SUPEREROGATION [2-28-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Strivings of An Old Man—SUPEREROGATION [2-28-25]

 

[My birth month is up after today, and so will be my excuse for writing self-indulgent columns about myself. I’ll try to get beyond myself in future columns, but I make no promises.]

Quitting was never an option. Whatever life put in front of me, I figured “The only way out is through.” [Robert Frost] Well, I didn’t “figure” it. I didn’t think about it at all. I just had to do whatever was there to do.

So to be successful, I figured I had to show that I could out-do everybody. There probably was a little more thinking in that.

Not out-suffer, because I didn’t think of it as suffering, or even out-work, because I really didn’t think of it as work. Maybe it was trying to out-hardship everybody, or out-endure them. No, those words aren’t quite right, either. I guess I’ll have to stick with that general, generic, “do.” I wanted to show that I could out do everybody.

Early life gave me a hard row to hoe--not as hard as some, but certainly hard enough--and I tried to show that I could outdo even that row. I sought out other hard rows to hoe. I got satisfaction from that.

Hardship was a challenge. I got satisfaction from meeting the challenge and vanquishing it. The bigger the challenge, the greater the satisfaction.

Mostly, I did it in silence. I wasn’t trying to be secretive, though. Indeed, I was glad when someone saw my doing, and praised it, but it seemed wrong for me to call attention to it, except by the doing itself.

It started with sweet-corn detasseling when I was twelve or thirteen. It was hot, miserable work, walking those long corn rows. We made fifty cents per hour, but the work was so bad that few were willing to stick out. Thus Princeton Farms offered a 25 cent bonus, per hour, for anyone who stuck out the whole season, day one through the last day. I was one of only two who got that bonus. That was a huge bonus. I wasn’t about to forego that, regardless of how miserable I was.

I learned that I could outdo, and when I outdid, I got something extra.

The summer before my senior year in college, I was a social worker, basically with seven- to nine-year-old girls, plus out-reach duty, at Howell Neighborhood House in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. But I wasn’t just a full-time social worker. I was also the Sunday morning preacher at two Methodist churches. The other 7 college kid summer workers and three live-in professional social workers were late sleepers, so I would come home from my preaching and have lunch ready for everybody when they dragged in from their various rooms. There was no one that summer who did more than I did.

When I entered seminary, I was the Director of a community center that had a pre-school, a football team, a youth program, cooking and sewing and citizenship and workshop classes, and an after-school program. Because I tested high, the seminary offered me—one of only three students who qualified—the chance to take Greek and Hebrew classes at the same time I was taking the English Bible classes all students took. I jumped at the chance.

At every stage of my life, it was the same: outdo.

It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Many of us who outdo also neglect family and friends and God, but I tried to outdo in those areas of life, too.

The problem now that I am old is that I am unable to outdo. I can barely do. Having gotten my identity and satisfaction so long by outdoing, I’m now adrift. With nothing to outdo, especially with nothing the world wants me to outdo, or cares if I outdo, or even do, who am I? With nothing to outdo, how do I keep from being bored?

Not for the first time, but maybe for the last time, I have a great opportunity, to move from status as a human doing to that of a human being.

Stay in touch. I’ll let you know if it works out.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

 

INCLUDED [W, 2-26-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—INCLUDED [W, 2-26-25]

 

The only way a new kid could get accepted in my childhood inner-city neighborhood was by breaking the line in Red Rover. Acceptance meant you got to join the line. The big bully boys would lock their arms and dare me to try to break through. But I wasn’t just the newest kid. I was the youngest and weakest. No way I could join that line. Until their mothers sent their little brothers and sisters out to play. The longer the line got, the more chances there were to break through. Better chances, too. And I so much wanted to be included…

Inclusion. That has been the theme of my life. Because I knew how painful it was to be excluded, I wanted everyone else to be included, too.

I had a big extended family. My mother was one of 8 children, my father one of 7. Until I was 4, my immediate family often lived with my paternal grandparents, because it was Great Depression days. I learned that inclusion was best in a wide circle.

If you try to get included in a small circle, and you are rejected, the hurt and shame are great. If you try for inclusion in a big circle, even if you are rejected in one place, you might be accepted somewhere else.

In our small nuclear family of four, I often felt excluded. Our parents spent so much energy trying to work out their relationship that they often had none left over for my older sister and me. Mary V was a great older sister, including me in her love and concern, but almost 5 years older, she often wanted time to herself or with other girls her age. I was often left on my own, roaming the streets of Indianapolis at age 8 and 9, looking for some place to belong. I liked to roam especially in the winter, when lights came on early, because I could look into the houses as I walked by on the sidewalk and see scenes of inclusion. In those houses, I could imagine that everyone was included. in my own house, I knew that was not true.

