I have thought of that short phrase often: Take courage. What does that mean? Faced with a blank page, I will take courage and fill it with words.

OK, let’s get serious. What if I make a mistake? I’ve gathered materials about grandma’s life for years; yet I often struggle with getting the facts right!   Can I trust this process of writing?

My red-haired great-grandmother, Anna Janzen Funk, was born March 15, 1895, in Friedensfeld, Sagradowka, southern Ukraine, one of 12 children of Franz J. Janzen (who also had red hair) and Katharina Boldt Janzen. Growing up in a well-developed Mennonite culture, Anna matured into a strong-willed, spiritual, intelligent person. She developed a hatred of crocheting, much preferring to read.  She did not have much time to read, however, as she began working seven days a week when she was 15. When she was 20, on a dark, rainy Sunday, she took the train about 90 miles to her second job. She was going to be a baker’s helper at Bethania Mental Hospital, near the Dnieper River. While she was at Bethania, in February 1917, the Russian government collapsed and the socialistic Bolshevist regime took power. Their army (the Reds) took over the area, taking livestock, food, and household goods, killing and razing estates. Anna’s family disappeared. The opposing White army battled the Reds back and forth across the Ukraine.

So, after that long setup, here’s the story about the importance of creativity, and how critical courage is in expressing creativity. One winter day, about 30 Red soldiers had stolen all the extra clothing from the male hospital patients. Now the revolutionaries were warmly dressed, slurping their soup in the dining room. As fast as she could slice bread, the soldiers grabbed it. Anna rushed into the spacious, bright kitchen with its tiled floor and huge stainless steel kettles to get a new batch of bread which the kitchen girls had just pulled out, and to ask them to punch down the rising dough and form it into more loaves to be baked. She heard a sharp knock on the back door of the kitchen. When she opened the door, she was startled to see a couple of dozen soldiers from the White army, who had been able to cross to Bethania on the frozen Dnieper River. “Let’s have lunch!” they demanded. What was she to do?  The Reds were having their soup in the dining room!  As she stood on the doorstep, the bright sun lighting up her coppery hair, she squinted at the hungry White soldiers, many of them her own age or younger, and rubbed a floury hand over her forehead. She could see that the Whites had added a lot of mud from the thawing banks to their uniforms and boots. Of course!  She grinned as she scolded them, “Please, boys, do you think I will let you in the house with those boots! Scrape the mud off completely! Knock again when those boots are clean, and I will give you a nice meal.”  Truly disarmed, they smiled back at the saucy young woman and began working on their boots. Anna brought the trays of bread into the Red group, encouraged them to fill their pockets for later, and opened the front door for them. As she saw the last Red soldier’s back going through the front door, she motioned silently to the kitchen girl to let the Whites in for their meal.

Now that I’ve written the words, I know quite well that this is not exactly the way it happened. I have left things out—big things, like the Makhnovist bandits. I have made things up, like the dialog. But—I have steadfastly shuffled phrases and sentences like jigsaw puzzle pieces to achieve that moment when I am not only seeing a picture that feels true, I myself am standing beside Anna on the back step at Bethania, close enough to see the flour dusting her forehead, to hear her steady breathing as we stand in the sunlight, facing those hungry, rough young men. I watch with my entire self, to witness her in the very moment of taking courage. She uses what she has—her bright hair, her confident smile, and her memories of her lost brothers—and speaks. The ugliness of war transforms into a homely backyard scenario: big sister telling the boys to clean their boots before coming inside. Anna’s courageous creativity has brought life to the day.

Opportunities for life-giving creativity occur daily. Filling a page with words is good practice.

Joanna Wiebe, May 1, 2007

These are some things I wrote between the ages of seven and twelve.

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This is another poem by my sister Christine, from The Voice of a Writer.  She wrote it as a gift for our mother on her 66th birthday. My sister Susan, my mom and I had a little discussion about the blue willow plate. Did we ever have one? If so, did Christine have it at some time? and who has it now?  I thought I might have it but when I looked at our blue plate, I realized it had a hunting scene, and my husband says it definitely didn’t come from Christine.  Susan remembered that as children our library did include a book called Blue Willow, which I still have…it’s on the bookshelf right in front of me.   It’s a lovely story by Doris Gates, first published in 1940, with awesome soft black and white illustrations. It was a Newbury Award runner-up in 1941.

