The Sons of Martha

March 4, 2013 Leave a comment

“The Sons of Martha”

When I think of the shrinking middle class in North America in relation to the small percentage who have all the money and seemingly endless opportunities to strengthen their power ad place, and bolster their sense of entitlement, my mind often turns to the genius of the poet of the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling. He may have been out of favour with the many for a long time, and his fundamental outlook on life was that of a Freemason, but who else could put poems like The Sons of Martha  together. It was inspired by the biblical story of Mary and Martha as told in Luke 10:38–42. In the bible story, Christ visits a home where two sisters, Mary and Martha, live; Mary sits at the visitor’s feet to listen to him while Martha races about attending to the hospitality until her patience runs out, and she calls on Mary to help her. Martha is chided for her mundane concerns, and told that “Mary has chosen what is better”.

 The poem celebrates the careful work done by workers and builders to provide for others’ physical needs. While written in 1907, it was adopted by Kipling in 1922 to be part of the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer performed by graduates as they prepare to enter the engineering profession. (Wikipedia)[1]

  Those of us who have worked in the church, obligated to prepare sermons year round, have surely tried to deal with this story in Luke`s Gospel. Unfortunately I did not start reading Kipling until I was well into graduate work on the British in 19th century India. There I met Kipling who intrigued me no end.

We were warned never to join the Masons, and I never did, though invited.  For Ben Warkentin, son of that famous Johann Warkentin, first longtie  minister of Wink;er MB church,   about whom I wrote in my series on `Mennonites in the Atlantic Provinces“ in the 1970s, Masonry was his substitute for church. For Kipling in 1907 it `gratified his craving for a world-religion and his devotion to the bond that unites  the sons of Martha, the men who bear the burden of the world`s work.[2]

The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary’s Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.

It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.

They say to mountains “Be ye removèd.” They say to the lesser floods “Be dry.”
Under their rods are the rocks reprovèd—they are not afraid of that which is high.
Then do the hill-tops shake to the summit—then is the bed of the deep laid bare,
That the Sons of Mary may overcome it, pleasantly sleeping and unaware.

They finger Death at their gloves’ end where they piece and repiece the living wires.
He rears against the gates they tend: they feed him hungry behind their fires.
Early at dawn, ere men see clear, they stumble into his terrible stall,
And hale him forth like a haltered steer, and goad and turn him till evenfall.

To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till death is Relief afar.
They are concerned with matters hidden—under the earthline their altars are—
The secret fountains to follow up, waters withdrawn to restore to the mouth,
And gather the floods as in a cup, and pour them again at a city’s drouth.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not preach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they damn-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren’s ways may be long in the land.

Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path more fair or flat;
Lo, it is black already with the blood some Son of Martha spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness to any creed,
But simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need.

And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessèd—they know the Angels are on their side.
They know in them is the Grace confessèd, and for them are the Mercies multiplied.
They sit at the feet—they hear the Word—they see how truly the Promise runs.
They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and—the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons!

l

[1]Kipling`s biographer, Charles Carrington (Penguin, 1955), tells how he gave his social philosophy (as expressed in The Sons of Martha) in an address to the graduates from the University of St. Andrews. Kipling had been elected as the Lord Rector of the University. This speech was published under the title, Independence.

[2] Carrington, 106; cf 181Kipling had a soul for the Anapaes, a sometimes galloping rhythm. tAnapestic tetrameter is a poetic meter that has four anapestic metrical feet per line. Each foot has two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. It is sometimes referred to as a “reverse dactyl“, and shares the rapid, driving pace of the dactyl

 

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Darwin’s Mistake

December 29, 2012 1 Comment

Darwin’s Mistake

 

Three monkeys sat in a coconut tree

Discussing things as they’re said to be

Said one to the others, “Now listen,  you two,

There’s a certain rumour that can’t be true,

That man descended from our noble race

That very idea is a disgrace.

No monkey ever deserted his wife,

Starved her babies or ruined her life.

And you’ve never known a mother monk

To leave her babies with others to bunk,

Or pass them from one to another,

Till they scarcely know who is their mother,

And another thing you’ll never see  - -

A monk building a fence around a coconut tree

And let the coconuts go to waste,

Forbidding all other monkeys to taste.

If I’d put a fence around this tree,

Starvation would force you to steal from me.

Here’s another thing a monk won’t do,

Go out at night and get in a stew,

And use a gun or club or knife,

To take some other monkey’s life.

Yes, man descended, the ornery cuss,

But, brother, he didn’t descend from us.”

Anon.  According to various entries in the Internet under this heading, the author is not known, so I feel at liberty to share this with my Blog readers. While it has its humorous intent, it says much about man’s inhumanity to man and refers the reader back to Exodus 20 and its Ten Commandments, and to Jesus’ twin commandment ‘To love God and Love your neighbour as yourself’ as fulfillment of the law.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Revenge of the Acadians

December 7, 2012 Leave a comment

What does it mean to be Acadian?

Having lived in Sackville, NB, for 29 years, in a town that once was known as Beaubassin, I could not help but be drawn to a book Justina brought home from another library. It was Clive Doucet’s 1999 Notes from Exile: on being Acadian. He, a newspaper man and prolific author, was telling what he learned from the 1994 Retrouvailles, when 250,000 Acadians came together for their first world reunion held along the eastern shore of New Brunswick. This was 239 years since the Deportation of the Acadians. They had lived in Acadia since 1604 and then, because they would not swear allegiance to the British during the build-up to the Seven Years’ War between France and England (1756-1763), they were ruthlessly uprooted from the only land they knew and dispersed far and wide in 1755.

