THE STUBBORN MORWELL OUNCES

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter -- 

This is Bob Morwell’s last Sunday as a full-time pastor. He is retiring today. He’s old enough. He’s also fed up with the hypocrisy of the United Methodist Church, proclaiming Open Doors and Open Minds and Open Hearts, but only if you’re heterosexual.

His retirement makes me feel old. Again. Older. I’ve been feeling old since the first of the students from my campus ministry days started retiring. Bob’s retirement after 41 years of ordained pastoring makes me feel old because I was there at the beginning of his career. Almost. He had been on staff at Wesley UMC in Charleston, IL for a year, his first after ordination, when we started working together there.

Bob was full of ideas and hopes and idealism. As always, however, the realities of the intransigence of all institutions, including the church, began to show up. That’s a jar to all of us who start out thinking people are in the church because they want to act like Christians. Sometimes he got discouraged. So did I, but as an older colleague, I felt it was my job to encourage him, regardless of how hopeless I felt myself. So I always reminded him, and myself, that God does not call us to be successful, but to be faithful.

He took that focus in and made it his own. He writes in farewell to his congregation at Carterville, IL First UMC: “Our task is to be faithful to our understanding of God’s will, and to be open to the possibility we might have more to learn. Our task, even in times of uncertainty is to be selflessly and humbly loving. I see no way to retire from that.” 

It is better--if you are an advocate for care for the oppressed and justice for all--to be successful, to achieve care and justice, but there are a lot of forces in the world that do not want love and inclusion and justice to prevail. They gain too much for themselves through exclusion and injustice.

The more self-centered you are, the more ruthless you are. You don’t care who gets hurt while you grab for what you want. If you are seeking justice, you do care. The non-caring ones always have a big advantage.

As this world gets hotter and nastier, with more and more people seeking only their own good, becoming more powerful as they do so, trampling anyone who gets in their way, caring not if the world goes down in flames as long as they are the ones with all the matches, it’s easy to get discouraged, to want just to back off and sit and complain.

Yes, we inclusive Christians want to be successful, but in the end, that’s not really up to us. What is up to us is the faithfulness with which we practice Christian love.

IU business professor Wain Martin was famous as the first prof to apply computer technology to business, and for writing the text books about it. More importantly in my mind, he was the icon of Christian generosity in Bloomington, IN for his whole, long life, especially to those with the hardest row to hoe, like those in prison, or just out of prison and finding all the cards stacked against them as they try to become good citizens. And Native Americans.

He used to make a lot of trips to the Dakota reservations with supplies for the needy. When he became too old to do so, a friend took his place. But he was dumbfounded on his first trip. He reported to Wain, “I took all that stuff to those people, and they gave it all away to others. There was nothing left for them.” Wain said simply, “Next time, take more stuff.”

Bob Morwell has tried to do that through his years—take to those in need more of his stuff, more of his advocacy and work for justice. He has been faithful even when it did not look like success.

When I am discouraged now, I turn to Bonaro Overstreet’s magnificent little poem:

You say the little efforts that I make

will do no good; they never will prevail

to tip the hovering scale

where justice hangs in balance.

I don’t think I ever thought they would,

But I am prejudiced beyond debate

in favor of my right to choose which side

shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

As I age, my stubborn ounces don’t weigh as much, but, if anything, like old folks are rumored to be, they are even more stubborn.

Happy retirement, Bob. May the world continue to feel your stubborn ounces as you enter the years of winter.

John Robert McFarland

THE UNRIGHTED WRONG

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections On Faith And Life For The Years Of Winter — 

It was the start of the second semester of my senior year at IU, the era of pencils instead of computers. The registrar’s office told me I could not register for classes until I had paid my fines from last semester. “What fines? I don’t owe any fines.” “Yes, you do. There’s a check mark beside your name.” “Okay, how much do I owe?” “We don’t know that here. You have to go to the place where you owe it to find out how much.” “Well, where do I owe?” “We don’t know that here. You’ll have to go to each of the departments where you might owe a fine and get them to give you a waiver that shows you don’t owe them anything.”

