Joanna Wiebe

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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.