Watchman, a poem

Lying awake in darkness

two in the morning ‘til four

soft snoring in gentle rhythms

at my side

What I call my watch time

“Watchman, what of the night?”

The faces of my friends

hover here in gentle sweetness

just beyond my reach

Watchman,

what of the night?

Watchman!

What of the night?

John Robert McFarland

EXCEPT FOR TED

I receive a plenitude of church newsletters. In one of them, this note was posted by a woman: “I want to thank everyone for their prayers, except for Ted.”

I have no idea what to make of this. Did Ted refuse to pray, and so deserves no thanks? Is he just no good at praying and so does not deserve thanks? Is she going to thank Ted in a more personal way? Does Ted usually pray but was exempted this time for medical reasons?

All I know is that I’m now praying for Ted.

John Robert McFarland

Poem-Advice on Dying

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,”

ranted Dylan Thomas to his father

Like all else in his Self-addicted

haze, he spoke only to himself

But father knows best

or at least better

Enough to know not

to take advice on dying

from a child

 John Robert McFarland

MISDIAGNOSIS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter For the Years of Winter…

MISDIAGNOSIS

Dave called. He had heard from Charlie Bob that Bob had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had six to eight weeks to live. Bob was selling his motorcycle and the rest of his stuff and arranging for hospice car. I’ve learned not to tarry when I get that sort of news. I quickly wrote Bob a sappy letter about all we had shared and hope for the future and such like stuff. That was almost two years ago. 

I waited. I watched the obits in the hometown newspaper. No news of Bob. I called Mike and John from time to time. They hadn’t heard anything. I talked to Dave. He didn’t know anything. We assumed we had missed Bob’s obit. I was disappointed. I thought maybe the obit writer would say something nice about the sappy letters that had comforted him in his death throes.

Then Bob’s mother’s obit appeared in the newspaper. Ninety-nine years old. Survived by her son in Florida, it said. How could that be?

So Dave called Charlie Bob again. No, Bob wasn’t dead. Quite the opposite. After he got rid of all his stuff, he began to feel better. He went back to the doctor. “We must have misdiagnosed you,” was the new diagnosis. Charlie Bob couldn’t give Dave Bob’s telephone number right then because he was in the basement, doing laundry, since Daphne can’t do stairs anymore.

This has put us into an embarrassing situation. How do you call up an old friend and say, “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, but I thought you were dead?”

Every once in a while you get a misdiagnosis. Not just from doctors, but from others who look at your life and think you’re diseased when you’re only dealing with a problem that can’t be seen by others. They tell you there is no reason to have faith, that that there is no reason to hope. Or they give you sappy bromides when you just need to get rid of some stuff.

At our 55 year class reunion, Bob said to me: “Do you remember that summer when the District Superintendent would send you around to various churches on Sunday mornings to fill in while the pastor was on vacation or in rehab or something, and Dave and Donald Gene and I would go along? You’d preach, and we would sing as a quartet. I always said the best preacher I ever heard was an eighteen-year-old kid.” I pointed out to our classmates that this showed Bob had not been to church much in the past 55 years. He protested that that was not true, that he had gone to church a lot, but how much can you trust a guy who won’t even die when he’s supposed to?

This is very embarrassing. If Charlie Bob ever gets up from the basement so we can get that telephone number, I have to call Bob and take back all those sappy things I said about him.

John Robert McFarland

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

You are always welcome to Forward or Repost or Reprint. It’s okay to acknowledge the source, unless it embarrasses you too much. It is okay to refer the link to folks you know or to print it in a church newsletter or bulletin, or make it into a movie or TV series or Broadway musical.

{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

I tweet, occasionally, as yooper1721.

I have nothing to do with those double under-linings Blogger puts into the body of these posts, randomly, it seems, to lead you to advertisements, and I wish they would stop that.

Committee Meeting--a poem

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter

COMMITTEE MEETING

He died this week

Did not send apologies

Or a report for his sub-committee

He simply left

The chairman said

we should take a moment

“To remember how he touched our lives”
then gave us seven seconds for the task

Someday I shall die, report undone

and in some damp basement

on ancient, metal folding chairs

eight weary souls will remember me

in seven seconds—fifty-six in aggregate

It is fitting, and it is enough

John Robert McFarland

[I found this today, hand-written on a yellow sheet, November 10, 1983]

I STAY IN MY HOUSE

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter…

Winter makes hermits of us all.

I think of Thoreau beside the pond called Walden. I should get that book out and read it again. I read it first in college, in the spring time of my life. I knew it was a classic. I knew thus that I should appreciate it. I suppose I did, but I cannot remember. I just wanted credit for the class. And a good grade.

Now I am past the point of needing credit, of any kind.

I do not need a good grade, either. I do not need others to tell me that my life is worth living. Either it is or it is not, regardless of what others think. I do not need their grade.

Thoreau was a hermit by his choice. I am a hermit by winter’s choice. Winter’s choice has, however, become my choice. I stay in my house.

