Kelly Hayes' Last Hurrah

He wanted his funeral to be his last chance to have the final word.  He hoped both friends and enemies would be present.  He died July 31, 2013.

Kelly Hayes, 61, recycled both trash and people.  He had strong feelings when either were swept aside as if they had no value.  

In 1995 I wrote an article about him for The Marketplace (MEDA publication). At the time he was running a one-man recycling enterprise, competing against the mastodons of the trash business. He called it the Sun Prairie Dog Services.  The prairie dog symbolized his small business, the mastodon the major trash haulers. 

The smallness of his business or the fact that he was brushing up against mastodons every day didn’t faze him.  Profit was not his goal. Spreading his ideas was. At his funeral he once again spread his thoughts about what gave meaning to his life. 

Several months ago, after the death of a friend, he wrote his own funeral service and emailed it to the church office. As usual, he did not follow the usual format for such an event. All his life he lived outside the box, doing things the way he thought would best serve God and the environment.  This farewell was  planned around hymns that had meant a great deal to him:

“Jesus loves me this I know.”  When he was hurting, Kelly said he  needed Jesus, God’s son incarnate in the flesh. Jesus’ love gave him comfort.

“My life flows on in endless song.... while to that Rock I’m clinging.” The  church and Jesus Christ meant a great deal to him. The Mennonite church had given him a vision, a song, he said, and a community. Kingdom of God values were important to Kelly, not what he wore or owned in consumer goods.  He kept his needs down the minimum, his concern for others’ needs hers high.  

In the 1995 article he told me, “I try to take seriously Jesus’ words in Matthew 5 about the comparative value of life and food, body and clothes.”

At the funeral, several people mentioned how Kelly “recycled” people in addition to trash. He took homeless men into his home, hoping to get them back onto their feet and returned to society as contributing citizens.  On occasion he sent his “roommates” to a neighbor’s home to shovel her snow-covered walk.

“Wonderful grace of Jesus.”  The more he needed grace and mercy, the more God gave, Kelly said. 

Recycling is hard work, messy and difficult,  he told me, but he kept at it. He was always trying to look after the “little person” who gets lost in the clamor for gain.

Among his valued customers were older men and women who were shutting down and cleaning out a lifetime accumulation of possessions—a painful process.  He was aware of their pain but also of their lightened spirit as they let their stuff go.  He checked on older shut-ins on his route.  He and they needed each other. 

One funeral attendee  said,  Kelly never said, “I need something for me.”  His word was always, “I will look after the needs of others.”   

                                       

“Taps,” yes, Taps, that mournful yet at the same time joyous  tune played at the end of day in countless settings. He wanted the world to know that “all was well.” He was now resting safely in the bosom of his Savior. His day had ended.

The final hymn we sang was “I am the resurrection and the life.”  He saw society the way it could be, in its resurrection glory, not as it is.  He saw the world as a place where there was no more pain, sorrow, judgment or condemnation. 

I learned to know Kelly in the 1970s when he was a student at Tabor College in Hillsboro, Kansas, majoring in English and mathematics.  His father was a military man stationed in Guam.  Kelly  came to my office often to challenge what I had said in class, wanting to have the last word. He had little regard for punctuation and spelling. Yet we got along well.  He was a creative person, churning out poems and plays.  He lived outside the box – living at one time in in an intentional community.  At times he  looked like an OT prophet at times with his shaggy hair and beard.

When I moved to Wichita, he became my recycler, but also  a person who cared deeply for me when I was suffering the loss of my daughter.  He brought some friends to sing hymns.

Kelly was a man of faith and of the church. For many years he was a member of the Mennonite Church of the Servant, a house-church based congregation.   More recently he had been attending Asbury Church.  

He held to strong specific  theological positions, especially with regard to the environment.  He discussed easily his view  how  the Old Testament version of Year of Jubilee could be resurrected in a modern society. Sometimes he held his own Jubilee.

Kelly,  once again you had the last word.  

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Why, why. why ......

Living many, many  years gives me time to ponder many things. Like a young child, I have boldness to keep asking why.

1.      Why does a blow to a man’s crotch provoke  hilarious laughter? Just wondering. 

2.      Why must women flex one knee slightly when posing for a photo and men can stand straight and tall? What’s wrong with standing firmly on two feet? 

3.      Why, when  athletes are asked to comment on a game,  out comes  mumbled syllables: “We didwhatwehadda do .... haddado ..... haddado ....”

4.      Why does a teen shows obvious terror when a customer hands over a $20 bill  and the charge is $13.62—and no computer?

5.      Why do movie directors have the leading lady wear stiletto heels while fleeing from the villain over cobblestones while he is wearing hob-nailed boots?

6.      Why are deaths of in-the-womb babies considered murder  and killing of  out-of-the-womb grownups in combat considered okay?

