1977 Worship and Europe

1977  Worship and Europe. Sleeping in church, Edwin Alderfer, tennis partners, storge, Schnauzer Pinky, a tree house; trip to Europe, TourMagination, Jan and Barbara Gleysteen, Arnold Cressman, Willi Schweikard, communion at Anabaptist cave, J. Lawrence Burkholder, leadership, Argentine dirty war, Patricia Erb.

During the seventies, my favorite worship times were when I was sitting in church sleeping or dozing or writing in my journal with Gloria, Jacob, Hannah, and later Elizabeth beside me. Jacob drew pictures, and I have a page full of H’s which Hannah at age two filled in my journal. I developed an on-going love affair for Edwin Alderfer’s sermons because in the summer they were easy to sleep to while I heard birds outside the window, pre-air-conditioning. I felt that pastors had little new to say to me aside from what was already in the Scriptures and in Christian tradition, and that the best they could do for me was to accompany a good sleep. Perhaps I took this approach from my days of an Amish childhood when I would look up and see our farmer neighbors were mostly asleep after working all week, at peace with God.

I wrote in my journal during Kingview Mennonite worship on August 17, 1977: “This morning in church is one of those times when one wonders what is real and what is illusion. Am I really here? What is the minister saying? I only hear a tone; it is a pleasing tone and makes me sleepy and restful and terribly alert at the same time. Outside a warbling wren is singing and accompanies the voice of the minister. I have a strange feeling of being completely unaware and at the same time feeling a kind of euphoria that I am alright and am well taken care of. It is perhaps illusory but I have found these experiences to be some of the most religious times of my life. Am I having the same experience that the people at Einsiedeln, Switzerland, experienced? I do not know. Perhaps it is not that important as to the forms of our worship whether we hear a warbling wren, an Alderfer or a black madonna, but that we follow the counsel of the prophet to “do justly and have mercy.” 

The Einsiedeln reference was to a recent European trip where we visited the Catholic shrine, but here I was also developing the idea that much Christian education was in ritual and the morning service was as much a ritual as an intellectual or invigorating experience. I decided that the best ministers were what my parents called drones, gentle monotones and sleep inducers and Edwin Alderfer was always the measure; he set a high bar. I recall several years later at a church council meeting where Aderfer’s tenure as pastor was up for discussion, and I found that among the people sitting at the council, I was the only one who wanted to continue his pastorate. The others, to my disappointment, were looking for a more stimulating or invigorating message.

Aside from good church rest, I may also have been partial to Alderfer as a good tennis partner during the seventies. We would often get up at six-thirty seven and play tennis for an hour. Ed had a drop shot which seemed to cross the net and then come to a spinning slow-down, dropping down by the net. I was told that Ed had been an outstanding baseball player back in his school days at Souderton, Pennsylvania. Tennis is a sport of breaks between games and sets, but with Edwin there were more than I ever experienced before or since. Ed would perspire profusely, and even wearing a white sweat band on his head, the sweat would come into his eyes and face, steaming shut his glasses so he couldn’t see. At regular intervals, we would need to stop while Ed wiped the fog out of his glasses.

About this time Gloria gave me a book called The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey; this was pure nineteen seventies pop psychology applying thinking positively and mentally projecting where the ball should go. It was literally as Robert Frost once quipped of free verse, playing tennis with the net down. Basically it moved on the romantic theory that one should simply serve, swing, and run to one’s delight and passion; do what comes naturally and good things will happen on the court. I liked this approach and played in this manner the rest of my life, wearing lightly the formal mechanics and professional guides regarding how a forehand, backhand and overhead should be executed. Aside from Alderfer, other good tennis partners during those years were Alan Philips, George Huffman, Bob Clavarel, Charles (Chuck) Fausold, Walt Kiebler, and Paul Barclay. The latter would later become our daughters’ coach and was an especially good friend, and still plays as I write this in March of 2012.  

But my biggest tennis partner was Gloria who loved the game and we often played together from our dating years in the sixties. I learned that she would get mad if I threw her points. We competed against each other many a Sunday after church; often we took the children to the park and let them play on the swings while we played tennis, and soon of course they picked up rackets themselves. Gloria and I also played as doubles partners, often against two men. We organized a Mennonite Publishing House tennis group this summer (this was now post-Clayton F. Yake League 1971), and in 1978 easily winning both the singles and doubles championship. The tournament had recreation and friendship merit alone, but I still enjoy the certificate; done by no less than the Mennonite Publishing House staff artist Ivan Moon.       

