2000 Millennial Barcelona

2000   Millennial Barcelona. Spain, a New Year and new century, reflections on transcendence, Venezuela, Family: Jakob, Hannah, Elizabeth, Anson, Gloria. Barcelona and Catalonia, Jakob’s mental illness, visiting London, Wimbledon, US Open, Gordon Parks, a suicide attempt, Philhaven, Kidron, Miriam Kratzer, the Liberian acapella choir, Ruth Miller, Michael Yoder, visits to Cuba.

On January 1, 2000, I was writing in my journal, “Thoughts on Life,” sitting at a table near Barcelona, Spain, where Elizabeth had rented us a beach house. Elizabeth had come to Barcelona in the Fall of 1999 for a year abroad to study Spanish. I was enjoying the light of a new day, a new century, and a new millennium. I was thankful that I have another year to live and for the many blessings of work, family and friends. Most of these next paragraphs come from my journal entries in Barcelona where Hannah, Anson, Gloria and I had traveled for a week of vacation and Christmas. Jakob came over from England where he was in a graduate program at the University of London.

We were actually at Sitges, a small resort city on the Mediterranean Sea coast, and I was in a meditative mood, thankful for the creation and that the world was still standing these two centuries after the coming of Jesus Christ. I remembered in the mid-seventies to eighties, I used to despair that the world would not last. I thought that we would blow up in a nuclear war or another confrontation which would lead to the last world war. 

Then we went to Venezuela in a Christian mission assignment with Eastern Mennonite Missions (EMM), and I believe we made a contribution to the church and mission in Venezuela, especially in regards to Anabaptism and the Mennonites. But more than that, I regained my faith in a transcendent God. Venezuela was a turning point for a middle-aged father to see and experience with Christians who whether poor or rich in worldly goods could be rich in spirit. I recognized that life is and will be more than the present and the material. I recognized in these souls that life on this planet may be saved by those who recognize that life is a gift from the Creator.

I had Venezuela on my mind because from December 14-16 torrential rains fell on the Vargas state causing terrible mudslides. It was estimated that 20,000 to 50,000 people lost their lives there. Mennonite Central Committee and EMM had a campaign of sending buckets in relief, and we helped collect buckets in Scottdale. We also sent a contribution of $1,000 to the Eastern Mennonite Missions for those who have suffered.

On New Year’s Eve we attended a party given by Elizabeth’s friends Manolo and Patricia and among those attending were the counsel and vice-counsel of the Cuban consulate in Spain. It was an enjoyable evening with the Spaniards and the Cubans and some Austrian friends who were visiting. As it turned out, with Spanish, English and German, I could communicate with all of them. The Cubans were looking to purchase computers and technology from the Spanish and their language and foods brought back many good memories of our time of living in Puerto Rico. Cubans and Puerto Ricans shared many Caribbean foods: rice, chicken, large red beans and cold vegetable pea salads were served.

I looked forward to the next century knowing that I will not live another one and wanting to take stock regarding my contribution to the 20^th century and what I might contribute to the next one. In other words, I needed to give an account of my life. Family wise, my biggest project was to think and act kindly with our son Jakob. He had come away from Turkey teaching and a difficult marriage and was making a new start. This change had freed him in his family, vocational and I believed spiritual choices. If his emotions were still fragile (were they not always), his mind was bright and he seemed to manage things in graduate school, or so we thought. Now, our main hope, prayer and support were for him to leave graduate school for his vocational life. The many options of life seemed freeing, but this multiplicity can also paralyze him in making decisions. Little did I know that the options had already paralyzed him at the University of London.   

If Jakob had so much trouble finding a meaningful profession or vocation, our young women seemed to have found life and vocational tracks with some ease. They had an amazing sense for their possibilities and had moved into the medical (Hannah) and teaching (Elizabeth) fields. But most important, they have a deep respect for God and the church. We had taken hymnals along to Barcelona, and on New Year’s Day, we sang in the evening with everyone joining together. We all had our variations of faith, the Christian faith and the Mennonite denomination, but singing was an important expression around which we could unite; it was an aesthetic experience, as well as devotion, praise and confession. Finally, there was Gloria who had been a true, healthy and handsome wife over the past 27 years. She was as strong as the sea and as stable as the earth in her basic intuitions and convictions. Gloria liked the sun, but she also was the sun, which the Ecclesiastes writer said, also rises.  

Dear reader, an apology. Last year we were in the Ukraine and Russia, and now we’re in Spain and you are probably thinking I have gone to writing travelogues and trip reports of interest to few but the writer himself. I want to give a little rationale and defense because Spain was an important part of my education as I hope you’ll see. Elizabeth guided us around Barcelona, la Sagrada Familia, and the land Gaudi, all of which fascinated us. But the biggest realization in this modern and cosmopolitan city and post-Franco country was how civil and well, Western, it seemed. Spain had even stopped bullfighting in Barcelona. I had thought Spain was ungovernable in my youth and until the seventies. After fighting a fierce civil war and being ruled by a 19^th century general Franco for about four decades, Barcelona now seemed like a livable American or European city. Whether in art, economy or architecture, Spain as represented by Barcelona seemed totally at home in the democratic Western European countries of England, France, and Germany. This is not an apologetic for Western modernity, societies of pastoral pre-modernity also have their virtues. It is only to say both are preferable to Spain's earlier habits of anarchy, civil wars, and dictatorship.  

Still, on many of Barcelona’s shop signs and in its bookstores and schools was a language which I did not recognize: Catalan. Within cosmopolitan Barcelona was Catalonia; one found a strong provincial identity. Here was an emphasis of the region’s Catalonia identity and, in fact, a strong impulse to establish a separate country called Catalonia. I suppose the education for me was that history moves in several directions, often in paradoxical and complicated ways.

I often wrote in my journal on vacations and in transitions, and on the second day of the New Year, I wrote 1999 in my journal and then crossed it out. I would need to get used to writing 2000. I would also need to get used to our family being separated. All I could think about was that we left Elizabeth in Barcelona and Jakob at the airport returning to London. We had traveled many times, but this leaving had an especially sad part, and I think it may have had to do with Jakob and the fragile nature of his life, at the same time I was so glad for our children’s lives.

The new year and century was also a time to look at work goals and issues at Mennonite Publishing House; our computer systems did not go down at midnight of the new century, but little did I know of the impending crisis which waited in the next year. But all this seemed secondary to family and especially Jakob who I hoped was now on a new stage of adulthood and meaningful work and profession. We had many good conversations especially relating to his graduate study in international aid and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). But by April, Jakob wrote to us and then called us by phone that he was having anxiety attacks and could not concentrate on his studies. He was depressed, could not finish his papers, and he thought life may not be worth living. Elizabeth had visited him during her spring break and had mentioned that he seemed unusually anxious about his studies and life in general. Early in May I got a ticket and went over to London to visit with Jakob and to encourage him or to bring him home.

In some ways, it was a surreal visit regarding Jakob’s illness because he had relinquished his studies by that time, was quite disinterested in talking about his emotional condition or mental health and mainly wanted me to have a good time in visiting London. In fact, on the surface he seemed like the Jakob of old except that now he was emotionally tied to another woman, this one a young graduate student he had met in Turkey and with whom he was living in London. When we were out and about, about every two hours Jakob would call her, letting her know where and how he was. This attractive young woman seemed to be a prototype of the women who entered Jakob’s life; she was on an educational and career path and seemed to have her life together, and Jakob provided a handsome companion and erudite conversational partner.  

Meantime, although the intent of the London visit was to deal with Jakob’s emotional and mental breakdown, I now realize that neither Jakob nor I were capable of that project without outside help. Both of us had spent our lives ignoring counselors; we were far too strong for these therapeutic weaklings. We often called them shrinks, somewhat on the same level as dog catchers and social workers. In fact, I now realize that the Miller extended family ethos of mainly ignoring and even scorning the new therapeutic culture did not serve us well on these occasions. In Jakob’s case, he got it from both sides; the Miller-Schlabach tradition on my side was that work, willpower, or physical exercise would take care of any and all emotional problems. The Miller tradition on Gloria’s side had a similar approach to work along with a high appreciation for holding one’s feelings and emotions in check, always secondary to a strong will-power. 

As it turned out, the original purpose of my visit was put aside, and Jakob and I spent the week traveling all over London, he serving as an unusually capable guide. We visited the new Tate Art Museum, Westminster Abbey, and 10 Downing Street. One evening we boarded the Eye (a huge super ferris wheel) and viewed the skyline of London, and another day we rented a car and headed out into Shakespeare country -- Stratford on Avon. This visit was an especially comfortable day as we drove through the well-trimmed countryside and farmland. We stopped at various times to see pheasants along fence rows or to get a coffee or ale. Only at Stratford itself was Jakob uncomfortable with its huge stream of tourists and the commercialization. One day we went to Oxford, visited bookshops, and another day we visited the Mennonite Centre at Shepherds Hill (they sold a lot of our Herald Press books).

On Sunday morning, I attended the Mennonite worship at Wood Brook; it was the first Sunday after the departure of the long-term American missionaries Alan and Eleanor Kreider, hence still a time of some grief. In the afternoon I visited Karl Marx’ large grave site at the Highgate Cemetery (East) not far away: “Workers of the world unite.” I paid a two Pound entrance fee “to 

aid in conservation, restoration, and maintenance.”   