Actually, the forcible removal took place during most of the 1750s. By burning down their villages in Acadia (east of today’s Wolfville), they were able to force the most terrible upheaval (called the Grande Derangement) to the area around the French-built Fort Beausejour and Acadian Beaubassin (at today’s border between Amherst, NS and Sackville, NB). When the Fort surrendered to the British land forces and naval forces floating in on Fundy tides, the surrounding villages were destroyed and those who did not escape were removed. Approximately 11,500 Acadians were expelled, their lands and property confiscated. They were not killed nor enslaved as were the Germans, including Mennonites, in Russia under Stalin, yet the Acadians were completely uprooted. Doucet wrote the English idea was to “dismantle their communities and sense of themselves as an independent people so that they would never again challenge British interests in North America.  It was an 18th century precursor to ethnic cleansing.”

The Acadians were deported throughout the British eastern seaboard colonies from New England to Georgia. Thousands were transported to France. Most of the Acadians who went to Louisiana, according to a Google account, were transported from France (without the King’s knowledge) on five Spanish ships “provided by the Spanish Crown to populate their Louisiana colony and provide farmers to supply New Orleans. These new arrivals from France joined the earlier wave expelled from Acadia, creating the Cajun population and culture.”

How could Acadians return to their former lands when others were encouraged to consider them as ‘vacant.’ The ‘Damn Yankees’ came immediately after 1755; the Baptists landed near Sackville in 1763,* the Yorkshire Wesleyan Methodists came to Chignecto in 1772, the Scots Presbyterians on the Hector landed at Pictou, NS, in 1773.  The United Empire Loyalists (Huegenot and Anglicans) came to the Saint John River valley in 1784 and thus launched the creation of New Brunswick with a capital at Fredericton.

The Acadians came back however. Doucet wrote about Caraquet, Richibucto, and who has not hear of Shediac, the lobster capital? But let me concentrate on how they settled along the banks of the Memramcook, the river below Monkton, opposite Dorchester, and there built a new capital for themselves. The village of Memramcook became known as “the cradle of New Acadia.” There Acadians built their cathedral and their Acadian College which became the “corner stone of superior education in Acadia.” This College became the Université de Saint-Joseph, the first francophone and Acadian university of the region. When this became the Université de Moncton in 1963, “the campus reinvented itself as the Memramcook Institute and began offering adult education courses … the true heart and soul of this community.”

With a population of 4,638 inhabitants and covering 185 square kilometers the Memramcook region, according to Google, “offers numerous cultural and recreational activities such as the Apple Blossom Festival, the Lumberjack Festival, the Accordion Festival, as well as the Bluegrass Festival.” That is a small portrait of Acadia.

I, ‘from away,’ became aware of Acadians in a traumatic way while researching the 200th anniversary of Sackville’s Methodist/United Church in 1987.[1]  Not surprisingly, I came to the 200th anniversary of the Acadian deportation, 1955. I was amazed, nay dismayed, that the editor of the United Churchman would through a period of five years, 1951 to 1956, raise a huge stink about what was termed an Acadian ‘Renaissance’. First he thought that building a retirement home for United Church ministers in Sackville [not more than ten miles from Memramcook, by crossing the second longest covered bridge] would help to create a rallying place, a ‘bastion’, against a “different  culture pressing down the east coast of New Brunswick” threatening to engulf the whole Maritime area. In 1955 he was calling on all Protestants to hold the fort, to adopt the English strategy of 1755 against the French. He feared that Acadian and Roman Catholic propaganda was behind that Renaissance. All Protestants should renew their loyalty ‘to their Lord and to their Church.’ He feared losing the ‘war of the cradle’ in NB and ‘Acadians will rule the Province led by a totalitarian church!’[2]

            I was appalled. Could anything be more WASPish?

Actually, the Acadian survival was strong enough by the 1960s for Moncton to become its hub and New Brunswick to become officially bilingual. An Acadian named Louis Robichaud, head of the Liberal Party of New Brunswick, became the Premier of the Province. He introduced an education bill for equal opportunity of all NB children regardless of their background. One of the chief architects of this bill was Charles Forsyth who was minister of Sackville United Church when I took a position at Mount Allison University in 1965. When he was asked to move to Fredericton to become, in effect, private secretary to Robichaud, there was utter consternation among Sackville UCC congregants. How could a Protestant minister leave a congregation in mid-stream to become secretary to a Liberal, Catholic, Acadian Premier!

Perhaps I may conclude this Post by asking what did the Acadians come to mean to us? They were not very evident in the student body of Mount Allison, especially once New Brunswick had its own French-speaking Universite. When we renovated our kitchen in 1985, a local Baptist had the contract, but the cabinets were produced in Shediac. When we redecorated the whole downstairs, the men who did our walls, ceilings, and hardwood floors were Acadians, some of them Pentecostal. They walked on stilts while plastering the nine-foot ceilings in our 1909 house. Two men who made our attractive loveseats and wing-backed chairs from scratch were Acadians from Richibucto.

Their ‘revenge’ was our satisfaction for work well done.

*Have just seen for the first time a SACKVILLE POSTAL STAMP, WITH THE NUMBER 250  ON IT. This came on a Christmas letter from Charlie Scobie, Sackville resident. if you add 250 to 1763 you get 2013.**  Next year the Baptists of Sackivlle will celebrate 250 years of presence in Beaubassin (Sackville). they landed at Slack’s Cove, brought in on the tide.

