Religion, and getting your butt in gear

 Religion, and getting your butt in gear

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve heard some incredibly intelligent people say that they are going to let their children “learn about God on their own.”  For someone who is a believer, this is like saying, “I am going to let them learn about mathematics or their own,” or “I am going to let them learn about dentistry on their own.”

On one hand, we all learn about these things on our own, but on the other, for someone who is new in the world, having a little guidance at the beginning can be really handy.

I find it hard to believe now, but there was a time in my life when I had the leisure to play video games.  One of my favorites was the Civilization series of games. You are dumped into a virtual world in which you know very little and you play the best you can from there.  You move around in the world of the game and as you visit a new place and learn something about it, that place is lit up on your screen.

To me this is a serviceable metaphor for life.  We are dumped into life knowing nothing; our worlds are small; but as we move around we see more, and we know more.

One key difference is that in Civilization you know how many turns you have; in real life, this is not the case. You’ve got a fuzzy estimate at best.

This is where religion comes in. One of the things you learn from religion is that one day you are going to die.  This is harder to learn than you might think.  

When you are young, you think you are going to live forever.  Then, if you have pets, you see them die.  Then, if you have grandparents, you see them die. While you are sad because of this, you think, well animals are different than we are, and grandparents are old.  Old people are supposed to die. (Yes, that hurts, but you know as well I do that’s the way we thought when we were young.) 

Religion teaches this as a basic.  As a young Baptist, I would hear it every Sunday.  The need to walk that aisle and be saved because one day I was going to die.  That was terrifying, but I am not sure I believed it even then.

But if you read through the Bible (and a history book that covers a long period will work too), you see all of these energetic, high-achieving people rise up, and one by one they all die.  Eventually, after hearing the message over and over it sinks in: This is going to happen to me and to everyone I know.

That one bit of knowledge is a powerful principle or organization.  The clock is ticking; if you’ve got things you want to do, you’d better get your butt in gear.

Religion teaches you the message and gives guidelines to make yourself into the kind of person you want to be.  And it may very well be that you reject it. Jesus himself didn’t force it on anyone. We do better in the things that we decide to do ourselves.  That is the truth that the people I mentioned in the first paragraph have grasped.  But...

As parents we try to impart to our children the things we have found value in.  We send them to school; we take them to the doctor; and we drag them to church.

That last sentence was the literal truth for what my mom did to me. She dressed me in a paisley shirt with a nice little bowtie and put shiny black shoes on me.  Then she left black marks on the sidewalk in front of the church as she dragged me in.

Eventually, after I was too big to drag, I stayed at home.  But at some point, I was able to find the front door of another church.

So I go to the dentist; I go to the doctor (and my age more and more of them); and I go to church.  This last part isn’t because I am afraid to die, but because I want to know how to live.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 Please pass the fried potatoes

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been studying a little Latin.  The verb “tradere” means “to hand over.”  We get a couple of English words from it: one is trade and another is tradition.  Tradition is what our ancestors hand over to us. “It’s all yours now, kid.”

I am thinking about this because I’ve been on a diet.  Let me explain.

My mom’s dad was a carpenter, and when she married Dad, Dad was working in oilfield construction.  Her way of cooking was designed to meet their needs.  She suffered from that as she fought weight all of her life.  And this was the environment into which my brother and I were born.

My brother and I have both fought weight issues all of our lives, and have lost and gained hundreds of pounds.  I am not blaming my mother for this because she did the best she knew. I am saying this because during the course of my diet, it has occurred to me that because we as humans have drifted so far from nature that our instincts are no longer a good guide for us in eating.

We eat because we need food to live and to work.  That is why my mom made such huge, calorie-rich meals.  You need a lot of calories to swing a hammer like her father did or to push rod-and-tubing down an oil well like my dad did.  Little did she know that her sons would be a teacher on one hand and a college professor on the other.  

My grandfather needed calories to raise houses; my dad needed calories to raise oil derricks. You don’t need that many calories to raise your voice to a class of teenagers; you don’t need that many calories to raise a question in a committee meeting.

But it is hard to break from what you learned so young.

Because humans are social creatures and food is such a basic need, it is tied up in the fabric of society.  It is tied up in our basic memories.

At Thanksgiving, I insist on canned cranberry sauce.  The kind you slice into hockey pucks with marks from the can still on the sides.  Does it taste better than the wonderful sauce my eldest daughter makes? No.  It reminds me of my mother because that is the way she did it.  It’s the way you do it when you are cooking for construction workers.

But I am not a construction worker.  My needs are different.

This year I turn sixty.  While we are taught about the traditional three-score and ten, the times they are a-changin’. I might live to be 80.  My endocrinologist scared me by telling me I might live into my 90s. If I do, I need to learn a new way to eat.

And I am trying.

But the training of my youth is strong.  The memories of my mother’s cooking are powerful.  While it would be easy to blame tradition, tradition might be a way to skip my potatoes fried in bacon grease and to eat them too.  We don’t eat like Thanksgiving every day.  We set a time for it.

