ARE YOU GOING ON TO PERFECTION? [R, 6-25-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings About Perfection by An Old Man Who Is Still Going On—ARE YOU GOING ON TO PERFECTION? [R, 6-25-26]

 

When I was still a young preacher, I heard a basketball referee say that in his profession, you were expected to start out perfect and then get better. I immediately applied that to the ministry.

 

I should not have been surprised at the need for perfection as the minimal standard. I had learned as a child that perfection would save me from punishment but not gain me any praise. Perfection was the necessary minimum.

For instance, I learned to be quiet about pain. Never say “Ouch.” If I got hurt, my mother would hit me. Not for saying “Ouch,” but for getting hurt. It meant I did something wrong. If I had paid attention, I wouldn’t have gotten hurt. To this day, pain doesn’t make me hurt as much as it makes me angry, at myself: Durn, I messed up again.

Perfection as the minimum standard was right in my wheelhouse, as a Methodist minister. After all, it was the organizer of Methodism, John Wesley, the great theological exponent of free will, who espoused the doctrine of Christian Perfection. Along with the others in my ordination class, I answered Yes when asked, “Do you expect to be made perfect in this life?” I’m sure that all of us crossed our fingers behind our backs, and, more importantly, immediately began defining perfection in various non-perfect ways.

 

When John Wesley declared that perfection should be the goal of Methodists, it is usually added that he meant perfection in love. No one can be perfect in intelligence or athletic performance and such, even in kindness, but love is entirely different. With love, you can start over at any time.

 

Gabrielle Zevin says that her book, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow “…is about work. And it’s about love.” It certainly is, but it’s also about perfection. Because it’s about video games.

The book title, of course, comes from Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in his eponymous play by Shakespeare…

 Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. [1]

Zevin is an excellent writer and story teller, but I’m sure I missed a lot of the nuances of the book because I haven’t played a video game since Pacman. Tomorrow3 is about young people who play and create video games. That involves work, and love, and the possibility of perfection.

There is no standard by which you can judge that a game is perfect when you are creating it. You can work and work and get it better, but how can you possibly know if ever does reach perfection?

Love and playing video games, though, you can start over at any time. You don’t even have to play to the end of the game. Any time you make a mistake, you can start over.

You have learned how to play better next time. You have moved closer to perfection.  When you feel that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, you can start over.

In Christian terms, starting over is called repentance. Its original meaning is simply to turn around and go the other way. If you have trouble with the others who are trying to create and play the game, you can start over at any time. That’s called forgiveness,

You don’t go on to perfection by being perfect. When you make a mistake playing the game, you just start over.

You don’t have to wait for tomorrow… or tomorrow… or tomorrow…

John Robert McFarland

1] My college roommate, Tom Cone, once had a dog named Brief Candle, so that when necessary, he could order the dog out of the house in Shakespearean terms: Out, out Brief Candle!

 

FORGIVE & REMEMBER [T, 6-23-26-

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—FORGIVE & REMEMBER [T, 6-23-26-

 

I think all the annual conferences of The United Methodist Church have finished their confabs for this year now. The purpose of this annual assembly, of clergy and lay members from each congregation, is to make plans for next year, and to get a retrospective of the year past.

In our winter years, we get a retrospective of the events of all our years past.

In my first appointment after seminary, I was standing around at a break in some ministerial meeting, chatting with my colleagues. One was the pastor of a large and prestigious church. He was less than a year from retirement and so prone to looking backward rather than forward. He gave some advice to those of us who were young and looking forward.

“You young fellas need to trust the bishop and the cabinet,” he said. “They’ll do right by you. They always gave me better appointments than I deserved.” [1]

I pointed out that obviously we could not trust the bishop and cabinet, because if they gave him better appointments than he deserved, they gave some of his colleagues lesser appointments than they deserved. You couldn’t be all that pleased or trusting if you were in the latter category.

He was totally befuddled. He didn’t understand at all what I was saying. That, of course, was because he didn’t mean what he said.