I just opened the book, read the first line, and felt a familiar shiver of delight: “Janey Larkin paused on the top step of the shack and looked down at her shadow.”  I read and re-read this book when I was ten.  Janey’s one treasure is a blue willow plate, and the story takes us to the moment when she faces sacrificing this one treasure to gain something even more important to her and her family.

At last week’s Festschrift celebration for my mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, Susan read this poem to the audience.

Now that I think about it, our sister Christine’s life was a series of sacrifices, handled mostly gracefully.  She struggled to keep her body alive as she cultivated her ever-more lively spirit. When she was 45 years old her body finally wore out but her spirit is still zesty and with us.

Christine Wiebe – January 1989
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This is one of the poems by my sister which was included in the recently-published book about my mom, Katie Funk Wiebe.  The editors gracefully inserted a number of her poems into the chapter which I wrote, What would mother do?   The book is The Voice of a Writer: Honoring the Life of Katie Funk Wiebe, recently published by the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission, edited by Doug Heidebrecht and Valerie G. Rempel.

A sunburst of three-inch multi-colored vintage-fabric parallelograms, I owned a new quilt, hand-pieced by the women of the Julesburg Mennonite Church. My elation over my winning bid was shared by my sister Susan as we sat on the aluminum bleachers in a fair barn at the Hamilton County Fairgrounds in Aurora, Nebraska. We had met at this Mennonite Central Committee auction on an April Saturday to share our love of quilts and to do some homework. Susan had agreed to help me think about what to write about our mother.

“People want to know that she was as great a mother as she is a great woman in her public life,” Susan said.

I didn’t immediately respond, as I paused to witness an especially fine king-sized quilt raise almost $5,000 for the Mennonite Central Committee.

“Hmmm,” I said, hunting for a pen to take notes on the back of my bid card. “Of course she was a great mother. Just look at her children!”

Susan listened patiently while I mused on the excellence of Katie’s children. James is a technological innovator and businessman. Christine, who died in 2000, was a nurse and writer. Susan is a physician practicing General Internal Medicine. I am a writer and software designer. We have nurtured seven children, and so far, two grandchildren. We have followed our mother’s example of ethical behavior, and positive, energetic involvement in our families and the world.

“By measure of her children, I’ll agree she was a great mother,” Susan said, breaking into my monologue. “But she did not nurture us in a way that was typical of a Mennonite mother of the 1950s and 60s.”

The main thing that was different was that she wrote. I first became aware of this unusual behavior in the mid-1950s, when we were living in the white frame parsonage in Hepburn, Saskatchewan. Slipped in among all the other things Mommy did in a week, sometimes she put pieces of soft yellow foolscap paper into a typewriter, and rapidly tapped her fingers on the black keys. At other times, she tailored clothes for her three girls and herself (I will always be thankful for that beautiful blue dress with the black velvet trim and sparkly buttons). She ironed our clothes, including our father’s starched shirts (he almost always dressed up). She gardened and canned. She baked light, delicious bread in a wood- and coal-fired stove. Visiting church dignitaries and missionaries would roll up their sleeves and tuck their ties into their white shirt-fronts before giving themselves to her chicken soup, sucking every bit of meat off the bones, slurping the homemade noodles. My mother helped me struggle through my math homework and engineered wild Easter egg hunts. She tuned into Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC radio, while we slid around on old woolen socks to polish the hardwood floors. We were proud to hear how she had once won a prize for her handwriting, a medal for being smart, a scholarship to study physics. For a treat, Mother would open her cedar chest and let us look at a watercolor she had painted, her wedding dress, photos of herself as a confident, beautiful young woman. She played the piano. She sang popular songs like “The Happy Wanderer,” and recited Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and other romantic poets: “I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills. When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils…” Oh, I loved my mother. And she loved us. She was always available for questions and confidences. Except—when she was typing at her small desk under the stairs, by a window looking north over the prairie. When she was writing.

My entire memory of my father, Walter William Wiebe, is of a man intensely focused on educating himself to take a role as a religious journalist in the church. I had a feeling that our family was special because our father was preparing to step into this greatness. There was a dark side to this focus on his education. I experienced a chronic and growing family tension around money. I was desolated by his absences when he attended summer school, conferences and church meetings. But I was excited when he said that we were going to move to a place with lots of books, because by the fifth grade, I had read every book in the Hepburn, Saskatchewan public school library, and could finish in one day the two books doled out by the traveling bookmobile.

