Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Communication, discernment amid differences, Polarization, Teachings of Jesus

Orthodoxy and Anabaptist-Mennonitism in Respectful Conversation

Leave a comment

Some  months ago Harold Heie, with whom I had once co-edited Mutual Treasure: Seeking Better Ways for Christians and Culture to Converse, asked me to consider being 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.

The inaugural post was by David Ford, of the Orthodox tradition, and I was Anabaptist-Mennonite respondent, a response also offered below. In future months I’ll also potentially share other responses and my main post on my own tradition, scheduled for December 2021.

*  *  *

As I’ll explore more fully in my main post (Dec. 2021) on how Anabaptist-Mennonites view following Jesus, the fragmentation of my tradition(s) makes it a challenge to discern the most fruitful vantage point from which to write. Not only is Anabaptism embodied in multiple traditions but its expressions in Mennonite Church USA, to which I belong, are increasingly fragmented.

MC USA is currently only about a generation old after being formed in 2002 from the merger of prior Mennonite denominations with their own centuries-long histories of fragmentation. Yet already in the past decade or so, inability to resolve deep differences, not limited to but certainly often revolving around whether and how to welcome LGBTQ participants, has caused MC USA to lose almost half its members. The pre-merger denominations had a total of 130,000-some members, the merged denomination initially 120,000-some, and the current denomination in the 60,000s.

As I’ll touch on again in my December post, each fragmentation sends sub-traditions rippling this direction and that. As I wrestle then with what standpoint to adopt in responding to David Ford’s insightful, inspiring, even moving overview of what it means to follow Jesus in the Orthodox tradition, I find myself drawn to remembering the main emphases, often enough stereotypes, within which I was shaped from boyhood on. Let them provide, helpfully or not, hints of a grid for approaching Orthodoxy and engaging how Ford’s articulations fit or challenge the impressions within which I was formed.

A primal emphasis I imbibed practically from cradle on was that Anabaptism and specifically my Mennonite expression of it had reclaimed the purity of the early church after centuries of corruption. Such Anabaptism was not only a reaction against the historic church, particularly Roman Catholic as experienced in 1500s Europe, but also a Radical Reformation reaction against or at minimum beyond the “establishment” Protestant Reformation. This is why early generations of Anabaptists and Mennonites were often persecuted and killed for their beliefs. I’ll always remember the Church of the Brethren (another Anabaptist tradition) seminary friend who, sitting among our Reformed-tradition friends, told the professor and class he still could hardly fellowship among those whose forebears had drowned, burned, beheaded his ancestors.

Still a core enemy was commonly viewed as the Roman Catholic Church,  casting its thought-to-be-corrupt shadow over the entire church but perhaps more malignantly than Eastern Orthodoxy. The latter seemed almost too distant and different to be meaningfully engaged.

If there was an error particularly linked to Orthodoxy it was perhaps iconography. As a visit to many long-established Mennonite church buildings devoid of sacred imagery will sometimes immediately make clear, Mennonites have long been iconoclasts, sharing with many Protestants the view that icons are idolatrous but in their Radical Reformation way rejecting icons with even greater passion. The distinctive style of Orthodox iconography has sometimes made it seem even more greatly “other.”

A second emphasis was that in contrast to Catholics and Protestants, often viewed as “buying” their salvation through such practices as infant baptism, the Mass/Eucharist, and/or “cheap” grace,” Mennonites embodied the saving power of Christ through literally living out the teachings of Jesus. Hence Mennonites (stemming from the Anabaptists whose name means “rebaptizers,” a label imposed by enemies) viewed infant baptism as not being faithful to the Jesus who invited adults to make a conscious decision to follow him. Even quite conservative Mennonites frequently resisted the state through refusing to take up arms because Jesus taught love of enemies. They resisted swearing oaths because Jesus taught us to let our yea be yea and our nay be nay. And so forth.

Today some branches of Anabaptist-Mennonitism have moved far beyond the more stereotypical aspects of such emphases. Mennonites engage in interfaith dialogues with Roman Catholicism and sometimes Orthodoxy and even become converts. So it would be misleading to suggest that attending appreciatively to David Ford is anomalous. But I do want to underscore—appreciatively indeed!—that Ford does ease the path for respectful conversation. While not minimizing or disrespecting such traditions as my own, he offers an Orthodoxy radiating significant strengths and appeal.

