Tag Archives: Pennsylvania

Of Reach and Mennonites and Lancaster and Boxes and Shoo Fly Pie (Vignettes of a Journey #5)

Christian living, life on the foreign field, travel, , , , , , , , , ,

A few days ago, here in Hutchinson, KS, I went with my aunt for her weekly chemo treatment at the local clinic. We were waiting in front of the elevator when the door opened and three elderly ladies disembarked. Upon seeing us, the one immediately exclaimed, “Oh, my ladies from Yoder!” The next one saw us and exclaimed as well, “Oh, I love Yoder. We spend a lot of money in Yoder.” And they chattered away about Yoder without giving either of their subjects the time or airspace to say, “Well, actually, we are not from Yoder. We are from Hutchinson.” (Yoder is a small town about 12 miles southeast of the Hutchinson area. The Amish in that area are more “well-known” by tourists than the Amish in the Hutchinson area).

Anyone from Yoder will quickly correct you if you think they are from Hutchinson. Anyone from Hutchinson will do the same. We are quite different, in our minds anyway. But to the non-Anabaptist outsider, we are basically the same.

I experience the same thing when in Thailand and a fellow American discovers my roots. A common remark is usually similar to this, “Oh, then you must be from Pennsylvania!” And such comments follow such as, “I’ll bet your mom makes the best shoo fly pie.” When I say, “No, I am actually from Kansas, and I don’t think my mom has ever made shoo fly pie,” their brow inevitably wrinkles and they blink several times as if to say, “She is confused by her transplant into Thai culture. She actually is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and eats shoo fly pie on a daily basis, but she is simply confused.”

Actually, I have only been to Lancaster twice in my life, which would come as a shock to the aforementioned fellow Americans, who consider Lancaster to be the hub of all that is Amish and Mennonite. And it probably is.

My second time in Lancaster was just last month at REACH, which is an Anabaptist missions conference held every 2 years in Lancaster, PA. REACH is a stark reminder of how many different stripes of Anabaptists exist. I should make sure to say that not all the people who attended REACH this year were from Lancaster and I am sure thousands of Lancasterites did not make it to REACH.

I am sure that the ones who organized REACH this year did not do it to show off all the different sub-denominations of Anabaptists that exist. I am sure that they planned REACH in order to give God glory. And it certainly did.

But forgive me if I marvel a little. After spending 7 and a half years in the tropics of Thailand where the sighting of a Mennonite causes no less excitement than a UFO streaking across the night sky on a summer’s eve, it is overwhelming to spend 2 days at a mission’s conference with 2500 Anabaptists.

It is rather like eating 5 meals of pizza after subsisting on rice and spicy minced pork for 2 years.

Or like drinking a gallon of chocolate milk after you have been drinking Pepsi all your life.

Or like reaching a desert island in the middle of the ocean after you have been at sea for 5 years. You should be overjoyed at being on land once more, and you are with one part, but another part of you longs for the jostling of the waves once more.

Doing REACH is especially mind-boggling if you do it while you are jet-lagging after an 11 hour time change. Jet-lag has a way of bringing out the worst in you, whether it is feeling totally void of emotion and energy at 2 in the afternoon, or whether it’s giggling helplessly and immaturely at an ill-timed comment during one of the regular sessions at REACH.

Even with all of the overwhelmingness, I really did enjoy REACH.

The three things I enjoyed most was reconnecting with old friends, making new ones, and attending the breakout sessions. I got to stay at my friend Abby’s house, and go out to eat with my childhood friend, Tina. I got to see Judi and Barbara and Diana and Rosa. And I will stop listing names there, because soon I will offend someone for not putting their name on the list.

Then there was meeting new people. People that stopped by the INVEST booth who knew so and so who used to live in such and such a place. People who were friends of a friend, or who had spent time in Thailand years ago, or parents of a friend, like Amy’s mom and Abigail’s parents. I met someone I had been told various times I should meet, and then found out she had been told the same about me.

