A Life Pilgrim of Indomitable Spirit

When I came to the final chapters of Harry Loewen's most recent book of stories about people in Mennonite history, Cities of Refuge, I recognized at once that I had met the main character of one story many years ago.

In 1989 while with a tour of about thirty other Canadian and American tourists interested in their Russian-Mennonite origins, we visited Karaganda in Kazakhstan. As our plane flew mile after mile over densely forested territory to the north,I was reminded of scenes in the movie Dr. Zhivago. This was the Siberia I had heard much about. We had already visited the Ukraine where I was privileged to walk the streets of Rosenthal, where my parents had lived, loved, worked and endured. In 1923 they and thousands of other Mennonites left for Canada. But now I was back in the land of their birth.

The tour schedule was rigorous so one Sunday in this far eastern part of the former Soviet Union I stayed in my room during the evening church service to sleep. I was worn out. About 9:30 p.m. Clarence Hiebert, our tour leader, came knocking on my door with a local minister, Johann Koop and his adult son. They wanted me to join them to visit the elder Koop's father, David Klassen. There was a possibility that he had worked together with my parents at Bethesda Hospital for the Mentally Ill in the Ukraine.It would give the old man great joy to talk about his early life there. I agreed to go with them.

We drove to a high-rise apartment building. In the central court children were still playing as old women, probably their grandmothers, watched. I found little to please the eye. Everywhere there was quickly-built housing -- a forest of apartment buildings, each like the other, each without architectural adornment, all beginning to deteriorate. But this was before perestroika.

At the Klassen apartment a pile of shoes and a mound of rugs greeted us at the entrance. This family was in the process of redoing their apartment before leaving for Germany. They, like hundreds of other German-speaking people living in Russia, had been infected with emigration-fever to become Umsiedler (resettlers) in Germany.

Everywhere we went during our tour, the talk was about who was leaving and who was staying. One minister told me, "We don't know if the emigration is of the Lord, but we can't stop it." In the 1920s some people had hesitated to leave. Times would improve now that the Russian Revolution was over. Why leave? Later they regretted their decision. Now people of German-origin were rushing through the open door. Who knew how long it would stay open?

Old Mr. Klassen, age 90, was already in bed, so he was awakened. A daughter-in-law dressed him in a shirt and someone covered his legs with a blanket to make him respectable for the "American visitors." He had been deaf for a while but now was also blind. We spoke to him through a speaking tube made out of a newspaper held to his ear.

He told us his story briefly. During the 1930s and 40s he had been exiled three times for a total of about 25 years because he was a minister of the Gospel. His wife had been sent away for ten years because she had gone to church services. As she was driven away, her young children clung to the sleigh, but the driver whipped their little hands.

I learned he was a poet and a musician as well as preacher. He took my hands in his long, strong ones and wept. He had worked in Bethania from 1925-27 until it was torn down because of construction of the Dnieper dam. My parents had already left that institution by that time. No overlap.

Before we left we prayed together. He insisted on standing for prayer "to the glory of God." No sitting during prayer for him. I learned he died the following year.

Every once in a long while we meet a memorable character. David Klassen is one of those people I will never forget because of the impression he made on me in those brief moments we had together. He was a man of spirit, faith, and will. He went back to sleep, I assume, after we left -- and I lay awake to ponder his story.

What I've learned on my way to becoming 87 years old

Last week I celebrated my 87th birthday with flowers, chocolates, nuts, cards -- lots of them, and especially people. What have I learned to this point? About ten years ago I made a list of my learning to that point. Here are my revisions and additions to that list:

10. I think I could live in a nudist camp. A few years ago I couldn't answer the phone unless I was fully clothed, even buttoned up. It felt absolutely obscene to answer the phone in less than the required minimum The change came when I went to water exercise classes. When I entered the dressing room I didn't know where to focus my eyes amid all the breasts, buttocks, buns, and bellies both freely and modestly displayed in all sizes, shapes, and colors as we women dressed and undressed. Most of my new friends had surgical scars up the front, down the side, across this vast expanse, up that narrow strip, under that flap. With time I could look at them in various stages of undress and calmly carry on a conversation about the best way to make macaroni salad without embarrassment. And now I even answer the phone in the all-together if someone phones just before I plan to jump into the shower.

