"How to Win by Losing"

Recently I read that two of my favorite bloggers, Carol Bodensteiner and Shirley Hershey Showalter decided to collaborate their writing efforts. Both of them have written memoirs about growing up in the country (Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World by Shirley Hershey Showalter and Growing Up Country by Carol Bodensteiner). People who read their books told them so many stories about their own days of growing up in the country that these two authors wanted to provide a place for people to find each other and to share their stories. With the help of Iowa governor Terry Branstad, who signed a proclamation declaring March 18, 2015, "I Grew Up Country Day," they did just that, providing a Facebook page for people to share their stories on that day.

Our Family in Germany, 1947
(I am next to my mother)

When I read about this event in Carol's blog, I began to think about the fact that I didn't "grow up country" and that I wished I had. Suddenly I felt that this was my heritage too; an idyllic childhood had been stolen from me by Communism in Ukraine. Revolutionaries confiscated my grandparents' land and our family became refugees. It didn't seem fair and when I thought about it, it made me angry.

A meditation by Richard Rohr helped me regain my equilibrium. In "How to Win by Losing," Rohr explains the countercultural and paradoxical teachings of Jesus (Matthew 5-7). A story that begins with loss can be a very rich and can be told in many different ways, as Jesus so aptly illustrated in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus tells stories about a lost son, a lost coin and a lost sheep. 

I have to accept that I have a different story than Shirley and Carol and that it is in the telling of my own story that I will come to an understanding of who I am. I do tell this story as I live my life. I tell it orally to my children and grandchildren in bits and pieces, and I blog about it. Most often, however, it plays in my head and that's usually where it stays. I enjoy this ruminating, and so I love what April Yamasaki wrote in her book Sacred Pauses: "The blank page is not a rebuke to get busy writing, but an invitation to linger over your thoughts" (p.32). It makes the writing process inviting rather than intimidating.

I also like what columnist Jim Taylor (Okanagan, B.C.) says: "I write because I frequently don’t know what I’m thinking until I hear myself saying it. Thoughts swirl through my mind like a school of minnows darting through the shallows in a lake; I have to line individual minnows up in order to understand them. That’s the great advantage of writing. I get to see my words before anyone else does. I can parade them for my audience of one, straighten their lapels, even send them back to change into more suitable attire."

I'm grateful that I don't remember my family's losses and that I was too young to understand what was happening. It is only in retrospect that I begin to comprehend a little of what my parents and grandparents endured and how courageous they were. When they finally settled in that small village they helped build in the Paraguayan Chaco, I was four years old, and this was my first home! 

In Paraguay, 1948
(I am seated on the right)

Five years later, when I was nine, my family arrived in Canada. We lived in the country for only one year before moving into town where my dad found work. It was my great uncle who exposed me to what it was like to "live in the country." We went to his farm often and I "helped" with milking, driving tractor, taking the cows out to pasture, and playing with the horses. I also had several close friends who were "country girls"; they often invited me over to their place. These are wonderful memories for a small-town girl! So I did have my share of "growing up country" even though I didn't live in the country. 

Arrival in Alberta, 1952

Transformed

An interesting place here in our city of Winnipeg is Sam's Place, a used bookstore, cafe, and music venue, located in the Elmwood neighbourhood of Winnipeg. I love this place because I enjoy being surrounded by books. They are all donated and originally belonged to someone's library. I like to think that they were loved and cherished in the homes from which they came and still exude this atmosphere.

Hardy and I were both interested when we read that the focus for January at Sam's Place was MCC Manitoba's Low German Program. On January 14th we attended a special event there called "Low German Mennonites in the City -- Telling our Stories."

The event was hosted by Tina Fehr Kehler, who is fluent in English and Low German and works with MCC to help Mennonites arriving from Central and South America. Her special guest was Mari Loewen. Both Tina and Mari shared their struggle of growing up in a very conservative community where the lovely "worldly" things which attracted them were forbidden. If they wanted to wear jeans like their peers at school they had to wear them under their dresses. Makeup had to be applied in secret and all evidence of it removed before they returned home. Both Tina and Mari eventually moved to the city and after a huge time of adjustment they launched their own careers, Tina with MCC and Mari editing a very successful magazine called Anna. 

