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.

********************************************************

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

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.

Women at the Back: 1966 Canadian Mennonite Brethren Conference

Worldly (in Low German:  weltlijch): A response to mennonite in a little black dress by Rhoda Janzen

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Worldly…what does that mean to a Mennonite Brethren person?

Contemporary theologian Tom Finger says, “It is understandable why marginalized Anabaptists often attributed the intense opposition they experienced to a single systemic entity, the ‘world’.”

I think this was true of the Russian Mennonite Brethren churches that I grew up in Saskatchewan, populated by immigrants fresh from heavy “opposition”, as Finger puts it, during the Russian Revolution.  In other words, after living through five or ten years of torture, rape, shootings, loss of homes, intimidation, mass burials, famine, etc., it’s understandable that the older people around me when I grew up created an atmosphere of extreme distrust of the “world”.   Although my mom and dad were exceptionally lively, open-minded and eager to explore the world, (for Mennonites), the heavy darkness of those earlier times was carried by my grandparents and their friends, and they communicated a deep, palpable paranoia, which I caught.

I remember that when I was six and had broken my arm, I was petrified to tears whenever the nurse came near me, because she wore lipstick, which meant for sure that she was going to hell.  I was afraid of the Lutheran children in my school, because they were “worldly”.  Some entertainments were fine, like the filmstrip on how aluminum is made, which we watched over and over again in the third grade.  Premarital sexual behavior was definitely worldly, and I remember a girl being excommunicated because she was pregnant and unmarried.  Marriage between believers and unbelievers was as worldly as it could get. Divorce was a terribly worldly thing, something you shouldn’t even think about.

Dancing, of course, as Rhoda affirms, is verboten in the MB world both because…it leads to sex!…and also because “There was something about the lighthearted frivolityof dance that suggested a fatal weakness in priorities. Mennnonites were supposed t work with dignity, and when the work was done, there would be something to show for it.”  Unless, of course, it’s “liturgical dance”, which some of the more liberal Mennonite churches have toyed with.  Rhoda’s best chapter, in my opinion, is Chapter Eight: Rippling Water, which talks about her intense childhood longing to dance.  I was teary reading about the dance training  Rhoda’s brother is providing his daughter, and how they watched  this young dancer perform, interpreting “the elemental concept of rippling water, her hair unfastened, cascading behind her like the sheer azure chiffon that clung to her slender form…it spoke volumes that this man, who knew nothing about dance and who had probably never danced a step in his own life, was prepared to go without a second car so that his daughter could ripple like water.”

Tom Finger says, “Historic Anabaptists . . . often overplayed Spirit and downgraded matter.”  Rhoda’s description of her dancing niece and supportive (Mennonite) father is a beautiful intertwining of matter and spirit.

As Rhoda suggests, in her generation, the line is blurring between inner and outer, creation and creator, and perhaps, Mennonites could even be “in the world, but not of it.”  And they are in the world more and more all the time, although sometimes in the form of intentional communities, like Reba Place Fellowship, where I live, in Evanston, Illinois.  A recent issue of Mennonite Weekly Review talks about how urban the Mennonite church is getting these days.  “Person by person, a new network of urban Anabaptist leaders is growing,” says Linda Espenshade of the Mennonite Central Committee, on the front page of the March 8, 2010 issue. And a huge number Mennonites around the world today are not ethnic Mennonites at all.  In a MB universe like that, it’s hard to make fine distinctions about what’s in and what’s out. About the only really tough issues of worldliness, anymore, are homosexuality (“Love the sinner but hate the sin!”) and abortion (“Hate the mother and love the baby!”), as Rhoda describes.

Rhoda speaks of a Mennonite “mistrust of education” and quotes an old Low German proverb “Ji jileada, ji vikjeada (the more educated a person is, the more warped)”.  Maybe she is talking about the Kanadiers   Because I’ve never seen Russlanders who didn’t want their children to be more highly educated than themselves.

Or it could be  degradation of a traditional Anabaptist approach, that “Christians must not value a person according to the amount of education he has. Wisdom can be received by every member of Christ’s body, for the Holy Spirit gives wisdom to each member as he or she asks for it in faith.” (J.C. Wenger, What Mennonites Believe, P. 24).

Mennonites in general have always sought literacy and education. In fact, they became religious rebels back in the 1500s because they had read the Bible for themselves, and interpreted it differently from the priests.   The Mennonites in Russia had managed their own education until World War I, when educators were forbidden to associate. After the March Revolution in 1917, the educators re-formed but in a few years, the Soviet took oversight of all educational efforts.  When the Russian Mennonite Brethren immigrated to Canada, they immediately began thinking about higher education. A two-year Bible institute in Herbert, Saskatchewan was operated as a sort of ecumenical Mennonite school but it wasn’t Mennonite Brethren. So the Canadian MBs decided to create something new. In 1927, they founded Bethany Bible Institute in Hepburn, Saskatchewan, (where I spent several of my childhood years living in the student dorm because my dad was a teacher there). The purpose of Bethany was: “ To give our . . . youth foundational Bible instruction in the German and English languages . . ., to wrench our youth away from frivolous pursuits and the contemporary ‘Zeitgeist’ . . ., to nurture the German language as a special possession handed down from our fathers . . ., to raise believing youth for the battle of the faith . . . [and] to take into account the needs of the congregations in the methodical training of Sunday school teachers and sundry (church) workers.” Two years later, in Alberta, the Coaldale Bible School was begun. Another of these institutions played an important role in my own life: Mennonite Brethren Bible College, which was founded in Winnipeg in 1944, and where I also spent a few memorable childhood years living in the student dorm, because my father was a student there. That’s also where my sister Susan was born.