So we left the parsonage and moved to Virgil, Ontario.

Our family expanded to include a friendly little brother, James.

My father was very ill for a time. The six of us then moved to Kitchener, Ontario. After studying at Waterloo University and finishing his bachelor’s degree, our father moved to Syracuse University in New York state to pursue a master’s degree in religious journalism. The rest of the family stayed behind in our little rented brick house on Bournemouth Street. Mother continued to write articles and joined the Christian Writers Club. Additionally, she worked in temporary secretarial jobs. Because she was gone from home more now, she began teaching us the formulas for making basic foods. Under her direction, we continued to keep ourselves and our home clean and attractive. However, she did not teach us that any of the domestic arts were an end in themselves. For example, we did not quilt, or even consider quilting. Free time was for reading and writing. My sisters and I took the bus downtown to the public library and came home with stacks of exciting, delighting books. There were never any restrictions on what we could read. While my father was dubious whether I would gain anything from reading Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, he let me plow through it. I took a touch-typing course.

I begged for my own room, which Mother created by partitioning a corner of the basement with blankets. Here, a narrow beam of sunlight illuminated a thirteen-year-old girl perched before a small desk, like her mother’s, with a typewriter and a stack of soft yellow paper. I wrote long stories about First Nations’ princesses and lost children; poems featuring dead birds and bare trees. Late at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I read most of Dickens under the blankets with a flashlight.

I am looking at a photo of our family, taken in late 1961 in our Kitchener living room. Although we are living on next to nothing, we’re impeccably dressed and coiffed. Mommy holds the baby. Daddy is home from Syracuse for Christmas. We face the photographer solemnly. We are about to change our lives, yet again. For our father is almost done with his education and is about to take the important church position our whole lives have been about, for as long as I can remember.

One year later, in mid-November, 1962, we are living in a drafty rented house in Hillsboro, Kansas. Our father is gone. Months after having achieved his life’s dream, he finally died of that mysterious thing that was growing inside him for many years. Mrs. Walter Wiebe is now a single parent of four children: I am fourteen, Susan is eleven, Christine is seven, and James is three, just days away from his fourth birthday.

We all missed—unspeakably—the vibrant presence of Walter William Wiebe. We didn’t feel like a family any more. But in our bereavement and isolation, our family could not turn to counselors, psychotherapists, or school psychologists, for there weren’t any. We heard Christian platitudes about death. We hid our bewilderment and pain from Hillsboro, our church, and often, even from each other. I cried alone. But we had our Mother.

The week after my father’s funeral, mommy sat down at her typewriter to write dozens of well-composed letters to caregivers, community members, friends, and family. She vividly told the story of our father’s illness and death, carefully explained our circumstances, warmly thanked people for their cards and letters, their gifts and visits. Even in such a time, she had the presence of mind to make carbon copies of her letters, which, years later, she shared with us. The letters reveal a person struggling with great challenges, extremely short of money, yet gracious, determined and scarcely revealing the immense feeling of being overwhelmed. In the letters, as she enters a period of mighty grief for the loss of her beloved husband, she nonetheless appears to be organized, thinking logically, communicating expressively, and in touch with some inner vision of how our lives could be re-ordered to become more efficient and sensible. These are some of the talents Katie used—at last—to create a settled, coherent home for her family. I was greatly relieved when she said our moving-around days were over and that we would stay in Kansas. She went to work full-time. Within two years, we were living in our own modern ranch-style home with a yard, a garage, and large trees. I graduated from Hillsboro High School, and studied two years at Tabor College while living at home. During those five years, I also was participant, support system, and witness of my mother’s approach to single parenting. I had not previously known a single parent, so I had no expectations. I took it for granted that she was only doing what any mother would do if left with four children. Now I see how exceptional she was.

One of her challenges was that as a fatherless family of three girls and a toddler boy, few knew how to relate to us. Our mother felt like “an incomplete social unit.” I saw that we were not invited to visit at my friends’ homes, the homes that had both a mother and a father.

