How many times have you been properly in love?

Piers Morgan of CNN often asks the persons  he interviews how often they have been properly in love.  Properly?   What does he mean?  Completely? Intensely?  Thoroughly?  As a Britisher does he mean nicely? Correctly? 

Why does he ask this question?  Is this a significant memory to hang on to? 

Being in love is always pleasurable, if sometimes maddening, irrational, and heart-rending.  Everyone should have the experience of falling in love at least once in their lives. Twice is better.

I can remember a few summer romances of long ago.  I remember the rush of emotion, the longing, the feeling that without being close to this young man my world would fall apart in a second.

I remember falling in love with the man who became my husband.  I fell properly in love and then learned to love him over the brief 15 years of our marriage.

I would like to tell Piers Morgan that it is probably more important to remember memorable moments, life-changing moments, when the world turned as if on a pivot, than being properly  in love.

One year after my husband’s death in 1962 I and my family of four young children were landed immigrants in the great country of the United States of America and I was the family’s sole supporter – at a low monthly salary. We had only been in Kansas for seven weeks before Walter’s death.

 I didn’t fear being deported for I faithfully carried my new green card in my wallet.  For me to work outside the home full-time was a new venture.  To manage the family finances was a new challenge.  To be the sole parent of four lively children was equivalent to climbing Mount Everest.

Christmas, one year later,  was one of those unforgettable moments. Nothing momentous happened. We weren’t starving, but we were eating a lot of bologna and macaroni and cheese.  It was a fearful time. As I wrote in my book Alone: A Widow’s Search for Joy, in those months after Walter’s death “Fear grabbed me in the pit of my stomach and hung on .... I became obsessed with the fear that I might die suddenly and leave the children orphans. I could see them – four waifs, sitting at the curb begging .... I drove the car as little as possible, fearing a car accident. I feared illness. Every small symptom of ill health, whether constipation or loss of appetite or a twinge of gas, I interpreted as serious illness .....”

I remember clearly that first Christmas after  Walter’s death and the tremendous feeling of exultation I had that we had crossed the first mountain, difficult as it had been. God had been gracious; we were thankful. ... We hadn’t flunked the course.

Now that was a memorable moment.

I remember also when I was in Rosenthal/Chortitza in the Ukraine in 1989 with a select group of people looking for their Mennonite roots.  The night before we left I had phoned Mother to ask her once again to give me some directions with regard to where she and my father had lived decades ago.  She remembered the landmarks clearly, excited for me that I would visit her old home.

 I found the street, the storefront,  the ravine, the hill. I walked the streets of this now Russian town hardly able to grasp that this was where my parents had once walked, lived, did business transactions.  On the high hill outside the city had stood my grandfather’s windmill,  blades turning vigorously in the wind.  In the village cemetery of Kronsthal, in the overgrown area among the trees and high grass where broken gravestones littered the underbrush, my father had buried four adult members of his family  in 1920 during the typhus epidemic and the famine that followed.

 I will always remember that moment standing on that hill, now a wheat field. I find it hard to express what I felt – but it was a connection to my family’s heritage. It helped me understand who I was.

I remember also learning to forgive.  Yes, learning to forgive.  It doesn’t come easily or quickly when  someone has hurt you.  It wasn’t a skill taught at school or Sunday school.  Maybe Catholics have an easier time with forgiveness going to confession regularly.  But it is like deciding to lose weight. First, it has to be a head decision, then become a habit. That  decision to lose weight or to forgive has to be made each morning on arising and dozens of times during the day until it takes firm hold and becomes the natural thing to do. 

I believe such events are more important than having been “properly” in love.

 

About Ruehrei and bigger things

Another of my friends died about two weeks ago. It made me sad. I think of my mother who at age 98 told me how alone she felt, for all her friends were dying, leaving her behind.

Her words reminded me of the time, years ago, when the curfew rang in the evening, how we children dropped whatever we were doing and rushed home, dirty, sweaty, tired, happy.  The day had been good.  Sometimes a child who hadn’t heard the bell peal across our little village needed a special holler to come home.

Mother was waiting for that special holler to head to her final home. Her friends had all heard the call and left.  She had been saying good-bye to life and hello to the new life ahead for some time.  At my age these are two daily tasks.

