Human Doing or Human Being?

An eastern philosopher when describing western society said that we are human doings rather than human beings. What did he mean?

Our culture is constantly on the go. We define ourselves more by what we do than by who we are. We become fixated on action, activity, doing. We become obsessed on our role in life, whether it’s being a teacher, a preacher, a farmer, or “only a housewife.” We become so focused on outward activity, that we forget who we are in the very core of our beings. We try to be something other than who or what we really are in order to fit into the mold that our culture tells us to be. Our inner selves get out of whack from our outer demands. We become fragmented, fractured, and sometimes to the extreme, schizophrenic.

Sit in silence along the lake and contemplate nature

The only way to bring balance back is to pay attention to the inner self, the Spirit of God in us, our souls, if you please, the image of God in which we have been made. And the only way we can come in touch with this inner self is to spend time in rest and solitude. “In returning and rest you shall be saved, in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isa. 30:15).

Our culture has an aversion to silence and rest. It provides us with many distractions.

How we become human doings:

1.     Busyness. Many of us avoid facing our true selves by becoming busy. We think that we can avoid facing what we don’t want to know about ourselves by staying busy. We think that by doing more things we will become more important in the eyes of others. But will we become more important in the eyes of God?

2.     Noise. Noise comes in all forms. Too many of us turn on the radio or TV, or some other noise as soon as we get into a car, enter our office or our homes. We can’t stand the silence. We are afraid of what the silence might show us.

Our excuse for rest is to “Veg out” and to plop in front of the TV or computer and be distracted by the mindless babble that flows out of the programming. It is constant noise, and it is the noise of our culture’s values, not the voice of God.

3.     Boredom. When our children are bored, we rent them a movie, turn on the TV or electronic device, and they turn into immediate automatons, and they are out of our hair. What if we would let them wallow in their boredom? More often than not, out of the boredom comes an idea, and a spark of the imagination, and they are off into their own little world. It is no coincidence that image and imagination are related. By using our imagination we discover the image of God in which we are made.

Even as adults, we should let our “vegging out” time take our minds into the world of our imagination instead of letting the purveyors of sleaze control our imaginations.

4.     Experiences. We tend to live on the surface, going from one new experience to another, much like we surf the channels on TV, never getting into the show completely, but always looking for a more exciting, more engaging show or experience that may just be on the next channel.

This “experience surfing” is a reality for most post moderns. Too often we are more interested in listing the countries or states we’ve visited than learning anything about the culture and people who are in the area. Our exciting experiences are recorded on social media punctuated with our spectacular pictures.

Many tend to experience church and religious life the same way. You hear people who leave a certain church say that they “just weren’t being fed.” This generally is more a commentary on the eater rather than on the feeder. What they mean is that they want a “better,” or a “newer” experience.

The church, too often in trying to meet this consumer demand thinks that it needs to make its worship more contemporary with louder music, dancing down the aisles, high-tech PowerPoint presentations. But there will always be a church down the road that will have a newer charismatic leader, a jazzier praise band and offer a better worship experience. Se we channel surf to the next place of worship.

5.     Drugs. A way that our culture deals with the fragmentation that we feel between our inner selves and the demands of our “human doing” culture, is to turn to mind and body altering drugs.

I find it easy to understand why so many young people turn to drugs. They see no difference between the new experience of altering their mood with drugs and their parents taking drugs to induce sleep, to have sex, to suppress their appetites, and to control every malfunctioning body part. Drug advertising is everywhere—drugs will fix everything, even the huge void in our souls??

Food is also a big drug in our society. Do we live to eat, or do we eat to live? I think it is no coincidence that our “human doing” culture has an epidemic of obesity while the “human being” cultures of the East do not. If not with drugs, we turn to food for the comfort we need to fill that fragmentation we feel between our outer and inner selves.

How to become human beings:

1.     Spiritual Disciplines. Because of the hunger for balance between the inner self and the demands of our superficial “human doing” culture, many people are turning to eastern religions. Many of us forget that Christianity is an Eastern religion as well. Before the Enlightenment and the crowning of science as more important than religion, Christians practiced most of the spiritual disciplines that Eastern religions offer. These disciplines help to keep the balance between the demands of the inner and the outer worlds. They help us to become human beings rather than human doings.

In our book The Spacious Heart, my sister and I outline many of the spiritual disciplines that have been practiced over the centuries by Christians, in this space I will mention a few that will help us bring some balance to our lives.

2.     Solitude. I already quoted the Isaiah passage, “In returning and rest you shall be saved, in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” By letting our minds run in solitude and rest we can get in touch with our inner self.

3.     Prayer and Meditation. You might take a favorite Bible verse along with you on a walk, or a favorite song. Or using your imagination, you might walk along the banks of the sea with Jesus and have a conversation with him.

4.     Fasting. Takes the focus away from food and on to more important matters.

5.     Retreats. What we call retreats are often filled with activity— “doing.” How many of us plan a retreat to just be!? Alone in the woods with our thoughts, our imaginations, our journals?

