Where poppies blow . . .

Suppose you were marching in a military parade dressed in a crisp, khaki uniform, shoes shined to perfection, embedded in a troop of soldiers looking and stepping exactly as you do. (North Koreans are very good at this.) Would you not feel just a tad odd? Wouldn't it all seem a bit kindergarten? Would you not feel a bit like an interchangeable machine part?

     I know I would.

     There's plenty of that military "peacocking" going on just now, what with our CF18s in Kuwait, two soldiers killed in civilian territory, the anniversary of WWI and today, poppies everywhere. And militaristically-motivated thinking is on the rise in Canada, in part because our politicians are crassly willing to hitch their electoral hopes to whatever mood is in public favour at the moment.

     I'm not wearing a poppy this year. I've been to the fields where poppies blow; I've counted crosses row on row, I've marveled at these delicate red blossoms growing, waving valiantly against the gold of European wheat fields. They don't represent the dubious valour of desperate soldiers trying to survive greedy politicians' wars in the muddy, cold trenches of Belgium to me. They suggest much more closely the wispy, timid fight for survival of an idea, an idea about a better world, a world in which peace is won through gentler campaigns. A world schooled by the sure knowledge that what is won through brutality destroys both victor and vanquished.

     Wild poppies are very fragile.

     The first priority of military endeavour is to dehumanize one's own men, to uniform them, accustom them to marching lockstep, convince them that obedience is better than reason. The second need is to dehumanize the other, characterize enemy soldiers as soulless vermin to be eradicated. How else could your neighbour or mine bring himself to set rifle sights on another man and pull the trigger?

     No. The poppy has become for me a reminder of our folly, not our honour. It's a reminder to me that we humans routinely shit where we eat, befoul the bed where our children will need to sleep.

     I won't wear a poppy today. Unless, perhaps, I should find one that is black.

     I willingly honour, though, the heartbreak and mourning of those who have lost loved ones in war, whose fathers or mothers, husbands or wives, sons or daughters were brutally taken away in whatever war fate placed them.

     May God comfort you.

From what trauma do I suffer, I wonder

A Mennonite Path through Cree Territory

We were about 20 of us gathered in the Mennonite Central Committee Africa Room. We were focused on inter-generational trauma, specifically as it relates to Mennonite history and to Indigenous Canadians' stories. In short, many of us who were born into Mennonite faith and culture have a history that includes martyrdom in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and—for some of us—the brutality of the Stalinist purges. The trauma endured by our Indigenous neighbours through their displacement by settlement and the more recent cultural genocide represented by the residential school system was a reality more immediate to most of us who experienced the Truth and Reconciliation process.

Trauma. We didn't used to use that word. Now we hear regularly about the effects of “post traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) in returning soldiers of recent wars and neurological research has begun to unravel why it is that we can't simply pull ourselves up by our bootstraps after severe trauma, why we don't “just get over it.” 

That trauma echoes down through generations is a possibility included in our discussions, a possibility that drew some skepticism from participants.This is not surprising; having been schooled in the idea that it's our genes that determine the characteristics with which we begin life, it's hard for us to imagine that sorrow or joy, anger or patience, for instance, could attach to biological, genetic structures. The burgeoning study of “epigenetics” hints at the possibility, though, that attributes (including, possibly, the personality changes brought on by trauma) can be passed down biologically outside the mechanisms of genetics. (Hence epigenetics, outside genetics.)

We know that persons abused by parents are more likely to behave harshly with their kids than persons who were raised with love and patience. Where trauma changes behaviour, in other words, changed behaviour is inevitably modeled for next generations.

We've been told by our Indigenous brothers and sisters that the residential school system and the trauma it induced has had inter-generational consequences. An elder said to me once that the cultural folkways that governed child-rearing were destroyed by the simple fact that children were taken away from home at a young age. Denied the privilege of raising children for long stretches and over generations fundamentally wiped out the ability to parent with conviction and integrity. It's not hard to see, if his assessment is correct, how this phenomenon coupled with the trauma of separation could have monumental, devastating cultural consequences.

