Category Archives: grace

grace, inspiration, loving viewpoint enemies

Proud to be an Okie

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Blog post from Kingsview & CoActually no, I’m not from Muskogee, Oklahoma, where “We don’t smoke marijuana” and “where even squares can have a ball,” as country singer Merle Haggard celebrated. Still I’m almost proud to be from there as I ponder the history of the version Merle first sang, what he came to make of it, and what became of it over the years since he first wrote the lyrics (with Roy Edward Burris) during the Vietnam War.

It’s complicated. Just before the pandemic hit and he mostly stopped live touring, for the first time I heard Kris Kristofferson, surely closer to the hippie Merle mocks in the song than to a square, in live concert. (There is a 1975 version on YouTube of Kris singing “Okie” with Cher and Rita Coolidge that seems to suggest some ironic awareness; the younger Kris throws around his mop of wild hair as he intones the lyrics about not letting “hair grow long and shaggy.”) That pre-pandemic night Kris, himself oddly enough a former soldier, sang  of the hippie-like values and addictions Merle chastised accompanied by “The Strangers,” the very band Merle founded and toured with until his 2016 death.

Memories of that night came flooding back when CBS released a special featuring Willie Nelson’s 2023 ninetieth-birthday concert. Woven through it are several appearances by a frail Kristofferson, supported tenderly by such singers as Roseanne Cash and Nora Jones. These made me grateful I’d experienced Kris live when I did and reminded me again of the “Okie” complexities.

Because they also live in me, riven by paradoxes in my roots and life trajectories, the contradictions inherent in hearing Kris sing Merle’s famous “Okie from Muscogee” did fill me with a certain rapture. The contradictions throb in me, for example,  as I remain committed to pacifism yet will never forget how moved I was by the stories of U.S. veterans I met while dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

By the end of his life it seemed clear Merle, once a prisoner pardoned for burglaries by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, was singing the song within layers of complexity I could never claim fully to plumb yet which intrigued. The Okie (which he only kind of became after his family migrated from California during the Great Depression) who sounded like he was bashing anyone who smoked marijuana had battled addictions himself.

Anyone who hasn’t heard Merle sing “Amazing Grace” at St. Quentin, where he had been imprisoned, hasn’t fully experienced grace. This version is ragged, rough, and raw–throbbing with awareness of how “wretches” (an “Amazing Grace” lyric I rejected when younger, before I grew old enough to recognize myself in it) are saved.

So this is who sings about being from Muscogee. And in his singing so many layers of meaning, he reminds what richness imperfect people can offer if true to their truths rather than addicted to offering fake truths.

I and we needn’t agree with Merle on every detail to grasp that here is a real human being, someone who has traveled through vicissitudes with integrity, acknowledging and even magnifying them when called for. Here is no flattening of meaning but ever deeper exploration of it.

And so as Merle ages his songs become ever richer, their subtexts ever more resistant to simple interpretations, such that it made sense at Kris’s concert for his audience to break into applause as  “Okie from Muscogee” launched.

We were sitting, that night, in a country in which some loved “only squares can have a ball” and others loved the possibility that Merle’s song is at least partly the satire Kris may think it to be. Yet the song transcends the divisions.

The hatreds and animosities that spawned it in the 1960s as war raged have perhaps not so much healed as mutated and maybe even intensified. Interpretations and responses to “Okie” have mutated as well. Some see it as one more inspiration for continuing the cultural battles. But as I ponder Kris singing Merle’s song as his own life fades and with the band Merle’s death left behind, I find myself living at least briefly in a world in which only squares can have a ball yet with the hippies sing toward that grace still able to amaze.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, baptism, Evangelicalism, grace, Mennonite, salvation

Collaborating with Grace, the Gift from Beyond

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

It’s interesting to note that Wesley Granberg-Michaelson joins the significant number of “Respectful Conversation” partners reporting having made some sort of journey beyond or at least through evangelicalism as part of embracing their current tradition. I’d count myself among such. Though I was born into the Mennonite church and raised by Anabaptist-Mennonite parents, whether what we believed in was Anabaptism or an evangelicalism tinged with fundamentalism was often unclear.

I resonate, then, with Granberg-Michaelson’s report that he started out evangelical, going back to a conversation in the kitchen with his mother when he was just four. There is indeed appeal in accepting Jesus before going to the dentist to make sure to be saved in case Jesus returns more quickly than young Wesley returns from the dentist.

I made the same move as Wesley except oh, maybe 100 times, and it just never seemed to take. I never seemed to become unqualifiedly saved. I remember when I was maybe 12 overhearing my mom say to my dad something along the lines of “If he doesn’t do it by the time he’s 16 he never will.” To this day I’m not sure if “it” was accepting Jesus, but I think it was. That only added to the pressure and caused maybe another 50 efforts to become saved.

But thoughts and feelings that seemed not to belong to saved people would always return shortly after a few days of the sainthood that would validate that Jesus was now in my heart. For me the solution, if such it was, to the quandary came from choosing in my twenties to try out whatever it meant to follow Jesus. I’d aim to follow Jesus whether or not I always believed there was a Jesus to follow and whether or not I had any confidence that Jesus was in my heart.