9. You don't need to forward an email to five addresses even if the sender says the boogeyman will get you if you don't. Believe me, you don't have to read all the stuff sent your way, and if you worry about having deleted that wonderful joke, forget it. It will come back to you again, and again, and again.

8. Under the skin, Mennonites (all stripes), Methodists (all stripes), and Baptists (all stripes) and even Catholics (one stripe) are pretty much alike. I know. I've mixed with all kinds. Also all the other denominations. I haven't found that any of them bite.

7. If after you've read the first chapter of a book and it is boring or doesn't make sense, feel free to drop it. Let someone else plow through it or simply keep it on their bookshelf to add the aura of erudition to their home.

6. Even if I'm on a "Do not call" list, solicitors still call to tell me I have won the lottery or some such big prize if I donate money to their cause. I've learned it's okay to hang up. Machines have no feelings.

5. I've learned it's important to stop and grieve over losses, even something as small as a file misplaced in the boxes around me. I hear again and again about "getting on with one's life" after the loss of a family member or other tragic event. At times it is necessary not to get on with one's life and stop to mourn the loss of a body function-- or a relationship. And then start moving.

4. It is important to face the day running, or stumbling, or with the help of a walker if need be. Face the day and it won't stare you down.

3. An assignment to write an article still gets my creative juices flowing. And my mind active.

2. Once you get into the swing of getting rid of stuff (on shelves, in boxes, in closets), it gets easier and easier. When we finally leave all our stuff and get stuffed into a long narrow box, whatever happens to our stuff won't matter. I've learned to carry one thing out every time I bring something in.

1. Each birthday, especially in the eighth decade of life, forces an admission of human limitations, but also an increasing awareness of God's unfailing grace. This time of life has its glories just like any other. Faith forms faith.

A family reunion revisited

In 1994 I attended a Peter P. Wiebe family reunion in British Columbia. There were about 120 of us, many of whom I didn't know, having lost contact with the younger generation over the years and because of the distances that separated us. I had been asked to speak on Sunday morning. What to say?  The words fell into place:

Heredity is powerful!  Anyone looking over this group of Wiebes would immediately know they were related.  My son walks the same way his father Walter walked.  There is that characteristic Wiebe eyebrow arch,  the character traits that appear and reappear such as the love of singing and music in many of them, the urge toward creativity, particularly writing poetry and much more.

Pain is omnipresent!  From my decades of association with many of them, I knew the depths of pain  and heartache some had experienced. Illness, death, disappointments,  failures, wrong steps -- all were present as they are in all families.

Grace is abundant!  As I looked over the crowd of faces that Sunday morning I became very much aware of the grace that had prevailed in their lives -- the perseverance, the continued reaching, the encouraging,the forgiving.

Grace had been imparted to me by many of them.  As I wrote in my first book Alone: A Widow's Search for Joy, a tiny, white-haired grandmother, her face lined by many years of hard work and poverty, sensed my fear as I faced the birth of our first child.  My  younger friends told me what to expect at the hospital, how many diapers and nighties I would need and all about formulas and night-feedings. This mother and grandmother, my mother-in-law, said simply, "The Lord helps at such times."

A glimpse of grace will not send a burdened person deeper into despair and self-pity, but will lift and encourage and help him or her to see a God able to meet their need. With these words she built  a bridge by which I could walk in faith into one of the deepest experiences of a woman's life. She was telling me that when a woman needs God, God is there to help. And he was.

All twelve of her children had been born at home, miles away from the white sterility of a hospital.  Perhaps she was thinking of the time one baby  arrived in the dead of winter in the old frame homestead on the cold, snow-covered prairies. Perhaps she was reminded of the time she held a limp, feverish little girl in her arms on a hot, dry August day in Saskatchewan to watch her breathe her last. Whatever had been her own experience, she was offering me faith, steadied by the grace of courage. 

