Vera's Journey

One of my nieces, Judy Yoder, who lives in Floyd County, Virginia, recently researched and authored a 700 page volume, “Vera’s Journey,” the life story of Vera Early Heatwole, a woman who lived most of her 102 years in southwestern Rockingham County.

The book, which details the life of a remarkable local woman who raised 11 children and overcame the trauma of becoming totally deaf in her late thirties, has sold some 7000 copies to date. Part of what makes it fascinating is the way it chronicles the profound changes ordinary rural Mennonites and Brethren in western Rockingham County had to adapt to during Vera's century of life, from 1906 to 2008.

Reading it brought back some of my memories of the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, which our children loved having us read to them at bedtime, stories that took us back to simpler times and often to times of great hardship, when families had to live and work together for their survival through good times and bad.

Most of us have been spared many of the stresses that were commonplace even a couple of generations ago. Which leads me to wonder whether our being so sheltered has made us soft and less resilient, less able to cope with hard experiences our children and grandchildren may yet have to face in the years to come.

None of us necessarily wants to go back to life as it was then, but a strong case can be made for spending a lot more time with our children reading the stories of good people from the past they can learn valuable lessons from--and a lot less time with mindless screen-based entertainment.

An Easter Sunset Service

I had never heard of an Easter Sunset Service, but our Family of Hope House Church just created and observed one, on the evening of the Orthodox Easter.

After a 5 pm indoor picnic at EMU's Discipleship Center on the hill above the campus, we used the following litany of scripture and music (singing from the Hymnal, a Worship Book) and had an anointing service for Rachel Stoltzfus, the beloved senior member of our congregation.

I wish I had brought a camera to catch the wonderful sunset we witnessed as we closed the service at 8, not unlike the one shown above that is on my realtor friend Kai Degner's website, taken by a friend of his.


ORTHODOX EASTER SUNDAY APRIL 15, 2012
Family of Hope House Church

Praise God and celebrate great light!

Genesis 1:1-5

# 652 The day you gave us, Lord, is ended
# 654 Sun of my soul


Responsive reading
The day has passed, and I give You thanks, Lord;

make the evening and the night free of sin,
I ask You, Savior, and save me.

Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit;
The day has ended, and I give You glory, Master,

make the evening and the night free of offense,
I ask You, Savior, and save me.

Both now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

The day is over, and I give You praise, Holy One;

make the evening and the night free of evil designs,
I ask You, Savior, and save me.
Lord, have mercy...

Let my prayer come before You as incense,

the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice;
Lord hear me.

Orthodox Book of Prayers

Confess to God and experience full forgiveness! 

Gen. 3:8-9
# 658 All praise to thee, my God, this night

Prayer of Confession

If I have wounded any soul today,
If I have caused one foot to go astray,

If I have walked in my own willful way,
Dear Lord, forgive!

If I have uttered idle words or vain,
If I have turned aside from want or pain,

Lest I myself shall suffer through the strain,
Dear Lord, forgive!

If I have been perverse or hard, or cold,
If I have longed for shelter in Thy fold,

When Thou hast given me some fort to hold,
Dear Lord, forgive!

Forgive the sins I have confessed to Thee;
Forgive the secret sins I do not see;

O guide me, love me and my keeper be,
Dear Lord, Amen.                

C. Maud Battersby

Reflect on God and gain new wisdom!

# 819 Psalm 90        # 653 Abide with me

May God support us all the day long,

till the shadows lengthen
and the evening comes
and the busy world is hushed

and the fever of life is over

and our work is done—
then in his mercy—

may he give us a safe lodging

and a holy rest and peace at the last.  Amen.


Attributed to Cardinal John Henry Newman, Prayer in All Things

Fellowship with God and find renewed faith!

John 20:19-31
# 570 We walk by faith

Christ with me sleeping,
Christ with me waking,
Christ with me watching,

every day and night,
every day and night.                  

Celtic prayer from Carmina Gadelica

Trust in God and experience deep healing! 

Luke 4:40, James 5:13-16 

At even, ere the sun was set,
The sick,
O Lord, around Thee lay;

O, with how many pains they met!

O, with what joy they went away!

Once more ’tis eventide, and we,

Oppressed with various ills, draw near;

What if Thyself we cannot see?

We know that Thou art ever near.

O Savior Christ, our woes dispel;

For some are sick, and some are sad;

And some have never loved Thee well,

And some have lost the love they had.

And some are pressed with worldly care

And some are tried with sinful doubt;

And some such grievous passions tear,

That only Thou canst cast them out.

And some have found the world is vain,

Yet from the world they break not free;

And some have friends who give them pain,

Yet have not sought a friend in Thee.

