1987 Liberation Theology

1987  Liberation Theology. Laurelville staff, personality types, J. Robert Ramer, Berdella Blosser Miller, Central America: El Salvador and Nigaragua, Peace and Justice, Liberation Theology, Lori and Larry Leaman-Miller, LeRoy Friesen and Richard Shaull, Gregory A. Fronius; “I Am a Mennonite, Not an Anabaptist,” Joe Greene Hall of Fame induction.

In the front of my 1987 journal is the paper work of personality styles which we did at Laurelville in November of that year.  Karl and Evelyn Bartsch of State College were regular resource people at Laurelville during that time, Karl leading groups from his counseling profession and Evelyn singing; she was a good soloist in the classical repertoire. Their son Jim also worked at Laurelville so this connection was an additional reason for them to be around. Anyway, based on Bartsch’s tests I was an extravert, intuitive, (ENTP) which according to the key meant: I was quick, ingenious, and good at many things. I was stimulating company, alert and outspoken. I may argue for fun on either side of a question. I was resourceful in solving new and challenging problems, but I may neglect routine assignments. Finally, I was apt to turn to one new interest after another.  And my types were skillful in finding logical reasons for what we want to do.

There were 16 types in Bartsch’s guide based on two people called Keirsey and Bates and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Hence others were more introverted and sensing rather than my extroverted intuitive type. The idea was of course that all the types were good, in Christian language a gift and a given, but that we can get alone better if we understand ourselves and the types of our fellow workers. The largest grouping of my colleagues at Laurelville fell into the Introvert Sensing (ISFJ) style: quiet, friendly, responsible and conscientious, and other key leaders with whom I were worked were extroverted sensing (ESFJ) types: warm-hearted, talkative, popular, conscientious, born cooperators who love harmony. The Sommers Dana and Donna enjoyed these types of harmony activities, and on balance I think they helped us get along with each other. By 1987 Mike and Mary Zehr came to Laurelville and their young children, and about this time Ken and Rhoda Bowman moved to Nashville, Tennessee. Both Ken and Mike were enjoyable colleagues, as was the office manager Betty Miller. Bob Brenneman was especially competent as the youth program director and in the winter did some helping on maintenance. Both he and Betty Miller had strong administrative capabilities.

Even though the Laurelville staff was basically conservative in style, tastes and beliefs, there was a great deal of latitude within that culture for deviancy, especially silliness and practical jokes, perhaps heightened in the summer when college staffers were around, many of them from Hesston College, a two-year Kansas school. One young man was especially fond of the camp food mixture of M &Ms, nuts and dried fruits called gorp. So when the staff gave him a party for some occasion they mixed dog food into his gorp; he ate it vigorously with gratefulness, while the rest of the staff all evening barked like veritable canines, keeping the ingredients a secret until several days later. Another summer night, we had a men’s night out to eat and go bowling in Connellsville; most of us went a large van, I believe it was the Sommers’ motor home but I followed with our car. One of the fellows mooned people in vehicles who followed behind the big van. Mooning (pulling your pants down with the arsch on display) was a young men's prank during those years.  I remember telling Betty Miller about it the next day in the office and she simply smiled. As it turned out I learned afterword, the women also had their own dinner night out, and ended the same evening by skinny dipping in the camp pool.

Aside from the Laurelville programs which Bob Brenneman and I directed, an even greater number of rental groups came to the center, one of which was of special interest was the Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) leadership with their new publisher J. Robert Ramer from Edmonton, Alberta. Ramer became publisher of Mennonite Publishing House in August, and he would oversee 105 employees at the MPH building in Scottdale, and 180 others in 13 bookstores. The bookstore managers would come to Laurelville for a planning retreat, at this time including a number of Ontario stores. After serving as publisher for 26 years, Ben Cutrell was staying on as a consultant. Ramer previously headed the Business Administration Department at Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, member of the faculty since 1966, and had served on the Publication Board for ten years.

Although by this time a number of Mennonite agencies had moved away from Scottdale, at this point MPH was still at its heights in publishing with a full line of congregational curriculum and the strong sale of More with Less cookbook, and was considering adding a second book editor, theological book editor what with the beginning of a new Believers Church Bible Commentary Series (1986). The publishing people were our neighbors and we kept in touch, and their workers would regularly tell ours that they pitied us for having to work on weekends. The sympathy seemed misplaced because I actually enjoyed working on weekends; that’s when people could come to Laurelville, knowing that we as staff would be able to be off for a few days during the week.

During the late eighties we were getting post cards from my mother-in-law Berdella Miller from all over the world. If her senior husband Roy R. (1986) had traveled during an earlier life, now as a widow, it was Berdella’s turn, and she began to travel, going with travel groups to Russia, England, and various European countries. Berdella clearly wanted to see the world after growing up in the fairly constricted large Samuel Blosser and Sarah Elizabeth (Sadie) Spicher family from Columbiana. Berdella, born in 1920 was the second child in a large Amish Mennonite family of modest means with father Samuel working as a farmer and carpenter, never achieving much and the family selling eggs and garden produce in the nearby city of Youngstown for income. I grew up with the talk of a generation called “children of the depression,” but Berdella was first person I met who seemed to embody this term in the traditional sense of having a general feeling of scarcity, bordering on anxiety, rather than a sense of abundance or at least sufficiency.

But if the Blossers were shaped by these familial constraints, there was also a streak of the unusual in the names this Swiss German family gave its children: Adelia, Christine, Hermine, Arthur, Herman, Emerson and Marcellus. For Berdella these aspirations for achievement and new horizons meant that after high school she took a commercial course of one year at Goshen College and went to work in the offices of the Mennonite Central Committee headquarters in Akron, Pennsylvania. This was during the Second World War years and there she met the education coordinator 14 years her senior, Roy R. Miller of Holmes County. She invited him out on a leap year date. They were married on April 1, 1945, and she moved with Roy R. back to Holmes County where Roy resumed his familial and professional pursuits.

For Roy R. returning to Ohio was like being a fish in the Holmes County pond, but Berdella never felt quite comfortable in the water. She was close to her sisters, especially Christine, and now she was isolated from her Blosser family and beginning her Miller family with the birth of Leslie in 1946. Although she was the wife of a respected educator, this role seemed to never quite fulfill her sense of belonging. The same went for church; Berlin Mennonite was a pervasive community institution, but it was run by the large Lincoln (Link) and Ida Yoder family, and Berdella felt locked out. The Yoders were large in numbers and influence with adult children and families in the church, peers of Roy and Berdella. The pastor was Paul Hummel, husband of Mary Yoder, and their daughter Brenda was Gloria’s good friend growing up; Roy was church treasurer and Berdella librarian.

Still, Berdella tended to view these extended family systems as a seamless block of strength while she was all alone and weak, and even Roy and her children could not quite be her bridge to belonging. She would sometimes tell me a church incident, quite harmless I thought, regarding who taught Sunday school or led music, but then she would say now don’t you say that to your brothers and the family. When her son Leslie came out as a gay during these years, it seemed to add to her isolation because she loved him and may have identified with his alienation. The Holmes County pastors and the church ethos considered homosexual practice as against biblical teaching.