In addition to the false modesty to which all men, and women, of “the cloth” are prone, he was just saying, “I accept my past.” His was not a rational, truth-in-a-scientific-way statement. He wasn’t doing arithmetic; he was doing forgiveness. He was forgiving the bishop and the cabinet and his congregations and himself for all that was past.

Rather than the usual mantra of “forgive and forget,” I suggest that it is better to forgive and remember. Remember the facts of your past, or your past loses meaning. But forgive the reality. Accept the gift. We need to remember the facts. Those are reality. But reality, when it is applied to memory, is overrated.

In my winter years, I have learned that rationality is not usually helpful in understanding things that are primarily emotional.

Paul Tillich said, “Forgiveness doesn’t change the facts, but it does change the meaning of the facts.”

Forgive the facts. Forgive the past. Accept that which is better than you deserve.

John Robert McFarland

1] The system is changing, but traditionally in Methodism, ministers are not hired by the congregation. They are appointed by the bishop and the cabinet, which is the District Superintendents glommed together. We can’t request a particular appointment, and we have to go where we are sent, although we can sometimes weasel out of it. From the beginning of American Methodism through the first half of my career, there was no negotiation of any kind. The bishop told you where you were going, usually through the DS, and that was all there was to it. Sometimes you weren’t even told; sometimes you didn’t know until the appointments were read on the last day of the annual conference where you would move the next week.

 

 

 

TOOLS [Sun, 6-21-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Man—TOOLS [Sun, 6-21-26]

 

Today is Father’s Day, so I’m thinking about tools.

A hardware store flyer came in the mail yesterday. I looked through it carefully. I don’t need or want anything from a hardware store, but I do it to honor and remember my father. Also in honor of my late brother, Jim, who inherited our father’s tool ability.

My father loved tools, and so he loved hardware stores. In his last years, when he had given away all his tools because he had to go to a senior citizen apartment, or was living in a nursing home room, he would have me take him to a hardware store, ostensibly to buy a light bulb or a cleaning cloth. Really it was so he could browse the shelves, to see what was new. The only eyesight he had left was about ten percent in one eye, but he would get that eye right up against the shelf, and comment unfavorably on the price.

I had no interest in tools myself, not his kind of tools. He lost his eyesight in an industrial accident when I was five. Shortly thereafter, I entered into the fourth of the eight stages of psychological-social growth, as outlined by Erik Erikson, industry vs inferiority. It’s basically when you learn to use tools, or fail to learn how to use them.

Tools, of course, are not just the hardware kind. There were many household tools that women had to learn to use. Doctors have to learn to use scalpels. Scientist have to learn to use telescopes and microscopes. But to me, tools meant the kind my father used.

Dad organized his tools so that he could still find them and use them, even with his minimal eyesight.

I, of course, was fascinated by his tools, so I would sometimes get one out to “use,” which meant to play with. I would sometimes leave it in the yard, where he couldn’t find it. In my psyche I heard him say, “You can’t use tools.” I think he probably said some variant of “You can’t use MY tools,” for good reason. I, however, internalized the idea that I could not use any kind of tool. I still can’t use his kind of tools. I settled for inferiority over industry.

Sort of.

I did play the bassoon, which requires as much manual dexterity as most workbench tools.

Also, I took up another kind of tool, language.

I wanted to be a journalist. That’s the trade of one who uses words as tools. I loved stories and wanted to tell them. Just as importantly, I wanted to tell them honestly. Everyone said that Ernie Pyle told the story of WW II the way it really was. I wanted to be an Ernie Pyle.

There is, of course, a different way to use the tools of words, just as there is a wrong way to use my father’s kind of tools, to make the instruments of war rather than to build a cradle for a little child. Many users of words use them to misinform, to propagandize, to lie.

Mastering a tool isn’t the only task. The tool user must also be mastered.

John Robert McFarland

“The aim of literature is to discover and illuminate truth, whether biography or history or fiction.” Rachel Carson

 

 

ALL OLD MEN LOOK ALIKE [F, 6-10-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Escapades of An Old Pizza Eater—ALL OLD MEN LOOK ALIKE [F, 6-10-26]

 

I was pretty well caught up on meditating, but Helen sent me to the pizza joint, anyway, to get a pizza, which is the other reason to go there. [See the column for 5-28-26 if you don’t understand this.]