And none, O Lord, have perfect rest,

For none are wholly free from sin;

And they who fain would serve Thee best

Are conscious most of wrong within.

O Savior Christ, Thou too art man;

Thou has been troubled, tempted, tried;
Thy kind but searching glance can scan

The very wounds that shame would hide.

Thy touch has still its ancient power.

No word from Thee can fruitless fall;

Hear, in this solemn evening hour,

And in Thy mercy heal us all.                                     

Henry Twells, 1868

Go with God and be a great blessing!  

#655 Now on land and sea descending

Praying for Sanford

We feel blessed by reports of my brother Sanford's improved health since his heart attack.

Here his beloved Martha is praying with him in his room at Hospital Mexico in San Jose, where he has been moved for possible bypass surgery. This is one of the best government hospitals in Costa Rica, an above average Central American country which has invested its resources in education and health care instead of in military might (Costa Rica has only the equivalent of a National Guard).

My brother and his family joined other several other Beachy Amish families in moving to Costa Rica in 1968, where they have established numerous churches and now have a publishing enterprise that produces La Antorcha de la Verdad, which now has the largest circulation of any Mennonite publication in the world, according to a piece by John Roth in the April 2, 2012, Mennonite World Review.

We invite your continued prayers for Sanford and his family and for the churches they have helped establish in Central America. Three of his sons are pastors, editors and writers who are active in providing leadership in the work, along with numerous indigenous pastors and leaders.

A remarkable story.

P. S. My nephew Pablo Yoder has written numerous books, including a beautifully illustrated nature book, "The Work of Thy Fingers" and one for younger readers, "My Father's World."

The Susanna Heatwole Brunk Story

Each year as a part of my JMU Lifelong Learning Institute class, "Mennonites in the Valley," Ruth Stoltzfus Jost joins us at the grave site of two-year-old John Brunk at the Bank Mennonite Church cemetery, where she sings the following piece written by her sister Helen about their great-grandmother Susanna Heatwole Brunk's experience during and following the Civil War. It is printed here with Helen's kind permission:

THE BALLAD OF GREAT-GRANDMOTHER SUSANNA
by Helen Stoltzfus

In the valley of Virginia,
my great-grandmother Susanna
met and married Henry Brunk.

They had a son.

But not long thereafter the Civil War broke out.

Henry felt he could not stay true to Christ and be a soldier.
He, along with 69 other young men, rode out
of the war zone
hoping to escape.

They were captured by Confederate soldiers who demanded that they surrender their arms.

They surrendered their Bibles.

The Confederate soldiers took their horses and put the men in prison.  They gave them three choices

One: Put on uniforms and take up arms; Two: haul supplies as non-combatants, or Three: stay in prison.

I have a young wife and a baby son.  I will haul supplies as a non-combatant.

But Henry's conscience still bothered him.  He felt that he was still a part of this machinery of war.  One day he simply left his team of horses in the field and walked out through the orchard and the woods, a deserter, with a price on his head.

He hid in attics of kind strangers, weaving willow baskets to earn money, while Susanna, pregnant, cared for their son John. One day, one day - she gave birth to a daughter, Sarah.  But not long thereafter their son John died.

Henry heard the news.  At the funeral, he knew the Confederate spies were there to track him down.  So he had to hide at his own son's funeral.  Standing in the back like a stranger, leaving before the last hymn was sung.

And Susanna stood alone at her son's grave.

Henry and 17 young men managed to escape to the North.  Henry sent a message to Susanna:   Meet me in Hagerstown!

She put her possessions in a spring wagon and set out with her baby and her sister.  They rode northward into war territory.

Suddenly they were surrounded by Confederate soldiers who seized Susanna's horse.  At the same moment, the Union army began to close in on them.

"Yanks, the Yanks are coming!  Follow us!!!"

(as Susanna)  "I'll do no such thing!"

And since the Confederates were fleeing from the Union Army, they had no time to force her to  follow them.  So she rode on, continuing northward.

She was almost at Hagerstown.  She only had to cross the Shenandoah River.

But when she reached Harper's Ferry the bridge was burning.

Behind her were Confederate soldiers,  before her a burning bridge, a baby in her arms.

A miller appeared.  He showed her a place where others had managed to cross.  She plunged her spring wagon into the Shenandoah and  crossed safely.

She arrived in Hagerstown.

"But will I find Henry?"

She rode down the street.  She looked from left to right.  She passed a store front, glanced in the window at a shoemaker repairing shoes.  Henry looked up.  Their eyes met.

