LIVING ON THE BYPASS [Sat, 4-25-20]

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

LIVING ON THE BYPASS      [Sat, 4-25-20]

Helen and I have been living on the bypass for over six weeks now. Or maybe it’s over sixty years.

Yesterday we went out in the car. It was quite exciting, and a little anxious. It was only our third foray out in all these weeks of quarantine. But we had an extreme emergency. We were almost out of balsamic vinegar, whatever that is. We’ve done very well with deliveries of necessities, but we want to support local businesses, in this case The Olive Leaf, a strip-mall storefront “we” have patronized for many years, and Helen was able to order and pay by phone, and all we had to do was pull up in front and pop the trunk lid, and Olive came out and put the sack in the trunk and smacked the car on the rump, the way you do with a horse to get it to go, and away we went—complete social distancing, with, of course, appropriate sack disposal and bottle wiping when we got home.

In the process, we drove by our church, St. Mark’s on the Bypass, literally on the bypass, the Indiana Highway 46 bypass. It has no other name, and Bloomington has no other bypasses; when you say “the bypass” in Bloomington, everyone knows exactly what you mean.

We were the first couple married there, when it was a very new congregation. The building is much larger now, but it was then, and is now, our church. When daughter Katie was an IU student, 25 years after our college years, each time she and her friends used the bypass, she pointed out our wedding spot, so much so that they began to yell it out before she could: “Look, there’s the church where Katie’s parents got married.” On the bypass.

Yes, taking the bypass to get from our house to The Olive Leaf is unnecessary, but we drove the long way, so we could see the redbuds and dogwoods and flowering crabs and pansies and tulips on the IU campus. There is no other sight quite like it. And we got to drive by our church.

“It looks so lonely,” Helen said.

No cars. No people going in and out. No pre-school children playing in the yard. No Boy Scouts. No AA group folks. A church bypassed on the bypass.

It reminded me of the first time I attended a continuing education event for clergy, The School of The Prophets, at Depauw University, in Greencastle, IN. I was a twenty-year-old part-time college student preacher, in a company of several hundred full-time preachers. I felt important to be included in that august group. [We were meeting in August, so…]

In the morning I was in a workshop led by Webb Garrison on how to collect sermon “illustrations,” in a shoe box, because it was cheap, on 4x6 cards, because they fit the shoe box, using rubber cement rather than scotch tape because it didn’t dry out so much. At lunch I had gone downtown to buy 4x6 cards, and rubber cement, and a pair of shoes I could not afford, so I could get the cheap box.

I was late getting back, and as I hurried along the street, I could hear the voices of the assembled clergy, singing as one great choir, to start the afternoon plenary session. Standing on the curb was an old man in a black suit, shiny at the knees, a yellowed white shirt buttoned at the neck, no tie. I was dressed in the standard college student uniform of the time—Kingston Trio vertical strip shirt, chinos, argyle socks, white buck shoes. He looked at me and said, “Are you a preacher?” I was not sure of the correct answer to that question then, or even now, but it was easiest to say “Yes.”

“I was a preacher once,” he said.

I waited for a moment, but he said no more, and I started toward the assembled preachers, assuming he would come along with me, but he stayed where he was, on the curb, on the bypass, his ear cocked toward the distant voices.

Now I am the old man in the black suit, shiny at the knees, listening to the distant voices, the voices of memory, and of hope. I understand that just because you’re on the bypass, it doesn’t mean you’re lonely. Or alone.

John Robert McFarland