On May 13th at 2:00 pm there will be a service for Rev. Rob McCall who was the pastor at the Blue Hill Congregational Church for 28 years. For those who knew Rob, please know that all are welcome for the service at the Blue Hill church.
Read artist Robert Shetterly’s reflections on the life of Rob McCall. (Ctrl & click on the link to go to the website)
April 21, 2023. Rob McCall died this morning – not unexpectedly. He had been failing for some time. His passing is a great loss to his community in Blue Hill, Maine. Also to the world.
I painted his portrait five years ago, and at the unveiling of it in the Blue Hill library, with Rob there, I said, “I know of no greater contemporary nature writer and no greater source of wisdom for how we must think of ourselves in relation to nature if we want to survive on this planet.”
He was, for many years, the beloved minister of the Blue Hill Congregational Church. But it may have been his weekly essays, his Awanadjo Almanac, through which most people knew him.
Rob paid extraordinarily close attention to all the miraculous phenomena of nature and equally close attention to the frequently dispiriting behavior of humans. He gently, but adamantly, encouraged members of this community to perceive more closely and act more generously. It is not an exaggeration to say that he changed the ethos of this place. In a democratic society how people act, what they choose to protect, what values they bring to important decisions, who they choose as leaders, how humble or arrogant or prejudiced or kind they are with others depends to a great extent on the quality of their teachers. The truths they tell. Rob McCall was a quintessential teacher. The best way to remember him is to read his own words. Here is a little selection of his quotes that I collected:
“Most creatures under heaven are entirely concerned with faithfully feeding and mating and playing; raising their young in peace and unafraid. They are oblivious to the rise and fall of fortunes and empires except when these events interfere with the natural rhythms of life, when their habitat is threatened, their water poisoned, their air sullied. The nations rage, the kingdoms totter while wild roses still shyly bloom, deer still graze, whales still dive and breach in search of food, and the hermit thrush still sings its age-old, sorrowful song from the cool woodland shade.”
“Around here the spirits of the towns are mostly Christian. But the spirits of the forests are Algonquin; the spirits of the snow and ice are Inuit; the spirits of the mountains are Buddhist; the spirits of the big trees, rocks and waterfalls are Shinto; the spirits of the animals are Neolithic; and the spirits of the bays and islands are Celtic, Druid and Pagan. If you stay in town, Christianity might be all you need. But, if you wander far out beyond the towns, Christianity may not be enough.”
“We are told that Moses was out seeing for himself when he saw a burning bush. God spoke to Moses, not through any book or priest or church, but in the form of a living plant on fire. This is the elegance of myth, because this is precisely a description of plant metabolism: every plant is doing a slow burn as carbon, water and sunlight are synthesized by chlorophyll into sugars which the plant burns to sustain its life, and all life. Every bush is a burning bush, every shrub is a revelation.”
“Why is it that hurricanes and other natural disasters seem to affect the poor more harshly than others? Why would a just God further punish those who have suffered the most by sending destructive storms to add to their suffering? Let’s not be too quick to blame God, who sends good weather and bad to fall equitably on everyone. The poor often suffer more from natural disasters because of poor housing, inadequate transportation, dilapidated infrastructure, and inferior rescue and medical services. It is up to man, not God, to change all that. A few rolls of paper towels are not going to do it.”
“Massacres of innocents are getting to be commonplace these days, thanks to a festering rage in industrial societies joined to advanced firearm technology. Nearly every morning it seems we are greeted by another horror of mass murder. It is dangerous to suggest that this is not about guns but that it is simply about mental health, or religion, or terrorism, or domestic violence, or a bureaucratic failure somewhere. A madman with a knife might manage to kill a few innocents before being stopped, but a madman with an assault rifle can kill scores, as we have all witnessed recently. So this is most definitely about guns, and no denial can alter that truth. It is criminally negligent to continue to allow public health and safety to be endangered in this way. It is diabolical to insist that this slaughter was the intent of the founding fathers when they drafted the second amendment to the Constitution, which clearly states that armed men should be ‘well-regulated.’ It is tyrannical to suggest that the right of a few to use their weapons should massacre the right of the many to the peaceful pursuit of happiness, and make children, and adults, afraid to go to school or to church, or even to leave their homes.”
I could fill many pages with the words of Rob McCall. I won’t do that, but suggest you seek them out for yourselves. Most of his best thoughts are preserved in his books.
But I want to leave you with the quote I chose to scratch into his portrait:
“I don’t care what you believe, frankly. I don’t care if you believe that Christ was actually bodily resurrected from the condition of being clinically dead, or if you believe it’s all a silly myth. I don’t care what you believe. I care what you love. If you love the Creator and the creatures and your neighbor and yourself and your family and your enemy and the Earth and the Great Mystery, then what in the world do you need beliefs for? And if you don’t love these, what earthly good will beliefs do you anyway?”
I have no doubt that his soul is at peace. A life more dedicated to justice and truth and nature and kindness we could not find.
Let us continue to heed his words to bring peace to the world.