In light of that, I feel almost a twinge of envy that Granberg-Michaelson can report that the Reformed tradition “chose me.” There is gift here, the gift of feeling that Someone has chosen you which is moving and affirming in a different way than if it was primarily you who did the choosing. As Granberg-Michaelson summarizes, “Grace comes solely as God’s initiative, as pure gift. Faith is never an achievement or personal accomplishment.”

I mostly concur. And I think we Mennonites influenced by the individualism often linked to evangelical influences can be reminded by Granberg-Michaelson of our tradition’s from-the-start convictions that the walk toward and with Jesus happens as we become members of Christ’s body.

Each of our traditions can also find gifts in the summary of the Reformed tradition as confessional, covenantal, committed to the conviction that the world belongs to God, aware that sin is real indeed yet so is the journey from “guilt to grace to gratitude,” and ecumenical.

Those of us who are grandparents, as am I six times over, may also find blessing in Granberg-Michaelson’s testimony that “When I sit with my two grandchildren on my lap, my Reformed theology gets undone.”

My Mennonite theology gets undone too, though this did send me down a side-trail that may nevertheless deserve a touch of exploration:  wondering how any of us help next generations see gifts in our traditions as religions and denominations and traditions are in so many ways coming undone.

Some of my grandchildren are being raised in ways connected to Christianity, even sometimes Mennonite-flavored. Others less so. In-laws range all over the faith–or lack thereof–map. When we get together, we can’t assume that, say, Mennonite is our common understanding.

Even so, how surprising, and moving it has sometimes been to learn that even grandchildren as young as two pay attention for example to prayer at meals and regardless of their particular background will often propose or even personally initiate prayer. This includes the youngest, whose heart has somehow instructed her to put her two index fingers together and close her eyes as a gesture of prayer.

I suspect at least two factors come into view here. One is that indeed the communal emphases of our traditions hold insight. We are formed together, not simply apart and not entirely by larger cultural influences even as traditions increasingly atomize.

The other is that we do need somehow to take into account Granberg-Michaelson’s testimony to not only chasing grace ourselves but also being chosen and blessed by it whether or not we’re fully capable of understanding it. This takes me back to his thoughts on covenant.

On the one hand, I remain a committed enough Anabaptist-Mennonite that I don’t fully embrace his conviction that covenant includes infant baptism.

When an infant is baptized in a Reformed (or other) congregation, theological critics will complain that he or she has no choice in the matter. But that is precisely the point. Christian faith is carried communally; it’s personal but not individualistic.

I see the power of this understanding and in that sense am drawn to it. Still I’d prefer to look for ways the communal carrying of Christian faith Granberg-Michaelson rightly emphasizes does not preclude reserving baptism for the adult or at least adult-in-training believer consciously committing to the journey with Jesus.

Here I see some analogy with my marriage commitments. I could not have become the married person I am apart from community and “covenantal relationships of love.” And I respect that marriage arrangements vary across cultures in enriching ways. Yet I’m grateful to have had the privilege of intentionally–though certainly not in full understanding of what I was doing!–committing myself to another through sickness and in health until death does us part.

On the other hand, and as I ponder through the prism of my grandchildren, I see much to celebrate in Granberg-Michaelson’s report:

So, I don’t regard my prayer in the kitchen as an autonomous, individual act of free will, but as part of a mysterious movement of grace transmitted imperfectly but certainly through covenantal relationships of love. Believing and belonging are intertwined, and not always sequential.

Amen. Maybe the Mennonite in me can see adult baptism as collaborating with the grace which comes as gift from Beyond. Many thanks, Wesley, for leading us so meaningfully from guilt to grace to gratitude.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, discernment amid differences, God, grace, loving viewpoint enemies, Teachings of Jesus

Can Mennonites and Lutherans Experience Grace, Faithfulness, and Even Fun Together?

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For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

* * *

Can Mennonites and Lutherans, once bitter enemies, have fun together? Though the journey is challenging, that’s a question Mark Ellingsen’s take on Lutheranism in “Lutheranism: An Evangelical Catholic Way to Follow Jesus” stirs for me.

Noting that, as was true for Anabaptists, the label Lutheran was originally applied by critics, Ellingsen wants to highlight such names as “evangelical” and “catholic.” He explains that Lutheranism incorporates many strands, including Pietistic, Confessional, or the “Neo-Confessional” he names Evangelical Catholicism. He also stresses that most Lutherans can at least agree “that the Christian life must be rooted in God’s grace.”

Where does my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition fit into this? I resonate with John J. Friesen’s take that we owe much to Lutheranism—which helped create space for the Anabaptist rejection of Roman Catholic indulgences, commitment to the Bible (sola scriptura) above tradition, belief that Scripture should be accessible to the common person rather than only privileged priests, and the ensuing affirmation of the priesthood of all believers.

As Ellingsen notes, “Lutherans . . . join with most Protestants in embracing the idea that all who are baptized, all who follow Jesus, are priests. Christians who follow Jesus are priests, for they have been dedicated to living lives in which they perform the sacrifice of dying to their sin and rising to serve Christ and the neighbor (Luther’s Works, Vol.31, p.53; Ibid., Vol.36, p.145; Apology of the Augsburg Confession, XXIV.26).”