But as Harley Eagle said to us in the sessions (if not in these exact words), if we want to be contributors to reconciliation with our Indigenous neighbours, we must begin by healing ourselves. So I'm left wondering: how much of my outlook and behaviour was given its direction in the life of my ancestors? Was my father moody and given to occasional fits of anger because his grandfather was frustrated with his lot on a poor farm in Novovitebsk? Would I be more patient if my grandparents hadn't gone through the trauma of relocation to a cold, bare, dry prairie? From what inherited malignancies do you and I need healing? Or is it all balderdash?

What is clear is that the land on which I live—Treaty 6 territory—was once Cree life space, likely assumed by them to be an eternal land legacy. In Treaty 6, the Cree agreed with the Canadian government to share the space and the said Canadian government offered a piece of it to my ancestors, a piece for which we've been grateful ever since—ironically to the Canadian government, not to the Cree. There's a way of our behaving as settlers that emanates from historical roots, that includes the possibilities of civilization vs heathendom, of manifest destiny, of obedience to authority as a way to survive, of emotional and cultural insularity as bulwarks against whatever threats may come, of stubborn silence as a virtue: die Stille im Lande.

There's much in us Mennonites that needs healing. The road to a future of equality and fraternity with out neighbours will be paved by an acknowledgement that it is us, not they, with whose healing we ought logically concern ourselves first.

Happy Thanksgiving

Aren't dandelions amazing?!? Can you be thankful without directing your gratitude toward something or someone? I wonder this Thanksgiving Sunday about feeling thankful, about expressing grateful feelings without knowing exactly what or whom I ought to be thankful to, a euphoria without knowledge of its source. I have moments—sometimes days—like that.       Long ago now, I had an epiphany forced upon me by circumstance, the revelation being that to thank God, or Allah, or the Buddha specifically for my abundant food, for instance, could hardly be consistent without its corollary, namely that the deity that chose to grant me such good fortune also chose to let—or cause—my neighbour to go hungry. The conundrum caused too much stress to ancient theologians, I concluded, and so a second god, an evil one, was invented so that a different deity could be blamed for the ubiquity of evils and failures.        But whether the ancients were right or wrong in their world view regarding good and evil, they did prepare for us some remarkable insights. I'm intrigued by their thoughts on Sabbath, for instance, a deliberate check on our tendency to overdo practically every project that engages us: too much focus on ourselves, too much property and stuff, obsessive preoccupations with self-indulgences. The Sabbath is a stop sign that urges us to take stock of our lives and reset if necessary.       Perhaps Thanksgiving is a Sabbath of sorts, an acknowledgement that those things that keep us well-fed, safe and content have been won with great effort by those who went before us and by those that sweat and strain to build, to fix, to plant, to harvest so that we might be warm, safe and satisfied. My inclination this thanksgiving is to show the sincerest gratitude to my family, to my neighbours, to farmer friends, even to the man who always has a store of gasoline for me so I can drive thither and yon and the corner grocer for blessing me with friendship, hard work, skills.       And, of course, I will in a faltering, uncertain way give thanks for the miracle of this planet with its beauty, its sustaining resources, its air, water, soil and oxygen that deserve my gratitude with every breath I draw, with every apple I eat, with every waking morning even though my pleasure in all of it is brief and uncertain.       For certain, I did not make this happen.       My thoughts of thanksgiving often stray to the poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins, whose verse sometimes baffled my English students completely, but whose sounds and images captivated the more one immersed oneself in them, studied them.       Happy thanksgiving. Pied Beauty Gerard Manly Hopkins Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal, chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.

How far can you count?

How come we seem able only to count to 2?

Pope Frances is visiting Albania where—CBC News tells us—half the population is Muslim, the other half Christian. Two colours. Black and white. No grays.

Comments posted on North American websites hurl accusations back and forth; the labels—you lefties or you rednecks—suggest a world with only 2 political sides. (Some imply that in Canada, the Greens, the NDP and the Liberals are all "lefties," as opposed to the Harperites who are "that blessed ONE in a world of only 2," and vice versa, of course.)