**Actually, this is not the way it was celebrated. The founding date of Sackville was taken to be 1762 and thus 2012 was the anniversary year. According to the published outline of the celebrations of 2012 in Sackville there is no mention of the Acadians nor of the Baptists. Interesting.

[1] The Chignecto ‘Connexion’, The History of Sackville Methodist-United Church, 1772-1990

[2] See “The Chignecto Bastion”, 146-147

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CMU and the Christian Ideal

November 4, 2012 Leave a comment

CMU and the Christian Ideal.

If I understand Gerald Gerbrandt, the outgoing President of Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, correctly, he hopes his legacy will be a University “of the Church for the World.”[1] I do not see a problem in maintaining that ideal as long as the Church that is envisaged remains that Church, and the World that Gerbrandt has in mind remains that World. He sees CMU as an Anabaptist/Mennonite school with an outreach to many parts of the world. This is how McMaster was launched in Toronto in the 1880s – a college for young people of the Baptists of Ontario and Quebec Convention; Acadia University in Nova Scotia as the much older college was intended in the first place for the youth of the Convention of United Baptists of the Maritimes.

But both church and world have had a tendency to change within each and towards each other. An example of how the imaged church may turn to become more conservative and begin demanding changes in the burgeoning university is shown in McMaster’s history.  The Rev. T.T. Shields, pastor of Toronto’s Jarvis Street Baptist Church, fighting the `modernism` of the day in the 1920s, tried to control McMaster as a bulwark against those who began to question such things as the inerrancy of the Scriptures.  When McMaster however honoured a notable theologian who did not meet Shield`s strictures, and then appointed a liberal professor to the faculty of theology, Shields started a fight that would end with his expulsion from the university and the Convention and the launching of a new association of Regular Baptists (see the Internet). The University, anyway gifted with land in Hamilton, decided to move the school in 1930. The Board of the Convention of Ontario and Quebec gave up control in 1957 and McMaster became a privately chartered, publicly funded non-denominational institution. It has however maintained a Divinity School on campus to this day. From among Mennonites Walter Klaassen is a notable  graduate.

An example where one wing of the church had become more liberal and ready to support a University that would have a wide appeal in the Maritimes and beyond is found in the Annapolis Valley. For more than a century Acadia had served as the premier undergraduate school for the United Baptists of the Maritimes (the Convention). A Baptist-oriented university for the world!      Beginning small in the 1830s, Baptist-supported Acadia saw the decided Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian leanings in Halifax universities. In order to garner a significant number of students and professors, it opened its gates, stating that ‘no religious tests … shall be required of the professors, scholars, graduate students or officers of the said college; but that all the privileges … shall be open and free to all and every person or persons whomsoever.’ Stephen Franklin asserted that for more than a century Acadia ‘has had more true academic freedom than most Universities.  Historically the Baptist convention has a long liberal tradition of freedom of thought and free investigation.’ He noted that in the 1960s Acadia had five Jewish professors and quite a few non-believers.[2]

Was this about to be changed in 1966?  In that year the Convention voted that henceforth, after 128 years, the aim was to have all persons teaching on campus be professing Christians, people who had ‘a personal belief in and commitment to Jesus Christ.’ What is more, no more Jews were to be hired. Thus, both anti-Semitism and anti-liberalism had reared its doubly fundamentalist head at Baptist Acadia just as I was getting settled in a Wesleyan/United-oriented University in Sackville, NB. Otherwise, these Maritime Provinces were dotted by small Irish Catholic colleges and one French-language school for Acadians in Moncton.

This intervention created instant uproar among faculty and administration at Acadia as had happened at McMaster forty years earlier. Most members of the faculty were decidedly against this new demand. But the fight was not as much on campus as in the Convention where the cleavage between the numerically strong fundamentalists of the north, mainly New Brunswick (an illustration will follow below), and the more liberal churches in the south, Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, widened and the north threatened to take over Acadia’s Board.

What worried all of them was the changing culture among young people, the same phenomenon that stirred the educational pot of the Mennonite world, for example, at Bethel and Tabor in Kansas, already in the ‘30s and ‘40s. If faculty and administration could not hold the line, would it have to be the Convention? At Acadia the problem was not settled until the matter was taken to the NS Legislature which took majority control out of the hands of the Board and thus ensured the continuation of an open university, a nominally Baptist one for the whole world.

Allow me a good story from Acadia in the first half of the 1930s:  When Cornelius Unruh, missionary in India, Mennonite Brethren from Ruekenau, Russia, working under the umbrella of the American Baptists, wanted to send his two sons abroad for a university education, the secretary, Joseph C. Robbins, a Canadian who had graduated from Acadia, recommended his alma mater. Have no fear, he wrote, Acadia is a good school where there was religious and academic freedom. The result was that Cornelius and Henry Unruh were sent from Nalgonda, Andhra Pradesh and the famous Ootacumund School in India’s south, to Wolfville and after four years (1933) each had Honours degrees, one in Chemistry, the other in Mathematics, and each got good jobs, Cornelius with Kodak in Rochester, and Henry with Provident Insurance, in the south. Besides, Acadia gave the father an honorary doctorate for his role in India.[3]

Gerbrandt`s ideal for a continuing Anapatist-oriented Christian university will be tested in various ways. There may be many shifts in the years ahead. Not all Mennonites who qualify for openings in ‘higher education’ will gravitate toward the ideal of maintaining the ‘Christian’ university. I cannot help but ask, will some of CMU’s graduate students apply for jobs, with confidence, I hope, say, to the University of Manitoba where there is less commitment to faith questions and succeed there and compete with graduate students?  And will they there meet other Anabaptist/Mennonite-minded professors who never circulated through Christian schools? What comparisons will they make with those and will they be any more successful in their witness than the secularized ones?