It was winter. Cold. Snow everywhere. IU is a pedestrian campus. No buses in those days. No scooters. Beautiful in the snow, but slow going. Nonetheless, I went. To the library. To the athletic department. To the book store. To the parking department. To The Indiana Daily Student newspaper. To the housing office. To the trolls under the Jordan River bridge. Every one of them gave me a document to take back to the registrar to prove I didn’t owe anything.

“Oh, some clerk must have put a check by your name when it was somebody else who actually owes a fine.” “You mean somebody else is getting away with being guilty while I’m the one who had to do all the work to prove I’m innocent?” “Yes,” the registrar said.

That’s the way that story ends and remains, to this day, more than 60 years later. That’s the way it will always be. Somebody got away with not paying a debt, and somebody else had to pay the price, not with money but with time and shoe leather, because a distracted clerk put a check mark on the wrong line. There are a lot of stories like that, in which the mistake and the payment are much more significant than my lost afternoon. And they end the same way—not like a Saturday matinee Western, where wrongs are always righted—but without resolution.

As old people, it’s okay to remember the times we feel we were on the receiving end of injustice. It’s not wise, however, to hang onto the story in order to feel again the anger and frustration. So I think instead about how great it was to be able to walk briskly that afternoon, without a single worry about losing my balance. About how beautiful the campus was in the snow, even on a gray day. About the satisfaction of proving I was not a debtor.

Those sorts of mistakes were understandable in my college days. Record keeping was cumbersome, especially in an institution that was used to a few hundred records and suddenly had thousands. Everything was done with paper and pen, often pencil.

Records were kept the same way for hundreds of years. Suddenly, there were typewriters. Almost immediately after typewriters came computers. The only constant is mistakes.

Vera Largent Watts, the Registrar at Garrett Theological Seminary, said that when I started there, they were still using paper and ink. While I was there, they went to manual typewriters. A decade later they went to electric typewriters. A decade later they went to computers. That’s when she retired.

Computers make things faster, but they don’t eliminate the mistakes, and they can multiply a mistake at warp speed. So in my memory, I keep walking the snowy pathways of my old campus, glad to have good legs and good memories.

John Robert McFarland

“The older we get, the fewer things seem waiting in line for.”

Are You Bloated Tonight?

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter— 

The first time I heard Linda Luttrell sing was when we were in 7^th grade. The last time was at our 50 year high school reunion.

“Three Little Words” was her solo at an assembly program in the old “Departmental” school building in Oakland City, IN. I recall thinking, “She sounds just like someone you’d hear on the radio.” She was that good.

In between 7^th grade and our 50 year reunion, she sang many solos, earning degrees in music, becoming a classically trained and beautifully voiced music professor.

And just as a classy and classical soprano aria soloist would do it, she sang this after supper at the all-school banquet that featured our class as the honored guests for our 50 years. It is, of course, to the tune of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” It was written by Roy Turk and Lou Handman in 1926, but made popular by Elvis Presley in 1960.

Are you bloated tonight

Does your tummy feel tight

Did you bring your Mylanta and Tums

Does your memory stray

To that bright sunny day

When you had all your teeth and your gums

Is your hairline receding?

Your eyes growing dim

Hysterectomy for her

And it’s prostate for him

Does your back give you pain?

Do your knees predict rain?

Tell me dear, are you bloated tonight?

Is your blood pressure up

Good cholesterol down

Are you eating your low fat cuisine

All that oat bran and fruit

Metamucil to boot

Makes you run like

A well oiled machine

If it’s football or baseball

He sure knows the score

Yes he knows where it’s at

But forgets what it’s for

So your gallbladder’s gone

But your gout lingers on

Tell me dear, are you bloated tonight?

When you’re hungry, he’s not,

When you’re cold, he is hot,

Then you start that old thermostat war

When you turn out the light

He goes left and you go right

Then you get his great symphonic snore

He was once so romantic

So witty and smart

How did he turn out to be such

A cranky old fart?