Meanwhile, during the fifties, Berdella raised her family, sewing their clothes, cooking and canning and taking annual Easter photos of the family together, the girls in new dresses, almost a model of Eisenhower era domesticity. Berdella found some outlet in artistic expressions such as singing in a women’s quartet, meeting with in a book club and even dabbling in some literary creations of her own. When Berlin and Walnut Creek formed the new Hiland High School in 1958 with her husband as the executive head, Berdella composed the music for “Hiland High,” which became the alma mater —and still in use today. And she used her training in typing and office work in typing the Spichaer family history for her mother. In the seventies when I wrote a novel coming out of a Puerto Rico setting, Berdella typed it into clean copy; again in the eighties when I was writing a Holmes County based novel, Berdella typed clean copy. When the children were all grown, she went to Berlin Elementary school to work in the library, and in the summer during my Laurelville years, she came to our family camps and senior adult week, totally loyal to her grandchildren. When the grandchildren visited her, Berdella was prepared for months of scarcity with a refrigerator stocked full of various flavors of soda pop drinks and a freezer filled with every flavor of ice cream. It was a child’s treat.  

And Berdella was a loyal friend. At the Berlin Elementary school, she and the librarian, I believe her name was Purdy, became good friends. In the early eighties, the librarian was in a severe auto accident and reduced to a vegetable state for a number of years—paraplegic and incapable of language use. Every week, with the same regularity that she went to her hair dresser, Berdella went to see her friend. One could see little in the relationship; it was devoid of the basic mutuality one would normally expect in friendship. But this was Berdella approaching agape love.

Although agape love was operative in the personal world, the geopolitical world was more interested in justice, and with a specific view of justice often defined by socialism. I saw it in the events in Central America which during the eighties was in civil war in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The war in El Salvador was a civil war of peasants and revolutionaries against a military dominated government. In this war justice, often in my circles called peace and justice, was defined as an attempt to achieve an equal distribution of resources. Religiously, this reading was largely along the lines of liberation ideology, a Marxist reading of Scripture; think José Miranda and Gustavo Gutierrez. In El Salvador, aside from the international media groups, we got the church news from a young Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) couple Larry and Kori Leaman-Miller.

The Leaman-Millers generally sounded like a pacifist wing of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), emphasizing the violence of the government’s army and paramilitaries but silent regarding the violence of the guerilla armies. Appealing to the legacy of the slain priest Oscar Romero, the Leaman-Millers seemed hopeful the FMLM uprising would bring the government to negotiate freedom to the peasants and also stop persecuting religious people sympathetic to the guerilla’s cause. The attempt was to de-legitimize the El Salvadoran government, loaded with a long record of human rights abuses which accompanied the civil war.

In the neighboring country of Nicaragua, justice and liberation had already occurred; the Marxist oriented Sandinistas had overthrown a corrupt government but were now engaged in another civil war, this one called the Contra War. Former Somoza militia, allies and small land owners were now taking up arms to overthrow the Sandinistas. Again there were the international media reports and In this case our main religious news source was an organization called Witness for Peace and a Sharon Hostetler, who appeared to have Mennonite or Brethren ties. This group worked to give a human and positive face to the Sandinistas, and generate public support to have the American government stop supplying arms to the Contras. The effort was to support socialist types of governments, presumably more just governments.

I agreed with that our government should not supply the Contras with arms to overthrow the Sandinistas and that El Salvadoran democracy should be, well, more democratic within the realities of Central American culture. Still, I was increasingly uncomfortable with the one-sided approach of these lefties who gave tacit support to the armed guerillas in the overthrow of governments friendly to the United States. I was equally put off by apologists for socialist states which could be as oppressive as the oligarchies they replaced. In El Salvador in supporting the insurgency, these pacifists were in effect extending a war in which the North Americans citizens could leave, but the poor of El Salvador could not. About 70,000 people were killed.

A good example is the Miller-Leaman couple who when threatened could safely return to the United States, unlike the local peasants. Given the patterns of the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua as models for the insurgents, it was not clear to me that El Salvador would have been better off if the FMLN had won and set up its own version of a people’s republic with the attendant poverty and loss of freedoms.

I wrote in my journal about what I called the overseas worker guilt syndrome, and wrote to John A. Lapp of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). It begins by sending post-Vietnam youths abroad for what are increasingly called presence and advocacy assignments. The young volunteers listen and hear a story of Third World (poor countries) woe and injustice. The youth have already given up on charity and service, perhaps even development. We teach the people how to fish rather than giving out fish. So much for the Jesus’ story of feeding the five thousand. The next stage was saying the poor learned to fish but did not have access to the pond. The state should expropriate the pond. The volunteer already has a sense of American fallibility because of the Vietnam War, and it would be impolite as a foreigner to blame the hosts for their troubles or to take some responsibility for local conditions.

With an ideology of suspicion toward any Christian relief, service or development effort except political change and with a deep sense of guilt, the volunteers begin to blame USA government and the West for most of the problems of their new friends. This approach is safe and therapeutic as long as the volunteers are under the umbrella of the democratic West. It gives the volunteers a sense that they are doing something while doing little meaningful or concrete, now far from extending the Christian cup of cold water. 

The Miller-Leamans were an excellent example of this kind of moral exhibitionism when they came back and spoke for an hour on C-Span. Although their effort did little except to legitimize the violent insurgents, they could feel morally good by having their consciousness raised by the violent FMLN uprising and blaming the American government.

Central America was especially on my mind because the Venezuelan press and government had supported the Nicaraguan overthrow of Somoza but was suspicious of the Sandinista suppression of dissent. Carmen and Luke Schrock Hurst from our congregation were serving in Honduras helping the refugees who were streaming from El Salvador into neighboring Honduras. I was also influenced by the Catholic pope John Paul II who while strongly supporting social justice was deeply Christian and not Marxist such as the liberation theologians. I remember when he visited Nicaragua in 1983 and upheld the importance of the church and was interrupted by Sandinista partisans. I admired John Paul’s courage. The Honduran Mennonite Olvidio Flores did a North American speaking tour on Central American conflicts and was a part of our Presbyterian Mennonite Shalom Conferences.

At one of the conferences we had the Mennonite theologian LeRoy Friesen and the Reformed liberation theologian

 Richard Shaull. Not unexpectedly, Shaull did a modest just war legitimation of liberation movements, but Friesen was the surprise. He had just returned from El Salvador, was shocked by the poverty, and could no longer endorse biblical pacifism because of the injustice he saw in El Salvador. His view of distributive justice (socialism) was now trumping Mennonite pacifism. I will talk about these conferences (1988), but Friesen’s candid confession, I suppose, jolted me to wonder where justice was leading Mennonite thought. I remember my friend the Presbyterian pastor John J. Lolla quipping to me afterwards that Friesen sounds like one of us (Presbyterians).   