I experienced particularly this paragraph as summarizing Orthodoxy as an integrating tradition ranging across Scripture, theology, liturgy, the historical church from apostolic age on, spiritual practices, and more:

For this endeavor, the Orthodox Church provides many resources for spiritual growth, including daily study of the Holy Scriptures, being guided by the Church’s long-standing interpretation of them; time-honored prayers for many occasions; rich liturgical life, replete with psalmody, and including hymns filled with devotion and sound doctrine; the Sacraments—especially the Eucharist, celebrated at every Divine Liturgy, and the Sacrament of Confession; celebration of the many great holy days (Feasts) of the Church Year; the writings of the Church Fathers; the Lives of the Saints; the doctrinal proclamations and canons of the Ecumenical Councils—especially the Nicene Creed; veneration of the Holy Icons; the sign of the Cross; the connection with one’s Patron Saint and Guardian Angel; and the spiritual direction of one’s spiritual father.

Though no doubt partly due to my own blind spots, particularly my early experiences of Anabaptist-Mennonitism left me feeling that the key requirement of following Jesus was to live correctly, in faithful and even almost slavish embrace of Jesus’ teachings, particularly in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. We were to live in conformity only to Jesus, not the false and pagan practices of “the world.” Sixtysome years later, I still relive the weeks my parents forbade my taking part in a first-grade play that included bearing fake weapons. I’ve remained haunted by the near-contemptuous look on my teacher’s face, seeming to say that my family’s values were not only strange but idiotic.

But I had less idea how to nurture a spirituality that would empower such practices. I experienced my tradition as telling me how to live but not so much how to do the living. Ford also emphasizes holy living, at times perhaps echoing a perfectionism I’ve experienced in my own heritage. Yet he also offers a tradition rich in resources for the journey. As for me and my house, we can learn much from that.

We can as well from the “Holy Icons.” For some years I had a Mennonite university colleague who had invested passionately in learning about Orthodox icons and allowing them to inspire his own art. There is a power in visual expressions of holiness sometimes hard to find in traditions focused on words and practices.

When it comes to ethical living, Ford generates two responses for me. First, as a neophyte in encountering Orthodoxy, I was surprised at how strong—and for me stereotype-shattering—the above-introduced emphasis on holy living is. As Ford observes, echoing my own tradition’s commitment to Jesus’ commandments, “Growing in communion with Jesus is accomplished in large measure through keeping His commandments (John 15:10; also 15:14 and 14:15).” Ford relatedly highlights “Endeavoring to surrender our own will to His will (Luke 22:42); this includes surrendering our own will appropriately as we self-sacrificially serve others, placing their needs and desires ahead of our own.”

Second, I did look for Anabaptist-type determination to address the social justice implications of the Sermon on the Mount. I searched for ways Orthodoxy might champion the cruciality of not allowing social, economic, political idols, the nation/state, or the Powers as some might put it, the last word on such matters as, say, how we solve conflicts or share resources, including within and between nations. Or how vital it is to disobey the state if it insists on practices—such as accepting being drafted and sent to war—that violate Jesus’ teachings.

Or seeing major implications for social justice understandings in such calls as Jesus offers in his Luke 4 “inaugural address” proclaiming good news and release to the the poor, captive, blind, bruised. For at least some Mennonites (by no means all amid our many splits but certainly evident in a variety of Mennonite position statements of recent decades) there are resources here for analyzing the troubled state of U.S. creation care, economics, governance, politics, policies, and how to proceed when societies tilt toward the rich, the powerful, those who amass and exploit rather than care for the least of these.

I’d expect that implicit in Orthodoxy as described by Ford are paths for social analysis and justice. At that same time, the explicit focus is particularly on individual, personal, interpersonal, internal spirituality and its nurture and expressions. It seems to me that Orthodoxy would benefit in this area from interaction with Anabaptism.

On the conversation with Orthodoxy could go. And on I hope it will, with my tradition and others, as we share and together find our mutual treasures.

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

Communication, hermeneutics, The other

Love Language

5 Comments

Love Language upside-down chairI’m not the perfect husband. I know, I know. Everybody knows that. I wasn’t really asking for examples. I don’t need more data. It is, yes, stipulated.