The story doesn't end there.  They moved to Illinois. Susanna, age 26, bore five more children in  the next eight years.  Then, like many others, they decided to move west to Kansas in a covered wagon.

Even though the Civil War had ended, the feelings of resentment were still very strong between the North and the South.  Missouri was a slave state.  Kansas, a free state.  The Missourians refused to let settlers, on their way to the "free" state of Kansas, drink water from their wells.

So Susanna, pregnant, Henry, and their six children drank from the streams and the ponds.

When they arrived in Kansas, Henry unhitched the horse, turned them out to graze, built a wigwam shelter made of boards, and lay beneath it.  He never got up again.  He died of typhoid fever. 

In the next six months, three of Susanna's seven children died of typhoid fever.

My grandfather remembers his mother, my great-grandmother Susanna.  She is leaning over the kitchen table, tears streaming down her face.  Silently she cuts up her husband's suit to make clothes for her children.

Her ten-year-old son took work in a mill.  Then in the middle of the night, men came knocking on her door.  "Mother, mother, your son has been hurt.  He fell asleep, his arm got caught in the wheel."

They brought him in from town and laid him on that same kitchen table and cut off his arm.

It is told how near the end of her life, she ironed a dress, but left the ruffles, the beautiful ruffles... unironed.

The following is an additional stanza written by Ruth Soltzfus Jost:

In later years, she told these stories to her grandchildren.
They remember many Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners at her prairie home.
They remember the little cakes she sent home with them after a visit.
And though they could never remember her singing before,
When the end came, she sang.
She asked her family to sing.
She asked her doctor to help sing.
And they all sang her favorite song,

"Oh happy day that fixed my choice
On thee, my Savior and my God."

Is This For Here, or to Go?

In our house church yesterday (we meet at four), Skip and Carol Tobin shared their vision of a church being less about trying to attract others to come to us, and more about preparing and sending us out to wherever we are needed.

At the close of our service, as we prepared for our usual evening meal together, we shared the bread and cup of the Lord’s Supper as a metaphor for the poured out and broken life of Jesus. Since one of our members has a gluten allergy, we used rice crackers as our bread. It was brittle fare, nothing like the bland texture of leavened bread, a fitting sign of a life broken for others.

As we poured grape juice into cups for everyone around the table, we invited each to share what they needed from God for the week ahead. Blood is a sign of life, we reminded ourselves, not just of death, so we expressed, by turn, our need for renewed life from a God who freely offers life to all.

It was a moment of clarity for me, that in the partaking of an ordinary, life-giving meal, that we not only celebrate our coming together, broken and in need of new life for ourselves, but that in communion we prepare for going out, ready and able to share with others the life we receive in the Eucharist.

In order to live in the world in the imitation of Christ, we need all of the spiritual energy we can get--energizing, life giving bread, life enhancing drink.

As this food gives up its life for us,
may we follow that pattern of
self surrender for each other.
May we be life for one another.

from “Prayers for the Domestic Church” by Edward Hays

Click on "Home" above for recent posts on Harvspot.

If I Have Learned to Live

In one of I. Merle Good’s musical plays there is a song with the line, “It hardly matters what I know or where I’ve been or where I go, if I have learned to live,” with the refrain, “If  I have learned to live, then I have learned to die. It hardly matters how I die, or who I am remembered by, if I have learned to live.”

What makes death feel so tragic, especially that of a young person, is when a life hasn’t had a chance to be lived out, or in some case has been wasted or misspent.

Maybe we’ll never feel a life has been long enough to really be complete in the way one New Testament writer affirms, “I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith.” With that sense of completion, one might be more nearly ready to die as one would retire at night after a full, satisfying and well spent day--tired, finished, ready to lie down and rest.

In our case, my wife and my remains are to go into an inexpensive casket and vault and buried in the cemetery of the Zion Mennonite Church south of Broadway, where I served as pastor for 20 years. But the simple memorial stone that will mark our burial site will not be our legacy. That we will be in whatever love we have managed to live, celebrate and leave behind for our children and whoever else’s lives we have been able to touch.

"We Try To Lose Ourselves"

                

We live by mercy if we live.
To that we have no fit reply
But working well and giving thanks,
Loving God, loving one another,
To keep Creation's neighborhood.

.... my friend David Kline told me,
"It falls strangely on Amish ears,
This talk of how you find yourself.
We Amish, after all, don't try
To find ourselves. We try to lose
Ourselves"--and thus are lost within
The found world of sunlight and rain
Where fields are green and then are ripe,
And the people eat together by
The charity of God, who is kind
Even to those who give no thanks.