So don’t take any bets

It’s as good as it gets

Tell me dear, are you bloated tonight?

John Robert McFarland

“How did I get over the hill without ever getting to the top of it?”

SELLING GOODNESS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter -- 

When I pastored in Charleston, IL, we had a lot of young [22-35] singles in our congregation. Our campus minister, to Eastern IL U, George Loveland, was one of them. He and Helen were cooking buddies. He complained to her one day that one of the biggest problems of cooking as a single was left-overs. “Even if you try to cut a recipe down, you have to eat the same thing for a week,” said George. “Well,” said Helen, “let’s have a supper group at our house for singles where you all bring your leftovers. We’ll have a good church fellowship group, and you all can get rid of your leftovers.”

It worked great, except there were several EIU Home Ec professors in the group, and they were not about to bring leftovers when they could show off their culinary skills with new dishes. We ate great, and had good fellowship, but George died with a refrigerator full of leftovers.

One night the guys had all left and the women began to tell horror stories, the ones involving the bathrooms of guys they dated, or where they went to parties. There seemed to be large aggregations of unidentified green things growing in those bathrooms. The women vowed that they would never go to those particular apartments again.

I mentioned it to Eli Sidwell, Charleston’s leading realtor and landlord.
“Well,” he said, “apartment women aren’t so great at cleaning themselves, but yes, the guys are worse. But those are straight guys. I don’t understand people being so anti-gay. You rent to gay guys and they leave the place better than it was when they moved in.”

I don’t think that’s in the Top Ten Reasons Why Gays Should Be Treated Like Everybody Else, but it worked for Eli.

I saw Eli’s obit in the paper last week. He was 86, and the obit pic was current, but he was still a strikingly handsome man. He was one of the leading Republicans in IL, the man who started Charleston’s own Jim Edgar into politics and shepherded him all the way to the governor’s mansion.

He was a true businessman, thinking always in business terms, even trying to convince me that the church was actually a business, with me as the proprietor. I explained that if the church is a business, then the customers are the owners, and I was just the maintenance man. I don’t think we ever connected on that, but it was okay, because he thought the church’s business was selling goodness, not making money, and that’s sort of neat.

He was highly successful as a business man. Most of all, he was a highly successful human being, a staunch church member, a constant supporter of mine--even though we were many furlongs removed in politics--just because I was his pastor. I liked and respected Eli. I pray for the passage of his soul and for the good memories of his loved ones. He sold a lot of goodness in his days.

There has been much speculation recently about why attitudes toward gays have changed so much from exclusion to acceptance in such a short period of time. I doubt that keeping the bathrooms of rental units clean is one of the major reasons, but if you give a decent human being like Eli any chance to exercise his innate goodness… that’s a good start.

John Robert McFarland

“At the end of the day, I’d rather be excluded because of who I include than be included because of who I exclude.” Rev. Eston Williams. The “Sizzle” site says the original source is Caleb Miller.

WE ALL NEED HELP WITH OUR WOO-WOOS

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life For the Years of Winter—

I learned that from the late Joe Frazier, the baritone in The Chad Mitchell Trio [CMT], the great folk group of the 1960s. We were in our special lounge on the MS Amsterdam cruise ship, late at night, with Joe and the eponymous Chad and Mike Kobluk, and the regular musicians for the trio—Paul Prestopino and Ron Greenstein and Bob Heffernan—and other CMT fans.

Helen and I are not cruise people, but the trio had reunited to do an autumn foliage cruise with their fans, up the Canadian Atlantic coastline, and we were on the cruise because Joe had asked me to help him write a book about his life in the mode of my memoir, The Strange Calling. Since Joe lived in Big Bear Lake, CA, and we lived in Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the logical way to get together was on a cruise in the Atlantic.

The trio did several formal concerts, and at night we gathered informally in our lounge to sing all the old CMT favorites. Sometimes we sang along with the trio, sometimes we just listened.