As I think over that reunion I am reminded of Oswald Chambers' words: "The lives that have been of most blessing to  you are those who were unconscious of it."

Heredity, pain, grace -- all three come plentifully. Heredity comes without our choosing. We do cannot choose our genes. Pain likewise. Most people would not choose pain if they knew how to avoid it. Grace is something we can open ourselves to all times.

Who can be a purveyor of grace?    This gift is not limited to specific types or groups of people, or to certain denominations even though their  fences  are erected high to keep grace limited to their kind, or to some theological persuasions. I have been blessed by the words of a stumbling speaker  more often than the carefully crafted production of a slick orator which  slid past me like a greased pig its would-be-capturer.  The imperfect and the perfect, the poor and the rich, the sick and the well, the educated and the uneducated -- everyone can be the means of grace to others.

Heredity, pain, grace. All three play a part in our lives.

A Midas touch that has nothing to do with money

Last night I finished reading Yann Martel's book of short fiction titled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Having read his novel The Life of Pi I was ready to see what other kind of writing he did.

Each piece in this unusual collection shows the strong social conscience of an exceptional writer. The first story features a young man dying of AIDS and his close relationship with his friend. He became infected through a blood transfusion.

In the second a young Canadian university student visits Washington, D.C. and experiences the Vietnam War through an intense concert performed by a group of veterans in a theater being demolished. In the third Martell describes variations of a warden's letter of comfort to the mother of a man he has just executed. The execution is, of course, "always painless."

I identified most with the last story about a young man visiting his elderly grandmother. He is bored beyond words by her nattering about her life ... blah, blah, blah, blah .... and the objects that surround her in her home..blah, blah, blah. At the end the young man is forced to acknowledge that "My grandmother has a sort of Midas touch; every object she touches becomes eternal.... Every object in her house was infused with an indwelling psyche that spoke to her of somebody or something of her long life." It is another way of saying that if you want someone or something to stay alive, you have to keep remembering.

My little apartment is alive through the objects that surround me. On the TV stands a mantel clock with the words "Time by Tim." A student named Tim made it for me when he graduated from college. He fell in love with Shakespeare during his studies and named his first son William in recognition of the great playwright.I look at the carefully-made clock and think of Tim -- and Richard II, or was it the III?

Above the TV hangs a zinc etching of the Funk windmill that stood high on a windy hill on the outskirts of Rosenthal, in the Ukraine. My grandfather owned and operated it for several decades in the early 1900s. Daughter Joanna drew the picture. Brother-in-law Henry had it etched and mounted. I tell myself that picture represents my past, a good past, a complicated past, with war, revolution, famine, pestilence, and migration, and new beginnings woven into it.

The marble bookends on the antique stand were given to my husband at the time of his ordination in 1954 by his sister and husband, John and Susie. A whole lifetime of experiences with these friends/relatives rises to the surface when I look at the bookends. Like the grandson in Martel's story they speak to me of an event and keep friends alive.

My mother's workbasket stands in a corner. She used to keep her knitting in it. I recall sitting next to her as she sat in her easy chair, her German newspapers around her. "These are my friends," she said. She loved to read. On Sunday mornings she carried the workbasket into the bedroom. Knitting as work; on Sundays she rested.

Across from my recliner is Christine's nun's chair. When she worked as a parish nurse at a Catholic church in Chicago, she scrounged for furniture in the rectory attic for her apartment. She brought back this discarded nun's chair to Wichita when she moved here. Christine died in 2000 but her memory is very much with me, and also the image of a nun, in habit, calmly rocking in that chair with simple lines, across from me.

Son James made the coffee table in a high school woodworking class. Daughter Susan stitched the quilted wall hanging above the kitchen table. My apartment comes alive when I look around. It doesn't have things standing around, but people.