                      

This is where the story really becomes beautiful. Mari did not know what to call her magazine, until someone asked her what her mother's name was. Anna, her plain Mennonite mother, who cooked and baked and sewed and gardened, became the inspiration for the magazine's title. Mari told her audience that everything she aspires to in this magazine, she learned at the feet of her parents -- the ingenuity and imagination to invent new ways of doing things from the little that was available, the hard work required to keep a farm and family thriving, the stubborn tenacity to hang in there in spite of the odds against them. As an adult, Mari was able to set aside her frustration at her people's conservative mindset and recognize, appreciate, and make use of their positive qualities. Both Tina and Mari exhibit no trace of bitterness, but are able to laugh and make fun of things that had the potential to turn them against their parents and their community.

My reading these days has also broadened my perspective on what it means to be transformed from a young and somewhat naive person into a determined adult through extraordinary suffering and unimaginable circumstances. A friend gave me the book A House in the Sky, by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett. Lindhout's memoir tells the story of her horrific experience as a captive for ransom by Somalian bandits. She was released after more than a year of captivity in which she endured torture that can only be described as evil personified. Through some mysterious process, Lindhout was able to have an out-of-body experience where she floated above her body, seeing "three people suffering, the tortured and the torturers alike." She came to the conclusion that her captors must themselves have undergone extreme deprivation and suffering and she was able to forgive them. After her release and subsequent healing of her body and mind, she actually returned to Somalia and founded the Global Enrichment Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports development, aid, and education initiatives in Somalia and Kenya.

This modern account of suffering reminds me of what some of my family went through just prior to and during World War II. I never heard them speak of it but have read several books about such experiences. These accounts are written in German and really should be translated for the next generations. All of us need to understand that the evil which occurred in the past is yet alive and well among us; we need to be prepared to meet it head-on.

Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hate. It is a power that breaks the chain of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness. (Corrie Ten Boom)

"It's a Small World After All"

We have a large map of the world hanging on our wall. Colored pins mark all the places where we have been. My travelling life began almost as soon as I was born. It was not a luxury of choice that caused my parents, my grandmother, my aunts, and my uncles to leave their home in southern Ukraine and travel the world when I was only four months old. They were forced to flee.

By the time I was four, we had fled via Poland and Germany, then crossed an ocean and ended up in the southern hemisphere (in the Chaco of Paraguay, South America). When I was nine we arrived in Canada. After high school I changed provinces; after marriage I changed continents and found myself once again in the southern hemisphere (in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where we lived for almost twenty years.

Travelling must have been in the stars for both my husband and me. He too fled his home (in the Vistula Delta of what is now northern Poland) with his mother and grandparents. He was seven years old. He too crossed an ocean. If I hadn't changed provinces in 1963, we would not have met each other! As it turns out, we did, and that is another whole story, left for another time.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to live in the same place your whole life; to be born in the same place where you die; to keep all your uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents around you, always! That is not my story.

This January we will be celebrating our 47th anniversary. We are travelling again, but now we travel backwards more often than we travel ahead! Allow me that pleasure for just a moment.

It was a bitter cold day that January 13th in 1968, much like it is these days here in Manitoba. I felt like the winter queen in C.S. Lewis's Narnia series. I should have worn a fur stole and arrived in a sleigh drawn by horses!  Instead, Hardy's cousin Lothar chauffeured us and we had decorated the car with plastic flowers. Just recently Lothar and his wife Ruth celebrated their 60th anniversary and we reminisced a bit about our wedding day. Their daughter Karin was our candle lighter, together with my little sister. Karin is now a grandmother!

When I look at this picture of the beginning of our life together, I realize that, even though we are totally absorbed in each other, we were not alone in this venture. Lothar made his car available to us; my sisters and I made the flowers that decorated it; my Mom made my wedding dress; the women at the church cooked our wedding meal. 

When Hardy and I got married, we left our loving community but we never felt that it left us. We took with us what we had learned from community at home and in Africa we found another community -- fellow missionaries who helped us transition into another culture; other expatriates whom we met at our children's international school and at the international church; and finally, when we were more comfortable in our surroundings, the local people. They taught us their language, their customs, and their way of life. So, in a sense, we took our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins along with us and added many more to our community.

On this cold January morning of 2015 I realize once again how wealthy we are! We left Africa in 1984 and found a new community in Kitchener-Waterloo. In 2008 we returned to the place where we began our life together: Winnipeg, Manitoba. Some family members and friends have passed away. Others have moved on. We have once more transitioned to a new community, gained new friends, touched base with a few of the old ones. 

By loving forces quietly surrounded

Secure and sheltered I can feel no fear,

So I would like to live these days together

And go with you into another year.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned these words [my translation] from his prison cell in December 1944, days before he was executed by the Nazis.)

How Can I Keep From Singing?