Being urban Canadians, we did not fit into the local culture. The Low German Mennonite Brethren town of Hillsboro, Kansas was all at once more lowbrow, more rural, and worldlier than the Russian-German Mennonite culture we had known in Kitchener, although these Kansas Mennonites had come to America several generations earlier. I walked into school wearing dresses which had been sewn by Mother, with love and skill. But these girls in Hillsboro wore store-bought skirts and sweaters, nylon stockings and high heels, jewelry and makeup. They teased their hair into bouffant beehives. I’d never had a date. Some of the girls here made out with boys; a few were going steady. Our family didn’t even have a television set and never listened to popular radio. But some of my new classmates got up

early to do farm chores before coming to school, singing along to Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline on KFDI, and the Beach Boys, the Crystals, the Shirelles, and the Chiffons on KEYN. They talked about what they had seen last night on The Beverly Hillbillies, Candid Camera, and The Ed Sullivan Show. Nobody had heard of any of the poets Mother had brought into my life. In the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium, I had been part of the Mennonite World Conference and a Billy Graham revival, as well as in the audience for the Vienna Boys Choir from Austria. Here in Hillsboro, I was invited to football games, pajama parties, and hay rides.

Because we were different, our family became emotionally interdependent. We turned to our mother for our support, encouragement, affirmation, and friendship, and Mommy leaned on us too; to the point where we became very sensitive to one another’s moods. Mommy sometimes felt despondent and said she was afraid she couldn’t do a good job with us as a single parent. She said to us, “You have no father but our Father in Heaven.” We read an article by Billy Graham which seemed to suggest that it is very harmful for children to grow up with only one parent. Some in the community suggested strongly that Mother should remarry as soon as possible. I coldly told her, “I don’t mind at all if you would ever want to get married again, but the day you did, I would leave home.” Then I felt bad for what I had said and tried hard to make her happy, to behave well, to obey her. I memorized jokes to tell at the dinner table.

I slowly awoke from the fog of my grief to realize with horror that I was now living in a dull town of 2400 persons stuck out in the middle of what seemed like nowhere. As I finished high school, I often felt alone and angry, and almost always unchallenged by my schoolwork. I invented an imaginary friend and became obsessed with boys. I did my chores sluggishly, carelessly. I thought about killing myself. I blamed myself for my father’s death and fantasized about bringing him back to life. I ate too much. I experienced stress-induced coronary artery spasms and chest pains. I began to butt heads with Mother over abstract topics such as existentialism and pantheism, and wrestled with her over the power issues that emerged because I would take care of the children until five-thirty, when she arrived home from work to take back the reins of authority. Once I complained that Jamie was getting spoiled because she wouldn’t discipline him, and I didn’t know how, and she cried. She told me she longed to spend more time with him. Sometimes, Mother and I would clash against each other so hard that we would both wind up in tears. Memories of these times are now still painful to us, especially James, who was so young when he witnessed them.

The other children were more even-keeled. However, Mother had other kinds of challenges with them. For example, Susan had two operations for a ruptured appendix, and Christine became ill with what was initially diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis, then systemic lupus erythematosus.

Where should Mother turn for support? What could she offer her children as a way to work with their emotions? What would strengthen our family? Hillsboro offered us narrow resources. The Parkview Mennonite Brethren Church was an emotionally inhibited environment, although some of the members loved us well, particularly John B. and Susie Jost, and P.B. and Hannah Willems. Mother received the gift of their friendship, which gave us all a happy, safe haven where we could relax and be ourselves. However, despite the generous warmth of some of its members, the church in general was not a place to for emotional healing. It also was not a place to wonder out loud about existentialism and pantheism.

To nurture us emotionally and spiritually, Mother re-invigorated our practice of family worship. Every evening after supper, we prayed together and read Bible verses and sections from books like Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest: “Never reserve anything. Pour out the best you have, and always be poor. Never be diplomatic and careful about the treasure that God gives. This is poverty triumphant!” Mother also encouraged us to write and journal, practices Christine and I adopted. By example, she taught us how to see the stories in our lives, and tell them. She thought carefully about the new cultural influences we were encountering, and used her discrimination to make choices about where we would engage and where we would hold firm to our family’s values. She filled in the low-cut bodice of my party dress with frothy chiffon trim. She bought a television set and we watched Star Trek. We attended football games, and afterwards, talked about how silly we felt when we joined the others in cheering out loud.

Mother was often not at home, and when she was, she kept office hours. This was because she was gaining her bachelor’s, and then master’s degrees, while working full time. James remembers how special he felt when she put aside the papers she was grading to give him time and attention. He remembers that his Mom was very protective of her youngest child. “She had a very good mommy radar—she knew where the dragons lay,” he told me recently.

