I AM AMONG YOU AS ONE WHO IS [F, 11-29-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Corrections of An Old Man—I AM AMONG YOU AS ONE WHO IS [F, 11-29-24]

 

Like most boys in the years just past WWII, I wanted to be a part of what was then “America’s game,” baseball. I wanted to be a player, like Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams. Or Johnny Wyrostek. I wanted to play for my team, the Cincinnati Reds, like Johnny did. He wasn’t as good as DiMaggio or Williams, but he had the right uniform.

 

Then he didn’t. The Reds sold him. Just like a slave. I knew about slavery, because we studied history in school back then. I also knew slavery wasn’t right. I decided to change careers; I had no intention of being a slave.

So, I didn’t know quite what to make of it when Jesus said, in my Sunday School paper, about the same time I decided not to be a baseball slave, that he was among us as one who serves. [Luke 22:27] Wasn’t a servant just one step up from being a slave? You still got ordered around by people who thought they were better than you. I didn’t like that.

 

But I wanted to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus. The Christians I knew just seemed so much more satisfied with life than other folks did. They were nicer to be around, too. They wanted to help, and fix stuff that was wrong. So, I wanted to be a Christian, someone who helped people, and fixed things that were wrong. Like slavery. So I was a strong supporter of Curt Flood, born just a year after me, when he took on the baseball slave masters and their political enablers…and won!

I did a pretty good job of it, for a long time, being a helper and fixer. I thought “being among you as one who serves” meant being there as one who helped and fixed.

To me, that meant always carrying the heavier load in any relationship, always doing more than the other/s in that relationship. The best Christians were the ones who sought out the heaviest loads to carry.

 

But Rachel Remen, MD, says there is a difference between serving, and helping and fixing.

 

“Perhaps we can truly serve only those we are willing to touch, not only with our hands but with our hearts and even our souls. Professionalism has embedded in service a sense of difference, a certain distance. But on the deepest level, service is an experience of belonging, an experience of connection to others and to the world around us. It is this connection that gives us the power to bless the life in others. Without it, the life in them would not respond to us.” [My Grandfather’s Blessings, p 204]

Oh, good grief, now I’ve got to start all over and be all touchy-feely. Well, I’m getting rather tired from that heavy relationship-lifting all those years, anyway. Maybe belonging instead of helping and fixing won’t be so bad…

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNMASKING THE HOME EC THEOLOGIAN [11-27-24]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—UNMASKING THE HOME EC THEOLOGIAN [11-27-24]

 

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Helen will cook a special meal, as she has for 66 years. I shall be thankful for the meal, yes, but primarily for her presence. So, I share this story, because it gives me a chance to give thanks for the real theologian in our family.

I have long wanted to write a novel about a theological detective, solving crimes not just while being clergy, like Harry Kemmelman’s rabbi books, or G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, but solving them by applying theology stuff, not detective stuff, to the mystery. I even started a couple of times, but always got derailed by real life. So I have written the following as a short story. It’s first-person, but not a memoir. [Warning: it’s long, 1000 words instead of my usual 500.]

 

I put the last book back onto the top of the stack. Almost two feet high. 13 books. All started. Some half-finished. And not a single one that I’m willing to continue.

            I reach for the remote before I realize the TV is out. My wife tried to reprogram it so it would “work right.” Now it doesn’t work at all. So she’s in the kitchen revving up some supper. I have until tomorrow, when the doctor will tell me I’m dying. I have until tomorrow to learn who can restore Christian unity.

            I’m not a super-hero, didn’t get bitten by a church mouse to give me special theological powers, although I have encountered a few church rats in my secret forays. I’m just an average theological detective. I’m hired to infiltrate into supralapsarian congregations to find out if any of their members are secretly infralapsarians. That sort of thing.

But I’m secret, not like the big gun theological detectives, who advertise on TV, like “Brother Hammer, The Devil Dasher.” If anyone finds out about Sister Mary Justice and me, the game is over.

No, nothing like that. Sister Mary Justice and I aren’t romantically entangled. Sister Mary Justice isn’t even her real name, just what she goes by in the nether world of theological chicanery that we inhabit. She needed a Protestant to do some nailing on the door of the bishop while she slipped in the back way, and she’d heard of me through the grapevine, the one they squeeze to get the juice for communion. Or Eucharist, as she prefers to call it, acting like she doesn’t even know Protestant words.

My cover in the world is as an expert witness in heresy trials. I’m the world’s leading expert on patripassionism. The problem is, there are no heretics anymore. Anything goes. Otherwise, you’re being “judgy.” Especially patripassionism. Everybody believes that God suffers, and if you look at what we’ve done to God’s world, there is good reason to believe that.

