Loved Into Life: Vincent Harding

After some 50 years, Vincent Harding, colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at Eastern Mennonite University once again. His smallish, unassuming manner and subdued speech belied an internal strength that permeated his comments and his life.

During a chapel address at EMU, he outlined numerous people from whom he had received love, and how these people shaped him into the person he is. It reminded me of the book Strength to Love written by his friend, whom he affectionately referred to as Martin. Hearing him speak, shaking his hand and exchanging introductions, made me feel part of a living history. 

His mother, his church community in New York City, and his elementary school teachers were all people whom he listed as his “lovers.” Then he was drafted into the army. He absolutely loved basic training; he was good at hitting the target with his rifle and was proficient at using a bayonet. At some point, however, he heard a voice with the question, “Vincent, how does learning to kill another human being square with your understanding of Jesus, who taught you to love your enemies?” 

He didn’t identify the voice as coming from God, and he didn’t elaborate on how he left or stayed in the army, but identified the voice as “love that loved him into life.” Upon release he found himself at the University of Chicago doing graduate work in history. It was there that he met a “strange group of people” who were the Mennonites. Eventually he became a pastor in a Mennonite Church on the south side of Chicago that was one of the few churches interested in staying and ministering in a neighborhood where whites were leaving in droves and blacks were taking their place.

Through the Mennonite Central Committee, he and his wife Rosemarie, the first black graduate of Goshen College, established a Mennonite Voluntary Service Unit in Atlanta, Georgia, a few blocks from the home of Martin Luther King. 

There is more that I could say about his life’s story and his comments yesterday, but I’d like to focus on his character. I kept asking myself as I observed him, how can this man be so calm, so collected, with love exuding from his every pore? After facing dogs and water hoses, irrational hatred and jail, how can he be so serene? Why isn’t he consumed by anger, by the wish for revenge? After all, only a few things have changed since the Civil Rights movement reached its height in the late 60s.

He claimed that his “strength to love” came from being loved, and named those who loved him. I suspect something much deeper. I believe that he has a spiritual life that goes beyond saying a few prayers around meal time and reading a quick devotional before beginning his day. True, receiving love from the people he named is a very important element, but that love needs to be sustained by a divine love that one can only find through a deep relationship with God. That is the only way one can sustain a true love for enemies and overcome anger and the desire for revenge. 

Vincent Harding is a wonderful example of someone who combines a deep spirituality; an inner world, with a deep commitment to social justice; work in the outer world. Would that there were more Christians following his example.

Presence, Patience, Prayer: Cultivating Compassion Among the Marginalized

This article is part of a MennoNerds Synchro-Blog on Missional Spirituality for the month of February. MennoNerds is exploring through this event Spirituality through an Anabaptist lens and what it means concerning participation in the mission of God.

When working with marginalized people, presence, patience and prayer are necessary elements of the ministry of compassion. As a chaplain who visits Spanish-speaking patients in our local hospital, I have listened to stories not only of physical pain, but stories of pain from marginalization and alienation. 

Presence

 “My whole life is a lie,” sobbed María in Spanish on her hospital bed. “I came here for a better life and have found nothing but disappointments.” María’s latest setback was an unexpected bout with appendicitis. 

María had told me that she was from Honduras. Her confession came after a telephone call interrupted our conversation. She identified herself as someone else, saying that she was from Puerto Rico. It was obvious that she was working and living with a false identity.

I listened as she poured her heart out to me, detailing all the hardships of being considered illegal in this country, being far away from her own children, not being able to be with her sister who was currently dying of cancer, and having a stack of unpaid bills that was growing higher each day. The American dream had turned into a nightmare.

There was little I could do to change María’s ugly and unjust situation. Nevertheless, being present to her and listening to her in her own language, showed care and compassion. God became manifest “on earth as in heaven.”

Patience

Jorge was in the hospital for more than a week when I met him. He was isolated for fear of tuberculosis. He didn’t really want to talk to me, another white man with a tie, a clipboard and an assumed agenda. But I persisted, insisting that I was there to stand alongside him in these moments of pain and suffering. 

After my third visit, he began to open up. Slowly his torturous story began to unfold. He had left his wife and two children more than a year and a half ago to seek a better life in the United States. He started with little money and no legal documents. He had to cross three international borders to get to his still unknown destination.

Hitch-hiking and freight trains were his main means of transportation. Along the way he tried to do odd jobs to sustain himself. He reached my city on a freight train suffering from a high fever and a debilitating cough. He got off the train and checked into our hospital with no friends, no family, no money, no place to call home and no papers. 

Once again, there was little I could do to change his desperate and unjust situation. My persistence eventually showed Jorge compassion; a sense of God’s presence in an oppressive world too often hostile to him. 