The winter is outside, in the snow, in the tracks of the deer, in the disappearing tail of the rabbit, in the quick flash of the fox, in the slow snore of the bear, in the bare space in the cold air where the hummingbird used to hover. The winter is in here, too, in my house.

There is the cold air of absence here, but there are also the tracks of memory, the disappearing tale, the quick flash of understanding, the slow snore of acceptance, the question about spring, about when it will come, if it will be early or late, if the bushes will still flower, or if the deer, in the empty gnawing of their winter, will have killed them with desire, desire for one more meal before the boom of the hunter’s gun.

I stay in my house. I look out the window at winter, and I wonder about the spring.

John Robert McFarland

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

You are always welcome to Forward or Repost or Reprint. It’s okay to acknowledge the source, unless it embarrasses you too much. It is okay to refer the link to folks you know or to print it in a church newsletter or bulletin, or make it into a movie or TV series or Broadway musical.

{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

I tweet, occasionally, as yooper1721.

I have nothing to do with those double under-linings Blogger puts into the body of these posts, randomly, it seems, to lead you to advertisements, and I wish they would stop that.

You SHOOT the Ball!

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter For the Years of Winter…

You SHOOT the Ball!

This has been a winter of discontent for an Indiana University basketball fan. Our young team is unpredictable, beating a juggernaut like Wisconsin on a T and losing to a bunch of biochemistry majors like Northwestern the following Saturday. I did have some good moments watching the NW game, though, because Chris Collins is in his first year as the NW coach. The TV cameras often went to his father, Doug, watching from the stands. It made me remember Doug’s first game at IL State U, when I was the Methodist campus minister there.

In 1969, Dr. Jim Collie announced his retirement as the ILSU basketball coach. I had just read an article in SI about Will Robinson, the great Detroit high school basketball coach. His ambition had been to coach at a university, but he was black. No one would hire him. He was getting close to the end of his career. It looked like his dream would go unfulfilled.

I went to Milt Weisbecker, the ILSU athletics director, and said: Why not hire Will Robinson? He’s won a million state titles and sent a thousand players on to the pros so he’s obviously an excellent coach. He really wants this, so he’ll be cheaper than most. He’s close to the end of his career, so if it doesn’t work out, he can retire. You’ll help a man achieve his dream. And, the clincher in my mind, think of the recruiting advantages the only black coach in the nation, at a non-black college, will have in recruiting!

Milt was polite. Wrote me a note to thank me, and explain why it wasn’t going to happen. He was not about to hire a high school coach with no college experience to replace a man with a real doctorate and a hundred years of experience. It sort of sounded like, “What if it does NOT work out? I’m not going to take the heat for being the first AD in the country to hire a black coach.”

I suspected that Milt was more open-minded than that, though. So I organized a letter writing campaign to persuade him. It wasn’t much of a campaign. Many were called but few [letters] were written. Only two that I know of.

Something worked, though. Will Robinson was hired.

Some worried that the best basketball recruit ILSU ever had, Doug Collins, would transfer. When he signed on, he thought Jim Collie would be his coach. But he stayed. I was there for his first game and Coach Robinson’s first game. Early in the game, Collins went for a steal and missed. Out of position as he was, the player he was guarding scored an easy basket. The black coach stood and pointed at the white player. The arena went quiet as a church during a request for volunteers to work on the stewardship drive. Robinson stamped his foot as he pointed at Collins. “You…SHOOT the ball!” he said.

Collins never forgot that lesson. He shot the ball every time it touched his hands during a distinguished college and Olympic and pro career. It’s fun to watch his son point to a Northwestern player and say, “You SHOOT the ball.”

Not everybody on the team is supposed to shoot the ball. Paul of Tarsus reminds us in I Corinthians, 12^th chapter, that some are called to pass, others to rebound, still others to take a charge. The point is: you do what the coach tells you to.

John Robert McFarland

I’m often a bit confused during the Big Ten [B1G according to their logo] basketball season. Helen and I are IU grads. So is daughter Katie. With any luck, and some scholarships, granddaughter Brigid will join our ranks in four and one-half years. I now live in the home town of Tom Izzo, the MSU coach. Thad Matta, the OSU coach, was a little boy in my church in Hoopeston, IL, and I baptized his little sister. I went to theology school at NW [Garrett-Evangelical]. I did my doctoral work at Iowa, and grandson Joe was treated for his cancer there. My good friend and one-time roommate, Walt Wagener, is a WI fan. Our children have four IL graduate degrees among them. I’m always for IU, but when two of the others clash, I’m not sure where my loyalties should be. 

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

You are always welcome to Forward or Repost or Reprint. It’s okay to acknowledge the source, unless it embarrasses you too much. It is okay to refer the link to folks you know or to print it in a church newsletter or bulletin, or make it into a movie or TV series or Broadway musical.

{I also write, not very often, the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

I tweet, occasionally, as yooper1721.

I have nothing to do with those double under-linings Blogger puts into the body of these posts, randomly, it seems, to lead you to advertisements, and I wish they would stop that.