A Blessed Good Friday Walk

photo by Nikki Fox, courtesy of the Daily News-Record

I was blessed yesterday participating in the 26th annual Good Friday Walk involving scripture readings (from Luke's passion account) and prayers at each of ten "stations of the cross"at various locations in downtown Harrisonburg, such as the Judicial Building above.

It was my privilege to be the reader at the tenth and last station, the outdoor garden area at the St. Stephens United Church of Christ, where we focused on the burial of Jesus. For the closing prayer I borrowed the words of singer/songwriter Steve Bell and a Holy Week selection from the Common Book of Prayer:

In the mighty name of God
In the saving name of Jesus
In the strong name of the Spirit
We come
We cry
We watch
We wait
We look
We long for you

O God,
who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son
to the death of the cross,
and by his glorious resurrection
delivered us from the power of our enemy:
Grant us so to die daily to sin,
that we may evermore live
with him in the joy of his resurrection;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. 
Amen.
(1979 Book of Common Prayer)

It was a good day for walking, period, in the mode of what David Augsburger calls "pedi-tation". Since I was taking the day off anyway, I enjoyed making the 2 1/2 mile trek on foot to the Good Friday Walk (took the city bus home:-), then another 1/2 mile walk to spend time with my beloved at VMRC's rehab unit, where she is still recovering from her knee replacement surgery. In all, both body and soul greatly benefited.

Jesus sets a good example for us in the walking department. On Good Friday, though, it was a journey like none other, the Via Dolorosa, or "Way of Sorrows".

A Royal Pain in the Knee

My longsuffering wife Alma Jean is currently in a rehab unit at the nearby Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community, recovering from her knee replacement surgery last Friday.

Her good surgeon Dr. Pereles (pronounced "peer-less") of Augusta Health near Staunton, where she had the procedure done, warned her she would have times of hating him for what he's put her through, but neither of us were quite prepared for how excruciating the pain could be. "Worse than having a baby," she said, and so bad I wished I could take turns enduring it for her.

Alma Jean has been a trooper, though, through it all. Bolstered by lots of love, prayers and pain medications, she's endured hours of having her leg strapped in the infamous Continuous Passive Motion (CPM) machine plus numerous sessions of physical therapy, starting at AH and now continuing at VMRC, where she has been since Monday.

We're so grateful to God, friends and family for all the support we've received. Members of our house church and others have brought in an abundance of food and flowers and have helped out in countless ways, including having some angels come in yesterday (while I was at work) and tidy up the place.

All of which helps deal with an ordeal that's clearly not for the faint of heart.

Her address is VMRC, Room 102B, 1475 Virginia Avenue, Harrisonburg, VA 22802.

Leaving The Amish

Saloma Miller Furlong (photo courtesy of DNR)

Last week our local paper published an article on Saloma Miller Furlong’s visit to Eastern Mennonite University to discuss her memoir, "Why I Left the Amish". As an ex-Amish myself, I had a lot of mixed feelings about the piece, one that may or may not have accurately portrayed her beliefs or values, of course.

According to the article, Saloma made her decision to leave her Amish family and community at age 20 to get her “dream job as a waitress at Pizza Hut” and later to become a published author, one of several things she said she could not have accomplished otherwise. (“Leaving The Amish,” March 16, 2013 Daily News-Record).

A part of what motivated her to leave her family was her having an abusive father who suffered from schizophrenia and depression. She did say he later was prescribed medication and “never abused his family again”, but her emotional wounds were obviously painful and deep. 

My own experience was quite different, in that I grew up in an imperfect but deeply caring family, but I also left my own Amish community (at age 21), not to get away from an unhappy past but in order to attend college and become a teacher. My parents weren't really happy about that, but gave their begrudging blessing, though they were afraid I would meet and marry a Mennonite girl if I attended what was then Eastern Mennonite College (which is exactly what happened!). 

Unlike Saloma, who still seems to see the proverbial grass on the other side of the fence as undoubtedly greener, I recognize both the costs and the benefits of my choice. On balance I don’t regret my decision, but there are many things about the community I grew up in that I will always miss. When it comes to the most primal of human needs for identity, security and belonging, I may never be able to celebrate for myself and for our children as much as I have left behind. 

