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Health Care and Community

Mark R. Wenger

I“Really, Michael King, Really”
A Conversation with a Mennonite Unbeliever Michael A. King

After The Mennonite (Feb. 3, 2009) published my column on “Will You Hold Me as I Held You?” it was reprinted in DreamSeeker Magazine (Spring 2009). Between both outlets, that column generated more than average response, but none more substantial than those from a reader who turned out to be a Mennonite no longer able to believe in God. I found his feedback moving, provocative, and worth pondering.

In the midst of that conversation arrived an article by atheist Alan Soffin (now printed after this one). Add to all this the fact that I myself have long wrestled with how we confront life’s shadows yet maintain faith in God (wrestling from which “Hold Me” emerged), and I became convinced that others might value the opportunity to experience the candid engagements of my unbelieving friend with issues of faith and doubt.

Thus with his permission—but with the understanding he shall remain anonymous—I share below our exchange of letters, one from him, then my response, and finally one more from him to me plus a copy of a letter he sent to a friend. The letters are reproduced as written except for light editing to fit Cascadia style, to trim away occasional wording, or to mask Anonymous. 

Dear Michael King,

You have, in your “Will You Hold Me As I Held You” portrayed so eloquently, so very eloquently the mystery and the paradox of human existence. Magnificent. I have read it three or four times in the last three or four days.

After years of living here and living there, of considerable travel, of reading and studying too much in the sage of Western civilization, of shoveling dirt and grass on my parents graves in a futile effort to gain closure, and now watching and holding and playing with new grass—two grandkids—and contemplating my own final withering—-well, your words, your language, your expressions, were as if out of my own well.

However, I am surprised that The Mennonite printed your article. Although most beautifully written and expressed, it is at heart a very depressing consideration of the ultimate meaning (or non-meaning) of life. The one factor that allowed The Mennonite  to devote a page to your inspiration is your occasional reference to “God,” the “grass that fadeth not and that shall endure forever” and the corresponding final reference to the “love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.”

Come now, Michael King, what if there is no God? What if there is no “love of the Lord from everlasting to everlasting?” Despite how often we repeat the phrase and hope against hope that such a reality is not just more grass? What in our “experience” testifies to those “truths” as eloquently as our “experience” testifies to the “grass” metaphor?

And perhaps the most major question of your article. . . . What difference in the final analysis would a “God” make, would the “love of a Lord from everlasting to everlasting make”?? Would such a “God” and such a “love” make the grass which now withereth, flourish again? Does the repetition of those phrases fulfill our deepest need to believe “it just ain’t so”? Is “God” and the “love” merely an extremely powerful antidote to the illusion?

Your entire article is based on experience, the ultimate arbiter of reality. All who read it will immediately identify. The separation will occur in your reference to “God” to “his hands” to his everlasting love . . . really, Michael King, which fork do you really take? Really . . .

Sincerely yours, Anonymous D

Dear Anonymous:

Many thanks for your provocative response to my “Will You Hold Me” column.

I find your thoughts quite insightful and thought-provoking. I’m not sure to what extent you might see them as affirming versus critical, but I myself experience them as accurately aimed except that maybe (though I’m not sure, since I’m not positive what your own thinking here is) I arrive at a slightly different destination while taking much the same path you seem to be pointing toward.

To elaborate: You seem to be highlighting the possibility that God is tacked on to a perspective that finally implies non-meaning/non-God. I don’t really disagree. I intended to push pretty hard on the bleak end of things. I believe Mennonites/Christians tend to be far too quick to offer pious faith statements without confronting the data that seems to call for different conclusions, and my column reflects that, as you rightly discern. I found, in fact, that I was still not quite done going that route when my most recent column came due. See what you think of my continuation of the theme when it appears in The Mennonite June 2 [and in DreamSeeker Magazine Summer 2009].

Where it’s possible we arrive at a different destination is that—as perhaps my forthcoming column elaborates—I don’t see confronting the difficulty of integrating God with our more troubling experiences as thereby invalidating the possibility of God. So for me to include God in the column was not simply to tack on an antidote for an illusion but to long for God to be more than illusion.

Am I sure about this? No. That’s why the column does in fact keep God at some distance. I don’t want God in there too quickly making everything fine. It’s not fine a lot of the time. One Mennonite scholar sent an e-mail describing himself as “a 90-year old, wondering how someone as much younger than I am as you are, can understand the elderly plight that well.” Something like that was what I was trying to get at. Getting God integrally into that is a hard-won challenge, and probably one thing you perceptively pick up on in my column is that I’m not sure how to do it, even as I think it’s worth the quest.

Question: the “Hold Me” column is reprinted in DreamSeeker Magazine, which I edit. I think your letter would make an excellent response piece. How would you feel about having it published?

Thanks again for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully and carefully, Anonymous. 

Dear Michael King,

To begin with, may I again identify the beauty of your expression in “Will You Hold Me?” Very very well done. I loved it . . . and certainly identified with your questions. . . .