So I don’t get Rhoda’s comment about a “Mennonite mistrust of education”. I haven’t seen it. It’s a worldly education that the Mennonites don’t trust. It’s the education of women that Mennonites have sometimes viewed as diabolically worldly.  Young Mennonite girls in Russia were not educated past the third grade (my grandmother Anna Janzen Funk, for example), whereas young boys would go on to high school, and even, like Rhoda’s grandfather Jacob K. Janzen,  go on to advanced studies.

In the 1966, when Rhoda was a toddler and I was a teenager, Mennonite Brethren women were just starting to look up from their borscht and their babies and take a step into full participation into the life of the church.

Take a look at the photo at the top of this page, which I found on the Internet site 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.  Scrawled on the back of the photos is an interesting comment:  “Even the women attended in fairly liberal numbers. Who knows, by the time we get to the next conference, we may have half a dozen delegates from their ranks!”

The year that photo was taken, of women sitting at the back of the conference room, 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.
• Billie Jean King won her first Wimbeldon singles title.
• And my mother Katie Funk Wiebe was saying, “women can no longer look for safe, easy roles away from the social and intellectual ferment of our age.”

For most of their history, Mennnonite Brethren women were expected not to contribute to the thought life of MB society, to preach from the pulpit, or to take any overt leadership position in the church or community – as my mother Katie Funk Wiebe has done, leading the way for many other Mennonite women, and for women in general.

“Until the mid- to late twentieth century, and in certain subgroups still today, Mennonite women were explicitly excluded from important aspects of church organizational life and expression. In their literal understanding of female subordination and silence before man and god, Mennonites differed little from other Christian denominations.”  “In 1975, the Canadian MB conference for the first time provided food service and childcare so that women were freed to attend all sessions” (From Marlene Epp’s book, Mennonite Women in Canada.)

When I was a teenager, deciding what to do with my life, my mother was just beginning her journey into taking these stronger roles in the church. As a young woman, I was driven to educate myself, explore the world, to write fearlessly, to be all that I could be. I didn’t know any Mennonite Brethren woman who I could look up to as a role model. I certainly did not see any MB women who were living the kind of life I dreamed of for myself – a life of vigor, intellectual honesty, and engagement with ideas, people and change. My soul didn’t feel at home in the constrained environment of Gnadenau MB Church in Hillsboro. No woman there had connected with me on a soul level, or intellectually, or had encouraged me to grow into who I was as a person, or had shown me how that mysterious activity is done.

In 1967, at the age of 19, I explored the borders of a wider world as I interned at Reba Place Fellowship, which at that time was still a pretty new and radical experiment in Christian intentional community (It’s now over 50 years old and going strong. ) In the fall, I enrolled at the University of Kansas. I tried out some new behaviors, which distressed my family.  My sister Christine 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 KU, 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 lost to the family, not to mention 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.

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.

I left the Parkview MB Church (they’d changed the name from Gnadenau by this time, the abandonment of the German moniker being yet another sign of adaptation to the world).

Even though I don’t know Rhoda at all, I resonated with her words around leaving the church. I saw that ultimately, like me, she left the MB church because she did not see a place there for an intelligent, strong-minded, creative, zesty woman.

And so we went out into the world. How brave, how rebellious,  how Anabaptist — to leave our church.   To become worldly.  And find our souls.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

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.

Worldly (in Low German:  weltlijch): A response to mennonite in a little black dress by Rhoda Janzen

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Leaving the Mennonite Brethren church is a momentous life event. Either you are in or you are out.  When I left, it didn’t seem possible to say, oh, I’ll stay in the church and be partly worldly and explore all my questions about pantheism and existentialism in the context of the gemeinde.  But it’s not easy to leave the church and keep your toe in, either.  This is a historical approach, of separation from the world. This was maybe largely due to the fact that as Mennonites dispersed across Prussia and Russia, their host countries didn’t really want them to mingle with the general populace, infecting the peasants with their virulent memes of pacifism, Biblical literacy, and religious self-determination. This was not a problem, because the Mennonites themselves saw that it was easier to be themselves if they stayed away from the fallen world — and maybe also because the book-reading Russian Mennonites saw themselves as superior to the illiterate Slavic cultures.  Many Mennonites employed Russian laborers, but they didn’t necessarily treat them like full human beings. (This was not going to help the Mennonites later during the Russian Revolution, but that’s another story.)