I do feel I have an expanded life, and our children and grandchildren have increased opportunities to accomplish more things. Whether all of these are, in the end, truly better things is a judgment I'm not yet ready to make. I do want to be sure that in striving to have our children experience more of what we didn't have growing up, that we don't deny them some of the good things we did have--simplicity, community, humility and a set of basic, down-to-earth life skills I largely took for granted growing up in that faith community. 

I felt Saloma's story could have simply focused on an individual leaving a family in which an abusive father failed to get some desperately needed medical help until it was too late to salvage his relationship with his daughter. Instead, the article portrayed their whole community as dark and abusive in a way that I felt was completely undeserved.

The Amish are far from perfect, and are the first to say so. But like a kind of Protestant monastic movement, they teach us the wisdom of not blindly embracing every innovation as automatically bettering our lives and that of our communities, and of following Jesus' example of loving God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving and blessing our neighbors everywhere--and even our enemies--as ourselves. It's almost certain that our planet would be far better off if it were inhabited by far, far more of them.

P.S. For your information, Saloma, there are numerous Amish who are published authors. One of my favorites is David Kline, a self-taught naturalist, organic farmer and Amish bishop from your home state of Ohio. Then there is Linda Byler, a Lancaster County (Pennsylvania) Amish author of best selling novels about her people who remains a member of the group to this day.

To read more of my Amish-related posts, check this link http://harvyoder.blogspot.com/search?q=amish

 

Touched By a Giant

Church of the Savior's Gordon Cosby

Gordon Cosby, founding pastor of the Church of the Savior in Washington, DC, died Wednesday at age 94. He chose to spend his last days in hospice care at Christ House, a medical facility for the homeless, one of the many ministries of his Church.

Ron Copeland, a local founder of Our Community Place and pastor of the Early Church, shared with some of our local pastors how influential he was in his life, taking time to correspond with Ron as one of many younger leaders he mentored and encouraged.

A long time admirer of Cosby, I was glad to hear him a number of years ago at one of the sessions I was a part of in a week at the Wellspring Conference Center, yet another outreach of the Church of the Savior.

After speaking with the group and exiting the room to go to another appointment, he turned to make a final point before leaving, standing right next to where I was sitting. As he made his comments he, for no particular reason, placed his hand on my shoulder. He didn't know me and wasn't singling me out in any way, but I'll never forget the warm feeling it gave me to feel blessed by the touch of this gracious, Christ-like leader. Just a simple and spontaneous gesture, but one I will never forget.

Jim Wallis of Sojourners, another Christian ministry in DC, writes that when he visited his longtime mentor on one of his last days, he said, in his "deep graveling voice", “I am enjoying dying.” He also reported Gordon as once saying to a pastor who had expressed disappointment that his new church had only 15 people, “Wow. Fifteen people is amazing!”

As a pastor of a house church congregation, I can identify with that.

According to Wallis, Cosby chose to keep a relatively low profile, turning down most of his many invitations to speak, never needing or wanting to be out front or become a famous public figure. He instead chose to spend most of his time quietly working with a relatively small group of people who trying to “be the church” in Washington, D.C.: the Church of the Savior.

If only I could follow Jesus even half as well as he did.

Miriam Is With God, God Is With Us

My 61-year-old niece Miriam Schrock of Stuarts Draft died Tuesday at the Roanoke Memorial Hospital, just two weeks after having been diagnosed with lymphoma. She was the second oldest daughter of my sister Lucy, who died in 2003, and her gentle pastor father, Alvin Schrock.

Miriam had multiple health problems going back to her having rheumatic fever as a child, and she later suffered from scoliosis, major hip surgery and numerous other conditions, including her recently needing a pacemaker for an ailing heart.

What always impressed me about Miriam was her cheerful smile and her warm, servant-like spirit. I've never heard her complain about anything, ever, although her life was anything but easy, and the last two weeks of her life were especially difficult.

According to notes kept by members of her family, on February 23 Miriam had a bad fall resulting from one of her occasional unexplained blackout spells. That week she went to her doctor, who found that her liver enzymes were elevated and who scheduled a liver scan for her.