In my early years, until we moved to the farm when I was 10, I just wanted to be included. I didn’t want responsibility for including others, leadership of the circle. Likewise, I was afraid of rejection. That was even worse that exclusion. So, I didn’t try too hard for inclusion. I mostly looked on from the outside.

But Oakland City was a different world. I didn’t need my small family circle. Kids on the school bus and in my class thought it was not only acceptable but good to have a new kid. I had friends! My circle was widening. I saw new possibilities. I not only enjoyed inclusion, but I wanted to extend it to others. Big circles were best. I wanted to have a role in making the circle bigger.

I think that is why I was elected class president in high school, year after year. I knew the names of everybody in the class. I called them all by name. I made sure that each got a personal invitation whenever there was a class party or other event. I was everybody’s friend.

I think that is why I became a preacher. Yes, I traded my life for my sister’s, but that was the mechanism, not the impetus. In the church, everyone is included. Everyone in the world.

To me, it just felt like common sense, natural, to include people who are usually excluded, such as ethnic or gender minorities, people who are “different.” It made no sense to me that anyone could be excluded from the world created by a God who was willing to sacrifice himself, in Christ, for everyone.

John Robert McFarland

“Perhaps the secret of living well is to pursue unanswerable questions in good company.” Rachel Naomi Remen

AWARE OF THE PRESENCE [M, 2-24-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—AWARE OF THE PRESENCE [M, 2-24-25]

 

I would like to be a mystic, have experiences of mysterious sounds and voices and lights and colors and temperature changes. I respect the witnesses of folks who have those experiences. I’m not a mystic, though. I’ve never had those experiences. But I am an awarer.

That’s not a word, but it should be. By it, I mean simply that I am aware of the presence of what William James called the “something more.” [1] There is something more than we can experience with our earthly senses and encompass with our earthly words.

We usually refer to that “something more” as God.

The problem with the word God, though, is that, as Paul Tillich put it, “As soon as you say God, you lose God.” In other words, the something more can’t be contained in any word, or any number of words.

As an awarer, though, I need to use the word God to be able to explain that I am aware of God. I don’t see God, but I am aware of the presence of God.

It’s like when I’m looking out the window and Helen comes up behind me, a little bit off to my side, and she looks out the window with me. I can’t see her, but I know that she is there. I am aware of her presence.

 

I’m also aware of the presence of God, looking out the window with me, looking together at the universe.

Awareness is not belief. I am a believer, as well as an awarer, but they don’t necessarily go together. You can be one without the other, I think. The point is to allow either belief or awareness, the former basically intellectual and the latter basically spiritual, to lead you toward the something more.

Perhaps you need not be either a believer or an awarer. Maybe you just need to be a knower, knowing that there is something more.

Rachel Remen tells a story of taking her mother to see a nephew ordained as a priest. The family was Jewish, refugees from Russia, and Rachel’s grandfather, her mother’s father, was a famous rabbi. But the nephew’s father had married a Catholic girl and converted. His son was becoming a priest.

Rachel’s mother was not religious. She was in poor health. The service was two hours long and entirely in Latin. Rachel worried about her. But as they left, her mother said, “It was wonderful. My father, the rabbi, would be so proud. Another life dedicated to befriending the movement toward wholeness in others.”

Her mother was not religious, but she had been a social worker and advocate for the poor, trying to make a better world, trying to help others move toward wholeness.

Remen concludes that all those ways of helping others move toward wholeness, of being aware of the something more, are holy.

John Robert McFarland

1] The Varieties of Religious Experience

OLD GUY SOFTBALL [Sat, 2-22-25]

 BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—OLD GUY SOFTBALL [Sat, 2-22-25]

 

Today “my” Cincinnati Reds start spring training games. The training itself started Feb. 9, when pitchers and catchers reported. Why those guys first? It takes pitchers a little longer to get into game shape, and what’s a pitcher without a catcher?

In the Rocking Chair League, pitchers didn’t even need warmup, since they threw about two miles per hour, and catchers didn’t even bother to crouch. They stood as far behind home plate as the umpire would let them, caught [maybe] the ball on the bounce, and then bounced or rolled the ball back to the pitcher.

Bill Holada’s obit was in the paper recently. Bill was manager of the Fossils team in the Rocking Chair League. It was an old guys league. Over fifty. I played third base. We thought we were old, enough to be named Fossils. That was almost forty years ago. Little did I know what it meant really to be a fossil!

I played third base because I was the new guy on the team, and we already had a first baseman, my usual position. He was Bubba, from Alabama, and he was even taller and slower—the main attributes for a first baseman--than I. That left third base for me, because nobody wanted to play third, because it really was “the hot corner.”

In an old guys league, 90% of the players bat right-handed. It was slow-pitch, so they had time to wind up to hit the ball as hard as possible. That meant screaming grounders down the third base line. After a game, I’d be bruised all over—arms, legs, chest—because we played on a field that had experienced no dragging or raking in thirty years. Every ground ball hit a divot or a clod and bounced anywhere but into my glove.