After working for awhile at the same publishing company that had enlisted my father to move to Kansas, Mother became a professor of English at Tabor College. And she continued to write. In the 1950s, her first published articles had been bylined, “Mrs. Walter Wiebe.” Now her work was under her own name: Katie Wiebe. She discussed with us children whether she should include her maiden name in her byline, too. So we witnessed her evolution into the writer, “Katie Funk Wiebe.”

Recently, I found an instructive photo on the website of the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches. This photo depicts a group of women attending a session of the 1966 Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches. The women sit apart from the men in the back rows of the Eden Christian College gymnasium. The year that photo was taken, women around the world were taking a front seat. Indira Gandhi was elected India’s third prime minister. Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), Roberta Bignay became the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon, Janis Joplin gave her first live concert, and Billie Jean King won her first Wimbeldon singles title. And in Kansas, Katie Funk Wiebe was saying, “women can no longer look for safe, easy roles away from the social and intellectual ferment of our age.” In May of 1966, she attended the Maranatha Christian Writers Conference at Winona Lake, Indiana and returned ready to do something with her writing.

Our family dinners became excited explorations of Big Ideas. Daring questions were asked. For months, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique took the place of honor on top of our bookshelf in the dining room! Mother wrote many articles relating to the liberation of women, inviting understanding by being open about her own experience as a widow on the fringes of Hillsboro, Kansas society. At the same time that she advocated for changing roles for women in the church, she valued the Mennonite Brethren church and looked for ways to broaden her role there. This created both an inner and outer tension, which played out in our family dynamics.

It was a big day for the family when our Mother!!! was invited to speak in the “Big” Hillsboro Mennonite Brethren church (although not from the pulpit). In the church, we four sat near the front, eagerly watching her. She looked poised and beautiful in her dark blue dress, and spoke fluently, with many interesting stories, making complete sense, in words that anyone could understand. I was proud to be her daughter. Then we went home to eat Sunday dinner, a pot roast with potatoes, carrots and onions, which had been slowly mellowing into tender wonderfulness in the oven as she had been speaking. We were all elated. Mother had preached!

“No, children, it wasn’t preaching,” she said, “I didn’t speak from the pulpit, and that’s an important difference.”

“I don’t see any difference,” I said.

She smiled, ruefully.

The phone rang.

We all stopped chewing to listen. She answered buoyantly, but in a minute, her voice lost its confident ring, slowed.

She came back to the table, looking uncomfortable and tense.

She said that the caller—a man in the church—had criticized her sharply for wearing a dress with such a short skirt, just below the knees. She was being provocative, he had said. “It isn’t a thing for a Christian woman to do, sister,” he had chided her. “Bad enough that you stand in front of the church and speak. But in such a dress….”

I wanted so much to comfort Mother, help her feel better.

“He’s weird,” I said, using the nastiest word I could think of. “What difference does it make what you wear?”

Susan spoke up. “You made a very good sermon,” she said. “I could understand every word. That’s the main thing. That guy is crazy.”

“That’s not kind,” said Mother.

“He was not kind to you,” said Christine, softly, and got up from her chair to hug her mommy. Jamie joined them as Susan and I sat stiffly in our dining room chairs, not knowing what to say, angrily looking out the window at the road. I closed my eyes and pretended I was little again, on holiday in northern Saskatchewan, Daddy driving our brown Chevy through piney, rocky landscapes painted by a glowing sunset.

“It’s alright, children,” said Mother. “Let’s not let that man make us bitter. Let’s eat dinner. Then after dinner, Joanna, will you watch Jamie so I can finish grading those papers? Christine, can you work with Susan on your science homework? Then at ten to three, we’ll leave for the play at Tabor College.”

Now the quilt auction was almost over. The late afternoon sky was turning yellow-grey; a storm was brewing. I knew I should get on the highway if I was going to beat the weather. Susan admired a quilt purchased by her friend’s mother, then turned back to me with a summary of our discussion.

“That’s how Mother was,” Susan said. “She gave us the knowledge that we can do hard work. She was telling us: ‘I can do things that are unpleasant, difficult, and tedious. I can do things atypical for my social group, even when I am criticized or misunderstood. I can handle the internal conflict between my need for acceptance and my need to be true to my self and what I am called to do. And I can do those hard things for years.’”