My biggest literary success was an accidental one when the family study guide called Family in Today’s Society (1971) went into its fifth printing that year. I had collected essays which were published earlier, but family was of interest to me, however amateurish my qualifications. About this time, someone gave me a cassette tape recording of the lecture of C.S. Lewis had given on the four loves: storge: affection, family love; philos: friendship, platonic love; eros: sexual and erotic love; and finally agape: Christian love, the greatest love of all in Christ and as the apostle described it in 1 Corinthians 13. I believe it was Paul Erb who had given it to me; Erb as a former English literature professor had been an admirer of Lewis for his Christian apologetics. I took an immediate interest in storge, family love, perhaps it was because at that stage we were a young family; it is the love of hearing the footsteps of a child in the next room or a dog patting his tail in the kitchen.

At this time we had a small Schnauzer puppy which my brother Roy and Ruby had given us; we named her Ophelia, but we called her Pinky because pink was Jacob’s favorite color. Pinky was a friendly dog who got on well with the children and soon became a family member. Then on Thanksgiving weekend, she ran across Loucks Avenue and was instantly killed by a car. The children cried, and we took her to the vacant land behind what is now the Southmoreland Elementary School and buried her, in the spring planting a tree. Pinky was the first in a long line of pets which our household had, many of whom came to sad ends. I remember confessing to our pastor Ed Alderfer my shame in feeling so sad about the death of an animal. Alderfer, ever the good pastor, gave us absolution.   

Family themes also affected my reading choices; I became fascinated by the apocryphal book of Tobit which is a family story, and introduced it to the youth when we led the youth week at Laurelville. I often wrote in my journal the motto of Tobit 4:21 “Do not be afraid, my son, because we have become poor. You have great wealth if you fear God and refrain from every sin and do what is pleasing in his sight." Storge family love was a major component of Jane Austin and Tolstoy’s stories, and I think it was what drew me to John Updike, even if his families were dysfunctional. If it drew me to novelists, it also drew me to recreation choices. About this time yoga was becoming popular, and a book called Yoga for Children became our evening exercise guide, this was a good activity to relax and get the children ready for baths, stories, prayers, and sleeping.

Outside, I built a tree-house in the cherry tree in our back lawn; this was a good sized tree-house about twelve feet up in the air with rungs for climbing nailed to the tree trunk which would have to be declared unsafe. Our children got wounds and stitches from falls but survived. Hannah seemed especially fearless to falls; while still a toddler, I remember hearing her tumbling down our carpeted steps from the upstairs, running and catching her; but within minutes, she climbed right back up again. Not to be outdone, Elizabeth broke her wrist from a fall at the tree house. The children played in, fell from, and slept in the tree house during their childhood years. Finally, they outgrew it and abandoned it, so we turned it into a little chicken house, beginning several decades of backyard poultry. 

But the big event for us that year was our three-week travel tour to Europe with our neighbors Jan and Barb Gleysteen. The Gleysteens had begun a travel company with Arnold and Rhoda Cressman, and had selected Gloria and me to go along to serve as devotional and music leaders and also to help with the financial accounting. We readily accepted for this travel opportunity and for our interest in Anabaptist and Mennonite history. One could hardly underestimate the Anabaptist Vision and historical renewal interest which was finding its way into Mennonite thinking with these tours and lectures. This interest was begun by Harold S. Bender in the generation earlier, and it was taken to a high intellectual level with the John Howard Yoder Concern group young radicals, but now an Anabaptist Vision interest was stimulating a generation among the rank and file membership, especially enhanced with Anabaptist tours. 

The TourMagination trips, often called TM, were closely tied to the charismatic personality of Jan Gleysteen whose tours always filled quickly. His self-description in the tour booklet was as “more than anyone in the Mennonite Church today a personification of Anabaptism. His slide show ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ has been shown in many meetinghouses throughout the U.S. and Canada. Born in Amsterdam, he developed a serious interest in art at an early age. His encyclopedic memory of both important and unimportant data makes him a source of many serious and light moments.” Gleysteen had met his future wife Barbara Detweiler while she was in voluntary service in the Netherlands after the Second World War, and by 1953 she had brought him to Pennsylvania where he began working for Mennonite Publishing House as an artist and illustrator. By the seventies, he also did some editorial works such as editing the church bulletins, and was a colleague of mine in the congregational literature division.