I'm pretty sure ISIL, or ISIS, sees the world as 2: us and the infidel.

I remarked on this at the dinner table the other day, ill-advisedly declaring in defense of 2 that the entire population was either male or female, and was brought up short in support of all those many who are born with gender characteristics that are ambiguous, even scary to those who tenaciously cling to the fiction of a black and white world, a world of 2.

I grew up in the Mennonite Church in a predominantly Christian community. There we learned that "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters (Luke 11:23, also found in the gospels of Matthew and Mark)." We also learned that, "Jesus answered (Thomas), 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me' (John 14:6, not recorded in the other gospels)." There's really no easy way to interpret these passages other than as a description of a world of 2—those with me and those against me.

I was diligently taught not to count past 2 in these matters.

Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair—speaking on the subject of Christian Church/Aboriginal reconciliation—said that  "Christians and their churches must demonstrate respect for Aboriginal spirituality . . . they must no longer insist that Christianity is the only way for all people."  (Esther Epp-Tiessen in INTOTEMAK, Summer 2014, Vol 43, No 2)

If Justice Sinclair is right, then the kingdom of heaven is not populated by a monochromatic white but by rainbows of colour, not 1 as against 2, but 3, 4, 5 . . . ∞ together, a myriad of persons known not by the greenness of their leaves but by the flavour and nutrition in their fruit. (See Matthew 7: 16 - 20)

I've never been to Albania, but I'm guessing there aren't only Muslims and Christians there, and among those two groups, that there are liberal thinkers and conservative thinkers and any numbers of gradations between, plus Buddhists, Unitarians, agnostics and atheists, etc. I’m also guessing that good fruit doesn’t only grow on tree 1 or tree 2.

(What a bit of irony—70+ and still learning to count!)

We do our politics, our religion, our social interactions, our very families great wrong if we can't bring ourselves to count past 2.

Human Rights, Political Rights

Browsing in the Amnesty International Annual Review for 2013 jogged my memory of a recently-heard declaration (I know not from whence it came) to whit: “There are no human rights, only political rights.” I concede that we use the phrase glibly, as if invoking a human right makes reference to something that is immutable, eternal and clearly understandable to anyone who is human.

      Political rights speaks of the privileges granted to citizens by a state, as in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They are legally enforceable, as in the guaranteed right to participate in elections in Canada.

      Human rights implies that beyond the political rights and freedoms written into the laws of states (or not), there exists an overarching charter relevant to every human being born on earth, whether Canadian, Sri Lankan, Colombian or Irish. If such a universal charter exists, then a state—for instance—that denies its citizens the right to participate in their governance is in violation of that charter. 

     In contrast to political rights, history has shown us that human rights are, by and large, unenforceable—except through indirect and usually ineffective means like shunning, shaming, pleading, bargaining, threatening, etc. It's one thing for the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights to declare that “Everyone has the right to education,” but the UN hasn't the means to prevent Boko Haram from bombing schools in Nigeria.

      Is an unenforceable right a right after all?

      The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a collectively-arrived-at attempt to enunciate an overarching charter, a visualization of what the dignified, contented life consists of for any person born on this earth. I am one of the lucky few; born in Canada, I experience political rights pretty well consistent with the UN Declaration. Had I been born an aboriginal Canadian or a female in rural Nigeria, not so much.

      Whether yours and my views on human rights tend more toward justice issues, democracy, humanitarian aid or possibly even the saving of souls in preparation for a next life, I'm sure we generally agree that the privileged and the powerful of this world owe the down-trodden a hand up. My choice has been, and continues to be, support for Amnesty International in their tireless work in support of persons suffering human rights abuses. Because Amnesty is non-sectarian and focused, it can do what sectarian organizations have found difficult, namely the supporting and/or rescuing of individuals whom neither political nor human rights charters and declarations have been able to protect.