Part of Russia’s approach to keeping the Mennonites contained was to restrict the amount of land they could occupy. By the early part of the twentieth century, this policy  resulted in the division of  the approximately 110,000 Mennonites in Russia into an elite landed and a discontented, proletariat, landless class, because there just wasn’t enough land to pass on to the kids.

So here we have the Russian Mennonites at the turn of the Twentieth Century, living with the uneasy tensions of Frisian/Flemish, worldly/spiritual, land-owning and landless. As the Russian Mennonites struggled internally with their own polarities, they began to experience the effect of similar class struggles in society at large. They were directly impacted by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the German occupation, the destructive impact of the Red and White Armies, and the Makhno Occupation, with its continuous climate of violence, plunder, confiscation of property, starvation, bloodbaths, epidemics, and rape.

I don’t know any details of the suffering Rhoda says her family experienced during this time, but I can imagine that there are parallels with my own. For more than half a century before the Russian Revolution, Mennonites had been leaving Russia for Canada and the US, in response to the political and economic upheavals that had been going on for even longer. During the German Occupation, my mom writes, the Mennonites, who were of Dutch origin, were German-speaking and thus were labeled “’agents of Germany’ and ‘enemies of the state’. They were forbidden to use the German language in the press or in public assemblies of more than three persons or face a fine or prison term. From November 1917, until the German occupation troops arrived in March 1918, roving bandits robbed, imprisoned, tortured and murdered the Mennonites.  The leader of these bandits, Nestor Makhno, claimed that his molestation of the Mennonites was due to a Mennonite employer’s earlier mistreatment of him.

Mom writes that after the German troops withdrew from the Ukraine, “complete lawlessness ensued, with a civil war between the Red and White armies and an uprising of peasant anarchist forces competing for dominance at the same time. . . The area where the Mennonites and other Germans lived in the Ukraine was the territory   most affected by the civil war between the Reds and the Whites.” The village where my grandparents lived, Rosenthal, “was an ideal location to station troops because it was situated in a deep and broad valley, but its farm land was located on a high plateau, affording an almost limitless view of approaching forces in all directions except south.” The windmill owned by my great-grandfather sat on top of this high plateau. The Red/White front passed through this area about seventeen times in the next few years, and even across our family’s yard, giving the family “a  front-seat experience of the war with bombs flying over their house and  dead soldiers  in their backyard with arms and limbs shot off,  empty eyes staring at the  crows overheard waiting for the furor to stop.” Mennonites in Russia personally saw members of their families, friends and neighbors killed, tortured and raped. They spent time in prison because they were Mennonites. Many of their homes were destroyed. Members of their families were arrested and never heard from again. They lived in fear.

Almost every Mennonite decided to leave Russia for Canada; Canada finally opened its doors to approximately 20,200 Mennonites between 1923 and 1929. A sizable percentage of those who were able to go to Canada were Mennonite Brethren (including my grandparents and Rhoda’s grandparents). These immigrants experienced further trauma as they uprooted themselves from the Ukraine. The members of the Janzen and Funk families had called the Ukraine their home for about 130 years. Rhoda’s grandfather, Jacob K. Janzen, was an educated professional with a large family to support. My grandfather was a clerk; his family had owned a successful flour mill.  Now they were expected to become farmers, for that was what the Canadian government wanted them to do.

These immigrants had survived four years of world war followed by four years of revolution and counter-revolution. Their farms, villages, schools, businesses and homes of the Mennonite colonies had been a theater of conflict for the fronts of the two armies. They had survived typhoid fever and smallpox epidemics, periods of famine.

Now they were in Canada, being encouraged to learn English and assimilate into Canadian culture, which most of them did, although not without great soul-searching. For hundreds of years, the Mennonites had been living separately from their cultural milieu – first in Prussia and then again in the Ukraine.  A consistent concern of theirs was how to be more “spiritual”, and less “worldly”, and here in Canada, with its openness and freedom, their daily life was shot through and through with worldliness, in the form of media, popular culture, public education and the loss of their cultural languages of Low and High German.  (In 1922-27, several thousand very conservative Russian Mennonites who had come to Canada in the 1870s immigrated further, from Manitoba and Saskatchewan, into Mexico and Central and South America, in a desperate bid to preserve their language, cultural and religious identity, objecting strongly to their children being Canadianized in the public schools.)

When the Mennonite Brethren immigrated to North America, their issues came with them. The Frisian/Flemish polarity fell away with the emergence of a new form of class consciousness: the newcomers vs. Mennonites who had come to Canada from Russian earlier. Relationships between the two groups were strained. The Kanadier viewed the newly-arrived Russian Mennonites as “too proud, too aggressive, too enthusiastic about higher education, too anxious to exercise leadership, too ready to compromise with the state, too ready to move to the cities, and too unappreciative of the pioneering done by the Kanadier. As far as the Russlander were concerned, the Kanadier were too withdrawn, too simple-minded, too uncultured, too weak in their High German. . . too afraid of schools and education.” (Frank Epp, Mennonites in Canada: 1920-1940.)