I was backed up by Kenny Zike, who played left field. Kenny was my neighbor and friend and fellow cancer survivor. He was also the fire chief, and whenever a fire siren sounded, he took off. Sometimes the fire truck would come down the street beside the softball field and he would just jump on. It was a professional fire department, not volunteer, but Kenny being the chief, he needed to be at every fire. So, in times of fire, I had no backup.

That was when we’d look on the bleachers for anyone in an orange shirt. That was the color of our uniforms. Well, our uniforms were just t-shirts, in the proper color, with the team name on the front and the player name and number on the back.

Why we needed shirts with names and numbers, no one knew, but we got a new shirt every year, so when our granddaughter was born, I ordered my new shirt in her size and with her name. Manager Holada assigned her the # 1.

The other teams had names, but I can’t remember them. We never used team names, anyway. We referred to teams as light blue or dark blue or green, whatever the t-shirt uniform color was. If a team was missing a player, like Kenny during a fire, anyone with the right color shirt would fill in. I loved to play, and on game days there would be three games in a row, so I would pack t-shirts of every color in my gym bag and go early so that I could get into more games.

That’s the kind of league it was-casual. The home team was responsible for keeping score. That job fell to some wife who was there for the late afternoon game, with the hope of getting her husband to take her for a burger after the game so she didn’t have to cook. One game we were changing sides when one of the guys asked what the score was and what inning we were in. The score-keeper wife said, “Oh, I don’t know. I stopped keeping score a long time ago. It was just too much trouble, and you looked like you were having fun…”

Bill Holada wasn’t just our team manager and right fielder, he was the creator and commissioner of The Rocking Chair League. I’ll be forever grateful to him. It was the kind of time where we had so much fun we didn’t need to keep score.

There were Republicans and Democrats on that team. There were atheists and evangelicals. There were professionals with doctorates and high school drop-outs. But you played with and for anyone with the right color shirt, and you didn’t even worry about the score.

John Robert McFarland

MAKING FRIENDS LAUGH [2-20-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Humor of An Old Man—MAKING FRIENDS LAUGH [2-20-25]

 

What do you do when your hip, your computer, your furnace fan, and your car all go bad at the same time? Well, nothing! Not until you get them fixed. So I missed my usual every-other-day schedule of posting columns this week because of furnace repair guys, physical therapy, tow trucks, and computer guys who like to talk but cannot work and talk at the same time. The furnace fan is still a mystery, even though we did pay for a service call. Anyway… I suspect people would have laughed had they seen my befuddlement this week, which is the segue to…

Most people come to church hoping the preacher will say something funny, that they’ll have some reason to laugh.

I always felt that I needed to entertain a friend. In the early days, that meant telling jokes.

Fifteen-year-old boys rival dads for corny jokes. They collect them and tell them. I certainly took my turn at that.

[Spoiler alert: you’ve probably heard these jokes before…]

Preachers are especially subject to laughs about butts. Perhaps because it seems so naughty. Especially in the context of worship.

I remember how the late, great George Paterson laughed so hard when I told him and Ida Belle the one about the pastoral prayer in the worship service. The preacher intoned, “…we are but dust,” and would have gone on, but a little voice piped up and said, “Mommy, what’s butt dust?”

And Joe Snider, our wonderful pastor when I was retired, laughed so hard when I told him about something his successor did. She had been an accountant for many years before entering the ministry, and she preached like an accountant. She liked to build up all the arguments for a theological proposition, and then switch and name all the arguments against it. On one fateful Sunday, she got to the switch point and said, “But…and I’ve got a really big but here…” The congregation went deathly silent. We all knew that if one of us broke and giggled, the whole place would go up. Joe went exactly the opposite of silent; he knew just what each of those folks would look like, shoulders trembling as they tried to suppress guffaws.

Talk show host Stephen Colbert was only ten years old when his father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash. He thinks he became a comedian because after that loss, each time he could make his mother laugh was so precious.

Some of my happiest memories are when I made someone laugh. Not just genial laughter, but the loss-of-control laughter of surprise.

My father was a quiet man by nature, and even more so after he lost his eyesight in an industrial accident when I was five. He had so little to laugh about. When I was in my junior high joke spieling period, he was more likely to tell me to shut up than to laugh. When Helen joined the family, though, he loosened up so much. She’s had a knack for charming old men. Still does.

We were visiting my family—younger brother and sister still at home—when I told the story about Harry Truman campaigning out west on an Indian reservation. [1] Truman said, “You’re going to have chicken in every pot.” The Indians chanted, “Oompah! Oompah!” He continued: “And a car in front of every wigwam.” “Oompah! Oompah!” And so on. When he was finished, the chief said, “Mr. President, please step into the corral so we can present you with our best horse and silver-mounted saddle. But be careful. Don’t step in the oompah.” Daddy had voted for Truman, but he was sure than anything a politician said was oompah, but he’d never heard that word for it before. It caught him by surprise. He laughed until tears ran down his face.