Prayer

As I entered the hospital room and introduced myself, I could feel the tension in the air. The woman lying in the bed had lost a child in birth. I assumed that the man standing by her bedside was her husband. I expressed my sorrow at their loss and tried to be a loving, non-threatening presence. Every attempt at communication failed. I had seldom felt so uncomfortable. 

Hoping to salvage a little of the visit, I asked if I could pray for them. Somehow they agreed. I went over to the woman, laid my hand on her shoulder, and prayed a very simple prayer, hoping to end my ordeal and be on my way. When I lifted my head, the man was sobbing, his shoulders visibly shaking. He proceeded to enumerate a litany of woes that he and his wife had gone through in the past three months, culminating with the death of their newborn. 

The atmosphere in the room changed remarkably after the prayer. The relationship between me and the couple changed. What started out as a forced, awkward encounter, had become a moment of compassion and sensing God’s presence.

Each encounter emphasized one of the concepts more than the other, but they all included presence, patience and prayer. Being patiently present and praying with those who are at the margins of our society demonstrates compassion. Even if the injustice isn’t reversed, the presence of God is experienced by those on the margin.

The Shame Game

Father Greg Boyle, in his delightful book Tattoos on the Heart, quotes John Bradshaw by writing, “shame is at the root of every addiction” (p. 43). Fr. Boyle works with mostly Latino gangs in Los Angeles and makes many astute observations about human nature, including the quote on shame. He has experienced first hand the results of gang members wearing a heavy cloak of shame. 

“I’m no good,” “I am worthless,” are tapes that play over and over in the heads of the shamed, and in the case of the Latino gang members, being with each other is the most love they have ever experienced. However, the addictions that they acquire necessitate posturing and defending territory, propelling them into a cycle of crime and violence, acting out on their shame.

Every culture in which I have lived or with which I have had significant contact, uses shame as a means to make people conform to societal expectations. Some cultures are more shame-based than others, but all function by shaming what is considered aberrant behavior. 

In my own background, my mother would frequently say to us, “What will the neighbors think?” Apparently it wasn’t so much whether the behavior was good or bad, but rather how the behavior would be seen by the eyes of the culture. We constantly felt the gaze of one particularly scowling neighbor, and felt the shame of her frowns whether we were aware of what we were doing or not. 

Religious systems are particularly adept at producing shame. They prescribe many more “thou shalt nots” than “thou shalts;” how not to behave, rather than how to behave. Impossible rules are set up to follow and falling short of these ideals produces shame. These rules mainly focus on the negative aspects of the sacred texts to which their religion ascribes, and forget the positive ones. 

If we are made in the “image and likeness of God,” and that God pronounced creation “good,” why are we so intent on tearing down this goodness with shaming each other? Why can’t we recognize the goodness in each other rather creating rules to shame each other?

I know that in the classroom students respond much better to affirmation than shaming. In one particular case, I had a student who was faltering in many areas, both in her personal life and her academic life. She presented quite an attitude in class, posturing much like I imagine the gang members in LA do. In spite of her meager academic achievement in my class, I noticed something special about her. She could reproduce the sounds of the Spanish language better than anyone else in the class. 

One day after class I called her aside and told her that she had a “sweet Spanish accent,” and that she had “potential to become fluent in Spanish.” She probably thought I was going to shame her. Instead, I gave her an affirmation. The compliment took her off guard, but her face lit up in one of the brightest smiles I have ever seen. Her attitude and grades in the class improved exponentially. I could tell many similar stories. Yet our system is intent on shaming and putting down rather than building up and recognizing the God-given image and likeness within each of us. 

What will the neighbors think? Is not the question to ask. That is the shame game. The question to ask is, How will you reflect the image of God to your neighbor? 

Where have all the flowers gone?

Over the past number of years I have been collecting re-mastered CDs of the albums that I liked from the 60s. As I listen to the lyrics, I am impressed over and over again how many of them have to do with issues of justice; the trilogy of societal evils identified by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as “racism, militarism and materialism.” I have wondered about how my generation, which was so passionate about these issues, acquiesced to the pressures of conformity to the prevailing culture.

The death of Pete Seeger, one of the most powerful voices in our culture against these evils, made me think once again about how things have changed in my lifetime. One of his songs, made popular by Peter, Paul and Mary, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, speaks about the cycle of the life from flowers to girls to soldiers to graveyards. “When will they ever learn?”, implores Seeger.

Perhaps I am too cynical, but I don’t think that much has changed in any of these areas; we haven’t learned. True, progress has been made in the realm of Civil Rights and racism; after all, we do have an African-American as president. But there is still too much racial profiling, disproportionate jailing of African-Americans while white privilege abounds in all levels of society. Added to this older racism is now the prejudice against another group; “illegal” immigrants. When will they ever learn?