Then there was the March 31, 1987, death of Gregory A. Fronius in El Salvador, the first American soldier killed in this war. Fronius, a staff sergeant, had served in the Special Forces and how he died was inaccurately disclosed at the time, given that Americans were not to serve directly in combat actions. Later he was posthumously awarded a Silver Star for leadership in defending an army base camp at El Paraiso under attack by the FMLN rebels. I went to his funeral on April 7 at the nearby Pennsville Baptist Church and wrote about the experience in my journal. The church sang and played popular Vietnam anthem “The Green Beret.” Then a picture emerged of an American military officer I somehow did not expect.

Fronius had gone native: learned Spanish, married a Panamanian Celinda (now holding a folded flag), and nicknamed “Rojo” by his comrades for his red hair. The pastor George Nichols gave a sermon which emphasized Jesus sacrifice for humanity and Fronius’ sacrifice for his country. I wrote in my journal (April 13, 1987): “I suppose I went in part because here was another person who had gone to Latin America, as we had, to serve but his service had been of a different order, and he had died. I was sorry and also moved.” Although I believed that American forces should not have been placed in El Salvador, nevertheless I respected Fronius’ commitment and felt for the family and friends. Fronius’ death took on another news cycle in 2002 when it was revealed that a Cuban spy Ana Montes imbedded in the USA Defense Intelligence Agency had probably caused his death. She is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.  

Finally, about a year later, while visiting the Pendle Hill eastern Quakers, I came across some of the writings of Chuck Fager such as Quaker Service at the Crossroads (1988). I had read him earlier in the 1960s on the civil rights movement, and now he was a staunch Quaker wondering whether The American Friends Service Committee had moved from its religious roots. Second, I read Guenter Lewy’s Peace and Revolution; I remember picking it off of the peace shelf at the Lancaster Provident Bookstore and thinking how the Provident chain prided itself in providing various points of view. I suppose the irony of how a pacifist group such as the Quakers could actually become partners in the violent often Marxist inspired revolution and war in Southeast Asia was disheartening. Would this trajectory be the fate of the modern Mennonites in a generation or two? It was a cautionary thought.      

My response to all this was to write “I am a Mennonite not an Anabaptist,” which I first wrote in 1986; it was published in the following year in our denominational weekly Gospel Herald.  Here I was using a specific meaning for Anabaptist as a 16^th century revolutionary; this is not the only meaning of course. Instead, I was taking inspiration from the 19^th century Mennonite, the quiet in the land. I suggested that we (1) appreciate the resilience and ongoing vitality within North American Mennonitism, (2) accept the economic and social order in which we find ourselves, (3) be more intuitive rather than scholastic regarding teaching the faith, (4) accept  being part of the American middle class, (5) recognize various ways of being prophetic (other than left-wing politics), and (6) finally cherish a certain modesty and quietness. Publishing it involved a six month passive aggressive quarrel with the editor Daniel Hertzler who wanted revisions, mainly documentation.

I considered these revisions as stalling techniques by an unhappy editor who disagreed with my point of view. But to my surprise it was published as the lead and cover article with photos of the 16^th century Michael Sattler, a 19^th century Mennonite farmer, and a 20^th century Levi Miller on the cover. I remember assistant editor Steve Shenk made a pre-publication presentation to me at one of our Laurelville summer camps. I believe it was the music camp. I considered this article the signature confession of my spiritual transformation from the early seventies to the late eighties.  I was invited to give it as a sermon at my home congregation Kingview Mennonite Church, April 26, 1987.  

Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh Steelers had stopped winning their 1970s Super Bowls but those team members were now being ushered into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. When defensive tackle Joe Greene was inducted into the Hall on August 8, 1987, Hannah, Jacob, and I drove out and met my brother David and son Kent for an enjoyable Saturday morning outing.

Most of this comes my memory, journal and personal files of the period. J. Robert Ramer coming to the Mennonite Publishing House was reported in the Ohio Evangel (November-December 1987, 6). Berdella Miller typed the Spichear Family History: Descendents of Michael Spichear and Nancy Zook (1976) for a booklet self-published by her mother Sarah Elizabeth (Sadie) Spiker Blosser. Berdella’s visiting her librarian friend comes from my journal, Notes on Life, April 1987, which has a sermon on friendship given at the Scottdale’s Trinity United Methodist Church on August 2, 1987.  On liberation theology, I read Marx and the Bible by José Miranda and A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez.  The paragraph on the volunteer guilt syndrome comes largely from my 1986 journal entry August 10, 1986, and a letter to John A. Lapp August 28, 1986. I was specifically reflecting on MCC presence in the Philippines but much would also apply to other third World countries. Mennonite Central Committee volunteers Kori and Larry Leaman-Miller can be seen on the C-Span Library, December 18, 1989, under the title “Persecution of Church Workers in El Salvador.” I drew from my journal entry April 13, 1987, regarding Gregory A. Fronius funeral, but by Googling his name in the internet, one can get much additional information. Reference to Guenter Lewy is Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1988). “I am a Mennonite not an Anabaptist,” was published in the Gospel Herald (July 7, 1987, 481-484). . 

1986 Arthur Avenue Neighbors

1986  Arthur Avenue Neighbors.  Laurelville family leisure camps with Merle and Phyllis Good; “Witness” controversy, Jacob, Hannah, Elizabeth, Arthur Avenue neighbors, Mildred and Web Stauffer, Bob Davis, Arnold and Patricia Gasborro, annual block parties, Fred and Rosanne Huzak, Denny and Carol Stoner, Charles (Chuck) Fausold tennis, Tinkey Nist and Charley Brown, Bob Davis' Stu, Café con Leche, Julio Macduff, Ophelia, Gloria’s student Mexico trip, a reflexologist guest.

Laurelville was family friendly, and summers were especially good to our family. My work was program and event centered, and during the winter we’d go our own ways at Connellsville, Scottdale and Laurelville, but in the summer Gloria and the kids would come out in the afternoons for swimming, playing, and sunning.  The family would also join on a few camps such as the years we did family leisure camp with Merle and Phyllis Pellman Good and their daughters Kate and Rebecca.  These were generally small groups which developed strong personal friendship, plus they had the comedy of Merle Good’s pleasant theatrics. We knew the Goods from visiting their Dutch Family Festival in the seventies and their publishing firm Good Books. But during these 1980s summers when they helped with Family Leisure Week, it was Merle and Phyllis simply being young parents who enjoyed singing, doing skits, praying, listening and taking hikes up on Sunset Hill.