7.      “Tell me a little bit about  ....” releases a flood of words, as if a hydrant has  broken. “Little bit” is no longer just a few words. Why? 

8.      Why has the word  “sin” almost disappeared from our vocabulary? Instead I hear “Everyone makes mistakes,” “I goofed,”  “I’m not perfect.”

9.       I know that language changes. It’s a living thing, but the changes should make sense.  Why is “Jane gave the balls to Betty and myself” acceptable in modern parlance?  I won’t even mention the difference between “lie” and “lay.” 

10.   The ancient scribe of Proverbs  wrote:  “There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of man with a  maiden.”

No one can trace exactly  the eagle’s flight, the snake’s slithering, the ship’s path in the sea.  But I think he was pondering a man’s courtship of a woman.  Like the others, it can’t be  described exactly.

Courtship is sometimes slow, but always wonderful, mysterious, and memorable.  It can’t be replicated. 

My question:  Why has courtship disappeared from our society?

They're playing our song!

“They’re playing our song!”  What does the speaker mean by  “our song”? 

Usually, it means that the tune is one heard repeatedly during earlier moments of great tenderness or romance.  “Our song”  has become a symbol of a special time. When the first chords are struck, the past rushes into the present to recreate that special time.

“Our song”  translates into “our hymn” when it comes to church life.  Hymns also become symbols of shared or individual experiences.  They often chart the inner journey.  They etch theology more deeply into the soul than a stonecutter working with marble. 

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

As a young adult I sang choruses such as “For God so loved the world.” To sing “Dare to be a Daniel” inspired me to charge  into life with courage. Later on, specific hymns became important. “How great thou art” still speaks hope and courage.  At night when sleep eludes me I say the words of “Abide with me” to quiet my soul.

 “Our hymn(s)” were once referred to as the core hymns of the faith, or Kernlieder. These were hymns sung again and again during a specific period in the history of the church. The singers knew them by heart.  They were “their songs.” 

The small church our family attended when I was a child included many new immigrants, including my parents and older sisters, recently arrived from a stressful time of revolution, famine and pestilence in Russia.  They arrived with next-to-nothing and a huge travel debt.  But these people sang Heimatlieder, songs of heaven. These were their core hymns. 

Today, some 80 years later,  I can still sing some to myself because I heard them again and again. During times of bloodshed,  hunger, death and starvation, these hymns became soul nourishment  as they thought of another  place  where children didn’t die of hunger, where heartless men didn’t storm into a house and hack the innocent to death without cause. 

They had memorized these hymns. Singing without hymnbooks was common during my childhood.   If  people were lingering too long in the foyers or outside talking,  the song leader began a lively hymn, and as the people strolled in, singing. 

One of the first Canadian  Mennonite Brethren hymnbooks contains 34 such Heimatlieder which the hymnal committee deemed had melodies unique to the Mennonite Brethren and expressed feelings of suffering with hope.  

I am reminded of another incident. The place was Novisibirsk in Kazakhstan. The year 1989. Our tour group of about 35 had gathered in a small church to hear from its leaders about the origins of this congregation, born out of persecution during the Stalinist years in Siberia. They had all been exiled to labor camps in this mining area.  

As I usually do, I examined the few books in the book rack in front of me.  What did these people sing? 

I picked up a good-sized book of about 300 pages, all words and music hand-copied.  I couldn’t believe my eyes. Without funds or means to buy hymnbooks,  older men in particular, had taken it upon themselves to copy about two-thirds of the Dreiband, a compilation of three hymnals, so that at least the choir had music to sing from. Congregational singing was either from memory or the song leader lined the hymns. Without hymns, they felt impoverished. 

I have lots of questions about hymn-singing today. Which hymns would we identify as Kernlieder, core hymns of the faith, hymns that belong to us,  a people for this particular time in history?  

Which hymns would be the core group of hymns of a truly Anabaptist/Mennonite congregation?  Which hymns draw newcomers to us?  Even more, would a congregation today survive musically without hymnbooks, something to hold in our hands or watch on a screen? 

Mennonite Encyclopedia  states that the early martyr hymns were the “strongest attractive force” for the newly developing Anabaptist congregations. They were often clothed in  popular tunes, not strongly didactic or doctrinal. 

I’ve been wondering recently how we would respond if suddenly all hymnbooks  (and screens and other  means of projection or reproduction) disappeared from our book racks, what would we sing from memory?  Real hymns, not choruses or campfire songs either. All five verses. 

Hymns sung from the  heart represent the core repertory from which we nourish our souls, especially in times of crisis. I sense a great need to sanitize hymns by making the language more politically correct and to remove offensive words like “blood” that might make the singer think this congregation was edging into fundamentalism.  Experience-based hymns are also taboo yet I still love to hear a congregation sing “Marvellous grace of our loving Lord” in harmony.   