Another day Jakob and I went out to Wimbledon and saw the Pete Sampras on Centre Court and Jennifer Capriati on the side courts. The one-time child tennis prodigy Capriati had made a come-back in tennis after going off the rails with personal problems. She showed up in London looking exceptionally well-fed, and the London tabloids were having a field day with her weight, or overweight. Jakob was humorous and as lucid as ever in discussing family, tennis and world affairs as well as the sights and sounds of London, and he was equally opaque and seemingly quite incapable of assessing his own emotional situation and making the small decisions which would have led to a greater sense of accomplishment. Since he had left school, I encouraged him to return to the States, and he seemed to think this was his next move.

In late August I got a call to pick up Jakob in New York where he had arrived and was ready to come home and start another chapter of his life. By this time the US Open was being played, and Jakob and I spent a day there before returning home. But what I recall from that day was not so much the tennis as the Arthur Ashe sculpture in front of the large stadium named after him. That evening who should show up taking photos of the Ashe sculpture but Gordon Parks, one of the century’s best photographers and author of one book (The Learning Tree, 1963), a growing-up story which had influenced me so much as a youth. I don’t recall if there was some special occasion around the Ashe sculpture or whether Parks simply happened to be visiting. But somehow to be with Jakob and Gordon Parks on that afternoon seemed an epiphany. We were all growing up and learning.  We drove home to Scottdale, and I thought Jakob was ready for a new beginning.

A few days later, one evening Jakob and I sat on the back patio visiting, and he brought up the hereafter and what I believed regarding death and life after death. I told him my Christian beliefs, but little did I realize how depressed he was with life and that death was near.  He left that evening with the car, and early the next morning we got a call from an East Cocalico Township police officer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The police officer said that they had Jakob under suicide watch at a local hospital and were planning to take him to Philhaven, a mental hospital at nearby Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania. Jakob had stopped at a nearby Turkey Hill convenience store, and called the police officers, asking for help and telling them he was on his way to the Atlantic Ocean to end his life. So the officers drove him to a local hospital for the rest of the night under suicide watch and then transferred him to Philhaven. A week later we went to visit Jakob at Philhaven. He was ready to be released, given prescriptions on medication, and he seemed much better.

In the meantime while Jakob was at the hospital, my sister Miriam and Veryl Kratzer volunteered that he could come out to Kidron and live with them for a while. He might possibly find employment with a former teacher; I believe his name was Jim Nussbaum, who had a painting business. This seemed to be a good fit for Jakob, and he lived and worked in Kidron until the end of the year. A decade earlier, Jakob had a good high school year with the Kratzers, and again he found Kidron a healing and growing place. On the surface, at least religiously it should not have worked because Miriam was an emphatic evangelical believer and Jakob closer to a tolerant agnostic.

But Miriam and Jakob always got along. They seemed to empathize with each other in a positive way for various reasons; I suppose both having their share of angels to welcome and demons to repel. Years later, Miriam reflected on those years and saw them as Jakob’s search for God and God’s search for Him. In any case, she led him and his young twenty-something friends in a small group Bible study during those years.  

Jakob also attended the Kidron Mennonite Church, and one Sunday morning the need was presented for a road manager of a Liberian men’s acapella choir. They looked around the circle for a volunteer who had qualifications and was available. They all pointed at Jakob and he was named to this job, a voluntary service assignment for the next several months of 2001.

These young Liberians most of whom were blind had survived the cruel civil war which had wracked their country in the 90s, killing an estimated 200,000 people. They were also confessing Christians and sang of joy in being alive and also for their Christian faith. Their very presence told a story of some of the most brutal atrocities which they had experienced, and they were raising funds for schools and orphanages back in Liberia. The project was a good fit for Jakob for several reasons: he was a good public person and gave them a good introduction; their acapella African music was aesthetically beautiful and authentic; and he enjoyed contributing to a project which was altruistic and giving.  

Jakob did this service project beginning with churches in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and eventually going so far west as St. Louis, Missouri. By Spring the tour was complete, and Jakob came back to Kidron and began to work as a counselor for Boys Village (now the Village Network) near Smithville, Ohio. Jakob had good supportive friends; at this point. Central Christian High School was having strong in enrollment, and young teachers were added to staff. Among these young friends he discovered in Kidron were his cousin Ruth, who had started to teach at the elementary and Michael Yoder, a Hartville native and high school social studies teacher. Jakob and Michael and some cats (Trotsky and Plato, as I recall) soon moved together in a mobile home out at Kidron Road Route 30 intersection and they were sometimes joined by another Central graduate Tom Messner. Other young people who were at Central during those years were Anna Dunn and Tim Kennel. Jakob also got acquainted with his Miller cousins, especially Ruth’s sister Amy and Mark Schlabach who would come up and visit him during those years.

I think those two Kidron years were mainly good years for Jakob, even as he would also get discouraged. Around the holidays of 2001, I mentioned to him that if he could hang in for another year (he was now with Wooster Community Services), why don’t we celebrate with a summer vacation together in Cuba. So in the summer of 2002, we headed for Toronto and then Havana and spent an enjoyable week, staying in the old Sevilla Hotel where Graham Greene had stayed in an earlier day. The hotel served a good breakfast in the open-air top floor, a kind of Marxist heaven with a string quartet playing Beethoven, Bach, and John Lennon’s “Yesterday.” Michael Yoder and his sister Maria were in Havana during the same week, and Jakob visited with them too.

The Cubans were friendly hosts, but our guide at the Museum of the Revolution was such a fervent Castro devote’ that about an hour into the long-winded tour (she had announced that we should be prepared for at least three hours), Jakob quietly told me the place has bad karma. He made a quick escape, and our guide was crestfallen for losing her young audience, and wanted to wait until Jakob returned. I told her Jakob was not feeling well, and I would try to find him. We both escaped the museum, but the island and the Cubans were enjoyable to visit. It was a time of Cuban and American rapprochement, and by Fall the University of Pittsburgh was organizing a teacher exchange. Gloria went to visit with the Cuban teachers and classrooms around Thanksgiving time. Since then relations between our countries cooled, but I post this during 2015 when Cuban American relations are again normalizing. I hope it continues.  

By the summer of 2002, Jakob’s Kidron period ended as he, Michael Yoder and Ruth Miller all moved to Pittsburgh which will be, well, another chapter. If Jakob’s life was transitions, this was also the life of Michael and Ruth and Hannah, Anson and Elizabeth. They were also going through educational, professional and cultural changes which they had initiated and with fewer and smaller crises. Meanwhile, an institutional crisis was looming in the new century at the old Mennonite publishing firm with which I worked, but those chapters also can wait until another year.        

Most of this comes from memory and my files and journals from 2000. Part of the section on Jakob’s Kidron years comes from my Sister Miriam Kratzer’s reflections at Jakob’s memorial service on September 7, 2005.  

1999 Russia, Khorititsa and Tolstoy

1999  Russia, Khorititsa and Tolstoy, “Khortitsa 99: Mennonites in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union,” Harvey L. Dyck,  Orris Basinger, Sarah Kratzer (now Kehrberg), Delbert Plett, Svetlana I. Bobyleva,  Jack Thiessen, “Not Totally with Honor: US Mennonite Church Responses to Soviet Repression,” Derek Fraser  comments and West Overton Overholts, Moscow, Leo Tolstoy, Tula and Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy and the Mennonites.

During first half of my life, Russia was never far away. Because of the Soviet Union, I heard of bomb shelters during the 1950s elementary school. Russia is technically one republic within the Soviet Union but I’ll use the terms interchangeably here. By my high school years there was Sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis; the name Nikita Khrushchev was commonplace. By the time I went to college, I took out low-interest loans with the National Defense Act, and I started to read the Russian novelists, especially Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. 

By the early seventies I started reading the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, and especially his autobiographical memoirs Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick (1972). Although I think I read all of the British Muggeridge’s books, many relating to his conversion to Christianity, his years in Russia in the 1930s were always formative. Then in the seventies I started reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, especially One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  By 1978, when Solzhenitsyn gave the Harvard commencement address, most of it was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. By the 1980s, I was again reading the New York public intellectuals such as Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, some of whom I had read earlier before they became what were now called neo-conservatives.

But if this national and international context kept Russia in my consciousness during the first half of my life, my religious and denominational affiliations also kept the Soviet Union in my consciousness. As a Mennonite and a confessing Christian; in my youth I learned that the Soviets had driven out or killed the Mennonites in the Ukraine and formed an atheistic state. When the children’s story Henry’s Red Sea was published telling about the Mennonites fleeing the Soviet Union after the Second World War, I read it. I heard of the radio preacher Carl McIntire who was strongly anti-communist and picketed our denominational relief agency Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). We had hosted a delegation of Russian Mennonites (and a Soviet agent). 

When I turned 18, I registered under the military draft as a conscientious objector, in effect because of the Vietnam War, sponsored on the one side by the communist north (backed by Russia) and on the other side the democratic south (backed by the United States). By the time I got to Scottdale in the early seventies, my Mennonite Publishing House colleagues reminded me that we right here in Scottdale had had hosted MCC-sponsored Russian Mennonites. The Mennonite Publishing House magazine Christian Living published articles on Soviet Russia’s domestic life which had the families appearing as a garden variety Good Housekeeping households.

So with this literary, religious, and political background I was very interested in visiting Russia, and when an opportunity came to visit and participate in a conference in the Ukraine (now an independent country), I jumped at the chance. “Khortitsa 99: Mennonites in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union” was a conference of largely Canadian Mennonite related scholars and Russian and Ukrainian scholars headed by Svetlana Bobyleva from the University of Dnepropetrovsk (called Yekaterinoslav from 1802–1917 for Catherine the Great in the Mennonite texts) and Harvey L. Dyck of the University of Toronto. The conference was to have lots of papers by the North American scholars and also by the Ukrainian scholars who now had access to the archives which had records of the Mennonite communities in the area, a kind of lost history. Hence these historians were interested in new research on this sectarian community of which now mainly remained the big dilapidated buildings and Soviet records.

