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.