Trying on the future for size

Whenever I find too many familiar names in the obituary section of the paper, I go to the dark corners of my closet and gingerly haul out Death once again to try on for size. 

I’m sure most people my age at some time try on this certain future for size.  We know the past. Sometimes it was a good fit, almost like a new Spandex girdle. Other times it was way too big, too small, too heavy, too light –and we wished what we were experiencing would go way.

One thing about the future is sure: Our lives as we knew them here on earth will be over.  Our bodies will end up, possibly in a coffin, possibly cremated, but as dust, somewhere. And we have questions and concerns. 

I think of my young uncle who with his family was lined up against the wall to be shot by the revolutionaries in the political upheavals in Russia in 1917-19.  Decades later, he remembered thinking: “One of those bullets is meant for me. Will it hurt?” 

That’s the question I ask as I think of death, exact time unknown: “Will it hurt?”   “How long will it take to die?”  “And after death, what happens?” 

I listened to a gerontologist, whose specialty is end-of-life issues, lecture recently at LifeVentures, an enrichment program for older adults.  He assured us that dying didn’t need to be a long, agonizing journey. Hospice has the means to alleviate pain.  But, still, I feel like Woody Allen, who said, “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” I prefer to live. I still have too much on my bucket list.

Unfortunately, there is no trial run for death like there is for childbirth. When our first daughter was born, the intense, gripping pains of end-stage labor took me by surprise. I felt I was being torn apart.  Before the birth of our second daughter  I told myself boldly that I was going to do this the natural way and experience this baby’s birth without anesthetic, at least not as much. Preparation helped me control the birthing process to a certain extent.  

So here we are, this growing group of aging men and women,  trying on a certain future for size. We read the daily obituaries as if religiously obligated.  Which ones are younger, which ones older? When will our name be here?  Who will care? 

Our culture mixes sex with everything, some totally unrelated to it. Food, cars, vacations, toothpaste, whatever.  I keep thinking we will soon get ads for coffins with a voluptuous, semi-clothed female draped over them like lounge singers over a grand piano.  

Yet I doubt that because our society hesitates to talk freely about death or have a close association with the process unlike another age when poets wrote much and often about death. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote, “Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just ourselves and Immortality.”  

   

Dying now takes place in hospitals and hospices, away from daily life—too scary, too intimidating.   Our society doesn’t want to think that there is a time when we have to leave this world, yet in Fanny J. Crosby’s (1820-1915) old, but familiar words, “Some day the silver cord will break. Some day my earthly house will fall.” 

Yet a fast surf through TV stations will show shooting after shooting, bludgeoning after bludgeoning, by any and all means.  People drop by the dozens, covered with fake blood. 

I don’t have the urge to die.  I still have too much I want to complete. Yet I know the future holds this step. So what is death?  It’s  another stage in the journey.  It’s as much a part of life as birth. It separates me from my body, family, friends, but not from God.  

Heaven is outmoded  thinking, according to some  people, like last year’s car models. Yet I think of my mother, who in her last years yearned for death and what it would bring, assured she would see my father once again. She thought of that as heaven.   

Our society would like to dispense with both heaven and hell.  I’ll admit  I don’t see heaven in terms of wings, halos, and strumming golden harps while strolling down streets of gold. Yet when I think of  how wonderfully  intricate and amazing our bodies with their souls are, I find it hard to believe dust is the end.   As a Christian I see death as a journey toward God into eternity. "I know that my Redeemer lives!"   And it’s not up to me to judge who will get there.

And with that assurance, I can shove  Death back in the closet corner  once again.   

 

Why Bibles wear out

I’m for a multi-laypreacher system, yet not a multi-pastoral system.  That would surely mean many needs would get dropped.

After almost nine decades of listening to sermons, I think I have a right to express an opinion. My  first sermon-listening experiences took place in the little Mennonite Brethren Church at Laird, Saskatchewan – but only during the summer.  During the winter we children attended the United Church of Sunday school and a worship service only rarely. A frozen river between where we lived and the church meant winter travel was impossible. 