And the breakout sessions. The general sessions were good too, but the breakout sessions tended to be more informal and specifically tailored. I got to listen to my good friend, Janelle, speak on mentoring young women, and then another good friend, Carolyn, speak on discovering steady joy in a life of following. Another of my favorites was a workshop by Allan Roth, on the advantages and disadvantages of being an Anabaptist on the mission field.

Between all these delights, I sat behind the table at the INVEST booth and watched all the different tribes and kindreds and tongues of Anabaptists stream past and enjoyed talking with some of them. Being on the more conservative end of the Anabaptist spectrum at a mission’s conference has interesting consequences because of the tendency to be put in a box. I find this strangely enervating, and yet at the same time exhausting, since shattering preconceived notions can be somewhat exhilarating and yet you do get tired of jumping out of the boxes that hundreds of people put you in. Can I not just be me and not the box you put my church constituency in? Yet, I realize that Anabaptists thrive by placing people, and figuring them out, and well, putting them in boxes. I do the same and in some ways it is a natural human instinct. One of my teachers once called it a survival instinct.

Once REACH was over, we spent a groggy evening at Janelle’s house and then she drove us back to Abby’s house.

That night I went to sleep dreaming that I was trying to find a breakout session in the church where REACH was held, and using Google maps to find it.

In No Strange Land

ache, home, life on the foreign field, Poetry, , , , , , , ,

In No Strange Land – by Francis Thompson (Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay )

O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air—
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry,—clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

I was just 21 years old and a very intimidated, Amish student at Faith Builders Summer Term in 2011 when I first was introduced to this poem. I chose most of my summer term classes to build my teaching skills, but in addition to that I audited a course that turned out to be my favorite. It was called Poetry Appreciation, taught by a man called Jonas Sauder, who with his long beard and quiet unassuming way of speaking seemed a very safe person for this scared country girl. Jonas Sauder seemed to be a legend at Faith Builders. My friend Betty Yoder said that most people’s brains are either a mile deep and an inch wide, or an inch deep and a mile wide, but that Jonas Sauder’s brain was a mile deep and a mile wide.

I was mostly self-taught in what I knew of poetry. We had studied a little in grade school, and I had never attended high school. I had borrowed books on poetry at the library, and mostly just read poetry for the beauty of it, without analyzing it too deeply. So, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I walked into the class. If an intellectual like this was going to teach us poetry, then I was sure to flounder. But the class turned out to be exactly like it’s name, “Poetry Appreciation.” Jonas had a way of presenting the poetry that made it seem unthreatening, tangible and real. And appreciatable. If that could be a word.

It was a small class, but I can remember only about 3 names of the students. One of them was my friend Jen Miller, and there was a Titus who looked exactly like what I imagined some melancholy 18th century poet might look like, and a Jewel who read poetry with a voice that was poetry itself.

I looked forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays because I could go to this class. It seemed like a safe haven for me, a very homesick Kansas farm girl.

Then one day we read the poem, “In No Strange Land,” by Francis Thompson (who also wrote another favorite poem that I fell in love with at the age of 15, “The Hound of Heaven”). At first, the entire poem went over my head. I had no idea what it meant. Then, as we started looking at it closer, I grew to love it.

The entire poem is a paradox. In simple language, you might say, “The entire poem means that God and his angels are closer than what we realize.” Fish, in seeking the ocean, do not need to fly. Eagles, seeking air, do not need to come down to earth. So why do we constantly look for God in far away places instead of close to ourselves? If God could walk on the water in homely Galilee, what would stop him from bringing your lost cat back, or fixing your bad visa situation?

For me, the poem reminded me then that God was just as close in Intimidating Mennonite Educational Culture as he was in the in the barn where I scribbled down poetry on scrap paper while milking cows.

It reminds me of the verse in Acts 17 where Paul is talking with the Atheniens. He says, “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:  For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:26-28 KJV).

“Though he be not far from every one of us.” Perhaps there is more holiness in our everyday lives than we realized.