Rhoda’s father, Edmund. Janzen, and his wife were both Russlanders.  In my own family, my mother was a Russlander who grew up in a Canadianized home, because Blaine Lake did not have a Mennonite Brethren church. My father, Walter William Wiebe, was a Kanadier who grew up in a Russlander community (and absorbed their values).  I grew up in Russlander communities in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, before moving to Hillsboro, Kansas in the early 1960s, the place where my father died.

In Hillsboro, settled in the late 1800s by Russian Mennonites, our family struggled to figure out how and who to be. We swung between the values and practices of the conservative Russlander culture we had known in Canada, and the temptations of the American Mennonite Brethren culture.  I could see by the names on the tombstones in the Gnadenau church cemetery that these people who had died in Hillsboro, Kansas, were my people:  Janzen, Wiebe, Funk.   But — Hillsboro Mennonites were so…worldly!

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

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.

Worldly (in Low German:  weltlijch): A response to mennonite in a little black dress by Rhoda Janzen

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

I was immediately charmed by the bold way in which Rhoda launched into a discussion of body parts and secretions. To be honest, it reminded me of those late-evening chats round the dinner tables of my childhood, when the adults got raunchy in a diasporic Mennonite flavor of Low German, a language that seems to have grown directly out of the earth.  I guffawed at Rhoda’s brittle, brilliantly funny sentences, causing people in nearby seats on the plane to crane their necks to see what was so hilarious. I cringed when she described her interactions with some of her relatives and in-laws.

Of course, Rhoda’s story is uniquely her own—a visit back to her Mennonite family and the community in California in which she had been raised, after her handsome husband Nick left her for a guy named Bob whom he had met on gay.com.  However, as I read on, I began to get the feeling that  Rhoda’s back story intersects mine. I saw similarities:

• dramatic and drastic flights from our Mennonite Brethren roots
• ability to whip up dinner for ten with an hour’s notice
• puzzling early choices in men
• happy-go-lucky academic demeanor
• quest for meaning
• ultimately, respect for and participation in the values and principles of our parents

When I got home from my trip to Portland, I emailed my mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, to tell her about this book. Of course, she knew about it. Being the leading Mennonite feminist writer means she’s always got her finger on the pulse of Mennonite literature.

Not surprising. It’s a fun parlor game among Mennonite Brethren people to dig up these kinds of family connections. In fact, given the small gene pool, it’s not unusual to discover that you are related to another person in more than one way (Come to think of it, at the funeral of my husband’s grandmother Ruth this past summer, I discovered that my paternal aunt Susie was married to the grand-nephew of the man who married my husband’s grandmother’s sister. Was that fun for you? If so, you may be a Mennonite Brethren.)

Some of the details in this essay are drawn from an extensively-researched history of my grandfather Jacob Funk, which my mom is writing. The history of this side of my family begins with the August 1, 1789 arrival of 20-year-old Frantz Peter Funck and his young wife Maria at Kronsweide, near Zaporoschye,  South Russia, in the first group of Mennonite immigrants from Prussia. I also dug up a history of my grandmother Anna Janzen Funk, which mom wrote awhile ago. From these pages, and a few other sources I had handy, I was able to delve into the history which Rhoda and I share.

I already knew that some time in the 1500s, some of our Dutch ancestors read the Bible for themselves, and felt led to disobey the state church (and thus, the state) and re-baptise themselves as adults. These rebels, our great-etcetera grandparents, were from the Flemish and Frisian areas of Holland. For their effrontery in claiming freedom of thought and action, they were burned at the stake, roasted on a slow fire, tied to the stake, drowned, buried alive and otherwise persecuted. (Read the Martyrs Mirror if you want to know more, but I warn you, it’s scary.)

The Mennonite survivors fled to the northern lowlands of Germany and the Danzig area, which later became Prussia. Here they lived from 1540 to 1790. They learned German, which became the language of God and Mennonite culture — Low German in daily life, and High German in church. Non-conformity to the “world” was important, both in their material and spiritual practices. They honed their spiritual approach, sometimes squabbling between themselves over culturally-related expressions of what exactly non-conformity meant. The Flemish Mennonites saw themselves as an elite, progressive group, and considered the Frisians low-brow. These two groups took their class consciousness and divisiveness with them to the Ukraine, where they migrated after an1786 invitation from Catharine the Great. Here they continued the great debate over how best to live a spiritual life.  Frisians accused the Flemish of being worldly in their choice of clothing; the Flemish said the Frisians were less than spiritual in their style of houses and furnishings. They differed in their modes of baptism: the Frisians sprinkled, the Flemish poured. Who walked closer to God? was the question.

A small but fervent group of restorationists seceded from the mother Russian Mennonite church around 1860, calling themselves Mennonite Brethren. They considered themselves the true believers, as opposed to their cold, non-believing, worldly Mennonite neighbors. This group considered themselves really spiritual – when they baptized, they dunked the entire person!