  

I say good-bye to things more easily than I once did.  Whatever sits on shelves and hangs on walls no longer means much to me.  I wonder about hoarders who keep piling it in.  What draws them to their stuff?  What makes it impossible for them to give it up. 

I say good-bye to activities more readily each year.  It feels good to stay at home and not keep rushing around  like my children. Son James flew to Washington, D.C. this weekend via New York City. Daughter Susan drove to Kansas City. Joanna visited Kansas a few weeks ago.  I am glad they can do this. I can’t.  This week I resigned from a board I had been on for 37 years. It was time to let go.

I find it fairly easy to say good-bye to those lumps and bumps  that cling to my thought life, particularly my theology.  They have hampered me long enough.  My need for certitude in minor areas has become less.  Dispensationalism, for example.  Many younger people don’t know what the word means or why it was of major importance to some of us at one time.  Or why people were dogmatic about each arrow and line in the large complicated diagram depicting the end-times.  The faith life isn’t about arrows and lines and complicated formulas.

I say good-bye, with regret, to the loss of skills like cooking and baking, which I once enjoyed immensely.  I have lost the touch, I tell myself. I no longer know what yeast dough should feel like before I put it in a large bowl to rise, so I don’t attempt a batch of sweet rolls any more. 

I get hungry for old foods like green bean soup or summer borscht but can  never find all the ingredients in supermarkets.  Summer savory?  What is that?  Without it green bean soup is just vegetable soup. So I make  Ruehrei for myself, and, as I look at the little pan of food, I wonder what it was like when I made this soul-food for six people. It must have been a mountain.

I keep saying hello to a deeper understanding of faith.  Paul wrote to the  Corinthian church that outwardly he was wasting away, yet inwardly he was being renewed day by day.  To keep growing inwardly is important to me, especially to hang onto joy and a deeper understanding of grace.

I keep saying hello to new insights into my family's story. Life review is important for all older people. I do it for several  reasons: (1) I want my children to know where they came from, the country of origin, and the values that shaped their ancestors, including mine. You don’t know who you are until you know where you came from.

 (2) I want them to know why our extended family, originating in rural life in the Ukraine in the former USSR,  never became farmers in Canada when they arrived here in 1923 though new immigrants were expected to become homesteaders.

(3) I want them to know about the generosity of my father’s uncle Abram D. Schellenberg, who came to Canada  a good decade earlier and established a business  in Saskatchewan. His foresight enabled him to sponsor my father’s extended family and other relatives looking to escape the political unrest and hardship in the former Soviet Union during Lenin’s rule. Such gracious giving needs to be remembered and emulated in some form.

 (4) I also want them to understand what happened to the other half of the family – my mother’s side, which  got caught in Stalinist Russia and spent eleven years in forced labor in Siberia following World War II.

As children we never stopped our play to wait for the curfew.   It always came as a surprise. Already time to go home?  But home we went.  That’s the way I feel about life.  While I am  aware there is a curfew ahead,  I want to be hard  “at play” at my pursuits when the bell rings, yet ready.     

What? Me a bag lady? No way!

This weekend two events happened that bothered me:  I lost a blog I had written. It was ready to post when it disappeared from my faithful computer like the morning mist.  Computer expert Joanna worked hard to find it using all search engines she could think of.  No luck.  I had to say good-bye to that masterpiece. 

Joanna was somewhat philosophical about it. Maybe I really shouldn’t have written it. It was about my strong reaction to an article about church men using their male energy in a day of wild behavior, demolishing and blowing up old cars “to the glory of God.”  “Aggression is the essence of manliness,” they were told.  Oh yeah? Not the way I see it in this day of war, violence, and domestic abuse. 

The other event? 

My children pushed me, once again, into more new electronic technology:  Facebook and a KindleFire device. 

Such  items begin as a gleam in the eye of one of the children, not mine, but I have to suffer the labor pains to bring them to life and nurture them thereafter. 

In the early 1980s son James insisted: “Mom, you can’t let yourself get much older without learning to use a computer.”

“But my parents and their parents before them lived to a ripe old age without learning. Why do I have to?”  I had all the counter-arguments down pat.

“If you want a head start into old age, you’ve got to use a computer. Old age and computers are a compatible team.  Can’t you see yourself several decades down the road—you’re old, making doorstops out of catalogs—but with a computer you could have fun playing games – Mystery Writing, Adventures in Medications, Committee Strategy."

