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). .