Stories Of Martyrs Forever Changed My Life

Pat, with her husband Earl, practice 

radical hospitality in our community.

Pat Martin gave this presentation as a panelist at the November 15 workshop on "Anabaptist Rebirth: Living Justly, Joyfully and Sustainably," at the Harrisonburg Mennonite Church. 

I share this with her permission:

Simply Live!

We are here to think about what it might mean to be Anabaptist in the 21st century, and maybe to ask ourselves whether we still share the values of our early Anabaptist forebears. 

I remember as a 9- or 10-year-old, sitting in the library of the old Eastern Mennonite College Administration Building, waiting for my father, who had an office in an alcove overlooking the library. I’m not sure how, but one day I found a copy of the Martyrs’ Mirror, maybe in the stacks, or perhaps it was lying open on a pedestal. 

I was both fascinated and horrified, perhaps not unlike the attraction many youngsters today have to horror movies. I pored over the etchings of Anabaptists being killed in the most gruesome ways possible—being drowned, burned at the stake, beheaded, buried alive—and I still remember wondering when it would be my turn. I kept returning, on occasion, to the pictures and stories, and it was often those nights that I had a hard time getting to sleep.

But it was such influences that informed my understandings of faith and life growing up. It was the wall plaque in our home with Menno Simons’s quote: “True evangelical faith, cannot lie dormant, it clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded, it has become all things to all people.”

And it was grandparents and parents who, in the way they lived their lives, tried to follow the teachings of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

So early on, I tried to be perfect. I too wanted to follow the teachings of Jesus, even if it meant losing my life. In my early 20's, I went with Mennonite Central Committee to work in Vietnam during the American war there, thinking it would be a good way to test my commitment to non-violence. During our second term with MCC in Vietnam, Earl and I and by then two small children, chose to try to  live, as closely as possible to the Vietnamese around us—with no electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. We washed our clothes and bathed at the well we shared with neighbors. We learned how to use a squat toilet outside our house. We went to the market daily for food and cooked over a charcoal stove. 

We soon learned that we needed help to live simply. We needed an extended family.

Quaker friends brought a young Vietnamese woman to help us learn how to simply live! Trinh was a 19-year-old refugee woman, who we were to later learn had lost her mother when a U.S. plane dropped a napalm bomb on their home, just 25 miles south of where we were living. This young woman not only taught me how to cook and preserve food without refrigeration, but she also showed me how to live joyfully without resentment.

During the last months of the war in 1975, as fighting intensified and people around us were living in fear, Trinh lived open-heartedly, without anxiety, and loved us and our children as her own family. Trinh has become a model for me in how to accept whatever life brings—to “simply live,” which is what I intended the title of my presentation to be, not Simple Living, as printed in your program.

Over the years, particularly as our three children were growing up, I never seemed to have time to pull away and find time for quiet reflection and prayer, but I did find it helpful to “Practice the Presence of God,” something I learned much later, as introduced by Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century Carmelite friar, who said the secret of living in the kingdom of God here on earth is the art of “practicing the presence of God, who paints Himself in the depths of our souls.”

The Buddhists talk about mindfulness, which seems to me to be a similar idea. In 1969, on our way home from Vietnam the first time, we stopped in France for a month and visited with the
Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, at the community he established after he was exiled from South Vietnam in 1966 for expressing opposition to the war and refusing to take sides. One morning after breakfast we found ourselves washing dishes together with Nhat Hanh. He picked up a rice bowl and said, “When you wash the rice bowl, you focus all your attention on the smoothness of the bowl, the smell of the soap, the wetness of the dish cloth, the warmth of the sun streaming through the window. You don’t wash dishes quickly and thoughtlessly so you can get on to doing something else, you simply live mindfully into whatever it is you are doing at any given moment.

Adam Bucko, director of the Center for Spiritual Imagination, says: “In the end, contemplation is not about escaping life but entering it more fully. It is how we listen for God in the silence—and how we hear God in the cries of the poor, the groaning of creation, and the joy of being alive. It is how we
remember what’s good and live from that place for the sake of the world.”

I used to say that I wanted to try to live at a level that is sustainable for everyone in the world, and I still think about this often, but I have found it’s hard to know what that is. I try to live simply, but I am beginning to understand that living as an Anabaptist, in today’s world, may call for a deeper understanding of what that might look like.

Jesus might say to my younger self striving for perfection: Even if you are baptized by sprinkling as a young adult, and stay involved with your church, and do alternative service as a conscientious objector to war, and live simply and grow healthy food for your family, and give generously to good causes, and yes, even die as a martyr, but do not love your life and the people in your life, you have missed my message.

In this day and age, where Christianity is being tied to nationalism, we as Anabaptist followers of Jesus are challenged to simply live with a new awareness of the path we are on—a path that Father Richard Rohr says “will call for a total transformation of consciousness, worldview, motivation, goals, and rewards that characterize one who loves and is loved by God.” Grace, he says, always has the last word. We are not the primary doer in the world of love. It is being done unto us.

In 1997, when Earl and I moved to Harrisonburg for me to complete the Masters in Conflict Transformation program at EMU, we anticipated returning to Asia, once again, with Mennonite
Central Committee—this time as regional Peace Advocates.

But life presented us with a different path that called for us to stay put. And out of that disappointment, another long-term dream emerged—to provide a place of hospitality. Along with another couple, we found a large house to rent here in Harrisonburg that could accommodate other people living with
us. Since I was helping, at that time, to provide leadership for the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, we started by inviting international students to move in with us—sharing meals, transportation, friendship and life. We called ourselves the Open Table Community.

After a few years, when some neighboring apartments became available to sublet, our community grew to include, at times, other EMU students, people needing temporary housing as they looked for jobs and apartments to rent, homeless people, returning citizens, people struggling with their mental health, sometimes relatives and friends, even two Turkish businesswomen who needed a break from New York City. Three marriages and four babies also added their excitement to our community life.

Over the last 27 years, more than 150 people from over 40 countries have been part of the Open Table Community. 

Henri Nouwen talks about hospitality as that space where people are free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, pray their own prayers, dance their own dances and follow their own vocations. We experienced this shared hospitality. Despite the diversity of our cultures and beliefs, we were graced with a love that enabled us to live together, pray together, cry together, laugh together, and dream together of a world where the Kingdom of God, the Beloved Community became a reality.

For Earl and I, simply living into the path that seemed so hard to accept at first was a process of transformation. We could not think our way into transformation, but had to live ourselves into it, often weeping our way through it.

I have come to believe that the sacred task we have as Anabaptists, perhaps even as humans, in this 21st century is to simply live in the present,

whether we  are moving or staying
whether we are working or playing
whether we are weeping or laughing
whether we are sick or healthy
whether we doubt or whether we believe
even whether or not we can pray, at any given moment,

we are being called by God to be fully alive and to love even as God loves us.

Toward the end of his life, Menno Simons wrote, “Without this love, it is all vain, whatever we may know, judge, speak, do or write. The property and fruit of love is meekness, kindness, not envious, not crafty, not deceitful, not puffed up, nor selfish. In short, where there is love, there is a Christian.”