An evening of prayer

I just “overheard” a Facebook conversation expressing dismay and amazement at those who schedule (church) events on the evening of the Super Bowl. Well, guilty as charged in this corner, but none of us in the small group that formed to plan a service of prayer and lament for the Mennonite women of Bolivia thought of it, frankly, and no offense was intended. None of us, obviously, are followers of football.

In spite of American football’s crowning event and the rather poor driving conditions in southern Manitoba, however, some 80 or so people gathered for the service last night at the Morrow Gospel Church.

It’s always hard to evaluate something you’re involved in yourself, and that’s not the purpose with this post anyway, except that I’d announced it here and want to say now that it happened, and say thank you too to local readers of this blog who attended. We prayed using stories, Scripture, and song, and lit candles to mark our petitions. The music was wonderful, both the congregational singing led by Christine Longhurst with pianist Sherry Toews, and instrumental music by Lilian Guenther (harp) and by Barb Hamilton (viola). In the middle of our litany of lament, Lilian sang, unaccompanied, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” — this just before a Lamentations text that includes “Pour out your heart like water before the Lord.” Music can do that for us; it pours like water.

A few lines from Leona Dueck Penner ’s benediction sum up, I think, the “movement” that those who participate in prayer can experience.

One by one, in trembling hope,
we gathered here this evening to pray and to weep
for our sisters and also our brothers in Bolivia,
feeling helpless yet wanting to express our love and
compassion for them across the miles.

Through God’s grace, we leave now strengthened and renewed
through sorrow expressed and shared within the community of faith
in the name of Jesus who invited the sorrowful to find rest in him…. 

As for “movement” within the people for whom we prayed, that is likely beyond our means to determine. 

(Although it wasn’t the main aim of the evening, the offering raised for a women’s shelter that’s nearly completed in Pailon, Bolivia, under the auspices of the Evangelical Free Church of Canada Mission, came to more than $ 2900.) 
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Re. the specific situation around the sexual assaults, the most recent news I’ve seen — though it was more editorial commentary than hard facts —  was several weeks ago now, from the Kurze Nachrichten, a German newspaper in Mexico, saying that there was to be a hearing shortly of half a dozen men held in Cotoca, with the possibility they would be released for lack of concrete evidence. (No DNA testing has been done.) A number of men are being held in a different prison. The commentary includes [my translation] that “one is struck by the fact that those imprisoned in Cotoca are not well off… and one [wonders] whether money is playing a larger role than justice and truth… Bribe money is the boss; the law its obedient slave.” But, the article goes on to say, “Three uncontested truths remain: many women were used as objects, some are still being used, and only a few people are letting it trouble them much.”

Further to “Original Sin”

I promised, in my previous post, to say something about our “Take and Read” evening around the book Original Sin: A Cultural History by Alan Jacobs. I can report that the weather was cold, the roads icy, attendance about 17, and the desserts delicious. (No apples, but a hint of fruitiness in the lemon chiffon cake. The chocolate torte and Toblerone cheesecake, however, were temptation enough on their own.) 

More to the point, though. In summarizing Jacobs’ work, Paul Doerksen stated his discomfort with Augustine as he hardened his views about “sin, sex, and unbaptized babies.” With these disclaimers, Doerksen also urged us to consider “a more robust view” of original sin. As Jacobs points out, the doctrine does have its positives: it’s liberating (versus anxiety — if I can get it right, am I getting it right?), it’s democritizing (proceeding from an egalitarian spirit), and it has explanatory power (the only way we can understand ourselves). 

If we did take on a more robust view, what would that mean? One of the discussion questions posed to us was, How would an embrace of the doctrine of original sin shape the vocation in which we find ourselves? Doerksen reflected on his job as a teacher, for example. Was he more Wesley or Rousseau in his approach to his students? Thinking more of the image of God in them or of their shared sinfulness? The former has its difficulties and the latter offers some surprising potential, implications like Yes, they need guidance, but I do too, so mine shouldn’t be punitive but gracious, etc. 

The discussion ranged across many facets of the book, as such discussions do, but many participants felt that Jacobs had not done as well as he might have in placing original sin within its larger theological context of grace. Sin has to be seen by the light of the cross.

I took home with me a number of matters to reflect on further.

The matter of Mennonites, for example. They have not embraced Augustine much, being accused rather of semi-Pelagianism, said Doerksen, and thus prone to legalism, to a kind of uptightness, wanting the church to be pure, trying to getting it right. How many divisions there have been because of that!