The above is a part of one of  Wendell Berry’s poems, “Amish Economy,” published in his 1995 collection “The Timbered Choir” and included in the introduction to Amish farmer David Kline’s book, “Letters from Larksong.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Amish/Anabaptist focus on choosing to lose one’s life, to give it away, as taught by Jesus, rather than spending all of our energies trying to preserve as much of it as we can. The Amish seek to live a life of “Gelassenheit,” a German word describing a spirit of yieldedness that results in investing ones life in humble service to others rather than engaging in a lifetime pursuit of domination and accumulation. They would be the first to acknowledge their humanity, though, and that they are far from perfect.

My Amish parents, known throughout our rural community as “Aunt Mary” and "Uncle Ben," were good examples of a well spent life. It wasn’t uncommon for my mother to go help a sick neighbor, a new mother or a needy friend at a moment’s notice, or for them to provide hospitality around our dining room table for all kinds of guests, even from our meager means. And my father, generous to a fault, was faithful in helping his neighbors and in tithing his modest farm income even when times were hard for our family.

Maybe life really is meant to be a gift to be given away. In the end, we have to lose it all anyway, whether we choose to or not. So why not be intentional about it, experience joy in giving away our gifts and assets to make the world a happier and better place? And maybe just die penniless and happy?   

But now, in summer dusk, a man
Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns
Sits under the yard trees, at rest,
His smallest daughter on his lap.
This is because he rose at dawn,
Cared for his own, helped his neighbors,
Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.

Wendell Berry. 1995.IV in A timbered choir: the Sabbath poems 1979-1997. New York, Counterpoint, 1992, pp. 190-191.

(photo from the not too much web page by Brian McKinlay)

An Evening With An Amish Sage

I’ll long remember hearing David Kline, Holmes County, Ohio, Amish bishop and naturalist, speak at Eastern Mennonite University last week.

In response to a question about the Amish not sending their children to school beyond the eighth grade, he explained that he and his fellow Amish see education as a lifelong endeavor that really just begins after elementary school. As evidence of this, he said that the bookmobile that serves his community, dubbed “The Traveling Book Shelf,” has the largest circulation of any in the United States, in the part of Ohio that now has the largest concentration of Amish in the world.

Kline himself is an example of a truly self-educated man, a naturalist and author of three books that portray some of the simple everyday pleasures of living on their 120-acre organic farm. In his book “Scratching the Woodchuck, Nature on an Amish Farm,” he describes the many birds and other creatures he finds so fascinating, including  how he once discovered a sleeping woodchuck on a warm summer day which he carefully scratched with his walking stick, and how the dozing animal responded by arching its back with pleasure at the attention.

In "Great Possessions, An Amish Farmer's Journal," he describes how his entire family works together to grow and market food and take care of the land and the animals that are so vital to their way of life. Without the distractions of radio, television, computers, e-mail, or cell phones, something as ordinary as cleaning out their horse barn becomes an opportunity for Kline and his teenage son to experience healthy exercise while engaging in an extended man-to-man conversation, something that happens all too seldom between most fathers and sons in our faster paced urban society.

Hearing from this gentle saint helped me appreciate even more my own Amish upbringing and added to my desire to pass on the best of that legacy to my children and grandchildren.

P. S. Here's a link to my post "Going on the Amish Diet."

Jesus and the Seventh Story

Brian McLaren, in an address at Eastern Mennonite University several years ago, spoke of seven major narrativies that shape people’s thinking and behaviors.

First there is the Domination Story, promoting an “us over them” mindset, one inevitably followed by the Revolution Story, one that is about seeking the violent overthrow of an oppressive empire--as in “us versus them.” 

Then comes the Purification Story, in which in order to gain or maintain power we seek to blame, shame and exclude a perceived dangerous minority, “us versus those.” This in turn gives rise to the Victimization Story, “us in spite of them,” in which an oppressed minority's identity is maintained through memories of past injustices.

There is also the Isolation Story, he says, “us away from them,” one in which communities define themselves by their withdrawing from what is seen as a corrupt and doomed majority.

Then, of course, there is the ever familiar Accumulation Story, in which we perceive happiness and security resulting from gaining ever more possessions in a competitive, greed-based economy, "us with more than them."

People tend to wrap their life and their faith around these all too familiar narratives, says McLaren, and then to co-opt Jesus, Allah or Jehovah as justification for their claim to empire and domination, for example, or to make God all about revolution, or about purification (pointing the finger at undesirables), or to describe God primarily as identifying with victims, or as an isolationist, and even to make God the champion of accumulation and all about blessing the wealthy.