Just as I left home, though, I got a text from the CVS drug store, a little farther down the street, saying they had a script ready for me. It was the fourth text they had sent me in the previous 24 hours. They even promised that they would send more texts. The only way to stop CVS from texting is to go get the durn prescription, even though you already have enough to last a lifetime, especially if your lifetime probably isn’t going to be a lot longer.

It takes about 15 minutes for a large pepperoni to bake, so I decided I’d go to CVS while the pizza was baking. I explained to the tattooed lady at the pizza joint that I would be right back and that she should not give my pizza to some other old man who came in and claimed that was really his pizza.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “that’s a problem, since all old men look alike.”

Wait a minute! That’s my line, that all old men look alike. Oh, maybe I’ve been to that pizza joint before.

But wait another minute! All old men look alike? No way! I was wearing a faded blue shirt and an IU ball cap and cargo shorts…oh, wait. That is what all old men wear. They all have white beards, too.

Turned out that CVS kept me for more than 15 minutes it takes for a pepperoni to get ready. They had no record of my prescription, even though they had texted me all those times to say it was ready.

[CVS likes to overdo things. Every time I go there, I regret not having invested in receipt paper. On a recent “Law & Order,” one of the cops said about an arrestee, “He has a rap sheet as long as a CVS receipt.”]

Despite the blunders of the CVS computer, the people who actually do the work at the South Walnut CVS are always kind and competent. The nice young pharmacist said she’d fix up my prescription right then, if I could wait ten minutes.

“Wait ten minutes? You’ve got to be kidding me. That woman at the pizza joint will give my pizza to some other old man if I don’t get back there in time.”

To her credit, the pharmacist understood. I mean, what’s the point of taking medicine to make you live longer if somebody else gets your za in the meantime?

When I got to the pizza joint, the tattooed lady was sitting there with my pizza on her lap. “I’ve been guarding it,” she said, “so somebody else can’t get it, but how do I know you’re not some other old man?”

That’s always the question.

John Robert McFarland

“The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

 

 

THE LAST WESTERN [W, 6-17-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Social Commentary of An Old Westerns Fan—THE LAST WESTERN [W, 6-17-26]

 

It was TV’s “rural purge” that did it.

From WWII to the end of the Gunsmoke TV series, Westerns reigned supreme as the primary entertainment genre. I grew up in that era of Western stories as entertainment—radio, movies, books, TV.

My hero was The Lone Ranger. Tonto, also. And Red Ryder. Little Beaver, also. Western heroes needed “faithful Indian companions,” but they were always the “and,” the “also,” the add-on.

As a kid, I loved the Westerns on the radio, and the Saturday matinees. As I got older, the Old West was still my era of choice for entertainment. It was for most folks who had switched from radio to TV and movies, too.

We loved Bonanza and The Virginian and Have Gun; Will Travel.

We loved the Cartwrights and Marshall Dillon and Paladin on TV.

We loved Paul Newman and Robert Redford and Gabby Hayes and Richard Boone in the movies.

We loved the writers, like Elmore Leonard. Terry Johnstone. Louis Lamour. Zane Grey. Tom Eidson.

And JR McFarland. Yes, I thought I should have a semi-pen name for the many Westerns I was going to write, to distinguish me from John Robert McFarland--who wrote stuff about religion and cancer and humor and anything else that came up--but still acknowledge, sort of, that I was that guy, with more than one career.

I really thought that when I retired, I would have a career as a novelist, especially Western novels. After all, An Ordinary Man was published by HarperCollins even before I retired. It was well-received and sold forty thousand copies. That sounded good.

What I didn’t know was that in 1995, there were only forty thousand Westerns readers left. I had gotten around to writing Westerns at the end of that era. A guy doing a Westerns historical archive asked me for an autographed copy of my book. I didn’t realize that being included in an historical archive wasn’t really a good thing.