In 1967, at the age of 19, I explored the borders of a wider world as I interned at Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston, Illinois. In the fall, I enrolled at the University of Kansas. I had been helping with the younger children for so long that I now felt conflicted about abandoning the family and striking out on my own. James coveted my affection and seeing me when I came home from college was very important to him. Christine clung to me emotionally, and was distressed at some of my new behaviors. She was afraid that I wasn’t a Christian any more. She prayed for me and worried about me. Mother drove three hours north to visit me at university, bringing the children, and picnics. She began the practice of writing me a weekly letter, with detailed news, encouragement, support, jokes, and family updates. But despite all that she did, I was temporarily lost to the family and myself. After a year and a half, I dropped out of school and stayed for a few months at the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Wichita, until my son Matthew William was born. Just stating those bare facts does not begin to describe the experience.

In 1970, I launched a commune with my boyfriend, on St. Francis Street in Wichita, blocks away from our friends at the Mennonite Voluntary Service house. Christine worried about letting slip any information about my living arrangements to Mother’s friends in Hillsboro. “I wouldn’t care if my friends knew,” Chris wrote. “But if some of the people in the Parkview church knew there would be a big stink. What kind of a church is that? We put on a front as if everything is just fine. We never really communicate about what bothers us most deeply with the people in the church. We never get past the surface.”

Mother struggled to understand my actions, an unsteady mixture of individuation, rebellion, and stepping in her feminist footsteps. She had written about how men and women in the church “need each other’s support, but not at the expense of one another.” I was not patient enough to work through that struggle in the Mennonite Brethren Church, or in any church, for that matter.

In 1971, at the age of 19, Susan moved to Omaha to go to nursing school; she married a year later. Christine’s illness was diagnosed as lupus and she spent a summer at the National Institutes of Health, then moved into a Tabor College dormitory in September of 1972.

Christine was intrigued by my experiment in communal living. While she was at Tabor she took a trip to explore Christian intentional communities. Mother told Christine that communal living held no appeal for her because she cherished her privacy and independence. Nonetheless, with James as the only child still at home, Mother often told Christine that she was lonely. She also told Christine that she was feeling the pull to write more, but that she was “not willing to stake her financial security on her writing talent.” Christine commented, “I would like her to do what she wants to do.” By April of 1976, Katie Funk Wiebe was writing a book about her experiences as a widow.

At the MCC quilt auction, the grey-haired quilt bidders in the paid chairs at the front of the room were getting to their feet, showing off their purchases, finding their families, debating whether to go back to the food building to get one more paper bag of warm, sugar-dusted, raisin-studded portzelky. The sky was darkening and a stiff wind was rattling the metal roofs of the fairground buildings.

However, I had one more topic to bring up with Susan before we parted.

“When you were young, did Mother ask you if you would take Jesus into your heart?”

“Yes,” she said, “I was around five.”

Christine also told me about how Mother had introduced her to Jesus, not just as an idea, but “as a living Person who is interested deeply in me.”

“For me,” I said, “when I was about six years old, Mother asked me if I would like Jesus to come into my heart. I said yes, not knowing what I was choosing. I remember that she prayed with me, the Saskatchewan prairie wind tossing our hair as we stood in the back yard with our eyes closed and hands folded.

As I grew up, I read the Bible and went to Sunday School, but most importantly, I watched her live, to see how a follower of Jesus did things.”

Mother eventually became my guru, modeling the way, as I strained to live with the difficult consequences of my earlier choices. For example, for many years, my every day was tinged with despair that the Kansas legal system would forever keep me from my son, who had been adopted. Then one day, as a new mother of my second son, David Miguel, and living a hard life in a new city, working ten to twelve hours a day, I realized that I had a key to making things work for me. I decided that when in difficult circumstances, I would ask myself, “What would Mother do?” Mothering my sons David and Zachary, working in the corporate world, writing and expressing myself, and at last, after twenty-seven years, meeting and learning to know my son, Bill, this was my mantra: What would Mother do?

Upon asking this question, I would feel the tears dry on my face, my spine straighten, my brain swing into high gear, my confidence strengthen. Solutions would begin to appear. I would build relationships. Make friends. Think logically. Be gracious. Organize my calendar. Make lists and prioritize. Write letters. Reach out for help. Have faith in positive outcomes. Pray. Persevere. Create a better world. Some of these gifts came more naturally than others. Along the way, I developed my own strengths, and integrated them with these gifts from Mother.