When  we elders hear only praise choruses, sometimes with a loud beat that threatens to split eardrums, we feel disoriented. Here, in this sacred place, where we once  met God in the power of his holiness, we encounter what seems like chaos. We have lost powerful symbols of our faith. Our Kernlieder, the glue and sometimes the glory that holds a congregation together,  have left the scene.  

Every congregation, yes, every denomination, needs a core repertory of hymns they can sing without a book in front of them  that will transport them out of themselves into the realm of love and praise of God, their Maker. Some  will be dropped and new ones introduced, but some, like our daily bread, need to remain.

"Peace is a shy thing"

A few years ago I heard a lecture by Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried.  I attended several functions highlighting this book the focus of the BIG READ in Wichita. I never sensed that audiences grasped the gist of what he was trying to say about the Viet Nam war with which he was intimately familiar, and about war generally. 

For some people the city-wide focus on this novel was mostly a nostalgic look at a distant common experience. This was a war that wasn’t really a war.  The nation couldn’t agree on it politically, causing huge protests in America, particularly among young people.  Today, people protest their right to own firearms more often than the political and moral necessity of going to another country to kill or be killed.

Today I returned to my notes about O’Brien’s lecture. 

He told us that the Viet Nam conflict was actually between “two hells” and he, as a conscripted soldier, had to choose  to be loyal to his country or to his conscience. As a child he had been taught in church that killing was wrong. He had grown up in a world of absolutes: black versus white.  Now he was expected to kill – anything that moved. His moral compass went out of kilter.

He couldn’t reconcile these two disparate views– that one man’s truth was another man’s lie. One side’s terrorist was another side’s freedom fighter.  War caused him to do things he was ashamed of.  

It ended up with him losing his sense of purpose as he stumbled around in that Asian countryside in a conflict which had no front. Danger was pervasive and unrelenting, success measured in dead bodies. He had no idea what he and his friends were dying for.  Why do they make us do this? he asked himself. Reality became blurred.  Fact and fiction got intermingled.

Recently I read a newer book by O’Brien: In the Lake of the Woods. He calls it a novel, but like The Things They Carried, you begin reading what you think is fiction, when suddenly you find yourself faced with real life incidents. 

This “novel” begins with the fictional John Wade, Viet Nam  veteran, successful politician, who,  in his campaign for  president,  is defeated in a humiliating loss. Someone unearthed his Viet Nam record and made it public shortly before the election.

He and wife Kathy retreat to a cabin on one of the Lake of the Woods islands in northern Minnesota to nurse their wounds and mend personal differences sharpened during the tense times of the campaign.  

The novel interrupts this story  again and again to give excerpts of the court records of the trial of Lt. William Calley and the My Lai massacre during the Viet Nam war when about 300 defenseless villagers, young and old, women and children, even infants, were mercilessly butchered.  O’Brien was eyewitness to similar killings. Calley was the only person convicted of the My Lai  massacre, according to a footnote in the book. 

The earlier novel becomes more understandable after reading this second one. O’Brien has one theme and one only:  The after-effects of war. War doesn’t end with a peace treaty. 

In In the Lake of the Woods, Kathy disappears during the night, as does the Wade boat.  Law enforcement is brought in to conduct a search, with no success. 

The novel focuses on the search to find her but backtracks to the wartime experiences of her veteran/turned politician husband. Wade, the presidential hopeful,  thought he had  put his war experiences behind, but finds he can’t.  He  had also killed without cause and must rationalize his actions. 

The fictional part of the novel asks What happened here?   Was Kathy murdered?  If so, by whom?  Did she commit suicide?  Did she get lost during the night among the many little islands, which will soon all have looked alike to her as she motored among them?  We never find out about Kathy.  Readers are left to decide.  

The novel asks the same question about  Viet Nam: What happened here?  Its story line is a metaphor for the Viet Nam fiasco.  

At the lecture, O’Brien commented that people ask him why he blurs fact with fiction in his novels.  Reading this second book made that clear to me.  He said he did this mixing deliberately to make the point that in situations like Viet Nam, reality get blurred.  Who is the enemy?  What here is morally right? Morally wrong?  What is truth? What is a lie? The outer conflict creates a huge war inside and makes you question who you are.  

O’Brien writes, “War has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true.” 

Some people have the idea that once one power is defeated, peace will result. O’Brien told us in his lecture that “peace is a shy thing.” I understand his words better now. Peace does not rush forward boldly, defiantly, pronouncing itself as the victor. It remains elusive. 

After the conflict, mothers, wives, and children still mourn their dead, still go hungry,  still look for warmth and shelter, still ache for life as they once knew it.

After a conflict, those who fought return home, hang up their uniforms but not their memories.  What happened to others, to them, still remains murky, still a burden.  

“Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved.”

O’Brien writes, “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever” (The Things They Carried).  Not in the land. Not in one’s soul. 

 Peace is a shy thing, a very shy thing.