1993 Goshen, Indiana

1993  Goshen, Indiana.  Moving to Goshen, Indiana, a long-distance marriage, Gloria, Hannah, Elizabeth on moving, a sleepless night, comparing northern Indiana and southwestern Pennsylvania; Ruth Ann and John D. Roth, Nora M. Wingard (1913-1997) and 482 descendents, James A. Miller (December 24, 1951- July 21, 1993), a return to  Christianity, James and the Kratzers, last months on earth; my returning to Scottdale. 

My work with the Historical Committee of the Mennonite Church from 1990 through 1994 might be divided into two segments, two years of trying to move our family to Goshen, Indiana, and two years of trying to move myself back to Scottdale, to rejoin the family. For the first several decades of living in Scottdale, I thought of myself as a temporary resident, in the biblical lexicon, a stranger and a pilgrim, hence in the mid-seventies to go to Bowling Green for graduate school, or the early eighties to go to Venezuela for a mission assignment seemed in keeping with that philosophy. However, by the 90s our settledness in Scottdale had reached another level which I was to learn in due time. The children were well settled in school and the community, and Gloria in her sixth year of teaching Spanish at Connellsville High School, and there were things like school friends and retirement funds to consider. When I accepted the Historical Committee appointment in 1989, it was with the understanding by the family and the committee that eventually we would move to Goshen, Indiana, where the offices were located. We did not put a time frame on it and everyone seemed satisfied. I would go out to Goshen once a month, spend a week or two in the office, and do the rest of the work and travel from my office at home in Scottdale.   

So in the summer of 1990, I went to Goshen for the first month on the job, but I discovered that I was emotionally distraught, I felt I had abandoned my family even if Jakob had gone along and was working at Goshen that summer. I found a plaintive letter in my memo book which I never sent to the Gloria one Sunday afternoon in June saying  “I’ve deserted you” and “it simply has not felt right. Perhaps it will with time.” But it did not get better or ever feel quite right. Although I enjoyed my work, I never looked forward to those monthly leaving for Goshen by myself and always looked forward to returning to Scottdale. Theoretically, it should have worked because long-distance marriages were a media phenomenon and increasingly common. But I was never comfortable with the arrangement. I was feeling like the forlorn Western mustang stallion who was no longer with his herd. While I was gone, Gloria had to go on with life in making decisions and doing activities, so when I came home things seemed to be going too well without me. I was feeling displaced, maybe even ghosts of my father Andrew’s mid-life displacement in my head. We often had exchange students or temporary internationals or trainees at our home (Venezuelans and Spanish students), and a Japanese graduate student needed temporary residence for a few weeks, and Gloria quite innocently took him in. When I found out, I immediately drove home and made it clear another housing arrangement must be found, immediately. 

In the meantime, Hannah was now in her final years of high school and declared that she was staying in Scottdale even if it meant staying with another family and graduating from Southmoreland High School. By 1992, she and her classmate Anson Miedel had become good friends, and that was another reason she wanted to stay in Scottdale until they both left for college. Elizabeth was still in primary school, and was open to whatever Gloria and I worked out. If she was not as direct and declarative as Hannah, her preferences were also clear; she later told us she had been praying the Goshen night Gloria and I could not sleep—but I’m getting ahead of my story. By the summer of 1993, Hannah and her friend Anson Miedel had graduated, were leaving for Eastern Mennonite University and Westminster College in the fall, and Gloria was offered a Spanish teaching position at the East Noble School District, a little southeast of Goshen.

I remember it well because Gloria, Elizabeth and I had taken an August vacation at the Atlantic shore when the call came noting the job opening. The next week we drove to Indiana, Gloria interviewed, and the superintendent immediately handed her a contract to sign or to let him know within days. We had looked for houses which were available in Goshen and Elizabeth’s enrollment at Bethany, the Mennonite academy nearby. But all that night I could not sleep, and at dawn when we both got up, I asked Gloria if she had slept that night, she said no. We decided that this sleepless night for both of us was a united negatory -- on her taking the job, our moving to Indiana, and my employment as director of the Mennonite Historical Committee and Archives. 