By Saturday, March 2, she had become very ill and her skin turned an alarming yellow color. When they took her to Emergicare, the doctor immediately sent her to the Augusta Health hospital. There they attempted to insert a stint to drain fluid from her liver, but her cancerous tumors were apparently already putting pressure on her organs in a way that made that impossible, so she was sent to a specialist at the Roanoke Hospital.

The procedure they attempted in Roanoke caused a rupture in her esophagus, which added to her suffering and made it impossible for her to take any food or liquid through her mouth. But still she endured her pain and hardship like a good soldier, without complaint.

By Saturday her liver had failed and her kidneys were giving out, so on Monday they removed her feeding tube and moved her out of the ICU and into their Comfort Care Unit. There she died at around 2:30 am Tuesday, surrounded by her three sisters and one of her two brothers.

A week prior, Miriam had told her sister Barbara Ann that she heard someone whisper her name in her hospital room, first on one side of her bed then on the other. One of her sisters-in-law, also named Miriam, later wrote the following about that experience that was read at her funeral today:

He whispered my name 

in the dark of the night

in hospital room 864

first on one side

and then on the other;

He whispered, He whispered my name.

Exactly a week later

in the dark of the night

in ICU 1068

at the end of my journey 

as I neared the great Jordan

He called, He called out my name.

And now I am safe

I am healthy and new

The wearisome journey is over.

I know you will grieve,

our love was so deep,

but listen! He whispers your name.

It won't be so long;

you'll join Mother and me

where partings and pain all are past.

Together we'll praise Him,

we'll sing and be glad

with the one who calls us by name.

Condolences to the family may be sent to Miriam's widowed father Alvin Schrock and older sister Barbara Ann, who live at 280 Stuarts Draft Highway, Staunton, VA 24401.

Letter From a Dying Iraqi Veteran

Veteran Tomas Young

We may not feel comfortable with everything expressed in the following excerpt from a letter by a dying Iraqi veteran, but it represents some hard truth about the human cost of a truly devastating war.

A recent ABC news Sunday Spotlight also focused on the Iraq tragedy, and MSNBC will re-air a special this Friday evening at 9 pm EST marking the tenth anniversary of the invasion and some of the political realities behind it.

The letter can be found in its entirety using the link in the first paragraph (above):

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care. 

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole...

For my own thoughts prior to the invasion ten years ago this month, here's a link to a letter to the DNR published March 8, 2003.

Strictly For The Birds *

* Neighborhood cats and squirrels are not invited.

It's a kind of gift exchange. We provide over a hundred pounds of food for our neighborhood birds each winter, and they provide us with the simple pleasure of being able to observe them--up close and personal--within several feet of our dining room and kitchen windows. It's one of nature's truly fascinating reality shows, non-stop and in full color from early dawn until dark.

Red-bellied Woodpecker

With the exception of occasional brief spats, our feathered friends (not nearly all of the same feather) manage to get along quite well, usually taking turns foraging at the base of the feeder. Among them are juncos (our most loyal customers), chickadees, song sparrows, mourning doves, cardinals, blue jays, grackles, song sparrows, starlings, and occasionally a beautiful and rare red-bellied woodpecker.

Jesus cites birds as examples of creatures who never worry about where their next meal is coming from, but from our observation they certainly do work at it tirelessly. They are constantly doing what they are created to do, searching for food and providing for their families.

Sunday at our house church we sang a number of ancient hymns by some of the saints of the past, including one by St. Patrick on his special day, "I Bind To Me This Day". We then especially enjoyed belting out all five verses of the great praise hymn by St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of birds and a Christ-like servant of the poor:

All creatures of our God and King
Lift up your voice and with us sing,
Alleluia! Alleluia!

It is said that in a sermon St. Francis once delivered to an audience of birds he said, "My brothers, birds, you should praise your Creator very much and always love him; he gave you feathers to clothe you, wings so that you can fly, and whatever else was necessary for you.  God made you noble among his creatures, and he gave you a home in the purity of the air; though you neither sow nor reap, he nevertheless protects and governs you without any solicitude on your part."

Sounds like some good words for all of us.