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. 

Home for the Homeless

The Capture of Batoche: A search for a Metis homeland.

Heimat fuer Heimatlose, home for the homeless. I watched the video about the settlement and development of the Fernheim Colony in Paraguay by conservative Mennonites on the same day as the Israeli army began its ground assault on Gaza. Considering the establishment of Israel as a "home for the homeless," considering the attempts by pro-Russian separatists to make for themselves a discrete territorial space, wrestling with solutions to the right-to-build-pipelines-across-traditional- aboriginal-space conundrum here in Canada, it's hard to miss the common elements.

What combination of sensibilities has to come together to motivate us toward the extraordinary lengths we will go to to secure for ourselves a homeland? Obviously being a resident of earth, an earthling, just isn't precise enough for many people, much of the time. On the other hand, the longing for a place on this earth that is somehow my home seems more than a bit anachronistic in a post-modern world.

I watch people in public places engrossed in conversation via texting, cell-phoning, instant messaging and I wonder: is home now cyberspace, independent of physical place? And who are these luddites who believe that it’s not home unless you have title to the ground you’re standing on, among neighbours who look, think and act more or less like you do?

Certainly, the times “they are a’changin’” to quote Bob Dylan. Our capacity to adjust to the changes suggests an interesting research topic for some astute scientist. What with our burgeoning population and the technical changes going on, the prospect of physical homelands is fast becoming a sheer impossibility. The global village has put all humanity in a blender and we’re just not adapting to the nearly unrecognizable present and future.

There’ll be those, of course, who find solace in traditional places, but I’m afraid some soul-comfort is all they will find. I look to two scientific theories as tools to understanding human adaptation: Darwin’s Theories relating to change and adaptation and Chaos Theory. The former posits that we are forever changing gradually . . . very gradually. The latter theorizes that virtually any outcome is possible; it all depends on the “initial position” in a sequence and the relative weight of myriad coincidental factors contacted along the way. In other words, there’s no predicting where humankind will be down the road, except that it will be different from today and the environment in which it dwells will provide nudges along the way.

Sexual intercourse is necessary for reproduction, for the survival of the species. That it be helped along by strong biological urges makes sense in small, fragile populations and among unreasoning animals. It makes no sense in times of overpopulation—as far as reproduction goes—where it paves the way for unwanted births, abortion, pornography and the catalog of sexual aberrations that emanate from the overwhelming biological need to copulate alongside stringent restrictions about expressing these urges.

Biological evolution is extremely slow as all evolution of species is; technical evolution is fast. The mismatch is responsible for no end of misery.

Similarly, our concepts of homeland are changing slowly while the need to adapt to the cyber-homeland reality is pressing on us daily. The wars in Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza/Israel are wars of frustration, the consternation of a people that are left behind by the advancing world, trying to resolve their confusion through antiquated, extraordinary, outdated, sometimes-deadly means.

Our homeland during our lifetime is EARTH. We need to get used to it, at least insofar as our limited resources allow.

Some myths

Succulent wall hanging

Sunday afternoon backyard

Some of the tempting myths relating to the bloody conflict in Gaza/Israel.

Israel has a right to exist, therefore a right to defend itself:

      The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 on already-occupied territory set the stage for the current confrontation. The “right” for it to exist doesn't refer to any moral, ethical, human-rights definition of rights, but to international laws applying to nation states; i.e. it has a right to exist and defend itself in the same way that Canada does. We can, of course, compare the establishment of Israel to the arbitrary use of force that allowed virtually every other state in the world to acquire territory and finally establish the borders of its current state. The Americas, for instance, were occupied territory before colonization; indigenous peoples were forced off their traditional lands at gunpoint.

      The upshot of sanctifying the “nation-state” as a superior and over-ruling concept has trumped, even crushed, all kinds of other sensibilities. It has forced various ethnic groups, for instance, to abandon their traditions and beliefs in the interests of the “common good,” or to wander the earth in search of a peaceful homeland. (Mennonites migrating from Canada to Paraguay makes a good case study of this.) It has spawned apartheid-style relationships in many forms and in many places, creating hot-beds for human rights violations, discontent, poverty and conditions favourable to violent conflict.