I live alone and yet I don't live alone. I live with artifacts that speak to me of events and relationships in my long life. To give these up is like giving up living people, and the reason why the elderly resist moving to one room in nursing homes. The things that gave meaning to their lives have to be left behind and that hurts. It changes milk with heavy cream into skim, watered down.

Life without mirrors

In the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, the older woman in the nursing home tells the younger woman visiting her regularly the story of the Whistlestop Cafe and the women who managed it. She states, "People stay alive if you remember them." She is keeping those two women alive by telling their story.

I want to keep my aunt Aganeta Janzen Block alive by telling her story. I met her in 1989 in Moscow when she was living a daughter and husband in a high rise apartment building.

Aunt Neta had an amazing spirit despite decade after decade of unspeakable hardships, including eleven years in forced labor in Siberia during the 1940s. At the time she had four young children, the youngest about two and the oldest a growing boy of 16. Her husband, conscripted into the German army, died at the Belgium front during World War II.

Aunt Neta was a woman of indomitable faith in a loving God despite years of living with extreme cold, hunger, and brutal treatment at the hands of overseers. She wrote me about her life in about sixty to seventy letters, which I have been translating. It became clear to me wherever life gave her a resting place, even for a few minutes, and she had an audience, she would tell a story. Here is one:

At the death of her grandfather in 1915, she, then a young girl of nine, and her parents traveled 60 kilometers from Trubetskoy, where her father was working, to the funeral. My mother Anna and sister Tina and the houseparents at Bethania Mental Hospital, who were all employed there, came for the funeral also.

She writes that her two oldest sisters, whom she barely knew, having been away from home a long time, were attractive young women at the time. She especially remembered my mother, who was wearing a beautiful sky-blue shawl with a long fringe. She heard people say, "What lovely girls the Janzens have."

That wonderful memory of my mother remained with her. She said as she was writing about that image, it was like it had happened yesterday.

At the age of 15 [girls from poor homes left home early to help earn money], she left home to work for her Uncle Hans Janzen, whose wife was sick. They had four young children. She had to look after the whole household, which her uncle valued. One day he brought her a large white shawl -- not sky-blue.

Years later, in 1932, she and her husband, son of a kulak (landowner) were struggling to stay alive in Siberia, working in the forest. During the period of collectivization, landowners were displaced and their land seized by the regime. The forest work was hard. Her children small. The mosquitoes merciless.

One Sunday, early, they had gone to the nearest town to try to buy supplies. In a ,waiting for her husband, she carefully examined her surroundings and the people. All at once she saw a woman who looked exactly like her sister Anna, only her shawl was white. She couldn't quit looking, she was so drawn to this woman.

When her husband showed up, she said, "Come, I'll show you someone who looks just like my sister Anna."

"Yes," he replied, "and that woman is my Neta."

How could she have been so mistaken, she asked herself. The walls were mirrors and mirrors were no longer a part of her life. Later, they often laughed at her mistake.

I have since wondered after reading her story, what life would be like if one morning every mirror in the U.S. shattered and we had to live without them. What difference would it make? How much time would we have for other things?

Stuff and more stuff about stuffy stuff

A friend said she was sorting photographs. She was moving into an apartment. "You only have so much room in an apartment," she said sadly. She couldn't take it all with her.

Another friend mentioned he was sorting tapes. He used to be a minister and the audiotapes of his sermons had piled up. Now what? Who wants audiotapes in an age of CDs? He was in a quandary.

Years ago I found this anonymous essay about stuff, which I haul out from time to time as a reminder that a moving van won't accompny me at the cemetery.

STUFF
Every fall I start stirring in my stuff. There is closet stuff, and drawer stuff, attic stuff, and basement stuff. I separate the good stuff from the bad stuff, then I stuff the bad stuff anywhere the good stuff is not be too crowded until I decide if I will need the bad stuff.

When the Lord calls me home, my children will want the good stuff (I hope), but the bad stuff, stuffed wherever there was room among the other stuff, will be stuffed into bags and taken to the dump where all the other people's bad stuff ends up.