About this time my friend John A. Hostetler was on a crusade to get the film director Peter Weir to stop making a police action thriller in which a Philadelphia cop finds refuge among Lancaster Amish. Hostetler felt this movie would increase tourism and become too invasive to the Amish community. Plus, the story was fiction. Merle Good took the position that although having a film crew in Lancaster may inconvenience some Amish, there was nothing inherently wrong with making a feature film involving Amish characters, and he had some confidence in the director Peter Weir’s capability. The debate was held on a number of fronts, but for Mennonites it took on a personal element when Hostetler and Good wrote point counter point articles in the weekly denominational magazine. Similar to Hostetler’s earlier Amish defense projects John A.  had proxies state his point of view in public forums, in this case Donald Kraybill with an article in the Mennonite Weekly Review, claiming the Amish reject fiction; hence a feature film such as “Witness” would be more problematic than Hostetler’s documentary film and presumably his field sociology.

This struck too close to home as I was writing fiction with Amish characters myself and because it simply made no sense, what with my knowing the Amish have more fiction in the monthly Family Life than about any other magazine I knew of.  So I wrote a long letter to Kraybill to which he responded about a year later, acknowledging that he was incorrect on the fiction count, recognizing that the Amish read and write a lot of fiction, although they may not approve of Weir’s kind.  This writing was just the beginning of Kraybill venturing into Amish studies, and since he has become the foremost international  scholar and author in the field. But back to Good and Hostetler; I suspect it was partly also a generational issue of an elderly Hostetler viewing his authority and definitions questioned.  Hostetler even wrote my brother Paul a letter complaining of how he had to don dark glasses and a hat to hide his identity as he visited Good’s information center called The People’s Place in Intercourse, Pennsylvania. But all of these public controversies were far away from our summer Laurelville family days with the Goods. Meanwhile our children were growing up, and I’ll give an accounting of each.

Jacob seemed to always have a few good school friends around him during these years. Several I remember are Chris Overly from town and Steve Clark who lived out near the Ruffsdale. I remember taking these boys to their houses and they visited frequently, sometimes staying overnight. Jacob and his friend Chris Allegra were becoming politically active at an early age, and when the M*A*S*H* star Mike Farrell came to western Pennsylvania stomping for Democratic candidate Bob Edgar a U.S. Senate seat, we joined in a day of electioneering. Steve Brubaker was Jacob’s age, and so Maynard Brubaker and I took leadership of our church’s boys club, doing lots of games, activities, and service projects. One fall (October 8, 1984) we took Jacob and Steve for a day of Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) work up near Meadville, Pennsylvania; Dennis Hertzler went along too. Jacob’s friends and other Kingview boys club aged kids from Kingview such as Zach Brown and the Siriannas came to club meetings too. Another memorable evening we went in to Pittsburgh to hear Stryper, a heavy metal Christian band (November 17, 85).

The main time Jakob and I had music was when we would weekly drive up to Greensburg where he had violin lessons at about nine o’clock in the evening; Jacob as with all our children had a good musical ear and played the violin okay but it not as a first love. His real interest in music was more along the lines of jazz which we heard on WDUQ by a disc jockey called Tony Moad. We had many good visits on those weekly late-evening trips to and from Greensburg. 

My Greensburg trips with Hannah were monthly when we went for several years to visit John Wesner, the orthodontist. Hannah was an exceptionally fast learner, somewhat ahead of her class emotionally and academically, and often when we visited her elementary teachers, they spoke of her as much a peer as a student. Every time we’d meet our neighbor Nancy Clark, she told us it made her last year meaningful because she had Hannah Miller in class. During these years, I served as a home room parent, and I would visit her class along with another parent, and we would lead party and social games relating to the particular holiday.

For some reason, Gloria enrolled Hannah in some dance classes at Connellsville during these years, and I remember attending an embarrassing recital or two; as I recall Hannah posing for photos was a big part of the evening. Anyway, this charade lasted only a short time; Hannah was not especially suited for acrobatic dance, and better activities soon took precedence. She took up piano with the teacher our neighbor Marty Hawk, and was beginning a three-year run for spelling bee championships. As a sixth grader (1987), she won the Westmoreland County Spelling Bee, and then sang the Kermit the Frog’s solo “The Rainbow Connection” at the Southmoreland spring music program.       

At an early age, Hannah also began to work as a waitress at Laurelville which she continued to do throughout her junior and senior high school years. Many weekends she would ride with me to and from Laurelville, even before she had a driver’s license. If Hannah was brainy, she was also practical and she guarded her money carefully, as did Elizabeth. One of her English assignments was to write of her life thus far. She wrote her life story in a booklet with at least six pages describing here past and present life, but ended with a projection of her future. She wrote that she planned to attend college, marry a husband, have three children and become a chemist. 

Elizabeth started out slow at Scottdale; in the first grade she was placed in a low reading group. It may have been because when we returned from Venezuela she was the most bilingual of the three children, more conversant in Spanish than English. Gloria does not often show emotion, but when she found out about this placement, I thought I heard the clucks of an angry hen defending her chick. She went to visit the teacher Mrs. Shure who was very accommodating and said she would give Elizabeth special attention; sure enough, by mid-year Elizabeth was reading with the best of the class. 

Elizabeth was a third child mediator; this was true if the conflict was between siblings, parents, or parents and children. Although determined and self-disciplined, she always had a soft edge with all of us and listened to many points of view. We regularly had foreign exchange students from Johanna Hurtado to Spanish and Japanese kids; they inevitably gravitated to Elizabeth for counsel or perhaps space from the rest of us. Elizabeth seemed intuitively to sense some good and reasonable from all she heard and listened to various sides. During these years, we had neighbors Walter and Sue Kotecki whose daughter Erica often came down to our back lawn to play with Elizabeth.

I appreciated our neighbors along Arthur Avenue, even if they were what in the local parlance was called nebby, nosey, in everyone’s business. On balance, I figured this trait a small-town virtue; they were good-willed and watching over our house and children. Mildred and Web Stauffer lived next door above us; Web was born in the nineteenth century and a veteran of the First World War, and Mildred had worked in one of the local banks all her life. Both now retired and a brother and sister, they were well connected to the history of the community. Below us were the long-time Episcopal rector and his wife who sang opera arias while she played the piano. But they soon left town, almost overnight, amid rumors of the rector’s friendship with one of his parishioners The longest resident below us was Bob Davis, a single young man who was an outdoorsman and hunter; he had a welcome sign on his door noting there were loaded weapons inside. In his early years Bob had late night parties, and we heard rumbling and music until the early morning. But with time he settled down and, one could not think of a better neighbor than Bob Davis and his dog Stu.

Somewhat more colorful neighbors lived in a large brick house across Arthur Avenue in the Arnold and Patricia Gasbarro family and their children Christine and Vincent. Aside from their business ventures, Arnold worked as a mine inspector for the U.S. Department of Labor, but I’m mention two elements which made for the family’s distinction. First, I remember their vigorous debates (elevated terms here) which sometimes went well into the night on summer evenings and with the windows open--quite public. One heard spouses giving vivid descriptions of each others’ family origins, and father and son debates were held in the open garage while fixing motors. Sometimes a concluding argument was punctuated with the ping or thud as a flying tool hitting a wall. Often the next day or whenever we saw one of the Gasbarros, they would apologize for the late-night discussions, noting the unreasonableness of the opposing side.