My grandfather remembered these early Mennonite Brethren as intense people who tended to think that they were better than others. They were vigorously evangelical. They promoted an inward spirituality, spontaneous preaching, exuberant singing, and  religious services of spiritual renewal. They believed that salvation was a personal experience which could be known and celebrated.

Rhoda and I grew up drenched in Mennnonite Brethren-ism. Her grandfather, Jacob Kornelius Janzen, joined with the Mennonite Brethren soon after the group formed.  Not long after, my grandfather Jacob Funk also joined the MBs, because he agreed with their theology. My father was a Mennonite Brethren pastor. My mom is a famous Mennonite Brethren writer.  Rhoda’s dad, Edmund, was for some years moderator of the General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches.

When I was growing up in the MB church, it seemed to me that the folks in the church had an idea that they had a good handle on the truth, and the other branches of the Mennonite church were not as close to God.  The GCs, or General Conference Mennonites, weren’t rigorous enough in their beliefs or practices, I learned. The GCs might go to heaven when they died, but then again, who could be sure.

In1984, my mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, wrote a book, Who are the Mennonite Brethren?, which included an outline of the 1976 Mennonite Brethren Confession of Faith.  Jesus Christ, the Confession says, is the eternal Son of god, sent by the Father to reconcile a sinful humanity to himself. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary, and lived a holy and sinless life. He was crucified and died for the sin of human kind and rose from the dead. He is now with God the Father, interceding for all who believe in him. He will come again to judge the living and the dead and to establish his eternal kingdom.  Jesus is the key to understanding the Bible.  He is the mediator between God and humankind. He came to redeem the human race from the judgment and power of sin and to reconcile men and women to God. Through his death on the cross, Christ became the sacrifice which was sufficient to atone for sin and which established God’s new covenant with humanity. The Holy Spirit lives in every Christian and transforms him or her into the image of Christ. He empowers the believer to follow Christ and to be an effective witness for him. The Christian is expected to live in fellowship with God and other believers and to join a local church at baptism.  He or she helps to build the body of Christ with spiritual and material gifts. Nurtured through the Word, fellowship and prayer, the believer grows more Christlike and glorifies God by being a witness for him in everyday life. All followers of Christ continually need the forgiving, chastening and cleansing grace of the Lord. The fruit of the Spirit is increasingly evident in the believer’s life, especially in relationships with other people.

Whoa! that’s a lot of stuff to think through. I thought and thought and after several years concluded that maybe by the end of my life I might have some understanding of some of it. I couldn’t honestly say that I believed it all, or even substantial sections, or even one full sentence.  Who or what exactly is “God”?   What does “eternal” mean?  Isn’t blood sacrifice a little. . . extreme?  What about that nice Jewish boy in school…was Jesus not interceding for him, then? Seemed kind of picky of Jesus…no, I am not going to put in a good word to God for Howard, because he doesn’t believe in me. Yet I had said that I believed the whole Confession of Faith when I was baptised at 15.

At the conclusion of the chapter discussing the MB Confession of Faith, mother quoted a MB theologian as saying, “If there are articles in our Confession that a person cannot accept, then he or she should find a church with those teachings he or she can fully agree.”  Mom said, “These words may sound hard, but it is important for all Christians to find a church home where they are comfortable with the teaching, with the approach to the Word of God, and with the ministry of the church.”

Well, I left the MB church, at the age of 19. I don’t know when Rhoda left, but I am guessing that confession of faith didn’t resonate with her either.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

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.

Worldly (in Low German:  weltlijch): A response to mennonite in a little black dress by Rhoda Janzen

• What is “Mennonite” about Rhoda Janzen?
• Which part of her is the Little Black Dress?
• After a Mennonite woman has worn the Little Black Dress, can she really go home again?

I will address these three questions in this response to Rhoda’s book.

First, please bear with me while I give you a lot of background on myself and Rhoda and our genetic and cultural relationship. What follows may seem like a long string of “begats” but knowing this information might be interesting and useful. And some people have mentioned that the historical information Rhoda gave in her book was too sketchy. So here goes.

My red-haired grandmother, Anna Janzen, was part of the radically revolutionary religious group of Anabaptists called the Mennonites. Anna was born March 15, 1895, in a village in the Ukraine, in Southern Russia.  In 1923, Anna and her husband – my left-handed, vigorous grandfather Jacob Funk – immigrated to Saskatchewan with their two young girls, Annie and Frieda, avoiding the two undesirables of either being wiped out entirely, or disappearing into a labor camp in Siberia. Arriving with nothing but twenty-five cents and a debt of $468 to the Canadian Pacific Railways, they stepped of the train in the small prairie town of Rosthern. They soon moved to an even smaller town, Laird, where my mother, Katie was born, at a cost of $14, then the big city of Saskatoon, then back to the sticks of Bruno, where my Uncle Jack was born, and finally, Blaine Lake, a slightly bigger dot on the map, where my Aunt Susan came into the world. Throughout these moves, Jacob Funk pursued a career in the grocery business and tried not to think about the events he had witnessed in the aftermath of March 1917:  beheadings, stabbings, shootings, typhoid epidemics, rapes, mass burials, hunger, anarchy and general panic. It was enough now, to be in Canada, safe, and free.  Having been ordained as a deacon/evangelist in Russia, he also preached in the Mennonite Brethren churches in Saskatchewan.