We need laughter in the world right now. Say something funny. Even if you are the only one who laughs…

John Robert McFarland

 

1] “Indian” is the term the joke used.

THE BIG STORY [W, 2-16-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—THE BIG STORY [W, 2-16-25]

 

[More of my February self-indulgent personal memories, using my birth month as an excuse…]

I liked newspapers for as long as I can remember, which is about four years of age. They had stories that you didn’t have to know how to read to enjoy. Comic strips. There was progression from one panel to the next. Some, like Henry, didn’t even use thought/language balloons. I could see stories, before I could read, long before TV.

There was radio, of course, which I also loved for the stories. You didn’t need to read to enjoy them, either. But radio shows in those days were only “same time, same station.” If you missed an episode of The Lone Ranger or Red Ryder, you simply missed it.

The newspaper was constant, though. Even if my mother told me to get my nose out of the newspaper and run to the store, I could pick the newspaper up later.

Because I started looking at newspapers and listening to the radio for the stories, I began to understand that news itself was narrative. That was probably why my grade school teachers mentioned in their notes to my parents how much I seemed to know about current affairs. I listened to news broadcasts because I found stories everywhere.

I have often said that my interest in becoming a newspaper reporter stemmed from listening to The Big Story radio show, which is mostly true, but I want to give credit to The Indianapolis Times, too, the evening paper when I lived in Indianapolis from age 4 to 10. That was where I got to see the stories of The Phantom and Alley Oop and Joe Palooka and Henry, the kid who had only one hair on his head.

The Big Story radio show ran almost exactly through the years of my youth in Oakland City, 1947-1955. I wanted to go to college, but I knew I might not get to. No money. In those days, though, you didn’t have to be a college grad to get a job on a newspaper. I decided that with or without college, I would be a newspaper man.

So I got on the staff of Oak Barks, our high school newspaper, and worked my way up to Editor. I went around piously intoning that Thomas Jefferson had said that if he had to choose between government and newspapers, he would take newspapers. I figured no one could argue with Thomas Jefferson, so no one could argue with my vocational choice.

In the summer of 1955, I stumbled into admission at IU even without money, and I became a journalism major. But when I was 14, I had promised God I’d be a preacher if “He” saved my sister’s life, and He did. I had not kept my bargain. The guilt of my unfulfilled deal caught up with me the summer after my frosh year. I went back for my sophomore year as a pre-theology major. Of course, the godless state university had no such thing as a pre-theo curriculum, so I became a history major. History is all stories.

I was so disappointed that I had to be a preacher. I had looked forward, so much, for so long, to telling stories, in newspapers. Now, as a preacher, I’d have to give that up. I’d have to write long, boring sermons about whether God exists, and were there really miracles, and why you’d go to hell if you smoked cigarettes.

Even as a history major, though, I did not give up my love affair with newspapers. I took all the history courses that allowed me to read stuff by newspaper guys, especially the muckrakers, like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and the two volumes of The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.

But that very autumn of my sophomore year, Dallas Browning, the District Supt of the Evansville District of The Indiana Conference of the Methodist Church, appointed me to preach every Sunday at the three churches on the Chrisney circuit. A new sermon, every Sunday. I did not know how to write sermons, and I had no time to write sermons. So I told stories.

People seemed to get more out of stories than they did sermons, so I just kept on doing what I had thought I would do as a newspaper man, telling stories, speaking truth to power, like Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens.

Every week, I got to tell The Big Story.

 

John Robert McFarland

 

 

HELEN’S CHOICE [F, 2-14-25]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—HELEN’S CHOICE [F, 2-14-25]

[Continuing my birth month personal history columns… so, today, a column about my Valentine.]

As a teen, Helen loved her pastor, Newton Fowler. Even more, his wife, Lucretia. They were warm and personal, but also dignified. Helen wanted to be like that.

“Dignified” was an exception in Gary, Indiana in the 1940s and 50s. Helen’s family moved to Gary because her father had a job at U.S. Steel. Her first ten years had been in the little town of Monon, where three generations of relatives, on both sides of her family, lived. She and her same-age cousin, Sam, could safely roam the town together. It was idyllic, and all she knew.

Gary was different. The first day there, Helen was sitting on her front stoop, reading a book, when a girl her age walked by. With malice, without knowing her, except that she was new, the girl called Helen a dumbass. [1] Gary was a rough and rowdy place.

Helen and her mother had attended the American Baptist Church in Monon. [2] After a couple of church tries in Gary that didn’t work, about the time Helen became a teen, they discovered Westminster Presbyterian, and Newton and Lucretia Fowler.

