Christmas 2010: A Season for Courage

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Take courage to hold one another and be held

By Katie Funk Wiebe

As I held my new grandson in my arms, his dark eyes looked boldly into mine, seeing and yet not seeing. The year was 1979, the year of the Iranian crisis. Our Christmas celebration would be different this year because of this tiny newcomer. His life story had begun, we added a new chapter to ours.

People often relate their “best Christmas” or “most disappointing Christmas” stories as part of a festivity. Digging through the store of Christmas memories can be valuable, even when a person is celebrating alone, for through the backward journey we become familiar once again with the plot of our life story, the main characters, the conflict, and at which points in the action we allowed God’s grace to become part of the resolution. And, especially, make it part of the continuing pattern of life. Often at Christmas the year’s events come into full focus. Some memories gleam with a splendor that outmatches the starry heavens. One year was highlighted by joy, love, and laughter. Other seasons were scarred by hurt, failure and grief. Who hasn’t completed the required round of activities not feeling particularly spiritual, or even happy or sad? Christmas came and went like any other day, and left no mark. Its recall draws a blank on memory’s screen. What did happen that year?

What happened at Christmas isn’t as important as recalling how we dealt with the Christevent itself, year after year, and seeing the pattern of our attitudes toward it. Christmas began for me, during the Depression years, as it did for many children at the time, with high expectations of presents from impoverished parents. Gifts, small or large, were tangible symbols of love, and we children relished the season because it brought the excitement of surprises and rare treats of candy, an orange, and nuts.

One year I ruined our simple family celebration because the doll beside my plate on Christmas morning wasn’t as pretty as the one beside my sister’s plate. I fumed and fretted. After the holidays, my doll with its cotton body and hard composition head with a hole through which to tie a ribbon, was returned to the mail order firm for one with a china head, hair, and eyes that opened and closed. I got what I demanded, as well as the memory of a Christmas I wish I could forget.

After we teenagers started earning our own money, Christmas included the exquisite agony of buying gifts for others—as big as our small budgets could afford—but always with the hope they would look more expensive than they were. We sent out cards and counted the ones we received in return.

We approached the season with energy and enthusiasm, unencumbered by failures and disappointments. The season included rounds of programs, parties, singing of “White Christmas” and “Silent Night” and listening to Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” on the radio—activity of all kinds.

And then, gradually, over the years, Christmas became a time to draw close to persons rather than activities and things. Family members had moved or died. Gifts took second place. Christ’s love needed person-love to make it complete. One year, early in our marriage, when my student-husband and I were living in a tiny, one-room apartment with two small children, we faced one of our first away-from-home Christmases. The outlook looked as bleak as a blustery winter day in Winnipeg. Another young family, also restricted to the area, and we joined forces. My parents had sent a large turkey, which we roasted in the college cafeteria oven. We set up tables in the dormitory hall. Afterwards, the children ran shrieking through empty halls with abandon while we adults lingered over coffee and told ourselves we would always remember this shared money-less Christmas.

Over the years, the plot of one’s life story often moves in directions one never expects. I have found that Christmas is possible without all family members, but not without people. Christmas is possible without gifts, although a symbol of love brings joy. As I grow older, I understand Christmas is also possible without travel, programs, and banquets, but not without the hope there will be courage to continue loving. I agree with Madeleine L’Engel in The Irrational Season that the “Nativity is a time to take courage.” What good did the infinite God coming in the form of a finite child do? she asks. Human beings are still evil.

I look about me this Christmas 2010. We still do not have peace on earth of which the angels sang that first Christmas day. There are still wars and rumors of wars. People continue to murder and abuse to satisfy their own desires. Though the Bible is a best-seller, pornography and other trash has a strong following. Though interest in spirituality is increasing, people search endlessly for solutions to stress and change. Did Christ’s coming change anything? God came to earth as a human being to share our living and our dying, writes L’Engel.

That is an irrational act. The sovereign God in the form of a helpless baby doesn’t make sense in human terms. The price of God’s love was the pain of being human.

Christ came to share the life of this newborn nestled in my arms, I told myself, decades ago, as he looked about with the wondering eyes of a newborn. Christ came to share my life—the pain and joy of being human. He knows about it because he was Emmanuel—God with us. Christmas 2010 is the time to move ahead with courage because God knows us in our humanity. Because of Christ’s death, we can know him in his divinity. The message for this year is still Emmanuel—God with us because God loved us. Take courage to hold others in love—and be held.

Katie Funk Wiebe is my mother and this was her Christmas letter to us this year.

I wish many blessings to all my readers this holiday season! May you have courage and emotional resilience for the year ahead.

Christine is online!

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A self portrait of Christine

Visit the CMW Journal today!  The October issue of the online magazine published by the Center for Mennonite Writing  in Goshen, Indiana, came out on Tuesday, thanks to a great labor of love by editor Ann Hostetler. The journal features a wonderful selection of Christine’s poems,  a biography  and bibliography by my mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, an article by myself, and also great articles by friends Ellen Kroeker  of New Zealand and Jeff Gundy of Bluffton University. It also has an edited version of Chrstine’s book, How to Stay Alive, with its wonderful little sketches.

This publication means a great deal to my mother, for it gives Christine a lasting legacy.  Being online will mean many more readers will see Chrstine’s  poetry.