My mom, Katie Funk, married Walter Wiebe (also the child of Mennonite Brethren immigrants, who had come to Canada in 1917). I was Katie and Walter’s first child, a little ray of sunshine, chubby, energetic and interested in everything.

My red-haired grandmother, Anna, was part of a large extended family. When her grandfather, Kornelius Janzen died in 1896, he left each child an inheritance. I don’t know what Anna’s father Franz did with his money, but it is recorded that Anna’s uncle Jacob Kornelius Janzen used his inheritance to study theology in Germany.

After Jacob K. had finished his theology studies and was back in Russia, he became a Mennonite minister, and from 1912 to 1920 he also was the highly-respected housefather of the Bethania Mental Hospital in Alt-Kronsweide, Chortitz colony.  From 1915 to 1920 my grandmother Anna Janzen Funk worked as a cook at Bethania, where she became good friends with a young woman named Tina, who was working at Bethania “for the Lord”, as a volunteer, and not for wages as my grandmother was. On a clear spring day, March 30, 1920, Anna’s uncle Jacob K. Janzen married Anna to Jake Funk, a co-worker at the hospital.

Three years later, in July, 1923, Jacob and Anna Funk immigrated to Rosthern, Saskatchewan, Canada. Jacob K. stayed behind in Russia with his wife Martha and their children, Jacob, Siegfried and Walter. Martha died, and Jacob K. married his children’s nursemaid, Katherine Quiring. This was Tina, my grandmother’s friend at Bethania.  Tina and Jacob K. had another four children, Martha, John, Waldemar and Edmund.

A few terrible years later, (Rhoda’s book marks it as 1925 although the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encylopedia Online has it as 1927), Jacob K. Janzen, Tina, and their seven children immigrated to Laird, Saskatchewan. My grandparents were living in Blaine Lake, a town full of Russian Doukhobors, which was not far from Laird as the crow flies.

(Doukhobors were kind of like Quakers, in that they believed “The church is not within logs, but within ribs”. My grandpa was chosen to run the OK Economy Store in Blaine Lake because he could speak Doukhobor Russian fluently, among other languages.)

A trip from Blaine Lake to Laird could not be taken as the crow flies. My grandparents would get in the Buick and drive south through the Indian Reserve and then take the Petrofka Ferry (there’s a bridge there now) across the Saskatchewan River, head east to Waldheim, and then north again to Laird.  In winter, there was no need for a ferry. You could drive right over the river on the ice. The whole trip is about sixty kilometers.

My mom says “Our family often visited (Jacob K. and Tina and family) in summer and they came to our place in Blaine Lake by horse and caboose in winter. We were poor but they were poorer.” She mentions the challenges Jacob K. Janzen faced in his transition from being an educated, well-to-do professional in Russia, to being a novice farmer with seven children to support.  All the immigrants were supposed to be farmers; my maternal grandfather was lucky to have had an uncle, D.A. Schellenberg, who had come to Canada earlier, who offered him a job in his grocery store. (My paternal grandfather was not so lucky. A poet, musician, and sensitive soul in Russia, he became an anxious, terribly inept Canadian farmer. Their family was so poor that as a teenager, my father couldn’t have his burst appendix removed. Somehow he survived, but a few decades later, when I was fourteen years old, a massive jelly-like tumor coalesced around the site of the trauma, and killed him.)

But back to the story of Jacob K. Janzen.  In the early 1940s, he moved his family to a fruit farm near Grimsby, Ontario. He became one of the ordained ministers of the nearby Vineland Mennonite Brethren Church. His youngest son, Edmund, married Mary Loewen, and in the mid-1960s, they had a daughter, Rhoda.

Leaping ahead, in her forties, Rhoda Janzen published a book, mennonite in a little black dress and all hell broke loose. It was reviewed in the New York Times and the Mennonite Weekly Review, and became the talk of the Mennonite blogs. Hurt feelings were aired. Controversies swirled. Some people didn’t like Rhoda’s generic approach to describing Mennonite beliefs and culture.

My friend, Ruth Baer Lambach, a woman of Mennonite origin, who incidentally is also my (Mennonite origin) husband’s double second cousin, gave me the book to read on flight from Chicago to Portland, Oregon, on my way to my granddaughter’s fourth birthday party.  At the time, I didn’t know that Rhoda was in any way related to me, but knowing that she was writing about the experience of being a Mennonite, I was interested.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

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.

Enjoying the snow in London, Ontario

“It is in our bodies that redemption takes place.” - M.C. Richards

In What Mennonites Believe, by J. C. Wenger, I read that it is the “Holy Spirit that graciously leads the new believer to higher ground spiritually and nudges him to respond to new understandings of God’s will”.  (I am re-reading this book to stay in touch with my Mennonite Brethren roots).

