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

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE TITLE IS THE MESSAGE [Su 2-8-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Word Smith--THE TITLE IS THE MESSAGE [Su 2-8-26]

 

DISCLAIMER: Remember, this column no longer makes any pretense of providing inspiration for life. It contains only the musings of an old man…

The two most important books of my childhood were Tramp, the Sheep Dog, by Don Lang, and Mother Makes Christmas by Cornelia Meigs.

Those are good titles. They introduce you to the main character, and they give you the context of the story. Also, they are simple and memorable.

When I was about nine, I overheard my parents talk about a current book, My Sister Was an Only Child. That was simple and memorable, but it didn’t make sense. I was intrigued. I got a different feel for what a title could do.

As a person’s name is the short form of their story, so a title is the short form of a sermon or book or film or song. A name needs to fit the person, which is why someone like Archie Leech changes to Cary Grant. A title needs to fit the book, which is why The Return of the Shadow was changed to The Lord of the Rings.

The Wonder Years is a good title, but it is not precise. Any years can be the wonder years. I think the wonder years are right now. “I wonder about the here-after. I walk into a room and wonder… what am I here after?” [I wonder from whom I first heard that line, so I can give credit.]

I enjoyed titling my sermons. I wanted something clever, that would catch the attention of someone waiting for the worship service to start, or someone picking up a church periodical, but it was not good if it were only clever. It also needed to help a person get started thinking about the subject of the sermon. Like…

Overhairing the Gospel. {Yes, that spelling is correct.} Odd Times, Strange Places. Stealing Donkeys and Other Ways of Following the Master. In the Second Row, All by Yourself. The Love Stone. The Touching Time. God Uses Broken Things…

Even now, I title my emails carefully, so the receiver will know right away what’s in it, and may be at least slightly entertained. Yes, I love clever titles, but in an email subject line, simple is best. Not simple in a general way, like Just saying hi. More specific, like Are you going to the game? Did I leave my glasses at your house? Fred is in the hospital. Etc… Of course, you can get the idea across, and still be a little entertaining: You should see Fred in a hospital gown.

Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates a clever title. Professors often complained about the titles of my essays. Why? I mean, “The Man, The Mess, and The Message” is a perfect title for a paper on The Synod of Dort.

Editors always changed the titles of my articles. That was especially irritating, because they said that I was word perfect otherwise. They loved my stuff, because they did not have to edit. Every word was already in the right place, doing the right task, they said. I guess they figured they had to do something to earn their way, and since there was no reason to change any of the text, they changed the title.

Actually, I did have a line editor of a couple of times. Matt Lombardi for my cancer book. He couldn’t really find anything wrong, though, so we had a good time arguing about whether tetherball should be one word or two. He did save me from an anachronism, though. I can’t remember the exact context, but I had placed the word “gunsel” before its time.

The most egregious title change was when the editors of “The Christian Century” changed Stealing Donkeys for Jesus to Neither a Lender Nor a Borrower Be. I mean, yes, Shakespeare has more of a reputation that I do, but which is more intriguing in the Palm Sunday week edition?

But I need to be appreciative of editors, too. I titled my cancer book, Now That I Have Cancer, because that is the way I started every sentence after Feb. 5, 1990. But Donna Martin, of AndrewsMcMeel, said, “What you’re really saying is, Now That I Have Cancer I am Whole." She was right.

 

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

SHRINKS & STORIES [F, 2-6-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Psychology of An Old Man—SHRINKS & STORIES [F, 2-6-26]

 

My therapist, Sharon, told me she was exhausted by the end of each of our sessions. “I have to work harder with you than with all my other patients combined,” she said. I mistook that as a compliment.

Just as I had mistaken Helen’s statement for a compliment when she said, “You have often mystified me, sometimes worried me, and occasionally terrified me, but never bored me.” I didn’t realize that she was really saying, “I like boredom. Please don’t mystify, worry, and terrify me.”

Neither did I understand that Sharon was not complimenting me on my verbal nimbleness in avoiding how I felt about dying, by saying that I was better at hiding than all her other patients combined, but really saying, “WTH? How come I have to work so hard with you? Get with the program. You’re here to deal with stuff, not avoid it.”

