MASTERING THE USER OF THE TOOLS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

A hardware store flyer came with the newspaper today. I looked through it carefully. I don’t need or want anything from a hardware store, but I do it to honor and remember my father.

My father loved tools, and so he loved hardware stores. In his later years, when he had given away all his tools because he had to go to a senior citizen apartment or was living in a nursing home room, he would have me take him to a hardware store, ostensibly to buy a light bulb or a cleaning cloth. Really it was so he could browse the shelves, to see what was new. The only eyesight he had left was about ten percent in one eye, but he would get that eye right up against the shelf. He loved to see those tools.

I had no interest in tools myself, not his kind of tools. He lost his eye-sight in an industrial accident when I was five. Shortly thereafter I entered into the fourth of the eight stages of psychological-social growth, as outlined by Erik Erikson, industry vs inferiority. It’s basically when you learn to use tools, or fail to learn how to use them. Dad organized his tools so that he could still find them and use them, even with his minimal eyesight.

I, of course, was fascinated by his tools, so I would sometimes get one out to “use,” which meant to play with. And I would sometimes leave it in the yard, where he couldn’t find it. In my psyche I heard him say, “You can’t use tools.” I think he probably said some variant of “You can’t use MY tools,” for good reason. I, however, internalized the idea that I could not use any kind of tool. I still can’t use his kind of tools. I settled for inferiority over industry.

Sort of.

I did, however, take up another kind of tool, words.

I wanted to be a journalist. That’s the trade of one who uses words as tools. I loved stories and wanted to tell them. Just as importantly, I wanted to tell them honestly. Everyone said that Ernie Pyle told the story of WW II the way it really was. I wanted to be an Ernie Pyle.

There is, of course, more than one way to use tools. Some use my father’s kind of tools to make the instruments of war rather than to build a cradle for a little child. Some use words to misinform, to propagandize, to lie.

Many people in the winter years take up new tools or new tool tasks, for wood-working or knitting or pottery. That is a good thing. Mastering a tool, though, isn’t the only task. Perhaps more important is the opportunity we have in the years of winter to master the user of the tools.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

SECRET SUPPORTERS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

We went to see Bill this week. We’ve been friends for 55 friends. Found out he was in the hospital. Just dropped everything, packed an overnight bag, and went to see him. Got to see Paul & Sharon while we were there. We’ve been friends with them for 49 years. We have learned that at our age one should not dawdle in going to see old friends.

While there, though, I started thinking back to when I was the campus minister in that town, and got so much unlikely support from Ruth & Margaret. They were retired college professors. One of them—Ruth, I think--had been Miss America along about 1923. They were unlikely supporters for my style of ministry. This was in the days of Civil Rights and Vietnam, and I was in constant trouble with the authorities, both civil and church, for my advocacies. One couple came to church one Sunday, found out I was preaching, and immediately left. That probably happened more than once, but my wife happened to be hear them discussing their departure, so I know about that one.

Ruth and Margaret were sedate gray-haired church ladies, always nicely and classily dressed, very gentle in all ways, and my firm supporters against their fellow church members. More than once Ruth sought me out along the fringes of some group to assure me I was doing the right thing.

I know the reason for their support now. They were a lesbian couple. There was a bit of talk around the edges that their relationship might be more than just housemates, but who is going to accost a kind and gentle elderly retired professor church lady and accuse her of practicing the love that dare not speak its name? Nobody did that. But those ladies knew how the town and the church felt about homosexuality. They knew that if they “came out,” they would not be accepted. So they kept their love to themselves.

I was like a lot of others back then. If they had come out, I would have been nice to them, privately and publicly, but I would have thought there was something wrong with them.

But being outliers, the unacceptable, they were supporters of rights for others who suffered discrimination, even if that discrimination was not against their particular point of rejection. They were supportive, also, of a fiery undisciplined chaotic unacceptable young preacher who was supporting them, even though he did not know it, by advocating acceptance for the unacceptable.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

SUPERMARKET ACCEPTABILITY

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

I soloed at our new super market yesterday. No, I was not part of a Hallelujah Chorus flash mob. It’s just that I went by myself. I have been there with Helen, but then I only had to push the cart, one of those big long freight car carts. This time I had to find only a few small items, so I was pushing a little caboose cart, the kind that is really just a shopping basket on wheels.

I was dressed in my usual summer way—floppy white hat, t-shirt proclaiming the virtues of pickleball, shorts displaying the virtues of skinny legs. All the people who worked there--from the manager who looks a lot like “the most interesting man in the world” in those TV commercials, to the middle-aged stockers to the young women who are always going somewhere in a hurry—were suspiciously solicitous of my health and my hunting skills. I was not surprised. An old man in a floppy hat, pushing a caboose cart and alternately looking from a small piece of paper to the signs above the aisles, none of which ever mentions lemon juice, is bound to invoke concern. What am I supposed to do if he dies right here?