On the dark theological web, though, as a free-lance theologian detective, I am known as the Protestant expert on Catholic theology, or The Methodist Jesuit. Nobody knows that the cross around my neck hides a millstone placed there by my mentor and hero, The Rev. Franco Fudge, Doctor of Divinity, the President of The St. Fiacre University School of Theology. It was he who first realized my talent for duplicity, and my fondness for disguises. [1]

It was the All-Saints party. I was dressed as Huldrich Zwingli, because all the Martin Luther and John Calvin costumes had already been rented out. I was swaggering around, trying to act like a Predestinarian, when Dr. Fudge wiped his mouth and said, very quietly, “You’ll never pull that off. Everyone can tell you’re an Arminian.”

“What can I do?” I gasped, forgetting for the moment, because of his august presence, although it was November, that being an Arminian, I have free will and so can do anything I want.

“Come with me,” he whispered. “History will judge me harshly for this, but I’m going to introduce you to Sister Mary Justice. She’s the one dressed like Martha Stewart.”

“Martha Stewart? At a theology Halloween Party?”

“All Saints, not Halloween. She is trying to infiltrate a new underground movement known as Home Ec Theology. They eschew traditional Aquinian systematic theology categories in favor of recipes that ostensibly produce potluck casseroles but are actually instances of hypostatic union.”

“The two natures of Christ?” I gasped. “But…”

“Yes,” whispered Dr. Fudge, “it may be their devious ploy to unite the two so long divided, Unitarians and Trinitarians, since it is anathema to both alike. Can you imagine a world where Unitarians are taken seriously? I shudder even to think about it.”

“But isn’t anathema reserved for gays alone?”

“No, that’s abomination.”

Now Sister Mary Justice and I were tasked with learning the true identity of the Home Ec Theologian, the one person who could single-handedly reverse the Christian divide that had lasted a thousand years, The Great Schism of 1054.

 I whispered the password, “Filioque.” She passed it back, doing a remarkable imitation of an Italian vesper sparrow: “Feelly-oh-ohkay. Feely-oh-ohkay.”

“Remember the words of Mother Teresa,” she said. “Go home and love your family.”

She pulled a censer from out her robe, waved it in the still air of the ecclesial alley, and disappeared in a cloud of holy smoke.

I did as she said. I went home. I looked at my wife, fixing supper in the kitchen, the way she snuck a lettuce leaf under the Jello until it was almost hidden from all but the eye of unanimous discernment, the way she cleaves a loaf of home-made bread neatly into two parts…

Of course, the two natures of Christ, hypostatic union. I suddenly knew her secret identity. The Notorious HET. The Home Ec Theologian.   

John Robert McFarland

1] St. Fiacre is the patron saint of hemorrhoids sufferers.

 

 

 

 

I GET BY…WITH A LITTLE HELP [M, 11-25-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Shopping Adventures of An Old Man—I GET BY…WITH A LITTLE HELP [M, 11-25-24]

 

She was in line behind me at Target, to use the self-checkout contraption. Around seventeen, With her was a young man who looked like her boyfriend, and a woman who looked like her mother.

I don’t normally use the self-checkout thingamajig. I don’t normally go to Target at suppertime on Sunday. Or any other time. But this was an emergency. Helen’s mouse had died. No, she didn’t cut off its tail with a carving knife. But she was trying to finish a grocery order pickup for Monday, and that’s just hard to do without a mouse.

I went to the back door of Target, because it was faster to drive to that end of the store, and easier to park. I forgot that there are no cash registers there, with real people who work at them. The back-end checkout has only the self-confusion stations. [1]

But I didn’t think of that right away. I was on a mission. I found the mouses. I picked out the prettiest one. Cream colored. Flower pix. It cost more, but it’s nice for a woman to have a little beauty always in hand.

Since I was there anyway, and the microwave splash-dome department was close, I got one of those plastic covers to put over food in the radar range. The old one lost its top in a stove burner incident.

Then to checkout. Three of those things to choose from. I took the one that was closest to the fiftyish lady who was supposed to be helping folks but was sitting behind some carts looking at her phone. For some reason she seemed to be uninterested in fulfilling the duties of a minimum wage job on Sunday night. Still, I thought proximity would be good if I got into trouble.

Yes, the proximity was good, but only for the girl in line behind me. After watching me for a polite amount of trouble, she left her mother and boyfriend and stepped up, and with a sweet smile that showed her braces, asked if she could help me.

I explained that when I put the splash cover on the scanning surface, it had charged me for three, and I didn’t know how to get two of the charges off, or how to start over. She tried. She pushed numerous places on the mechanism. Finally, she went over to the “working” lady and asked her politely to come help us. Reluctantly, she came over, pushed some more places, and we were ready to start over. By “we,” I mean the girl with the braces.

She scanned the cover. Then, as she scanned the mouse, she marveled at its beauty. I explained that it was for my wife, who deserved a beautiful mouse for living with me for 65 years. She said, “That’s so sweet.”

As part of my program to require all credit card slots to point the same way, I acted like I was trying to get my card into the reader by pushing it straight in. I knew, maybe, that it had to be pushed up from the bottom. My benefactress did not understand my plan. She smiled and said, “Would you like me to try?” She took the card and inserted it correctly. [The back end of Target doesn’t have the scanners where you just touch your card.]