There’s much about the origins of my own group, the Mennonite Brethren, that I love — that stirring up, under the preaching of Eduard Wuest, a Lutheran, of the sinner to see “the bottomless pit that opens itself at his feet” but then grasping “Christ’s own blood and righteousness / My beauty are, my glorious dress,” and the willingness to open mouths long closed by traditional practices of silent prayer, to pray aloud, to speak of these things, to find new and passionate language for what was experienced within, and that receptivity to the ideas and spiritual practices of others, like a new lens in a telescope revealing more stars.

But I also hear the hard words of the Document of Secession erecting new boundaries  – “Therefore, we herewith completely dissociate ourselves from these decadent churches, though we pray for our brethren, that they shall be saved…” If they’d been more Augustinian, could they have stayed and continued renewal within? Some of that separatist, uptight spirit lingers with us still.

Then there’s the matter of my vocation — as writer and editor. What would a greater awareness of my sinfulness look like there?

Do we have to believe that we’re bad to the bone?

The third in the latest “Take and Read” series — a book analysis, discussion, and dessert group led by Paul Doerksen of MBCI — happens this evening and the book we’ll be talking about is Original Sin: A Cultural History by Alan Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Jacobs’ book is not a theological study of original sin (by which is meant “sin that’s already inside us, already dwelling in us at our origin, at our very conception”), but rather, as the subtitle suggests, the story of how this doctrine has worked itself out through (Western) history. Nor is the fact that humans do wrong under debate. That seems obvious enough. Anyone with self-awareness or knowledge of others, or with even a rudimentary sense of the 20th century knows how unloving and selfish, how truly cruel, we human beings can be. 

“Where does this wrongdoing come from?” asks Jacob. “What is its wellspring, the source of its ongoing prevalence and power?” In contemporary culture, scholars like Steven Pinker emphasize the biological determinants of human behaviour, but even they can’t explain “why selfish and violent are pejorative terms for us.” It’s time to re-consider peccatum originalis,  Jacobs says, “the belief that we arrive in this world predisposed to wrongdoing.”

On cards and other gestures

For more than 25 years, H. and I have been observing an almost daily ritual. We get up at six and drink maté, a Paraguayan tea.* During the half hour we’re imbibing our caffeine, I wake up (as a morning person, H. is already wide awake), we usually read Rejoice!, and we cross-check our schedules for the day. Then we get on with it.

Weekends, it may all take a little longer, and may include reading the paper and listening to music.

The past weeks we’ve added something else to our maté routine. We’ve been re-reading — three or four of them a day — the sympathy cards we received after my father’s death in December. We think about the senders and what they and the cards have said, and we include them with gratitude in our morning prayers.

I hope it won’t hurt anyone’s feelings to say that most of these cards then land in the recycling bin. The point I want to make is how much the cards have meant to us. Sometimes a person forgets the power of the small gesture — and how large small can be — until one is on the receiving end of one after another after another.

Some cards came from people we would not have expected to send one, and the surprise of that touched us. Some people who knew Dad took the time to share their memories – memories that enlarged our own memories of him. Some added a poem or reflected on similar experiences. Each card was unique, each one was appreciated.

We were the recipients of many other gestures-for-times-of-loss as well, such as emails and phone calls of condolence. Last week, we got the list of people who had donated money in honour of our father to the charity we’d chosen. Again, it was a humbling and touching experience, to see the names and think of what these gifts meant about Dad and us and these givers, and for the recipient mission agency.

Some gestures took the givers significant time. One friend spent the day baking cookies for us because she knew we were having a lot of out-of-town company. Several friends and a neighbour brought meals, including some of the most spectacular soups I’ve tasted in a long time. The church deacons came to visit, bearing  a fruit basket.

These are traditional ways of caring; they’re gestures and rituals we bring out for certain times. But like any ritual, whether it’s a daily one like our morning tea, or something practiced for specific circumstances, they build and maintain community. And what a wonderful thing it is to be part of community.

———-

*Drunk alternately as an infusion of hot water over yerba tea leaves in a container called a guampa and sipped through a metal sieve-straw called a bombilla. (Yerba leaves and paraphernalia pictured left.) Let’s just say it grows on you.

Short stories: to read, and to write

The latest issue of the Center for Mennonite Writing’s online journal is up: this one devoted to “new fiction.” Editor Ervin Beck says the issue is intended “to encourage the writing of fiction in the Mennonite community.” Periodicals favour poetry, he notes. “Fiction requires more space from the publisher and more patience and commitment from the readers.”