I appreciated the concern and attention. I was not about to mention the lemon juice problem, though. My geographical disorientation would only confirm their assumption that I was an escapee from the dementia ward and cause them to call the little men in the white coats, which is supposed to be “the men in the little white coats,” but everyone always says “the little men in the white coats.” [When you’re old and on a solo flight, you get a bit paranoid.]

I did not appreciate the most interesting manager in the world, though, for his concern was of the dismissive sort. “How are you, young man?” I am not a young man. I don’t look like a young man. He would not address a young man that way. He was saying, “Old men are not acceptable, so we’ll pretend you’re a young man.” That was not what he intended, of course, but it is what that really means.

Old men, and old women, are acceptable. So are teenagers. That’s why young people and old people are so often in collusion; both are treated by others as unacceptable because of their age. Oldsters and youngsters understand and sympathize with each other because of their shared unacceptability.

The point, though, is that you are acceptable, regardless. Your actions may not be acceptable. If you bonk someone on the head and grab her purse or cheat on a mortgage and put a family on the street, that is not acceptable. But it’s not because you are white or black or gay or straight or Sottish or Mexican or young or old or rich or poor, it’s because you’re a jerk.

This is the good news: God accepts you and loves you as you are. So stop being a jerk. You don’t have to take someone else’s money or sex or home or dignity to prove that you are superior and thus acceptable. You’re even better than acceptable, you are accepted. Just as you are.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

TRUTH AND STORY

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

We are excited. Aunt Rosemary is coming back from AZ for a visit. Given health and age, it will probably be her last. Cousin Kae will bring Aunt Rosemary over from OH. We’re hoping Aunt Edna can come over, too. Those three are the last of “the greatest generation” of my family, these now-nineties women who seventy years ago stepped out in faith to marry three soldiers just returned from the war. We’ll get together and tell stories…

I like the one about Uncle Bob and the Plymouth best. It was old, and sort of blue, and when Uncle Bob, from whom I get my middle name, went off to the army in WWII, he sold it to his next brother, Randall, who when he went off to the army to fight in the South Pacific, sold it to the next, and youngest brother, Mike, who when he went off to the army to fight, up from Sicily and Anzio, sold it to Bob, who was back from the army. By that time you can imagine how old and less blue it was. One day it stopped and refused to go anymore, right in front of the Plymouth dealership in Oxford, OH.

Uncle Bob went in and said to the dealer, “How much will you give me for that Plymouth out there?”

“I wouldn’t give anything for that Plymouth,” said the dealer.

“It’s a deal,” said Uncle Bob, and he laid the keys on the counter and walked back to Cedar Crest, the name of the big old house on the edge of town where Grandma and Grandpa and almost all their eight children, and the spouses of married children, and grandchildren, lived off and on during Depression and WWII years.

I told Uncle Bob, when he was in his late 80s, how much I enjoyed that story. “I don’t remember anything like that,” he said.

What a letdown! It’s important in a family to tell the stories, to keep them alive, but what if they are not true?

Another family story that my father told was that Grandma Mac, his mother, got cancer when he was a teenager. That was in the early 1920s. There was no cure, hardly any treatment for cancer. The oldest child, Glen, was gone from home, so Daddy and Aunt Helen, the only girl, number two in birth order, divided up between themselves the duties they figured would have to be carried out, who would be responsible for which of the five younger children and so forth, when Grandma died. She went to Louisville for treatment, although Daddy was a bit vague about the place and type of treatment, and lived to 96, so their planning did not have to be put into effect. It’s a remarkable story, one that would enhance even more the powers of the already remarkable Grandma Mac, but what if it’s not true?

Aunt Helen was already dead when he told me this story, and I can find no one else in the family who has ever heard anything like this. Daddy, however, always had a good mind and a good memory, and was not the type to make things up.

I’m going to keep telling about Uncle Bob and the Plymouth, and Grandma’s cancer, with the caveat that they might not be factual, because I think they are true. There is a difference between factual and true. That Plymouth and its wanderings and final resting are McFarland sorts of things. Preparing for a possible tragedy, even as a kid, is a McFarland sort of thing.

And, as part of the only stratum of the family that stands between death and the younger folks, I’m the only one who can tell these stories, for I’m the only one who knows them. That’s one of the jobs of winter in a family, telling the stories that remind us of who we are.

As Chinua Achebe, the great African author, has the village wise man say in Things Fall Apart, “There is no story that is not true.”

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

The picture is of the Pine Mountain ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI, the highest man-made ski jump in the world. I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter. I have a picture that is more appropriate now for Indiana, boys playing basketball in winter snow, but I have not yet figured out how to replace the ski jump picture with the basketball picture.

I tweet as yooper1721.

PUNCHING HOLES IN DARKNESS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

One of the things I look forward to most in moving from Michigan’s UP [Upper Peninsula] to SoIn [Southern Indiana] is lightning bugs, fireflies. I have missed their cheerful presence in summer. I remember chasing them as a child, putting them into jars so I could take the light inside with me at night.

