Falling into the Community

Every morning after announcements, the sixth-grade student president's voice would come on over the loudspeaker to recite the pledge of allegiance. Everyone except me and a few scattered church of the Brethren friends stood, placed their hands over their hearts, and recited the words that no one really understood. My Brethren friends and I stood but clutched our hands fiercely at our sides and clamped our mouths shut. We knew that we had a moral leg up on our peers. It didn't matter that we didn't understand why we didn't say the pledge—our parents had told us not to, and our parents were the sort of people who were right. I loved that I could feel so righteous just by not talking, and I always ran out to recess feeling proud of myself. 

My parents were Mennonites, but there were no Mennonite churches in our small Northern Indiana town. So they settled for the church of the Brethren, which they deemed the next-closest denomination to truth, and found a nice peacey sort of Brethren church to attend. Growing up, I understood the word “Brethren” to be mostly synonymous to the word “Mennonite.” Both of the words confused me, but I didn't really know any Mennonites aside from my parents and my Rich grandparents, so I really didn't understand what they were. Based on the inch-deep pool of Mennonites upon which I drew my ethnographic conclusions, I probably thought Mennonites were people with the last name “Rich” who didn't watch TV and sometimes had ancient toy chests filled with headless dolls lying around the house. And maybe I was partly right. But for the most part, I didn't think about it at all.

When I got a little older, my parents tried to explain to me the theological differences between Mennonites and Brethren, which seemed to amount to a silly little quibble over sprinkling vs. dunking baptism. I was not impressed. What really fired me up was showing off my pacifism. One year the Christian Peacemaker Teams held their conference, called “Congress,” at our good friends', the Kindy's house. They handed out these ugly-brown T-shirts that said “PEACE TAKES GUTS!” and had pictures of people like Menno Simons, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi on them. I got one that was probably three times too big for me, but I loved that T-shirt. I wore it to school all the time in hopes that I might provoke an argument with one of the many conservative kids in my school. These kids all wore the red and blue T-shirts with an eagle and a militaristic quote from some long-dead president on them. I disdained the brainwashed ignorance of their T-shirts. 

Sometimes my subtle provocations worked. A girl named Erica Grossnickle in my U.S. History class in eleventh grade hated me because in class discussions about war I always piped up to argue that even if my family was in danger I wouldn't defend them by killing another human being. Erica Grossnickle was the first person I knew who hated me so openly and with such venom. She would sit at the back of the class, mocking me and muttering “fuck you” while I talked. In some ways I saw this as my persecution—as required martyrhood for the radical beliefs I was so proud of. Wearing my ugly “PEACE TAKES GUTS!” t-shirt with Menno Simons staring up at me, I argued my case in even tones and never turned my head at Erica Grossnickle's aggressive comments from the back row. 

I was proud of being a minority in my convictions, but when I started shopping for colleges, I knew that I wanted to go somewhere where other people thought like I did. I didn't set out to go to a Mennonite college; I looked at a lot of liberal schools. But my parents started leaving little notes on my pillow suggesting that I should consider Goshen College, that I should try to reconnect with the Mennonite roots that were so unfamiliar to me—and as usual, they persuaded me. 

When I got to Goshen, it was like discovering a home I didn't know I had. I hadn't known that there were so many people in the world like me—even my church of the Brethren friends were not nearly as compatible with me as the Mennonites I met at Goshen. It was as though everyone at Goshen College had grown up in my same simple ranch house with my same compassionate-disciplining, Luddite parents. I felt strange connections to almost everyone I met—as though they were all long-lost siblings of mine. At dinner in the cafeteria we talked about the woes of not being allowed to watch TV as we were growing up, about our international journeys, about the ethics and compromises of our pacifist values. I fell right into place in the Community (capital C). 

my Grandma Rich

But I also quickly realized that to gain status in the Community, you had to milk your connections. Other students had gone to Mennonite high schools and churches for years and were way ahead of the game; my parents hadn't been involved in Mennonite circles for at least 25 years. I had a lot of catching up to do. So I started digging around, unearthing my claims to Mennonite ethnicity that had lain fallow for almost a generation. After a bit of Mennonite-game playing and talking to my grandma Rich (whose mental family tree encompasses at least five generations), people hiding under the guise of my professors began popping out as my third cousins once removed. I took to telling people I wanted to impress that my grandma was Elaine Sommers Rich, a Mennonite writer, and I staked much of my fame on my great-aunt Emma Richards, who, I announced proudly, was the first Mennonite woman pastor. I used all of these signs to prove my authenticity in the Community.

At Goshen, I finally came to understand that one of the most fundamental differences between Mennonites and Brethren was not theological but cultural. Mennonites had their own Russian and Swiss foods and their own wholesomely ethnic style of dress. I went to the local bakery in Goshen for breakfast on Saturday mornings and realized that I could spot a middle-aged Mennonite woman by her Birkenstocks, L.L. Bean fleece, and tasteful dangly earrings. Goshen Mennonites had a universal love of biking and whole wheat flour and a universal aversion to plastic bags and soda. Mennonites also seemed so much more taken with this idea of Community than any Brethren I had ever met. This emphasis on the group and the uniformity throughout the group made Mennonites seem like much more of a distinctive ethnic group than the Brethrens with whom I grew up. 

Looking back now, I see how the wires connecting that world-wide Community of Mennonites has supported the weight of my life. Even when I didn't know that I was part of that Community, I always have belonged. My family travelled a lot as I was growing up and lived in different countries, but no matter where we went there were always Mennonites. When we lived in Korea for a year on my dad's sabbatical, my parents looked up the Mennonite Central Committee workers stationed in South Korea and paid a visit to a family called the Froeses. I remember thinking it was kind of weird that we would go out of our way to meet these complete strangers, but we instantly clicked with them. When we lived in Scotland for my dad's second sabbatical, we invited a Mennonite woman who lived in St. Andrews to our house. When I was considering volunteering at a camp in Northern Ireland one summer in college, my mom found a Mennonite woman who had worked at the same camp and put me in touch with her. As Mennonites, we had a network of instant friends all over the world, and no matter where we went, finding other Mennonites was like finding home.

I have finally come to realize that being Mennonite means more than self-righteously abstaining from the pledge or arguing against war. Now that I recognize that I live in this world-wide Community, I feel less need to establish my Mennonite identity in opposition to non-Mennonites. I feel less inclined to prove my Mennonite identity by showing what I am not and more inclined to show my Mennonite self by exploring what I am—which is part of a Community. I've found that this positive demonstration of identity is far more inviting to “outsiders” (for lack of a better word) than the negative “I'm not like you” identity that I assumed with Erica Grossnickle. A negative “I'm not this” identity can only alienate others, while a positive “I am this” identity strives to find the connections between all people. A little like God, this Community is all around me and pops up when I least expect it.

Last week, for example, I was on an airplane to San Francisco for spring break. At the end of the flight, the middle-aged woman seated in front of me, who was wearing tasteful dangly earrings and an L.L. Bean fleece, turned to my friends and me and asked, “Are you Mennonite?” I have no idea how she knew, but as I sat there on the runway of the San Francisco airport, I looked at the Mennonite woman seated in front of me and I thought about the cloud of Mennonites I have known in my life, and I said, “Yes.”