By that time, one of the other scanners had come free and her mother and boyfriend had checked out their stuff and were waiting for her. As they walked away, I heard the mother say, in a voice much like her daughter’s, “That was so sweet.”

Well, yes, but I wasn’t letting her help me just to get a compliment.

John Robert McFarland

1] I also forgot that it was supper time, and even though the sun was shining as I drove to Target, it gets dark an hour earlier now, and I don’t drive in the dark, usually, but that’s a different story.

 

KRIS AND ME, SUNDAY MORNING GOING UP [SAT, 11-23-24-

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Lyrics of an Old Man--KRIS AND ME, SUNDAY MORNING GOING UP [SAT, 11-23-24-

 

He put on his cleanest dirty shirt

listened as Bobby sang the blues

with the past all dead and gone

with tomorrow out of sight

Asking nothing but our time

Sunday morning going up

 

I tied the strings on polished shoes

got in my old green Oldsmobile

raised autumn dust on graveled roads

to the steeple with the people

where I told the old, old story

Sunday morning going up

 

Like the Hebrews long ago

toiling up the temple mount

looking for a sign from heaven

with their sacrificial lambs

thinking it was just a little jaunt

Sunday morning going up

 

Jesus spoke the words of justice

Healed misery with mud

Heresy and hearsay were nail and tomb

Thinking they could hide him

with a stone that rolled forever

Sunday morning going up

 

Some day soon I’ll drive away

on a chariot of fire

a trail of memories and stardust

To the door marked not

for exit but for entrance

Sunday morning going up

 

John Robert McFarland

GETTING THE NAME RIGHT [R, 11-21-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Confusions of an Old Man—GETTING THE NAME RIGHT [R, 11-21-24]

 

I’ve never quite understood why Oriental is a bad word. I have no problem using Asian instead of Oriental, but I grew up thinking they were the same thing. Looking it up on line, one distinction is that Oriental should be used for objects, like rugs, but not people. I get that. Persons and objects are not the same thing. But aren’t people in the Orient Orientals, like people in America are Americans?

Don’t get me wrong. I think people should be called what they wish. However, I’ve never had an Oriental person tell me to call them Asian, but I’ve had quite a few American people tell me to call Oriental people Asians.

Am I sounding like an old crank yet? No, “crank” is impolite. You should call me a person of crankiness. You can call a person anything if you put “person of…” first.

Another explanation for Asian instead of Oriental is that it’s just outmoded. We no longer say Negro for instance, even though that was once the preferred, or “polite” term for folks of African descent. But Negro is a term from the days of slavery and segregation.

Well, yes, I understand outmoded. Descriptive words, especially where race and gender categories are concerned, change so rapidly, and no one quite understands why. I suspect it’s because young people always want to say that the words they inherit are outmoded, so that they can create their own generational language. That’s okay. Maybe necessary.

When I was the Methodist campus minister at Illinois State University in the 1960s-70s, that university hired its first black professor, Charles Morris, in mathematics. I was the host of a late-night program on WGLT, the campus radio station. I invited Charles for an interview. In the course of our conversation, I referred to Black folks. He gently corrected me. “The proper word is Negro.”

No, it wasn’t. It had been, but the Black kids I hung around with on campus thought Negro was an Uncle Tom term. They wanted to be called Black precisely because it was wrong. So, in that way, it became right. No one is called Negro anymore, just as no one is called Oriental.

Well, I’m glad that’s settled. Next, I’m going to tackle the difference between Hispanic and Latino and Latinx, and which one is outmoded and which one is “correct.” Be patient with me, though. I may not live long enough to get that one right!

And please don’t ask me about homosexual and queer and gay and…

The point is…even though we are old, and it’s hard to transition from one correct word to the new correct word, we need to work at it. It’s not that hard to be respectful. People will appreciate the effort. Asians and Blacks and… oh, wait a minute… I think they’re Colored now… no, that’s not right… People Of Color… is that it… well, at least I understand the people part, regardless of the category.

Be patient with me! And with yourself!

John Robert McFarland

 

 

HOW TO BE A DIGNIFED OLD MAN [T, 11-19-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—HOW TO BE A DIGNIFED OLD MAN [T, 11-19-24]

 

Daughter Katie Kennedy, the author, was recently recalling one of our family reunions when she was a college student. The McFarlands are a big clan, eight in my father’s generation, and this particular reunion was larger than usual, because the Smiths, my Grandma Mac’s family, were included. Most of the Smiths had not come before, and one of the older Smiths picked Katie to help with identifications. She pointed at me. “Who is that man?” “That’s John McFarland.” She laughed. “Yes, I know that’s John McFarland, but who is he?”

It took quite a while before they figured out that Viola Smith thought I, in my late 40s, looked just like my great-grandfather, John White McFarland, and she thought that is what Katie meant by calling me John McFarland.