“I can see myself with a scrambled brain learning all these new commands.  Years ago my writing teacher talked only about curves, straight lines, and whether to write above or below the line. With a computer I’d have to learn about Word Wrap and Soft Hyphens and Booting the system. I’m too old.”  I was not quite sixty at the time. 

“Mom, I’ve heard about people of ninety-five sitting on front of a computer  mastering it in a few hours.  Nothing to it....”

“Then how come some of them are growing extra fingers in their desperation to find all the keys?”

“You’re exaggerating, Mom. You’ll be a wonderful example to your grandchildren.  They’ll admire you sitting at your personal computer, writing them letters, balancing your checkbook,  logging into daily financial reports from New York to find out how your investments are doing.” 

“But, James, I’m already drowning in information, and I haven’t got any investments.” 

“Well, think of other advantages.  You could track where you’re on a waiting list for admittance to an old folks’ home to see if you’re near the top.”

“I love you, son, but the thought of a computer in the house scares me witless. I could never deal with a computer talking back to me.  I’m sure I’d break down and cry.  I couldn’t sleep nights wondering if it was plotting against me for having told it to Change Logged Disk Drive when it wanted to Abandon File Without Saving.” 

 “Listen, you can take a computer to bed with you and it wouldn’t  hurt a bit.  They’re tame as a kitten, like a pet, in fact. Before long, you’ll find yourself saying a loving good-night to it every evening. It’ll become friend, adviser, source of information ---.”

“But I can’t afford one.” 

“Nonsense. If you haven’t got one before you hit sixty, Mom, I can see you becoming a bag lady on the streets of  Hillsboro.” 

Me, a bag lady?  Roaming the streets of that little community? 

No way. I bought. James  set me up with a big IBM computer and a tractor feed printer. I was in business. Now I wouldn’t give it, e-mail  and the Internet up for anything.

About the same time as this life-changing event I needed a new tape recorder. The store clerk advised electronics.  I refused.  I bought a reel-to-reel recorder, which I used only a few times. I was still thinking in the old mode.

Next I welcomed a microwave oven, mobile phone,  cell phone, CD player, HD TV.  Now,  this weekend,  I was unceremoniously enrolled on FaceBook and given a lesson on using  a Kindle reader and playing Scrabble on-line.   Now it’s up to me. And I want to shrink into a corner and whisper, “Enough already.”  

Monday,  after nearly everyone left after a family gathering,  Joanna and I looked at some old photos of my parents.  A series of pictures shows the evolution of my immigrant Mother from a dark, floor-length, Old Country-style dress to a snazzy dressmaker suit she had made for herself in a lovely green wool about ten to fifteen years later. How had she managed the changes in clothing while learning a new language and culture with such grace? 

Can I make this deeper plunge  into modern electronics as gracefully? I think of the 1940s when I worked as a legal secretary and  I had  to type documents with up to fifteen copies at one time on a manual typewriter.  Every mistake had to be erased carefully on each copy.   The finished product was carefully meticulously checked with the original with another secretary reading it, including punctuation and paragraphing.Would anyone want to return to that method?

Okay, so I lost a blog.  No big deal. Just a lot of words. Ideas are without number. Will I master all this new stuff?   Not today, maybe not even tomorrow,  but I can only try. 

Facebook, Kindle, Scrabble, here I come – slowly. If I drown, someone please help!.

At my husband's grave fifty years later: Walter W. Wiebe 1918-62

When I was a child in the tiny village of Blaine Lake in northern Saskatchewan, the sexton of  the Catholic church always rang  the church bell to announce a death in the parish. The chimes came slowly, once for every year the person had lived.  We children  stopped our play to count the peals. A few, a child; many, an old person.  Poet John Donne (1573-1631)writes in one of his sermons, “Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

On Memorial Day my daughter Susan, son James,   wife Kathy and daughter Jennifer and I stood around my husband’s grave to remember his short life. The bell tolled  for him in  1962 in Kansas at age 44.

Walter and I met in 1945 when we were both attending Bible college in Winnipeg, I a naïeve 22-year-old  and he a more mature 28-year-old , just released from 4½ years in alternative service.

He had two goals: to get an education and a wife.  We were married two years later, and he began chasing his dream: B.Th., B.A., M.A. all the while supporting the family as a public school teacher, finish carpenter, school teacher, pastor.