For me, November is probably the bleakest month of the year (February is a close second!). The autumn splendor has disappeared and there is a gray atmosphere, a mixture of rain, sleet and snow. The prospect of six months of winter does not appeal to me at all. 

The Titanic sank in November. A dear friend and her three-year-old daughter were killed in a car accident in November. 

But good things happened in November too, just like they do in other months of the year. My Dad was born November 12th. Today, as I write this, is his birthday. I miss choosing birthday cards for him and writing letters to him in November (following our marriage we never lived close to home). My parents got married in November and their time together lasted almost 65 years. They taught us eight children about genuine love and commitment and I am so grateful to them. 

In October 1952, our family arrived in Canada after living in Paraguay for five years. I was nine years old. My mother had told us about snow. She cut paper snowflakes for us every Christmas and they were beautiful. She told us about Christmas in Ukraine and Germany and sang the German Christmas carol "Leise rieselt der Schnee" (quietly falls the snow) on sweltering Christmas Eves in Paraguay. That November of 1952 she called us to the window with great excitement. "Look at the snow!" she exclaimed. "Soon it will be Christmas. Our first Christmas in Canada!" I looked and looked, but all I saw was streaks of what looked like rain. If that was snow, I didn't know what all the fuss was about! I was quite disappointed. Later in December and for the rest of the winter the fields were covered with snow and we had to wrap scarves around our faces to keep them from freezing as we walked to school. After a while the scarves felt like frozen cardboard. I did not enjoy this. Snowballs shoved down my neck by boisterous boys were not my idea of fun either!

Above is a picture of my Dad and my sister and me in southern Germany, about a year after we were reunited. He had been drafted into the German army toward the end of the war, just before my sister was born. 

Several years ago I got in touch with a woman who used to babysit my sister and me when we were refugees. A teenager at the time, she is now an elderly woman. She says what she remembers about us is that we were always singing. As children, what mattered most of all was that we were loved and cared for. That made us happy.

Recently Hardy and I attended a luncheon in honor of Edgar Stoesz, an American Mennonite we met on two travel tours, one to Paraguay and one to Poland and Ukraine. Edgar was the "story teller" on both of these tours. Throughout most of his adult life Edgar worked with Mennonite Central Committee and had many interesting experiences to share with his fellow travelers. In his book Like a Mustard Seed (2008), he tells the story of how my father and his friend, Hans Rempel,  shouldered the burden of forming a vibrant church in the new Neuland colony,  I had never heard that story before. 

                                        

Edgar's most recent book, Finding my Way (2014), is his memoir. Edgar is an octogenarian and has led a long and interesting life. He ends his memoir with Robert Lowry's hymn "My Life Flows On."

No storm can shake my inmost calm

While to that Rock I'm clinging.

Since love is Lord of heav'n and earth,

How can I keep from singing?

I'm beginning to convince myself that I can make it through another November. I'll sing myself through it!

To Autumn

Of late I've been enjoying the "music" of the autumn season and have overcome my sadness and melancholy at summer's passing.  I mentioned the poets Keats and Rilke in my September post, and quoted some lines of lament from one of Rilke's autumn poems, which matched my mood at that time. Today my thinking is more in line with Keats who calls autumn a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" in his poem "To Autumn."  When he laments the disappearance of the songs of spring he corrects himself and says, "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too."

In my last post I wrote about our neighbour's apples ripening on the tree and falling to the ground. My dear husband, who cannot abide waste of any kind, mentioned it to one of their teen girls and offered to pick the apples in exchange for a bag or two. The next morning when I opened the front door there were five bags of beautiful apples on the stoop! I spent a day processing one bag (coring, peeling, slicing, freezing, making apple crisp). It was enough to inspire me to be generous with this bountiful gift. I stored as many as I could in the fridge crisper and passed the rest on to my sisters and to friends at church.

Thanksgiving is here in all its glory! I am thankful for apples and pumpkins and squash and all the delicious things I can make with them to satisfy my physical need for nourishment. I am thankful for poets like Keats and Rilke who feed my soul. I am so grateful for places like McNally Robinson Booksellers and Jubilee Mennonite Church that give me the opportunity to take care of my soul as well as my body. We had an amazing thanksgiving potluck at church last Sunday, and when we go to readings at McNally Robinson we sometimes enjoy their excellent restaurant. Just recently we have attended several presentations by Mennonite writers such as Maurice Mierau (Detachment: An Adoption Memoir) which I mentioned in my last post, and David Bergen (Leaving Tomorrow). I am looking forward to reading Rudy Wiebe's new novel Come Back, about the loss of a child through suicide.