When Katie figured it out, she explained, “That’s John Robert McFarland, son of John Francis and Mildred McFarland.” “Oh,” said Aunt Viola. [1]

I’m not sure I’d heard that story before, but I’m glad I have now. I’m glad that I looked like my great-grandfather, for he was an interesting man.

He was fourteen when The Civil War broke out. He lied about his age and joined the Union navy, serving on a gun boat on the Ohio River. He got some fatal disease and was mustered out with a pension “for life.” The government assumed he would die soon. Too bad. They didn’t realize what it meant to deal with a John McFarland. He lived to be 104.

He was a farmer, but because he had a pension--not really very big, but big enough--his real vocation was reading. Books were hard to come by, but he would borrow from anybody who had one. Books were precious, though, so it was a point of honor with him, that he would return a borrowed book the very next day. He would walk to some near-by town to borrow a book, read it as he walked home, sit up with fire light or lamp light and read through the night, and finish his reading as he walked the book back home the next day. [2]

I met him once, when he was the age I am now, and I was about four. He was a dignified old man in a black suit and tie and shoes, and white shirt.

Without intending to copy my great-grandfather, I always assumed I would be a dignified old man, the kind who has a black cane with a silver knob on top, who wears a fedora that he tips to ladies, who speaks kindly and politely to women and children, and wisely to younger men, and who leaves a cloud of gentle good cheer in his wake.

To this point I have been asking children to trade hair with me, since they have so much and I have so little. I have been telling old ladies on walkers that they are clogging up the aisle at church. I tell young men that the secret to a good marriage is the absence of communication. When wait persons ask if we have any questions, I say, “Yes; what is the meaning of life?” I leave a cloud of confusion in my wake.

I may look like John McFarland, but so far, I’m a lot more like John Robert McFarland than John White McFarland. If I am going to be a dignified gentleman in my old age, I need to get started on it very soon now. First, I need a fedora…

John Robert McFarland

1] My father was named for both his grandfathers—John White McFarland and Francis Marion Smith. He was the second son, but the first was named Arthur Glenn, for his father, Arthur Harrison, so John and Francis were both still available when my father was born. Strangely, neither my grandfather nor his first-born son went by Arthur. They were Harry and Glenn. Uncle Glenn was known as a great berry-picker. When he visited us on our farm shortly after we moved there, when I was ten or eleven, he took me berry-picking and taught this city boy to tie kerosene-soaked strings around my ankles to keep chiggers from crawling up my legs and getting into places where you don’t want an itchy chigger bite.

2] He was the model for the character named John White in my Christmas story, “Sheets for Christmas,” about how walking reader John White fools a KKK bunch into providing Christmas for a black family.

 

IT’S IN THE BIBLE…MAYBE [Sun, 11-17-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—IT’S IN THE BIBLE…MAYBE [Sun, 11-17-24]

 

I looked for my Arndt & Gingrich Greek-English lexicon this morning. I wanted to look up the use of some New Testament word. Of course I couldn’t find the lexicon. I don’t have any of my Greek and Hebrew language helps anymore. There was a time when I had a whole shelf full. They have gradually disappeared, just as those languages in my brain have gradually disappeared.

I miss those books. I was never a very good scholar of the Bible languages, but I got satisfaction from working at it. It seemed like what a serious preacher should do, exegete the scriptures of the coming sermon in their original languages.

Well, I do I have an inter-linear, Greek & English [KJV] New Testament, that I use once in a while for break-of-day Bible study, when I’m suspicious of the paraphrasers, especially the jargon “translators.” My Ethics professor, Henry Kolbe, used to say, “The surest way to be irrelevant tomorrow is to be too relevant today.” Jargon is too relevant. It changes so rapidly. What is “dope” today becomes “sick” tomorrow and is almost immediately replace by “brat.” [1] But jargon translations usually get a laugh when used for the scripture reading in Sunday worship, so they are popular. And they really are easier to understand.

The question, though, is: are they accurate? Are we understanding what the Bible writer said in the original language, or are we understanding what some jargon repeater thinks? Or, more importantly, what some jargon listener hears?

The Living Bible [1971]is a paraphrase, not a translation, done by Kenneth N. Taylor for good reasons, so that his children could better understand the Bible passages they used in family devotions. It has been criticized for being both too conservative and too Arminian [free will, 2]. The first criticism is probably valid, since in the original printing, the introduction even said it was written to make it more conservative. That was dropped in later printings. I have to recuse myself on the charge of too Arminian, since I am myself a Wesleyan Arminian.

More than any other type of language, jargon is open to the interpretation of the hearer. Especially when a word that already has a common meaning is appropriated to mean something else.  Dope and sick and brat are probably going to mean something quite different to me than they mean to anyone else.

Jargon is fun. If I say something silly, and a friend says, “Get out of here,” I know it is not meant literally. At least, I hope not. If my friend answers with “Twenty-three skidoo,” well, you know they’re really old!

Jargon is probably necessary as well as fun. But not for the Bible. Best, I think, to stick with the translations of someone who still has an Arndt & Gingrich.