The moving force behind all this was Harvey L. Dyck, an energetic scholar who had just edited a major work on the history of pacifism (The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective, 1996), somewhat in the stream of Peter Brock. If Dyck was a scholar, he was also an organizer and an entrepreneur. I suppose in the lingo of the time, a networker; the conference had dozens of sponsors. This was a time when the Russian Mennonites from California, Manitoba and Ontario still had memories of the lost Khortitsa communities and travel tours were planned each summer taking people to visit their lost homeland, complete with trips down the Dnieper River and regional folk dance shows. 

The trips reminded me of our 1977 TourMagination tour taking American Amish and Mennonite descendants back to visit their European spiritual and cultural origins. Anyway, these Russian Mennonite sons and daughters had money for trips and foundations to support research, conferences, commemorative plaques, and exhibitions. The conference was held in conjunction with the opening of an exhibit of Mennonite life during Tsarist and Soviet Russia with paintings, museum artifacts, and a complete model of a Mennonite village. The conference and exhibit were in the city of Zaporozhe (during pre-1917 called Alexandrovsk) which is near the former Khortitsa settlements. The Ukrainians were interested in this part for their history and also it was a way of attracting tourists.

When word got out to the family of my intent to go, I got two traveling partners in Orris Basinger of the Berlin Mennonite Church in Ohio and my niece Sarah Kratzer of Bethel College in Kansas. My brother Paul’s Men’s I Sunday school class offered travel subsidy and along with the deal came Orris as our travel manager. My sister Miriam offered Sarah who had completed a history paper (1999) at Bethel directly on the topic which interested me: “Whose Story? How the American Mennonites Tell the Russian Mennonite Story, 1940-1975.” However, unlikely a troop we were of a student, an editor, and a retired building products manager, we got along quite well; I don’t recall one unpleasant conflict with either but many enjoyable conversations. 

At any coffee table or lobby, Orris Basinger would tell whoever was sitting nearby whether a Ukrainian scholar or a Manitoba Mennonite that he lived in the world’s largest Amish settlement, immediately striking up a conversation. Orris reminded me of my mother Mattie as traveler who would pick up a conversation with anyone whether the pilot, a young child, or a business traveler-- talking about the weather, babies, or quilting, seemingly assured that the other person was equally interested in the topic. Sarah went jogging every day, and one morning I met her near our hotel after she had met a poor Ukrainian woman who needed money. She had given her some, but was still in distress whether she should have given her even more. I remember it for Sarah’s conscientiousness, but also because the poverty of these European-looking Ukrainians was unsettling. I suppose I was expecting that their new political freedom would also bring greater economic freedom. 
  

Orris, Sarah and I had many opportunities for informal conversations because of the cast of characters who sat around the Khortitsa 99 tables were as memorable as the papers. From Steinbach, Manitoba, came attorney Delbert Plett (1948-2004) who was interested in all things Kleine Gemeinde (the Russian Mennonite conservatives), old order, or Amish. Plett wore a string-tie like a cowboy and enjoyed a kind of a sheriff and scholar persona for the old order and conservative groups. I had known him earlier from phone conversations, and he did an interesting and idiosyncratic magazine called Preservings, strong on Steinbach, Manitoba, history and with a special editorial animus toward the American evangelicals and dispensationalists who had been polluting his pure and innocent Canadians. Hence, he liked the Amish and the old order Mennonites in Mexico for whom he was also a lord protector, buying them old John C. Wenger texts such as Separated Unto God.

Another Manitoba person around the tables was Winnipeg Mennonite heritage director Lawrence Klippenstein who had shared the archivist Dennis Stoesz with us, and kept a lively conversations going on a coffee-break and lunch-time text, the New Zealand historian James Urry’s scurrilous attack article on our convener Harvey Dyck, in effect accusing Dyck of being a neo-Nazi sympathizer. Dyck was threatening to sue the Mennonite Quarterly Review journal for libel, and  Klippenstein, of course, knew that the editor of the review was our relative John D. Roth. Why Urry who until then was one of the main non-Mennonite historians of the Russian Mennonites did this flimsy attack on Dyck and why John published it, I never quite understood. To me on the outside, it appeared as little more than petty academic turf protection and jealousy. In any case, John Roth eventually issued an apology and the subject passed, but it provided an unpleasant if salacious undercurrent at the conference.

A young historian Marlene Epp, daughter of the journalist Frank Epp, was studying the families, especially the single parent Mennonite women who had led courageously during the great trek out of the Ukraine from 1943 to 1945. The Ukrainian academy also brought a number of very capable women scholars to the table, the most memorable being the co-chair professor Svetlana I. Bobyleva. I am, however, surely remembering her for all the wrong reasons and through no fault of her own. Bobyleva was an attractive woman, hence often bringing the Manitoba professor and humorist Jack Thiessen to her side. The conference Falstaff, Thiessen seemed equally drawn to low German humor and to low neckline blouses. He had the crowd happily howling with shared memories of a Plattduetsch dialect while we outsiders, the Ukrainians and the “Swiss,” looked on bemusedly.

Identity re-interpretations are commonplace to anyone who travels, and on this trip, we Pennsylvania German Mennonites became Swiss, a term which I had formerly used for the Kidron and Berne (Indiana) Mennonites who had more recently arrived from Switzerland. Here Swiss meant all American Amish and Mennonites of Swiss German origins, not to be confused with the real Mennonites that would be the Californians and Canadians of Dutch Russian heritage. Meanwhile, conversations with the Ukrainians often took on a personal tone as these professionals tried to adapt to their cultural, especially economic, come-down in a post-Soviet Ukraine. One professor about my age described his family in detail; under Soviet Russia he could take his family each summer on vacation to the Black Sea. Now his salary was hardly enough for food and shelter; how economic conditions had deteriorated in the independent Ukraine was a constant theme. Freedom, as we used to sing, certainly wasn’t free in the Ukraine.

I will not review the several dozen papers which gave one a better understanding of the Mennonites in Tsarist and Soviet Russia. My own contribution was probably a sideshow, a reflection on how the American Mennonites had come to view these Mennonites from the first half of the century as suffering brethren to the last half of the century as islands of privilege. My presentation “Not Totally with Honor: US [USA] Mennonite Church Responses to Soviet Repression”was based on surveying the Gospel Herald and other documents on how Mennonite leaders wrote and especially Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) leaders responded. During the first half of the century, one could characterize Mennonite leaders clearly being anti-communist, but by the second half of the century, Soviet communism was viewed as a moral equivalent of the Western democracies. 

I wrote: “A double standard emerged which allowed one to praise a communist dictatorship from a distance, even though one did not have to live with its consequences. The Mennonites in the Ukraine who did not have this luxury suffered grievously. But this Marxist view left little room to sympathize with their plight.” The exceptions here were the rank and file Mennonites who had little interest in leftist politics and supported MCC as a relief and service agency. The conservative Mennonites and Amish meanwhile quietly pulled out of MCC and began their own organization to aid the suffering Christians in communist countries such as Romania. My Holmes County, Ohio, Alvin and Mae Gingerich cousins were leaders in this movement which eventually became Christian Aid Ministries at Berlin, Ohio. I viewed the MCC left-leaning leaders as giving tacit approval to Soviet totalitarianism in the 60s and 70s and supporting violent socialist revolutions in Latin America in the 80s. I could do neither.
     

In many ways, the paper was a confessional of my own intellectual travels during this second half of the century; I was no longer a fellow-traveler on the road to some idealized socialist justice. If 1968 represented my youthful flings of utopian dreams of universal love and social justice as defined by the New Left, by the late seventies I was also aware of socialist nightmares. The Soviets had killed ten million of their own people, including 30,000 Mennonites. When the Baptists and Mennonites were able to leave in the early nineties, they did.  I have yet to hear any of these Umsiedler (Resettlers) commending MCC moral equivalency efforts, unlike what one heard from the refugees during the first half of the century. In Latin America, Cuba remained imprisoned and poor, while Chile became free and prospering. Meanwhile, Russia and China were moving toward the civility of the Western democracies, however haltingly. As I post this, haltingly must be emphasized because Russia remains, well Mother Russia, hence annexing parts of ifs former lands in Ukraine. 

It seemed to me that the 20^th century had been a major debate on free markets and socialism and on democracy and totalitarianisms. In both cases, free markets and democracies generally delivered a greater degree of freedom, justice, peace and prosperity. By the eighties the British had elected Margaret Thatcher and free markets and freedom began to flourish around the world, especially in small Asian countries and India. I understood some of the pacifist reluctance to be on the side of freedom as coming from fear of heating up the cold war; the democratic West and the Soviets appeared to be at a nuclear stand-off. 

Still it seemed to me an honorable path could be navigated in which pacifist Mennonites would give moral legitimacy to the free countries where they found themselves. I was especially influenced by Richard Gid Powers’ book Not Without Honor on American anticommunism during the 20^th century. Early on, Powers believed he was studying one of the sordid chapters of American history, in the public mind almost exclusively associated with U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy or anticommunism as fascism. But Powers discovered that he had studied one of the most honorable chapters of American history.  