On the other hand, I also read that “Christians are weak because of their human nature (the ‘flesh’ with it’s evil tendencies). So Christians need worship for their own strengthening and upbuilding.”

This latter kind of thinking and believing has got me into much trouble in my life. Hating my “‘flesh’ with its evil tendencies”, I discovered myself hating myself, for the spirit is in the flesh and the flesh is in the spirit.

The way I see it, in all of us, matter constantly becomes spirit and spirit constantly becomes matter, and the whole process is holy.

When my soul finally breaks away with its “incommunicable load of consciousness” (Tielhard de Chardin, in his Phenomenon of Man), the sacred flesh will become cosmic trash, ready for recycling.

Everything is holy.

At the age of 19, I left the Mennonite Brethren Church, and began my quest for my soul, my place in the world.

Along the way, I encountered the Wilton, Connecticut Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. There, in the profound silence of that simple room with its tall windows and its arc of plain benches before a stone fireplace, I heard the words of John Woolman: “Dig deep, … carefully cast forth the loose matter and get down to the rock, the sure foundation, and there hearken to the divine voice which gives a clear and certain sound.” That made sense to me.

To me, almost all of the theology of my childhood was that loose matter which I then cast forth. I did not do it all that carefully, as Woolman instructed, but I cast it forth.

I deeply desired to have a life with integrity, and a spiritual life with meaning for ME.

I decided that I would not read the Bible any more, except for the words spoken by Jesus. I was given an icon of Jesus which I kept on the dashboard of my car for a few months, during which time I made a dedicated effort to realize that elusive personal relationship with Jesus that I had been urged to have as a child. But all my prayers and pleadings to Jesus led to nothing but a vague feeling that I was being superstitious. I quit praying in any formal sense, and stopped thinking about Jesus.

For more than a decade after I left home, my relationships were short-term and tumultuous, because although I was optimistic, lively, helpful, and charming, I was not a responsible person. I was self-centered, and emotionally volatile. I had a son, who I gave up for adoption. I took a lot of drugs. I learned about the philosophy of Be Here Now, from Ram Dass, Timothy Leary and their followers. I lived with a wonderful Mennonite man for a year, left him to travel with another man for a year, and then lived with a third man for three years, before marrying a fourth man, someone from Guatemala with whom I had very little in common. In fact, we did not even speak the same language.  When our son was seven, my husband and I separated, with violence and anger.

My life was a mess. I was ashamed of my failures. More than anything, I wanted to know how to love and be loved.  I began attending the unprogrammed Wilton, CT Monthly Meeting, where I encountered Quakers who seemed to have good skills for behaving in loving ways with one another. No one pushed me to have one kind of belief or another.  I didn’t have to believe in Jesus Christ as conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary,  living a holy and sinless life, crucified for the sin of humankind, risen from the dead, hovering around until that moment when—surprise! I’m back here on earth to judge the living and the dead and my judgment on you is…BAD JOANNA!  These Quakers were kind to me, and didn’t give me any of that jargon, and did not expect any of it back from me. That was such a relief. In that loving space, I could relax and start to be who I was. I started to believe that I could find that rock that the Quaker John Woolman spoke about, somewhere.

I explored other spiritual resources. I read Maria Montessori, who said we must “become incarnate with the help of (our) own will.”  Rainer Maria Rilke urged me to “Will transformation. Oh be inspired for the flame in which a Thing disappears and bursts into something else.” I began a practice of yoga which I continue today. Once in awhile I attended the United Church in Norwalk, Connecticut, where my second son was confirmed.  I studied A Course in Miracles. I went to an anger management workshop. I joined a group which used the techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous to deal with sexual intimacy issues.  I learned from a former student of Margaret Mead’s, Dana Raphael, that we have a need for each other. Such a simple truth. A former Jesuit priest, Dr. Dean Dauw, kept insisting to me that human intimacy can be a great evolutionary process, until I listened.  I was encouraged by my doctor, Paul Epstein, to take responsibility for my life, and my relationships.  Despite all this great help that I was getting, I was still lonely, not connected with others, often depressed and anxious.

On November 9, 1988, I read the words of Jesus in Matthew 7: 7-8: “Ask and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened. For everyone who asks receives, he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”

That day, I read these words and I believed them.

I said, to whoever was listening, “I’m asking. I am in need. I want to change my life.”

What happened next was that in the deepest part of my self, I knew I was forgiven.  I had real hope that I could transform my way of being in the world. I wrote in my journal, “I can let go of the past. I can be healed of all the pain and the hurt and will be stronger and more beautiful as a result. Life is wonderful. It’s marvelous. I am trembling at it all.”  I wrote down my prayer, “Dear God, I offer up to you all my pain, hurt, fear, anger, frustration and confusion. Please give me peace, surround me with your love and send some grace into my life.”  I wrote, “I forgive myself for all the pain I’ve caused, for even the things I didn’t mean to do.”