For your patience and commitment then, seven new stories or novel excerpts, including the story “Chopsticks” by yours truly, in which the first person narrator weaves a tale of piano lessons, a train ride, her brother, and her father.

One of the goals I set myself several years ago was to put together a collection of short stories, containing some previously published stories as well as new work. I have eight published pieces from which I might draw, and about half that many others more or less completed or in progress. The publication of such a collection is by no means a given, of course; it may take as many years to find a publisher, especially in these uncertain times, as to write the stories themselves!

But in the meanwhile, I need to get back on track with the project itself. I lost momentum when I returned to the MB Herald last year as interim editor, and have had trouble getting it back, though my desire to continue remains strong. There’s just something about this kind of writing — perhaps because it’s a relatively new genre for me — that provokes all manner of self-doubt, fear, and procrastination. Each time I sit down to it, it’s like jumping into water over my head and knowing I still can’t swim. What’s the right technique again, for legs and arms, for breathing? Help!

Well, enough confession. Flannery O’Connor said, “The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then to try to discover what you have done. The time to think of technique is when you’ve actually got the story in front of you.” So I’ve gone and declared myself here, and I’ve got the prod of my writers’ group’s monthly meeting on Monday, for which I must have something ready to read. The file of the story-in-progress is open. I’m jumping in. Again. 

Mennonite chick lit

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen has all the marks of chick lit, which I don’t usually read. (If that sounds snobbish, let me rush to explain that it’s an age thing: I’m up for some well-written crone lit, actually, if it’s out there.)

Plus, Valerie Weaver-Zercher, reviewing the book in Christian Century, said Janzen “manages to reveal little of consequence about either herself or the church from which she came,” and “her wit at times obscures authentic self-revelation.” I thought I didn’t need to bother with it then.

But I also read other more positive reviews and a discussion of the book at the Center for Mennonite Writing. And, of course, there was the fact that, if chick lit, it was Mennonite chick lit — an oxymoron, perhaps, until now. I learned further that the “going home” of the subtitle was to the Mennonite Brethren, which happens to be my brand of Mennonite, and the author’s father is Edmund Janzen, for some years moderator of the General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches (although author Janzen calls him “head of the North American Mennonite Conference for Canada and the United States…the Mennonite equivalent of the pope”). Don’t most of us like to know what’s being said about “us”?

Given the intrigue of conflicting reviews, then, and my undeniable curiosity, I decided to buy the book and find out for myself.

Found wanting

Here are some lines from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, which I’ve just finished reading (emerging from it as from a marvellous dream). I find them evocative — within their context, but without it too.

Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand….

And something sweet

I had a note from Celeste Kennel-Shank of Mennonite Weekly Review that the 80-plus-year-old newspaper has launched a blog, “The World Together,” which is great to hear, and means thoughtful and interesting commentary ahead. She also told me that I won the blog naming prize, meaning they picked the blog name I suggested. Since I don’t win stuff that often, and don’t play the lottery,  I’m rather pleased for sure, and will certainly enjoy the prize, a year’s subscription to MWR.

When I worked at the MB Herald I had access to a good number of publications, from Mennonite to other religious to academic and news journals, and one of my favourites was definitely the Mennonite Weekly Review. And I’m not just saying that because they gave me the prize. MWR is not a denominational paper but seeks to serve the entire Mennonite community. I think it’s the best first source for keeping up with what’s going on in the larger landscape of Mennonite conferences, agencies, schools, and happenings. It’s somewhat more tuned to the U.S. scene but works hard to cover the field and always looks and sounds professional.

Isn’t it a sweet irony, though, being rewarded for participating in a cyber-publishing launch with a whole year of weekly ink on newsprint? Fortunately, I’m still quite attached to the old ways of newspapers, magazines, and books, even though I read a lot online as well. I received a year’s subscription to the elegant Christian Century for my birthday, so this is going to be a blessed year indeed, in terms of the mail person’s comings and goings at our front door.

Oh, and please note note that editor Paul Schrag’s first post at the MWR blog is called “Responding to rapes in Bolivia” and comments on the Bolivian Mennonite story which has been a topic at this blog a few times already as well.

Now for something lighter

It’s a slow news day, as they say, here at Borrowing Bones (though in truth the ongoing distress of Haiti remains very relevant news for us all). So I thought this might be a good time for something lighter. A good time to make something clear.

I am Al Doerksen’s sister. 