Another challenge will surely come from the Canadian Association of University Teachers.  If CMU restricts the field of advertising positions that are open or/and demands a faith-commitment of a certain kind, the press will pick up the story and the publicity will wake up both the church and the public. If it advertises in the CAUT publication, this Union will hardly permit CMU to refuse qualified faculty who respond to advertisement of openings.

This is where we must widen the framework of the `world“ Is it likely that any highly qualified person in a field that is to be covered at CMU will apply to teach in one of its departments for the purpose of undermining CMU`s faith position?  I think not. The world out there is full of Christians by other names, as demonstrated by my friends and cemented from my own experiences, who live by ethical standards perhaps not yet achieved by some of our own people.

Allow me in closing a personal story. When I landed on my feet in Sackville, NB, home of Mount Allison University, the United Church-related campus in 1965, the administrators were glad to welcome a Mennonite, while the history faculty looked askance at an avowed Christian, Anabaptist, coming in and who might disturb the delicate balance tending at that time toward an elitism which many faculty wanted to pursue. Their attitudes in the long run did not bother me as much as the fundamentalism in Main Street Baptist church (as hinted above) where the minister could not accept that a Christian could teach at a secular school such as Mount Allison, secular only in that the Maritime Conference of the United Church after 1957 no longer had majority control of its board. After two Sundays even my 9-year son said, Dad, I never want to go to that SS and church again. We were welcomed at the United Church as people of the University and as Mennonites and, after a year or two, the wannabe intellectuals in the History Department were gone and my Catholic, Anglican, United, Baptist and agnostic colleagues pulled together amiably in History for two decades.

I close with the illustration of the Journal of Mennonite Studies. This highly rated and widely-read literary and mostly intellectually satisfying Journal may be compared with CMU.  When one looks at its editorial staff and advisory board, it is about as Mennonite and Anabaptist as anyone could wish, yet it is ‘in (even if not of) the University of Winnipeg for the Mennonite church’ and commands respect within that community, the University and the wider intellectual world. Why? Because there is academic freedom there. Otherwise it could hardly be a journal of the Mennonite Church for the world. It would shrivel to a journal for some in the Mennonite community. CMU must adapt to the same kind of rigorous criteria. Real religious freedom at the university is not possible in the long run without academic freedom and free enquiry.

History Faculty, 1985: Eugene Goodrich,     Bill Godfrey, John Stanton, Peter, Glenara Anderson, secretary, David     Beatty, Mark Davis, Graham Adams,,

Peter Penner, June, 2012

[1] Interview, Blazer (Spring, 2012), 4

[2] Weekend Magazine (No. 23, 1966), p 12-18

[3] Penner, Russians, North Americans, and Telugus: the MB Mission in India (Kindred Productions, 1997), 105, 338

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Everything but the Bible!

October 29, 2012 1 Comment

For some months in 2012, as illustrated in a previous post, I was alternating four books close to the Bible – about the Bible – with my pocket New Testament.  Then, my car having gone into a body shop because of a small accident, I was driving a rental. Somewhere, somehow, this beautiful book in India paper no less, enclosing the New Testament and Psalms in the New International Version, was gone, lifted. Couldn’t believe it! The clerks at a particular rental site must have been startled to have me phone to ask: ‘Was anyone there seen to be reading a little Bible?’

It was gone. Hope someone is reading the Sermon on the Mount!

Anyway, my reading of Luke’s Gospel and Acts lapsed for some time as I tried to complete my planned reading for a new appreciation of the Bible. I have already written a Post about Melvyn Bragg’s The Book of Books, the Radical Impact of the King James Bible, 1611 – 2011 (Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), 370 pages. According to Bragg this translation  “let loose a deluge of knowledge unlike anything that had happened before in human history“. Bragg’s central claim is that the King James Bible has been a catalyst for “positive achievement”, spurring both political radicalism and epochal social changes. He identifies it as a “wellspring” for democracy, women’s education, the abolition of slavery, and contains the greatest literature of all time.

For the making of the English Bible, I actually recommend an older book by Adam Nicolson, God`s Secretaries, The Making of the King James Bible (2005). This grandson of Sir Harold Nicolson, once PM of England, had a profound understanding of the King who authorized this new translation of the Bible into English when its prose could deliver a literary gem of Shakespearean proportions. King James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England saw a chance to use a new translation of the Bible to unify his kingdom. It has been said that “the dream of Jacobean peace lay behind a Bible of extraordinary grace and everlasting literary power.”
About fifty scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London did the work, drawing on many previous versions, and created a text which, for all its failings, has never been equaled. According to one reviewer, the central question of this book, in light of widespread views about how the Bible came to us, is how such ordinary men could make such extraordinary prose? In God’s Secretaries, “Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the accession and ambition of the first Stuart king; of the scholars who labored for seven years to create his Bible; of the influences that shaped their work and of the beliefs that colored their world, immersing us in an age whose greatest monument is not a painting or a building, but a book.”

If after reading Bragg and perhaps Nicolson and other fascinating volumes about the erstwhile influence of the King James Bible, I offer you Donald Harmon Akenson’s Surpassing Wonder, The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds (McGill, Queens, 1998). He does not accord fundamentalists and dispensationalist much space except a footnote in which he says: ignore them! In a word, ‘if you are a fundamentalist, fiercely and unconditionally attached to your religious tradition, ….this book is not for you.’ I do not agree with this. If you are one who has been indoctrinated into believing in the inerrancy of those Scriptures, you should try this work. It gives you an amazing education in understanding and Bible literacy which no one of some education and with love of the Scriptures should deny him/herself. You may find it too heavy. Akenson’s vocabulary is like none other, so it seems. And you may not be glad to read that there were enough writings gathered in the century after the death of Christ to make two more new testaments, nor happy to know that Akenson thinks too much space was given to the Apostle Paul.