Still I was trying to offer love. This was my vision: Last year it was like Covid Covid Covid all the time and my heart had just gotten a new valve and I was never quite sure if my chest would pop open and my heart would stop. So no, I didn’t get around to getting the grass off that little stone patio by the barn that emerged when my friend John, decades ago, said well we have extra stones for this drainage ditch, what shall we do with them?

And I said well what about dump them by that old horse barn which is clearly not today for horses or anything else impressive but would be great with a little bed of white stones in front of it?

So we did it.

And the patio emerged.

And it mostly grows grass and weeds where the white stones should shine.

But this year though my surgery scar is palpable, with little lumps that make me hope for that newfangled thing where they just inject your scar and everything turns baby-skin smooth, I also feel like my chest won’t pop open.

So I moved the chiminea that had been on the front lawn—temporarily for years for my daughter’s pre-wedding celebration—down to that barn patio. I whacked the weeds and sprayed vinegar over them. And I thought wouldn’t it be great to set it up for Joan to join me too, and after she talks with her friends on Zoom we’ll do a little romantic chiminea thing down here with a fire.

To remind myself and show her the way I took a chair, a patio chair with red webbing, and turned it upside-down on the lawn halfway to the barn and this amazing new romantic patio. Then I finished microwaving my part of the leftovers for supper and went down to join Joan.

She was ON A DIFFERENT CHAIR!

“What? I set up a chair just for you.”

“What? ” She says. “What chair!”

“Right there, upside-down on the lawn,” I say, “that red-webbed chair.”

“What?”  she says. “That was for me? How was I supposed to know that was for me?”

“Um because why would a chair with red webbing be upside-down on the lawn other than because I love you?”

“I did have a little trouble understanding why that chair was upside-down on the lawn. I thought it was one more not-yet-completed goal of yours.”

“What!”

“What else would I think? Would you think a chair with red webbing was upside-down on the lawn because I love you?”

“No, I’d wonder why you didn’t finish the job. But that’s different.”

“Why?”

“Well because obviously I set up this whole evening for you, to love you and cherish you like you deserve. And now you’re like what is that chair doing there? Isn’t this a problem? Is our marriage over?”

“Um Michael, how was I supposed to know a chair with red webbing turned upside-down in the middle of the lawn was your love for me? Really?”

“Yes! That’s my love language! Why in the world would I turn a chair over in the middle of the lawn if my love for you wasn’t through sickness and in health until the end of time? Why? Why? Why?”

Joan gazes at me. “Really?”

“Really.”

So now she knows: You see a red-webbing chair turned upside-down in the middle of the lawn, come on, say my goodness what a wonderful husband you are, you are really and truly my sweetie pie. How could I ask for more? Your love language is all a spouse could ever wish for or imagine. Thank you thank you thank you Michael King.

Um. Really?

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. The incident of the red-webbing chair has forced him to recognize that having a degree in rhetoric and communication does not guarantee love-language competence.

Creation care, inspiration, Mental and behavioral health and recovery, Teachings of Jesus

Presence and Love Dancing by the Dead-Ash Fire

4 Comments

Dancing by the fire image“The Affair,” a flawed yet riveting Showtime series, weaves over five seasons a web of sin and sorrow, of poor choices and consequences. One character’s inability across decades to stop harming loved ones and himself is horrifying.

Yet as Noah ages and life holds him sometimes brutally accountable, his heart opens. Noah tells a traumatized Joanie, whom amid tangled choices he once believed his daughter, of epigeneticist Eddie’s theory. Eddie believes trauma can reshape how our genes are expressed, meaning trauma can be biologically passed down. So if your ancestors lost a child you might feel effects without directly experiencing it.

But Noah also tells Joanie, “If trauma and pain can echo through generations, then so can love. If abandonment can ripple across time, then so can presence.”

Ever since that episode, the hope that not only the bad but also the good can ripple down has haunted and inspired me. I think I see it again in Steven Petrow’s Washington Post column (March 7, 2021) on “How you will be remembered depends on how you live today. So, too, does your happiness as you get older.” Petrow begins with poignant examples of what his parents’ tombstones say. His dad’s describes, “Journalist and Professor”; his mom’s testifies, “Beloved by all.”

Petrow explains that his father’s identity was so wrapped up in résumé-building that he had a terrible time adjusting to the loss of his professional perks as he aged. But his mom, though quite professionally accomplished herself, made the transition to “eulogy virtues,” the gifts to life and loved ones that linger even after death.