The Fowlers encouraged Helen. She was the only teen who sang in the chancel choir. She became president of the youth group. She began to think, vaguely, that perhaps she should have a career in the church. Probably as a Christian ed director, since women could not be ordained as clergy then. [3]

She met me at the start of her sophomore year in college. She’d already had a year as a home ec major, but a degree in home ec led to being a wife or a teacher. She didn’t think she wanted to teach, and being a wife was not in her control. She was still thinking, vaguely, about a church career, when she met this guy who as a college junior was already preaching on a three-church circuit. Getting involved with him meant a church career one way or another.

That didn’t bother her, of course. She liked the church. She had seen Lucretia Fowler live a good life as a preacher’s wife. But it did give her one problem…

…was she interested in me because I was a preacher? Did she want a Newton Fowler clone? Did she want the church, or did she want me?

I broke up with her in the summer of 1958 because I had so much responsibility for supporting my parents and younger brother and sister that I just couldn’t see my way to marriage, either financially or emotionally.

That summer Helen went on vacation with her parents and sister, making the grand loop around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. As they passed through a town, she saw guys working the garbage truck. The question suddenly posed itself: would I want to marry John if her were a garbage truck guy instead of a preacher? It was sort of moot, but she said the answer was very clear: Yes! [4]

So, when I called her up on Oct. 18 that fall, with no preface at all, and asked her to go out with me, and presented her with an engagement ring, she had her answer ready.

Why did I change my mind? Because my heart had not made the change. When you are in love, all the reasons why you should not marry just fade into insignificance.

What happened to all my concern and care for my family? Poor Helen! She got 45 years of that, too!

John Robert McFarland

1] Maybe something worse. Helen was so shocked she isn’t sure she remembered it accurately.

2] Also called Northern Baptists, to distinguish their theology from that of the Southern Baptists.

3] Presbyterians didn’t get around to ordaining women until 1965.

4] She can’t remember which UP town it was where she saw the garbage guys at work. Maybe didn’t even know its name then. But there is only one highway to loop around the UP, US 2, so it’s possible it was Iron Mountain, where we lived 50 years later. That’s a fun coincidence to consider.

OLD AGE BRAGGING [W, 2-12-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Regrets of An Old Man—OLD AGE BRAGGING [W, 2-12-25]

 

Well, I did it. Something I had pledged never to do. There are many things I have pledged never to do, having done them before to great embarrassment and chagrin, but this particular broken pledge is about old-age oneupmanship.

I was sitting on a bench outside the walk-in clinic--where I had to go for x-rays because the machine in my doctor’s office was broken—waiting for Helen to bring the car around, to spare my painful hip the walk to the parking lot.

As old man walked by me. Well, almost. He got by me but then circled back. He needed to talk to someone who would understand. “We’re old, aren’t we?” he said.

Well, he was wrong, of course. People sometimes think that I’m old because of my gray beard or my absence of hair. Gray beards are simply distinguished, but I made the mistake of telling Helen’s hair cutter, as she was “trimming” mine, that Helen thought I looked more intelligent with short hair, so Kate decided to make me look like a genius. No, I’m sure he thought we were kindredly elderly not because I look old but because I had a cane.

Anyway, I wanted to be kind to him, since he was old, so I acknowledged the truth of his declaration. Mistake. “I’m 86,” he proclaimed proudly.

Old age bragging rights! I noticed them first when I started calling in the homes of old people when I was a young pastor. Those denizens of past years delighted in telling me how old they were and how many surgeries they’d had and how many spouses they had outlived. I didn’t really think that any of that was worth bragging about. They weren’t really achievements.

It was even worse when old people were together, standing around after church, or sitting together at a potluck. Constant oneupmanship. I’m older than you! I’m sicker than you! I’ve had more operations than you! I’m more decrepit than you!

I vowed I would never be like that

But when that guy said he was 86, and he was so proud of it, well, I said, “You’re just a kid. I’m 88!”

Immediately I knew what I had done. He needed to be proud that he had endured, but I was so eager to win the old age competition that I just threw cold water on his “achievement” by comparing it to mine.

I scrambled to make it up, and was successful, I think, because he got to brag that he is so old that he has a child who is 65, and my oldest one is only 63. I was gracious in acknowledging that he won that one. That made us even, almost, I hope.

I think now that when I get old, I’ll better understand what motivates this competition. I was wrong when I was young to think that many years and many operations and many pains were not achievements. Endurance is an achievement, something to be proud of.

Also, though, something that doesn’t need to be compared to the endurance of others to be worthwhile.

 I’m so much older than everybody else that I am wise like that!

John Robert McFarland

RENOUNCING THE DEVIL [M, 2-10-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—RENOUNCING THE DEVIL [M, 2-10-25]

 

One of my cousins, in her 80s, raised her great-grandson. Two generations of their family were either unable or unwilling to provide a home for him. I greatly admire her. Raising a child is difficult at any age, but in your 80s?