Special CMW issue on my sister Christine Wiebe

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I’m looking forward to a special issue of the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing, centered on my sister Christine Ruth Wiebe. The issue will be published October 18, 2010.

My sister Christine’s significant creative contributions as a poet will be explored through publication of a selection of her work, and essays by Ellen Kroeker and Jeff Gundy, our mother Katie Funk Wiebe, and myself.  To prepare to write my essay, I read through almost 30 years of her journals. I found dozens of poems and some drawings which had never before been published.  I learned that she studied dance at one point, considering becoming a liturgical dancer.  And I also learned that when she was in Chicago she was in a Centering Prayer group, which is a discipline I also practice.

The photo above came in an email yesterday from Ellen Kroeker,  writing from New Zealand: “The Southern Ocean winds (the roaring forties which sweep across at that latitude) have been battering New Zealand for five days now.  I  have ignored the essays that need grading for too long.  I light a candle, pull my freesias closer and make a pot of tea (under the tea cosy in the picture) and pull out the Christine teacup.  Ah, not even alone, while the cold wind is rattling windows and doors.  I feel more settled now, an old friendship warming a very chilly spring day. I wish my students had some of her song in their writing.  I sigh, open another folder on the computer, and resolve to put some of Christine’s grace into my attitude and comments. When we think of her, she is alive in us, right?” Thank you, Ellen.

O Trees

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O Trees

You have stood by me these two and a half years

and I still don’t know your names.

Nameless, you have steadfastly endured

beside me,  slender, tall, always reaching

you rise straight up from the earth

past the concrete, the glass, to the sky.

At night you brush the soft grey light

You even out the clouds.

While I sleep, you are the roost of angels

In the day you pull down the sun

You suck it out of the sky

You entice it to stay

You hold the light in your arms while I sleep.

My sister Christine Ruth Wiebe wrote this poem when she was living in Chicago, on Tuesday, February 12, 1991.

Ann Hostetler and my mother Katie Funk Wiebe are working on a special issue of the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing focusing on Christine and Sylvia Bubalo, two writer/artists whose inspiring spiritual and artistic journeys deserve a wider audience.  Both struggled with chronic illness as well. Christine’s flavor was systemic lupus erythematosus.

I have been going through Christine’s letters and writings to find poems which she never showed to anyone, and this is one of them.   She also made the drawing, which was separate from the poem, but I joined them together here.  For the most part I have preserved her punctuation, but I am thinking that had she lived to publish this poem,  she probably would have added a few periods here and there.

Woman and Man

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Since 1971,  my husband’s family has gathered every two years or so for a reunion named after our male progenitor, Ephraim Baer.  I am president of the reunion for 2011, and I have renamed the event, the Ephraim and Lovina Baer Reunion.

I drew the rock on the left, in pencil, sometime in August, 1996. The actual rock  is about four inches wide and it’s split in the middle.

I drew the rock on the right, in pencil, on July 26, 1996.  The rock itself is about eight inches tall

These were rocks I picked up from a river bed somewhere in Connecticut.

Self-portrait, 1993

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In 1993 I won an award at the Silvermine Gallery in Wilton, CT, for a diptych, Two Letters.  They were a pair of “envelopes”, a memorial to men and women who died under Stalin’s KGB. Each envelope bore a black and white photo of a prisoner in the upper right hand corner, like a stamp. Addresses were etched in a cryptic formal script.  One was done on a nice creamy sheet of hot press Arches watercolor paper, the other on black scratchboard.

After I finished these two pieces, it was late May, and close to my June birthday.  I was inspired to do something more personal, an envelope addressed to myself, using scratchboard as a medium. The photo is of myself at the age of three, standing on a chair between snowbanks at my grandparents’back door in Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan.  This portrait was made possible, one might say, because my grandmother Anna convinced her husband Jake to leave Russia in 1923, thus escaping the Great Purge of the Stalin years,  which pretty well eradicated the family members which did stay there, although I have a Great Aunt Neta who survived the Siberian work camps and now lives in Berlin. The “return address” in the upper left corner is my birthdate and birthplace. The address in the middle is the word “Survivor”, scratched out in dramatic flourishes. I used rubber stamps and silver ink to create postmarks, and sealed it all with my thumbprint. Happy Birthday, Joanna Wiebe.

Maple leaves, voyageurs, beavers

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One summer day when I was about eight years old,  my cousin Trudy and I were jumping on a trampoline in her back yard. All around us was a very green, tidily mowed lawn. Trees in full whispering summer leaf stood at the periphery of the lawn, and above us gleamed a blue, blue Canadian sky. It was a happy moment for me, a little surreal, even. That’s because our cousin seemed so rich, with her store-bought clothes and auburn ringlets, her abundant toys, and this immense trampoline right in her own backyard.  Then Uncle John, Trudy’s father, came home from his store, carrying a cloth bag that was tied at the top. Smiling, he untied the string and tossed the bag’s contents onto the trampoline–hundreds and hundreds of Canadian coins.

And as Trudy and I jumped on the trampoline, all around our feet, and up into the air around us flew hundreds and hundreds of maple leaves, voyageurs,  beavers, moose, Queen Elizabeth, King George, and sailing ships, bouncing off the taut surface of the trampoline and onto the green lawn where they glinted between the blades of grass.