The Gleysteens were neighbors, and this trip became a family affair as Barbara went along with their junior high age son David. Also on the trip were my sister Rhoda and her husband Jon Mast and Gloria’s sister Bonnie, who had earlier taken some Jan Gleysteen tours. The tour groups of about 40 people had eleven couples, including one newly married couple from Ontario called James and Jenni Lichti. As a profile there was a grouping of twenty-something young singles often teachers or graduate students with summer travel time. Second was a grouping of older couples who were professionals or small business owners, having discretionary wealth and desire for a vacation which would help them understand their religious and cultural standing in the world. One academic with us was the Mennonite Brethren historian Paul Toews of Fresno, California. Here was a cultural and religious pilgrimage to Europe with a knowledgeable European guide, all worthy of Chaucer's tales.

On the tour we could have a kind of second-run at our Anabaptist martyr history as we sang hymns in dungeons, museums of torture, and cathedrals. And Gleysteen fit the mold well of being European worldly-wise in serving wine, art and eel which the provincial American Mennonites had apparently not tasted sufficiently in an earlier life.

One could go into considerable detail on the various sites of the trip and my learnings along the way as we traveled from Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and even the little kingdom of Liechtenstein. But dear reader, I will spare you  three weeks of Anabaptist sites, museums, concerts, more Anabaptist sites and bus riding around steep Alpine roads with hairpin curves. In fact, the bus riding took on a life of its own as the driver Willi Schweikard was a larger than life figure, the perfect counterpart for Gleysteen. He and Jan Gleysteen entertained each other in a kind of mutual admiration duo, often reflecting on each other’s outstanding traits whether in driving or in remembering some historical detail.

Much of the tour’s group life had an orchestrated encore feeling from earlier tours which included set photo opportunities, jokes, and a final gift to the tour leader and bus driver. The biggest build-up however was in regards to regular references to the communion experience which was to happen at a hidden cave of the Anabaptists near Zurich. The communion ware was a cup and chalice from Willi’s wife, a Reformed church member. Willi,  a Roman Catholic, gave an emotional speech  (translated by Jan) on how wonderful it was to all join together in  goodwill and friendship for communion, and celebrating the Lord’s Supper.

One can only celebrate friendship and goodwill, but still it all seemed contrived and superficial as a religious experience, as though a casual handshake were the equivalent of marriage vows. I was still reflecting on our overnight staying with a Dutch Friesland family who said they were also trying to put this all together of forty American Mennonites telling them about love (I had told the Dirk Willems story at the worship service) with an ex-Nazi bus driver. This family’s main memory of the Americans was of paratroopers falling out of the sky and landing in the farm fields, liberating them from Nazi rule during the Second World War. I have no idea whether Schweikard was a Nazi nor do I care, what I did believe was that he was mainly an German entrepreneurial opportunist who had made common cause with a Dutch Mennonite opportunist Jan Gleysteen. 

All of this was especially vexing to me because I was to give a meditation at the cave communion service, presumably to extol feel-good friendship and casual ecumenism, and I was not even sure I believed in open communion. Mennonites traditionally practiced what was called closed communion or among church members. This selectivity was not because other people were not Christians but because Mennonites took the Lord’s Supper to mean a level of membership accountability which would be inappropriate for casual acquaintances. Needless to say, what was supposed to the highlight of the tour was a low point for my three weeks.    

What strikes me in reviewing my journal is how much I looked forward to the times when we were off of the bus, and how much I wished we would be traveling half the distance so that one could see and meet the people and feel the country texture, rather than needing to spend so much time inside the bus. I tried to be accommodating because we were getting a free trip and it was great introduction to Europe and Anabaptism, but I promised, alas swore, never to travel on such a tour again, and my favorite times were the one free day in the Alps in Austria when Gloria and I climbed up until we reached the snow peaks. I also enjoyed the overnight stays with Mennonite families in Friesland (Berlikum in the Netherlands) and in the Alsace (Colmar in France). This complaint is not that the tour planners did not try to give authentic feeling to the tour; people could write papers or give a presentation on one part of the tour which fascinated them. We heard topics such as Conrad Grebel, the Black Plague (by the Charlottesville physician Kenneth Heatwole), the Rhine River, the concept of two kingdoms, the country Iceland, and the Anabaptist hymnal the Ausbund (my contribution).             