Petrow also reports his own temptation to live “more like my dad, with much of my energy focused on earning more, beefing up my résumé looking to achieve greater success.” Then he attends to Arthur C. Brooks. “‘After 70,’ Brooks wrote in an essay, ‘some people stay steady in happiness [while] others get happier until death. Others—men in particular—see their happiness plummet.'” And Petrow connects this with his quest to shift “from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues.”

It strikes me that résumé virtues can help pass on trauma and abandonment. In “The Affair,” Noah’s passion to be a best-selling author catalyzes considerable damage. Eulogy virtues may be more likely to pass on presence and love.

This matters to me because Petrow and I must be nearly the same age, and I’m in the thick of wrestling with résumé versus eulogy priorities. My heart is on the eulogy side. But I still miss parts (not all!) of the days my life revolved more than now around professional commitments and weighing this or that decision with potential to change lives for good or ill.

Now sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night from dreams of being back having too many meetings all the time and even navigating the anger of a colleague who was angry because I couldn’t schedule the appointments he thought I owed him quickly and often enough. That phase seemed soul-damaging while I was in it and often was. Yet in the dreams there is a frisson to being endlessly busy and in demand that can haunt me when I awake to its absence.

So though I’ve long aimed not to live like Petrow’s dad, I resonate with his late-life pain. And I’m glad Petrow ends with love for a father whose happiness declined because of lost résumé status but who even so had fostered eulogy values:

Soon after he died, and more than 15 years after he retired, his colleagues and students profusely acknowledged his résumé virtues—but their tributes also eulogized his humanity, noting he had been “a wonderful mentor and advocate,” and not least of all, “an amazing man with a kind heart.”

Petrow concludes, “I wish my dad had been able to hear that.”

I won’t be able to hear what’s said at my funeral, but Petrow helps me continue the move from résumé to eulogy activities. This seems to me particularly urgent now in a country and world unraveling as politicizing everything destroys us; climate extremes tear at bodies, souls, and power grids; a pandemic rips up customs that once spelled home. These are such large forces the temptation is to see the résumé builders—the powerful people—as our main hope now.

But what if that ceaseless restless quest for more better best is not only a solution to but also a cause of what needs healing? What if for those of us who attend to the teachings of Jesus, Petrow is updating give up your life to find it, take up your cross and follow me, for what good will it do you to gain the whole world and lose your soul?

What if urgently called for today are eulogy values? What if that means a vital need is to  pass on—even in tiny ways—presence and love, soul-pursuing rather than world-chasing, to echo Jesus? In this eulogy-centric stage I draw some comfort from that.

And I dare I hope I’m participating in that process even through treating ash trees and with dead-ash fires:

As nights no longer get cold enough to kill emerald ash borers, billions of ash trees are dying. At our house we treated one majestic ash. It was already borer-riddled but the tree guy said just maybe not too late. Last spring luxuriant new leaves crowned the tree. One limited yet glorious miracle. Let that ash tree live long enough for someone to bring a leafing branch from it to my funeral.

But we had to pay $10,000 to take down other dying giants before they fell on our house. Then this: A year ago Joan and I went abroad. A daughter, her husband, and a six-month-old granddaughter joined us. By the time we flew back into panicked Newark airport crowds, our pre-COVID-19 customs were gone and have yet to return. Since Newark we’ve lived in a bubble in which we routinely see only the loved ones who flew back with us that fateful day.

Fridays they stay over into Saturday. Recently I realized our granddaughter really likes rituals, including helping me set up fires in our basement woodstove. Now before Friday bedtime I ask if she wants to go to the basement. Wriggling with joy, she makes me leap to head off her going down the steps herself.

We start the fire. With dead ash wood. Yet from this death springs life: She delights, the flames turning her face golden. She points to the TV. Not good. Except. She’s learned you can play music on TV. So we go to a music channel that’s not too wild but has mellow beats. She starts to dance. And it becomes clear that, like her mother who so loves dancing she’s taken lessons, she gets the beat. She jigs back and forth. She raises both index fingers to point, grinning hugely at dance partners, while she twirls.

I think of my family history. Trauma going back centuries, including depression, anxiety, suicide, and yes, abandonment. On Joan’s side the baby girl who lost her dad at 10 months, its own abandonment. The trauma ripples down and is for us and billions reactivated by COVID-19 wounds.