Sometimes the reviews by ‘customers’ are more helpful than the professional’s. Here is one:

               “Akenson’s book is easily the most comprehensive discussion of Hebrew and Christian scripture I have read. For example, in the middle section of the book he takes the reader through some of the more important religious literature being written during the second temple period and identifies it as the source of many themes that eventually find their way into the Christian gospels. Surpassing Wonder was valuable for me also because it adjusted my perspective. I am used to thinking of the religious literature after Jesus as that of the Christian Bible. Akenson, however, brings equally to the foreground an extensive discussion of the rabbinic literature being written during the same period as the church fathers are formulating and arguing out what will become of the traditional beliefs of Christianity. Thus, in Akenson’s book, we get an overview (skillfully handled, especially considering the vastness of the rabbinic texts) of the literature of both the major religions that emerged from the tumultuous period of Jesus’ life and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. I would strongly recommend this book as an essential introduction to the writing of both the Hebrew and Christian bible and their historical contexts.”

            My euphoria from Bragg’s The Book of Books was sharply altered by reading in the biographical dictionary Who’s Who in the Bible. In recent months I added this book produced by Reader’s Digest and sold through mail order.[1] This dictionary treats of every person mentioned in the Bible and Apocrypha, in alphabetical order, length determined by the person’s importance and frequency of mention in the Bible, all this in scholarly fashion without suggestion of religious bias. While the view is often refreshing, it can also shake you up. For example, whereas Gideon, in days gone by, when proof-texting evangelicals used his heroics to symbolize something quite amazing, here he appears like a BC Bountiful polygamist with seventy children who are all sacrificed in the scramble for power in a strangely politicized world. What blood-thirsty characters appear there.

If you can believe that the land area containing the 12 tribes of Israel and all of their cousins and neighbours around (Moabites, Canaanites, Philistines, Ammonites, not to mention the larger empires of Assyria, Babylonia, Persia), can birth and feed such numbers as claimed, numbers large enough to field thousands of foot-soldiers and charioteers, then it was nothing for thousands upon thousands to be sacrificed in battle for political and empire-building causes. And even the kings of God’s Chosen had the disturbing habit of killing off all potential aspirants to the throne. Take no prisoners! Leave no rivals! Oh yes, there are some great and wonderful characters, like David and Solomon, but would you want to be the offspring of one of their many wives and concubines? By the way, what happened to all the females born and used. Were they sacrificed too.

What also makes this volume attractive is the bringing together of many, many reproductions of paintings found in great cathedrals. There are maps, explanatory sidebars, and fairly elegant prose to bring together the story of each person. For example, once you have read this dictionary story of the great Apostle Paul and his many journeys with the trials he underwent, you will see that the scholars who put the NT together had cause to celebrate him.

[1] Who’s Who in the Bible, designed and edited by Gardner Associates for Reader’s Digest General Books, 1994

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This is my story!

July 11, 2012 Leave a comment

This is my story!

You won’t believe it unless of course you have heard of Kindred Productions’ under-achievements before. You would think that books one writes for the general membership’s information and inspiration would be distributed, even at some cost to the treasury.  But it was my misfortune as an outsider (so considered by many) to have my two major books for the MB readership terribly mishandled by the managing level as well as by staff of KP. To this day I don’t know how many copies of No Longer at Arm’s Length (1987) were printed or sold. All I know is that it did not get into the libraries of the local churches where there are many readers who cannot afford $25-30 books as they come out. They will not buy at full price from KP sale lists nor without reading some judicious and fair reviews that recommend them for denominational reading.

Earlier this year by chance I learned that 600 copies had been printed of my Russians, North Americans, and Telugus, the MB Mission in India, 1985 – 1975 (1997). Then I also learned that after 14 years (14 YEARS!) there were still 309 copies sitting in boxes at KP in Winnipeg, until 2010, I believe, listed at full price.  Now that I let out a yelp or two, the person in charge at KP has found ways of disposing those copies at $9 and giving some to the discounters True, there is a claim that 300 copies were sold or/and distributed, but I never received enough in royalty payments to list the income for Revenue Canada.

I came to consider this AN AFFRONT REQUIRING REAL REDRESS! So, what did I do?

Well, I wrote the current head manager who had thought only of damage control. No matter what was said, the fact remained that KP had 309 copies in stock of Russians, North Americans and Telugus until very recently. That meant that KP had not been well served, and I had not been well served with the sale of something I devoted years to do. Both, I think, are circumstances that should be investigated. I cannot do anything about the former, but I can do something about the matter of not being well served.

Some friends in whom I confided were dismayed. Our schools, our churches, even seminaries, should have been targeted. But there are several problems, one wrote. There is a very low level of interest in our own history. Many of our professors are quite illiterate in MB history and also indifferent. The persons running KP often are relations of personnel without much education. Even worse, the Conference officially does not care.

I wrote: ”You certainly need to be acutely embarrassed and some of the significant people who don’t know about this need to be reminded how it was and why I devoted so much time to researching and writing that book.”