      Israel may have a nation-state right to exist, but its record by human rights principles does not favour its right to exist as a creditable and recognized nation.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people:

      This myth sounds so self-evident that the National Rifle Association and the lobby against gun registration in Canada freely use it, and many obviously embrace it without further discussion. The truth is that accessible weaponry represents a means and a temptation to violence that wouldn't exist if it wasn't there. Simply put, there are two options where serious conflicts arise: negotiate/compromise, or the zero-sum game we call war. It's easy to demonstrate that where the means for lethal force are absent, negotiation is far more attractive than it would otherwise be. Picture a Palestine where all borders, all weapons suddenly evaporated and then imagine how people would behave knowing that force would not be an option as a route to peace. Knowing that no rockets would be coming, no gunfire, no tanks, no bombs.

Israel's right to exist is embedded in prophecy and is the will of God:

      The declaration that the State of Israel is somehow predestined by the will of God is so absurd that it defies all credulity. Declaring this presupposes that there are ethnic groups whom God favours over others, sites and territories on earth that the Creator loves more than others and most deplorably, that God condones the killing or displacement of innocents so that the chosen ones may prosper and be safe. What is most astounding is that Christians who have, metaphorically, been schooled at Jesus' knee would not see the irony in holding such a position. Christ's message clearly aims toward the breaking down of gender, ethnic, racial distinctions and according to my reading, he would have been appalled to see people condoning the sacrifice of innocents for the advancement of a particular ethnic group.

Supporters of the Palestinian's rights are anti-Semitic:

      This card has been played ad nauseam and—apparently—very successfully. Israel declares itself to be a legal “state,” and the actions it has and is taking in and against Gaza and the West Bank are therefore actions of a legal state. Israel is not asked to answer on the basis of its predominant ethnicity for its atrocious behaviour, but as a state, which it purports to be. The United Nations has challenged Canada on its dealings with its indigenous population, not as European colonialists but as a state, one that has obligations under international consensus. So the state of Israel can be challenged on West Bank settlements, for instance, without drawing the accusation of antisemitism.

      The Harper government has routinely declared itself to be unequivocally in support of Israel's right to pursue its aspirations—by whatever means it finds necessary. I don't know what myths our government is primarily influenced by, but to be so unapologetically and arbitrarily one-sided on the Israel/Gaza/West Bank tensions shows a shallow and uneducated clinging to fantastical conventional “wisdom.”

      If only Harper would take the time to sit down and read a book, or call some of the Hebron CPT volunteers and ask them what they've experienced, then some of our prime minister's mythical view of the world might be illuminated by at least one, small shaft of light.

On WW I Centennary

Tomorrow will mark the 100^th anniversary of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination by a Serbian nationalist, 19 year-old Gavrilo Princip. History classes since then have declared this event to be the trigger that set World War I in motion—the straw that broke the camel’s back if not the actual reason for the bloody debacle that snuffed out over 17 million lives.  

                I’d like to recommend most highly an article by Esther Epp-Thiessen of MCC on the subject “Calling for a passionate pursuit of nonviolent peacemaking,” a response to the anniversary of this grotesque war.

                As many of you know, I’ve been struggling to get a Mennonite Interpretive Centre off the ground here in Rosthern. The foundation for an assumption that such a place is needed is the conviction that Anabaptist/Mennonite people are among the best placed of all the protestant denominations to interpret to the world a gospel of peace. At our most recent planning meeting, a member of the group reported that one response to our project was, “How many people will get saved through such a place?” It’s not a bad question, depending on what you mean by “saved?” A flippant answer might be, “If it helps to prevent another conflagration like WW I, possibly 17,000,000.”

                It does suggest some substantial questions, though, not the least of which is, “What is the gospel message with which we’ve been entrusted, and does it need to be passed on?” We do feed the hungry (somewhat and sometimes), visit the sick and imprisoned (not as much as we should), lament the plight of the poor (but don’t really know where to grab hold of their problems helpfully), but by and large, we do these things to and for known individuals. But what are we doing to help reconstruct the world so that so very many afflicted individuals and groups could be made safer?