The spiritual disciplines have traditionally been the way Christians have come closer to God and closer to themselves--until the twentieth Century. They are a means to turn our tendency to be “human doings,” stressed and burned out, into “human beings.”

If we are really interested in meeting the needs of our church, and others around us, we need to address this spiritual gap between the inner and outer worlds to make a difference. This is what people are hungry for. The rest is just part of the larger noise of our culture.

What’s in a name?

Some twenty odd years ago, while working as the director of communications for Virginia Mennonite Conference and Missions, I began our monthly newsletter with a short devotional titled “Klymer Klatsch.” It was a takeoff on the German word/phrase “Kaffeeklatsch” which means a conversation over coffee. I simply changed the first letter of my name to form an alliteration.

The old city hall in Affoltern am Albis, Switzerland

When I began to write a blog a few years later, it was only natural for me to resurrect the name Klymer Klatsch for the title. I’ve had numerous conversations about this title; most people are bemused by my choice.

While here in Switzerland, I’ve enjoyed doing some work on my ancestry, particularly looking into the origins of my father’s name Clymer, and my mother’s, Horst.

The immigrant from whom I descend arrived in Philadelphia with the name Henrich Clemmer. He had been Klemmer in Germany before he made the cross-oceanic voyage. My great-grandfather changed our name from Clemmer to Clymer.

Through email exchanges with Mennonite historian John Ruth, I discovered that the Klemmer name originated in Affoltern am Albis, a region southeast of Zürich. He also told me that there were variants of the name in the same region: Klimer, Klimmer, and Kleiner. So I searched websites related to the region and found another interesting variation of the name: KLYMER. Yes, the same name as I use in my alliterative blog title!

But it gets even more interesting. I kept finding all sorts twists and turns on the Clemmers’ migration to the USA with genealogical experts presenting contrasting views. So when I discovered a website MennoSearch.com, I was lured by the statement, “Research your Swiss, German, or Mennonite Ancestry,” including information on the Clemmers, I sprung for it.

I excitedly opened the PDF file on the Clemmer genealogy and the very first entry at the top of

The region Am Albis, near Zürich, where Klymer comes from

the page was this: “Thoman Klymer, b. c1554 at Affoltern, Zurich, Switzerland.” So the earliest found relative of mine was named KLYMER. The very same name I have used in my blog title. A coincidence? Pure luck? Or was it something planted in my unconscious that I’ve carried with me all these years?

I planned an excursion to Affoltern, the area of my ancestors. Since there was no graveyard near the train station, I started out on foot, looking for variations of my name on the mailboxes of apartment complexes. I must have looked at some 100 mailboxes without any success. Instead I found all sorts of other Swiss-Mennonite surnames: Huber, Good, Eberly, Lichty, Noll, Siegrist, Gautsche, Bergey, Mischler, Hess, Eby and Baer. I even found the name of some Honduran Anabaptists multiple times: Machado!

Not to be deterred, I began asking people on the street if they had a schoolmate or acquaintance named, Klemmer, Klimmer, Klymer or Kleiner. After enduring a number of puzzled looks, I finally found someone who knew of several Kleiners who were classmates of hers. I didn’t have time to schedule a visit with them, but I felt like I had made a connection.

What’s in a name? For me searching for my ancestry through my surname was a process of finding roots, a home. I now know where I’ve come since at least 1554. That’s over 450 years.

What’s in a name? A name that has been passed down for so many years and in different places, gives me a sense of knowing who I am. That name ties me to a human history of both time and place. But I also have another name. I have been stamped with the “image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:27), like every other human being. While my Klymer name links me to an earthly heritage, my God identity links me to an eternal heritage. “I have called you by name, you are mine, (Isa. 43:1)” says my creator. God has been calling me “Klymer” since before I was born, and since before I discovered where I’m from.

Swiss Independence Day, August 1, 2017

The Prelude. The Swiss are quite patriotic. You see their red flags with a white cross and little red candleholder cups designed with the white cross in multitudinous places—homes, stores, and public places. The candles are lit at dusk on August first.

Flags decorating my apartment complex balconies.

Beginning three nights before the actual celebration, we could hear firecrackers going off all around us. But nothing prepared us for the actual celebration on the evening of August 1. 

Stores began stocking all sorts of fireworks, sparklers, and firecrackers of all sorts a month before the celebration. In fact, they began appearing around July 4, which was ironically interesting for a US American, navigating his way through a year in Switzerland.

The brunch. It has become increasingly popular to eat brunch on a farm sometime before noon

Andy, Ruth, Esther's sister and
daughter Jasmina Wyss.

on August first. Esther’s sister Ruth invited us to join her family for brunch. We drove up into a very remote corner of the Jura Mountains, passing a number of Mennonite settlements, including the farm where my brother-in-law’s mother grew up. She is an Amstutz. Winding along narrow roads and through a one-lane tunnel, we ended up at the Scheidegger Ranch with some one hundred other people.

Esther and I enjoying our brunch.