There were many variables such as Gloria’s contentment with Connellsville High School Spanish teaching and finally as to whether we wanted to live the last third of our careers in the Goshen Elkhart community. On one level, it was no contest. Religiously, the northern Indiana community was rich in its Amish and Mennonite churches and institutions; Scottdale was a declining Mennonite population with one fragile institution—Mennonite Publishing House. Elkhart Lagrange counties were a robust small business entrepreneurial society with new Hispanic immigrants, and a thriving economic setting. Westmoreland Fayette was an industrial labor legacy society with few recent immigrants and trying to recreate itself with growing medical, educational, and service sectors. 

Still, we liked southwestern Pennsylvania; for one thing there was Pittsburgh; we enjoyed the cultural and educational elements of this small city which somehow was able to maintain a very livable environment. Second, we enjoyed the small town ethos of Scottdale where our children had grown up and where we had many good neighbors and church friends; we loved the trees, rivers and wildness of the Laurel Highlands. Third we were near family; this may seem strange to say regarding our Holmes County relatives who seldom visited us. Still, they came at crucial times of graduation, baptism, licensing, or a holiday and I always felt them nearby, even though in many ways culturally Holmes County and Westmoreland County were worlds apart. Maybe, I especially became aware of my love of Scottdale, in the course of two years around Goshen in which everyone I met seemed to take it for granted that one would want to move to Goshen, Indiana. Many of my Mennonite publishing colleagues and retirees already had made the move. The Hoosiers would say it so good naturedly with their mid-western heartland optimism, and I could only agree. But deep inside northern Indiana was also Hamlet’s Norway, a prison of long winters with grey skies and flat farmlands, dotted with recreational vehicle and duck factories, near a good little Mennonite college. I was homesick for my family.

Not that family was absent in Goshen; there were my sister Ruth Ann and John D. Roth and their girls. I totally enjoyed getting to know my sister Ruth better and John was an ideal mate at the college and historical library. When I left home at age 20, Ruth was only six years old, so we had only a short time together at Holmesville, and Ruth was now a young mother herself carrying on the tradition of her own mother of loving her work, church, and family in a busy way. She and John loved to entertain at their large table whether it was one of John’s college classes, small group friends, or extended family members when they were in town or students at Goshen College. Ruth was also active at church, whether at the Assembly, at that time a left-wing house church on the Goshen College campus or later at Berkey Avenue where they still worship today. Ruth was most like my mother Mattie of any of the three sisters; she and Mattie seemed to instinctively communicate, and for about three decades Ruth organized an annual Millersburg to Goshen trek of my Mother for Fall apple canning fests and Spring Bethany School benefit auction events. Ruth was also on the Bethany board for many years.

John had sent me a note already back in 1987, saying that the Historical Committee may be a good fit for me when the committee was looking to go in what it called New Directions. By the early nineties, John was hitting his stride as an Anabaptist Mennonite scholar having been named editor of the journal Mennonite Quarterly Review  at the same time he ran the Mennonite Historical Library with his old Goshen classmate Joseph Springer. An outstanding teacher, John was also a preacher and was becoming the go-to Mennonite speaker for commemorative events, inter-church dialogue, and scholarly conferences.  John was bilingual in German and English and by the late nineties when John and Ruth took the family to Costa Rica for a study service year; he also became fluent in Spanish. John had an amazing work ethic and in 1992 I noticed he was up at four o’clock and within a few months had translated the Letters of the Amish Division: A Sourcebook (1993) for the 300^th anniversary of Amish beginnings among the Swiss Brethren.

