Do I golf?

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It’s high summer, the Gulf oil spill seems to be capped, so time for something lighter here… a bit of fun. Please note, dear friends and acquaintances, that the following is an amalgam of conversations/experiences over the years; no one should feel recently or personally incriminated! 🙂

It always begins as the most pleasant, the most innocent, of inquiries, asked with so much anticipation, as if the asker and I are about to be fast-tracked into understanding one another perfectly.

“Do you golf?”

I hesitate.

I could say, “Yes, isn’t it wonderful?” and then I’d be inside, I’d be a Someone Who’s Grasped the Good-life Secret.

But where would such subterfuge get me? Next thing I know, we’d be booking a game and the truth would have to come out.

Better to admit it.

“No. No, I don’t golf.”

Following this, disappointment or even pity may hang in the air. (I guess we won’t be tight after all.)

But sometimes the asker’s hopeful enthusiasm is simply re-directed. Attempts to ferret out my reasons and then overcome them begin in earnest. (Many golfers, I’ve noticed, tend to be zealous on the game’s behalf.) Continue reading →

“Whoever was tortured, stays tortured”

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I’d like to draw attention to – and recommend — “Living with the Enemy,” an essay by Susie Linfield, which applies the ideas of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry to the current challenge of reconciliation in Rwanda. (It appeared in today’s Arts and Letters Daily, my Safari homepage.)

She begins,

“Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Rwanda. Numerous books and articles on the topic—some, though not all, inspired by Christian teachings—pour forth. It can plausibly be argued, of course, that in Rwanda—and in other places, like Sierra Leone and the Balkans, where victims and perpetrators must live more or less together—reconciliation is a political necessity. Reconciliation has a moral resonance, too; certainly it is far better than endless, corpse-strewn cycles of revanchism and revenge. Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light…

Linfield discusses Améry’s writings, then draws on the trilogy of Jean Hatzfeld (which I reviewed here and in three subsequent posts last March), as well as the work of Primo Levi and photographer Jonathan Torgovnik to remind that “whoever was tortured, stays tortured.”

There’s much that could be said about forgiveness and reconciliation that’s not the least bit glib, but of course Linfield is right. The way we inevitably go at it, in our hopes for — and advice to — others whose torments we have not shared, never mind understood, is too quick. We like happy endings, and the sooner the happier. Linfield’s essay slows our expectations. It challenges our minds about what’s really at stake in a lasting reconciliation.

Alfred Neufeld reads the past, for the future

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I’m home from B.C., tired and brain-full. The Renewing Identity and Mission (RIM) event I mentioned at the end of my previous post was interesting and well worth attending. It was packed with workshops — three tracks running concurrently in every time slot, which means it was impossible to attend more than a third of them.

For now, I think I’ll simply post a few notes and reflections on the opening address of the RIM consultation, delivered by Alfred Neufeld of Paraguay. His paper served as a kind of foundational analysis for much of the conversation in subsequent sessions, as well as provoking some good discussion immediately. It deserves — and needs — further discussion, it seems to me, especially when the longer paper upon which his presentation was based is available as well.

Neufeld is an educator and writer with a long list of credentials which I won’t list here, except to say that he’s one of the denomination’s leading theologians and so it was fitting, I think, that he deliver the keynote address, attempting to draw an analysis of Mennonite Brethren (MB) identity with reference to its founding in 1860, as well as posit a vision for the future. He is also, thankfully, easy to listen to.

Neufeld’s reading of 1860 (shorthand for MB origins), he said, is threefold:

-Mennonite Brethren wanted to recover the essential nature of the church.

-Mennonite Brethren wanted to recover the existential dimension of salvation.

-Mennonite Brethren wanted to recover the transcultural mission of the Holy Spirit.

More precisely, Neufeld follows J.B. Toews in calling the MB origins “a phenomenon of renewal.”

Neufeld then provided a fascinating list of how historians and various members of  “the community of scholars” over the past 150 years have described the essence of the 1860 dissent that formed the MB Church. (I’m working from my scribbled notes here and apologize in advance for their inadequacy). Continue reading →