At his confirmation, like any thirteen-year-old, he was a bit anxious, being up in front of all those people in a solemn ceremony, and distracted, so when the pastor asked him, “Do you renounce the devil and all his works?” he looked quite startled and shouted out, “No!”

My cousin was quite relieved when they got it sorted out. It wasn’t because, coming into puberty, he thought the devil and all his works might be quite appealing, like Brutus P. Thornapple, of “The Born Loser” comic strip, who, when asked by his pastor if he were troubled by bad thoughts, said, “No, I rather enjoy them.” The boy had heard the reverse of what he had been asked; he thought he was being asked to affirm the devil and all his works.

Pastor, congregation, and great-grandmother all had a big and relieved laugh together.

These are times when it is easy to become anxious and distracted. Indeed, the devil tries to confuse us so that we’ll not hear correctly the question God puts to us. We are asked by so many forces in the world, in so many ways, to affirm the devil and all his works.

The only way we renounce the devil and all his works is by loving. Love is the only thing that trumps the devil. [Yes, I understand my use of that word.]

If we try to defeat the devil with anything other than love, we shall fail.

Love is not weakness. It does not try to avoid confronting evil. It uses all the power that God provides. That power of God is love.

But love is not vengeance. It is not disrespect. It is not schadenfreude. Love is patient and kind. Love is not boastful. It’s not proud. It keeps no scorecard of wrongs. It is faithful. It is hopeful. Love never fails. [I Corinthians 13 paraphrased]

I’ve had contact recently with a distant friend whose wife died. He said, “I’ve been comforted by something you wrote a long time ago. ‘Love and I looked death in the eye; death blinked.’”

As we travel through these current dangerous and difficult times, God asks us, “Do you renounce the devil and all his works?” It is important to remember that the only way to renounce the devil and all his works is by loving God and all of God’s works, all that God loves.

John Robert McFarland

We know that there are approximately 2.3 million grandparents raising grandchildren in the US, but there are no stats on the number of great-grandparents in that role. From my own pastoral experience, though, I know that there are way too many, far more than we realize.

SHORT STORY SALVATION [Sat, 2-8-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—SHORT STORY SALVATION [Sat, 2-8-25]

 

[Warning redux: This is my birthday month, so the February columns are mundanely personal…at least, until spring training starts.]

Mrs. Powers gave me an old copy of “Capper’s Weekly” to take to Mother, for the recipes and hints on canning. On the way home, I looked into the magazine and found a story. Just a few pages. I read the whole thing before I got home.

I was astounded. You didn’t have to write a whole book to tell a whole story. It didn’t have to be the length of Treasure Island or Two Years Before the Mast. It could be whole in just a few pages, the time it took to walk the dirt road between the Powers house and ours.

I was eleven years old. I didn’t know then that as a literary genre, they were known as “Short Stories,” [Duh?] but I knew I had discovered something significant, something for a lifetime. I knew that I wanted to read short stories. I knew that I wanted to write short stories.

I did not know then that a sermon is a short story. I thought when I agreed to be a preacher that I would have to give up writing stories. Preaching, instead, was a fulfillment of that short story aspiration.

For sixty years, I told short stories from a pulpit. They were called sermons. That’s what it said in the worship bulletin-Sermon. But they were really short stories, about how God relates to the world and the creatures in it, each one a story in whole, that has no beginning and no ending.

Rarely did I actually write them. Yes, in the early days of my preaching, the days of Civil Rights and Viet Nam, I would write a manuscript, so that I could prove to some critic what I actually said rather than what they misunderstood me to say.

Also, because church and clergy periodicals sometimes wanted to print those sermons. It was easier to have a manuscript already prepared than to try to recreate it from memory. Once cassette recorders became common, though, I just recorded the sermon. If a copy were needed, it was simple enough for my secretary to take it off the tape.

Stories are always in the imagination before they are on the page. The “oral tradition” is much older than the printed page or the computer screen.

The Bible is not a book, a novel; it’s a collection of short stories.

The Gospel is not a book, a novel; it’s a collection of short stories.

When a tyrant tries to take over a nation, he wants to write a novel, a book, a long book, like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich. It is difficult for the rest of us to write a book when the tyrant has the only pen. But there is still time to tell a short story, one that can be read even on a short and dusty road. We combat the long book of evil by telling the short stories of love.

John Robert McFarland

I say that Mrs. Powers gave me a “Capper’s Weekly,” but it might have been a “Collier’s.” There were several general-interest magazines then that included short stories. We could not afford to buy magazines, or subscribe to them, but neighbors kindly shared magazines with us when they were through with them. I loved them all.

My short story awakening did not cause me to give up on books. I’ve read plenty of them. Even wrote a few. Still read them. But I read books in short story form—a few pages at a time. Indeed, at any given time, I have 6 or 8 books in my “page a day” rotation, which is exactly what it says. I love to see how the authors and stories react to one another. Yes, sometimes I take 610 days to read a book. It’s how I judge the ability of an author, to hold my attention from day to day.