On the other hand, casting a shadow Ellingsen doesn’t address, Luther became a vitriolic opponent of Anabaptists. How did this come to be?

Through establishing Lutheranism as a state church. As Friesen summarizes, “When Luther opted for the state-church model, placed the Lutheran church under the authority of the state, and persecuted minority churches, Anabaptists believed that Luther had betrayed the teachings of the Bible.” Anabaptists rejected models in which church and state together policed the boundaries of acceptable Christianity.

In contrast, Anabaptists, purveyors of the Radical Reformation, believed that the commandments of Scripture and particularly the teachings of Jesus trumped the state if church came into conflict with state. Surely, thought Anabaptists, there was conflict  if the church demanded, contra Jesus, killing enemies, swearing oaths, infant baptism not optional but coerced, upholding civil order and established norms if they blocked following Jesus. Surely there was almost unbearable conflict when not only did the state go against Jesus’ teachings but the very Martin Luther who celebrated grace countenanced the possibility that the state should execute Anabaptists for sedition and blasphemy.

Although they based it more on New Testament practices than a formal take on the priesthood of believers, Anabaptists, and their Mennonite branch, were also often more radical in blurring the line between laity and clergy. I experienced this as a seminary graduate trained in an American Baptist seminary (where Lutherans were classmates) whose professors advocated a moderate setting-apart of ordained ministers within a larger commitment to the priesthood of all. My first pastorate was at Germantown Mennonite Church, oldest Mennonite congregation in North America, established in Philadelphia in 1683 by Mennonites and Quakers. By 1980s a faithful remnant of some 25 congregants was expressing commitment to the priesthood of all through a leadership team that included ordained but unpaid ministers plus several congregants. As a paid minister, I would stretch the pattern.

My first Sundays careful attention was paid to where I stood when preaching. At the front of the historic building was a raised platform and pulpit many congregants’ saw as too prominent, evidence prior generations had strayed from true radicality. With heart pounding I went to the pulpit instead of the humble portable lectern. Whoever was right or wrong, the resulting controversy had roots reaching down to the early days of Anabaptism, not to mention Lutheranism.

But as with all human traditions, Mennonites are complicated. The same understandings that could be understood as discouraging trained professional priests/pastors exercising authority over Christians also generated structures that sometimes straitjacketed individual freedom of conscience. There were reasons for this; as Astrid von Schlacta observes, “Yes, sola scriptura implies that the meaning of Scripture does not depend on interpretation by a priest. Yet Anabaptists believed that collective interpretation of the Bible by the community of believers was indispensable.” True enough. But then in the name of the community others in the community, often themselves paradoxically following the authority of the leaders they trusted, might ban those they considered out of bounds.

This has led to circumstances in which Mennonites seeking to be “without spot or blemish” have generated communities that have policed boundaries of the quest, excommunicated congregants perceived to be non-repentant sinners, and risked crushing grace under law. In her memoir The Merging (DreamSeeker Books, 2000), my aunt Evelyn King Mumaw tells how her parents helping establish an early 1900s Sunday school. In that Mennonite context, this was perceived as violating church norms. Mumaw describes the day the bishop came to put her family out, an event which cast lifelong shadows over the family, including her younger brother who was my father:

Attendees were warned to discontinue their involvement. Those who continued attending there were finally excommunicated. Limerick Sunday school was closed. All persons who were put out of church were to confess that they had sinned in order to be  reinstated. Some would only confess they had disobeyed a conference decree. I still remember that chilly morning when the little Bishop with the cold sharp eyes came driving up our lane in his boxlike Model-T Ford. I think it was the time he had come to tell my parents that the people who kept on attending Limerick after they were told to stop were going to be put out of the church. And that included my parents. The people who went through this experience were deeply hurt.

This takes me back to Ellingsen and the gospel of grace. One could underscore the shadows of Lutheranism. One could claim, as I’ve heard Mennonites do and sometimes done myself, that Lutheranism purveys a cheap grace. One could suggest, and I see some value in this, that those who wrap their commitments around faithfully following Jesus, often rooted in the Gospels, may experience formation complementary to that of those who particularly celebrate sola fide and sola gratia, frequently rooted in Pauline epistles.

But after 500 years, Lutherans have asked forgiveness for persecuting Anabaptists. Ellingsen underscores that there is an ethical component to Luther, who believes “you only sin bravely when you do not give into concupiscence, when you boldly live a sacrificial, sin-denying life (live your baptism), but do so with the awareness that even then you are still sinning, that all good done is a function of God working in and through you (Complete Sermons, Vol.4, p.367).” And Ellingsen paints moving word pictures of the gifts of grace:

When you live in a family, with a lover whose love works on you, the loved one does not have to tell you what to do to please him/her.  You just sort of know.  True human love is spontaneous.  Imagine then what God’s love can do to you.  In fact, when you are in love (fall in love – note the passivity) it is like an ecstatic experience.  You lose yourself.  Should we not expect it to be that way in the arms of Jesus?  This is another reason why Lutherans claim that there is no need to teach Christians how to follow Jesus.  It will just happen spontaneously when you are living with Jesus. 