After the Amish conferences and commemorations, by the summer of 1994 John was a keynoter at Don Kraybill’s Elizabethtown College conference in Pennsylvania, commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Harold S. Bender’s The Anabaptist Vision publication (1944). Out of that conference John published six papers which were given under the title Refocusing a Vision: Shaping Anabaptist Character in the 21^st Century. I considered it a pastoral and churchly appropriation of The Anabaptist Vision, perhaps in contrast to an earlier generation (the Concern group) using the vision more as an idealistic and theoretical construct. John offered the manuscript to Mennonite Publishing, and I regret we did not pick it up. I think I was self-conscious regarding self-promotion because John was my brother-in-law, and I had contributed a chapter “A Reconstruction of Evangelical Anabaptism.” But it merited the distribution the denominational publisher could have given it; John’s Mennonite Historical Society then published it. Anyway, John pulled these many projects together with great alacrity. If my sister Ruth and their girls (already a Suzuki string quartet) made my Goshen years enjoyable for family purposes, John equally did so for professional and vocational reasons.

One additional family connection during these years was my father’s sister Nora M. Wingard (1913-1997).  During my four years of monthly treks to Goshen, I often visited Aunt Nora the matriarch of a large clan in LaGrange County, Indiana, on weekends. When she died on October 8, 1997, she left behind about 500 living descendents, all of whom she used to tell me with modest gratefulness, lived within buggy-driving distance of her home near Shipshewana, Indiana. There were actually 482 grandchildren and great grand-children. She had 10 children from two husbands and inherited a slew of step-children from Joe Wingard, her second husband.  

Toward the end of her life Nora lived as comfortably and humbly as any Amish grandee could with this large extended family, perhaps especially in relief because her married life began so tragically (1944). By the time I was seeing Nora in the 90s, she was holding court in her little house with a big living room surrounded by children of several generations who seemed to come and go during all waking hours with food, errands, messages or simply visits. Across the road from Nora, were Betty and Joe Junior on the family farm, and next door were Ruth Ann and Jay who had just been called as a deacon in 1992 in the local church district. Just up the road were daughter Mary Miller and her family of 11, most of them married offspring. Nora’s twins Freeman (now a minister) and Ferman (both of whom I had recalled as adventuresome teenagers), had settled down nearby and both had families of 10 children each with successful farming and business operations.

Nora enjoyed singing and when family members gathered, we would often sing from hymnals and also mimeographed English lyrics. This Amish matron with her offspring sang from the Ausbund on Sunday mornings, and by afternoon also sang my father’s English gospel songs, such as “All the Way My Savior Leads Me.” In a Miller family which had more than its share of poets, eccentrics, hypochondriacs and pessimists, Nora ended up as a pragmatic optimist. While still living, Andrew would regularly stop in to see her when he was driving people with his van, and Nora said he walked just like their father Martin. She had seen sufficient tragedy as a young woman and later suffered the waywardness of children and grandchildren during their experimental Rumspringa stages. But her Christian faith, a pious belief in the grace of God and her faith in the church as a supporting community seemed to sustain her—as it did her children. She simply outlived her troubles, the children came around, and a strong family and church network nurtured them.

When Nora died in the Fall of 1997, my mother called me when I was in California, and I tried to change my ticket to come back right away even at a high cost, but mom told me the family would understood. Mom in her practical sense about these things, assured me that she, Ruth and John Roth at a minimum would go. Still, I regretted not being there to say goodbye to this somewhat out-sized personality of an aunt. Not that I had special family claims on her; I had far fewer than many of her other relatives, but she was an inspiration and a living reminder of my father’s side of the family which I never knew very well. She seemed to represent so much of the family’s artistic, cultural and church reality. The Martin and Martha Miller children were bright, high-achieving and poetic young people who were raised in modest rural poverty, but they married well and generally raised healthy and expansive Amish families.