The food.

The buffet menu consisted of fried eggs and bacon along with the Swiss version of hash browns (called Röschti, and a good bit better, I would add). Breads, including the traditional braided Sunday Züpfe, jams, and a variety of cold cuts, cheeses, Birchermüesli and coffee rounded out the buffet’s offerings. We ate to our hearts’ content.

The Outing. You cannot be invited to a Swiss celebration of any sort without going on an after brunch (dinner) walk to “help with the digestion,” so we wound our way down one mountain through Tramelan and up the other side to Chasseral, a lookout point with communication’s tower on the top of a 5,000 ft. mountain. I understand that it is the highest point of the Jura mountain range that borders on France in the western part of Switzerland. The tower is visible from many areas of Switzerland, even from our dinning room window in Aarberg.

Overlooking Lake Biel from the tower

We walked the fifteen-minute trail from the parking lot to the tower, took some pictures and then headed back. We had to stop at the restaurant for drinks before heading back home. 

The Celebration in Aarberg. From about 7:30 pm on to midnight, the town of Aarberg planned an Independence Day Celebration in the “Stedtli,” the beautiful “Old Town.” About 300 people gathered to hear a local choir and band that provided entertainment while they ordered a variety of foods and drinks before taking part in the official part of the evening.

First, there was a welcoming speech by the Mayor, then a reflective speech by a distinguished

Mayor of Aarberg

The youth who were honored

guest on the future of democracy in the Switzerland as well as the world. The next part of the ceremony was a pleasant surprise for me. They had invited about 20 young people, who had just turned 18, as special guests for the ceremony. They were given a letter from the Mayor, and encouraged to become active citizens in Switzerland’s civic life. Not only is 18 the voting age for Swiss, but also when they are allowed to get their driver’s license. I found this to be an interesting touch to an Independence Day Celebration, but am told it is pretty common throughout Switzerland. I find this to be a wonderful rite of passage unknown to us in the USA.

Words to the Swiss National Hymn

After the youth were honored, we stood to sing all four verses of the Swiss National Hymn. The

crowd was admonished for only knowing the first verse, so flyers with all four verses were passed out so that all could join in. That was a great help for me, who didn’t even know the first verse. In my opinion as a musician and a singer, the music of the Swiss hymn far surpasses our own anthem, which is nearly unsingable. The words paint a picture of the beauty of Switzerland’s natural God-given land and a longing for that land, rather than a bellicose tribute to a flag.

At exactly 9:15 pm, the children paraded through the Stedtli with the traditional red ball lanterns suspended on a stick called “⁠⁠⁠Fackeln,” accompanied by drumming. The Fackeln lanterns are red with the white cross, with a lit candle inside. Many of the children were dressed in traditional dress. It was a touching sight, with the children eagerly anticipating their inclusion in the national event. The traditional parade is called a “Fackelnumzug.”

After the children’s parade, everyone was encouraged to stay on to dance until midnight. A band was provided for that purpose. Esther and I were pretty exhausted from all the activities of the day, so we went home.

Decorated Old Town

The Fireworks. I was pretty sure that we could see some major fireworks displays from our kitchen window on the third floor of our apartment complex. Several years earlier, we were invited to one of the more famous fireworks in Switzerland set off over Lake Biel. Since Biel is only 20 minutes away from where we live, I figured that we could see them from our house. I was not disappointed. Although not as spectacular from a distance, I could still claim that I saw them.

However, who needed the fireworks from a distance? The Swiss LOVE fireworks, and the laws prohibiting certain types must not be as strict as they are where I am from. We had spectacular displays both in front of as well as behind our apartment. Along with the numerous firecrackers, the noise sounded like we were in the middle of a war zone. The only similar thing I’ve experienced was in Honduras during their New Year’s celebrations after being suppressed by a state of siege during a war.

It was impossible to escape the noise. I finally fell asleep at around 11:00 pm, but when I went to the bathroom at 2:00 am, they were still going strong. All the reticence of the typical Swiss character seemed to be let loose with a bang—or maybe I should say quite a few bangs.

The other traditional event is the lighting of a huge bonfire. We didn’t personally witness any of these, but as we travelled around during the day, we saw many pyres prepared for this event. They are HUGE. I did see a large plume of smoke off in the distance from my kitchen window, but I wasn’t sure if it was from a bonfire or some other fireworks.  

The aftermath. I have come to know the Swiss to be some of the neatest and tidiest people on the planet. However, when I walked around my city the morning after, there was trash, mostly from various and sundry spent fireworks, littered everywhere. For a US American who likes tidiness up to a certain point, a tidiness that doesn’t include obsessiveness, it was a sight to behold!

On my walk, I ran into a neighbor who wasn’t as enthused about the celebrative noise as most Swiss. After asking about how I slept, she went on a tirade against the festivities of the night before. She said her dog went berserk with every bang, and she imagined that the many babies in the neighborhood weren’t very impressed either. She probably has her house in pristine order.

Decorated Old Town of Aarberg