John Robert McFarland

1] “Brat” is the name of the new album by Charli XCX, released just this recent June 7, so it is the current word for the Gen Z and millennial lifestyle, which according to Ms MCX is “…very honest, very blunt, a little bit volatile.” [I had no idea that such a lifestyle is new.]

2] Arminian means free will, [what you do on earth makes a difference about where you’ll spend eternity] as expressed by Jacobus Arminius, rather than predestinarian, [what you do on earth makes no difference since God already knows whether you’ll go to heaven or hell] as espoused by John Calvin, in the Protestant Reformation.

MANAGING OLD PEOPLE [F, 11-15-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—MANAGING OLD PEOPLE [F, 11-15-24]

 

Long-time friend Bob Hammel, the great Hoosier sports writer, had to move recently, with wife Julie, to a retirement home, because neither of them can drive now. Bob and I have always shared coffee and conversation together, so I go out for a morning each week, to drink from the cup that never runs dry, continuing that eternal conversation. [Which is more upbeat this year since Indiana U actually has a football team, rather than a bunch of guys who run around the field doing football-like activities without actually playing football.]

Bob and I often talk about the changes that old age brings, and how old people don’t need as much help as younger people think we do. Well, we might need it, but we don’t want it.

Younger people think that what we need most is security; we should sit in a chair and never move, so that we don’t fall. We don’t want to fall, but we don’t want just to sit in that chair, either. Unless we feel like it. Then we want to be left alone instead of doing the “socializing” that younger people think we need. [I don’t think younger people are going to come out very well in this column, regardless of what they do.]

I was touting independence in one of our conversations, on the theory that any skills and knowledge we suspend, we’ll end up being unable to do at all, so that it’s important to keep doing it so we don’t lose it. Bob, who is a truly wise man, said, “More importantly is the sense of self-worth you get by being able to keep doing things for yourself.”

Well, yes, and that’s where I had the most trouble when I was doing things for my parents when they were in their 80s and 90s, and I was a younger person, in my 50s and 60s.

The problem was: my parents wanted to do for themselves, and they couldn’t. My father was blind and my mother was basically an invalid. Helen and I would work out some plan for them, sometimes at their request, and at the last minute, they’d play fruit-basket-upset. They became both a frustration and a management problem.

Even though it wasn’t exactly my fault—because they really were a management problem—I still feel bad about treating them as such. They probably did not even notice, because they were wrapped up in their own emotions and relationships, and I was surprisingly patient. [And my wife was unsurprisingly competent.] But I knew that I was treating them like a management problem rather than like my parents. I was treating them like I would treat any other cantankerous old person, and, as a pastor, I had plenty of experience with cantankerous old people.

Is there a life lesson here for old people? One I can apply myself? Yes. Don’t be a management problem for your children… oh, wait, that doesn’t sound quite right… oh, here we go… Don’t be a management problem…

John Robert McFarland

THE GREAT ASSUMER [W, 11-13-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Lyrics of An Old Man—THE GREAT ASSUMER [W, 11-13-24]

 

I have been asked several times recently how people can go on these days, in the midst of great disappointments, with little hope. Well, do what I do, and assume that everything will be okay. Just be an assumer…

Remember The Great Pretender song? Buck Ram wrote it as a classic lost love song; he pretends he’s okay, even though she has left him. The Platters had a big hit with it in November of 1955.

Being a hopeless romantic myself, it spoke to me. As it hit the airwaves, I was in my first semester at IU. I had just had a disastrous experience with my first college girlfriend, and also with first semester mid-terms. I realized that I was pretending to be a college guy, able to win the affection of girls and the plaudits of professors, when I didn’t know how.

My biggest problem, though, was not pretending. It was assuming. I assumed I knew more than I really did. Assuming has dogged me my whole life, so this is my theme song…

[You can hear The Platters sing The Great Pretender on You Tube to get the melody.]

THE GREAT ASSUMER

Oh, yes, I’m the great assumer

Assuming I know what to do

Directions I eschew

I already know what to do

At least, I assume that is true

Assuming I know what to do

 

Oh, yes I’m the great assumer

I’m sure that I know where it is

I drive up and down

All ‘round the town

Enclosed in a great cloud of bliss

Even though I don’t know where it is

 

I look for your face

But it’s not in this place

 

Oh, yes, I’m the great assumer

I’m sure the parts are all there

I forge on ahead

Instructions I can’t bear

So where does this last thing go

I really have no way to know

 

Oh, yes, I’m the great assumer

Baby, a hard rain won’t fall

Although prognosticated

It is now belated

Surely it won’t be coming

Oh, I’d better start running

 

To the church I drive

But it’s no longer alive…

 

Oh, yes, I’m the great assumer

Dreaming of heaven above

I know I’ll go there

Eternal bliss I shall share

Until they see my sins on a scroll

Then they’ll tell me where else I can go

 

John Robert McFarland

 

VETERAN’S DAY REGRET [M, 11-11-24]

 BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—VETERAN’S DAY REGRET [M, 11-11-24]

 

One of my semi-regrets is that I did not serve in the military. No, I did not have bone spurs, like some people claimed to get out of military service.