Then I wonder if also rippling down the generations will be that little girl dancing by the dead-ash fire, experiencing even amid Covid isolations presence and love and giving it back to us. And I dare hope such eulogy practices will linger even longer than the résumé activities now fading.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. Parts of this column were first prepared for a February 28, 2021, sermon at Salford Mennonite Church.

gratitude, inspiration, Mennonite poet, Poetry

Winter Color, by Julia Baker Swann

Leave a comment

I hear a slow summer wind in this sponged carpet of russet needles
under my feet. Smoldering burnt orange around silver tree roots and evergreen.

Husks of tall blonde meadow grasses sway in the barely-breeze.
Skeleton seeds wait, gold even without light.

Rocks splattered with the creep of fungus and lichen. White, yellow,
and neon.
In the warm pockets around each stone’s breath, bright clover tests growth.

When inside my home the clouds are a heavy drape.
I crave the sun-spill across the floor.

When I go out the moss grey sky is a complex churn.
I would need violet, black, and even a dab of rose to paint these layers.

The subtle hues ask me to quiet. To clothe myself
in terracotta and winter-berry, silver-tone, tawny down,

deer-skin, dusted pine, honey-sap and moth-wing white.
To chant these muted colors like a bold prayer,

treasuring the particular sounds.

—Julia Baker Swann is completing an MA in Theopoetics and Writing at Bethany Theological Seminary and is poetry editor at Geez Magazine. She is author of The Moon Is Always Whole, her first poetry collection (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2020).

Anabaptist-Mennonite, Mennonite poet, Poetry, Writing

Country Night, by Jean Janzen

2 Comments

Lying awake I remember branches
scraping the night window, I, a child
away from my crowded home to my
cousin’s spacious country rooms,
she and I in separate beds.

How to hold the memory of my heart
racing in the dark, the small body
curled, the wind wild? How to hold
that child until dawn ignites the leaf
with its tiny separate rooms,
the stem clinging?

—Jean Janzen, a poet living in Fresno, California, is the author of six previous collections of poetry who has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and other awards. A graduate of Fresno Pacific University and California State University of Fresno, she has taught at Fresno Pacific and Eastern Mennonite University. Janzen is author of What the Body Knows (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2015).

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Bible, biblical interpretation

Protect Her from the Chaos

Leave a comment

It has been increasingly painful to watch my granddaughter, old enough to take so much in but too young to talk, use hands to communicate. Whenever she sees something to interact with, she waves. This includes cars and trucks but increasingly settles on people. And above all other children. Yet when she sees children, COVID-19 distances her. So she will wave and wave. Once when her grandma took her to a playground and her waving to potential playmates failed, she burst into tears. Her hands speak her longing. And highlight the distances traumatizing our world these days.

Those hands yearning take me back to books I encountered as a 1980s seminary student but which had been released around the time I was born: Principalities and Powers by G. B. Caird (1956); and  Christ and the Powers, by Hendrikus Berkhof (1953). I’d not heard of either before.

But given how regularly the Apostle Paul’s references to them in letters to the Romans, Ephesians, Colossians were cited in church when I was growing up, I had heard ceaselessly about the principalities and powers. My vague sense was that they were satanic forces of evil, fearsome but not in ways hugely pertinent to my youthful realities.

Caird’s and Berkhof’s were the first treatments of the powers that made me come alive.  Both wrestle with whether Paul ultimately believes literally in angelic or demonic powers and both shift at least some emphasis to what Berkhof calls “structures of earthy existence.” Here the focus starts to fall on the patterns and systems that make up our cultural, political, social, legal, military realms, and more.

It is no accident that Caird and Berkhof were writing in the aftermath of a planet and countries and cultures devastated by world wars. Their books were released in the decade after World War 2, a decade which also saw the Korean War, the Cold War, and so many more occasions for thinking through the powers.

Particularly Berkhof taught me to see such structures as both evil and good. Particularly Berkhof feels to me alive in spirit today, addressing the core realities we are at this moment living through as he tells us that the structures are evil. They are evil because they demand loyalties only God deserves, as when a nation commands us to pledge allegiance in ways that clash with obeying God.