This particular night, it was late, and Joe was tired and not feeling well, and he got up to leave, just as someone called for Mike to sing his lovely version of “Four Strong Winds,” by Ian Tyson. Joe was half-way through the door and rather dejectedly turned around and took up a stance behind Mike, to sing the background harmony he had always sung on that piece.

“Go on,” Mike said to him. “You’re tired. I can do this by myself.”

“No, you can’t,” replied Joe. “You can’t do your own woo-woos.”

Those were Joe’s background sounds, sort of like the four strong winds themselves, as Mike sang. Yes, Mike can sing that song by himself, and wonderful it is when he does it, but the trio had a long history of working out arrangements that enhanced a song to its fullest, and on “Four Strong Winds,” that was when Joe did his woo-woos.

There are a lot of things we can do by ourselves, but they go better if there is someone to harmonize with the woo-woos, and you can’t do your own woo-woos.

John Robert McFarland

“Are you goin’ away with no word of farewell, will there be not a trace left behind? I could have loved you better, didn’t mean to be unkind. You know that was the last thing on my mind.” Tom Paxton wrote those words, but I always hear them in the voice of Joe Frazier.

In 1962, Milt Okun, the musical director of The CMT, heard a demo by a totally unknown kid who had changed his name to Bob Dylan. The CMT immediately recognized its potential and tried to record it as a single, but their record label wouldn’t let them—they thought it was a loser song. Next the CMT tried to use it as one song in an album, but their recording firm again refused. So Okun gave “Blowin’ In The Wind” to another group for which he was musical director, “Peter, Paul, and Mary.” It went to # 2 on the charts, and so CMT was forever trailing PPM and The Kingston Trio in popularity and record sales, even though the CMT was far better musically.

VOTING WHO WE ARE

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter -- 

There is within us from birth the desire to dominate—to have our own way—and the desire to cooperate—to consider the needs of others as well as our own. Theologically, these are “original sin” and “prevenient grace.”

Especially in our early years, but true mostly all the way to puberty, we dominate or cooperate according to our own internal state at the moment. It’s the “if I’m not with the girl I love, I love the girl I’m with” syndrome. If I’m feeling unhappy within myself as a four year old, I take it out in mean behavior on whoever I’m with, even if it’s the most important person in the world, the one who loves me most. If I’m feeling happy and secure and content as a four year old, I am kind to whoever I am with, even though they may be nasty people who are themselves not kind to me or anyone else.

Most of us grow out of that four year old state and begin to be able to relate to other persons as other persons, rather than only as projections of our own internal state. Some never do. You can name some of those folks.

At puberty, those twins begin to separate. Some people become dominators and some cooperators. Oh, we are never completely one or the other. Mafia hitmen are notoriously kind to animals. But our actions—in family and politics and sports and business and all the rest of life—tend to become either dominating or cooperating.

Most who are dominators are not very competent at it, but it is the only way they know how to relate to the world. So they cheer on the ones who are skilled enough and ruthless enough at dominating, even if they themselves suffer from the domination system. They get the emotional satisfaction of domination by proxy.

I learned a long time ago the maxim that we don’t vote for candidates but we vote for ourselves. I thought that meant we voted for candidates who would serve our interests. More recently, I have come to understand that we don’t primarily vote for candidates who represent our interests but for those who share our emotions, even if those candidates carry out policies that are bad for us and our own interests.

In politics or economics or church, you don’t vote your interests, you vote your character. You vote who you are. So look at who you vote for and realize: you’re looking in the mirror.

That’s why I’m a conservative; I think character matters. That’s why I’m a liberal; you can’t trust in character alone because some people are bad characters.

John Robert McFarland

I know. These posts are supposed to include a whimsical or slightly humorous story. Sorry about today’s.

A new reader of these musings asked me the reason for the title. I started writing this blog when we followed the grandchildren to Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where winter is 13 months long every year. I sub-titled it “reflections on faith and life from a place of winter for the years of winter.” I was 70 then and thought I was in the years of winter. I had no idea how young 70 is! That was just December. Now I’m deep into January!

