THE HEAVENLY FESTIVAL [W, 7-9-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Speculations of An Old Man—THE HEAVENLY FESTIVAL [W, 7-9-25]

 

 [Fear not; You believe in God; believe also that there will be a Christian application, sort of, at the end.]

It’s fair and festival season.

It’s time for the Toledo, Iowa “Stoplight Festival.” Toledo now has three stoplights, but the festival celebrates only the first one. It was the only one for many years, starting in 1949. It’s still there, smack dab in the middle of the intersection, on a sturdy metal pole, about five feet tall.

Every town needs a festival, something to rally around, build community, see local girls in bathing suits, eat rubber pancakes, sell raffle tickets to get a new defibrillator for the volunteer fire dept.

If the only thing you have that sets you apart is a stoplight, then you have a Stoplight Festival.

When I pastored in Arcola, IL, we had two festivals, one long-standing and one that started while we were there, because folks felt that one festival wasn’t enough to keep us going.

 

The first is the famous Broom Corn Festival. Broom corn is exactly what it sounds like—a corn-like plant that provided the bristles for brooms. It was grown locally, and so broom factories located there. The most famous of those is Libman. You can see their ads on TV all the time. Now most of the brooms have plastic bristles, and broom corn is imported from Mexico, but that doesn’t slow down the festival. One little patch of broom corn is still grown in Arcola so its harvesting can be demonstrated during the festival.

When we lived there, Arcola started the Raggedy Ann Festival. The connection to Arcola was tenuous. Johnny Gruelle created Raggedy Ann. He was born in Arcola. He moved away when he was two. No one was sure if he ever returned. But if you don’t have even one stoplight, you create a festival from whatever you can find. 

A few years ago, an Arcola bank was robbed. One of the local jokes was, “Now we’ll have to have a Bank Robbery Festival.” [1]

Garrison Keillor paid tribute to the small-town festival ethos with Toast & Jelly Days in Lake Wobegon, MN.

Cities try to have community-building festivals, like the Taste of Chicago. But they fall flat. Too many people and too few tastes. Everybody who lives in Toledo, Iowa passes that stoplight every day. That makes every day a festival.

Most of us, when we think of heaven, just lying around on cloud 9 all day, playing the harp, doing nothing…well, that sounds boring. When we think of heaven, it’s the community we look forward to. [They don’t worry much in heaven about ending a sentence with a preposition.]

If heaven is worthwhile, it’s got to be for the community, seeing all the folks we love who are already there. Which is why I think heaven is just a small-town summer festival. You know everybody. All the old relatives show up. There is music and laughter. Some local kid, who went away and made it big, like Jesus, gets to be the parade marshal. God tells Dad jokes at the talent contest. Isn’t that enough to make you want to go there?

And if that’s not exactly the way it is in the next life, at least it’s fun to think about in this life.

John Robert McFarland

1] A side light on the bank robbery: it was one of several in small towns in the area, done on his lunch hour by a counselor at the county mental health department. He was very dutiful in trying to get back to work on time after each robbery.