But back to Khortitsa 99 where two memories especially remained with me. First, the Canadian ambassador to the Ukraine Derek Fraser spoke at the opening of the exhibition, reflecting on the tragedy which happened almost a century ago. Violent revolution and Soviet repression meant that thousands of Mennonites migrated to Canada which turned out to be a tremendous human resource to his country. The net effect was that Canada as a society benefited culturally and economically from this influx of churches and citizens. Left unsaid but clear to all was that by driving out some of its most productive citizens. Ukraine had greatly impoverished itself during the past century; the evidence was still all around. A second insight was visiting the big brick buildings which were left around the former Khortitsa, machinery factories, a girls’ school and a large meetinghouse in which we sang hymns and heard addresses. 

Although these one-time Mennonite owned buildings were all in some state of dis-repair, they reminded me of the large brick Overholt homestead back at West Overton, Pennsylvania: the distillery, houses, and barns which the Overholts and their workers had built during the 19^th century. By the 20^th century the Overholt project was also finished, and the people, industry and commerce had moved on. The difference was big however. The change at West Overton happened through people’s choices and the market place; the change at Khortitsa had happened through violent revolution and repression. Somehow, I could not find moral equivalence in these two systems of government.

But we had a second week; we traveled to Moscow where we stayed at the Hotel National which is right beside Red Square and the Kremlin. The 1903 hotel, most recently renovated in 1995, itself had historical meaning because Lenin and Trotsky had stayed here as had the North American Mennonites Harold Bender and David B. Wiens in 1955. Don Loewen the Mennonite Central Committee representative in Moscow had arranged for his friend Natasha Sedenkova to serve as our bilingual guide for the week. We visited the sites such as Lenin’s Tomb, and one day we drove out to the Novodevichy Cemetery, located on the grounds of a former convent where notables such as Nikita Khrushchev were buried. 

I remember Sarah was especially interested in the Russian musicians and composers who were also nearby: Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) and Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953). Loewen was able to get us tickets one night for the legendary Bolshoi Theater, and we took in a performance of Verdi’s “Aida.” We visited the Orthodox cathedrals and also the big Baptist church building where Billy Graham had preached and which during the Cold War had often appeared in our church periodicals. We went to various museums, the most memorable the Tetyakov Gallery which had classic 20th century social realism and a number of Ilya Repin paintings. Nearby in a desolate lot were tumbled over monuments of Stalin and other fallen Soviet leaders.

Repin also painted portraits of Leo Tolstoy. One day, we visited the Leo and Sonya Beers Tolstoy’s family house, now a museum, in Moscow and another day we headed for Tula, a city a 100-mile drive south and nearby Yasanya Polyana. This was my real goal of our trip, and it was a beautiful Spring day, and as we drove to Tula the same aspens which Tolstoy had described in War and Peace were still quivering during our morning drive. We stopped at a bakery and coffee along the way and bought a traditional bread at Tula (our guide Natasha called it ginger bread) which I took along back for the Mennonite publishing workers. The large Tolstoy estate was well preserved and a number of workers were out in the orchards and field with the tools and forks of 19^th Century Russia. The house is also well preserved and has the feeling of a country house as described in his novels. We walked out to grove of Tolstoy’s final burial place with green vegetation on top of the unmarked earth bier. Tolstoy and his brothers used to talk of a green stick buried nearby which would have all the secrets of life, peace and health. It was never found.

I started reading Tolstoy in college and when we moved to Scottdale Ken Reed was reading the 19^th century Russian novelists, and we would often discuss them. Then my mother-in-law Berdella Miller gave me Henri Troyat’s wonderful Tolstoy biography which she had read in her Berlin book club. Now, I was fascinated by his life and family too. By 1974 I had discovered Tolstoy’s connection to the American Mennonite Daniel Musser, and I sent a letter to John Oyer of the Mennonite Quarterly Review that I would like to do a study of Tolstoy and the Mennonites. Oyer encouraged it, and over the next three decades I dabbled in the subject, and I confess that I’m probably one of the world’s foremost living authorities on that subject, and I’ll list the publications below. Some Winnipeg PhD student has probably studied it since in greater detail. 

Ken Reed and I used to say that our life goal was more modest than Tolstoy’s to find the green stick which in his boyhood economy had the meaning of life, peace and happiness. Our goal was to become old sages like Tolstoy, sit on our porches and have the peasants come by and seek our counsel. So, now I am an old man, have a house with a long porch and sit on it in the summer time with plenty of time and room for the muziks to visit. As of this writing in 2013, I can report that only one Upper Tyrone peasant regularly comes to seek my counsel, or perhaps more accurately companionship. His name is Carlos, my faithful dog. So much for my youthful Tolstoyan vanities, but his writings remain.. 

Most winters I pull out a Tolstoy volume, and have probably read War and Peace and Anna Karenina a half dozen times, and their density, brilliance and characterizations continue to fascinate me. Still, given all that I know about Sonya Beers and Leo Tolstoy’s sad and terrible latter years, I also read them as cautionary stories and essays. A brilliant mind and moral certitude can have an ugly underside, especially to family life. Still, visiting Yasnaya Polyana was a highlight of our Ukraine and Russia visit, and now I was ready to go home. 

Our Moscow send- off was one morning at the large Sheremetyevo International Airport where everything seemed to be totally confused and disorderly, even as flights somehow safely were taking off and landing. I tried to find German, English or Spanish declaration forms but could not. So I decided to join the spirit of this apparent disorder. I simply took the French and Russian form (I’m guessing here) and after filling in my name Levi Miller Schlabach wrote in random addresses, dates and numbers in boxes with no idea what they represented. Everyone was hurried; the official took my form without looking at it, placed it on a stack, and told me to proceed to the gate and plane. Sarah and Orris navigated this airport with equal aplomb, and we were headed home. Back in the United States, the end of the year was approaching, but it was also the end of the century, and everyone had what was called Y2K fever; our daughter Elizabeth was headed for Barcelona and Jakob in London. But that is the subject of the next chapter.    

Most of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement address was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (June 9, 1978, 7), still in my files. James Urry’s attack essay on Harvey L. Dyck was "Fate, Hate and Denial: Ingrid Rimland's Lebensraum!" in Mennonite Quarterly Review (January, 1999, 107-127). My Khorititsa paper “Not Totally with Honor: US Mennonite Church Responses to Soviet Repression” was published in Mennonite Life (September, 2004, http://tools.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/2004Sept/miller.php ). The Richard Gid Powers’ book is Not Without Honor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). My Tolstoy and the Mennonites projects were  “Daniel Musser and Leo Tolstoy, Mennonite Historical Bulletin (April 1993, 1-7); Robert Friedmann and Tolstoy in “A Reconstruction of Evangelical Anabaptism,” Mennonite Quarterly Review (July, 1995, 295-306); and “Leo Tolstoy and the Mennonites,” Journal of Mennonite Studies (Volume 16, 1998, 163-180). 

1998 Hymns and Dylan

1998  Hymns and Dylan. Mennonite Publishing House projects: Jubilee curriculum, agency and congregational language use, Christian Living magazine, Sarah Kratzer,  Hymnal A Worship Book and earlier Anabaptist hymnals, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, family singing, J.D. Sumner, Mennonite Youth Fellowship counselors, August Wilson plays, Connellsville High School football, immigrant ancestors John Miller and Magdalena Lehman, other family events.

A repeated theme in my journal after my return to Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) for congregations in the mid-90s was how to do more with less. You are right, a cookbook title, but it also meant how to expand sales with fewer expenses.  The two biggest income streams were a children’s Sunday school curriculum called “Jubilee” which functioned quite well under the leadership of Rosella Wiens Regier of the Faith and Life Press at Newton Kansas. At that point, the main publishing groups were the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, but we also had participation of the Brethren in Christ and the Mennonite Brethren. A second big income stream was the Adult Bible Study which moved along okay when I changed editors (1995). On balance Jubilee children’s curriculum met the needs of congregations who wanted an Anabaptist and biblical story curriculum. We still had sufficient sales that we could invest in the color and media which would make it what teachers considered easy to teach. Having the Mennonite Brethren and Brethren in Christ around the table helped give the curriculum a conservative spiritual and ethical flavor which fit many of our congregations, and our publisher Robert Ramer always encouraged this direction.    

Still, some critics were detecting New Age influences which, as near as I could tell, meant insufficient traditional evangelical language. The New Age concern was also driven by the growth of this generic religious literature in the big box bookstores such as Barnes and Noble. Granting an ongoing paranoia within American Evangelicalism about New Age, I discovered that our own modern Anabaptist writers and editors had a parallel paranoia about the Evangelical community and publishers who provided most of the language of Christianity in North America. They simply substituted an institutional Anabaptist language of peace and justice.

Not everyone among the local churches was so keen on our institutional language however. What I discovered in re-entering the Mennonite publishing field was that the conservatives were more selective in their language choice, neither jettisoning traditional Christian language nor adopting whatever seemed trendy among the left wing political and cultural chatterers. When I started editing in curriculum in the 70s the traditionals would send us letters—often handwritten and signed sincerely in Jesus—that they did not understand our language. What I also learned is that the conservatives are very polite; indeed they did understand our language and simply disagreed with our word choices. They preferred to see sin and salvation appear as well as meditation and mediation. But by discreetly saying they could not understand it, they could avoid lengthy debates with an editor like me (we, of course, called it dialogue).

When I returned in the mid-90s the conservatives had refined their strategy even further. When they disagreed with our language choice, they didn’t even bother to write letters or by now an e-mail; they simply stopped buying or affiliating. If conservative Anabaptists wanted some biblical realism or carried some pessimism of human potential (outside of Christ and the church), they could now buy their curriculum from other pacifist Anabaptist publishers in Virginia or Kentucky, or there was always our evangelical cousin David C, Cook.