Here I still want the Mennonite formation that says human commitments are never fully whole so that, like couples who may not always feel love but want to receive and offer it nevertheless, we need teachings and a community that create disciplines of right living—whether or not these spontaneously emerge. On the other hand, how those Limerick Mennonites yearned for a more ecstatic church than the one offered by the cold-eyed bishop. How importantly Lutheranism, drawing on the Pietistic strand Ellingsen embraces, reminds us that with

awareness that everything we do is a sin, it follows that the best Christians can be is simul iustus et peccator (100% saint and 100% sinner) (Romans 7:14-18; Luther’s Works, Vol.32, p.111; Ibid., Vol.27, p.230).    This is a freeing insight, as it entails the awareness that we are loved by God, even despite all our sin and selfishness.

And how helpfully we can collaborate on the Way. As von Schlacta sees it,

The Anabaptists were part of the Reformation and shared basic convictions with Lutherans and Reformed. Yes, sola gratia means we do not attain salvation through works. But living the faith was important for all. The Anabaptists called this discipleship. For Luther it was “new obedience.”

Perhaps together, then, amid grace and forgiveness for the sins evident in both (and all) traditions, we can say a celebratory yes when Ellingsen asks, “Can the rest of the catholic tradition also embrace the freedom, spontaneity, and fun which Lutherans often associate with following Jesus?”

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently a participant in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this response to Lutheranism was first published.

God, grace, inspiration, love of God

Hemmed in by God’s Love, a guest post by Jen Kindbom

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Caffeine is a mixed blessing for me. It gives me the laser-beam focus especially handy in creative endeavors (such as writing these words) or monotonous tasks (such as grading hundreds of papers). Not only that, it almost instantly relieves those headaches that a couple of Aleve, a nap, and a big glass of water just won’t touch.

But caffeine also makes me jittery, shaky, and paranoid. For example, I distinctly recall sewing in my attic and fearing acutely that at any minute I would be arrested and hauled off to prison–for what offense, I do not know. How to express my relief when I realized it was no accidental crime haunting my conscience, just the frozen mocha. . . .

Then I think of Psalm 139, which I’ve studied with my first-year character ed classes for the past six years or so. Psalm 139 conveys the depth of God’s love for God’s people on a very personal level. We see God’s hand upon each of us at our very core. We see God’s knowledge of each of our thoughts before we’re aware of them, and—one of my favorite images, particularly as one who sews—we see God’s love hemming each of us in. There’s no escaping a good hem.

I find it particularly comforting that the message of this psalm is not one of conditions. The words do not say “You perceive my thoughts from afar and abandon me when they’re too much.” The words do not say “You love me unless my thoughts are off the deep end irrational, or too fast for me to keep up with.” The words do not say “You hem me in until I’m afraid and I can’t quite pin down why.”

No.

They say “You hem me in, behind and before.”

When children are overwhelmed by questions that seem too big or even too irrational, loving and thoughtful adults at their best respond kindly to them. So it is with God, so we see in the psalm. What if it rains inside? What if the house blows away? What if there’s a bee in the field?

Imagine these are your thoughts, as they have certainly at times been mine. Imagine God putting tender hands on each side of your face, kissing your forehead, and then taking your hand and walking with you, listening as we talk it out, answering your questions in ways that acknowledge that to you, the fear is real and also that you are safe. In that moment—as in every moment—God hems you in. God hems me in, behind and before.

The psalmist prays for God to search me and us, to know our anxious thoughts, caffeine-induced or otherwise. He prays for God to let us know of any offensive way within me and you—not to condemn us or to add a brick to the wall between us and God but because God knows the possibility of an unhurried mind. And God desires that for each of us: thoughts and a mind at peace in the hem that is God’s love.

—Jen Kindbom, an Ohio-based writer, teacher, and designer, is author of Cadabra (DreamSeeker Books, 2015)  (2015) and the chapbook A Note on the Door (2011). Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Connotation Press, Literary Mama, and other journals and anthologies. Jen is interested in lifting the veil of poetry for her students, and pursues ways to integrate poetry and creative writing into her high school English classes.

family relationships, formation, grace

Connecting Our Souls’ Carabiners

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“Dad,” said the brilliant negotiator, “you have a choice. If you agree to listen to what I’m doing in college without judging or punishing me, I’ll tell you the truth. Or I’ll just lie about what I’m really doing. Which do you prefer?”

That story has so shaped our relationship over the decades and still so informs my thoughts and feelings about accountability, human relationships, and moral formation that I often return to it. Should I have found some different solution? Should I have explored consequences for this brazen acknowledgment of readiness to lie?

As my daughter’s phase of family building suggests she may someday face that riddle, I remember my mother watching me, her once argumentative teenager, parent my children. When Mom witnessed a trying interchange I’d see a sweet but sly smile. She was sinfully enjoying watching the son once sure he knew more than she confronting daughters confident they knew more than he. If my daughter faces her own reckoning with “or I’ll lie to you,” what should she do?