      A friend once told me that he didn't like the language of rights because it smacks of demands for me, me, me without acknowledgement of related responsibilities to others. Certainly, we hear plenty of “I demand my rights” talk these days, but the squealing of privileged people selfishly suing for rights shouldn't deter us from recognizing that the means to dignified, contented life is being routinely stolen from the majority of our fellow humans by tyrannies, corporate exploitation, discrimination, crime, injustice and/or sheer neglect.

      Are there such things as basic, incontrovertible human rights? Among us privileged, it comes down to the question of whether or not we deserve the benefits we enjoy while others don't, both cases owing primarily to serendipitous accidents of birth.

      To begin lending your support to the fight for human rights world wide, please click here.

Please pass the potatoes . . .

Just listened to a 20 minute CBC podcast of the program “The 180,” with Jim Brown. He was interviewing Al Mussel; the descriptor for the interview reads: “Want to Save the Planet? Skip the farmer's market.” The argument wasn't hard to follow, if somewhat hard to swallow: the world population requires efficient, massive food production which local, intensive farming can't deliver. Hence, if we want to feed the world, relying on local, intensive production will require putting more land into agricultural use which, in turn, will devastate wet lands, forests, etc.

      Like many, we (my wife and I) have fallen in love with the local food markets. Recently, we went out to a nephew's small market garden and dug our own potatoes, beets, carrots and picked a bushel of tomatoes. A month ago, we joined a group of friends in butchering 113 free range chickens in exchange for our winter's supply. Our experience is that local production allows us to judge the quality of the product, thereby enabling healthier, tastier eating. (The emphasis, I think, should be on “tastier”: eat a tomato off the vine or a chicken off the grass and store produce begins to taste like cardboard.)

      But then, we North Americans have choices in this matter; much of the world doesn't.

      Obviously, the discussion about food consumption and production can't be just one dialogue. An individual household's relation to the sources of its food is not the same subject as the feeding of the world's population. Unless we have small farms of our own and energy generated off-grid, foodstuffs have to find their way to our kitchens through some means outside of our direct control. That reality alone propels us beyond the mere consideration of our personal diet choices. On a world scale, the fact that some regions can produce so much foodstuff that they're always in surplus and in search of markets doesn't present an obvious solution to world hunger. If the goal is nutritious, uncompromised, balanced diets for everyone, I have no problem reaching its achievement for my household; when I'm asked to contribute to reaching that goal for everyone in the global village, I don't know what more I can do than support emergency aid through MCC or another similar organization.

      Logically, everyone in the world should be near the source of his food. An imperative corollary to this would obviously be the curtailing of population growth to match the productivity potential of the general area, an extension of the simple admonition that a couple should never allow themselves 6 kids if they only have means to feed 2. A second corollary—to my mind—would be the internationalization of the world's food supply; when food is raised, bought/sold and consumed like widgets on the world market, it's difficult to see how its production and distribution can ever be made to serve the goal of good diets for all persons.

      A third prerequisite would, of course, have to do with ending all wars for all time. I'll get right on that as soon as I'm done this.

      Hopeless as it may seem, let's not give up. Thumb your nose at Al Mussel and shop at your farmers' market, dig up a plot in your backyard and grow your own tomatoes, send buckets of money to aid organizations, buy fair-trade coffee at Ten Thousand Villages, write your MP a letter whenever you see government skimping on their aid budget, shop at Mom and Pop rather than at corporate chains, bicycle more and drive less, and recycle, reuse and reduce.

      
     (I took a break right here to brush potatoes and peel carrots—garden fresh—for dinner. How anyone can sit down to new vegetables without thanking creation and gardeners first is beyond me. Segne Vater diese Speise, uns zur Kraft und dir zum Preise. Amen)

Milton's Dress

 

Milton's dress

So here’s a brush with history and a reason to ponder the nature of the historic. In museum jargon, we call the story behind an artifact its provenance. On my desk at the Mennonite Heritage Museum in Rosthern lies a small child’s dress, once white, now somewhat yellowed. The provenance card reads: “BABY DRESS – worn by Milton Siemens in 1916. He drowned on his 21^st birthday. Accession #80-475.” (Small children wore dresses whether male or female in those days; it probably made diaper-care easier.)