I certainly expected to be in one military branch or another. I grew up during the draft. Unless you had some excuse, like a bad heart, or you were a preacher, you automatically had to serve two years. I was in good health, and certainly didn’t intend to be a preacher.

If you didn’t volunteer for the branch you wanted, the Selective Service just told you where to go. My eyesight wasn’t bad, but I wore glasses, so I figured the Air Force was out. Also the Navy, since I couldn’t swim and didn’t want to. Probably the Marines, since my beloved Uncle Johnny had been a Marine in WWII. But the Army would be okay. Uncles Randall and Bob and Mike had been in hard combat in WWII.

Those WWII guys were real heroes. Not the way we say "hero" now, just anyone who wears a uniform, but men, some very young, who asked not what their country could do for them, but did what they could for their country, regardless of the cost. I wanted to be like them. I think all boys did.

When I was starting high school, several of the junior and senior guys joined the National Guard. They said it was easy money. They just drove thirty miles to the armory at Evansville once in a while and marched around. Then Korea. Their Guard unit was activated. They went to Korea. Hadn’t finished high school. Some just seventeen. Some did not return, and those who did became criminals and wife beaters.

I was too young for Korea and too old for Viet Nam. Besides, by the time Nam came up, I was married, with two children. And I was a preacher.

In high school, I thought I had totally suppressed my promise to God that I would be a preacher if “He” would save my sister’s life. “He” did. I didn’t. So I went to college to become a newspaper reporter.

In my college, though, all male students had to take two years of ROTC. IU had both Air Force and Army ROTC, but we didn’t get to choose. I was assigned to the Army.

I liked it. Uniforms and ranks and orders were right up my alley. I was gung ho. I became the ROTC unit’s DFMS, Distinguished Freshman Military Student. I joined the elite Pershing Rifles. I was going to do four years of ROTC and be an officer in the regular army. Career man. RA all the way.

Then, in the summer before my sophomore year, my deal with God caught up with me. By the time I returned to IU for my second year of ROTC, I was a preacher with three churches. I was no longer interested in a military career, or even ROTC.

The cadre, the teaching officers, didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to tell them. It seemed a bit shameful to drop out of the military, because that’s what it was—dropping out. Even my Selective Service status changed. I was no longer draftable.

Sure, I could have volunteered, but we were without a war then. Korea was done. So what was the point? I was headed for three years of graduate theological school after IU. Besides, I had met a really cute girl. My future was marriage, not military.

I have always honored military folks, active and retired. I tried to be a helpful and understanding pastor to veterans. Sometimes I tried to support soldiers by opposing wars, In the words of Pete Seeger, “Support our boys in Viet Nam, bring them home, bring them home.”

I’ve always been a realist follower of Reinhold Niebuhr about war, though. I’d like to be a pacifist, but I can’t. There are times when you have to oppose evil with force.

On a day like today, though, at all the concerts, the band will play the songs of each of the military branches, and those who served in that branch will stand. I will hum along. I know all the words to all those songs, the WWII words and the more modern versions, too. I say a word of thanks for all who have served, especially those, like the older high school boys I admired, who did not return from war. And I feel a bit of regret that I can’t stand during one of those songs.

John Robert McFarland

THANKS FOR THE THORN [Sat, 11-9-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—THANKS FOR THE THORN [Sat, 11-9-24]

 

My first reaction is the same, every time—irritation, frustration, disgust.

For the last 36 years, my surgically-reduced semi-colon has required me, every day, to stop what I’m doing, with no more than 30 seconds notice, and dash to the toilet. Usually during my early morning hours, my best hours for thinking and writing. When that short notice starts, as I have just ascertained the meaning of the universe but have not yet had time to write it down, I think, Not again! But that is a notice that will not be denied, and by the time I have gotten back to my keyboard, the meaning of life is no longer remembered.

It's my cross to bear. Well, no, it isn’t. It’s not a cross. It’s a blessing. It’s a reminder, of how blessed I am.

It’s similar to the thorn in the apostle Paul’s flesh. [II Corinthians 12:7-9] It certainly started in the same way. I had a pain in my flesh that the surgeon discovered was a tumor penetrating my bowel wall. Had I not had the thorn in the flesh, that sent me to the operating room at midnight on my birthday, I would probably not be alive today.

Paul’s thorn? We’re not sure what it was. He obviously was not speaking of a literal thorn, but it was something—either physical or emotional—that caused him real pain, so much so that he had repeatedly asked God to remove it from him. But God said, “My grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect in weakness.” So, Paul counted his pain as a blessing. It kept him humble, a constant reminder that he was the same as everyone else, that he needed the grace of God.