He quickly rose to the top in whatever he did: Valedictorian and student president at college. He made friends easily. His ordination to the ministry in 1953 meant a great deal to him, a much-valued acknowledgment of his spiritual and leadership gifts.

He loved books. He loved learning new things.  A classmate wrote after Walter’s death about a college Zoology class both were taking in Waterloo, Ont. about 1960: “Walter had the habit of talking along to himself when the professor was lecturing. He had had some science before so this material was not entirely unfamiliar. He would say, ‘Yes, I see that.’  Or ‘So this would be this way’ or ‘Then it would go there’ .... always indicating he was following exactly what the prof was saying..... It didn’t take long and the prof was only lecturing to one person; the rest of the class was practically nonexistent.... I’ve never had that experience anywhere else. He was a real inspiration to me though it showed me up as a student.”

In 1958, Walter  became ill for the first time.  We didn’t think it was serious, but it was, and in 1962, after several surgeries, a  brief seven weeks after having moved to Hillsboro, Kansas, he died of what in lay terms is known as “jelly belly.”  I have written about his death and the life that followed for us as a family in my book Alone: A Widow’s Search for Joy (Tyndale, 1975).

At this simple memorial, I read a poem by daughter Christine, who died in 2000 at age 45, which she wrote about her father’s death at age  seven.

I clomp down the stairs in Daddy’s shoes.

Mother gives me some death words.

They don’t fit anyway.

Take them back, mother.

Relatives fly to our home like black birds.

Curled in uncle’s lap I watch.

“What did that mean?”

“We’re talking, German, Chrissie.”

At the back of the church: a long box

with a person in it.

I want to look inside

but I’m too far away.

Under the fir trees: a stone and a hole.

Is it really six feet?

Why is the lid shut?

May I move closer, mother?

Both James and Susan agreed with Christine that the memory she recorded in her poem “Letting go”  about  the last Christmas Walter was with us was memorable:

This is how it should be;

Christmas vacation, and I am six;

Daddy and I are driving outside the city

To a great hill with untouched snow.

Sun warms the car.

I climb up the tracks Daddy makes

hearing the crunch each time the first time.

We stand at the top, just Daddy and I, breathing,

And the sparrows laugh.

"I’m afraid,” I say.

But then we’re sailing

And  I’m safe on a narrow strip of wood

clinging to his broad back,

A solid thing in a swaying world,

And I’m laughing and wishing

We could fall like this forever

Into the sun sparkles and whipping wind

And the white snowdrift

Waiting to embrace us

Over and over and over.  

To read more of Christine’s poetry as well as an autobiographical sketch and  critical essays, go to Christine R. Wiebe, “Writing as Spiritual Journey, Creative Mennonite Writing, Vol. 2, No. 6,  Oct. 2010 and also JamesWiebe.blogspot.com  in which he writes a lengthy blog about what the loss of his father he barely knew meant to him at “Hasking  and Other Reflections on Fatherhood,” February 8, 2012.

Susan read an excerpt from daughter Joanna’s book Birth Mother, (Kindle ebook) about a time when she and Walter attended a revival meeting when she was a young girl and felt compelled by the powerful preaching to go forward at the altar call, yet didn’t think she needed to.  He told her she didn’t have to go. “Never let the crowd do the thinking for you. Always do the thinking for the crowd.”

I thought of words he often mentioned to me his father had given him: “It is better to spend fifty years struggling for the truth and making mistakes than to live for a short time according to tradition.” Like father, like son.

Around his gravestone I read from a few of Walter’s published and unpublished writings, including words written to himself: “Some people are born thirty years too soon. Their ideas are ahead of their time. Every invention is but a contravention of customs, every advance in science, political systems, etc. is ahead of its time.”

“Every man is made by his past experiences, advantages, heredity, environment – and by the future he entertains in his breast.”

In his article “Spiritual mountaineering,” about the Old Testament pioneer thinkers Caleb and Joshua,  he concluded with a story about a preacher  who asked at a service for the names of the two spies who believe God could give Israel the Promised Land. Over a hundred hands shot up, signifying they knew the answer. Then he offered a twenty-dollar bill to anyone who could, from memory, give the names of the other ten spies.  No one took up this offer. The ten spies are forgotten, but Caleb is remembered for his faith. “He wholly followed the Lord.”  All his life he had but one desire and that was to do God’s bidding.  This is what God asks of each one of us – to “die climbing,” Walter concluded.  Caleb died climbing.