As a Mennonite raised to believe in two main realms, one the world’s, one God’s, and to be loyal to God’s when they clash, I practically drank in this view with my mother’s milk. This is why when I turned draft age during the Vietnam War, I registered as a conscientious objector loyal to God rather than then-President Nixon and the military he commanded.

But that is not the end of the story Berkhof tells us about the powers. For Berkhof the powers are also good. Commenting on Paul’s conclusion in Colossians 1:15-17 that Christ “is before all things, and in him all things hold together,” Berkhof says that “Diverse human traditions, the course of earthly life as conditioned by the heavenly bodies, morality, fixed religious and ethical rules, the administration of justice and the ordering of the state—all these can be tyrants over our life, but in themselves they are not.  .  . ; they are the dikes with which God encircles His good creation, to keep it in His fellowship and protect it from chaos. . . .”

And that takes me back to my granddaughter’s longing hand. For that hand to touch other hands, it needs powers that protect her from the chaos.

On the nights when it looked like U.S. powers were on the cusp of unleashing direct military intervention against protestors for racial justice, some among the military powers I would still register conscientious objection to rose against such domination. Here and there in politics and government as some leaders show us what demonic idolizing of the powers looks like, others, often humbler in ego and role, protect us from chaos.

I pray that in the days ahead and for years to come many hands, seen and unseen, will build dikes against chaos and clasp my granddaughter’s outstretched hand.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. Until recently, when Mennonite World Review was merged into Anabaptist World, he wrote “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

 

Awe and wonder, Creation, Grief and loss, hope, inspiration, Poetry

To the Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star, by Kathryn Winograd

6 Comments

So little you know, wild-winged
and unshaken beneath a dog star,
half-grazing the pines, the bare winter
aspen I stand in the dark wash of
waiting for the tip of a yellow moon.
In Ohio, girlhood, these April stars
circled a pond bull-dozed
by my father, a raft of cattail
where the red-wings spun their nests
above the scrim of caught water.
Tonight, in this near dark, so close
my hand could circle it,
Sirius hovers above the red
factory lights of Pueblo
and the Sangre de Cristo blue-
washed in this hour.
I am cold in this wind,
in this spine of the Milky Way,
these blue white stars named
for a bear or a lyre or a woman
weeping her dead into a river.
I think I was still half-sleeping
in a field of grass, in a haze
of stars, in a far and nameless
country you care nothing
about, burying and unburying
those I love. Such quiet,
the mining trucks to the north
stalled and the little generator
of a shed where no one lives
in winter shut down.
And then, your wings, almost
against the moon. Why
must I always be alone,
searching for something beautiful?

—Kathryn Winograd, a poet and essayist, divides her time between Littleton, Colorado, and a “pie in the sky” cabin her husband and she dreamed of for twenty years before stumbling across forty acres of high meadow ranch land near Phantom Canyon. She is the author of six books, including her most recent collection of essays, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which received the Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her first collection, Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation, was a finalist in the Foreword Reviews 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards.  Her poetry collection, Air Into Breath, an alternate for the Yale Series for Younger Poets, won the Colorado Book Award in Poetry. She currently teaches for Regis University’s Mile High MFA. She wrote “To Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star” during the first months of the pandemic.

Faith, hope, inspiration

Sourdough from East Coast to West and Even Zarephath

2 Comments

It should be emphasized upfront: the primary motivation was neither self-improvement nor altruistic baking for loved ones. It was fear of shortages.

Along with family, I was out of the country when COVID-19 began its wildfire stage. We returned to grocery shelves mostly still normal except for whole corridors emptied of toilet paper. But just days later half-empty shelves became the norm.

Flour started to vanish. Especially wheat flour, my favorite for bread. And yeast. My alarm rose. Amid such big fears as socioeconomic collapse, loved ones getting sick, or I myself being infected post-heart surgery,  I was beginning to experience my day-to-day pandemic concern: fear of shortages.

What if I couldn’t have bread? Especially wheat bread? The antidote became clear after several days of researching the flour/yeast supply challenges: sourdough starter! You can grow sourdough starter from flour and water. Eventually it feeds its way into creating its own sour-tasting yeast mix.

That didn’t solve flour shortages. I’ve not figured out how to fix these by, say, growing and grinding my own grains, but only by watching for sources of the occasional five pounds here or there. I try to accept that as anxiety producing as the erratic supply is, the situation is dramatically less problematic than billions of people have long navigated every day.

