either, that horrible hostile era of the state the prides itself on Hoosier Hospitality.

I don’t live in the Indiana in which a former Republican governor and university president, of all people, has to decry the current state of the state, going backward because of one-party rule. [Mitch Daniels]

So, whatever state we live in, I think we should get to choose the era.

 

I live in the days of real Hoosier Hospitality, the days of a newspaper in every town, the days of one-class basketball, the days of free public school for all, the days of Herman B Wells and academic independence, the days when any kid could aspire to great things.

That’s not denial. That is hope. Jesus did not say that we should try to make this world better, but that we should live in a different world, one that already exists, but is “unrevealed until its season,” in the words of Natalie Sleeth’s Hymn of Promise. The Kingdom of Heaven, the kingdom in which God’s will is done, is here, now. We have a choice, whether to live in the real and eternal world of God’s reign, or the false and fleeting world of kakistocracy.

“As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  Joshua 24:15.

John Robert McFarland

THE MEDIUM IS THE CONFLICT [Sat. 2-14-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Communicator—THE MEDIUM IS THE CONFLICT [Sat. 2-14-26]

 

[Remember that this column now makes no attempt to be informative or inspirational. It is only my reminiscences. Besides, I think I’ve written about Paul before. No, not the apostle Paul; the other one…]

I walked into the room to defend my dissertation, and there sat Paul! I had not thought of Paul for several years. But if I had thought about him, and someone asked, “Who’s the person you’d least like to have present when you defend your dissertation?” I would have immediately said, “Paul!”

He was close to finishing his doctorate when I started mine, at the U of Iowa, more than 50 years ago, but we overlapped for a year. We were in a couple of seminars together, and we chatted in the grad student’s lounge. Paul was firm in his opinions, and willing to express them.

Paul was good at doing theology in the time-honored academic way. You read every theologian from Irenaeus and Augustine through Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard on to Rahner and Barth and Tillich. You compare and contrast their approaches to epistemology and soteriology and all the other oligies. Then you declare which one you think best.

But I had been a campus minister for the past decade. I was well aware that the traditional method of doing theology didn’t connect with young people at all. They didn’t care at all about Kant’s “categorical imperative.” They read communications scholars like Marshall McLuhan and futurists like Alvin Toffler. In fact, they weren’t doing much “reading” at all. The electronic revolution was starting. People listened to tapes and looked at videos. It was a multi-media age.

So I wanted to do my dissertation on the interface between theological methodology and communication theory. What does it mean for experiencing God if “the medium is the message?” Well, one thing it meant was that I should do my dissertation electronically, as a movie, not as a printed tome.

That intrigued a couple of my professors, and most of my fellow students. It shocked and flummoxed most of the faculty, and one student in particular. Paul was outspoken about everything, and he was quite clear that such an heretical type of dissertation should not even be allowed in a respectable university.

It wasn’t that Paul was a bad person. It was just that we had diametrically opposed ways of doing theology. His was irrelevant, to anyone who was not a theologian, but nobody in the theological or university communities knew that yet. His method was tried and tested and approved. Mine was none of those.

And here he was, sitting there with my dissertation committee. “Paul is here for a semester,” the Dean said, “filling in for a prof who’s on sabbatical. You don’t mind if he sits in today, do you?”

Well, of course I minded, but I didn’t say so. I really never learned to say “No,” at least not in personal matters. I’ve just always gone along. If someone said “Go split some kindling,” or “Go preach at those churches,” or “Play the bassoon,” or “Let’s get married,” I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “Okay.”

Fortunately for my defense, my dissertation had not taken movie form after all. That turned out to be too complicated. But it was close. I had written a theology of narrative, by way of a collection of short stories. I was taking a narrative approach to theology rather than didactic. At least, it was print instead of electronic,which made it more palatable to respectable academics. I think something non-print might have been too much for poor Paul.

To his credit, he remained silent, save for one question: “Why?” I said, “You know why.” The other folks on the committee looked puzzled, but it seemed to satisfy Paul. He knew that, for me, the medium is the Gospel.

John Robert McFarland

Happy Valentine's Day!❤

 

 

 

 

 

SOMEONE TO TELL US WHEN TO STOP [R, 2-12-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Man—SOMEONE TO TELL US WHEN TO STOP [R, 2-12-26]

 

Donna, my friend of almost 80 years, pulled out in front of a pick-up truck. The truck driver wasn’t hurt, but Donna was in the hospital in a coma for several days before she died. Mutual friends say that she had been acting a bit out of it for a couple of weeks before that. She should have given up her keys, but she was single, with no one to get her groceries or take her to the doctor if she didn’t drive. That’s a dilemma so many old people face.