I‘ll have to let her cope while I smile. Yet maybe she should conclude, as did I, that she has been outfoxed. One reason I didn’t call my daughter’s bluff was that it was no bluff.  She really would hide what she was up to.

I grasped this from knowing her but also myself: I had done the same thing to my parents, if less courageously. I simply invented something like a five-year statute of limitations:  Here’s what was going on then that I didn’t want you to know, like the time I stole a banana when I was a boy in Mexico City, ran across the busy street to throw the peel in the grassy median strip, forgot to check traffic on the way back, got hit by a Jeep but not tragically so, hence pretended running happily on was just my James Bond-esque style.

But a key reason I accepted my daughter’s deal was that I loved her. I loved that teenage mix of bravado and precisely the openness of soul that had led to her to offer terms that would let her stay open.

The years to come were challenging. I’d wrestle with okay, now I know this. Now what? How to honor the bargain when some choices  terrify me and could  lead to bad things that underdeveloped frontal cortex isn’t fully grasping?

I stumbled onto two responses: One was if you do X or Y, dear daughter, other authority figures may impose unhappy consequences; keeping me in the loop won’t spare you. The other was to repeat, in so many conversations such as that classic one over chicken and pasta, that like mountain climbers supporting each other, my rope is clipped to your soul no matter what rock face you climb or cliff you fall off.

What I could glimpse then but more clearly years later is what a gift she gave us both. Social and church glues fail as angers and alienations sever us from each other’s hearts. Rising anxiety, depression, suicide intersect with cruel social media and political worlds that encourage being the best—how many likes do I have?—or one-up: No, I won’t seek the Light with you; I’ll exploit your weaknesses to impose my ways. Mutual-accountability ground between whatever feels good and zero tolerance shrinks.

What if instead we connected the carabiners of our souls to confront life’s mountains and cliffs with ropes clipped together?

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Awe and wonder, grace, hope, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Be Not Afraid and other Poems, by Julie Cadwallader Staub

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Be Not Afraid

I am converted and every day:

when the clouds dream
a new dream
and fill the air
with snow

when the pines and hemlocks
lift their needles
and welcome
what sun there is

when the creek,
hard frozen,
listens as the fox
trots along its side.

This world of enchantment
waits for you
like the milkweed
standing in this snowy field

its pod open wide
like angel wings outstretched
ready to catch
the rising wind.

Moth

When Jesus said, “Suffer the little ones to come unto me”

I know he included this inch-long moth
marooned on the bike path
gray wings delicately trimmed in white
a neon orange head
an iridescent blue body.

When I put my fingers down in front of it,
it climbs right into my hand,
happily, I think,

and when I crouch at the edge of the path
to let it go
there is a young apple tree growing there,
sensitive and wood ferns,
buttercups,
a spray of little white asters

for such is the kingdom of heaven.

Slow by Slow

“Secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.” —John O’Donohue

It’s like yeast, they say
or a mustard seed

but I submit
it is also like carpenter ants

the way they work, hidden,
unbidden, unnoticed,

deep within the foundation, the walls,
the very structure of the house

so that one day
light filters through
where a thick wall stood

one day
you see a patch of open sky
where the hardest ceiling had been

one day a door
stands ajar that has been
locked for a lifetime.

Slow by slow
grace finds a way.

Slow by slow
still the gift comes.

—Julie Cadwallader Staub’s poems have been published in various journals, featured on “The Writer’s Almanac,” and included in such anthologies as Poetry of Presence (Grayson Books) and Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry (Green Writers Press). Her poem “Milk” won Hunger Mountain Review’s 2015 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her first collection of poems, Face to Face, was published by Cascadia Publishing House in 2010, and her second collection, Wing Over Wing, will be published by Paraclete Press in 2019 and will include all three poems posted here.

God, grace, inspiration, Suffering, Terrorism

Disbelieving in Wonder

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BalloonKCPost-MAKThe horrors keep mounting up. Even at a distance they trigger disbelief, “This can’t be happening” exclamations of shock and dread. The trauma for those onsite must splinter hearts and souls and sometimes sanity itself.

On Sunday my wife Joan and I took a walk. We spent much of the time talking about the terrors of recent days, terrors made all the more terrible because for so many months now we have taken so many walks after so many awful things have befallen our human brothers and sisters, whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian or any of the other forms of faith through which we long for God.

We reached few conclusions. We agreed that some of the things some people are saying are so beyond the pale we can’t believe we’re hearing them. We especially can’t believe we’re hearing them so often from Christians that we shudder, time and again, at even being associated any more with our own tradition.

We noted the problem of speaking up for the truth when everyone these days means to be speaking for the truth. How are we called to speak when we all, as we utter the things the others consider blasphemous and obscene and yes, beyond belief, do so in the name of God?

As we thought about this, we saw on the far horizon a hot-air balloon begin to drift in. Wow, cool. Hey, look, it’s coming this way.

BalloonatSunset

Wouldn’t it be great if it came across those trees and even closer? It did!

BalloonNearsLanding

And closer. Closer. Closer. Close enough to make us nervous. What if it got too close to the power lines overhead and to us?

Closer. It drifted past, just feet away. It slowed. It hovered. It landed on the lawn right beside us. The pilot in an orange vest seemed to be training a passenger.