In contrast to all of these, he concludes, is the Reconciliation Story, "us and them as one," one in which a loving and just Creator calls all people to live and work together to turn the world into a shalom of peace.

It is that seventh story I want to celebrate and pass on to my children and everyone else I can get to listen.

Amazing Grace and Sugar Snap Peas

With the weather being so April-like the past few days, and with the forecast calling for showers tonight and still more balmy weather this week, I couldn't resist planting a row of sugar snap peas early this morning.

OK, when it comes to gardening, I can get a little carried away. Not that I haven’t had success planting peas in February before, I’ve just never done it quite this early in the month. But then, whether as a result of climate change or just an unusual weather pattern, it's not been this balmy this early in the year that I can remember. And seeing crocuses about to bloom just creates the urge in a farm boy like myself, even in February.

With gardeners, hope springs eternal. Each new year is seen as the one that will finally break all records, for the tallest and most outstanding yellow sweet corn, the most productive harvest of green beans, the earliest and tastiest red tomatoes ever.

And getting my hands in the mellow topsoil along the sugar snap and pole bean trellises this morning reminded me again of how therapeutic gardening is. The dark brown earth required no tilling, this having been done when the garden was put to bed last fall. I was able to make a furrow with my bare fingers, the humus-rich soil feeling something like it must feel having your hands in a sand tray in some psychotherapist's office (not mine). I was taking part in what has become for me an annual healing ritual, prayerfully pouring in seeds and covering them with a benediction of soil and some life-giving compost.

And then to wait.

I see a vegetable garden is a metaphor for a productive life, made possible by a combination of miracle and muscle. Without the miracle of seed germination and plant growth and the amazing gifts of earth, sunshine and rain, nothing would grow, no matter what kind of effort we invest.

On the other hand, without a gardener to prepare the soil, plant some seeds, mulch or otherwise keep weeds from taking over, and sometimes providing some lifegiving extra blessing of water in the heat of summer, little of anything edible will result. It takes the combined work of both a great Creator and a dedicated caregiver to make this annual wonder happen.

So it is with living a productive and fruitful life, always a collaborative effort involving both unmerited grace and daily, down to earth discipline.


P. S. I was delighted to see that the Valley Conservation Council has invited Ohio Amish farmer David Kline to speak at a meeting in Montezuma next Wednesday, February 8. I've not yet met him, but have enjoyed reading two of his books and cite him in one of my blog posts "Going on the Amish Diet".

Note: Kline will also speak from 8:30 - 10 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 9 at EMU's Common Grounds Coffeehouse in University Commons and at the chapel service in Lehman Auditorium from 10-10:30 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 10. Admission is free for both events. For more information contact Jim Yoder at 540-432- or email yoderjm@emu.edu.

They've Turned the World Upside Down?

Sheldon C. Good, web editor of the Mennonite Weekly Review, recently posted the following on the MWR blog site "Our World Together," and gave me permission to use it here (Incidentally, there is no logical reason that the "Northern Hemisphere" should appear on top of a world map!):

There are more Christians in China than the United Kingdom, and the population of Russia is nearly as Christian as the United States, a new study on global Christianity has found.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life study shows Christians make up nearly a third of the estimated 2010 global population of 6.9 billion, and in a historic shift, no single continent or region is the indisputable center of global Christianity. From the study’s executive summary:

A century ago, this was not the case. In 1910, about two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe, where the bulk of Christians had been for a millennium, according to historical estimates by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. Today, only about a quarter of all Christians live in Europe (26 percent). A plurality — more than a third — now are in the Americas (37 percent). About one in every four Christians lives in sub-Saharan Africa (24 percent), and about one-in-eight is found in Asia and the Pacific (13 percent).

In short, the study shows that Christianity today, unlike a century ago, is truly a global faith.

New Year's Visualizations

 "...faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not (yet) see."                                                               Hebrews 11:1 (NIV)

One of the key factors in experiencing personal growth and change is to “begin with the end in mind,” to first be able to picture the outcome we want, i.e., the new and whole self that with God’s help we see ourselves becoming.   

A good way to start is write a detailed description of that self, one done in the present tense, as though it were already true.

For example, “I am someone who looks for good qualities in others, and avoids speaking ill of others behind their backs.” Or, “I am able to avoid junk foods, stick to having at least five salad meals a week, and follow a plan of hearty exercise at least every other day," etc.

This is not to imagine ourselves being some super man or woman, or even a saint, but simply a healthy, whole person, the kind of person we would want our own son or daughter to become. Having this kind description in view is a little like when we are putting a jigsaw puzzle together and keeping the picture on the puzzle box in front of us as we work at fitting all the pieces together.