FLATTENED [R, 2-6-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—FLATTENED [R, 2-6-25]

 

It was a lunch hour pickup football game. I was assigned to block Tommy Houchins. He was a 200 lb senior. I was a 100 pound 8^th grader. He growled, “If you get in my way, I’ll flatten you.” I think it was the only time he ever talked to me.

No, the seniors didn’t haze the 8^th graders, or mistreat us in general. They basically ignored us, except to refer to us as “those little 8^th graders.” It was an apt description. Most of us were little still, thirteen years old, barely into puberty, just beginning high school growth.

For some reason, in Oakland City, high school started with 8^th grade. Lunch-time pickup games included anyone who wanted in, even little 8^th graders. But we didn’t get to touch the ball, like throw it or catch it. We were assigned to the line…across from people like Tommy Houchins.

Folks usually don’t believe me when I say that high school was an idyllic time. Oh, sure, there were the usual academic woes concerning algebra, and the romantic tragedies of real or imagined rejection, but kids really were nice to one another. This was the 1950s. Niceness was expected, and rewarded. Yes, we made fun of one another. If a boy wore those green or gray work pants to school instead of blue jeans, we’d say, “You going to a funeral?” Miss Grace Robb frowned even on that, and we liked Miss Robb and wanted to please her, so we tried to keep out of her hearing when we made rude remarks.

Which brings me back to the offensive line, and Tommy Houchins. I was caught between a rusher and a quarterback. I didn’t want to let my team down, by letting Tommy through, but I didn’t want to get flattened, either. So, I tried to make it look to my teammates, especially my quarterback, that I was trying to block Tommy, while not actually getting in his way. It didn’t work. Tommy flattened me, and my teammates were disgusted with me, especially the QB, since Tommy flattened him, too.

You would think that the point here is that I learned my lesson and no longer tried to appease both sides of opposing forces. Not so at all! I continued that through my whole life, even though I learned then, and over and over, that there is no way you can please everybody.

But I take satisfaction from knowing that each time I got flattened, even though I was trying to avoid flattening, and each time my teammates got disgusted with me, even though I was trying to avoid their odium, it meant that I had lined up in the right place, on the right side.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

HOW MANY JOHN MCFARLANDS DOES IT TAKE TO… [T, 2-4-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—HOW MANY JOHN MCFARLANDS DOES IT TAKE TO… [T, 2-4-25]

 

Today is my birthday, so I looked up John McFarland on Google. Turns out that there are 1316 people in the US—mostly men, I assume--named John McFarland, “in places like Ohio,” it goes on to say, as though Ohio might be an especially useful place to be named John McFarland. I guess so; I was born there. So was my great-grandfather, John White McFarland. [1]

I had no idea there are so many of us. We could have a club.

It wouldn’t be nearly as big as the Jim Smith Society. The folks of that name, male and female [Yes, they admit Jimmies] even have an annual convention, no name tags required. They are never embarrassed by forgetting the name of another attendee.

Several years ago, we checked into a motel in East Lansing, MI, on a trip to bring granddaughter Brigid home for a college break. The receptionist was confused. She had us down both for one night and for two. Helen thought it might be because she [Helen] had called twice, because she had to make a change from the original reservation. But the receptionist decided it was probably because another John McFarland was involved, because, she said. “It’s a very common name.”

Really? In East Lansing, Michigan? She must have grown up in Ohio.

Well, yes, I know that it’s a common name, but not quite as common as Jim Smith. Also, I’m the only one with that name, except for my father and the other 1316.

Back when I was in college, all basketball players were named Johnson or something similar. Watching college basketball now, I’m often confused by the hyphenated last names of players. When you know the name only from hearing the commentators announce it, or mispronounce it, it often sounds like they are calling a player by first and last names, like Winston Morgan when he played for IU. For some reason other players were called only by last names, but he was always given both. Once someone referred to him only as Morgan and I had no idea who they were talking about. That’s why the names of players should always be on the backs of their jerseys. But these days, with a hyphenated name like Rodriguez-Wojtowicz, the letters are so small they are hard to read.

Hyphenated names have always existed, but they got a real boost from the women’s lib movement of the 1960s. [The movement for full rights for women had been going on for a long time, in various ways, but it wasn’t until the ‘60s that it was regularly called women’s liberation.] As women protested losing their family identity by taking the names of their husbands, one of the solutions was using both names, with hyphens. A couple of those couples were personal acquaintances, the Neufer-Emswilers and the Birkhahn-Rommelfangers. We often wondered what they would do if a child of the Neufer-Emswilers married a child of the Birkhahn-Rommelfangers. They certainly could not play basketball.

Anyway, today I am doubly infinitized. [An 8 horizontally is the sign for infinity.] So I feel doubly blessed. Thank you for being part of that birthday blessing.