Now to continue, of course, you can use my response as you see fit. But without using my name. I have an inordinate fear of revealing how very secular my thought has become—in lieu of my early experience where every kind of doubt or deviation was a certain sign to damnation and worthy of hell-fire.

And even among my friends here in the Midwest, doubts and secular thoughts are not condemned, just merely written off as irrelevant. And being 75 is already being sufficiently irrelevant!! And so I am very cautious in opening up or revealing any thought bordering on unorthodoxy. I have no need of looking for unnecessary trouble. It would be the theological version of “coming out.”

So upon reading today your May 13 letter—I had to chuckle how well I had camouflaged my real intent!!!! But your “suspicions” were well-founded—they are real!! Right on!!

But even in your May 13 letter, you continue to use the word God. Precisely. what does your use of this or these letters—g-o-d—mean? Suppose there is a “God.” What does he-she-it do? What does he-she-it bring to the table, to the conversation? That has relevance for you, for me? What are we looking for, searching for that thing, to which this g-o-d somehow seems to be the answer? Why do you have a need to talk about “God” and what “good” enters your life if and when you do so?

When I have a bolt without a nut, the bolt is useless. Without relevance, without meaning. So I look for a device, a nut, a special nut that will fit the bolt thread and thereby make the bolt relevant, meaningful, helpful. What does this so-called “God” do? Is he something like the above “nut”? I think we know what our problem is (we do?) and so just how does that “thing” that “being” supply the answer as the “nut” does for the “bolt.”

I confess, I am at a loss (a total loss) when I hear people use that word because there is nothing in my experience that bridges epistemologically the gap between “me” and “that thing out there or in here or wherever, whatever it is, is.” I give up. I just roll my eyes and exit the field of discussion!! Maybe we should again read “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett? Have you? Yes, I am certainly waiting for your writing delving further into the “problem”—the “guest”—the “search.”

Sincerely yours, Anonymous. 

Dear Friend of Anonymous,

I owe you a very appreciative and grateful “thank you” for calling this evening—and the small group an apology for not being “present” on Wednesday evenings. The least I can do and should have done is to explain (not excuse) my absence.

The same should be said about my absence from Midwest Congregation. So here goes. . . .

I just don’t find Midwest Congregation intellectually challenging. I used to come because it was very interesting to observe how so-called “religious” folk conduct themselves in what is their once-a-week religious ritual. I finally got bored with the Sunday morning “verbal displays” (called sermons, teachings, etc.) and the lack of intellectual honesty (as I perceived it) in the ensuing discussions.

And I have to admit—I find the 10:30 Sunday morning CBS Schieffer program and especially the 11:00 NBC “Meet the Press” with Gregory so much more exciting and stimulating. Real problems, real subjects . . . pro and con, give and take. I love it.

But also, I loved (and admire) the article in The Mennonite

by Michael King on “Will You Hold Me . . . ” and so I wrote him a letter asking questions (which I thought pertinent!) on his article. Our dialogue was rather interesting.

I miss, I need, I love that kind of interaction. It really begins with experiencing myself as a mystery, even to myself. And to then viewing all those other homo sapiens on two legs wandering to and fro in the same fog (the mystery of life) as I am and wondering what exactly is constitutive of their mystery. . . . Who are they? I? We? What’s going on here?

In conclusion, I just read the June 8 Newsweek, page 30, on “Let’s talk about God,” and as I told you, I asked [name deleted] to order Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate and Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. I become very excited (inwardly agitated!) when I read such articles and can hardly wait until those books arrive. It’s almost like an intellectual and spiritual orgasm . . . they speak to my innermost needs and questions.

On the other hand (on the other side of me!), this coming Sunday (and the following Sundays), I’m going to Midwest Town to sing in the “Old Rugged Cross” Church the “old-fashioned” gospel songs—the ones I grew up with—the ones whose theology is now as far from me as day is from night—but the ones who also exert a tremendous hold on my emotional life. I used to be the pianist in our church . . . and that included the men’s chorus, the revival meetings, altar calls, etc., etc.—you name it.

They became so deeply ingrained in my psyche that to “cast them out” of my mind (to have them “exorcised”) would leave me at the age of 76 rather emotionally barren, destitute, a shell. I so much look forward to singing them—but only with an ample supply of Kleenex on hand.

I hope you will understand. It’s a world I no longer occupy and find impossible to return to. I often ask myself, in introspective moments, where and when and how did this journey happen? Who was the one who opened and cleared such a path and that therefore, according to the Good Book, should be cast into the lake of fire?? What a mystery! Hence the fog in which I wander!

Sincerely, Anonymous

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC; editor,DreamSeeker Magazine; and a pastor and speaker.His unbelieving Mennonite friend’s history includes the post-World War II Mennonite service experiences  in Europe through which he saw the ravages of war, including the Holocaust, and found it difficult indeed to square such experiences with God.