This Laird congregation was a small group of Kanadier, Mennonite  descendants of  the first wave of immigrants to Canada in the 1870s, and a smaller number of Russian Mennonite Brethren, who came in the 1920s.  Services were held in German in the mornings and English in the evenings – a good tradeoff.

“Do you have a word from the Lord for us this morning, Brother Funk?”  the church leader asked my father when our family entered the small entry way.  Long distance telephone calls  were too expensive in the early 1930s and letters too uncertain.  A good preacher always knew if God had been speaking to him during the week, knowing he might be asked to preach.  

Yes, Dad a message from the Lord in his Bible and his heart.  He had wrestled it out for several weeks, maybe even months, while stocking shelves in his grocery store, dusting cans, waiting on customers, watching the weather.

He worked at it like I do a blog – while baking chicken for lunch, knitting a square for an afghan, walking, resting.  His sermons came out of his life experiences with his customers and his early life in the Ukraine. I  have only one of his sermons one he preached to me one Sunday afternoon in Edmonton before his death, while he was sitting on the living room couch and I took notes.

This sermon came out of his life and had to do with how the wind affected the the windmill his father owned and operated high on the hill in Rosenthal near Chortitza.  It had to do with the similarity between the wind and the Holy Spirit, and that he, as a miller, couldn’t control the direction of the wind. The application was clear:  you can’t control the working of the Spirit. Don’t force the mystery of how the Spirit works.

I grew up when Bibles got worn out – literally. I showed my father’s Bible to my son James recently. The cover is crudely patched with tape and artificial leather.  I can still see him, sitting at the table,  wetting his thumb with this tongue, before turning the page, which resulted in deeply gouged pages.  Passages are underlined, explanations added in the margins, and the book itself  full of clippings. A Bible used this much fell apart. 

The Bible was my father’s source of inspiration, and he worked hard to connect it to life – to  discrimination, prejudice, and the need for making personal peace with Christ as Savior.  After all, he had been an ordained deacon/evangelist in Russia. Whether he succeeded is not for me to judge.  He preached what he thought he had to say.

To preach every Sunday with a message that enlightens, inspires, challenges, comforts,  is a tall assignment – especially one that  meets the specific needs of  the congregation for that time. 

I have been reading Jeremiah, the weeping prophet. I was struck again by how rich his language was – studded with gems of similes, metaphors  and symbols arising from the life of the Israelites.  He  spoke to a specific situation:  Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon will capture  you and take you away, don’t flee to Egypt,  you will return.  Jeremiah knew his God and knew his people and he tried to bring a message from the Lord for the people.

The lectionary is a good idea – but not when it binds the preacher. The present professional pastoral system is a good idea – but  I look for the surprise sermon by someone who has been working on a word from God for weeks, maybe months.  I keep looking for the church leader to ask a man or  woman coming into the building, “Do you have a message from God for the people today?”   

Hopping down the Zwieback trail -- only in Menno-land

Children learn the alphabet by various ways.  I recall a song I learned ending “Now I know my ABCs, tell me what you think of me.”  When I suddenly have to remember what letter comes after the one I am focused on, I still sing this song to myself. 

Other children learn their ABCs by stating “A is for apple, rosy and red, B is for ball .....” and so on. 

Now children and adults – all of us – have another device to learn the alphabet – the Anabaptist alphabet creatively portrayed in the book On the Zwieback Trail: A Russian Mennonite Alphabet of Stories, Recipes and Historical Events by Lisa Weaver with illustrations and designs by Julie Kauffman and Judith Rempel Smucker.

It is published by Canadian Mennonite University Press in Winnipeg. A truly classy production.  Bold, bright, beautiful. 

Do Methodists have such a treasure? Baptists? Catholics?  I doubt it. 