I am thankful for writer friends such as Dora Dueck who encouraged me to begin writing this blog. Her recent book, What You Get at Home (a collection of short stories), received an excellent review in the latest "Journal of Mennonite Studies" (Vol.32, 2014). In part, Frieda Esau Klippenstein writes:

As a Mennonite writer, there is something refreshingly different about Dora Dueck. The secret to success for many talented Mennonite novelists and short-story writers has been their audacity or shock value.  . . .  Dueck's writing is not within this genre. It is not at all outrageous, and is notably devoid of indignation or reproach. Rather than amusing or shocking us to attention, her strategy involves layers of perspective, with which she lures us to a place of empathy and new understanding. Her characters are so authentically portrayed that it is easy to believe that Dueck knows these people -- perhaps is some of these people. With this level of ease and confidence, overstatement is not necessary.

Last, but not least, I am thankful for friends who have sustained me along my life's journey. They live on in my memory even though we may have lost touch over the years. Just recently one such friend arrived at my doorstep. In grade twelve Carrie and I edited the high school newspaper together, struggled with math and science and had a crush on the same guy. Our ways parted after high school and we didn't see each other for fifty-one years.  FIFTY-ONE YEARS!  It blows my mind!  She came to Winnipeg to attend a Mennonite academic conference and we had one evening and a lingering breakfast together. Conversation flowed and on parting we realized we needed much more time! Perhaps I can return the visit and spend some time in B.C. where Carrie makes her home.

"I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers."

-- L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

The Days of September

I have to face the fact that summer is over and September is well on its way. I recognize all the signs: plummeting temperatures that almost reach the freezing point at night; geese honking across the evening sky and staging on the nearby lake; sunset arriving earlier as I go on my evening walk; our neighbor's apple tree loaded with sun-ripened fruit that falls to the ground and rots (When is he going to pick them? When is he going to bring us some? Maybe he forgot this year!); me, dragging my houseplants inside from the deck and realizing that they have grown immensely over the summer and I don't have room for them all. Our bright kitchen is beginning to look overgrown and I'm debating about which plants I have to get rid of.

There is beauty in this season of slow relinquishment, even though it is tinged with sadness. The poetry of Keats (To Autumn) and Rilke (Die Blätter fallen) hum in my head:

The leaves are falling, falling from afar, / as if in heaven distant gardens wither /

they fall reluctantly / and in the night the heavy earth has fallen / 

from all the stars into its loneliness. /

We all are falling. / This hand falls. / Regard the other one. / It lies in all. /

And yet there is one / holding all this falling / forever gently in his hands. 

                                                                          (R.M. Rilke, Die Blätter, trsl. by E.N. Schroeder)                                                   

Autumn Leaves, by Sir John Everett Millais

My summer reading has, for some reason, been all about the sadness experienced by people through abandonment and death, and how they (for the most part) manage to struggle through to the other side.

It began with Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search by Martin Sexsmith, which we chose to read for our Sisters' Book Club. The Catholic Church took three-year-old Michael away from his single mother and sold him to a well-meaning American family. For years mother and son searched for each other from across the Atlantic. The book itself is very sad and rather depressing, with little redemption. I saw the movie (Philomena) first and (exceptionally) it was much better than the book.

Another book on the topic of adoption is Maurice Mierau's Detachment: An Adoption Memoir. It  is written from the parents' perspective. The author and his wife adopted two brothers, a three-year-old and a five-year-old from a Ukrainian orphanage in 2005. Like Michael in Philomena, the boys struggle with a sense of abandonment. Mierau deftly weaves the adoption experience in with his father's traumatic past; that of a small Mennonite boy who witnessed atrocities in war-torn Ukraine and Germany during World War II. The memoir is realistic and unsentimental. Both of these books widened my horizon and helped me toward a better understanding of what happens to children psychologically when they feel that their parents have forsaken them.

Moving from these adoption books, I read two books by Beth Powning which deal with the grieving process after losing a loved one. The Shadow Child (1999) is the story of a mother coming to terms with the stillbirth of her first child. I resonated with this memoir because it so accurately described my own feelings after losing our premature son.

Powning's second book, The Hatbox Letters, is a novel of love, grief and renewal. A widow begins to connect the strands of her unravelled life, while at the same time piecing together the hidden tragedy of her family through the reading of old letters. I was never bored by Powning's lengthy descriptive passages. They are like paintings in a museum that you can look at time and again and discover new meaning.

                     

I know that winter is inevitable and I will deal with it. I'll just move my chair a little closer to the fireplace, pick up a good book and transport myself into another world for a while. But for now, there is still time to enjoy autumn's splendor. I hope these Indian summer days will stretch well into November.