            This is my story: If Peter Hamm in 1981 had had his way in the Board of Missions,  I would have been commissioned to do the whole story as a text book for Mennonite schools. When that was rejected, I decided to do the MB Mission to India as a separate topic. It was large enough by itself – and significant enough – if it was going to be done in the way I approach such subjects. I would devote my last Sabbatical, 1988-89, and sabbatical income, to the basic research in Fresno. I entered upon that venture without an official guarantee of publication.

But when I asked for permission to go to Fresno from New Brunswick [a five day trip!] to do the research in the CMBS/F I was warmly welcomed by the whole Toews clan (John B., and sons John E., and Paul) and given a carrel in which to work, and made an ‘adjunct professor’ of MBBS. I gave periodic reports to the Seminary faculty. At one time, I could hardly believe it, I was asked to make some introductory remarks to the Board of the Seminary meeting in Fresno. I felt honoured to do this.

To sum up, I did all this without any professional fees, did the research in Fresno, made two trips for it, spending overall a total of eleven months in that archive, spent nine years at this book, besides fulltime teaching until 1992. I even went from Calgary to Waterloo (at my own expense) to autograph copies in 1997.  What a farce that was.

Along the way, following the reviews by the expert readers, Hiebert, Wiebe, and Martens, and later by Enns-Rempel, and Paul, a decision was made by the Commission to publish. After that the design and printing and binding was brought to Canada.

I was never asked to pay a subvention.

I was also never paid for any expenses.

I was also never given a letter of thanks by the Historical Commission that I can remember. Compare the BC Conference who many years after the event sent me an official thanks for my first book for the Mennonite Brethren, the little history of the West Coast Childrens’ Mission which I did in 1959.

To date I have not received any royalties worth reporting to Revenue Canada.

So, what does KP owe me besides an apology? If I were to consult a lawyer, what would he/she suggest? Anyway, for starters, please have the Conference Treasurer send me a cheque in the amount of $1,000 as ‘unpaid royalties’ or by another name. And do throw in ten copies of Russians, North Americans, and Telugus, so I can at least give them as gifts to my friends.

Now, valued at $9 that is not such a large donation.

This brought results. This is a paragraph from the executive letter of June 25th:

“Two weeks ago the Historical Commission met for its annual meeting, and gave careful consideration to your concerns, and to your requests. The Commission acknowledges the great investment that you made for this book. The Commission shares your disappointment that more people have not purchased copies of it. Therefore, in appreciation for your work, the Commission members decided that they would gladly send you as many as 50 books at no cost to you. You can then distribute these as you see fit. If you are willing to receive these books, I will arrange to have them sent you as soon as possible. (With your confirmation, please also confirm your mailing address.)“

My reply:  “Should I be surprized? Fifty copies. At $10 that adds up to $500. If I perchance wanted to mail these to almost anyone, near or far, the cost for mailing on average would be at least $10 and so the onus of circulation may be seen to be shifted on me. I will of course not attempt to do that, though I will mail some copies.

I will not ask for 50 copies, 40 will be quite enough. Over a period of perhaps two years they will all be gone and read as eagerly as my one copy is now being read by a good Presbyterian! My mailing address is Peter Penner, Emeritus Professor, 20 Rundlelawn Close NE, Calgary, AB,  T1Y 4A5.

But I am herewith asking staff at KP in Winnipeg to mail one copy each of Russians, North Americans, and Telugus: the Mennonite Brethren Mission in India, 1885-1975 to the following four university libraries in North India.

The rationale is this: In 1972-73 I spent four months in India on research and travel as a Shastri Scholar (compare Ron Neufeldt, James Pankratz). When I had completed my pursuits I had published four books on British India in the 19th century, particularly as applied to North India. The three most important are listed here. Two of these were published in New Delhi and have found use in India`s universities.”

            The Patronage Bureaucracy in North India:  The Robert M. Bird and James Thomason School, 1820-1870.  Delhi, Chanakya Publications, 1986, 380 pages;

            Robert Needham Cust, 1821-1909:  A Personal Biography. Lewiston, N.Y., Edwin Mellen Press, 1987, 357 pages

With Richard Dale MacLean, The Rebel Bureaucrat:  Frederick John Shore (1799-1837) as Critic of  William Bentinck’s India.  Delhi, Chanakya Publications, 1983, 304 pages

The archives in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, were most useful. I spent ten weeks in Allahabad and lived on the campus of Ewing Christian (American Presbyterian) College.

I will write the librarians of each of these institutions that they should expect copy in due course of my book on the MB mission to Andhra Pradesh, and tell them how much I learned from my four months in India, and that I went down to visit this mission in February 1973 and wrote two articles about it, published in the Mennonite Reporter.”

My alternative request was duly honoured and ‘expedited post’ brought me forty copies on the day of our 63rd wedding anniversary.

Filed under faith and integrity, Uncategorized

Rudy H. Wiebe and his Peace Shall Destroy Many, 1962-63

June 12, 2012 3 Comments

Recently someone became interested once again in looking back to see what the publication of Rudy Wiebe’s first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many meant. Since Justina and I were close to Rudy and Tina Wiebe then,  I thought I would throw the following into a Post.