No less in trade books the choices were many, as Anabaptist publishers multiplied and every respectable major (and minor) Christian publisher was offering some Anabaptist themed or authored titles. I tried to steer our editors to a mediating position of being explicitly Anabaptist in content and also explicitly Evangelical in tone and spirit. Most of all, I tried to appeal to what elicited people to buy our curriculum. From our surveys, it was ease of access, ease of use, and finding denominational distinctions. I wanted our writers, marketers and editors to think of these variables from the standpoint of how a member in Winnipeg, Phoenix, Archbold or Lancaster may view these issues. The Mennonite publishing personnel tended to view these variables with the assumption that the institution was the denomination, any dissent by the local congregation was called a lack of denominational loyalty. I considered this approach as little more than self-indulgent therapy for our staffers—which we could not afford.

Although I woke up many a morning before dawn thinking finances and nurturing the big projects, one of my joys during those years was a small project, a little magazine called Christian Living. This family and community monthly brought in only about fifty thousand of our three million dollar annual revenue, so it was more of a small pleasure, the closest to a general interest magazine we had left, which a generalist would enjoy. And I found the 1970s editors such as Daniel Hertzler, Helen Alderfer and Ken Reed stimulating staff associates who had also given me opportunities to write as a young person such as “Coming Home to Holmes County,” (1971). Christian Living came out of an older literate tradition which also took interest in a middle-brow Mennonite reader of the arts, culture and community. I considered it an Anabaptist version of Saturday Review, Eternity or the Atlantic Monthly, only the latter of which survives. I wrote a paper on the magazine for a “Mennonites and the Family” conference which John Roth organized at Goshen College in 1999. I wish I could find it.

The magazine had fallen on hard times, especially when the attempt was made to turn it into a narrowly focused family and how-to raise children monthly; this focus alienated, even angered, some of the regulars and older readers, and it never caught on as a general family magazine. The new potential readers were young baby boomer families who were raising kids, and it seemed to me commendable in attempting to expand readership; it may not have been helped by the polarizing style of the editor Lorne Peachey during the late seventies (1978). Circulation continued to fall, and after Peachey left in the mid-80s, my neighbor the conciliatory missionary editor David E. Hostetler tried to give it more of the community diet. David Hostetler left for Laurelville in 1990, and staff changes continued, including our publisher J. Robert Ramer finding Steve Kriss, a Johnstown student at Eastern Mennonite University. Kriss took a fling at multi-culturalism on which he still seems to thrive today over near Philadelphia. By the end of the decade the subscriptions stood at 3,000 which were hard to sustain economically. Still, I thought it had cultural and Christian merit.

In 1998, we decided to outsource some of the work by having Steven Nolt, a young professor of Goshen College provide editorial help, as well as Myron Augsburger, the evangelist and educator from Eastern Mennonite University. By 1999 we had Sarah Kratzer (now Sarah Kehrberg) come for a summer internship, and she stayed on as staff, picking up managing editor responsibilities, and it took on a renewed editorial focus. Both Sarah and Steven Nolt often picked up younger writers, and we gathered themes which went from Manhattan to Zaporozhye with stops in places like Millersburg. We did major profiles of people such as the fashion designer and seamstress Julie Musselman, Mennonite World Conference president Nancy Heisey, and the mega-church pastor Leslie W. Francisco III. My strict sister Miriam Kratzer wrote a “Dear Mary Martin” family advice column—a Mennonite version of the Jewish talk radio maven Laura Schlessinger, although I believe neither was aware of the other. None of this diet was new to the longer tradition of Christian Living or to what Merle and Phyllis Goods’ Festival Quarterly had done so well from 1974 to 1996. I look back at those Christian Living issues as invigorating and affirming Christian and Mennonite culture, faith and literature, but its magazine life was short, ending when the Mennonite Publishing House collapsed in 2002, but that is a later story.

One of the strengths which Sarah Kratzer brought to Christian Living was reviewing new music with her musical background and training. Sarah was a music and history major at Bethel College in Kansas, but I knew her as a strong vocalist and a violinist from childhood days. She had played in the in the Cleveland Symphony Youth Orchestra and in the Central Christian High School orchestra and ensembles, as well as giving violin lessons to children in the community. On May 25, 1996, she gave a recital at the new music hall of Kidron’s Central Christian High School. I have never seen anything quite like this where a 17-year-old high school senior could put together such an enjoyable and well-attended program of her own performance (piano, voice, and viola), her Suzuki students, and finally her family (“For the Beauty of the Earth” with Amos, Esther, Martha and Hannah). When Sarah was in school in Kansas she played viola with the Wichita Symphony for a few years, and I was able to attend one of her concerts when I had meetings in the area.

The big hymnal seller for MPH during my years was Hymnal A Worship Book which was released in 1992 by the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren. I was on the side-lines as this latest hymnal was being developed, and I believe it took a human relations manager and musician such as my predecessor Laurence Martin to bring it off. The groups had quite different traditions, especially the Brethren who had already largely assimilated into the American religious mainstream. In the same way that Goshen College professor Mary Oyer left a broad stamp on the 1967 Mennonite Hymnal, the Eastern Mennonite University professor Ken Nafziger left his own stamp on the 1992 Hymnal A Worship Book. Both Oyer and Nafziger had mid-life conversions to appreciate the richness of international music, especially African drumming.

The missionary movement had spread Anabaptist churches all across the African, Asian and Latin American continents, and week-long world conferences on a six-year cycle would especially bring these churches into contact with North American Mennonites. Hence, international music took a much larger profile in the 1992 Hymnal as did a number of new hymns such as the first one “What Is this Place” which expressed an Anabaptist simplicity and community. At the same time the 1992 Hymnal picked up some older Mennonite pietistic hymns such as the second one “In Thy Holy Place We Bow.” One other element which the 1992 Hymnal navigated with some delicacy and success was the need to update American English language usage, especially gender terms such as man, at the same time honoring the literary tradition of the original poetry and verse. These language issues were some of the issues we needed to respond to as publishers.      

The new Hymnal was an eclectic but quite satisfactory mix for modern Mennonites at the same time that the older hymnals continued to sell well among the traditional Mennonite and Anabaptist groups which were growing even faster than the moderns.  Music is a large part of many religious traditions, and its special niche among the American Mennonites has to do with the tradition of acapella singing which continues today. From mid-nineteenth century when Joseph Funk started printing shaped notes music in Rockingham County in Virginia, four-part harmony singing characterized the American Mennonites which tied them to the amateur singing school tradition. Hence, for Mennonite publishing, music books and hymnals were an important product for congregational worship beginning with the 1908 Church and Sunday School Hymnal, 1927 Church Hymnal and the 1968 Mennonite Hymnal.

We kept all of these hymnals in print, and when sales decreased among the modern Mennonite groups, sales increased among the traditional Amish Mennonite churches. When Hannah and Anson got married, we had under the benches a book we called “the red hymnal,” the 1968 Mennonite Hymnal for “The Love of God.” In my life time I had sung in all these hymnals from the old Anabaptist hymnal the Ausbund and Lieder Sammlung during my Amish childhood; Church and Sunday school Hymnal at Beechvale summer Sunday school and Maple Grove Mission; Church Hymnal at Pleasant View, Mennonite Hymnal at Kingview, and Hymnal A Worship Book at Scottdale. I call the Ausbund and Lieder Sammlung old but that should not mean disappearing; I’m quite sure they are by far the best-sellers among all Anabaptist hymnals in use today. The Amish Mennonite hymn singing tradition continues strong among the traditional groups, but today it is challenged among the moderns. During the time I post this, Garrison Keillor joined the Goshen College Mennonites for a hymnsing on his radio show Prairie Home Companion, at the same time that other congregations are abandoning this traditional singing for contemporary choruses led by what they call praise bands (vocals, guitars and drums).      

But we also listened to music; a summer evening July 17 of 1998 Alison Kraus and Union Station came to sing at the Pittsburgh’s South Park. Gloria, Elizabeth and I went to hear her. Niece Esther Kratzer was along; she was doing a summer internship at Mennonite Publishing House. A month later that same year, Art Garfunkel sang at Hartwood Acres where we generally went once a year for a Sunday evening picnic. But the big event for us was the next year when Garfunkel’s old partner Paul Simon did a concert with Bob Dylan at the pavilion near Burgettstown on Sunday evening, July 18, 1999. This was sixties music heaven as two of pop music’s greatest songwriters of our generation were together on stage. Paul Simon sang and played with a large band, what one local called a United Nations orchestra, multi-textured music much of which came out of his beautiful Graceland South African album, as well as some of his old sixties tunes such as “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Then he and Dylan did a few songs together: “Hello darkness my old friend...” 

Finally, Dylan finished the evening with his hard-driving small band which came right out of his old folk and then rocker days and his on-going re-interpretation of his own melodies and lyrics which were strained, croaking, and barely understandable, to me at least. Over the years Dylan’s never-ending tour has come to the Pittsburgh area about once a year, and I have often gone to hear him, as much for the poet as for the music. And as one who has never smoked pot, I still rather enjoyed this annual smell wafting up with the music. At various times son Jakob, neighbor James Lederach, or publishing colleague Josh Byler went with me, all three of whom knew ten times more about Dylan’s music than I did.   

I could write a whole book on family singing, and during these years when our extended Miller family got together, we sang. After Andrew died (he enjoyed doing oral prayers), we often did a singing prayer or grace at the table such as “Great God the Giver of All Good.” This was a warm-up for later singing, and Sister Rhoda made all of us a notebook of over a hundred songs called “Gathering Songs for All Generations” which we would use during those years. We also often sang extemporaneously from memory. When our immediate family got together, we now had an additional bass singer in Anson Miedel. Gloria could sing any song, it seemed, and she was the glue which bound us together in music often teaching our parts with the piano or strumming along with the guitar.