During these years I was exposed to a lot of mediation and conflict intervention training, and I sometimes thought of our neighbors. But I never considered myself capable of intervening nor of calling in intervention. First, I was intuitively a debater myself, and even after many workshops and seminars, not good at mediation. Second, I thought that probably another party trying to intervene would simply have united the Gasbarros against the third party, thus simply escalating the discussion to another arena.

And I confess, dear reader, the above paragraphs by themselves give a distorted view of our  neighbors. The Gasbarros were not only debaters and emotive story tellers, but here is their second characteristic: good-natured and generous neighbors to us. Arthur Avenue had no parking space, and we often parked our second vehicle on their lot, as did our visitors. On a sub-zero winter morning, they would jump start our vehicles, and they would lend, borrow or exchange any tools. Simply put, if we ever needed help, they were first responders of unusual loyalty. I was away a lot at night and on trips, and I found some consolation in the thought that  we had four friendly giants across the street who would have made short shrift of any intruder to our home.

I saw another side of Arnold on June 2, 1985, at Christine Andre’s wedding at the Byzantine Catholic Church out along the Mt. Pleasant Road; Arnold read the Scripture text; to my recall it was the Love Chapter of 1 Corinthians. He and Pat served a great meal and drinks at the Scottdale Firemen’s Hall afterwards. Arnold Gasbarro died on March 6, 2003, and we went to the funeral home, visiting with the family and, sure enough, we walked into a family debate with Arnold’s body and casket as the backdrop. It all felt authentic to Arthur Avenue, and I thought probably a generous God in heaven and now Arnold were looking down with some humor at our earthly drama.   

The Gasbarros did not come to our block parties which drew mainly from the other side of Arthur on Loucks Avenue, headed up by Tinkey Nist and the Koteckis, Huzaks, and Stoners. Each summer or fall since Sue Kotecki and Rosanne Huzak started the block parties in the seventies, a family would host, generally providing the main entré and drinks, and everyone brought dishes. Often there was a bingo game and various door prizes; sometimes it was seasonal and we did pumpkin carving; another time we had lawn mower races with both a riding and push category. Fred Huzak early on recorded these events on his video camera, and sometime played them back to us; the Huzaks also sometimes hosted a winter neighborhood indoor picnic. When Fred retired from Lennox Glass in Mt. Pleasant, he took a cross country coast to coast bike trip, and the resulting video became an evening neighborhood gathering. All of these community events helped us to see each other in a personable light, whatever our differences in background, vocation and religious affiliation. 

I’ll mention several other neighbors. Denny and Carole Stoner lived behind us on Loucks where they raised their three daughters and often we could hear them visit on the back patio much as I’m sure they heard us down below. Denny always called down a neighborly greeting, and we had a special connection because he and his brothers (Jim and Wally) played basketball at the old downtown Y cracker-box gym and also later at the Southmoreland gymnasium. These were men’s pick-up nights and many enjoyable evenings of exercise in the winter. Carole Stoner was also athletic and played tennis with Gloria in the women’s league. The additional connection with Denny was that he and his brothers had grown up on Market Street beside the Mennonite Meetinghouse and had been good friends of the Mennonite minister John L. Horst’s family, especially their son John during his school years. During the eighties John Horst, now a professor at Eastern Mennonite University, and family would come back to Scottdale and Laurelville for various music or family camps.

In the summer my tennis exercise was going Wednesday evenings with neighbor Charles (Chuck) Fausold up to Hidden Valley on their men’s tennis night. Sometimes the pharmacist George Hoffman went along, and we played round robins until dark on the courts which was even more enjoyable when one of the Pritts brothers (Ronnie, Randy, or Roger) was a partner. They were always competitive and always polite. They were sons of the Alverta and Clifford N. Pritts of Champion and associated with the Connellsville school system, hence knew Chuck and also my wife Gloria. Chuck and Betty Fausold had a house near Hidden Valley and we sometimes stopped in, but most of the time after the men’s tennis, we all went down to the Hidden Valley bar for a sandwich, popcorn and drinks. The evening's tennis winner provided a pitcher of beer.

Hidden Valley guests and condo owners would often join us on these tennis evenings, and I would sometimes meet someone who discovered I worked at Laurelville, often called "the Mennonite camp,” and I would hear a camp story. A typical one was of a one-time youth having attended Laurelville on a Young Life weekend. These were big youth weekend events in which Reid Carpenter would bring busloads of Pittsburgh youth to Laurelville. The names of Carpenter’s organization and leadership changed over the years, but the spirit of the event remained remarkably constant over the decades; many Pittsburgh youth began a vital and personal encounter or commitment with Jesus Christ during these weekends.

So that was our neighborhood, and most has been positive, except our dogs. First, let’s note the positive about the dogs in town; these would be our neighbor dogs. Tinkey and Ron Nist behind us on Loucks had Charley Brown, a short-haired large brown-black mixed breed dog for as long as we lived on Arthur Avenue--about 30 years. Charley even outlived Tinkey’s husband Ronald. When a Charley Brown got old or died, Tinkey simply replaced him with a similar looking Charley Brown who generally stayed in the house with Tinkey unless he was riding around town in the front seat of her truck cab, looking out at as if he were the mayor of Scottdale, which I believe Tinkey considered him to be. Tinkey generally talked to Charley in formal English calling him Sir Charles the Second, Third or Fourth, as though he were fully conversant in Elizabethan English, and as of this writing in 2012, they both (Tinkey and Sir Charles) still live on Loucks Avenue.

Below Tinkey Nist on Loucks was the Hovanec family Beagle who with father and sons went hunting rabbits and small game each Fall and Winter. Coming up the Arthur Avenue was Bob Davis and his dog Stu (both already introduced); Bob had other dogs, but Stu was the most memorable. Stu lived outside in a dog house bedded with straw most of the time, and in the winter sub-freezing weather Bob put an extension chord and heat lamp in the dog house. One night the straw caught fire, and we were awakened by the fire department truck in the street below us, lights flashing and Stu running around, fortunately loose and alive.

Then there were the Miller dogs; our first one on returning from Venezuela was a big mutt colored like coffee with milk, hence Café con Leche. A good-natured stray with big energy and a big voice, we kept Café con Leche for a few weeks, but I knew we could not maintain him. I had picked him up near Laurelville as a stray, so one morning I took him back along the road near Laurelville, not far from where we had found him and left him there again. Dear reader, yes, I knew about animal shelters, the humane society and all those well-meaning agencies. But my belief was that Café con Leche found another home or if not was happier as a wild dog than cooped up in a house or a shelter.

