Conversations About Community: final exam essay

The three Canadian Mennonite novels that we read in this section of the class raise a number of questions about how Mennonites ought to relate to each other and to people outside of the Mennonite community. Peace Destroys Many, by Rudy Wiebe, interrogates the concept of peace, exploring when Mennonites ought to rise from their traditionally peaceful silence to actively influence their communities and the world for the better. The novel A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews, asks how much a community should try to keep peace by unifying the multitude of beliefs that compose it and when doing so will only inevitably splinter it as dissenting members leave the community. Katya, by Sandra Birdsell, asks what methods, whether earthly or spiritual, people use to distinguish themselves from others and why they do this.

The Mennonites in Katya don't fit my traditional conception of Mennonites; they are continually using physical, earthly means to set themselves apart from their non-Mennonite Russian counterparts. In this community, wealth becomes a tangible, visual way to show their in-group status, and they admit quite openly that they think of themselves as superior. Even as a young girl, Katya has already learned her status in the social hierarchy; when Vera asks Katya to come down from Katya's place in the wagon to play with her, Katya surveys the dirtiness of the yard and symbolically declines to descend to Vera's level (58). Wealth is a way into a group, and because Mennonites are so often concerned about being part of a community, they strive to prove their group membership by separating themselves from their poor non-Mennonite neighbors on the basis of wealth.

Though this financial separation seems extremely elitist and counter to all Mennonite values, really it is only another strand of the spiritual/ideological boundaries that Mennonites so often draw between themselves and the rest of the world. As the character David Sudermann says, “'If you ask me, we're proud of our separateness. We've become architects of separateness . . . We're superior. Some even think we're chosen'” (82). Like any religious group, Mennonites hold certain convictions that they view as the right way to live, and just as so much of the world uses wealth to distinguish themselves, Mennonites also use these values as emblems of community membership. This separation often comes in quite handy; if they are both removed from and superior to the rest of the world, Mennonites don't have the constant sense of community obligation to help other people achieve their status. As David puts it, “We have come to think that being separate from the world means we can ignore the plight of the people who are not of our kind” (81). So while some modern Mennonites would frown on people who create hierarchies to distinguish themselves from others, Mennonite religious beliefs often serve the same dividing purpose as worldly wealth.

All three of these novels explore questions that deal with how Mennonites, who take such pride in close-knit community, ought to interact with the broader world. The ties within the Mennonite communities that these books describe can be so valuable in creating connection between people and establishing a sense of belonging. But all of the questions that these novels ask also reveal some weakness in community—whether that is because community sometimes attempts to propagate a single uniform belief or because community can stifle a greater connection to all humans.

Goshen Martyrs

A sentence from Stephanie Krehbiel's essay “Staying Alive: How Martyrdom Made Me a Warrior” caught my eye. Krehbiel writes, “In the end, it seems the martyr and warrior archetypes both harbor the same dangerous potential: to make us locate evil solely in the Other and imagine ourselves pure, be we sword-bearers or victims” (Tongue Screws and Testimonies 143).

At Goshen College we talk a lot about the Other in cultural/ racial/ socioeconomic terms, attempting to unite ourselves with people who are very physically and tangibly different from ourselves. But while divisions between these groups definitely do exist, I do not think that racial or socioeconomic othering is our main problem here at Goshen. I know that I am much more likely to think positively of a person of a different race or culture from me than I am to think positively of a person whose ideologies differ from mine. I think Krehbiel's analysis of “martyrs” and their othering is dead on.

To be willing to die for your beliefs, your convictions have to be pretty strong and dogmatic. And to have such strong beliefs, you can't really allow for any flexibility in considering other perspectives or points of view. Because the martyr's beliefs are so strong, he or she must consider anyone who has even a slightly different perspective wrong. Thus, anyone whose values don't match the zeal of the martyr's convictions become the Other. Martyrs are so focused on belief that this, rather than race or culture or socioeconomic class, is the main point of tension in their lives.

While we don't really have too many Mennonites running around dying for their beliefs anymore, I think that the dogmatism of martyrdom survives in the Mennonite culture. At least at Goshen, these days the issues so important to Mennonites seem to be somewhat different. Goshen martyrs get their sense of minority “persecution” from their beliefs that in some way differ from mainstream culture. So, for instance, more liberal Goshen Mennonites sense that they are a minority in their beliefs in environmentalism, feminism, pacifism, and a number of other isms—and so they think of themselves as “martyrs” for these causes. These issues are so important to them that they would do anything to advance their causes. And these definitely are really important causes. But unfortunately, I think this more modern martyrdom is just as apt at “locat[ing] evil solely in the Other [people who may disagree with these beliefs] and imagin[ing] ourselves pure,” as the martyrdom that Krehbiel describes.