BalloonLanding

Children lived at the property the balloon had landed on. Their parents came out and greeted the balloonists. After some cheerful chatting, lo, the pilot asked the children if they wanted to get in the basket. The parent in me imagined them jumping in and the balloon jumping up and away and who knew what next. But their parents, sturdy sorts, accepted this moment of grace. The children climbed in.

Carefully, so carefully, the pilot let loose a sliver of flame. The balloon rose, just a foot or two above the lawn. Slowly slowly the pilot took it across the lawn. Then ever so gently he set it back down again.

Another few moments of cheerful chit-chat, more flame, and up the balloon soared, headed east in the fading glow of the west-setting sun.

BalloonTakesOff

Joan and I returned to our walk. Excitedly we shared our disbelief. When we came back past the balloon-landing lawn, the children’s mother was working outside. We asked how her children were doing.

She grinned. They were inside, she said, watching and watching and rewatching the video of themselves being taken up in the balloon that came out of nowhere to transport them into a moment of disbelief, of adventure, of joy they would likely remember the rest of their lives.

BoyGirlWatchBalloonLeaveIMG_20151206_161042

The one doesn’t fix the other. A fantasy that descends from the sky to make imaginations dance and spines shiver doesn’t atone for the terrible things that have been descending from above and flaring from guns. But they were haunting moments of grace, those fleeting minutes of disbelieving not in dreadful things but in the unbelievable fact that this wonder—hinting at the sort of treasure for which all God’s suffering, frightened, terrorized children so ache—had descended from on high.

—Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary and vice-president, Eastern Mennonite University; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.

Creation, family relationships, God, grace, inspiration, love of God

Spellbound

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ShMHKC2015poste was spellbound. As I watched her, the spell stretched over to bind and bless me too.

We were flying away from a week that had included hurt and sorrow for many. Our denominational convention in seeking to strengthen the ties that bind us in Christian love had sometimes achieved this but also sometimes torn the threads.

Soon enough she’ll need to be finding her own path through all the ways we wound each other. In fact, because she was born into this flow of pain going back to the very beginning, back to the angel with the flaming sword barring the return to Eden, she too is already wounded. All of us who care for her are already in ways known and unknown shaping her not only through our love but also through the frailties our own births into the brokenness have formed in us.

But right then she was spellbound. I imagine she couldn’t even grasp the concept of flight; I doubt she understood that she was in a vast airborne bus and that what she was seeing was thousands of feet below her. Yet as the plane descended, quickly now, toward the runway, the houses and trees and cars were turned golden by the setting sun and at the same time the lights of approaching night began to flick on all across the landscape. She can’t talk yet so I don’t know precisely how her brain was relaying the magic to her. Yet the wonder of it did seem to have caught her attention.

In turn, she caught my attention, this dear granddaughter reminding me that there are more primal ways to experience the world than my grizzled, aging self, too caught up in life’s complexities to see much more than the burdens, often manages. And witnessing her spell then opening myself to it did envelop me in grace.

My granddaughter’s spell took me back to those first days of creation, when God hovered over the face of the chaos, over all that was formless and void, and spoke into being light and dark, mountains and valleys, dry land and heaving seas, trees and flowers, amazing animals, cool bugs and irritating but needed critters, birds singing and getting their early worms (or hopping around Amtrak’s 30th Street Station gobbling noodles, as happened on Sunday), women and men and children in all their endless varieties. I remembered that God looked upon all this and marveled at how good it was.

I saw that my granddaughter, though lacking the words or concepts to explain it, was present to it. In her wordless way, she was treasuring it. Even amid the grief and pain that was still much with me and will long be with us, gratefully I joined her in the worship.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; and owner, Cascadia Publishing House LLC

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, God, grace, LGBTQ, love of God, Mennonite Church USA, same-sex relationships

Blogging Toward Kansas City, Part 7: Bending the Curve

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KCMainBlogPostThumb200x200x72It’s hard to tell how much and what type of history Mennonite Church USA made yesterday as intertwined resolutions on sexuality were passed. What will it mean to live a.) within the parameters of one resolution that called us to “forebearance,” to living patiently and respectfully with each others’ different views; and at the same time b.) within the implications of another resolution that reaffirms current membership guidelines related to persons who identify as LGBTQ?

I think it’s too early fully to understand what was decided, so I’ll defer detailed comment to another day or wiser analysts. (Meanwhile see news reporting on the wrestling with and voting on the sexuality resolutions from The Mennonite and Mennonite World Review.) Here I’ll mostly underscore my sense that we lived through a day of pain and sorrow.

I’d guess this was true for persons across the spectrum of beliefs, given that divergent beliefs were one cause of the pain. This meant that any combination of decisions was likely to be experienced as gain by some and pain by others.

The pain must have been palpable for any of us who felt that our very ability to honor conscience was in play.  Along with anger as its frequent companion, pain must have been particularly intense for any of us who felt that our personal inclusion or exclusion, or that of our loved ones, was at stake. Some have been giving eloquent voice to this suffering on Facebook and elsewhere.