When I visit my daughter, she always moves her stuff so I will have room for my stuff. With their stuff and my stuff....well, it would be much easier to use their stuff and leave my stuff at home with the rest of my stuff.

This fall I had an extra closet built so I would have a place for all the stuff too good to throw away and too bad to keep with my good stuff. You may not have this problem, but I seem to spend a lot of time with stuff -- foodstuff, cleaning stuff, medicine stuff, clothes stuff, and outside stuff. What would life be like without all this stuff?

Now there is all that stuff we use to make us smell better than we actually do. There is stuff to make our hair look good. Stuff to make us look younger. Stuff to make us look healthier. Stuff to hold us in and stuff to fill us out. Stuff to play with, stuff to entertain us, stuff to read, and stuff to eat. We stuff ourselves with food stuff until we're too stuffed to stuff in any more. We end up looking stuffed.

Well, our lives are filled with stuff -- good stuff, bad stuff, little stuff, big stuff, useful stuff, junky stuff, and other people's stuff. Now, when we leave our stuff and go to heaven, whatever happens to our stuff won't matter. We will still have the good stuff God has prepared for us in heaven. -- Author unknown

A house as a place, not just space

Recently I placed all the photos I could find of houses where I have lived in an album in chronological order. There aren't as many as I expected. I got the idea from Leland Harder of North Newton who wrote his memoirs, a chapter on each house he had lived in from childhood on up. He went to great effort to get pictures of each house and to recall what went on in that particular house.

I looked at each of my pictures carefully. The first picture is the house where I was born in Laird, Saskatchewan, in 1924 -- nothing but a low, ugly, wooden shack. Two rooms. A kitchen and eating area. A bedroom and living area. Both miniscule. Both crowded. Washtubs, boiler, wood, shovel, outhouse are all outside. When space is limited in a house, people claim the great outdoors.

In the doorway stands my handsome father in shirt and tie and Mother with me wearing a frilly bonnet in her arms and little Annie and Frieda beside her. The family was probably ready to walk to church when Dad's brother John came out of the shack next door with a camera and snapped the picture. They were all newcomers to the land -- recent immigrants from the Ukraine.

For some people, a house represents their station in life -- rich or poor, high class or low class. Yet as I look at each picture, the house in it represents much more than the space where I lived at the time.

I like the way theologian Walter Brueggeman differentiates between space and place. I now live in an apartment of about a thousand square feet. Some people would say I don't have much space, and sometimes I think so myself, when books and files get piled on the bed and dining room table. A friend recently thought I had a very spacious apartment.

I recall visiting an aunt in northern Germany in the late 1980s. She had recently come from Russia with her daughter's family consisting of husband and six children as Umsiedlers. They (nine people) lived in a cramped apartment in Espelkamp. I had written her to reserve a hotel room for me. I didn't want to intrude on their already crowded space. She resisted my request. Reserve a room for me in a hotel, away from them? Unheard of. "During the war," she said, "we could have housed thirty people in this space." Space is relative.

Place is something else.

"Place is space that has historical meanings, where some things have happened which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations," writes Brueggeman.

He sees a place as space in "which important words have been spoken which have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny."

I look at that first picture in my album and I wonder what words were spoken between Mother and Dad, strangers in the land of Canada, in those close quarters. At what point did they decide that this land would be their land, and that they would merge their identity with it? Can a person have more than one homeland at a time? Or does new space result in a time of uncertainty?

As I examine each of the other pictures I think of the words that were spoken in them -- or that should have been spoken. In which house was my identity established? In which did I begin to dream about the future for myself -- especially as a writer?

I remember lying on the woodpile in Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan, basking in the warm sun and dreaming of life beyond this little hamlet north of the Saskatchewan River. I never realized that though the one-and-a half story frame house painted cream with green trim may have been the space I was occupying at the time, it was also the place where my destiny was being shaped by the stories I was being told about life not so long ago in Russia, about life as my father experienced it now in his store on Main Street, about the words I was speaking to myself, silently, cautiously, about becoming a word-maker.

Place, not just space. We turn space into place with words.