Ironically, the very first issue in 1962 of the new Mennonite Brethren Herald  carried a notice of Rudy Wiebe’s novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, one of the first novels by a Mennonite ever to be published by a non-religious press. And he was its first editor! Hardly did we know when that issue came out that this book would ‘destroy the peace of many’. The first review of Wiebe’s novel in the MBH was written by Peter Klassen of MBBC’s music department. He believed that “many Mennonites will be disturbed to see themselves cast in this mould [of conflict]”.[1]

Personal Visits with Rudy Wiebe:

Though I cannot remember why Rudy came to us three times from Goshen, IN, while I was pastor of the Toronto MB Church (1962-64), I entered the dates of his visits, but made no record of our conversations in my Daybook. Rudy brought Tina and did an overnight on October 5-6, 1963; he came alone December 8, 1963; with his family June 4, 1964: Tina, and children Michael and Adriane. On one occasion I remember how he sang a solo in a church service. We were together at the 1964 Mennonite Graduate Fellowship at Elkhart which featured John Yoder, William Klassen, Victor Adrian, and others.

I assume from other sources that he talked to us of his new and well-liked environment in Goshen and his opportunity particularly to get to know John Howard Yoder and the circle of friends mentioned in one of the footnotes associated with Hildi Tiessen’s 2002 tribute (see below). I also assume that Rudy and Tina at that time were as interested in the issues we were facing in Toronto: just trying to be a normal MB church congregation but discovering later that I had a church worm in my council and congregation who tattled and complained to the ever mindful home missions committee and further afield under which we operated officially. Our issues were more important to me and my family at that time because we were not only undermined but woefully underpaid, given Toronto living costs. Of these things I wrote rather profusely.

Note: While I did not make notes on our conversations at the time, I did however file away some articles about Rudy and his career.

Meanwhile, some members of the Toronto congregation, very disturbed by the virtual firing of Rudy H. Wiebe as editor of the new MBH because of the controversy caused by the publication of this novel, voiced their objections in a letter to the publications committee. It was written by Herb Swartz (now in Virginia) and signed by others. When I met J.H. Quiring at the General Conference in Winnipeg in the summer of 1963, he considered it wise that I as pastor in Toronto had not signed that letter of complaint to the publications committee. Quiring as much as told me this group really had no business writing that letter. The matter was in the hands of the publication committee, and they had done the right thing. He reflected the views of many when he said: ‘We don’t have people like the Deacon Block portrayed in Peace Shall Destroy Many in our churches!’[2]

During my sermon in German for Remembrance Day service in November 1995 at FMC, Richmond Road, Calgary, entitled “Der Friede wird viele stoeren,” I tried to show just how PSDM became a disturbing element in Mennonite circles. His novel came totally unexpectedly as romance literature. It was pure fiction, contrived in Rudy’s mind, based in a world called Wapiti which however seemed to have many elements very similar to his family’s home in the bush of Saskatchewan. It disturbed readers as far away as Orenburg, Russia (where Rudy’s family came from) because they thought he had fabricated Deacon’ Block’s character from some controlling character in the Mennonite church in that location back in the 1920s. [See MR story from April 8, 1964]

Everyone, including Quiring, seemed turned on by the vision of Deacon Block dominating his family and his church!

The Important Sources

The most meaningful statements that explain Rudy Wiebe’s  thinking and ordeal during the years of the PSDM’s incursion in Mennonite congregational life  are found in the following  [and most of them were brought together by W. J. Keith in 1981]:

1) Rudy’s editorial, “A Personal Word to Friends,” his last editorial in MBH (June 21, 1963) In this he pleaded for a high degree of honesty and openness, much as Frank H. Epp always demanded. Rudy feared there were many in the Canadian conference “who do not believe that frankness and openness is the way that should … be fruitfully discussed”.  He was however given a warm plaudit by the conference publication committee for the “creative and imaginative and aggressive approach to your assignment.”[3]

2) The first reviews are mentioned in W.J. Keith’s Introduction to his edition of A Voice in the Land, Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe (NuWest Press), 1981. He leads up to Herb Giesbriecht’s review and also in his interview with Margaret Loewen Reimer and Sue Steiner.  Non-Mennonite critics were divided. Some liked it a lot and others did not understand his use of language, much less the Mennonites. What seems funny now is that readers west of the Red River, descendants of the 1870s immigration, saw themselves in the novel which exposed things from the inside that should never be exposed! Wiebe professed to be startled by the vehemence of the criticism. He must have struck a nerve! Many who had never read the book, only heard it second hand, were quite upset! (p 127-128)

Indeed, there was too much truth for comfort.

2) “O Life, How Naked and How Hard When Known.” This review by Herb Giesbrecht,  MBBC librarian, at the request of the editor of the Canadian Mennonite, given in Keith, 50-63, brought a robust reply from Rudy. For Giesbrecht, the plot line was very clear, the gradual exposure and final disintegration of Deacon Block, but Rudy did not agree with that!

3) Rudy’s response in the Canadian Mennonite, “An Author Speaks about his Novel,” 64-68, was directed most immediately to Giesbrecht in which Wiebe presses home his main theme: what does it mean to the character Thom to be Mennonite Brethren, so to speak, in time of war? Thom’s story is intended as the main theme, and he remains somewhat confused to the end! [Cf. # 6]

4) “For the Mennonite Churches: A Last Chance,” in Christian Living, 11 (June 1964), reproduced by W.J. Keith, 25-38

5) “The Artist as Critic and a Witness,” Christian Living, 1964

6) “The Meaning of Being Mennonite Brethren,” MBH, April 17, 1970, 2-4 [was to be confused?]

7) Elmer Suderman,”Universal Values in PSDM”, probably the very best review, Keith, p. 69-78 wherein Elmer responds to Thom as the main character in PSDM.

   Note: My own view is that the furor about PSDM was nothing like the uproar over Wiebe’s My Lovely Enemy (1983) and Gordon Nickel’s positive review in the MBH, where letters kept pouring in for months afterward, and many cancelled their subscriptions, bringing about the resignation of Nickel in 1984 and that of Harold Jantz a year  later.

