Tag Archives: Katie Funk Wiebe

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.

Take courage

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Many of the letters written by Anna Janzen Funk to her daughter Katie, my mother,  contained the phrase, “Take courage.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna Wiebe, May 1, 2007