No entertainment era lasts forever. That is partially because changes in technology make new forms of entertainment possible. But Westerns made the move to TV quite well. In fact, Westerns made TV as popular as it was. But TV was also the reason for the fall of Westerns, because of “the rural purge.”

Westerns celebrated a WWII mentality, good guys against bad guys. They even wore different colored Stetsons so you could identify them easily—white hats for the good guys, black hats for the bad.

The Folk music revival of the 1960s fit well with that mentality. It provided the musical ethos for Westerns. Its most celebrated hero was “a condemned man named Tom Dooley,” who was facing rural frontier justice “down in some lonesome valley, hanging from a white oak tree.”  

But then came rock and roll. The Beetles. Elvis. A Viet Nam war mentality, when it was not at all easy to tell the good guys from the bad. Westerns were “rural.” TV execs were seeking younger urban watchers who would be better customers for the advertisers of cosmetics and cars. Thus, “the rural purge.”

So, my Western novel writing career came to a sliding halt. Just as well. I was pretty good at coming up with titles. A good title often has the word “last” in it, like this column. I wasn’t very good at figuring out a good conclusion, though. Sort of like this column…

John Robert McFarland

I really thought An Ordinary Man would make a great movie. I even cast it, with Richard Harris as the ordinary man. I’m sorry you didn’t get to see it.

“It’s terrible to outlive your own generation.” Djuna Barnes

HUMAN WHOLENSS VS HIPPIE WHOLENESS [M, 6-15-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Psychology of A Hopeful Old Human—HUMAN WHOLENSS VS HIPPIE WHOLENESS [M, 6-15-26]

 

There is an old story about a young preacher who went to preach at a country church one Sunday morning only to find that nobody else had showed up, except for one old farmer. “Well,” the young man thought, “I’ve prepared a great sermon. I’ll just go ahead and preach it.” After the service, the old farmer said, “When I take a load of hay out to the field, if only one cow shows up, I don’t give it the whole load.”

I think there is wisdom in that story, but I have a little trouble with it, for “whole” is one of my favorite words, and that little story doesn’t do it justice.

After I got cancer, and was told I’d probably be dead in a year or two, my late, great friend, Bill White, drove a hundred miles one day to spend the afternoon with me. As we talked, I realized that I was starting every sentence with, “Now that I have cancer…” The cancer had changed every aspect of my life. Bill said, “That sounds like the title of a book.” He knew me. He knew that I needed to write about anything I experienced, to be able to understand it and deal with it. 

But when I sent my manuscript to AndrewsMcMeel Publishing, Editorial Director, Donna Martin, said, “I think what you’re really saying is, now that I have cancer I am whole.” That became the title of the book. [1]

So, “wholeness” has become my fulcrum word, the word that explains, if not the way I do live my life, at least the way I try to live my life.

As I have grown older, though, I’ve come to know that there is a difference between what I call human wholeness, and hippie wholeness.

Hippie wholeness is not living wholistically, but about dropping out of the attempt at wholeness, into the morass of self.

It’s very appealing as we age, to drop out, of more and more. It makes life simple.

But it does not make life centered; it just makes you self-centered.

Our coffee maker has a little ridge around the burner. As I make the first pot of the morning, while I’m more feeling my way through life instead of actually seeing it, it’s easy for me to stick the carafe onto the burner in a way that is not centered. Then there's a mess I have to clean up. Centeredness helps to make the world work right.

There is only one center in hippie wholeness—me. Hippie wholeness is about personal comfort. I, the person, should never be uncomfortable, be it physical or emotional. If it’s physical, I take some drug to make me feel comfortable. If it’s emotional, I drop out, I walk away. No thought to what happens to other people.

As our physician and I were talking about this last week, she said, “I’ve never heard the phrase, ‘hippie wholeness,’ before.”

I said, “That’s because I just made it up, and also because hippie wholeness puts your kind of medicine last. Human wholeness people start with the world, the community’s wisdom, the tried and true, penicillin and surgery and prayer. To be whole, we also do chanting and tree bark. Hippie wholeness people start with what is not common wisdom, what is offbeat, what is individual, chants and tree bark. They do penicillin and surgery after aroma therapy and coffee enemas don’t work.”