       I guess I’ve always known the story of Milton Siemens; his brother and sister still attend my church. His tragic death was somewhat of a legend in my growing-up years and probably coloured my parents’ attitude toward youth excursions to water.

      The dress is very light—gauzy, almost. I held it in my hands for a while imagining Milton’s mother slipping it over his head on a Sunday morning in 1917 or so, preparing to go to church, possibly imagining the delighted chucks under the chin for her handsome little man. And I visualized the heartbreak 20 years later when she got the tragic news that her son had suddenly been torn from her.

     Provenance. I’m surrounded by stories.

      It’s possible that among the threads of this tiny garment, Milton Siemens’ DNA could still be found with modern technology—but I doubt it.

Also on my desk is a fine-china teacup. The manufacturer’s label is in Russian; the provenance note reads: “CUP from Russia – 1923. Helen Dyck family.” There are photographs on these premises of Mennonite migrants from Russia arriving in Rosthern in 1923. Somewhere in their luggage is this cup that was too delightful to be left behind. 

There’s a can of ground, roasted wheat on my desk as well; if I put a teaspoon of it in this cup and poured boiling water over it and drank it, how close could I come to the sensation of a mid morning pripz break in 1920 somewhere along the Dniepr River?

I’ve entered dozens of photographs into our new databases, faded black and whites of places in someone’s memory. This morning a friend showed me numerous photographs of his family history, especially of Osterwick, the village in Russian Ukraine through which his roots can be traced. Long overrun by progress, that place still must exist, some of the buildings erected by the Mennonites who once lived there must still be in use, I would guess. So is it still the same place?

For many people, places invoke both nostalgia and story like nothing else can. A year ago, my brother retired from the farm on which I grew up and the “Epp Place” finally went into the hands of strangers. A story ends—not without a few pangs of regret—and another begins. ‘Twas ever thus.

So, is it true as the philosophers say, “you can’t go home again?” Is there anything of us in the artifacts and places we leave behind? Is something lost if places and objects of the past are forgotten, their records abandoned?

Obviously, my view is that our lives are about more than just today or I wouldn’t be here in the Mennonite Heritage Museum on a stat holiday entering data for—and placing carefully into temporary storage—a small boy’s dress and a chipped Russian teacup.

Some would say there are landfills for that.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Wild Rose on Cypress Hills

Michael Brown was shot dead on the street in Ferguson, MO a few days ago. There are plenty of opinions around: the shooting was triggered by Brown’s behaviour; the gun-happy, race-profiling cop shot him unnecessarily; the entire African-American population of the USA suffers under a pall of hate and prejudice that gives rise to such events.

      I obviously don’t know enough to assign any blame, neither for that shooting nor for the violence that followed resulting in yet more gun killings, which will also have to be investigated and judgements concluded.

      On The National last night, Keith Boag claimed to have observed at least two incidents of people being robbed in the street by young black men while he was covering the demonstrations. Obvious conclusion—if based solely on his comments—would be that police profiling of black youths may be justifiable—or at least understandable—given the facts . . . a politically incorrect conclusion even if were accurate.

      In Winnipeg, a 15 year-old Aboriginal girl was placed in foster care by a care-giving relative because she was becoming unmanageable. A few days ago, her body was found in the Red River. Assessments of how and why she got there are already being expressed by all and sundry, even before the facts are known.

      These media-driven stories remind me again that we don’t quite grasp the nuances of cause and effect. There is seldom an event anywhere on the face of this earth that is the consequence of a single cause. I can think of at least a dozen possible causes for the death of Michael Brown—theoretically— and it’s not unreasonable that in a heavenly court of law, the perpetrators that drove Michael Brown’s life toward its tragic end might well have included his parents, his teachers, his classmates, his uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, the local grocer, the police, the people who train police, the economy, the church, President Obama, the NAACP, the KKK, guidance counselors . . .. A massive docket.