So, I have learned to ignore that initial frustration and anger at my semi-colon, for interrupting my great thoughts, for I know that it is actually a blessing. For one thing, that semi-colon, although decreased in size and controls, has given me 34 years, when my first oncologist said I’d have only one or two. In those 34 years, I’ve gotten to walk my daughters down the aisle, and play with my grandchildren as they have grown up, and go from 31 years of marriage to 65. And preach the Gospel of Good News. And live it.

There are other thorns we must deal with these days, thorns in the soul as well as the flesh. And yes, my first reaction is still the same, every time—irritation, frustration, disgust. That’s being human. Don’t sweat it if you react that way to your thorn. Just ask God to remove it, and you’ll get the same answer Paul did: “My grace is sufficient for you…”

Go forth in pain, giving thanks for your thorn, to live in love.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

ELECTION POST MORTEM [R, 11-7-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—ELECTION POST MORTEM [R, 11-7-24]

 

In the aftermath of the election, I am thinking of Augustine of Hippo--who by the time he died was Augustine of Rome, and who became St. Augustine--because he was the James Madison of Christian theology. Yes, it was Madison who was the primary writer of The Constitution, and Augustine was the primary theologian who gave us Substitutionary Atonement, The Trinity, and Original Sin, with the transmission of said Original Sin through sex.

 

When Augustine died, he could hear the shouts of the barbarians at the gates of Rome. He knew that the Pax Romana of the great Roman Empire was at an end. He had given his life to making Christianity both palatable and primary in the Roman Empire, and he died knowing that all his work was for naught. The vandals, those without the law, were taking over.

As a young man in Hippo, Augie had no interest in theology, or anything but his own pleasure. His mother, Monica, was a Christian, though, and she prayed devoutly for her son to be converted. Instead, he decided to go to Rome, because there were many and better fleshpots there. Monica prayed even more devoutly. “Don’t let him go to Rome, God. He’ll be lost forever.” Augie went anyway, and there, by chance, he heard Anselm preach his famous bee hive sermon. [2] He was converted, and set about making Christianity acceptable to the legalistic Roman culture and philosophy, which is why the simple belief “…in Jesus Christ, and him crucified” became a huge and impenetrable edifice of conflicting legalisms.

Two points: Monica’s prayer was answered the way she wanted, conversion for her son, even though it wasn’t answered the way she prayed. If Aug had not gone to Rome, he would not have heard Anselm and become a Christian.

And he would not have developed the theology that was so completely in sync with Roman philosophy and culture and government that it became The Roman Catholic [universal] Church—not The Jesus Universal Church.

Second Point: Augustine was a serious and devoted Christian. He really wanted everyone in the Roman Empire to be able to become Christian. He worked to that end. But as he died, he heard the barbarians at the gate. Original sin was going to overwhelm from without rather than from within, and all the work of his life was completely useless.

But the church went on. Lots of bad times along the way, some periods were so bad they were called the dark ages. And Augustine’s theology is triumphant, available for a Hoosier hillbilly to take issue with it.

The bottom line, I think, was said by John Wesley as he died: “The best thing is, God is with us.”

There are plenty of times that we don’t know the way or the will of God, but we can still know the presence of God.

John Robert McFarland

1] He died twelve years younger than I am now.

2] The church is like a bee hive, with one queen bee, and lots of workers, etc. It’s why the sports teams at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, IA are called The Bees, and why I give “Ambrose” as my pickup name at restaurants. [Don’t spend too much time thinking about that last part.]

 

FRAGILE IN THE TRANSITIONS [T, 11-5-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—FRAGILE IN THE TRANSITIONS [T, 11-5-24]

 

I started to get up off the sofa and thought, “This would be a good time to go do something stupid.”

My ability range for doing stupid stuff is rather narrow anymore. It’s mostly, “This would be a good time to go eat something bad for me.” When I was younger, though, I had a wide range of stupidity possibilities. “This would be a good time to tell the bishop what’s wrong with him,” followed by “This would be a good time to apply for a PhD program…” Once you start stupid stuff, it gains momentum.

I hardly ever considered the stupidity possibilities, though, except when I was in transition, from one place to another, from one activity to another, from one…

Helen had a yoga instructor who said, “We are fragile in the transitions.” She meant when moving from one yoga position to another, of course, but I find that it is true emotionally and spiritually, too. My brain and body are always ready to do stupid stuff, but the urge to stupidity is greatest in the transitions.

I don’t understand that. I can be perfectly happy, staid in place, writing a mundane poem or an irrelevant column, with no hint of stupidity rising, but then…yes, it’s usually my bladder that requires me to get up, and I think, “Well, as long as I’m up anyway, what stupid thing can I do?”

It’s never, “Well, as long as I’m up, I could take out the garbage.” No, it’s “As long as I’m up, I could go look at new cars and surprise Helen with a Morris Minor or 2025 Bel Air that looks like the 1956 model.” [1]

I think that we have learned from Trump’s Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol that even as a nation, we are fragile in the transitions. As long as I’m up here, what stupid thing can I do?