Actually, she did say that. She wasn’t as polite as Helen. She got tired of being so tired with me, and so grabbed my feet and dragged them to the fire.

My first oncologist said I’d be dead in a year or two. At least, that’s what I heard. [1] Quite a few people, including the bishop, informed me that our insurance would pay for me to go to a shrink as part of the treatment for cancer. [2] There seemed to be a whole lot of people who wanted me to go to a shrink. They didn’t say it, but there was an implied “at last.”

The problem was that to get ready to die, I had to look at my life, and I didn’t want to do that. Plato said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” But what did he know? Little Jack Horner did no self-examination. He sat in a corner all by himself, and he got a plum in his pie. Eating pie is a lot better than examining your life. Sharon didn’t understand that.

 

During the years that I was both surviving cancer and still pastoring a church, I became, by default, a shrink for children, not just children in our church, but in the whole town. I had no training as a child therapist, but people knew I liked kids, and my fee was zero. At one time I was seeing kids in every grade from third through tenth. Oh, and a preschooler when his grandfather was dying.

Pastors are supposed to be counselors of a sort--speaking personal words of encouragement and comfort--and we get enough education in what is called “pastoral care” to be truly dangerous. I wasn’t particularly dangerous, though, because I was so bad at it. If someone said, “My wife doesn’t understand me,” I was inclined to say things like, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. What’s to understand? Get over yourself. Stop examining your life and eat some pie.”

It was different with children. They didn’t say stupid things. They told stories to me--stories of monsters and magic plants, by little kids, stories of yearning and anxiety by bigger kids--and I told stories to them. Then we took the stories we had told each other and wrote new stories together.

My first oncologist was wrong about the “one to two years.” I’m now a 36 year cancer survivor. Plato is dead. So is my first oncologist. Sharon has retired, exhausted. And I’m eating pie and telling stories.

That’s what Sharon really did for me; she listened to my stories, and helped me write new ones. It’s only the untold story and the uneaten pie that aren’t worth living.

John Robert McFarland

1] You can read more about this in my NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE.

2] Technically I think “shrink” is reserved for psychiatrists, and Sharon was a psychologist. And I was just a story-teller.

 

 

 

 

SHORT LIFE—GOOD ATTITUDE [2-4-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Aging from an Aged Man—SHORT LIFE—GOOD ATTITUDE [2-4-26]

 

It’s well known now, at least among psychologists, that old people are not any wiser or smarter than younger people; we’re just aware that we have less time to live. When you know your days are limited, you make better choices about how to live them.

Psychological researchers like Laura Carstensen have done many studies that show this: your attitude toward life depends almost entirely on how long you think you’re going to live.

If you think you’re going to live for quite a while, you are interested in future achievement, expanding life, making new friends. If you think you will die in a relatively short time, regardless of how young or old you are, you are primarily interested in enjoying the present, drawing your circle close, with the family and friends you already have.

I did not know about Carstensen’s work when I got sick one night, and had surgery at midnight on my 53^rd birthday, and was told the next morning I would die. [That is not the exact time line, but that’s how it felt at the time, and still does.]

Within a matter of minutes, I stopped thinking about where the bishop might appoint me next, and if I could get a novel published, and where Helen and I might go on vacation. Instead I was thinking about whether I could afford to retire early so that I could spend all my time with my family and close friends, especially my grandchildren. Bigger churches? More book sales? Acclaim and applause? Not interested at all.

 

It’s not morbid to say that you’ll die soon, as I often do, not because I’m sick, but just because of the realities of age. As a society, we don’t deal well with that. We seem to think that if we don’t anticipate death, it won’t happen. Younger people, who are still in their futuring years, keep saying to me, “You’re much healthier than other people your age. Oh, you’re so healthy, you’ll live to be ninety!” Yeah, but what are you going to say when I’m 89? Yes, that’s today, so it’s okay to say, “Hey, you’d better start making good choices about how to spend the rest of your short life.”

John Robert McFarland