Perhaps I can set times to eat the foods my mom made and have them only then.  We eat to live; we eat to work; but we also eat to remember and love.

If I learn to do that, maybe that is something I can hand over to my children and grandchildren.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 It must be spring

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am looking out my window at a scene and I’ve a feeling I’ve seen it all before. It is as if I am riding on a merry go round and I see the golden ring circling by.

There is a bright red cardinal sitting and singing on a branch of the oak tree out my window.  There is snow on the ground so white as to hurt your eyes.  The sky--not a cloud in it--is a shade of blue that words are insufficient to convey.

And it is 15 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

It must be spring.

The fans of science fiction talk about time travel.  Theoretical physicists will talk of time dilation in the theory of relativity, both special and general.  The poet will say “You can’t go home again.”

But people of a certain age know that time travel is possible.  We call it memory.

During the course of the last year, Jean’s mother has passed away.  Jean has dealt with probate, with the cleaning of her mother’s house, with the disposal of belongings from ancestors unmet and unknown.  She has dealt with a lifetime of detritus. But close your eyes, and it was just a moment ago.

We don’t remember a continuous stream of things.  We remember events.  We remember certain events because they were joyful or--more likely--painful. We revisit them for the same reason.  They are things that don’t obey normal arithmetic.

Jean’s mother passed away on May 1.  Blink and that will be here. Yet--in some strange way--that event seems closer than Christmas.  The portion of time from July 4 until now seems to have lasted ten years, but Janet died only a minute ago.

We go on.

When our parents are alive, we pull away from them in rebellion.  We must do this to assert our own individuality, to be our own beings.  But when they pass away, we don’t have to do that any longer.  We gain freedom to become more like them because we are not in danger of getting lost within them.  We can be more like them and still be ourselves.

It’s complicated.  My father has been dead for more than 35 years, but I’ve only caught myself being more like him recently. 

It started a while back, I am sure, but I’ve only been seeing it truly manifest recently. I suppose this is because with the death of the last of Jean’s and my parents we’ve only now truly become the adults in the room.

We’ve no one to defer to; we’ve no one to seek for a final opinion; we are alone and in charge.

It is terrifying.

Then you think that they must’ve felt the same way too, and they made it.  So, you think, maybe we will too.

Events can be far and near because we roll our memories up like a string of Christmas lights.  They are far apart in the calendar, but near to hand in the roll. And often tangled.

But the merry go round keeps on turning.  Soon the flowers will bloom and the summer will come. And we will have to mow. Again.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

Thus to sing and thus to love, Alleluia!

 Thus to sing, and thus to love, Alleluia!

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been attending a Bible study up at Our Lady of Lourdes that is being led by some friends I’ve had for more than three decades.  On the second Sunday of the study, a member of the class, at their request, led the group in the song “Holy, Holy, Holy.”  This was chosen because the lyrics are lifted directly from the Book of Revelation, which is what the group is studying.

I was surprised for two reasons. Number one, Catholics are much better singers than I’ve been led to believe.  Number two, the song is a protestant song; it was written by an Anglican clergyman in the early nineteenth century.

But this got me to thinking: Even though the Church, the Body of Christ, is terribly divided, we do have a certain unity when it comes to hymns.

We were never meant to have so many churches.  You don’t have to believe me; read Paul’s epistles. Jesus gave us one church, and the rest was done by man.

But we can get together around hymns.

Twenty or so years ago when I first became active in church, I became familiar with the hymn, “Here I am, Lord.”  It can really get your blood pumping.  It was written by a Jesuit, i.e. a Roman Catholic.  Again, so much for Catholics not being able to sing.

I’ve attended Easter Vigil with my Catholic friends.  They ended the service with “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” which was written by John and Charles Wesley.  If that is not a Methodist hymn, then there are none.  And quite frankly, even if all of our churches crumble into pebbles, our hymns will be sung. (At Opolis UMC they sometimes sing six hymns during a service.)

I’ve been to church with my Lutherin grandsons.  They sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”  Charles Wesley at his best.

I’ve sung “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” at the Methodist Church.  It was written by Martin Luther. Again, if that is not a Lutherin hymn, then there is no such thing.

I am sure that there is an interesting study to be made with regard to how much cross-pollination there is among the hymn books of the various churches.

Why is this?

Hymns are close to our hearts.  

There is a saying, “Those who sing, pray twice!”

It is true.

And we remember when we sing.  Some of the clearest memories I have of my mother are standing by her side singing in church.

My family and I have discovered the TV series Ghost.  We first found the series on CBS, and then we found the British show it was copied from.

The premise is there is a couple living in a haunted house, and because of a brush with death, the wife attains the ability to see and hear ghosts.  One Christmas, the husband’s family comes to visit. The one thing the wife wants to do is to get around the piano and sing Christmas carols, but the husband’s family isn’t interested.  Because of this, the wife goes to the piano and sings them alone.

But she isn’t alone.  Behind her, and invisible to everyone else, are the ghosts, who are more than happy to sing with her.  (I tear up just writing about it.)

My point: Like her, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. If we are divided on this manner of worship, or that matter of doctrine, at least we can sing together.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )