J Daniel Hess’ Blog

Today I read Rhoda Janzen’s “memoir of going home.”  In very brief, Janzen, at age 43, after two extraordinarily difficult events, returns to her Mennonite community of origin in Fresno, California for a Sabbatical rest from her college teaching position at Hope College.

I envision four distinctly different groups of readers.  (1) Non-Mennonite readers who reside on the conservative side of the political and religious continuum.  (2) Non-Mennonite readers who think of themselves as liberal.  (3) Traditional Mennonites.  And (4) Mennonites at the edges. My guess is that as collective units, these four will have contrasting opinions about Janzen’s book.

Conservative non-Mennonites will not stay with the memoir long enough to see any redemptive message, what with vulgarities, promiscuity and open rejection of Christian faith unabashedly verbalized by a woman who left her religious upbringing and got herself into lots of trouble. If a book is to be rejected on the basis of a “dirty word” or “elicit relationships” this one fails early.

Liberal non-Mennonites — and I’ve read at least one such review in New York Times Book Review — will praise the wit and humor and insight of the writer and pause in wonder of the power of Mennonite community to heal a broken heart. They will see Rhoda’s mother as a flamboyant angel; quaint traditions will begin to make sense.

Conservative Mennonites — and I speak of this group with respect — will shudder, as they have shuddered many times before when Mennonite and ex-Mennonite artists “fly the coop” and then report their twisted reactions to the way they were brought up. Rhoda Janzen’s style does not admit euphemisms. She calls things by their names. Some readers may react as did John Updike’s wife: “Reading his books is like having a mouthful of pubic hair.”  This book will offend the sensibilities of many of these people. There will be whispers at quilting parties and concerned discussions at ministerial meetings. But since Janzen is not a church member, there’s not much they can do except pity her relatives and friends who are “exposed” in this account. One of my friends considers the book “a pitiful, misguided effort;” I understand this disquiet.

Mennonites at the edges — and I consider myself one — will laugh our way through the book, not just because it is funny but also because we’ve been there and done that. Oops, not all of us. Some have never had the will or courage or grace to return home from our far-out sojourns, home to our Mennonite communities of origin. The nature of our sojourns varies: coming out, changing political parties, turning away from Christianity, doing drugs, getting Ph.Ds, marrying aliens, helping to create popular culture, making gross mistakes and so forth.

For a selected number of us, and I hope it is the majority, the return home has been similar to Janzen’s. Mine occurred at age 48 when I and my family drove to Pennsylvania to help celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. While we had made holiday visits prior to this event, I had not yet truly returned home. I wrote about this occasion.

The anniversary party stunned me.  For three hours at the East Petersburg Fire Hall, I met little cousins now grown tall, straight uncles now bent, aunts whose erect sturdiness I hadn’t noticed as a child, people of my blood, farmers and homemakers and carpenters and feed salesmen and nurse aides. People from Manheim and Christiana and Elizabethtown and Ephrata.

Some I didn’t recognize.  Thirty five years was too thick a camouflage.  They had to say their names.  And we’d stand for a moment in disbelief – imagine not knowing Miriam or Elwood – and then of a sudden clutch each other, letting blood touch blood.  And many introduced a wife or husband, and reached for a wallet to show pictures of children now grown.  Again, we’d draw close, not as people about to make a friendly pact, but as parties to an old pact that never could be broken.

I heard vignettes of life, succinct summaries of 35 years; in an afternoon, I encountered just about all of the possibilities: a baby born handicapped, marriage to a high school sweet heart, a youth run away from home, a foot caught in an auger, a woman depressed for a decade, a lucky break at IBM.  I saw people with eyes aflame, and eyes downcast.  I heard the echoes of laughter from living rooms decades earlier, and saw 45-year-old men now wearing tiresome habits that began as poor teenage manners. I shook the hands of a farmer, broad and callused, and hands of a person frail with diabetes.

In the presence of that throng, two older people stepped up to me and without introduction enveloped me in their arms.  “Daniel! Daniel!”  It was Uncle Wilbur and Aunt Barbara, two relatives I had known only as big, for I was then a child.  Uncle Wilbur had been quiet, a farmer on a dairy down beyond Cochranville.  At family reunions he was a  gracious host, but never called attention to himself and never gushed over us.   Aunt Barbara had always been the happy enthusiastic aunt in the kitchen, mother of three likable cousins, Anna Mary, Robert and Wilbur Junior.

Many years passed.   Uncles and aunts and cousins stayed home when I left for college, then graduate school, professional life, and rearing my own family in another state.

In our conversation, I learned that Uncle Wilbur had been ordained a minister, something I just couldn’t imagine in a man quiet as he.  But as a faithful Mennonite, he answered the call of his church.  He was chosen by lot and served a congregation with integrity.

There was something about the way they greeted me, the wide open hug held close, the words “Daniel! Daniel!” that made me know, as for the first time, whom I belonged to.

Who I was, how I acted, what I believed had been molded by circumstances and people I myself had no part in choosing — that I had been born in Lancaster County Pennsylvania, part of an extended Mennonite family, in a farming community, in the year 1937.  How can a person be so lucky?

I thought of a Barbra Streisand line, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”  And the title of a book by Harold S. Bender, “These are my people.”

Back home in the Midwest the week after the anniversary dinner as I tried to measure the meanings of my people, I got out paper and pen and wrote to Uncle Wilbur and Aunt Barbara.  No Hallmark card could say what I meant.  The note was not significant, yet it was a bit strange because I usually don’t write such notes.  But I was compelled to thank Uncle Wilbur and Aunt Barbara for . . . .  Actually I don’t recall my words.

Two weeks later, Mother phoned across the 600 miles to say that on Saturday, Uncle Wilbur was outside working, then came into the house, sat down, and died.

May God bless Uncle Wilbur and my family forever and ever.

I value Janzen’s book because it tells her story well with integrity and forthrightness, not only in interacting with her Mennonite home but also in her coming to accept her own role in a journey that  crashed.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.