One of the reasons the Bible is so important is that it does not sugarcoat reality. The constant presence of evil is well-known in the stories and meditations of that book. One of the most important themes of the Bible is that even though, as poet William Stafford puts it, “The darkness around us is deep,” “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” [John 1:5.] That is not pop-psych bumper-sticker “everything’s okay, god is good all the time, all the bad stuff happens for a reason” religion. The Bible acknowledges that the darkness is real. It also says that the light is real, and the light shines in the darkness.

There was a time when street lights were gas lamps. To light them, someone with a flame on the end of a long taper, the sort of thing that acolytes use to light candles in church, would reach up and set the wick of the street lamp to burning. I am too young to remember the lamplighters, but the song about “the old lamplighter” was popular when I was a kid. The refrain said, “He made the night a little brighter, wherever he would go, the old lamplighter of long, long ago.” [1]

That has always been a background theme song for me. I have always wanted to be the lamplighter, the one who, in the words of a child who saw the lamplighter for the first time, said, “That man is punching holes in the darkness.”

I’m not sure I’ve ever been tall enough in faith to be a lamplighter, but I think anyone can be a firefly, a lightning bug. Either way, that is what following Christ means, I think, to acknowledge the depth of the darkness, but to keep punching holes in it with the light.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] “The Old Lamplighter” lyrics were by Charles Tobias, music by Nat Simon, published in 1946.

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ in winter…

I tweet as yooper1721.

MOVING-a poem

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

Even with careful planning, and giving over two tons of stuff to the St. Anthony DePaul store and the Habitat for Humanity Restore, after a 600 mile move, we are struggling to fit into a condo that lacks the large two-car garage and the full walk-out basement. We have a garage, but it is a very narrow, one-car affair, and there is no other storage. We had the movers unload almost everything into that garage so that we could unpack one box at a time without gridlock in the house itself.  But, of course, that gridlocks the garage. The boxes are three deep and stacked over head-high, and every one that looks like it has something we need is behind others that just glare at us and dare us to move them and find some other spot to set them in the gridlock of the garage.

It is difficult to get my mind onto writing or anything that is not an effort to unpack boxes and repack cardboard and paper in the bundles required for recycling here. I did manage to find some of my favorite books, including Wm. Stafford’s The Darkness Around Us Is Deep. In it he has two poems about moving, from two different moves of his own, entitled “From the Move to California” and “An Oregon Message.” They inspired me to write a moving poem of my own. It is not like Stafford’s, of course, since he was one of the truly great American poets, but I thank him for the impetus.

It is true that breathing is much harder

when buried beneath a pile of boxes,

cardboard resting soft but hard upon the soul.

But the rumors of our demise by moving

are not true, at least not yet.

We feel our way between the piles of stuff

and wonder why it was not left behind.

Long and narrow pathways in rooms

that do not gladly welcome strangers.

Boxes that will not surrender

until the last flap dies.

Chairs and lamps and tables

we have lived with for sometimes

almost fifty years surround us.

but we do not know them, nor

do they know us. Where they belong

in this new plan we cannot say.

It makes them uneasy.

They depend upon us

to help them find their place.

I wonder about the place

called heaven,

if it is filled with boxes crammed

with stuff that would not fit

our bigger barns on earth.

This place is new, and filled with fright

and full of hope…

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so I am still trying to understand and follow Christ in winter.

I tweet as yooper1721.

ROTATING THE BOOKS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

Moving mixes things up. After eight years in one place, the longest we have ever lived in one spot, my books were all nicely organized and categorized on the shelves in my study and the living room. But moving 600 miles to a condo got the books confused. The condo is much smaller than our northern exposure house, so now my study has only one book case instead of two, and the living room has only two instead of three. The books lost many companions in the downsizing, and they don’t know where they belong.

So now MSWord for Dummies stands side by side with Wally Mead’s Extremism and Cognition. My NRSV Bible is sandwiched between Kierkegaard’s Attack Upon Christendom and John Pollack’s The Pun Also Rises. Elaine Palencia’s Small Caucasian Woman is to the right of Wayne Oates’ The Christian Pastor. I know some small Caucasian women who are Christian pastors, but Elaine doesn’t write much about them. Paul Tillich seems to be strangely interested in Bob Hammel’s books on basketball. The same is true with Reinhold Niebuhr and the history of the Cincinnati Reds. And the United Methodist Hymnal… well, if osmosis works with books, soon we’ll be singing “Go Tell Aunt Rosie On the Mountain That It Was a Very Good Year.”

I think the books are onto something. One reason we make so little progress in human relations is that we stick too much to our own kind, read and see and hear only the books and magazines and blogs and TV radio shows of those who tell us only what we want to know, who enforce only what we already believe, who never challenge us to look at things in a new and possibly better way.

I’m going to leave the books alone, let them take the places they have chosen, with their new companions. It will be interesting to see what grows as the result of this new crop rotation.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.] The grandchildren, though, are grown up, so in May, 2015 we moved “home,” to Bloomington, IN, where we met and married. It’s not a “place of winter,” but we are still in winter years of the life cycle, so...

I tweet as yooper1721.