Militarism is still the backbone of our empire. The “military-industrial complex” which Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against has totally taken over our culture. Our economy couldn’t survive without continually feeding the insatiable military pig. Since the embarrassment of Vietnam, we have entered quagmires in Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, and meddled in the affairs of a myriad of other countries trying to make the world safe for democracy (read: safe for big banks and business to operate in an unbridled fashion). When will they ever learn?

Materialism is as prevalent as ever, if not more so. One of the rallying cries of my generation was to get off the treadmill and live a simpler life. I see little of that influence, at least among my peers. Dual careers, ever bigger homes and cars define who we are. We have sold out en masse to the call of our culture to climb the ladder of success and material gain. When will they ever learn?

What happened to the idealism of our youth? What happened to all the songs of protesting racism, militarism and materialism? Where have all the flowers gone? There seems to be one factor that changed everything: the draft. Until 1972, every young man over 18 was subject to the draft. Many of them came back in body bags, including some of my classmates. The Vietnam war made little sense to us. When we examined our hearts we saw the relationship between that militarism, racism and our materialism. So we tried to change the system to counter these evils. We did, at least partially. The draft went away. First there was a lottery system, and then the draft was abolished altogether. 

The current wars in which our country is embroiled do not make any more sense today than they did during Vietnam. The difference is that those who fight these wars are there voluntarily. The rest of us hardly notice. The press during the Iraqi war was not allowed to show the atrocities or the body bags that were paraded before our eyes nightly during the Vietnam war. Another war? We yawn and go about our business of acquiring more and caring less. When will we ever learn?

I am convinced that if every politician had to send his/her son or daughter, or grandchild to the front lines of the war zone before they could vote yes to the next US military interference, whether overt or covert, there might be more thought given before sending troops. 

Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to graveyards every one. When will they ever learn?

Mennonite Meets Effects of War

On July 14, 1969, El Salvador invaded the department of Ocotepeque, Honduras, capturing the capital city of Nueva Ocotepeque. Many Hondurans fled into the nearby hills to escape the fighting. By July 20, through a peace treaty brokered by the OAS, the war was over. The retreating Salvadoran soldiers took everything they could find, and what they couldn’t carry, they destroyed. The already poor citizens returned to find their homes ransacked with little food or clothing left.

I was serving in Honduras with Mennonite Voluntary Service (VS) at the time along with some 15 other young men who had been drafted and chosen conscientious objection to war over participation in the military. 

During the week-long war, the whole country was under a “toque de queda” (state of siege) and there were “apagones” (blackouts). There was a ban on any fire crackers, probably the worst of all the strictures for the Hondurans who loved to celebrate holidays, birthdays, Saints days, and any excuse to set off a firecracker or ten. Rumors flew around everywhere, and whenever we were told to seek shelter because the Salvadoran planes were coming to attack, several of my expatriate colleagues ran out to the front porch to be sure to record the event on film. Nothing noteworthy happened on the north coast where we were safely located. 

Because of the desperate situation in the war zone that many Hondurans found themselves in, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the relief agency of the Mennonite Church, was asked to mount a relief effort in the region. I was part of the first team of VSers to respond to the need. After flying from La Ceiba to San Pedro Sula, it took us another two days by bus to reach our destination. While I was walking down the street in San Pedro, a Honduran man who passed me, spat at me and cursed. Many Hondurans felt that they were winning the war because their air force had destroyed the air force of the Salvadorans, and it was only a matter of time until the Salvadoran soldiers would leave Honduran territory. They blamed the USA for its interference in the region through the OAS. They thought that they had lost face in a chance to show their superior strength. This is the only time I felt any direct hostility as a US American in Honduras.

I spent one week in what was the war zone, hearing stories of the atrocities committed by the Salvadoran army. Not all people were able to flee, and those who remained were subjected to some horrible treatment. The one the sticks in my memory most is the story of a young school teacher who was repeatedly raped for nearly a 12-hour period as soldiers lined up outside the school house to wait their turn. 

My job was to help distribute food and clothing to the returning villagers. Our base was at the local “Amigos” church; the Quakers. First we had to sort the huge bundles of clothing and then distribute them at the local school. People lined up for blocks to receive whatever they could.  

One day it was raining and we couldn’t make our scheduled distribution point, so I stayed back and helped a photographer from some other protestant missionary agency develop some pictures in a make-shift photo lab he had set up. His pictures were from what we saw during the weeks following the war. I no longer remember the man’s name nor the agency for which he worked. However, after I returned to the US, I discovered that he had been expelled from Honduras for a book of pictures he had published exposing the poverty in Honduras. They claimed he unfairly depicted life in Honduras. I am sure I had helped him develop some of those salacious pictures. 