Actually, for me, at least, I think it comes from trying to follow Jesus. Have you ever noticed that it was in the transitions that the disciples did stupid stuff? They would be doing fine, taking the roof off somebody’s house so they could lower a sick person down to Jesus to heal them, but when they got out on the road, that’s when the stupidity came out. “Hey, Jesus, can I get a special place in your Kingdom, even though I’m no more deserving than anybody else?” Then, of course, “You don’t deserve a special place; you’re stupid.” “No, you are!” That’s the surest way not to get what you want.

Well, I guess the point is: Be careful in the transitions. What I do in the transitions, when that stupidity urge comes, I think about going out to the road beside our house, where Jesus is passing by, and I get in behind. The way is straight and narrow, so there are no transitions.

John Robert McFarland

1] Blame this on old friend, Jim Bortell.

ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT…ALMOST? [Sun, 11-3-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of an Old Man—ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT…ALMOST? [Sun, 11-3-24]

 

I had totally forgotten about the time I decided to become an advisor to Bobby Kennedy in his run for the presidency in 1968, until the strange life of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has appeared to remind me of a memory placed long ago in the back of my non-worm-eaten brain—the time I decided to be the Protestant/youth advisor to the middle-aged Catholic running for president, Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.

I never intended to be part of the Civil Rights movement, or any other movement. I just wanted to get an education and a pretty wife and have people think I was a good preacher. And be a decent Christian.

The movements of history, though, like time and tide, “wait for no man.” When you are confronted with a moral issue, you have to take a stance. I became a part of the Civil Rights movement just one decision at a time, trying to be a decent Christian, trying to do the right thing at that particular moment. 

The same thing happened with my opposition to the Viet Nam war. I was a campus minister in the days of Viet Nam. My kids were going off to war. I first supported the war, and then learned that our own government was lying to us, that the war was unwinnable, that we were sending young men off to die because, as both Johnson and Nixon said, “I don’t intend to be the first president to lose a war.” It was madness.

There were challengers, though, who said we could do better. When presidential aspirant Eugene McCarthy was asked if he could end the war if he were president, he replied, “Anyone who is president can end the war.” I liked “Clean Gene,” but I thought Bobby Kennedy had a better chance of winning the presidency, and thus of ending the war. I decided to back him.

Not just back him. Work for him. Not just as a volunteer. On his staff.

I thought he needed someone on staff who could advise the Boston Catholic how to deal with Midwest Protestants. Moreover, he needed someone who knew how to communicate with young people. Who better than a Methodist campus minister?

I was afraid to tell anyone. I knew they would ridicule me for thinking I could get onto RFK’s staff, even make contact with him. But I was determined. We needed to end that war. Bobby could do it. I could help him.

So I laid out my plan. I made lists. I collected resources. I put them in folders. I looked over his current staff. I started writing my pitch, why he needed me. I had no idea how to make the necessarily deep connection, but I was sure I could figure it out. I was committed. We had to end that war! Now, how would I explain this to my wife?

Then…RFK was assassinated. It made no difference to me personally. My life would go on as it had been. But…what about Bob? His family? The nation? All those boys—American and Vietnamese--yet to die in the tunnels and ride paddies?

I still have all those ideas I was going to use to help RFK. It’s a different kind of war now, but the nation is just as divided as it was then. I wonder if my ideas could be adjusted to work for a Baptist instead of a Catholic? I wonder how I’m going to explain this to my wife

John Robert McFarland

 

STUPID VOTING [F, 11-1-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Sort Of Relevant Musings of An Old Man—STUPID VOTING [F, 11-1-24]

 

When I learned that the Potter & Brumfield electric relays factory in the county seat was hiring, I went immediately. I really needed a job. There were only two requirements: you had to be 18, and you had to pass the entrance exam.

I had not graduated high school, but they didn’t care about that; I was 18. And I aced the exam. I was hired on the spot.

The quality engineer who gave the exams was impressed by my score. That pleased me, but surprised me, because the exam seemed quite easy. No dates to remember, no equations to prove, no predicate nominatives to place or match case.

Mr. Pohl explained that the exam wasn’t about such things. “We are trying to see if you can think,” he said. “More than half of those who take the exam fail it. They can’t think.”

In civics class, our teachers extolled the high voter turnout we had in our county. But as I heard Mr. Pohl, I realized that more than half of those voters couldn’t think well enough to do a job on a factory line. But there is no test for voting. Those folks have been voting for 70 years. Those still alive will vote again in November. All without being able to think.

My friend and former pastor, Paul Mallory, used to remind me that half of all voters are below average. They are highly motivated to vote, because they want to show the above-average people that their below-average stupidity is just as good as above-average intelligence.

There was a TV commercial a few years ago featuring the founding fathers working on the Constitution, replete with powdered wigs and knee stockings. I can’t remember what product they were touting, but I do remember that as Jefferson argued for the right of all citizens to vote, one of the others incredulously said, “You mean even the stupid ones?”

Well, yes. But if you are not stupid, be sure to vote, for the founding fathers had you in mind…way back then.

John Robert McFarland