The time we spent together before that simple gravestone was a good one, remembering,  cherishing, loving.   Never send  to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee – for some sooner, for some later. But it is important to keep remembering.

Life review by means of musical memories

I purchased a CD featuring  Zamfir on his pan flute. I had been looking for it for a while. Wonderful stuff. When he played  “Lara’s Tune,”  I was transported back to the Student Union at Wichita State University in the late 1960s. My husband had died a few years earlier and I was taking summer school classes towards a master’s degree in English to improve my work prospects.  I had four children to support. 

I left for Wichita, about 60 miles away, early in the morning before the children were awake.  They had to get themselves up and make their own breakfast and lunch.  I returned shortly after lunch. But there, in the Student Union, “Somewhere my love,” or Lara’s Tune,  the theme song from the dramatic movie Dr. Zhivago floated from the juke box every noon as I ate my solitary lunch of one hamburger.   My thoughts were not with Dr. Z’s search for his lost Lara, but with my children, alone at home, wondering what they were doing, and why I wasn’t with them. 

That little return journey into the past reinforced for me that music, in any form,  is always more than just a group of notes set to a beat. Each remembered piece is a powerful symbol that evokes our inner journey, the part other people can’t see.  

When I was a child I learned “The B-I-B-L-E, yes, that’s the book for me.”  That little tune still evokes good memories of vacation Bible school sword drills and flannel graph lessons. 

 

“The little brown church in the valley” also brings back good memories of driving in our over-packed car to church on Sunday mornings with everyone but Mother and the baby singing  “There’s a church in the valley.” We sang gleefully,  shouting with childish gusto at  the chorus:  “Come, come, come, come, come to the church in the valley.”  We were singing in parts. We were a family. We were whole. 

But on those trips Dad also sang Heimatlieder (Songs of heaven). They had a dimension I never understood until decades later. These hymns sung with great feeling by the Mennonites in the Ukraine during the  1917-19 Revolution and the famine that followed expressed a longing to move to a better place where  hunger, illness,  sorrow,  violence in indescribable forms,  and death would be no more. 

I remember best  “Meine Heimat ist dort in der Hoeh” (My home is up higher), but my immigrant father sang many more of these songs  in the car and with the congregation in the little church we attended about twenty miles away, a good hour’s travel that included a ferry boat ride. Those songs said, “Get us out of here, Lord. Life is too painful.”

Growing up were songs we learned in school, all very British and Canadian.  “D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay?”   We children knew nothing about Peel’s red coat or hunting foxes with hounds, but we sang with abandon about him, the  Men of Harlech,  and the Minstrel Boy who went off to war with “his father’s sad harp slung behind him.” 

The romantic music   of my youth like The Blue Danube, Skater’s Waltz, Beautiful Dreamer, and many more still makes me fairly swoon. Life was opening up. Life was delicious.  A  young man who had taken my fancy whistled “Mexicali Rose” every time  he strolled past our yard.  I rushed to the gate when I heard him coming. 

I recall the youth fellowship choruses  during my Saskatoon days, also the piano music,  Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, my husband and I listened to together after the children were in bed – relaxing yet uplifting. 

When daughter Christine was dying she and I  played the Singing Nun’s “Joy Is Like the Rain,”  until I was sure we would wear the record out. That recprd  will always be  comfort but also a  sorrow.

As I get older I find myself turning to the old hymns and Gospel songs I sang earlier in life. They show me a well-worn path to God’s presence.  I still wait for the rolling basses to come in at the chorus of  “Wonderful Grace of Jesus.”  And I sorrow for congregations who have never learned to sing four-part harmony and never heard a huge congregation sing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” while knowing that you belonged to these people and that these people were yours. 

 

Hymns teach theology like preaching never can, especially those sung so often the words are imprinted indelibly on my mind. When we elders hear only praise choruses, sometimes with a disturbing beat that hurts our eardrums,  or even just the chorales  first sung  during the Reformation period, we feel disoriented.  We have lost powerful symbols of our faith that regularly drew us into the presence of God.  These old Gospel tunes  remind me of the familiar Lord to whom I committed myself years ago. 

Life review is an important exercise as we age I am told by gerontologists.  It can be done in many ways.  Through remembered, or re-entered music, is just one, a good one.