Hippie wholeness is personal prayer: “Me and my wife, our son and his wife, us four and no more, Amen.” Human wholeness is intercessory prayer, kissing the booboo not because it takes away the pain but because it takes away the loneliness. [A phrase from Rachel Naomi Remen]

Hippie wholeness is about the individual. Human wholeness is about community. Hippie wholeness people like to say they are being honest. Human wholeness is about being kind.

We get whole by being kind, to ourselves, to others, and to the world.

John Robert McFarland

1] Donna Martin was noted for finding the right title for a book, for writers much better known than I.

PAYING THE PIPER [Sat, 6-13-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Story Teller—PAYING THE PIPER [Sat, 6-13-26]

 

I was chatting with a medical professional, an obviously competent woman, who laughed brightly when she said, “You’ve been retired longer than I’ve been alive!” Great; I was already feeling old enough.

I retired 30 years ago today, the last day of the Central IL Conf. of the UMC, last day both for 1996 and forever, since later that day the CIC was merging with the S IL Conf. to form The Illinois Great Rivers Conf. When Vernie Barnett, the head of pensions for our conference, introduced each of us who were retiring, he told how many years each of us had preached. For me, it was 30. Which was both right and wrong.

It was right because I had 30 years of pension credit. It was wrong because I had been preaching, under appointment, for 40 years. But I had the kinds of ministry that didn’t always lead to pension credit.

Counting part-time interims in retirement, I preached a total of 60 years.

I was good at preaching from the start of those years. I don’t know why. I certainly did not have much self-confidence. But from the first, at age 19, I was good at it. Not really at preaching, the way it was usually understood in those days, but at just standing up in front of people and talking, telling stories.

I think I was comfortable, standing up in front and talking, because, if you don’t get in the way, you can let stories tell themselves. I wasn’t up there by myself. I knew the stories had my back.

One man said, “You don’t talk at us or to us. You talk for us.”

There was one problem, though, with being a preacher, all those forty years: people.

That’s the same problem in a lot of jobs. People have a tendency to get in your way in almost any job. The problem is exacerbated, though, by the strange backward familial nature of the church—the preacher is the parent, but the children [congregants] handle the money and provide the housing. They are sometimes [often?] parents who say, “My house, my rules.”

If the children don’t like the rules you are laying down as the parent--about how you should treat black folks and women and immigrants the same as everyone else, and how you should not be greedy but share your toys with the poor, and how you should do your chores and get to bed on time and leave them downtown women alone—they get back at you by cutting your allowance.

In the Methodist Church, the pastor’s salary is set each year at the Church Conference [annual business meeting], which is presided over by the District Superintendent. I had a District Superintendent who told me, as he completed his term: “I have sixty pastors in this District. I have spent more time during my six years on your salary than all the others combined.”

One year, Harry Keal came to Charge Conference to try to deny me a salary increase. And those increases were never really increases in buying power; just cost-of-living adjustments, like 2 %.

Harry agreed that I was a good preacher, but he did not like the stuff I preached, the stories I told. He did not want to say that, though. Indeed, every time someone tried to lower my salary at Charge Conference--and that was pretty much every year, and sometimes in between—they said it was because of budget constraints. Everyone saw through that, because there were other lines in the budget that should have been cut, too, if we really had money problems, but they never even mentioned those.

Harry was a farmer, and tried to make his case on the basis of free trade economics. “When I take my corn to the elevator, I have to take what the market dictates.” Young farmer Steve Holaday said, “Yes, but the other farmers in the Co-Op don’t sit down and decide what you’ll get for your corn. That’s what we’re doing here.”

Today is the anniversary of my official retirement from the ministry. I look back on those 40 years before retirement, and I give thanks. It was a great honor to get to stand up in front and tell the stories of God. But I also give thanks that there isn’t anyone available to say my pension should be cut, because I’m not giving thanks in the right way.

John Robert McFarland