      It gives a new slant to the Biblical “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

      Most effects are the result of serendipitous, chaotic chains of events and the best the courts can apparently do is to determine who the last person in the chain with a potential for preventing tragedy might be. In the case of Michael Brown, it’s the policeman who pulled the trigger that will be under scrutiny; those further back in the chain will never be brought to trial.

      This is not to excuse the cop that pulled the trigger, or the person who killed Tina Fontaine and threw her body into the Red River. What I’m arguing against here are two things: first, the finger-pointing and blaming of specific persons without acknowledging our own complicity and second, the tendency to neglect more rigorous identifying and addressing of factors earlier in the chains of events that set directions for people’s lives: child rearing, child poverty, education and developmental activity, employment, housing, etc.

      Michael Brown and Tina Fontaine were not “born in sin,” as many are led to believe through some Christian doctrine. They were born to unlimited vistas of possibilities to which “sin” was introduced by the carelessness, selfishness and neglect of those who ought to have been nurturing them toward the best of the available futures. Exactly the same could be said regarding the cop who pulled the trigger in Ferguson and the Winnipeg killer of Tina Fontaine. Tragic events such as these have antecedents; most of the time we’d rather not be bothered with them.

      Perhaps naming and blaming the last person in the chain is a way of protecting ourselves from the guilt of knowing we are complicit in these tragedies. 

     " . . . Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." -John Donne

God is here among us . . .

Gott ist Gegenwaertig - Gerhard Tersteegen Hymn

"God is here among us . . ." is the opening passage in a hymn I chose as worship leader a week ago. Call me obsessive about lines like that, but what exactly (or approximately) can it mean? Typically, the third party in the trinity, the Holy Ghost, is said to be this presence; his/her spirit "reality" is not bound by physical limitations. But such considerations don't really get at the essence of what's meant when we sing the lines, I would guess.

      It must have something to do with nearness, the comfort a child gets from knowing mother is "right here." It may have something to do with discipline: God reads your every thought; he's omniscient, so keep your attention on the sermon and nothing else. But in the English translation of the hymn God is even more than "among us;" he/she is also "within us" so that our soul shall, "in silence fear him."

      Written by Gerhard Tersteegen in 1729—in German—the hymn reflects awakening wonderment regarding humanity's relative position in the universe with the one, omnipotent creator/father. I don't know this, but Tersteegen must have had inkling about at least two tautologies: if the universe has meaning, it's one meaning, i.e.unity is mandatory to meaning, and second, if this universe is the work of a creative force, then that force is either everywhere or nowhere, either alive and ubiquitous or mortal and gone. Tersteegen's hymn falls on the side of faith in a living, omnipresent, omniscient creator, obviously. His hymn would never have been included in Hymnal Worship Book or Gesangbuch mit Noten otherwise.

      Even if Tersteegen's hymn accurately defines our relative position to God—and his/hers to us—the struggle to find a satisfying meaning when untimely and/or tragic death occurs, for instance, is tough. The insistence that God will take care of you, through every day, o'er all the way—as another hymn so confidently intones—is difficult to sing along with by someone who feels parented by a creator who could intervene . . . but is unable to or—worse yet—chooses not to.

     The most likely explanation for our schizophrenic, approach/avoidance, conflicted relationship with our stories about God is that we're building on faulty premises, the most glaring being that God is separate from us, that he/she lives in a mysterious, other place from which we are separated by a gulf dug by our sinfulness. Metaphorically, this paradigm can probably teach something, but interpreted as binding theology it's probably more confusing than enlightening, comparable to telling your child from birth that he/she is worthless, and inspiring (for instance) another hymn writer, Isaac Watts, to pen, "would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I."

            I like Tersteegan’s hymn because it hints at a better foundation on which to build a perception of what we mean when we invoke God. If he/she is “among us” and “within us”, then we not only have good reason to value each other properly, but human ears become receivers, human hands answerers of our prayers.