As earlier promised, I did write Part 7, the last in my “Blogging Toward Kansas City” series, on Wednesday for publication in Mennonite Weekly Review yesterday morning, July 2, 2015. This was before we knew the results of the sexuality resolutions discernment. My impression is that today we’re continuing to find our way through some of the dynamics I reported on in yesterday morning’s MWR post but that we won’t fully understand what has happened or what could happen next, for good or ill, until we have a chance to absorb the hurt and grief.

I actually don’t know what comes after this for my own blogging. I need to do some of my own living into what has happened and what if anything to comment on or what other topics to move onto. In the meantime, I’m working with several authors of guest posts and look forward to sharing their writing when ready. Many thanks to those of you who have supported the launch of Kingsview & Co through your interest, comments, provision of guest posts, or shares through Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Now I’ll continue to pray, as I do below, that amid anxiety, chaos, and sorrow the evidence of things we don’t yet see and the substance of things we hope for (to echo Hebrews 11) will become clearer as God continues to bend the curve toward love and life.

Bending the Curve Toward Love and Life

In the middle of Tuesday night, I fell into a sequence of dreams. In one I dreamed that I was at the Mennonite Church USA convention, Kansas City 2015 (as I actually was). In a seminar I attended only in the dream, we were each to remember an experience of God’s grace. My dreaming mind went to this true story:

When I was seven, I ate bananas intended for something else. We lived on a four-lane Mexico City street with a tree-lined median. Racing to the median, I dumped the evidence then ran back—forgetting cars. With screaming brakes and horn, a Jeep hit me.

A nearby stop light had turned red; traffic was slowing; I was more bruised in ego than body. I scrambled up, pretended getting hit by cars was standard fare for me, and ran home as the driver stared.

I won’t claim detailed metaphorical connections while offering impressions from KC2015, but herewith some broad linkages:

First is being launched by a minor decision into near-catastrophe. Small moves can have large consequences. Many of us are feeling this at KC2015. As hymns are chosen, worship leaders decide what to highlight, speakers connect our circumstances with the Luke 24 disciples mourning dead Jesus, we’re attending to the smallest nuances.

We hear of gun-rights exercisers in tension with the local Moslem mosque. We learn of tiny gestures of reconciliation growing between two alienated communities. Are we really who we say we are? Or is ours “an idle tale”? we’re asked. We also engage endless war, drone warfare, abuse, justice amid racism, a remembrance of the Native Americans others of us displaced, and more. But over it all swirl LGBTQ-related dynamics as we wait to learn whether sexuality discernment becomes a Jeep hitting MC USA.

I asked KC2015 participants whose journeys with God catch my attention to offer impressions, hopes, fears. L. Keith Weaver, moderator, Lancaster Mennonite Conference, touches on our mix of feelings amid not knowing what the small or larger gestures of coming hours will produce:

I am feeling an awkward mix of joy and grief as I greet and worship with friends and colleagues in MC USA. It is a joy to experience God’s presence in his gathered people, celebrating God’s redeeming grace and sustaining love. There is also grief in knowing that conflicting values will make it difficult to experience the organizational unity we had hoped could emerge. God grant us mercy and grace as we seek to follow Jesus on the way.

A second broad linkage is loss of control amid chaos. I had some ability to make choices before and after being struck. Yet when I failed to anticipate traffic, chaos took control.

At KC2015, wise folks are paying attention to traffic amid prayerful awareness that a Jeep could wreck our discernment. Still, so much we don’t control. The discernment is unfolding not only across many layers of MC USA but also entities some may join instead of MC USA. Decisions across any layer can cause unpredictable ripples and counter-moves.

Among many naming the consequent anxiety is Theda Good, pastor, First Mennonite Church of Denver. Good anticipates renewing and building relationships at KC2015 but is also “aware of the anxiety in the family system. I feel it.”

Lois Johns Kauffmann, conference minister, Central District Conference, confesses to

anxiety as I think about the weight of our work together and the range of expectations we brought with us. This feels like a pivotal moment in the life of our church. It is a crucial time, not because the way will be crystal clear by the end of the week, but because this is not a business-as-usual convention. Maybe it’s pivotal because we’re aware of our need. Maybe it’s pivotal because we’re forced to face our power and privilege.

Many are experiencing heavy hearts. Echoing Weaver on grief, they doubt any discerners can control an outcome that holds us institutionally together. There is sorrow that this may be their last MC USA convention.

The third broad link with my story—the care of a gracious God—places me on shaky ground. If God’s care spares me, why do countless others, equally deserving, appear not to receive it? Still I believe that in ways we can’t reduce to formula, God bends the curve of Creation toward life and love.

Maybe God didn’t bend the curve toward life after a boy hid banana peels. Yet I’ll trust there was a divine nudge in my dream of telling KC2015 seminar participants that being spared death by Jeep was an experience of God’s care. I’ll trust this amid the longing many feel for God to bend this moment’s curve toward love and life.

Good’s hope is “that we will find ways to love, honor and cherish each and every family member while acknowledging we do not and will not agree on so many different topics.” She believes “The sexuality conversation will not be the last in which we will hold strong divergent views.” Good trusts that as the curve bends “we will find our way and continue to be known as a church of love and peacemakers.”