Then the second part of achieving change involves repeated practice, as in engaging in the kinds of  behaviors that are congruent with that picture, that description of our improved self.     

Practice needs to be of two kinds, the first involving a lot of mental rehearsals in which we prayerfully see ourselves responding more positively to challenging situations in our lives. In doing this, we help retrain our brains to successfully live out these new behaviors.

The second kind of practice, of course, is to actually engage in these behaviors in the real life situations we are in every day, realizing that insight alone will not bring about any automatic or lasting changes in old habits. But repeated practice will enable us to replace old habits and patterns with new ones.

Whenever I hear myself or others say they can’t accomplish some desirable goal, I want to suggest substituting that “can’t” statement with something like, “I find this really hard, and I haven’t found a way yet.”

That way, very simple but anything but easy, is to picture a new and more healthy, whole self, then engage in the hard work it takes to practice that new self’s positive behaviors until they become more and more natural to us. 

To accomplish this, it always helps to surround ourselves with lots of  supportive encouragers and allies.

Have a blessed New Year!

Note: You might also be interested in this blog.

Bright Hope in the Bronx

Jonathan Kozol's book, "Amazing Grace," is about his interviews with children living in the worst areas of the Bronx in New York City.

Thirteen-year-old Anthony Green wrote him this description of a future heaven as he envisioned it:

God will be there. He’ll be happy that we have arrived! People shall  come in hand in hand. It will be bright, not dim and glooming like here on earth. All friendly animals will be there, but no mean ones.

As for television, forget it! If you want vision, you can use your eyes to see the people that you love. No one will look at you from the outside. People will see you from the inside. 

All the people from the street will be there. My uncle will be there and he will be healed. You won’t see him buying drugs, because there won’t be money. Mr. Mongo will be there too. You might see him happy for a change. The prophets will be there, and Adam and Eve, and all the disciples except Judas... 

No violence will there be in heaven. There will be no guns or drugs or IRS. You won’t have to pay taxes. 

You’ll recognize all the children who have died when they were little. Jesus will be good to them and play with them. At night he’ll come and visit at your house. God will be fond of you. 

How will you know that you are there? Something will tell you, "This is it! Eureka!" If you still feel lonely in your heart, or bitterness, you’ll know that you’re not there.

Tragically, Anthony Green was shot and killed three years later on Beekman Avenue, in the worst part of the Bronx.

There’s just got to be a city with safe streets of solid gold for people like him.

When the Work of Christmas Begins

Writer Esther Gillette eloquently describes Christmas as 

A 

candle 

with haloed ray

quietly giving 

 itself away

Christmas is, indeed, a light that keeps on shining, a gift that keeps on giving, as Howard Thurman has written:

When the song of the angels is stilled
When the star in the sky is gone
When the kings and princes are home
When the shepherds are back with their flocks
The work of Christmas begins;
To find the lost,
To heal the broken
To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner
To rebuild the nations
To bring peace among people everywhere.

May the good work of Christmas begin in each of us.

A Christmas Eve reflection

Growing up on a farm I can especially identify with the following piece by one of my favorite poets, Wendell Berry. His reference to "April morning's light" suggests the kind of spring-like warmth that breaks into this otherwise wintery scene.

This is from his book "The Timbered Choir" (Counterpoint, 1998):

Remembering that it happened once,
We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns
Toward the long night’s end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall
(A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there,
Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air
Around them joyful as a choir.
We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own white frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.

We wish you and yours the very best this Christmas season,

Harvey and Alma Jean

A Mere $110,000 a Day in Spending Money

He'll judge the needy by what is right,
render decisions on earth's poor with justice.
              (Isaiah 11:4a the Message)

Blessed are you who are poor, 
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be satisfied.
But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
             (Luke 6:20, 21, 24, 25 NIV)

According to Forbes magazine, there now are well over 400 billionaires in the U.S., and 3.1 million millionaires. And their numbers--along with their assets--are on the rise, even as millions of the rest of their fellow citizens are losing jobs, homes and health benefits.

In an article entitled “Breaking the Spell of Money” in the July/August 2011 issue of Orion magazine, Scott Russell Sanders has us imagine what a billionaire (and many of these actually own multiple billions) could do with his or her wealth:

Suppose you keep a billion dollars under your mattress, where it will earn no income, and you set out to spend it; in order to burn through it all within an adult lifetime of, say, fifty years, you would have to spend $1.7 million per month, or $55,000 per day. If you took your billion dollars out from under the mattress and invested it in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds at current rates, you could spend $40 million per year, or $110,000 per day, forever, without touching your capital. It so happens that $110,000 is a bit more than twice the median household income in the United States. If you do the math, you will find that the twenty-five hedge fund managers who pulled in $26 billion last year claimed an income equivalent to roughly 500,000 households, or some 2 million people.  