John Robert McFarland

1] There is probably a simple migratory reason why John McFarlands proliferate in Ohio. Scots-Irish folk immigrated to America primarily in southern Virginia and the Carolinas and then--the never-quite-satisfied-with-where-they-be people that McFarlands are--worked their way up through Appalachia to Ohio and Indiana.

 

In Scotland we heard a folk singer warble, in Celtic, a song, when translated into English, says, “Grab your spears and grab your wife and run for your life, because the McFarlands are coming.” Consider yourself warned.

When a history professor of daughter Katie learned that her father was a McFarland and her mother a Kerr [pronounced Karr], he turned pale. What kind of offspring might come from the two most notorious Scots clans?

 

 

IS IT WRONG TO BE PROUD OF YOURSELF? [SU, 2-2-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—IS IT WRONG TO BE PROUD OF YOURSELF? [SU, 2-2-25]

 

[Warning: It’s my birth month, and it may be my last. Nothing imminent—no dread disease. But I’ve had a whole lot of birth months now, so… Anyway, I’m doing personal reflections this month, while I can, just writing about my own life. It might be boring. You could check back at Lent to see if I’ve gotten beyond myself.]

Is it self-indulgent, or a mark of hubris, or illusionary…to be proud of yourself for… working hard and making something of yourself…bragging about how far you came… well, yes, I always thought so. I mean, you can always find folks who had it harder than you did. But…

I saw an interview with Sophia Loren. She was a lonely, skinny girl in southern Italy. Her father was gone. She and her mother barely had enough to eat. Her mother entered her at age 14 in a local beauty contest because they needed the prize money. She didn’t want to be in the contest, because she thought her mouth and nose were too big. Apparently they were, because she won only second place. But it was enough for them to move to Rome, where she got a job modeling.

As she assessed her career, in her 80s, she said, “I think it’s okay now to say I’m proud of myself. It’s not bragging. It’s just being authentic. I had a really hard time as a girl, but I worked hard, and I made something of myself.”

Well, I figure that if an old lady like Sophia [She’s 3 years older than I] can be proud of herself for working hard and making something of herself, then so can I. I hope it’s authentic instead of boastful.

My parents were born in the first decade of the 20^th century. They both grew up in primitive conditions—well for water, outhouse, coal stoves, walking or using a horse to get some place. That was normal for their time.

It was not normal, though, after WWII, when I was ten and they moved us to a primitive little farm, but primitive was our lifestyle, anyway. It was all we could afford. All our neighbors by then had indoor plumbing, running water, central heat, cars instead of horses. We had none of those things.

On top of that, my father was blind and could not get a job. My mother had to apply for Aid to Dependent Children—welfare, which automatically made us “welfare chiselers.” We had an income of $85 per month, $1200 per month in today’s dollars. $14,400 per year. It wasn’t much for six people.

My first jobs didn’t pay anything. My father would trade the labor of the two of us together—building fence, making hay, picking corn, etc—for chicken feed…literally. But as soon as I was able, I took any paying job I could get—detasseling corn, picking tomatoes, jack of all trades in a combo grocery/service station, night shift in a factory. My family needed the money.

I was self-reliant out of necessity. If I did not have something, I assumed that I should do something about it. If I were lonely, I should make a friend or read a book. If I couldn’t do that until all the farm work was done, then I should get the farm work done as efficiently as possible. If my sister was dying, I should make a deal with God to save her. If I wanted to go to town, I should hitchhike or walk. I knew nobody else was going to do it for me. I don’t say that in a despairing way. I had lots of help in many ways. But I knew the real action in my life had to be done by me.

Our neighbors and church folk thought that was normal for someone my age. They had grown up that way. They liked to tell me about it, about their young years. Their stories made it sound normal. Because I lived like that, I understood and appreciated their stories. I didn’t think my story was anything special.

But they no longer lived like that, planting fields of sweet corn by hand, using horses instead of tractors, going without cars. They had furnaces and indoor bathrooms and running water, while I was growing up without those things.

They praised hand-cranked ice cream but that is about the only thing the old people and I had in common

Living that same way that old people had lived earlier, though, served me well in pastoring older people in my early years of ministry, because in lifestyle there was no age gap. Older people accepted me in spite of my youth.

Yes, there were probably two or three other kids in Oakland City who lived the primitive life that I did when we were in school, but very few. They had indoor toilets and cars.

Only now that I am almost 90 do I really understand how different my life was from my peers. Their parents or grands may have lived the primitive farm life, still much alive in story, but they never had.

Coupled with the absence of money and the stigma of welfare, I was a real outlier. It was like running a hundred-yard dash when you have to start ten yards behind the line where everyone else starts. I’m proud that I managed to run the whole race. I hope that doesn’t sound boastful.

I think it’s okay for you—regardless of how different your story may be from mine, or any other—to be proud of what you’ve accomplished, too.

John Robert McFarland