Whatever value one found in the recovery and idealization of sixteenth century Anabaptism by persons such as Gleysteen and Cressman, I had a second model of twentieth century Mennonitism in successful professionals and business leaders, perhaps best personified by the Goshen College president J. Lawrence Burkholder (1917-2010). Laurelville at that time under the leadership of Arnold Cressman was very interested in the past and the future of the Mennonites. And in 1977 Burkholder addressed the topic of Mennonite theology at a Spring weekend meeting of Laurelville members. He traced the 19^th century separatist and quietist period of more sociology than theology, and the 20^th century responses to the assent of American liberal Christianity.

Burkholder hoped Mennonites could retain their uniqueness with the recent emergence of Evangelicalism which by the seventies had emerged out of Fundamentalism as the dominant stream in American Christianity. Burkholder concluded with calling for a new leadership among the Mennonites based on (1) authenticity and (2) real ability. I think what made Burkholder the greatest interest to me at least was that he himself personified those traits in his having served as relief worker in China, pastor in Croghan, New York, professor at Harvard Divinity School, and  president of Goshen College.

I listened to Burkholder's philosophies for the next three decades, and when he died Gloria and I and Daniel and Mary Miller of Walnut Creek (their children attended Goshen College and Daniel served on the board of overseers) wrote a tribute to him: “Lawrence Burkholder was a wise and courageous Mennonites leader. In the post-World War II period, his realism and sense of tragedy gave him a unique role on a Mennonite stage often dominated by utopian voices.

“Especially impressive was his width of influence as a professor and Goshen College president who personally helped individual students make life-changing decisions. He could relate to our congregational constituency as well as others drawn to his global philosophy and international experience. As a church leader he cherished the uniqueness of the Mennonites, at the same time that he appreciated the larger Christian tradition.

“Professionally and educationally, he travelled far from his Pennsylvania Mennonite roots, but his longer view of history and love of the church, made him a trusted voice in the Mennonite community, its congregations and institutions. His counsel will be missed.”

Meanwhile, the Cold War continued to be played out throughout Latin America with internal leftist insurgencies against the various democratic and military regimes. In Argentina an anti-communist military junta had taken over the government and was involved in a dirty war of  broad sweeps against left-wing students, professors, revolutionaries and other dissidents. Many of these people were tortured and killed in a terrible story of the disappeared. Among those taken in one of the sweeps was a young university student Patricia Erb who was held for a few weeks and then released because she was an American citizen. Mennonite Central Committee put her on tour; I heard her speak of her horrible ordeal at the Mennonite Assembly in Champaign, Illinois, and later she came to speak here at Scottdale; she was the granddaughter of Paul and Alta Erb. She told about her torture and captivity, and what she heard while in captivity.

Patricia Erb also reported her experience to a number of American legislators in Washington D.C., who in turn applied pressure on the Argentine military to change its tactics. This lobbying effort was considered the highpoint by Mennonite Central Committee personnel in effectively witnessing to the government. Argentina’s neighbor Chile was also going through a difficult period where a democratically elected socialist government (headed by Salvador Allende, uncle of the writer Isabella Allende) was overthrown by strongman General Augusto Pinochet. During those repressive Pinochet years, many Chileans, including many evangelical Protestants, fled to Venezuela which had greater democratic freedoms and opportunities for employment. Some of these Chilean exiles eventually met Josian and Auria Santiago, Puerto Rican Mennonites we had known in while serving in voluntary service. The Santiagos were now serving with Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and beginning a Mennonite church in Venezuela. We would connect with these people, but that can await another decade (1983).   

Much of this chapter is from memory, my personal files and the notebook I kept of the trip by the TourMagination travel company. The Miller letter of tribute to Lawrence Burkholder letter appears on the Goshen College Website: http://www.goshen.edu/news/pressarchive/06-24-10-jlb-death475.html