But these persons, we’re being told by some, are the nation’s “job creators,” therefore we dare not burden them with even slight increases in taxes or government regulations, lest we inhibit growth and further endanger our economy.

Dare not what?

Try telling something like that to Amos, Micah or any of the Hebrew prophets. Or run that by Jesus, or try convincing his young mother Mary, who in her “Magnificat” boldly announces:

He casts the mighty from their thrones
and raises the lowly.
He fills the starving with good things,
and sends the rich away empty.

For a real mind boggler, a Libertarian candidate for Congress in our area sent me a link to a YouTube piece regarding a “$100 million dollar penny,” which helps us see how obscene--and insane--hoarding this kind of wealth really is (Note: You may or may not be interested in the controversial points made at the end of the clip on how some of the wealth of our nation is being managed, a subject I'll not weigh in on here).

Having said all of the above, to our world neighbors who are actually starving, many of us could be seen as the world's 1% who are way beyond blessed. At Christmas, we must gift with that in mind.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

In Barbara Robinson’s "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever," six members of the Herdman family, "absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world," somehow finagle their way into getting lead parts in the Second Presbyterian Church’s annual Christmas play, one that hadn’t seen any changes for as long as anyone could remember.

But to these uninhibited, stringy-haired newcomers to the church, everything in the story was new, and represented high drama. Pint-sized Gladys, who got the part of the "Angel of the Lord,’" bellows out, "Hey, Unto you a child is born!" as though it was indeed the most urgent news in the world. Leroy, one of the Wise Men, brings in the Herdman’s food-basket ham as his gift for the Christ child (instead of the fake gold, frankincense and myrrh he considered an unworthy offering). And terrible Imogene, as Mary, protested in practice, "You mean they tie him up and put him in a feedbag? Where was the Child Welfare?" (the Herdman’s knew all about Child Welfare).

But on the night of the play--one everyone thought would be ruined by the Herdmans--scraggly little Imogene Herdman was awestruck.

"In the candlelight her face was all shiny with tears and she didn’t even bother to wipe them away. She just sat there--awful old Imogene--in her crookedy veil, crying... as if she had just caught onto the idea of God, and the wonder of Christmas."


Maybe we all, like the Herdman’s, need to start over, hear and experience the story afresh.


P.S. Here are links to two recent provocative posts on the "Our World Together" blog, plus one to access Pastor Phil Kniss's 12/18/11 sermon at Park View Mennonite on "Occupy Bethlehem":

http://www.mennoweekly.org/blog/2011/12/14/taking-sex-out-sex-mas/ 

http://www.mennoweekly.org/blog/2011/12/15/real-war-christmas-fox-news/ 

http://www.pvmchurch.org/sermons.html

Celebrating the Real St. Nicholas

Some years ago I read about Mike Sherer, a Lutheran minister, who with his wife Kathe, a registered nurse, decided to celebrate Christmas without Santa Claus when their first child was three years old. They had come to see Santa as little more than a prop for the great North American Christmas Marketing Machine, and so decided to focus instead on his venerable ancestor, the real life St. Nicholas.

This third century bishop of Myra, who lived on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, became legendary for his generosity in helping the poor and needy in his parish, according to stories about him passed down through the generations.

Because this real saint seemed to be a good alternative to the jolly old elf of recent invention, the Sherers have begun celebrating the Feast Day of St. Nicholas, which is on December 6, as an early part of their family’s Advent, and each year designate 5% of their December income to give anonymous help to a needy individual or family in their community, in the spirit of the good bishop of Myra.

They do put up a tree, but cover the floor all around it with good books about Christmas instead of the many other gifts for themselves that used to accumulate there. The books they then put away each year with the tree decorations, to give them a rest and to make them “new” each Advent.

The Sherers report that their giving up a fake Santa for a real saint they feel embodies the true spirit of Christmas has been a richly satisfying change, one they would recommend to everyone

The above is adapted from one of my 90-second radio spots aired on the following stations: 
WEMC 91.7 FM 11:58 am (M-F) Sun 7:58
WBTX 1470 AM 9:20 am 4:20 pm (M-F)
WNLR 1150 AM 11:28 am (M,W,F)

Is it Time to Bail Out Of Wall Street?

Regardless of our feelings about the “Occupy Wall Street” Movement, most of us are deeply invested in Wall Street traded companies. We have all become increasingly attached to an economic system heavily dependent on promoting self-indulgence and on amassing wealth through producing lots of products we don’t need and are often better off without. The level of consumption required to keep this kind of economy going is simply unsustainable for our planet.