Only in the Mennonite world. 

This is not a primer in the usual sense, but a wonderfully cheerful illustrated introduction to the Russian Mennonites, beginning with the Anabaptists in Europe in the 1500s. These early radical Christ-believers practiced adult baptism, communion, and shared time, talents and goods.  On the Zwieback Trail, however, is not a “quiet-in-the-land” approach to Mennonite life and thought but a bold, upbeat look.  

So A is for Anabaptism, of course. What else? 

It continues with this novel approach to introducing new readers to the Russian Mennonites  with B is for Borscht.  Anyone familiar with this  Russian Mennonite cabbage  soup can add their own descriptors.  The recipe is illustrated with a photo appetizing enough to make the reader want to dip into the page  and taste it. And for those unfamiliar with it, to make a pot for dinner. 

And so, on through the alphabet:  D is for the Dnieper River basin of the Ukraine, where in the late 1700s Empress Catharine the Great invited Prussian Germans to settle on its fertile steppes.  

F is for Faspa, that  delightful Mennonite  “high tea,” only with Mennonites, it is coffee,  served in the early afternoon, usually consisting of Zwieback, coffee and lots of conversation.  It was looked forward to because it was a time to “neighbor,”  or visit, so important to these Russian Mennonites and their ancestors. 

On the inside front cover is a map of the village of Rosenthal, near the Dnieper River. A small windmill  in the top left-hand corner is identified with the words “Johann Funk Windmill.” That marks the spot where my grandparents and, later on,  my parents lived until 1923.  That year, along with thousands of other immigrants, they headed for Canada, away from the heartache of World War I, the horrors of the Russian Revolution, the desperation of the Hunger Years, and the pestilence that killed my great-grandparents, my grandfather and an uncle in two short weeks. 

On a trip to Russia in 1989 I stood on that spot and tried to imagine what it might have been like working inside that Dutch-style windmill, high on this windy hill—long since gone and replaced with wheat fields.  

The second colony settled by Mennonites in the Ukraine is shown with a map on the back inside cover, pinpointing the dozens of villages established along the Molotschnaer River. 

As I wrote in a blurb on the back cover, “Anyone with Verenike strengthening their muscles and Borscht flowing in their veins knows that Z could only stand for Zwieback.   Join a voyage of discovery down the alphabet trail to celebrate the history, culture and service of this branch of Anabaptist believers. From the early 1500s to the present, it’s all there for young and old to enjoy.” 

Each letter of the alphabet refers to some significant aspect of Russian Mennonite history , faith and culture.

M is for  Menno Simons, 16^th century Anabaptist leader after whom the Mennonites were named.  He taught that “True Christians do not know vengeance. They are the children of peace, and they walk in the way of peace.” 

It is a book that brings back memories, introduces new learning to the uninitiated, and tempts  readers to try new traditions and new foods. It is a treasure trove of unexpected pleasures.

I showed it to my son James Wiebe of Belite Airplanes when he came for lunch one day.  He, too, marveled at the professional look of this book.  But he stopped at the page showing a picture of a glider built by three young students about 1901 near Chortitza.  He was amazed.  Aeronautics interested his Russian-born ancestors as it does him, so much so that it led to a career change? He decided to trace that lead to find out some more. 

Other treasures include recipes for peppernuts, pluma mos,  Russian-style pancakes, verenike, and the almost sacred Zwieback, the two-decker bun,  a tradition among Mennonite housewives, made by the huge dishpan-pan full each Saturday.  

  

So all together: A is for Anabaptism!

To order your copy, go on-line for information about this bold new way of  writing Mennonite history.  You won’t regret it.  

I am running out of minutes

Our phones notify us when we are running out of days, even minutes.   Life doesn’t do us the same favor. 

I am running out of life minutes.  I know for a fact that at my age I have fewer minutes to live than I have already lived. Yet this is not a morbid thought, just a reminder to see what baggage I am lugging behind me.   If I had all my minutes to live over, what changes would I make?  What luggage would I leave behind?  What luggage can I leave behind? 