During 1992 and 1993, I often made a stop at Cleveland as I traveled from Pennsylvania to Indiana. I stopped in to see my brother James who was now dying of cancer. James and Lynn Pelikan lived in a comfortable house in Shaker Heights, and James was what might be called a vocational student. His house was filled with books and discs of classical music, and we would walk down the street to the Arabica coffee shop to visit. He loved to make copies of music selections and send them to his nieces and nephews for Christmas or birthdays. James was a poet and continued to write poetry until his death. James also wrote a Christmas musical drama for the church he had joined near Cleveland with the British pastor Alistair Beggs. James sent me many a sermon cassette of Pastor Beggs, and I think I listened to one or two of them; he seemed like C.S. Lewis lite with a slight tone of arrogance. James had reconnected with Christianity by reading Francis Schaeffer, the fundamentalist Christian apologist and cultural arbiter. James considered Schaeffer an outstanding guide on all things Christian and cultural. I was grateful that Schaeffer and Beggs gave Christian meaning to James’ life and thought, but I never thought their evangelical sub-culture was any more compelling than my own Amish Mennonite variety. And I thought most of the Anabaptist church varieties may have had the virtue of humility.

But another side of James emerged when Miriam stopped in one evening that year on the way to Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania, for a Recovery of Hope Marriage Week.  Miriam was discouraged and I knew her husband Veryl was too. But a week later, they stopped in on the way home and were truly changed people having some sense of the origins of their troubles and a common commitment to make their marriage work. We knew that given the nature of Miriam and Veryl’s personalities, their marriage would always have many ups and downs, but I had never seen anything quite like this change. I considered it a miracle; the marriage and family held, and they raised a wonderful and talented family of five Kratzers. And here is where James came in; when he heard of Miriam and Veryl needing this recovery period, he moved down into the Kratzer house and picked up the parenting duties with the gracious aplomb and humor of an old uncle. None of this is to subtract from the neighbors Corrine and Bill Helmuth coming over for the milking, the extended Kratzer family, and I think sister Ruth came in from Indiana too. But it always put James in a new light.

Still, James’ health continued to decline, and his death seemed almost 19^th century in how a poet was supposed to die, gradually and with ethereal thoughts. During his last weeks he did a few activities such as visiting Israel and the Cleveland Zoo which had to be stressful to his long-suffering wife Lynn Pelican. Ever writing until the end, one of his best writings appeared in the First Things magazine, under his full name as James Andrew Miller. During the last week when he was weak but still able to visit, the family brought him down to spend his last days in our Holmesville farmhouse. He died peacefully in his sleep, and on July 21, 1993, was buried near his father Andrew in the Martins Creek Mennonite cemetery. Both son and father had similar Christian beliefs regarding their eternal rest with Christ, what the evangelical Amish would have called assurance of salvation. But for James the physical death seemed almost kind while for my father the final weeks were cruel. Our cousin David Schlabach who became quite close friends with James in his last years, once wrote a paper saying how James showed him how to die. 

At the fall 1993 Historical Committee meeting met near Metamora, Illinois, and during the executive session discussed my associate Dennis Stoesz’ lengthy complaint that I did not spend sufficient time at the Goshen office, hence was not giving him sufficient emotional support, especially in his relationships with the former archivist Leonard Gross. He was probably right, and I knew it was time to go home. Several days later, J. Robert Ramer, the Mennonite publisher, called me early one morning and asked if I would consider coming back to Scottdale and Mennonite Publishing House. Laurence Martin of the Congregational Literature division was returning to Ontario. Not only would I have considered this position; I would have come back to sweep the floors. But it took another year to wind down my work at Goshen; as I said it was two years in going and two years in returning.   

Most of this comes from memory, journal “Notes on Life,” personal files, and my date book of 1993. The plaintive unsent letter to Gloria was a June 17, 1990, entry of my 1990 memo book, also entitled “Trip to Spain.” The John D. Roth book referenced is Refocusing a Vision: Shaping Anabaptist Character in the 21^st Century, Mennonite Historical Society (Goshen, Indiana, 1995). The section on Nora Wingard came largely from an unpublished reflection I wrote on her life soon after she died in 1997. James’ article “Other Plans: Journal of an Illness,” appeared in First Things (March 1993). Published poems and other articles can be googled under James Andrew Miller; his papers are at Cleveland State University.