Next came Julio Macduff, a purebred Shetland Sheepdog (Sheltie) which we bought as a puppy from my Holmes County cousin Emma Schlabach Miller; their family was breeding Shelties. We loved Julio, his spirit, loyalty, energy and proud demeanor. But Julio could not control himself from running and barking at cars. Outside he would happily chase cars from the bottom of our Arthur Avenue block to the top of the hill. I tried to train him, scolding him and even spanking him. When that failed, I tried driving past our house and pouring buckets of water at him from the vehicles; another time I took a broom inside the vehicle and whacked at him, trying to associate bad times with car chasing. So it is not for lack of effort at training, but Julio was undeterred by these efforts. He would come up to me after these ordeals with his head and tail held high, eagerly awaiting the chase of the next car--as though water or a broom had simply added to the experience. We also tried to keep him behind the fence and inside the house, but he kept on barking at cars.

Julio’s barking eventually attracted the attention of our magistrate to whom I could only respond as guilty. After paying several hundred dollars in fines, we regretfully decided that Julio was a country dog, so we sent him out to Kidron, Ohio to my sister Miriam and Veryl Kratzer. There Julio ran along the lane and the road for about a year, barking to his heart’s content, and then one evening Miriam called and said there was the sad news. Julio's end came when he got too close after the milk truck’s wheels. Next we got a female Sheltie, who was not a car chaser like Julio. We named her Ophelia and tried to breed her and raise puppies but to no avail. Ophelia loved to sun herself on the warm pavement in front of the house and was hit and killed by a car. After Julio and Ophelia’s untimely deaths, by 1989 we decided cats and back-yard poultry would be our pets, and they must await a later chapter. To all our Arthur Avenue neighbors, I confess I was not a good neighbor in regards to dogs. I grew up with farm dogs and never made the transition to borough living as I should have.  

Finally, during June Gloria arranged a Connellsville High School student trip to Mexico, and our whole family plus Gloria’s sister Bonnie went as a mix of chaperones and family trip. We developed our own itinerary with travel through the MTS (Menno Travel Service) agency, but a month before departure the Mexican government cancelled our hotel reservations, reserving all the Mexico City rooms for the World Cup visitors in the city that month. So we decided to try home stays, a kind of Mennonite Your Way in Mexico City; I got in touch with Guillermo and Eva Zuñiga, asking if homes might be available to host students four nights. A physician and church leader, Zuñiga found families who provided homes and transportation; we offered them the equivalent of our hotel budget. We visited the Aztec cultural sites, viewed the social realism murals, and attended the Ballet Folklorico, but I’ll not list everything here. Afterwards, the students talked of the family members they met as a highlight of the trip, including exchanging letters with their host families afterwards.

We also visited Guadalajara and then Puerto Vallarta on the coast where we ended with several days of sunshine, parasailing and morning exercise at the nearby John Newcomb Tennis Center. The Connellsville High School kids found a local night club where they would dance into the night. One evening our family and some of the kids left the hotel strip along the shore and visited the dusty streets of downtown Puerto Vallarta, attending a local movie theater which was showing a grainy copy of “Witness” dubbed in Spanish. The Mexican audience cheered when Harrison Ford decked the Lancaster ruffians who were bothering the Amish. I mention this movie in part because I was now fully aware of how my people the Amish had become an international phenomenon.

Closer to home our family continued to host people off and on who found us through the Mennonite Your Way listing. One unusual guest during this time was Raymond Mummert who practiced a traditional reflexology, which assumes that the foot is like a plant root supplying health and basic information to the rest of the organism. I had become acquaintd with this health approach when I had visited the Holmes County, Ohio, Amish folk healer John A. Yoder. For the night’s lodging and breakfast (instead of money), Mummert offered us health examinations, and I suppose entertainment, by making footprints of ink on a paper which he then analyzed. His analysis for me was: back out of line, lower disc problems, colon problems, liver (unspecified issues), heart trouble, and bad pancreas. His prescription was to get on a cleansing program, also noting that I had too much insulin which was burning my brains out. Fortunately, Mummert found Gloria and the children’s feet to be in better health.

Most of this chapter comes from personal files and memories. Background on the “Witness” movie controversy can be found in John A. Hostetler, "Marketing the Amish Soul,"
Gospel Herald (June 26 1984, 452-53) and  Merle Good, "Reflections on the Witness Controversy," Gospel Herald (March 5, 1985,
162-164). Numerous letters followed in the publication. Copies of Reflexologist Raymond Mummert’s foot analysis and diagnosis are in my 1984 Ideas and Activities file.

1985 Roy R. Miller

1985   Roy R. Miller (1906-1985), Laurelville Mennonite Church Center staff, Dana Sommers, Laurelville programs, faith and farming conferences, media attention; becoming a licensed minister in the Allegheny Conference; Venezuela learning; our coping with stress and changes.

Roy R. Miller came into my life in the late sixties when I met Gloria so I would often see him for almost two decades. When I look back, aside from my parents, three people entered my life at crucial times; Jacob S. Miller during my teen years (1957, 1963), Lauren A. King during my college and young adult years (1967), and Roy R. Miller as a young father and husband. I respected these people greatly, and they became almost like surrogate fathers. Of all these mentors, Roy R. had the largest stake in my well-being what with Gloria being a favored child, along with the arrival of his grandchildren Jacob, Hannah, and Elizabeth. 

I cherished him as a conversation partner mainly because he inherently understood the richness of silence and presence. He was the traditional humble, insightful and strong-willed Pennsylvania German for whom silence was natural, not awkward, and modesty was as our Anabaptist hymn said a beautiful virtue. This silence did not mean that he did not talk, but he talked mostly about concrete things: the parts of a Polyphemus Moth, a line from Oliver Wendell Holmes' verses, regional and Holmes County history, or the age and parts of a clock. He would bring out one the large Chambered Nautilus shells from the museum and describe its origins. He had a number of old and rare books which he treated as artifacts.

 

 For one such as I, given to opinions and ideas, he was a complementary friend, not because he was absent ideas and opinions, but because he shared them sparingly and even skeptically, giving primacy to the concrete and the project at hand. The project might be a moth collection, some rare coins, a consultation on the Amish, or pages of his scrap books of historic events or commentary. During these years Roy R’s administrative work at the East Holmes Schools was coming to an end, but the Berlin Mennonite Church was going through a difficult period after long-time pastor Paul Hummel retired and a strident pastor David Clemens was dividing the congregation. Roy was treasurer and influential but said little; his main contribution seemed to be a Christ-like suffering as his friends chose sides. It was as though his presence at Berlin seemed to say enough.

Roy R’s days of travel and evening meetings of school administration were over, and he always seemed available and simply showed up. As a young man he had traveled, and he told of eating oysters and clams in Boston during the thirties, traveling to Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps during the forties, as well as of the Roy and Berdella Miller family trip out to the western National Parks one summer in the fifties.  But during the times I knew him, he was simply a wise elder, presence and benefactor. When our family headed home, he often sent along an antique crock, clock, or family heirloom. As a young child, I thought my father Andrew could do about anything (1945); as a young father, I thought the same of Roy R., and both were true, of course. Roy R. was an administrator, educator, collector, historian, naturalist, and a clock man. He repaired clocks and built several grandfather clocks, two of which are in our house. But I already described his community accomplishments (1979) when the East Holmes community honored him and Wilbur Yoder.  