I would eat fewer beans and more ice cream.  That’s not original with me.  Let me say it in my words:  I’d aim for more joy, less drudgery. Joy is peace dancing. Anything done grudgingly means I’m dragging a skid of bricks over a gravel road. 

I would ask my parents more questions about what life was like when they were young, the challenges they faced, how they made decisions. But then I didn’t know what questions to ask.  Now I do. 

I was wondering the other day what my father’s feelings might have been when he stood on the streets of Moscow as a young man in the Russian military as a medic, away from his Mennonite community for the first time. The year  was 1914.  Did he feel the same way I felt when I moved into what seemed like a foreign country when I married?  Does the quality of homesickness ever change? What would he have done differently.

I would live with greater passion.   Passion was a bad word when I was growing up because it hinted at steamy liaisons in the dead of the night in some dark secret corner indulging in forbidden pleasures. 

In Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, the psychiatrist is trying to learn why his young disturbed patient blinded the eyes of several valuable horses with a metal spike. He learns that, before the blinding incident, the boy occasionally took the horses at night and raced them on the shore, bareback and naked, at top speed.  The boy tells Dysart, “At least I galloped. When did you?”  The psychiatrist is forced to acknowledge that the boy did something he had never allowed himself to do—to gallop, to know passion.  And he envies him.  

In  my book Border Crossing I confessed I had  been too concerned about what people would think if I waved a banner boldly, or spoke out frankly on issues I was concerned about. I saw a lion behind every blade of grass, and not a Wizard of  Oz Cowardly Lion either. So if I could do it all over,  I would be less timid about speaking up about injustice,  prejudice, violence, the chains of rigidity,  the inadequacy of either/or answers. I would have written more frankly, more forcefully, more fiercely. I hope. . . .

With foreknowledge about writing  opportunities,  I would aim harder at freeing people from oppressive theologies. In other words, I would like to have been a “catcher in the rye,” standing at the edge of the cliff, like the fictional Holden Caulfield, freeing people from oppressive views of God.  

Simply said, I would have studied more thoroughly how God  relates to people and people to God. Some preachers, teachers, and their kin spend a lifetime enmeshing their congregations in thinking that chains their spirit.   I would tell preachers their task is to free people from narrow, small thinking about God and how he works in the world. 

Before they went into Babylonian exile the early Israelites viewed  God as  a local and denominational God, limited  to their kind.  In Babylonian captivity  they learned that God was not limited to the temple or to them, but that God planned to extend his love also to the Gentiles. 

I grew up with much the same concept – God was restricted to my family, my church, my kind, only to learn as I dared step further and further  outside these boundaries that God was bigger, greater, and not someone I could limit or tame by my understanding. For too much of my life my understanding  of God was much too restricted. I made him my size, a size I could handle with comfort.

I would have demanded less certainty about faith matters,  for if we want faith in God reduced to something we can measure, caress, weigh, describe in concrete terms, we are the losers.   The apostle Paul speaks about these matters as a “mystery” with great depths of wisdom and knowledge.  When this mystery has been flattened, the transcendence of God dissipates and the awe, wonder, and transcendence is turned into lifeless words.  If I had all my minutes to live over, I would tell people, “Your God is too dinky.”

I would be kinder to myself and less judgmental of others for being less than perfect.  It sometimes takes a lifetime to realize that everyone has his or her own burden to bear.  Forgiveness of self and of others is the bread of daily life, not the dry crust offered to the dog. 

And yet, here I am, at age 87, nearly 88,  having to say that my life was what it was.  In Theodore Roethke’s words, “I learn by going where I have to go.”  I learned by going where I had to go.  I can’t change the past, but I can whatever minutes I have left.

 And so I go into my remaining minutes, hopefully still learning. . . and learning.