More importantly, perhaps, there was no one to tell her to stop driving.

We were visiting Aunt Gertrude several years ago. She drove us to a restaurant for supper. She drove very well. But as we ate and chatted, she said that she had told Kae and Paul, her children, that when they thought she should stop driving, she would. Not long after, they told her, and she just quit, cold turkey.

My father was blind, so couldn’t drive, and Mother was an atrocious driver. She had never been taught to drive, and she had not needed to know how when I was growing up, because we couldn’t afford a car. But when Daddy and I got jobs at the same time, we bought what seemed to us like a luxurious new car, a basic, manual-transmission Chevy with 63,640 miles on the odometer. Mother had been stuck on the same hardscrabble five acres for 7 years. She didn’t know how to drive, but that didn’t stop her. She got in that gun-metal gray Chevy and made it go places it never would have gone if it had a choice.

As the years went by, I bought my parents a series of cars to replace the ones that wore out. I tried for small cars that would be easier to park, with automatic transmissions.

My brother, 9 years younger than I, was a teen when I bought them the green Rambler. Jimmy delighted in changing the letters around on the front of the car so that they said Mable instead of Rambler.

Apparently I had forgotten the need for small cars when I got the Rambler, for Mother got it wedged diagonally into their old wooden garage and couldn’t get it out. Fortunately, or unfortunately for Helen, we lived in the same town at the time. [We moved them around with us for several years. We would move because the bishop appointed me to some other ministry, and I would find Daddy a blind-man job and a place to live in our new town.]

Mother called Helen, who went over to help. She backed the car an inch at a time, then changed gears from reverse to drive, then twisted the steering wheel as far as it would go, without power steering, and then inched forward, repeating the maneuver, ad nauseum. She said it took half an hour before she got the car out of the garage.

The last car I bought them was a neat, sporty, two-tone blue, Dodge Dart. We were visiting when Dad took us aside and told us it was time. They had gone to the laundromat. There was a pole in the middle of the parking lot. Mother couldn’t decide which side to use to go by it, so she just drove into it.

We knew Mother would not give up driving, though, just because we told her she needed to. She never cooperated with anything we said. And she wouldn’t give up driving just because she was no good at it. She’d never been any good.

So we pulled the Grandma lever. We told her that granddaughter Katie needed the Dodge Dart since she was now in graduate school. That worked. Even a contrarian will cooperate if it’s for the sake of a grandchild.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

THE QUESTING SPIRIT [T, 2-10-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THE QUESTING SPIRIT [T, 2-10-26]

 

In my old age, I find that it is the questions, not the answers, that keep me going.

That seems upside-down. As old and wise folks, aren’t we supposed to be past the questions? Shouldn’t we have the answers by now?

I’m thinking about this because I am culling my library yet again. In doing so, I pulled The Questing Spirit off the shelf.

I never actually read The Questing Spirit, the way we normally read a book, starting at the beginning and going forward. But I used it often, as a source of material for sermons and worship services, because it has such a broad array of spiritual poems and stories.

The editors of that book, Halford Luccock and Frances Brentano, knew that what is most important for spiritual growth is good questions. The poems and stories in that book pose those questions well.

I bought The Questing Spirit at a used book sale sixty years ago. It had been published 20 years before. A quick riffle-through told me that it had a lot of good, short poems that I could use to start Wednesday night communion services at The Wesley Foundation at Illinois State University. It has the name “Newkirk” stamped in the front.

I like new books. They are so pristine, so beckoning, so promising. They have a great smell. But there is something special about a used book, including, in The Questing Spirit, the mystery of Newkirk.

I used The Questing Spirit again, twenty years later, when I did the daily telephone devotional, “Dial Good News.”

It was an interesting juxtaposition. The Wednesday night communion was almost entirely young people. “Dial Good News” was almost entirely old people. But they responded to the voices in The Questing Spirit in the same ways.

Young people and old people seem to have a common willingness to deal with questions more than answers. They have questing spirits. I suspect I’m the only one, though, who has The Questing Spirit.

John Robert McFarland

“Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, not in God himself.” Unamuno