Robert Shetterly
Robert Shetterly - Americans Who Tell The Truth website
Rob McCall – Minister, Naturalist, Writer: 1944-2023
Rob McCall is a naturalist, writer and ordained minister who from 1986 until his retirement in 2014 was pastor of the First Congregational Church of Blue Hill, Maine. Since 1992 he has authored and produced the widely popular Awanadjo Almanack, a weekly broadcast from WERU-FM to a listening audience in mid-coast Maine and the worldwide web, and appearing as a regular column in several publications. The Almanack, “devoted to feeling at home in nature and breaking down the wall of hostility between us and the rest of creation,” began as a weekly commentary on observations of local plants, animals and small town life on the Blue Hill Peninsula. Awanadjo is Algonkian for the “small misty mountain” that slopes upward from Blue Hill village and provided endless inspiration for this author and preacher.
In the introduction to his Great Speckled Bird: Confessions of a Village Preacher, he says:
I am not a Christian by any prevailing definition. Christians can say the Apostle’s Creed without crossing their fingers. They believe in the second coming of Christ and the resurrection of the body. Christians are sure that accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior will gain them a place in heaven . . .Christians are confident that theirs is the only way, and do not hesitate to convert others by force or guile. Christians believe that humanity and the Earth are fallen and can only be redeemed by Christ. They believe that animals have no souls and that mankind is master of the Earth. All my life I have read the same scriptures, prayed the same prayers and sung the same hymns as other Christians, but I have been led another way. I do not believe these things. Nor do I find much evidence that Jesus believed these things either.
This “other way” is what McCall calls the Old Faith:
It is a faith which was from the beginning. It is a faith in the earth and the weather, the sun and moon, the land and the sea . . . It celebrates the healing power of the Creator spirit . . . It has two natural laws: ‘you reap what you sow,’ and ‘Do unto others as you would have others do to you.’
Scripture and nature are the two pillars of Rob’s creative and spiritual life, and when they are interwoven both are further illuminated, as in this recent passage:
We are told that Moses was out seeing for himself when he saw a burning bush. God spoke to Moses, not through any book or priest or church, but in the form of a living plant on fire. This is the elegance of myth, because this is precisely a description of plant metabolism: every plant is doing a slow burn as carbon, water and sunlight are synthesized by chlorophyll into sugars which the plant burns to sustain its life, and all life. Every bush is a burning bush, every shrub a revelation.
“I learned to love scripture from my father,” he says, “and nature from my mother, whose knowledge and love of wildflowers moved me.” Rob’s father was Clarence Field McCall, Jr., the United Church of Christ Conference Minister for Southern California at the time of his death, and a pastor for most of Rob’s growing up years. His theology was mainstream Protestant, was grounded in the gospel, and was more focused on social and economic justice than it was on personal salvation or church doctrine. Barbara Warren McCall was a Yankee Protestant who met Clarence in seminary, and when they were ordained together in the late 30’s she became one of the very few ordained female ministers in the country.
The McCalls headed west after their New England wedding and were serving a church in Rapid City, South Dakota when Rob was born in 1944, their third of four children. They moved a few years later to Forest Grove, Oregon, a college town one hour’s drive east of the Pacific and nestled in the Tualatin Valley, with majestic Mount Hood clearly visible on the horizon. In summers the McCalls headed to nearby campgrounds or Glacier or Yosemite National Park. They packed a canvas army tent and food and camping supplies for all six into a Mercury sedan that Clarence had rigged with a makeshift kitchen that unfolded from the back of the car. It was an idyllic life for a boy. When they moved from Forest Grove in 1954 and drove east toward their new home in Oak Park, Illinois, Rob remembers watching Mount Hood through the rear-view window for a long time until it disappeared.
He writes:
Around here the spirits of the town are mostly Christian. But the spirits of the forests are Algonquin; the spirits of the snow and ice are Inuit;the spirits of the mountains are Buddhist; the spirits of the big trees, rocks and waterfalls are Shinto; the spirits of the animals are Neolithic; the spirits of the bays and islands are Celtic, Druid and Pagan. If you stay in town, Christianity might be all you need. But if you wander far out beyond the town, Christianity may not be enough.
Rob graduated as a philosophy major in 1966 from Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, and Harvard Divinity School in 1970. Before entering the ministry in 1985 he lived in Concord, Massachusetts, where his Musketaquid Almanac appeared weekly in the Concord Journal. He has been married to painter Rebecca Haley McCall since 1967, is a fiddler, mandolin player, singer and guitarist and has worked as an elementary school teacher, handyman, tree and landscape contractor, church sexton, chimney sweep, and the foreman of a 250 acre apple orchard. His formal education also includes graduate studies in education, Doctor of Ministry in Congregational studies, and Certification in fruit trees and entomology. His Small Misty Mountain was published by Pushcart Press in 2006 and distributed by W.W. Norton and Great Speckled Bird, a collection of essays and sermons, was published by Pushcart Press in 2012.
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