The following year, at a seminar at Kripalu Yoga Center, a teacher called Vasudev was talking about how we could show our light to other people.  “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,” he said, smiling. A grey-haired woman in the audience picked up the line and began singing; in a few seconds the whole auditorium of about 90 persons was alive with song:

Jesus wants me for a sunbeam

To shine for him each day,

In every way try to please him

At home, at work, at play.

A sunbeam, a sunbeam,

Jesus wants me for a sunbeam!

A sunbeam, a sunbeam,

I’ll be a sunbeam for him.

A little self-consciously, but by and large joyously and with real meaning, I joined in the singing. I remembered singing it in Sunday School so many years ago, but now it made sense to me. I saw that one of my purposes of being on this earth was to be a vehicle for light and love.  I was already starting to see that I was naturally shining more clearly in the world as I was working to clear away the clutter of shame, guilt, and fear, and the baggage of old theology that didn’t serve me.

When the song was over, the audience rippled with laughter.  I thought, Grownups don’t sing such simple pledges of love to Jesus.  What does this mean for me, exactly?  But I laughed, too.

After that, Vasudev talked about how the waters of eternal life nourish us in being vehicles of light in the world. He explained this in Joseph Campbell’s words, who says we are given “invisible means of support” when we are “following our bliss”.   At the end of the day, Guru Desai added, “Act in love, but don’t get attached to the results.” That seemed like good advice.  I felt charged with positive energy and motivated to be a light in the world. I believed that I would get the help I needed.  I felt happy.

My loneliness and despair had led to insight and illumination. In Marion Woodman’s words, my ego had begun to establish a creative relationship with the inner world, and release its own destiny.

Of course, right away I started having problems being a vehicle for light and love. My neighbor came over drunk and ruined my son’s birthday party and I got angry.  I was still getting involved with inappropriate men. I got into arguments with my boss.  And so on and so on. I felt hope and despair when I remembered some words by Tielhard de Chardin which I had read many years earlier: “In every organized whole, the parts perfect themselves and fulfill themselves.”  “. . . we can only find our person by uniting together.”  “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”

When I read what  Isaac Penington said in 1667, “Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand.”, I knew I wanted to BE light and love in the world, to express love through my body, in the physical world, and connect in a real way with other people.  But I also knew my skills in that area were shaky, and my growth was much too slow.

In 1996, I found an organization which taught the principles and skills of intentional loving, which also was very focused on helping people live in their bodies.  That organization, Shalom Mountain Retreat and Study Center, in the Catskills, was a place where all psychological and spiritual paths were honored. They taught me spiritual disciplines that finally helped me open my heart. Experienced, compassionate facilitators and an intentionally loving community of fellow seekers respectfully helped me unblock the stuck places and claim my joy, my passion, my sexuality, and be the incarnation of Christ in every day life.

Shalom Mountain was founded in the 1960s by a man named Jerry Jud, who is now over 90 years old. He and his wife developed Shalom Retreats as a process for exploring the transformative power of loving community within the local Church. At that time he was deeply steeped in the life of the Church. Over 17 years, he had pastored two very large churches, but he saw that people could be in a church for fifty years and not know anybody. And they could not be known either, because the process in a church does not make intimacy possible. The church is scared of sex and the body, and the body is our vehicle through which we travel through this planet.  At the same time, he saw the power of agape, or unconditional love. He really believed it when Jesus said that the greatest commandment is that is you shall love your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself,’ … as yourself.  But how do you do that, exactly?

Jerry took the sayings of Jesus on the topic of love and summarized them in a few principles:

The Principles of Loving

• More than anything else, we want to love and be loved.
• Love is a gift.
• Love is a response to need.
• Love is not time bound
• Love is good will in action

From studying the words and life of Jesus, Jerry also compiled the Skills of Loving, and started giving retreats to teach these skills to clergy and their wives. The Church found that the power of these retreats was more than it could handle, and Jerry took his retreats out of the Church, and opened them up to everyone.

The Skills of Loving

• Seeing:  I do not look over or through you. I see you in your uniqueness.
• Hearing: I listen to what you are saying.
• Honoring of feelings and ideas: I recognize and affirm your right to feel and think as you do.
• Having good will: I will you good and not evil. I care about you.
• Responding to need: If you let me know what your needs are, within the limits of my value system, I will not run away. I will be there for you.

I have been going on Shalom Retreats, and have been involved with Shalom Mountain, since 1996.  I have used Jerry’s Skills and Principles of Loving as a guide for becoming an intentionally loving person. I use the word “becoming” deliberately, for it is a process of continual learning—sometimes pretty difficult learning.  I continue to take up my bed and walk. In practicing these skills of loving, I am being Christ in the world. This is what the second coming means to me. Having seen the light of love, it’s my joy to share it.  I feel good when I do. When I don’t, I know I am forgiven.

I have returned to Quaker Meeting, and now am attending Evanston Friends Meeting in Illinois.  In my involvement with the Meeting I have had the opportunity to worship and practice my skills of loving.  Synthesizing what I have learned and giving it back to the world in words is something I especially enjoy. So it’s been a real pleasure to write these last two blog posts, which will be a talk which I intend to give at Quaker Meeting in the upcoming week.