The majority of Americans also do most of their investing for retirement in this Mammon-driven system.

In recent years Alma Jean and I have felt led to move more and more of our modest retirement funds out of Wall Street traded corporations and into microlending programs that benefit people in need by offering them a hand up rather than simply a handout. Glen Kauffman, financial consultant with Everence here in Harrisonburg, helped us do this.

Here are several of our reasons:

1) We believe such investments are more profitable. Even though the actual interest earned is a mere 1-3% (one can choose the rate), investments in microlending seem far more productive in terms of faith-based values. Since Alma Jean and I want our money to really “work for us” in ways that reflect Jesus’ priorities, we are no longer satisfied with just “socially responsible” investments (no alcohol, tobacco or military industries) that still largely subsidize and promote consumerism rather than being about meeting basic needs. We may not be able to be perfectly “pure” in our investment choices, but since we actually have a choice between becoming stakeholders in, say, some water bottling company somewhere versus in a food production coop that can help lift the poor out of poverty, the latter is our obvious preference.

2) Trading in stocks represents a form of speculation not unlike a legal form of gambling. Of course the odds are generally better, and we agree that all business investments involve risk, but business profits are normally made by at least producing actual goods or services. Trading in market holdings represents an attempt to create “wealth without work,” something Ghandi referred to as one of “seven deadly social sins,” in that no products or services are created in such trades, and no actual value is added. I can understand the concept of being paid a reasonable "rent" for capital used to grow businesses, and I realize there are shades of gray between simply being fellow investors (and sharing risk), on the one hand, and the other extreme of people engaging in speculative on-line or other trading that does seem like gambling to me (only with better odds--the house doesn't always win), and/or who are constantly checking their portfolios in hopes of fate or good fortune earning them record-breaking returns. And let's be honest, most of us haven't the slightest sense of actually being a stakeholder in the many companies that are using our retirement money, nor any real interest in affecting their policies. We primarily want one thing, optimal returns for our investment, as long as no obvious harm is being done.

3) We believe microlending programs are actually safer investments. When the economy tanked in 2008, none of our microlending investments were affected. While no investments are 100% safe, the default rate on these loans has been proven to be very low, while we see ominous signs of worsening national and international debt crises that threaten the security of our entire financial system. And when this Babylon falls, most current plans for retirement will collapse with it.

So we are left with the question of whether we will trust our fortunes with the already rich who are bent on becoming ever richer (and who are consistently condemned by Jesus and the prophets) or with the poor who are working hard to support themselves and their families.

For followers of Jesus, the answer should not be that hard to come by.

I welcome your comments.

Living From the Grateful Side of the Ledger

Thanksgiving Day somehow brings to mind one of one of my late uncles, Moses Nisly.

Mose, one of my mom's older brothers, lived at our house for an extended period of time as I was growing up. Never married, he spent most of his life in the homes of various of his siblings, and when he could no longer support himself, some of his ten living brothers and sisters took turns taking him in and taking care of him.

Uncle Mose was somewhat mentally challenged, the result of a high fever he experienced with a case of meningitis in his childhood, we were told. Actually, no one talked much about his childhood in our family, but there were numerous stories told about his eccentric traits as an adult.

For instance, Mose was incredibly tight with his money. He even resisted having his everyday work clothes washed regularly, fearing they would wear out sooner as a result. Then there was the story about how he lamented the cost of shipping his favorite rocking chair by rail from Iowa to Virginia when he came to live with us. He was outraged by the railroad company charging him what they did since, as he reasoned, “the train was making the trip here anyway!”

Another of Moses’ traits was absentmindedness. He was constantly forgetting where he had put things, then blaming others for having misplaced or taken them. All of this added to his generally unhappy and negative outlook on life, and to seeing himself as a victim.

In spite of his general forgetfulness, though, there was one category of memories Mose could recall in the greatest of detail. He could cite with ease example after example of people who had mistreated him throughout his life. When I heard Garrison Keillor once describing some people as having “Irish Alzheimer's,” a condition that results in people “forgetting everything but their grievances,” I immediately thought of my uncle.

But we can learn from people like that, realize how important it is to wrap lots of gratitude around us every day of our lives. Unlike Mose, we can practice living from the assets side of our memory ledger rather than the debit side.

To a great extent, our emotional and spiritual health depends on how we do our mental bookkeeping, whether we make generous deposits in our inner savings account, and whether we then live out of a sense of abundance rather than in a constant state of victimhood and scarcity.