On November 21 of 1998 I saw The New York Times’ obituary of the southern gospel quartet bass singer J.D. Sumner. I had not heard Sumner’s low voice for many years, but his life reminded me of a whole stage of my life from shaped notes, to singing schools, our Miller brothers quartet, sister Rhoda’s Journeymen quartet, and finally to gospel music as entertainment (Sumner and Elvis Presley). On a November Saturday morning when we were working at the Mennonite Publishing House (so we could take off the next Friday after Thursday Thanksgiving), I sent an e-mail note to my brothers and sisters entitled “J.D. Sumner Died.” In any case, music was important to Mennonite Publishing House and to our family.

In 1996 we put a large hot tub into our back yard which we enjoyed especially in the winter when it was cold and one had the contrast of the cold air and the hot water. It was also comfortable to the muscles after jogging, distance running, playing tennis, or people at the office or classroom. Elizabeth and her high school friends used it on weekends, as did Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF) on occasion when we became sponsors about this time. This was my second turn (1973) as youth sponsors, and we had a good MYF group, but I always felt utterly incompetent to serve as counselor, primarily because I out of touch with youth and had no abilities as a  counselor. Fortunately, the rest of the adults (Gloria, Ken and Debbie Millslagle) were much better at this. 

What I did enjoy were focused activities, and during these years our MYF joined the Allegheny youth in Bible quizzing at Johnstown. We were finalists every year I served and participated with speedsters who knew the book of Romans backwards and forwards. I especially remember Adam Bucar, Cory Scott, and Karl Stutzman; I was quoted in the Allegheny Conference News: “My competitive juices really are in gear. The spirit of the day is so nice.” Another highlight of our youth sponsor term was an April dessert theater which I did not attend but friends told me about it when I returned several days later. They said the emcee Joel Shenk (impersonating Levi Miller) was especially funny; my awkwardness and stuttering thanks to theatrical Joel and the kids raised $750 for the St. Louis Convention that summer.

The MYF dessert theater was largely music and improvisational comedy theater which our family had been watching on Saturday Night Live. Our family grew up with these weekly idiotic skits from Chevy Chase to Tina Fey; one of our favorites was Jonathan M. "Jon" Lovitz doing “Master Thespian” in the late eighties. Somehow, the show has managed to re-create itself and in 2013 as I write this, Gloria and I still watch it, although I often fall asleep around midnight. One time while I was in Chicago on June 6 of 1998 for meetings, some of us went to a performance of the Second City, the improv theater where many of the Saturday evening regulars got their start. One live performance was enough; I preferred the TV versions.

Another theatrical part of our lives in the nineties was of a different nature: the August Wilson plays. Whenever they were performed, we went. Wilson (1945-2005) grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and I think we attended all of his 10 plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle, some of the most memorable being “Fences,” “Seven Guitars,” “Two Trains Running,” and “Jitney.” The plays came out of the ten decades of the 20^th century, and gave one an insightful experience into the joys and sorrows of African American life in Pittsburgh. But his characters (sometimes appearing in the next play too) by their very specific locality and dialect also gave voice to our common human cries of grievance, forgiveness, despair and hope. It seems to me Wilson stands somewhat alone in a select company of American playwrights such as Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neil.

Although Wilson had long since left Pittsburgh, he came back for opening nights and visits. One Saturday morning when Gloria and I went to the Strip District, I met him at a book store and told him I had enjoyed his play that weekend. He was friendly, but I did not want to bother him and his little daughter who appeared to be about kindergarten-aged; they should be allowed to look at books in peace. It was 1999, and the play was “King Hedley II” inaugurating the new O’Reilly Theater in the downtown Cultural District.  We saw most of Wilson’s works while the Pittsburgh Public Theater was still in the old Theodore L. Hazlett Jr. Theater on the North Side.

Another entertainment in the Fall was attending one of Gloria’s Connellsville High School football games. On Friday, September 11, 1998, this game was at Three Rivers Stadium, in what was labeled a fall football kick-off classic with the top western Pennsylvania teams: this time the Connellsville Falcons vs. the Mt. Lebanon Blue Devils and the North Hills Indians vs. the Upper St. Clair Panthers. I don’t recall who won, but it marked the end of the Connellsville Falcons as a western Pennsylvania football power under coach Dan Spanish’s leadership. The prior year Connellsville had won its section (conference) championship, having earlier won 8 conference championships, and going to the play-offs 14 out of 17 seasons. In 1991 Connellsville even won the whole western Pennsylvania championship at Three Rivers Stadium. After the year 2000, the program lost ground, and is still trying to recover as I write in 2013. But the first 25 years of Spanish’s leadership were football glory years with 169 wins and 82 losses and 8 ties. For our Fayette County locals who earlier called themselves Cokers and Mules with a heritage of coal mining and farming, it was always an extra pleasure to beat the well-heeled suburban teams of Pittsburgh.     

Another Fall event was family related when I attended a conference commemorating my immigrant ancestors John Miller (c. 1730-1798) and Magdalena Lehman (? – 1817). This John Miller was often known as Hannes, Crippled John and Indian John, the latter because he was present when the Indians attacked the Hostetler family (1947) in Berks County. This occasion was the annual meeting of the Casselman River Area Amish and Mennonite Historians, and J. Virgil Miller was the main speaker on September 19, 1998. At the time Miller lived in Sarasota, Florida, but earlier he had lived in Wayne County and was born near Charm, Ohio. He had taught and worked in Saudi Arabia for many years, all the while doing family research which he released in periodicals such as The Budget and Mennonite Family History. 

My father-in-law Roy R. Miller had followed Virgil Miller’s career and often pointed him out to me, so it was good to meet him in person, an unassuming but very bright family historian. Roscoe Miller of Walnut Creek was also present, and perhaps Leroy Beachy who often attended these meetings. In any case, these people were Holmes County’s strongest family historians. John and Magdalena had 11 children, and I read one of the descendent descriptions of son John Miller Jr. (for which Virgil had written the copy). In the afternoon we went on a bus tour of the historic Miller farm near Berlin, Pennsylvania, and dedication of a historical marker which read: John or Hannes Miller (c. 1730-1798), Amish-Mennonite immigrant of 1749 via Ship Phoenix, and his wife Magdalena Lehman (? – 1817) lived on this farm, called Miller’s Choice according to a deed of 1785. Their eleven children were born in Berks County, PA and lived in Somerset County at least part of their lives. There were 92 grandchildren. – the Casselman River Area Amish and Mennonite Historians 1898.” 

Many other family events happened this year, but I will simply mention a few: during the summer we traveled to Turkey for a few weeks (June 25 to July 7) to visit Lisen and Jakob. We were part of a group tour of the historic sites and cities of Turkey, also on the tour were Lisen’s Reichenbach family and with her Kreider grandparents. Unfortunately, my main memory of the trip was of an unraveling young marriage, and my main (as in pain, strain and insane) contribution was to make it even worse. By the end of the year, Jakob returned alone from Turkey and teaching, and spent the last two weeks of January 1999 with us, and I wrote in my journal that I thought those days may have been some of the most enjoyable weeks of my life. ”He is growing and developing his own identity, and I’m very proud of him as a teacher and son, most as a son. I want to bless him every day and lift him up to the only wise God our Savior and Lord.” One day we went skiing and in the evening prayed and smoked cigars; no wonder everything was rose-colored in my journal. Jakob told me about some of his British friends who were teaching in Turkey with him, and now he was thinking of studying at the University of London next year.  

We also celebrated my mother Mattie’s 80^th birthday in June and Gloria’s 50^th birthday on April 26. Our small group (Millers and Brubakers) came to our house and said we’d take Gloria on a Sunday walk on a path behind the Southmoreland Elementary school and the golf course ending up at the at the nearby Cactus Star Restaurant where Gloria was surprised by relatives (Stutzman family Carla and Maurice and sister Bonnie) and friends (the Halfhills Becky and John). Her sisters’ humor tended to favor age-specific gifts of various patented laxatives and fruits (prunes). Another part of her birthday was May 9, 1998, with the tennis Virginia Slims Legends tour (Chris Evert, Billie Jean King and Evonne Goolagong) holding court at Monroeville. By the end of the year Nathan Daniel Koontz and niece Esther M. Kratzer were married on December 28, 1998, at the Sonnenberg Mennonite Church. They were a part of a long string of Miller nieces and nephews who would be married in the next decade. That summer Esther had served as an intern at Mennonite Publishing House. Dear reader, I confess I’ve jumped around some here, but we’re back on a theme of publishing, music, and family. Next year we’re heading for Russia.

Most of this comes from memory but assisted by my little black Mennonite Publishing House 1998 date book, my journal notebooks, and personal files. The section on Mennonite Publishing House language use comes from a web article https://themennonite.org/opinion/40-years-of-peace-and-justice/ which appeared in The Mennonite (November 17, 2009). Background on the Garrison Keillor radio show at Goshen College on May 2, 2015 can be found at https://www.goshen.edu/photos/2015/a-prairie-home-companion-live-from-goshen-college/

The Paul Simon and Bob Dylan concert of July 18, 1999, was reviewed in both the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review the following day. The section on J.D. Sumner comes from a November 21, 1998 e-mail note in my correspondence file with the subject “J.D. Sumner Died.” References to our Scottdale MYF quizzing appeared in The Allegheny Conference News (June 1999, 2). On our immigrant ancestor John Miller, see Virgil Miller, Anniversary History of the Family of John “Hannes” Miller Sr. 1730-1798 (Morgantown: Masthof Press, 1998).