So far the flour has not run out. More amazingly, the yeast keeps growing as the starter thrives on. I experience a bit more fully now the power of the Old Testament story of the widow of Zarephath, who has “nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.”

But the prophet Elijah, confronting barren land after God has stopped rain, is out of food. God promises the widow will feed him. Elijah tells her to keep implementing her plan but first to make a little cake for him and then one for herself and her son, because “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” And so it happens (1 Kings 17: 8-16). It may not have been sourdough but it sure reminds me of it.

I‘ll never forget the surge, so intense I discovered the blood pressure I regularly measure had soared, when on the seventh day of feeding my sourdough starter doubled and more. And when dropped in water to test its potency, it practically leaped out, so energized it was.

My family is bewildered. This is not the Michael they know. He’s made it all the way to Medicare without even hinting at the urge someday to bake bread. Now he feeds his starters, Paulette (who eats unbleached flour) and Buddy (who eats wheat flour plus unbleached white) whenever they become exhausted.  In an effort to experience more hints of the Zarephath miracle, he also does not throw out starter discard (a byproduct of feeding the starter) but offers it to waffles and English muffins.

Lo, the recipients of this version of flour and oil are enthusiastic. They plead for an inexhaustible supply. I do my best to provide.

And recently I discovered the joy of providing not just the baked goods but spreading their source across the country. As so many of us have experienced worldwide, COVID-19 had inflicted trauma on West Coast children, grandchildren, and grandparents. Joan and I had previously relied on juggling vacations but often also work travels to include stop-offs in the West. But now such options to bridge the gap between East and West Coasts were blocked. We risked soon going for a year without visiting grandchildren growing up as fast as spring corn stalks. Various risk factors made flying seem unwise. Finally we settled on doing what we could with masks and careful stops to drive and meet halfway across the country.

What balm for traumatized souls. Older grandchildren Kadyn and Maya, eight and four, never before having experienced sourdough baking, each took delighted turns helping to mix and knead. Then my daughter Kristy had an inspired request: Could she take some starter back West? Carefully the feeding and dividing was done, and a starter child born from starter that had by now thrived across some 10 states headed forth across more states and miles.

A week or so later, as we mourned the renewed chasm of 3,000 miles between households came photos from Kristy: bread and muffins made from that sourdough.

When Maya who had helped make bread with me realized her mom was using a version of PawPaw’s starter, she was thrilled.

Through sourdough I’m nurtured—to my surprise given just trying to fix anxiety—in ways that help me grasp why so many new bakers have turned flour and yeast scarce. Sourdough doesn’t fix pandemic nightmares and deaths. But it can feel like healing balm on the wounds.

—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.

hope, Teachings of Jesus

Getting Through

Leave a comment

Years ago after I had published some of her books, I slipped into a talk Mennonite author Katie Funk Wiebe was giving at a retirement community. Although I had long connected with Katie in relation to publishing, I had only met her briefly a decade before. Even back then she was at retirement age and writing particularly on aging. Now in her 80s she was still writing away and active enough to be speaking 1300 miles from her Kansas home.

When I crept into the chapel where I was to help sell her books, I was instantly impressed. Why? Because we often view 80s as winding-down time. Such signals are even stronger as COVID-19 makes some see those over 60 (like me) as having few valuable years left. Yet there was a majesty to Katie that was riveting, even awe-inspiring, as she stood there framed by that head of white hair simultaneously dignified and wild and told her truths. I saw the Katie who in Border Crossing (DreamSeeker Books, rev. ed. 2003) yearned to have done more galloping “at breakneck speed. . . .”

A man likely still older asked Katie this: As we age, as ears and eyes, limbs, even brains fail, how is God with us then? And what are we worth then?

The next questioner wondered what it means to believe God remains present when dementia takes away everything we may have thought of as defining a person.

Katie pondered. She seemed not determined to get answers just right. She just offered the thoughts that came. A main response was to tell of walking with her daughter Christine. After years of failing health, Christine had finally moved in to be taken care of by Katie before dying.

Katie said some days were very hard with not much to be done but get through them. At the end of each day they’d sit with each other. They’d ask what in that day had been life giving, what life denying.

Sometimes they found life-giving things to be thankful for, even if as small as the sun shining. Other days, confessed Katie, they could think of nothing at all. The day had been grueling, even torturous. Those days they’d just sit with and sometimes hold each other and thank God that they still had each other.