And she’s still ahead of me on the path, my mother. I have gained wisdom by watching how she has managed her aging process. As I approach retirement, I reflect on the style in which she downsized her career, home, and possessions when she still had lots of energy to do it. I learn how to manage loss and change as I see how she responds as one after another dear friend or family member weakens, dies. I see that she grieves and then makes new friends, deepens other connections.

On July 5, 1964, when we were all struggling to learn how to live without Walter William Wiebe, I wrote this prayer for my mother:

Eternal Father of us all, I come unto thee in prayer
for my Mother.

For the rich gifts of life that she has freely bestowed
upon me, I give thee now these words of thanks.

For the measureless gift of physical life itself –

For patience through long nights of illness –

For an understanding heart when my feet stumbled
in finding the true path –

For guidance against shipwreck and for freedom in
which to grow –

For these gifts of a wise Mother I give my thanks to
thee and to her.

Grant me patience and understanding when her
thoughts are not the same as my thoughts.

Lead me slowly though it be, into the larger
wisdom that she has gained from life.

Make me a steady support for her,
in these years of maturing hopes.

In the name of Him who said to his earthly parents,
‘Did ye not know that I must be about my Father’s business?’”

At the age of sixteen, when I wrote this prayer, I had a Mother who was diligent, concerned, questing, wise, organized, gracious, perseverant, driven to express herself in written and spoken word. She still has these qualities, but they don’t define her now as they did then. The Mother I have now is also relaxed and celebratory, with a twinkle in her eye and a ready hug. Katie is now well-known in certain circles, admired, studied. She made a measurable impact on the role of women in the church. Through teaching, writing, and speaking publicly, she has helped people learn how to tell their stories, how to age more gracefully, how to grow spiritually. But these achievements happened out in the world. At home, she is Mother.

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This is Chapter 3 of the book, The Voice of a Writer: Honoring the Life of Katie Funk Wiebe, recently published by the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission. The chapter also included several poems by my late sister Christine Ruth Wiebe, which I will post separately to this blog. The book was edited by Doug Heidebrecht and Valerie G. Rempel.  The Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies at Tabor hosted an event May 24 to unveil the book and present it to my mom.  Mom says the book will be available on Amazon in the fall.

There’s a broad view of green fields and blue sky from my window at the Country Haven Inn, here in Hillsboro, Kansas. I’m here to attend the gala Festschrift event being hosted for my mother Katie Funk Wiebe by the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission.  Last night, as the sun was setting over the farm fields, at a dinner at the Milk and Honey Bed and Breakfast just northeast of Hillsboro, co-editors Doug Heidebrecht and Valerie Rempel presented mom with the book, The Voice of a Writer: Honoring the Life of Katie Funk Wiebe, which describes her life, writing and impact on the world.  I have a copy too, which I started reading at breakfast this morning.

From the back cover, by Linda Huebert Hecht:  “Katie Funk Wiebe has shown great leadership, from the time she was elected president of the young adult group in her Saskatchewan Mennonite Brethren Church to the present day. She wrote about her own experience, addressing both women and men and became a strong and prophetic voice in the Mennonite community and beyond. Although no one mentored her, Katie became a trailblazer and a model to others. The variety of approaches in this book enrich Katie’s story and make it an appealing and excellent book to read.”

In coming days, I’ll be posting on this blog the chapter I contributed to the book, Chapter 3: What would mother do?

Katie Funk Wiebe 2007

A reception and program honoring the life and work of Tabor College Emeritus Professor of English Katie Funk Wiebe will be held on Saturday, April 24, at Tabor College in Hillsboro, Kansas.

That’s my mom, for those of you who don’t know!

The highlight of the evening will be the unveiling of a new “Festschrift” book, The Voice of a Writer: Honoring the Life of Katie Funk Wiebe, published by the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission.

I wrote a chapter for the book, describing life with Katie Funk Wiebe as our mother. It’s a page-turner!

Mom, who is 85, began teaching at Tabor in 1966 and remained 24 years as professor of English and Journalism. Author of numerous books about the role of women in the church, she was named one of the 20 most influential Mennonites of the 20th century.

Aside from that, I love her just for being herself — questing, curious, perseverant, loyal, invitational, brave, true, a great story-teller, and always learning and growing. 

