Final Exam Essay

 We as a class have frequently realized throughout this semester that Mennonite writing often deals with how a community treats outsiders. This is obviously a broad topic, even when limited to a Canadian Mennonite perspective. The problem is also very accessible, since it happens constantly in communities of all levels. The lunch table that only the cool kids can sit at is an example. The poem, “Vesta's Father,” by Julia Kasdorf, where the father of her grandmother, Vesta Peachy, is not allowed to be buried in the Mennonite Church's cemetery is also one. One cannot forget that the wall in Jerusalem between Palestine and Israel is another.

In the three Canadian Mennonite novels that our class read, the community is always a Mennonite one. Likewise the questions that the novels ask are related to key historical (and modern) Mennonite themes; exclusion , persecution, and excommunication.

In “Peace Shall Destroy Many,” by Rudy Wiebe, the small Mennonite farming community in Saskatchewan live alongside people that they call “half-breeds,” Native Canadians. There is an uneasy relationship between these groups that deteriorates, as well as other conflicts within the Mennonites. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, it asks, “Whether an individual that tries to include outsiders, can think of themselves as better than those that exclude?”

While Thom becomes self righteous about the issue of conducting church in English to evangelize to the native population, he finds that the pacifist ideals he claims are hard to implement in the heat of the moment. Despite his teacher, Joseph Dueck's model of selfless devotion to larger issues while maintaining a pacifist principle, and his fiery desire to reform his tradition, Thom finds that even he has failings and needs humbleness to accompany his convictions.

In “Katya,” by Sandra Birdsell, there are two levels of separation in the society. The Mennonites are separated from the local Ukrainians by law, language, and religion. However within the Mennonite sphere, there also exists a divide between the rich landowners like the Sudermann family. While one person might see the story as one of the transgressions of the wealthy elite bringing ruin to all, the frame narrative gives the story a different meaning. The question is not, “Why did the bandits destroy the household?” but “How did Katya and those who came to America survive?”

Like the way Katya hid from the murder and destruction in the cellar, her story stayed hidden within her. Finally in this telling of it, to Ernest Unger, the story manages to live on. The idea that this story is being heard and recorded for history draws a parallel between the Russian Mennonite tale and the stories in the Martyr's Mirror. In both cases the fact that people survived persecution is in the end less important to future generations than the survival of their stories. These stories, as we have seen throughout the semester, give foundation and shape to many generations that follow.

In “A Complicated Kindness,” by Miriam Toews, the protagonist, Nomi, tries to find her way in an unusual situation where she is torn between nostalgia for her childhood community and the people that have been rejected by that community. Her question then is, “How do people live when separated by excommunication?”

Excommunication is particularly hard, because insiders who suddenly are no longer insiders have no roots left. In this story, most Nomi's mother and sister choose a selfless route and spare their family the pain of ignoring them by leaving town of their own free will. Nomi has to deal with this side of the separation until she is excommunicated for setting fire to a truck. Then her father leaves, in order to allow her to be free of the family ties that keep her in the town. While saving people from choosing by leaving, is a solution, it's not a particularly good one. It leaves questions and ambiguity, not the least of which being, is that actually why they left. Nomi doesn't have an answer, but the final page of the book, where she hasn't yet committed to leaving a town that utterly rejects her, and all her close family ties have left, is a testament to the pain and difficulty of living with separation from community by excommunication.

Although the introduction noted that all of these stories dealt with those inside and outside of community (similar ideas were explored by Tiessen, Hostetler, and Gundy in their presentations at the second Mennonite Writing Conference), there is a more important connection running through “Peace Shall Destroy Many,” “Katya,” and “A Complicated Kindness.” The similarity is that the Mennonite Church is still dealing with all of these issues.

Growing up in one of the wealthiest areas that Mennonites traditionally live in, I have seen first hand how churches manage to quietly exclude those who don't fit in with our upper-upper middle class lifestyle and maintain a safe distance from our less materially blessed neighbors. However, we still deal with some persecution (albeit, not nearly as perilous as our predecessors). The most clear example to me is the national anthem issue. Though we are not being chased with anabaptist-catchers, our spiritual heritage includes counter-cultural ideas that need to be defended against oppositional philosophies if we are going to retain them. Finally I see the way homosexuals are treated by churches, conferences, and even parts of Goshen college as excommunication. We don't use that language anymore, but we take people who have grown up in this community, and we make them unwelcome through hiring practices and by limiting their ministry potential (among other ways).

The other way that I hope these questions about community are related is that the next generation of Mennonite writers will continue to deal with them and produce books that owe some debt of gratitude to these Mennonite novels that came before them.