Last week in The Record, Patrick Maxwell, a senior at Goshen, wrote a perspective about this very issue. Maxwell writes, “The level of thinking that created our current environmental crisis was characterized by divisiveness, party-line voting, and warlike language; we in the environmental movement would do well to take Uncle Albert’s advice and expand our thinking across the aisle. [We need to take] a higher-minded, more inclusive approach if the planet is truly to be saved.”

Faith and works in A Complicated Kindness

I am fascinated by how Miriam Toews weaves seemingly trivial outward details into her novel A Complicated Kindness. Even from the very beginning she bestows significance on the mundane, characterizing Trudie through a series of details about her habits and preferences. “She liked a made bed,” Nomi narrates. “She had an uncanny ability to predict the weather. She’d snap towels viciously before folding them, often very close to our heads as we sat watching TV” (18). By describing her character only in terms of these minor outward characteristics, Toews suggests that these small visible traits are emblematic of deeper inward features.

 In this small Mennonite community, those outward characteristics are only that—an expression of the far-more-important workings inside people. Nomi says, “The Mouth came to our house one evening to tell my sister that her physical self was irrelevant” (115). The body can be completely disregarded until it becomes valued for its own merits instead of for its expression of oneness with a person’s internal faith—in this case it needs to be reformed, according to the conservative Mennonite doctrine in Nomi’s town. In other words, the outward things that people do must be expressive of their inner faith; thus, Trudie is expected to volunteer and prepare church potlucks. Outer characteristics or actions can never be valued unless they are connected to the correct, church-ordained inner purposes. This in some ways seems like the good-works approach to salvation that Mennonites often take. If these characters express their faith by volunteering for the church enough and retaining outward appearances of physical purity, then they will receive God’s—and the community’s—favor.

Miriam Toews

But in other places in the novel Nomi describes a more faith-based approach to salvation. She and Tash try to get their parents to say the word “party,” and Tash gets really angry when they won’t say it. “Things shouldn’t hinge on so very little,” says Nomi. “But I guess if you can die without understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that’s kind of relaxing” (114). Nomi speculates that maybe all that her parents would have had to do to make them a happy family forever would be to say the word “party” that day. Similarly, all a Christian has to do to attain everlasting happiness is express a commitment to God. Given all of the underlying problems within Nomi’s family and the community, however, the idea that one word could repair all that seems a little far-fetched; perhaps the reader is to believe that salvation by faith alone is equally unbelievable.

I’m really not sure what Toews is trying to say about the whole works versus faith debate—or maybe she’s not trying to say anything about it. Maybe she is just implying that this ideal of salvation is, in general, a little unattainable.

Class issues in Katya

I think it's interesting that the main character in the book Katya (Katya) straddles classes. She is not quite on par with the Sudermanns, but she isn't of the same class as the Karpenkos either, so in some ways she can understand both of their worlds. There are all of these parallels in the book that come out of that structure. When Katya chucks the Sudermanns' cup down the well, she understands why Vera would want to sabotage her. But when she decides not to play with Vera because her shoes will get dirty, she feels the same superiority that Lydia Sudermann might feel towards her. This sense of empathy seems to fit with a lot of Mennonite values. The irony is that neither of the families on either end of the hierarchy can fully empathize with anyone else (though David Sudermann tries).

Class also seems to collide with freedom and capture in this book. When Katya confesses to Helena that she stole the cup, Helena tells her a story about how Helena freed a bird out of a similar spirit of envy when she was a girl. It's as though wealth and privilege are somehow freeing while poverty is captivity; by letting the bird go, maybe Helena aimed to also achieve the freedom of her wealthy friend. After Katya confesses that she stole the cup out of envy of the Sudermanns and their wealth, Helena reinforces her lower status by making her do even more work.

Though poverty is captivity in some sense, perhaps it also achieves the ends of martyrdom and eventual freedom in heaven. At one point in the book Katya speculates about the Bible passage that claims that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Mennonites have typically emphasized simple living, seeing the humility of owning few possessions as a physical sacrifice for spiritual beliefs—much as other martyrs sacrificed their physical lives for their religious values. David Sudermann says, “I've come to think a person's willingness to die for a belief is in itself a vanity” (82). As a wealthier Mennonite, Sudermann has the luxury to criticize martyrdom; he is rich and doesn't see the value in physical deprivation that Mennonite views would traditionally champion.