But when we arrived back in the country in the summer of 1984, Roy was sick and weak. His physical ailment was prostate cancer, but I think several things made him get older the last decade of his life. His son Doyle’s accident (1976) aged him terribly. If Gloria was Roy’s prototypical daughter, Doyle was his honest son: even tempered, stoic, steady, predictable and unusually intelligent, even if he was wild spirited during his teen years. Roy loved Doyle and was in deep emotional pain for his son’s fall, hurt and handicaps, much as he was proud of his continuing education, vocational achievements, and life with the Mitchells at Ft. Wayne afterwards. Second, while we were in Venezuela, there was a robbery into the Miller household one Sunday evening while Roy R. and Berdella were in church. Old coins, money, and other collectibles were stolen. It appeared to be an inside job, to the extent that the thief knew the Miller’s schedule and the nature of Roy R’s collections. The Holmes County sheriff investigated, but the intruder was never identified. Roy R. put extra locks on the doors, and hid coins in the heating ducts, under the floor, and in the safe.

By the Fall of 1984, Roy sought no further treatment for his cancer such as chemo therapy or radiation although he submitted to some surgery. I remember visiting him in the darkened living room soon after his surgery, and he was not well and crestfallen. He told me in Pennsylvania German that the doctors had castrated him and turned him into a steer. He said it all in a matter of fact low voice, and I did not think he was angry at the medical personnel.  I thought I was listening to the wise sage of Ecclesiastes, who said that for everything there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die. His life had the feeling of this ancient Hebrew’s conclusion: “Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.“ Roy R. Miller died on January 12, 1985.

Gloria and I had little time to grieve Roy’s death. We were busy with settling into the Scottdale community life, having an additional member of the family in Joanna Hurtado, and both beginning new work. It was not easy; I remember on New Year’s Eve we were at a church social evening. After midnight our kids were in bed, but I found Joanna Hurtado standing at the large front window of our house looking out in the night sky. She was crying, but I knew that I could not comfort her; she was only in junior high school, and I knew she missed her mother and father. We had spent the last New Year’s Eve with the large Hurtado family and the Diazes (Carlos and Eliza) and at midnight popped champagne, grapes, prayers and good wishes.  She was a favorite of her father, and I knew she missed Enrique especially, but we could do nothing except stand with her. Actually, Joanna mostly had a good year and was a cherished family and community member. During spring break, she joined brother Paul and Carol and their children in a Disney World trip to Florida. She developed good friends among the teachers and students at Southmoreland Junior High School, and when Gloria returned with her to Venezuela the following summer her classmates gave her a mighty party send-off.

If my beginnings at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center seemed casual, the schedule could also be intense. My first meeting with the executive director Dana Sommers was in the lawn where he invited me to join him on the grass, under the trees, informal, relaxed and causal. That was laid-back Dana who was joined by Betty Miller, Susie Bontrager, Ken Bowman, Titus Schlabach, and Bob Brenneman, the administrative team, smiling, open shirt, and goodwill. And they were able to fix about anything which came along whether in building construction, food, program, pipes, or people. But if this team gave the impression of relaxed goodwill, they were also planning and efficiency. We had large program groups and large equally large rental groups which called for efficient planning and hosting. The Sommers were sensitive touchy feely types, and Dana ran the camp as a family project, hence for all practical purposes his wife Donna and sons Denny and Dixon were also a part of the administration (not without some complications). Still, they were big on back rubs and hugs and generally easy to get on with and even somewhat contrite, having just pushed out of leadership my old editor friend James Horsch. Hence, they were re-grouping in their own family style arrangement and quite supportive. 

I was given a free hand on programming and soon learned that Laurelville was going strong on what might be considered needs based programming. Adoption was big during these years, so Laurelville had large families in an adoption and foster family camp; some of the families had up to a dozen kids. The adoptive and foster families were even meeting in a big celebration on Thanksgiving weekend, in addition to the summer camp. One could say the same for camps and weekends for other groups such as divorced and formerly married, single parent families, deaf and hearing impaired, and mentally handicapped. You had a special need, Laurelville had a program for you and you could share with peers. Another element made these retreats popular with both our association members and our guests; Laurelville provided scholarships to help people come to the retreats, and association members enjoyed giving to people through the scholarship fund, hence a mutually rewarding experience for giver and recipient. 

When I started in programming that Fall, a new special need was simply waiting for a conference; it was the 1984-85 farm crisis. In the early eighties farm land prices sky-rocketed, and even the Japanese got into the act of buying up mid-western farms. Farmers became wealthy on paper overnight, and some of them took out huge loans on their farms or borrowed money for high priced neighboring lands. However, by the mid-eighties, the land prices bubble burst, and some of the farmers were over stretched and heading for bankruptcy. Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) named a Kansas farm couple Lester and Winifred Ewy to serve as listeners to people who were hurt. That was their actual title, as I recall. The Ewys, Arnold Cressman and I got together an ad hoc group at the MCC headquarters in Akron, Pennsylvania, to plan a conference. Helping out were the Illinois farmer Robert Yoder, Mennonite peace consultant Bob Hull, and retired Ontario farmer Gordon Hunsberger. We planned a program headlined by John Sikma, of the Christian Farmers Federation in Ontario, and Don Reeves, a Quaker hog farmer from Nebraska. A number of MCC-related people also helped such as Walton Hackman and Art and Jocele Meyer.

The conference caught the imagination of the Anabaptist farm community, and by the week before, we knew were going to have a good attendance of people. It was a huge success of therapy, worship, fellowship and celebration. Several farm families came who were in distressed situations, literally in tears over losing their farms and homes. They got support and sympathetic ears, and some even told their sad stories to the TV cameras. For most of the farmers, however, it was simply a good time of talking shop (farm) with people from another part of North America and basking the their new found attention, what with the old Mennonite church having recently declared itself as urban. Jon Mast and my sister Rhoda came, and Rhoda led the music with her usual gusto. A roomful of Mennonite farmers relished in singing four-part hymns and a rollicking folk song called “The Farmer Feeds Them All.”   That’s right, there is the king, the lord, the merchant, the doctor, and the teacher, but you know who feeds them all!  

TV crews came out from the Pittsburgh and Johnstown stations, and reporters came from the national press, such as The New York Times and USA Today. Actually, I had a hand in the Times coming. When I heard that we were getting a good crowd and interest, I put on my old news hat and called The New York Times, and harking back to my Wooster Daily Record days, asked for the “farm desk.”  The operator thought I said the “foreign desk,” and transferred me there where a confused editor told me there was no “farm desk,” but he thought the idea was of interest. He referred me to the national editor who said he was sending a writer and photographer. For the next several years we had great annual faith and farming conferences at Laurelville, one time even doing a simultaneous conference in the mid-west, sharing presenters over the speaker phone.