1997 Life Passages

1997  Life Passages, Lydia O. Kretzinger (1897-1997), Maurice and Carla Stutzman, Wedding of Hannah and Anson Miedel, the marriage ceremony, Daniel Hertzler, singing, the Laurelville reception  and Hannah; Mennonite men’s prayer breakfast, Daniel (Dan) Lint, Kent Hartzler’s counsel, gender groups, Kingview fun Night, an African evening in 1998, John Howard Yoder (1927-1997). 

The years of 1996 and 1997 were ones of joyful life passages for our family, and I wrote in my journal on New Year’s Day that we had finished a good and healthy year; Elizabeth was baptized and joined the church and has a sincere faith. She is graduating from Southmoreland and heading for Goshen College in the Fall. Jakob and Lisen Reichenbach have completed a year of teaching in South Korea and had shown themselves remarkably resilient in difficult and adventuresome situations. Gloria has an extremely (I know, I like superlatives) successful teaching career with an intuitive sense of how to combine profession, family and church. Hannah is engaged to marry Anson Miedel and both are on their way to medical school in the Fall. Hannah had finished an outstanding Fall of co-editing the student newspaper at Eastern Mennonite University. I concluded: “So I have much to be grateful for, and I will gladly say this.”

Even sorrowful life passages had a joyful side when an aunt had kept the faith in a full and productive life for a century. Gloria’s aunt Lydia O. Kretzinger died on January 2, 1997; she was born on April 10, 1897. Lydia was Roy R’s favorite sister and confidante, a member of the family who often had a place at the table when we visited. Like Roy, she was a collector and her Sugarcreek house was filled with collectibles from moving metal coin banks to oil and vinegar cruets; she had two corner cabinets filled with them and gave one each to Gloria and Bonnie. Lydia Kretzinger lived most of her life in Sugarcreek, but in her mid-nineties she had moved to Walnut Hills Retirement Community at Walnut Creek. Carla and Maurice Stutzman kept a good watch on her while they lived near Sugarcreek.

Meanwhile the Stutzmans moved to the home place at Bunker Hill where they built a kind of grandma house addition for Berdella. By 2002, Carla and Maurice also rebuilt the old Roy R. and Berdella house, enlarging and modernizing it with a brick façade all around outside, keeping the feel of the original rooms of the smaller family house inside. The new house with all its modern amenities retained a remarkable live-in museum feeling with which Carla’s father Roy R. would have been pleased. With a large basement complete with kitchen and recreation room and a large open garage, their homestead was excellent for Miller (Roy R.) and Blosser (Berdella) family gatherings and hosting Walnut Creek Mennonite and Hiland youth groups as their own children moved through their school years.

But the big event for our family that summer was planning for Hannah and Anson’s August wedding. We knew it was coming because they had been best friends from their last year at Southmoreland through their college years at Westminster and Eastern Mennonite University. Because Tom and Margaret Miedel lived also lived at Scottdale, and we had known each other since the romance began five years earlier, it was relatively easy to coordinate things together. I remember Margaret planted an extra garden of flowers that spring, many of which ended up at the wedding or reception. Religiously, Anson had grown up in the Pennsville Baptist Church, but at some point he threw in his lot with the Mennonites. I was always grateful Hannah found a mate with a biblical and Christian indoctrination and sound personal morals from his Mt. Carmel School and Pennsville Baptist days, even if our traditions differed on issues such as women in ministry and participation in military service.  I also sometimes thought Anson’s Baptist background may have helped him understand Hannah’s Andrew and Mattie Miller clan who had from the Maple Grove Mission years absorbed elements of conservative Protestant and Baptist culture: “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart” and “You Can’t Get to Heaven on Roller Skates.” When our extended family got together and we sang lots of gospel songs, they seemed strange to our own children, but Anson once told me they seemed familiar to him.

In any case, Hannah and Anson needed a minister for the ceremony, and the Mennonite pastor Linford Martin was heading for Indiana, and our new pastors Conrad and Donna Mast had not yet arrived in town. So the Scottdale editor and elder Daniel Hertzler stepped up, and he and his wife Mary gave them counseling, and Daniel officiated the ceremony in his cryptic unadorned style. Hertzler was an unusual combination of biblical scholar, church editor, amateur naturalist, and Mennonite pastor, all of which he did with considerable success. They asked me to give a meditation, as Jakob had earlier, but I demurred not wanting to spoil the occasion. John Roth and sister Ruth were then returning with the family from Costa Rica and he gave a memorable marriage meditation on Jesus saying that my yoke is easy and my burden is light. My sister Rhoda with great vigor led the hymn “O God, Your Constant Care” with the meetinghouse full of family and friends confessing in harmony God’s care from our “dreams of youth” to “the passing of the years.” I thought of our ancestors and future generations to come; I wept such that I could hardly sing.

If transition clergy needed to be secured for the wedding, the same for the reception venue—Laurelville Mennonite Church Center. The center was the natural place to have it because Hannah had worked there off and on since her junior high school days. But over 300 guests were coming which was over the capacity of the old Dining Hall, plus Laurelville’s other guests committed that weekend. Laurelville was building a large new gymnasium which was under roof but not finished, not even the doors attached. Turning the open air gymnasium into a wedding reception hall became a community project. Maynard Brubaker provided a lift and we spent a half day stringing up little lights to form a starry ceiling. Then on Friday afternoon Tom Miedel took a Hilltop Labs truck, and we borrowed tables from the Scottdale Mennonite meetinghouses and from the Southmoreland High School cafeteria. The Laurelville cooks (Marilyn Schlabach and staff) brought the hot food over from the main Dining Hall in our old Chevy Celebrity station wagon which we had left at Laurelville when I left the staff. Anson had rented china and silver for the place settings, and everyone was fed a full dinner, including a traditional southwestern Pennsylvania cookie corner with one of my mother’s big Amish quilts hanging above it.  Anson had secured a steel band to play in the evening; there was dancing and visiting. The evening ended with my brother Paul and Veryl Kratzer shooting off a fireworks display on the nearby tennis courts, while Hannah and Anson headed off to the airport. They were going to spend a week in Aruba.

The weekend included two other extended family events of the Blossers and Millers. Gloria’s extended Berdella Blosser families were meeting that Sunday at cousin Bob Blosser’s place near Scottdale where he and Laura lived; we could only attend a part of it. In the meantime, our extended Miller family summer outing was also that weekend, which turned out be for all practical purposes the wedding. But I remember they stayed around for the Sunday morning, and we went out to join them for worship. One of the final projects was on Sunday afternoon when Tom Miedel and his sons in law Jim Farmer and Ryan Maxwell came and we picked up the tables and returned them to the meetinghouses and Southmoreland school. I was tired out, and foolishly became angry and argued with Jakob. Later that evening Jakob and I took a long walk, smoked a cigar, and things looked up again. The following week, I was writing in my journal, that I got up early, and it was a refreshing week with the only glitch being our young Ringneck pheasants roaming in the Arthur Avenue neighborhood. By September 15, I knew things were back to normal when Hannah sent me a nice birthday card which said let’s put the fun back into dysfunctional. She was referring to her father.

Hannah was an honest daughter with a bright mind, a gentle spirit, Miller emotions and lots of common sense. She always wore her achievements lightly. During high school, she was the high academic achiever, but took an art and drawing class which somehow figured lower on her grade point average, and ended up ranked 10^th in her senior class. By her senior year her teachers and counselors tried to be supportive, but they could not hide their disappointment that their prize student did not pursue a more selective east coast school than Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). Still, at EMU Hannah had a good model in Lee Snyder, the academic dean who took her on as a protégé. Snyder during that time became interim EMU president while Joseph Lapp was on sabbatical or leave. I’ll never forget the note Hannah sent that her heart was heavy as Snyder handed the gavel back to Lapp when he returned. By her 2^nd year at EMU, Hannah was already given an early acceptance at the Hershey Medical School, but she waited on Anson’s medical school decision before making any final choices. Hannah was not untouched by our Miller madness when she sent a dispairing letter saying “My life is a mess.” The dilemma was on whether to take this or that course or whether to volunteer at a camp in Oregon or Laurelville that summer. She chose Oregon. Hannah took full advantage of EMU’s generosity and small college flexibility with an honors program, travels in England, a term abroad in Ghana, assisting in directing a play, and editing the student newspaper. Hannah worked as a summer intern at Mennonite publishing that last summer before her wedding, for her father at least a good transition.             

Over the years, an important institution to navigate through life’s transitions was our Mennonite men’s prayer breakfast on Saturday mornings. It was begun by my friend Daniel (Dan) Lint back in the 80s, or for as long as I can remember since we came back from Venezuela. Our pastor Linford Martin was supportive as is our current pastor Conrad Mast. It would have long since died out if Dan had not stayed with the organization. Once a month on Saturdays, we get together with one person in charge of breakfast and another the devotions. Mainly through Dan’s nurturing, the institution has somehow managed to survive gender and church mergers. Why would or should men want to get together by themselves anyway?  At one point a few matrons showed up, presumably to show there were no male privileges in the Christian kingdom, but we knew that already. We simply outlasted these women, and they eventually stopped coming. We actually invited the women to come as Valentines in February, but that did not work out either. Since half of us were single for some reason (widowed or divorced), that cut into the regular male crowd. The February women seemed more like my dear Gloria; they came under duress in a kind of Buster duty (much preferring to sleep-in on Saturdays). Eventually, we simply cut out the February Valentine breakfast; attendance got better.