                I applaud the efforts of my fellow Anabaptists who have risked much to bring shelter, sustenance, and a future to the neediest among us and around the world: MCC, MEDA, MDS, etc. But I am invigorated by Esther Epp-Thiessen’s appeal to us all to pursue with passion a discipline of non-violent peacemaking.

                Here’s an ancient legend I just made up: A certain family complains to a neighbour that his family is constantly struggling with water dripping down from the ceiling, falling on them in bed, contaminating their food, making irritating plop-plops day and night. The kind neighbour collects all the ice cream pails, buckets and cans he can find and delivers them to the afflicted neighbour so he can catch the offending drips. He then relays news of this good deed to a third neighbour who doesn’t seem impressed with what is obviously a benevolent gesture.

The third neighbour goes home, gets a ladder and replaces a few broken shingles, thereby rendering all the pails, buckets and cans redundant.

                If the realization of a safe, well-fed, free humanity is an objective of the gospel, then we Anabaptists may have to buy more ladders, risk climbing onto more roofs, broaden our definition of evangelism.

                Some matters to ponder in this time when the temptation for resorting to military solutions to conflict is a daily reality.

                I feel moved at this time to re-present Wilfred Owen’s WW I poem as a reminder to all of us that parades, Remembrance Day tributes, crisp uniforms, the pomp and circumstance of military funerals notwithstanding, war is never what it’s romanticized to be.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

(If you are visiting the link above, be sure to open the second You Tube video on offer there. It accompanies the reading of Dulce et Decorum est with WW I footage.)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots 
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum
Pro patria mori.¹

^{1.              1.}  It is is sweet and right to die for one’s country.

Wilfred Owen
Thought to have been written between 8 October 1917  and March, 1918

Do you know if you're an agnostic or not?

A recent Facebook entry pointed to a Red Letter Christians blog post by Alan Molineaux that caught my attention, particularly because of the title: We are all Agnostic; we just don’t have enough faith to admit it! You can find the post here.

                Molineaux’s point as I understand him is simple: we tend to grow into position A as opposed to B, and because we have been conditioned to think that pole A is the only place to be, admitting of uncertainty (agnosticism, if you will) is a failed stance. Effects of allowing that there’s substance between the poles could be demonstrated by negotiation and compromise; another is the admission that “I just don’t know.” (The word, agnosticism, means “not knowing.”) Because compromise is not on in religions heavily grounded in faith confessions, admitting to doubts—let alone declaring oneself to be an Agnostic Christian—takes a great deal of confidence—that substance we frequently call “faith.”

                I’ve lost count of the people I know who have wandered away from the Christian churches because pastors and congregations don’t know what to do with—or simply cannot tolerate—expressed doubt, cannot engage in conversation that admits of possibilities between the poles. Fact is, most of the people I’m talking about haven’t left the church (point A) to join that ferocious band of atheists holding out with the same one-sided vigour for the righteousness of pole B. They mostly find themselves in the company of people who are apologists for neither A nor B while, for the most part, continuing to think of themselves as heirs and followers of Jesus Christ.

                Pole A, of course, is governed by an evolved worship of and interpretation of the Bible. Far-reaching developments are happening in the discussions about Scriptures, seems to me. I’m reading a lot of material lately that advocates for teaching scripture as a library of unequal parts as opposed to a single book, of allowing life experience and broader dialogue to influence our hermeneutic approaches, of giving present inspiration a place alongside historic inspiration. This is not to say that it’s a tidal wave of progressive thinking; orthodoxy and conservative views of Bible interpretation are still getting the bulk of ink and air time and likely will for a long time to come. At least in North America.

                And it is having grown up in a polar environment that makes people choose to leave rather than open up what would be the can of worms that uncertainty represents for conservative religion, for their colleagues, for their families. We are all Agnostic; we just don’t have enough faith to admit it!

                Perhaps Molineaux should have added a few lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (III,i,85-90):

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,*
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Certainly the tortured consideration of what a declaration of doubt may do to friendships,  natural families, church families could qualify as “a pale cast of thought,” that might well “turn aside” what for many would amount to a “great enterprise.” 

Commentaries like Molineaux’s will always draw criticism for undermining individuals’ tenuous attachment to the dogmas of belief.

* “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” could be read as “infected by the debilitating practice of thinking-about-it-too-much.”