More information:

http://www.tabor.edu/about-tabor/news/2010/4/13/tabor-reception-book-unveiling-to-honor-katie-funk-wiebe-april-24

Give me more food

for this fire

that leaps out

of its cell

free and amused.

Joanna Wiebe, June 17, 2006, Princeton, New Jersey

I wrote this poem while at a Fellowship in Prayer conference at Princeton. This event was life-changing for me. I learned to love the act of prayer, and I learned more deeply just exactly what prayer is in my life. Basically, anything I do with my body.

As I recall, by the end of the event, I felt truly educated, and liberated, and . . . hot. It was a very warm weekend at the University and the rooms were not air conditioned.  I met persons of dozens of faiths from around the world, and danced, sang, meditated, walked the labyrinth, participated in a Taize service,  chanted — and prayed in the traditional ways I learned as a child, too…”Our father…” and the blessings before meals, and more.

The photo is a shot of a redbud in the crevice of a limestone wall of a house my friend Liz rented for awhile in Lawrence, Kansas. It is said this house was lived in once by famous beat poets and writers, and before that, a Swedish immigrant farm family.  I visited Liz a couple of years ago in mid-April, and the buds opened that weekend.

FAMILY PORTRAIT — In memory of Peter Wiebe, 1886-1951

Now that you stand life-size in our hallway,
I talk to  you, my uncle, oldest son
standing tall in the triangle of misery
and loss, the one who dared to leave.

Leaning into the heave of the ship,
ocean spray blurring the future,
you opened a path for my father
to follow, away from desperation,

not toward wealth, but music and a love
for words where fields lay open to rain
and drought, those furrows testing you.
Can beauty germinate in stony land?

My father found you plowing when
he arrived, northern light pouring
its long hours on your shoulders.
And then at night, hands sore and swollen,

with pen you seeded for us all
a raw loveliness of telling,
mud-caked and fertile. They say
your practiced violin solos standing

in the wagon on the way to church,
Aunt Lena driving the horses.
Dear Peter, I stand here holding
your songs, stories, and poems,
all rooted in struggle, even this page,
where I plant your wounds
with gratitude and remembrance. -- Jean Janzen

OK, so some of our early choices were a little…reactionary?  Neither Rhoda Janzen nor I married a nice solid Mennonite Brethren man, a believer, an early-waking guy who reads a lot,  has a general knack for fixing things, and, possibly, a beard.  Instead of the “smart, kind, humorous, attractive and affluent” MB Karl Kroeker, Rhoda married a gay athiest.  Instead of an intelligent, gentle, mathematical Mennonite Brethren man with a passion for social justice (and a short beard), I chose an illegal alien who pumped gas for a living.

And then, the reckoning.  After our failed marriages, some flailing about, wondering, who am I? The reactionary approach didn’t work. So now what do I do?  I’ve peered into the chaos and have seen that there is no Truth with a capital “T’.   So now, what’s true for me?

Darting away from a tradition of four and a half centuries of living a set-apart life and learning to make one’s own decisions: the way I see it, this behavior is not a break from the Anabaptist tradition but a bold continuation of the path of our ancestors, on the roam for one’s soul, intensely concerned with protecting and nurturing one’s individual experience.

Then, after some amount of individuation, what’s it like to come back and try to take a place in the Mennonite world again?

And here is where another aspect of the Mennonite Brethren church culture, one of the most attractive aspects, comes into play: family solidarity. The story of the prodigal son is not lost on the MBs, and I have seen many examples of young people decisively abandoning their Mennonite homes, communities and churches, becoming worldly in every way that they can – and then being warmly and lovingly welcomed back home. As has happened to me, more than once. As Rhoda experienced, when she returned to the family structure during a time of crisis, her mother “has always backed her daughters up, always supported us, always welcomed us into her home with open arms, no matter what choices we’ve made.” I can say the same for my mother, the essence of spiritual hospitality.

My mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, says that when she was a child growing up, when a guest was about to leave, she remembers that the host would remonstrate and say, “Doaut nobaat noch so schoen” (The conversation is still great. Let’s not quit so soon).   But I’ve said enough for now on this topic of my distant cousin and her book.  So for now, my fellow writers of poetry, eaters of borscht and zwieback, lovers of education, my MB brothers and sisters, the ball is in your court.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen

New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2009; 241 pp.; ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8923-7, ISBN-10: 0-8050-8925-X; hardback $22.00.