Although we lived in the same city for many years, I still meet people now and then, as does he, who know us separately but don’t realize we’re siblings. If I had kept my maiden name along with my married one back in 1974 when a certain Mr. Dueck and I tied the knot, our common paternity would have been much more easily discerned by all practitioners of the deliciously satisfying Mennonite game, whereby people ferret out one’s biological connections in order to form their opinion of you quickly, thereby saving considerable time and energy in getting to know you. But I suppose “Dora Doerksen Dueck” felt like just too many D’s in a row at the time, and so it is that I’m now routinely queried about any number of Duecks to whom I could be related (but am not) and never asked if I’m Al Doerksen’s sister (not to mention John’s, Norm’s, or Vic’s).

Well, I’m proud of the fact, and though we had our squirmishes as first and second born, and though my attempts to oust him as ruler of what would eventually be a sizable kingdom of siblings were completely unsuccessful, even when I enlisted the help of the brothers who came after me, I appreciate and enjoy him immensely. I’m proud too of the work he’s done over the years, especially in development, and currently as CEO of International Development Enterprises. (Their development entry point is water.) Since he’s spent time with Bill Gates, whose foundation gave IDE a hefty grant, I can also bask in a two-degrees-away brush with celebrity.

As proof of our long sibling bond, I offer the following photo from our childhood. Cast into the hard world we were, poor little things, so tattered and wretched, knowing we had to be there for the other or all might be lost. Should I ever run for president I will also use this photo as proof of hardscrabble beginnings, of how I pulled myself up by dint of no lies and lots of work — you know the drill — and of course with the precious encouragements of all my Beloveds, who would say inspiring things like, it doesn’t matter the rags, my dear, you shall have something that resembles a sailor suit someday. Yes, there are also photos of us lovely in such outfits, prairie children far from the sea, but clearly arrived in one good port or another, taking turns at the oars no doubt, still as sweet and solicitous as we could be.

But the sailor suits shall be saved for another slow day.

A movie that did the work of a sermon

It’s not often that a movie does the work of a sermon for me — the work a sermon may do, that is, of linking text/truth to some situation in my life and touching it with compassion, perhaps, or conviction.In this case it was conviction, and the movie was “Up in the Air.” 

Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) and Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) in Up in the Air

“Up in the Air” is a charming, thoughtful film about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who is constantly flying around the country doing his job as a employment termination specialist — he fires people — and whose personal goal it is to accumulate ten million frequent flyer miles. His lifestyle doesn’t allow time for settling down, not to mention long-term relationships, but he doesn’t really mind. In fact, Ryan also does gigs as a motivational speaker, helping people become freer, more unfettered, as he is. The metaphor he uses is that of a backpack, too stuffed with material possessions, too full of people. A backpack that needs to be burned, or emptied at least.

As the story unfolds, Bingham’s philosophy is challenged by people who demand his reluctant attention, and by an affair premised on his own ideas which reveals its true emptiness when he finds himself falling in love. 

The day H. and I went to the movie had been a busy one, a day in which I’d felt the backpack of obligations pulling heavily on my shoulders. I’ve gotten better over the years at discerning what to say Yes to, and better at saying No, but it’s not always the planned involvements and thought-through lists of our lives that get us down. It’s the things we haven’t planned that derail us. When I was a young mom, for example, it was the unexpected exigencies of children’s lives that could upset a nicely considered schedule again and again.

Now I’m in that swelling demographic of women who find themselves looking after elderly parents. Not looking after in a live-in situation, perhaps, but very much on call for driving, shopping, cleaning, decision-making, and so on. As anyone in this situation knows, there’s nothing predicatable about the lives of the elderly either. 

Whenever our obligations overwhelm us, the easiest reaction is frustration with the people who adhere to them. It is they, rather than the tasks, who seem to be hurting our shoulders. And the easiest solution, at least Bingham’s in “Up in the Air,” appears to involve taking distance from those people. But, as he discovers, that’s a pretty lonely place to land. And driving home from the movie, it hit me squarely. The people in my backpack aren’t the problem. As I trace the web of my relationships, in fact, I see that they’re the source of so much of my life’s value and joy. 

The challenge of how to balance the competing demands of my life probably won’t go away. When the kids were small, it involved constant negotiation, inner and outer, between the obligations imposed by their existence and my (then tiny and seed-like) sense of a call to write. And the negotiation never seemed to end, at any stage, and is still going on, now, in figuring out how to best to fulfill my vocation and take care of these other responsibilities too. 

“Up in the Air” clarified my thinking, re-oriented my heart. I realized anew what’s non-negotiable. It really was as good as a sermon. So maybe this week I can skip church. (Just kidding, Pastor Dan.)