In the midst of COVID-19 and so many chapters of the Christian calendar we’ve lived through in recent months, including Lent, Palm/Passion Sunday, Easter, Ascension Day, Trinity Sunday, and more, the Jesus story says that the great takes the form of the low, that God sometimes values the very opposite of what we do, that God is larger than death but also present in death and beyond. I suspect this matters as we confront—often squabbling over political implications—wrenching accounts of persons of all ages, often older but often enough not, savaged by COVID-19 and too frequently taken or grieving one taken.

And I think often that the upside-down Jesus is evident in Katie Funk Wiebe. I see Jesus in Katie’s head of white hair flaring, pondering with her questioners what is left to celebrate when we have little but dim eyes, failed ears, false teeth, a brain that may not even know who we are.

Amid worry that normalcy may not return soon or ever in its old forms, I remember Katie not fixing what can’t be fixed but sitting with dying Christine and even then being grateful for what remained present to be cherished. Both Jesus and Katie are gone now in bodily form, but I sense their spirits living on, intertwining not so much in answers to what lies ahead but in ongoing presence amid whatever each day brings.

—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.

family relationships, Mental health

See Me

Leave a comment

A blessing of six grandchildren is the chance to learn again a key longing of being human: “See me.” The ache to be seen is fundamental. It shapes us from beginning to end and through everything in between.

But oh how it shapes us as we begin. I see this in each grandchild. And I’ve found that with each the moment when we mutually experience the seeing changes our relationship forever. I could give many examples; let me try three representative ones.

I’ll always remember Maya that day we Skyped across a continent. She was nine-ish months. I loved her. I worked at getting to know her. But it was work. I had to keep experimenting with how she wanted to be related to. Then that day she kept bopping her head up and down.

Some impish urge caused me to copy her. She stopped. She stared. She bopped again. I bopped. Again she tested me. I bopped. Suddenly she grinned. Bop bop bop. Back and forth across the miles we bopped.

When I next saw her, I bopped. She bopped. We were launched. Three years later the bond grows ever stronger. What had happened? I believe that in the bopping Maya grasped that she had been seen.

August’s parents needed a babysitter for most of a day. Would I consider it? Yes. I drove five hours to figure out how to engage August. Bopping didn’t cut it. He just stared at his grandfather with a gaze that said, “You’re even more out of it than I thought.”

Experiment with this. Test that. Nothing. No crisis. We were getting along but perfunctorily. He was tolerating me. Then I got on hands and knees and followed. Everywhere he crawled, I crawled. Until . . . aha! He realized he was in charge.

Grins and grins. Crawl a few feet then turn. Is PawPaw following? Yes! More dazzling grins.

Now he walks and talks. But if he gets grumpy all I have to do is follow him, to his room, to look at sheep, to any of his current interests. All he needs is the following that tells him, “I see you.”

My youngest granddaughter, five months, needed figuring out. She responded to typical gestures, including my go-to, walking. But again it was work, a quest for what she really wanted.

One day I added speechifying to walking. I told her with some passion, including hand gestures, about grapes and raisins. I explained that she is a grape but raisins are grapes that have been aged and dried, that people my age are raisins, that her mother is half-grape, half-raisin. She was quite taken with the grandfatherly insights.

Then amid the speechifying her mom put her on a floor blanket. I got down with her. Her brow furrowed—What? What is he doing!—before yielding to a smile. I was joining her! I had seen her. Our relationship was a ballet from that point forward.

I ponder the state of the world. I ponder politicians who demand see me see me see me. I ponder their followers, who likewise want politicians to see us, cater to us, put us first. Perhaps by now it shouldn’t surprise but it does: Even as a pandemic sweeps the world, instead of pulling together many of us are splitting over whether COVID-19 is real, serious, to be fought against even if the economic toll is high—or is a form of fake news, perhaps serious but not that serious, not serious enough to shut things down. Once again the see-me cries emerge and revolve around you see me, not I will see you.

I wonder if we’ve corrupted the see-me transactions and attachments of childhood in ways that destroy. I wonder what would happen if we relearned to see each other at the primal levels I suspect the children within us all crave underneath the distortions of see me into which we keep falling.

—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.

Extending DreamSeeker Magazine through posts from Michael A. King and guests