From Hildi Tiessen’s Tribute to Rudy in 2002

Rudy was born in 1934 in the rugged but lovely region near Fairholme, Saskatchewan. His parents had escaped Soviet Russia with five children in 1930, part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian West, and part of a Mennonite history of displacement and emigration through Europe and Asia to North and South America since the seventeenth century. In 1947 his family gave up their bush farm and moved to Coaldale, Alberta, a town east of Lethbridge peopled largely by Ukrainians, Mennonites, Mormons, and Central Europeans, as well as Japanese, who ended up there during WW II.
Rudy Wiebe read as much as possible from an early age; his first reading materials were the Bible, the Eaton’s catalogue and the Free Press Weekly Prairie Farmer; he also recalls listening to his parents’ stories of Russia. By Grade 4, he had read through the two shelves of books available in the one-room schoolhouse. Growing up, he enjoyed Les Miserables, Toilers of the Sea, David Copperfield, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Greek myths and Norse legends. Later an admirer of Faulkner, Márquez, Borges and Tolstoy, Wiebe has always held to the fundamentals of plot, character and, above all, story. He believes stories should begin in the specific and local but expand into “a human truth larger than any individual.”
Wiebe won his first prize for fiction while studying literature at the University of Alberta, where he enrolled in a writing class and began producing poems, plays and stories. His winning story in a Canada-wide contest recounted a young boy’s response to the death of his sister – based on Wiebe’s own experience – and was published in the magazine Liberty in 1956. After earning his B.A., Wiebe left for the ancient University of Tübingen in West Germany on a Rotary Fellowship to study literature and theology, an experience that increased his respect for older and richer communities. Tena Isaak of British Columbia joined him there and they were married. The couple travelled in England, Austria, Switzerland and Italy before returning to Edmonton, where Wiebe completed his M.A. in creative writing. His thesis grew into his first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many.
In 1962 Wiebe earned a Bachelor of Theology degree from the Mennonite Brethren Bible College; he considered becoming a minister. He was editor of Winnipeg’s Mennonite Brethren Herald when Peace Shall Destroy Many was published. Many conservative ministers and Mennonites in small towns objected to the novel’s frank and at times unflattering portrait of community life, and there was considerable opposition to the book. “I wasn’t exactly sacked as editor . . . but the committee came to me and said ‘Ahem.’ I resigned.” The strength of this reaction made him think hard about the power of the written word, and reinforced his sense of wanting to be a writer.
Wiebe then was invited to teach at a Mennonite college in Goshen, an agricultural town [?] in Indiana with a large Mennonite and Amish population, where he would be Assistant Professor of English from 1963 to 1967. Goshen College was a lively and stimulating intellectual community where Wiebe committed himself to writing, study, teaching and travel. “I encountered men and women of real perception . . . really literate Christians who saw themselves as Jesus’s followers and at the same time were acquainted with the thoughts of others and had brought that kind of understanding to bear on what it means to be a Christian. The best thing that ever happened to me was the meetings we had every two or three weeks in one home or another – seven or eight of us, a psychiatrist, a couple of theologians, a couple of literary people. There were the best theologians there, I think, the Mennonite Church has ever had.”
Wiebe has not been reticent in acknowledging the life-changing influence upon him of John Howard Yoder and others in the Mennonite academic community of Goshen and Elkhart, Indiana. In fact, he has been lavish in praising the people he became acquainted with during those four years.

In looking back at Peace Shall Destroy Many, Wiebe has acknowledged that an immature theological orientation hampered his resolution of the problem of Christian pacifism. In a 1981 interview by Shirley Neuman with Wiebe and Robert Kroetsch, Wiebe admitted that when he wrote the novel he was a “fundamentalist Christian in the sense that my major stories came from a certain kind of fairly narrow understanding of what the Bible was talking about, which is how I grew up.”[4]  But that orientation was radically changed for Wiebe at Goshen College, where he acquired a wider way of understanding the world-view the Bible presents to us. “That is due – I wouldn’t want to underestimate it – to the time I was in the United States teaching at a small Mennonite college. There, for the first time and over an extended period, I encountered . . . really literate Christians who saw themselves as Jesus’s followers and at the same time were acquainted with the thoughts of others and had brought that understanding to bear on what it means to be a Christian.”

In particular, he singled out John Howard Yoder as the greatest influence upon him at that time. “There were the best theologians there . . . the Mennonite Church has ever had. . . . [John Howard Yoder] is a brilliant thinker; I think he has influenced my thoughts about what it means to be a Christian more than almost anything else.”[5]

    [1] PK, “Peace, and there is no peace”, MBH, 1/38 (12 October 1962), 16

    [2] For my letter to the Publication Committee and J.H. Quiring’s letter to me on this question, see PP to Schellenberg, Dueck, and Kornelson (26 June 1963), and JHQ to PP (18 July 1963); cf. this account with chapters on “the MBC as reflected in the MBH”

    [3] RHW, “A Personal Word to Friends”, MBH, 2/25 (21 June 1963), 3; “A note of appreciation”, Ibid., 2/16 (28 June 1963), 3; for a complete discussion of the career of Rudy H. Wiebe, see W.J. Keith, ed., A Voice in the Land (Edmonton, 1981)

[4] Shirley Neuman, “Unearthing Language: An Interview with Rudy Wiebe and Robert Kroetsch,” in A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe,” ed. W. J. Keith (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981), 242.

[5] Ibid

Filed under Mennonite Matters, Uncategorized

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