More than anything I remember the destruction I witnessed as well as the horrible stories; I could not imagine that anyone could commit such horror. Little did I know that in a few short years nearly all of Hispanic America would be involved in insurgency and counter-insurgency movements committing atrocities that made what I witnessed pale in comparison.

At home, this was during the height of the Vietnam war to which many of my schoolmates had been sent. What I witnessed totally reaffirmed my stance of nonresistance, and to be able to tell people in the region that I was a conscientious objector to war, and that I was serving to build up rather than to tear down, was very meaningful to most of them.

Essence Precedes Existence

Jean Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980), French philosopher, attempting to define existentialism said that all existentialists believed that “existence precedes essence.” We are all born (existence) into a meaningless and absurd world and it is necessary for us to create our own meaning (essence) out of this reality.

Sartre lived during the Enlightenment-influenced Modern Era where belief in science trumped belief in religion. Science could explain everything. What we experience with the senses is what is real, everything else is fiction. We live and we die, there is nothing eternal. All we have is our life, and that life is meaningless unless we create our own meaning. Nietzsche, another existentialist philosopher, spoke of our “will to power.” Ambition and achievement,  striving to reach the highest possible position in life, drive us to create our own meaning. We climb over everyone in our way to reach the top, fulfilling Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest.

Unfortunately, this world view has left many people in our day with an existential loneliness and a deep longing for something beyond ourselves and our “absurd” world. There is something within us, an internal compass, that continually points to something beyond ourselves. To ignore it, as the Enlightenment taught us to do, causes this loneliness. In our culture, too often this loneliness, or this holy longing, is filled with obsessive behaviors; addictions to shopping, sex, alcohol and drugs, food.

A way to quell this loneliness is to turn Sartre’s statement around and to understand that essence precedes existence. We are created in God’s image and likeness (Gen. 1:27). This is the internal compass that points us to something beyond ourselves. This God-stamp within us is eternal. According to Andrew Scott, “. . . the image of God [is] woven into the fabric of our being. If it were taken out of us, we would unravel. We would cease to be.” This is our essence, and it belonged to us before we were born. Essence precedes existence.

Henri Nouwen in his video series “The Vulnerable Journey,” speaks about all of us existing in the “heart of God” before we were born, and that our life (existence) is only an “interruption of eternity.” Being in the heart of God assures us of God’s eternal love for us. Being in God’s heart is our essence.

In order to deal with our existential loneliness and our holy longings, we need to get in touch with this eternal essence. This essence trumps the socialization of culture and family. This essence trumps the “will to power.” This essence makes us more than animals responding to external stimuli. This essence is our compass and hope.

How Mennonites Have Changed in My Lifetime

I have been in conversation with an number of Neo-Anabaptists who are trying to make sense of who the Mennonites are; one of the groups originating in the Anabaptist movement from the 16^th Century. One of the questions was about how leadership is/was chosen for local congregations. Since I grew up in the Mennonite Church, it got me to thinking how much the Mennonite church has changed since my childhood.

I decided to make a list of the all the changes I have noticed. I divided them into three sections, 1) Related to church life, 2) Related to public life and 3) Related to personal morality. If the item begins with a "no," it means that many Mennonites now do these things. Just a few caveats. I avoid listing the changes in traditional dress codes and use of modern technology. I am listing these changes without commentary. I think some are good and some not so good. The changes probably all come from greater assimilation into the larger US American culture. Many who grew up in the Mennonite Church will have had different experiences from mine, depending on their conference and region. Some Mennonite groups still adhere to many of these principles.

Related to church life and organization

1.  Paid leadership instead of volunteer

a.     4-year contracts instead of lifelong commitment

b.     Chosen by search committee rather than by lot

c.     Leadership from outside the congregation instead of from within

2.  Footwashing at every communion service

3.     A preparatory service before communion

4.     Change from teaching on non-resistance to nonviolent resistance

5.     No following of the lectionary for worship, no Advent or Lent emphases

Related to public life

1.     No holding of a political office

2.     No serving on a jury

3.     No study of law

4.     No voting

5.     No joining of service clubs like Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, Elks, etc.

Relating to personal morality

1.     No purchasing of life insurance

2.     No alcohol consumption

3.     No wedding bands

4.     No dancing

5.     No participating in organized sports (unless church-related)

If you grew up Mennonite, you might have other non-dress and non-technology-related changes. What is missing on my list? 

If you are a Neo-Anabaptist, you may be wondering about the rationale for some of these principles. What are your questions?