I learned a basic understanding from that conference which often served me well in my five years at Laurelville. Have a small influential group involved in the planning, and these people become advocates for the conference or retreat and would also attend to see it through to a successful conclusion. What with being a wannabe farmer myself, the family connections also made these conferences doubly enjoyable as Veryl and Miriam (sister) Kratzer always came as did my brother Paul’s old college friend Walton Hackman. A Franconia Mennonite farmer, activist and philosopher, Walt was an enthusiastic behind the scenes supporter; little did I know that by the next year, he would be dead of cancer. I was so tired when the conference was over that the following day, I took  Elizabeth out of Kindergarten and we went to the Aviary in Pittsburgh, as I said in my journal, “to cool off by watching the birds.“ Elizabeth was a unique little family friend during these Laurelville years because Jacob and Hannah left for school early, but I would hang around in the mornings and take her to school at nine and then Gloria was back from school when she came home in the afternoons.   

I had been licensed as an Allegheny Conference minister in absentia while we were in Venezuela, and when we got back, Laurelville requested that my license as a minister be extended for my work there. Even though I was not the camp pastor, the staff felt it was good in terms of seeing the programs as a Christian ministry, and relating to other ministers in the Allegheny Conference and neighboring Presbyterian churches. I remember the examination was in the Dining Hall at Laurelville, and included a young pastor with a newly minted MDiv from our own Elkhart Mennonite seminary no less. He asked whether I could affirm everything in the Mennonite Confession of Faith; I told them I could and he seemed disappointed. Then he asked me if there was anything in my family or personal life which might be problematic to being a minister. I told the examiners I occasionally smoked a pipe or cigar at home; that I did not do this in Venezuela in honor of the Lancaster Conference and the evangelical church patterns in Venezuela. However, I said I smoke at home occasionally, although in private and trying not to scandalize anyone. Now the young pastor seemed relieved, perked up and immediately volunteered that he smoked the pipe too. I confess that now I was disappointed. 

On May 12 my licensing service was held at Kingview Mennonite Church, and it took a momentous meaning for me because my parents and almost the entire family of brothers and sisters and children came down to join in the worship service, and we all had lunch afterwards at Laurelville. Arnold Cressman spoke, my nieces and nephews sang, and my old employer Paul M. Lederach, now head of leadership with Allegheny Conference, gave the charge. My father Andrew was so proud; finally he had a minister, if only a licensed one. It was at this occasion that he stood up during congregational sharing time and announced that he was invited to come down to Scottdale in 1948 but could not, and now was sending me to fill in for him.  Sister Ruth and John Roth were in Germany, and James did not make it, but I think this occasion was the only time everyone came to Scottdale, except fifteen years later for the wedding of Hannah and Anson. I tried to see my work as Christian service, but one of the biggest benefits I got from being an Allegheny pastor was going to a monthly group called Pastor Peer Partners which met at Somerset during those years. Irvin Weaver had brought a young set of pastors into the conference, and the meetings were enjoyable discussion and support.

Even though, I was not a great speaker, a number of churches invited me to speak after we returned from Venezuela and with the Laurelville connections. Often our family would sing too. Here are the churches which were listed in my date book:  Willow Street Mennonite Church, Lancaster Pennsylvania, July 22, 1984; Pittsburgh Mennonite Church, September 9, 1984; Rochester (New York) Mennonite Fellowship, October 28, 1984; Weaver Mennonite Church, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, November 11, 1984; Millersburg (Ohio) Mennonite Church, November 25, 1984; Powell (Ohio) Community Church, February 3, 1985; Charlotte Street (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) Mennonite Church, , February 24, 1985; Otelia Mennonite Church, Mt. Union, Pennsylvania, April 20, 1985; United Church of Christ, Scottdale and Ruffsdale, Pennsylvania, June 9, 1985; Reunion Presbyterian Church, Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania, Oct. 13, 1985; The First Presbyterian Church Greensburg, Oct. 27, 1985.

When I look at my journals of the year and the sermons I gave, I realize how I had became disenchanted with the sixties, my broad term for this period of leftist politics and the cheapening of family norms. Now instead of cheering the optimism, the music, and the freedom of the period, I lamented the losses of the decade; it became almost a mania for me. We even planned a Laurelville retreat around the theme, and I’m sure my friends were annoyed for my sounding like a broken record. 

Another development, however, came out of the Venezuela experience which I cherish to this day. I had a recovery of a belief in a loving transcendent God who revealed himself though Jesus Christ, and that in some way we humans have an immortal soul. These were beliefs which my Christian ancestors had carried for centuries, but which somehow in the political and cultural enthusiasms of the sixties and seventies I had largely forsaken. I think these beliefs may also have been accentuated by my friend James Lederach who had returned to Scottdale after Zaire (Congo) and law school. James was single, and we often played tennis and did things together during these years. He had re-engaged with Christianity and had a theory that when people adopt political religion it becomes a transcendent reality, alas an idolatry, to them. Such people often gave up traditional Christian beliefs. 

An even greater post-Venezuela influence was discovering A.James Reimer of Waterloo, Ontario. Here was a young theologian who espoused the Catholic and Mennonite beliefs and ethical practices of his ancestors and also loved Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. But most of that came later in the ninties.   

It was a busy and a changing year, and we had a Laurelville staff retreat with the counselor Nancy Hernley Conrad on dealing with change and stress. During the past year in the life change measures, Gloria and I had the following stressors: death of a close family member, gained a new family member, business readjustment, change in line of work, spouse begins or stops work, change in work hours or conditions, change in residence, and change in schools. We scored over 300 on this stress producing life change scale, double what was considered safe. The commentary suggested that much counseling may be necessary and maybe even institutionalization. The guide came out of Psychology Today, so we did not pay too much attention to it; and I remember Nancy Conrad calmly saying in effect that she thought we’ll make it.

I often came home late from a weekend retreat energized, but one night I rattled around the kitchen and Gloria asked if I was okay. I blurted out defiantly, something to the effect that we cannot fail. We did what Millers often do; we simply worked and often even enjoyed it. Gloria did new lesson plans each day and ran her classes during the day and the household in the evenings, and I worked long hours on weekends and evenings and took care of the household in the mornings. The children went to school and soon became involved with their classes, friends and activities. We were young and healthy, and maybe a pacifist version of Shakespeare’s mid-life soldier: 

“Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.”

Most of this material comes from memory and personal journals and files of 1985. References in the Roy R. Miller description on humility are page 199 of the Lieder Sammlung song book, “Demut ist die schönste Tugend, Humility is the most beautiful virtue” and on the meaning of life from the book of Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 and 12:13. Steve Shenk wrote a two-page report on the Faith and Farming Conference for Gospel Herald (December 11, 1984, 868-69), and William Robbins wrote a dispatch for The New York Times (November 24, 1984, A18). The scale of changes which cause stress events is in my file “Ideas and Activities, 1985. The Shakespeare quote is from the seven stages of man monologue in “As You Like It” (Act II, Sc. VII).