The prayer breakfast model was our leader Dan who paid little attention to these kinds of cultural issues and only promised a good breakfast and good fellowship, often including a good discussion. The institution, as I noted, survived through the merger of the two congregations and often has picked up a few neighbors and friends. Dan Lint was quite an accomplished cook in his own manner, and took his turn regularly serving large helpings of eggs, sausages, fruits, toast and cheese. Sometimes Dan and I would do breakfast together, going to the County Market (24-hour supermarket) early in the morning, buying what was needed before breakfast. Dan had a core of people he believed should be there, and he would call us during the week and remind us to attend and noted who will serve breakfast—the discussion or devotional seemed secondary. Sometimes, if you are not up and ready by 7:00 o’clock, Dan might call you that same morning and discreetly tell you not to let him down. Some of my best memories of people are from this group such as the artist Ivan Moon, the editor Paul M. Schrock and the entrepreneur Mervin Miller, all of whom have since died.

But a young man also stands out, Kent Hartzler. Kent was with us for a few years in the late 90s when he was marketing manager for Herald Press. For whatever reason, people sometimes said things in this setting which helped me; I’ll give an example from the Fall of 1997. After our youngest daughter Elizabeth left for Goshen College, I fell into a depression. Hannah and Anson had left for Philadelphia. Jakob and Lisen were heading for Istanbul in Turkey. I had felt sad when Jakob left for Kidron about a decade earlier, but we still had other kids at home. Elizabeth was the last one, and in the evenings, I would hear her steps on our stairways. That September I listened for the steps every evening, but they did not come. I shared this with the men one October morning, and they all seemed to know what I was talking about.

Kent Hartzler, one of the youngest men there, said he empathized with me and that probably his father felt this, and that my own father may have felt this way when I left (actually, I don’t believe Andrew did, but I got the point). But then he surprised me by stating the obvious; our fathers made it, and we should too. Get over it, Levi, you left your parents’ house; the kids will be okay. According to Kent this transition was all natural, perhaps as natural as the blue sky over Pennsylvania’s Big Valley and its nearby football team. I never forgot this counsel from a young man and have tried to remember it at other life changes and transitions. Kent soon left us, going on to eventually head up the Mennonite credit union, today called Everence.

One other subject was publically broached for this first time in this breakfast. One morning Daniel Hertzler wondered what Scottdale would be like without Mennonite Publishing House. Daniel was a biblical scholar and a sage who reflected on the Hebrew prophets and exile, as I recall. I think that was the first time we talked so openly about the possibility of Mennonite publishing moving or closing, and Daniel talking about it in the context of the prophets whom he loved and that one cannot be attached forever to one place or institution. I often thought Daniel’s theological spin on Scottdale and Mennonite publishing as exile was valuable, and the image stayed with me for many years.

While we are on gender related institutions, it seems to me that there has been value in them, and Gloria has for decades been a part of a women’s birthday dinner, a cohort which goes out for dinners about once a month. Her Goshen College alumni women’s group got together annually in various parts of the world. Mixed groups often played tennis together, but we also had men’s and women’s groups with whom we played. It is for women of course to say what value they see in their gender groups, but I have found value and enjoyment in men’s groups.

Another Kingview institution emerged while we were in Venezuela, a mid-winter annual fun night. This participatory theater and music had become the rage in the early eighties, and everyone wrote to us about what they called Fun night, that’s a capital F. I’m not sure if it was in reaction to Mennonites historically being fairly somber and upright types, that my generation decided it was time to make up for lost time of laughing. I think I first thought of this in the 80s when I went to Walton Hackman’s funeral over near Souderton among the Franconia Mennonites. After the funeral in one of the rather plain meetinghouses Henry Landes, one of Walt’s neighbors, sidled up beside me and assured me that if I would stick around after the burial and lunch, the informal session would have plenty of jokes and laughing. I decided to leave for home which was a four-hour drive anyway. Apparently the same was true of Paul Erb’s funeral which also happened while we were in Venezuela, and people wrote that it was so much fun, and everyone had such a good time telling humorous stories. We all have to do what we need to do regarding our backgrounds, but I somehow missed the sourpuss and American Gothic Mennonites and Amish. I regarded humor as a basic and long-standing survival strategy among my own stream of Amish and Mennonites, hence no special need for extra fun in church, generally thinking of fun being like joy, all the better for being un-intended. 

  

In any case, by the late nineties, fun night had become institutionalized into our local church culture as the one evening of the year, you could be a fool, playing into character or against character. Small groups were in charge, wrote original scripts, did elaborate sets and decorating, and it may have been an evening on a cruise ship, a one-room country school, a western dude ranch, or on an African safari.  Members such as Nelson Waybill, Alta Dezort and Jack Scott were good at various aspects of theater, but often the shows were simply home-grown operettas with unlikely actors. The seats or benches were removed from the Kingview auditorium and entire meetinghouse would be turned into a huge theater in the round, often the make believe beginning already by having parking attendants acting as police officers or ticketing agents. Playing in character were often Mervin and Arlene Miller as effete and impossibly hard-to-please travelers, complaining about accommodations and perks not being up to their high expectations. During these years, one memorable night, Kent (mentioned above) and Stephanie Hartzler came out an opening high above the auditorium sliding down through the air suspended by a cable. I have no idea what their drama and characters were (possibly Tarzan and Jane), but for many months afterwards we talked about Kent and Stephanie flying through the open air in the church auditorium.

      

But the one I remember best was in 1998 when our small group (Kim and Diane Miller, Maynard and Jan Brubakers, Robert and Linda Koch) planned an African theme led by Lord Stanley (that would be Kim Miller) as the American journalist out to look for the Scottish missionary, as in “Mr. Livingstone, I presume.” His side-kick was Sir Artless Cook (Robert Koch) and they meet some natives dancing beside a large kettle with a bright West Overton fire underneath. The natives (that would be Levi, Gloria, and the Moons, Dan, Ivan and Naomi) were singing “Can, Can, Can, Cannibal…” to the tune of “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl…,” the old 1962 pop song. Eventually some missionaries appear (our new pastors Conrad and Donna Mast) who sing the Beatles tune “Help I Need Somebody.” They sing so plaintively that the cannibals are moved, feel needed and affirmed, and join in the song, with  Naomi Moon calling to the missionary singing at the piano (Conrad): “Don’t go so fast; o make it last, my little Mast.” In the end, all is resolved, they give to the Save the Animals fund, and Lord Stanley will contribute an article to the New York Post. 

I remember this scene, of course, because I wrote and directed it, but there must have been a half dozen in an evening (each somewhat self contained and better than mine) such as the one with Kent and Stephanie Hartzler (above) flying down on the cable. After acting or singing in your own scene, you moved on with the crowd and became part of the participatory audience for the rest of the evening.   When the two congregations (Scottdale and Kingview) merged in the next century, fun night ended. But for two decades of the 80s and 90s the Kingview fun night brought some excitement to our long western Pennsylvania winters. 

This year began with family transitions, and we’ll connect to the world stage from the family: Hannah was in the audience when the theologian John Howard Yoder visited Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in January of 1997. She not only heard his speech, but I remember she told me she asked a question. What made Yoder’s appearance especially significant was that he was on a short list as one of the greatest Christian theologians of the twentieth century. Yoder’s brilliant mind and writings such as The Politics of Jesus did more to give credibility and public discussion to pacifism in the 20^th century than anyone since the time when the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy had given this teaching in the 19^th century.  Both Yoder’s messianic pacifism and Tolstoy’s nonresistance appealed to the life and teachings of Jesus. What also made the EMU appearance significant was that Yoder had been banned from Mennonite public appearances during most of the decade (cf  Yoder, 1947, 1972, 1988).

By 1992 Yoder had been exposed to be one of the Mennonites’ most successful sexual predators of young women and was undergoing church discipline and rehabilitation by the Indiana Michigan Conference. Hence, his Harrisonburg visit was one of Yoder’s first public appearances since the disciplinary process had achieved what the church officials called "closure," although it was hardly closure for many of the women whom he had violated. Leo Tolstoy has a further parallel in that the Russian apostle of love and nonresistance and his wife Sophia Behrs also had one of the most abusive and conflicted spousal relations one can imagine. And while we’re on the subject, in Washington this year the President Bill Clinton was having sexual relations with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky which almost brought down his otherwise quite successful presidency. As a youth my own family had taught me that human failings and sinfulness seemed to co-exist alongside of our achievements and virtues, even within the same person. By the end of the century, the pattern continued. That Fall of 1997, I had asked Steven Nolt to do a profile of Yoder for the magazine Christian Living. He sent me an e-mail on the last day of the year: John Howard Yoder died on December 30 of that year.

Most of this chapter is from memory and from personal files of the period. The hymn we sang at Anson and Hannah’s wedding “O God, Your Constant Care” appears in Hymnal A Worship Book (Mennonite Publishing House, 1992, 481). Hannah’s despairing “My life is a mess” letter from EMU was written January 13, 1994. The Kingview fun night section is partly drawn from a script entitled “Kingview Fun Night, March 13, 1998” in my Ideas and Activities file of 1998. On John Howard Yoder, EMU professor Ted Grimsrud’s blog is good reflection on Yoder’s  pacifism, his sexual abuse, and traditional nonresistance http://thinkingpacifism.net/2010/12/30/word-and-deed-the-strange-case-of-john-howard-yoder/ Steven Nolt’s article appeared as “Critic and the Community: John
Howard Yoder among the Mennonites,”Christian Living (April-May 1998, 4-8).