CONFIRMING THAT YOU COUNT

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter --

Be warned: this is longer than usual, [850 words instead of the usual 500 or so] and mostly a memoir.

I think that “confirmation” is one of the most important thing a church can do, because in it, we are confirming that each person counts.

I have been through a lot of confirmation Sundays, enough that they run together in memory, vaguely. Four, however, stand out, because of who I got to share them with. [Yes, but it sounds better having the “with” at the end.]

Granddaughter Brigid’s confirmation is memorable primarily because Grandma was her mentor, and they were so disgusted with the level of the confirmation materials that they devised their own. Later Helen asked Marcus Borg to write a confirmation-level version of The Heart of Christianity, since she had used it with Brigid and thought others should get to. He said that he could not write at that level, but she could, since she had been a teacher, so she should do it and he’d put both their names on it and get his publisher, HarperSanFrancisco, to publish it. Alas, that never got done, but that confirmation was important because we got to do it with our granddaughter.

The first confirmation that I remember was my own, and older sister Mary V’s, at East Park Methodist in Indianapolis. I was 9 and she was 13. There weren’t many kids in the church, and the pastor figured he’d better get us all confirmed while there were enough for a class, especially since the actual confirmation process involved standing up in front of the church and reciting together stuff that we had memorized. You feel better at a time like that if there are more kids around you to drown you out.

We had a class, I’m sure, but I can’t remember anything about it. It was probably during Sunday School. Mostly it was memorization. Probably Psalm 23 and such, but all I remember was the Apostle’s Creed. We were covered from the stock of robes in the church basement, various sizes of white, and stood up in front together and mumbled. Mary V and I both said after, only to each other, that the Apostles’ Creed was the only thing we were able to get through without gaps.

That confirmation was important to me because East Park was my first church, and I felt at home there. The people were affirming, especially when I was the young shepherd in “Why the Chimes Rang.” Mostly it was important because I got to do it with my sister.

The second important confirmation was similar to the first, in that it was a multi-age group. I was preaching at Stanwood and Red Oak Grove Presbyterian churches, near Tipton, Iowa, while I did doctoral work in Iowa City. They had quite a few children, about a dozen, who could be considered confirmation age. The people were eager to get them confirmed while they had a preacher who was willing to do it.

Daughter Mary Beth was confirmation age, so we would drive out together on Wednesday nights to do confirmation class. The women of the churches prepared a supper, a nice one. Then we had class.

In those days I was into writing my own materials and developing all sorts of unusual ways of confirmation education. The parents thought it was great. The kids were all cooperative and willing to participate, But mostly this confirmation was important because I got to do it with my daughter.

My last confirmation class was at Tampico, IL, when I did a part-time interim year there in retirement. We had class on Sunday mornings, since that was easiest for Helen and me. They had a big group, about a dozen kids, who fit the usual confirmation age, young teens, so we were able to do young teen stuff. The wonderful TV show, “Joan of Arcadia,” where God would appear to teen Joan in the guise of everyone from a linesman to the cafeteria line lady, was on in those days. It was required watching for confirmation class. At least one kid didn’t have the correct TV connections to get it [no live streaming and YouTube and such in those days] so a cooperative adult church member taped it and took it to him.

We had mentors who came to class with the kids and sat with them in worship and talked with them after worship about what we had done in worship and why. We talked every week about “our friend, Joan.” I wrote a “Confirmation Times” newsletter every week that reflected on worldly events and how we might see God there—more questions than answers.

This was a great confirmation experience, because the whole church was so enthusiastic and supportive and eager to get kids confirmed while they had a preacher who could do it, and because the mentors took their jobs both seriously and joyfully, and because the kids enjoyed participating so much. Mostly, though, this confirmation was important to me because I got to do it with my wife.

I think that “confirmation” is one of the most important thing a church can do, because in it, we are confirming that each person counts.

John Robert McFarland

Freud’s method was called “the talking cure.” Jesus practiced the walking cure. “Come, follow me.”