Sadness is a Wall Between Two Gardens

Years ago my husband Hardy and I had an experience which still makes us smile. We were in Winnipeg visiting family, and a missionary colleague invited us out for dinner to a Chinese restaurant together with our Congolese friend Pakisa Tshimaka, who is a paraplegic. We provided the transportation. 

After enjoying a delicious meal, we returned to our vehicle only to discover that our car would not start. It seemed the battery was dead and we would have to find someone who could help us restart it. 

As we sat there contemplating our next move, Pakisa glanced down the sidewalk and said, "I think Jesus is coming to help us." Startled, we followed his gaze, and sure enough, there was a bearded man coming down the sidewalk carrying a cross. He stopped for a moment, put down his cross and asked if something was wrong. We told him our car battery was dead and perhaps he could assist us by helping us push the car. He shook his head and said he was sorry he couldn't help us. He was carrying his cross all the way across Canada and he needed to be on his way, and off he went. "That wasn't Jesus, was it?" said Pakisa somewhat wistfully.

Hardy went into the restaurant to make a phone call. When the restaurant staff heard of our dilemma, one of the waitresses, a young Chinese woman, went to get her car, pulled out a set of jumper cables, attached them to her battery and to ours, and before long we were on our way. Pakisa smiled ruefully and said, "I think Jesus is a Chinese woman."

We often remind ourselves of that statement when our preconceived notions of how things ought to be do not match with our experiences.

I was reminded of it again when I read William Paul Young's novel, The Shack, for the second time. The author walks us through a father's journey with grief after his  youngest daughter, Missy, is abducted from a campground where the family is holidaying. She is brutally murdered. The book was published in 2007 and became a New York Times bestseller, with over five million copies in print. I read it at the time, was profoundly moved by it, but then put it aside. Recently, as we helped our oldest daughter and her family move to a new place, I rediscovered the book. My daughter had borrowed it and forgotten to return it. I read it again from cover to cover.

The Shack is an allegory in which the grieving father has a spiritual experience beyond anything he could ever imagine. Several months after the murder, he returns to the shack in the mountains where his daughter's bloody dress has been found. Like the battery in our car he needs a complete recharge, because everything in him has died. In the cabin he meets a God who is nothing like the one he has pictured all his life. The author depicts God as a big jolly black woman who loves to cook; Jesus is a brown bearded young man of Middle-Eastern origin, and the Holy Spirit is a lovely Asian woman. Together, the three-in-one help the father work through his grief and anger. He must face and deal with the demons of his own past before he can begin to work through the immense sadness and despair he feels at the loss of his little girl.

"Sadness is a wall between two gardens," writes the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran.

Rereading this book has been therapy for me. As I wrote in a previous post (June 24th), the saddest day of my life was the day we lost our firstborn son. Any parent who has gone through a similar experience will probably identify with this. I imagine that the grief is even more profound and also mixed with rage when a child's life is deliberately taken by someone. I cannot even begin to understand how angry and upset those people must be who lost loved ones in the recent missile attack on an airplane flying over Ukraine.

Like the main character in The Shack, those of us who have experienced the death of a loved one must go through the grieving process in order to be healed. It is never finished.

"Sadness is a wall between two gardens."

Often the wall of sadness grows higher and higher and it seems impossible to find our way over this wall to the other side. Reading a book like The Shack might help someone take another step toward healing.

[Postscript]

At the time I rediscovered this book, I was preparing to lead worship on Sunday and writing a memorial for a tree dedication which would happen that same week. We were also busy  helping our daughter and family move, so I didn't have a lot of preparation time. When I paged through the book, I noticed that every chapter was headed by a quote. These quotes helped me immensely and gave me the inspiration for the words I needed that weekend.

Interestingly enough, The Shack kept inspiring me and I was so moved that I decided to blog about it. I also received some strong "nudges" to do so. The nudges came from what Catherine Marshall, in her book Beyond Ourselves, calls the "inner Voice." This "inner Voice" prompts us and we ignore it to our own detriment. One nudge was that my daughter had given us things to take to the thrift store, and when I was sorting through things, the book was there again (she must have had a second copy). It looked like a well-used copy, but my daughter does not remember having a second copy! Another "nudge" I got was that our youngest daughter called and told me they had won a painting from a raffle ticket they had purchased. She said it was a picture of mountains and a cabin. When I saw the painting, it was "the shack," just like I had pictured it while reading the book! I now had no doubt what the topic of my next blog posting should be!