Harold N. Miller, pastor, Trissels Mennonite Church, thinks the week may “be good for the church. Perhaps it’s trust that our leaders have good instincts for what will hold the church together.”

Perhaps it’s a deep hope that our delegates are committed to “listen to the Scriptures for guidance” (in the delegates’ Table Group Covenant Litany), that we won’t abandon one teaching stance without deliberate, church-wide Bible study to discern whether we should embrace a new stance or affirm the Membership Guidelines resolution.

“The only explanation that is certain,” Miller stresses, “is that my peace was a gift from the Spirit of God.”

Kauffmann concludes,

More than anxiety, I feel grateful to be part of this church I love, participating in the hard and holy work of being in community. A wise person once said that every relationship is an opportunity for spiritual growth, because every relationship forces us to let go of illusions. I wonder what illusions God is asking me and us to release.

—Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; owner, Cascadia Publishing House LLC; and blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co. He is grateful to Kelli Yoder, assistant editor and web editor, Mennonite World Review to MWR for the opportunity to collaboratively develop and circulate this blog post.

family relationships, God, grace, inspiration, mental illness

Launching Kingsview & Co

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BarnFullPaintingOpen200x200x72Blogs on Kingsview & Co, which is an extension of DreamSeeker Magazine, are from main blogger Michael A. King combined with intermittent guest posts.

Below is the most recent prior Kingsview post, released in DreamSeeker Magazine 2012 at Kingsview Autumn 2012, and functioning here as the first post of Kingsview & Co.

Families:
Where Torment and Transcendence Mix

Michael A. King

The death of both my parents amid journeying with various friends and colleagues through complex family dynamics has made me want to zoom out to bigger-picture reflections. What keeps coming to me is this: Families are where we primally and intimately experience torment and transcendence.

I hasten to recognize that torment probably isn’t how those blessed with sunnier family experience would put it. And transcendence may not compute for those who have known primarily ways families maim.

So let me simply report why I think of both torment and transcendence.

Torment because I’ve seen so much of it in family layers going back generations. And in communities, often church-related, I regularly participate in. The torment can range across mental illness; the pain such illness inflicts on sufferers and those who love them; suicide; amid inability to navigate inherited shadows passing them on to others; divorce and its trauma for those separating as well as children, relatives, friends. I know a family in which attempts of children to grow up lead to being literally disowned; there is torment here for those disowned even as surely the acts of disowning flow from their own prior wells of anguish.

I could go on—and on—but my point isn’t to belabor the torment. I simply want to name it plus offer the severe mercy of acknowledging that the torment is not rectified by being Christian but accompanies us as Christians. No example I’ve offered flows from non-Christian family life. I don’t blame Christianity—but those of us in Christian families can empower shadows through believing there must be something non-Christian about them, hence we may take our church selves to church, sequester our family hurts at home, and in so doing often deepen rather than heal them.

I’ve seen this dynamic in relation to suicide and its frequent companion, depression. Many of us were formed within an understanding that suicide was sin and depression a sign of spiritual failure. Suicide has been viewed as so grievous we can even tell of suicidal loved ones whose bodies congregations wouldn’t allow in cemetaries. Seeing association with depression or suicide as shameful has made us reluctant to talk about such matters, to make them part of our church lives or faith journeys, to trust that rather than God’s judgment added to the depressive’s or the suicide’s torment, grace even here, and maybe especially here, can sorrowfully and tenderly abound.

And maybe that takes us to the cusp of transcendence. Because when families are able, imperfectly though truly, to confront their torments, they can become zones of amazing grace.
Not cheap grace. Any family who has walked through the worst of the worst knows grace is costly, bought by tears, sleepless nights of reliving nightmares, choices to grow even when one’s family soil seems too shallow to offer nurture, turning to mentors and therapists and friends and sometimes our own family members with readiness to keep loving even when it hurts like we imagine hell itself to hurt.

Recently a friend I’m in touch with only on Facebook, but with whom I share roots going back to our growing up together as children of missionaries, posted that a giant of our missionary youths had entered hospice care. This stirred us to share memories.

My friend remarked of the dying missionary and his wife that they “were probably the first people I met—as a young child—that were very very much in love and full of creative, imaginative energy. I’ll never forget them running across a field, hand in hand. I was very young and there is no photograph of that moment, but it is engraved in my mind.”

Chills. Tears. That is a picture of transcendence. Family can carry us beyond our worst to miracles larger than we achieve in isolation. Hand in hand across a field. So classic a film-like image as to be almost a cliché but in the best sense of cliché—though we risk cheapening it by repetition, the reason we’re thus tempted is that it’s so primally and powerfully true.
I think of the day a dying mother, amid a family’s shadows, embraced a child. And in that embrace said to one who was long an adult yet also a child tremulous still, “I love you as you are.” Transcendence.

Again I could go on. Because could we with ink the ocean fill, we wouldn’t exhaust the love, of God or for each other, that allows us to turn scripts of even family torment into narratives of transcendence.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania and Harrisonburg, Virginia, is Dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This column was first published in The Mennonite (Oct. 2011).