Blessed are the merciful

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I belong to a Mennonite-Catholic dialogue group which meets several times a year. Our assignment for this week’s meeting was a personal reflection on the Beatitudes, broadly, and then more specifically, in choosing one beatitude we were particularly “attracted” to at this point — in not more than seven minutes each! The contributions were varied, and all interesting. This was mine:

I memorized many parts of the Sermon on the Mount as a child, to get a reduction on Bible camp fees. So it seems the Beatitudes have been with me forever, like old markers, like a fence around my life. They’ve been markers for my (Mennonite) understanding of discipleship.

“Selig sind die Barmherzigen” (Blessed are the merciful), inscription over doorway in Berlin

In this reflection, however, I was struck by something else. The opening beatitudes [blessed are the poor, mourning, meek, hungry], at least, seem an expression of holes in the soul. I see need, grief, poverty of whatever kind, hunger. Yes, there’s a happiness expressed, but next to gaping wounds. Continue reading →

At home

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Anybody home? (Photo: R. Bergen Braun)

I’ve been thinking about home. I’m at home, so I guess what I’m really thinking about is being here – here in our so-and-so many square feet – and what that represents for me at the moment. Fall is in the air, for one thing, which means winter is coming, and winter is a time I love a lot. In winter home becomes even smaller and quite specific in being not the house and deck and garage and yard but the inside: these rooms, this furnace-provided warmth, these windows facing the low bright southern sun, these blinds against the early winter dark.

We’ve also been away for weeks at a time over the past months and now we’re home again without any immediate plans to leave. So I’ve been enjoying that too, settling back in with the projects centered in this place. One of those projects – more like an interval of particular happiness – concerns a week in October when our children and six grandchildren will all be coming “home” for a Thanksgiving family gathering. Continue reading →

Link notes: Bolivia, bread, a beach story, and more

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BOLIVIA  Those of you following the Bolivia Mennonites rape scandal and subsequent trial and judgment will want to read Mennonite Weekly Review associate editor Tim Huber’s editorial about it. At Sightings, Adam Darlage reflects on the “shocking” story in terms of how the “pacifist Anabaptist tradition” has shifted in the American imagination, from “deeply distrusting Old Order Anabaptism to romanticizing it.” He argues that a “doomsday narrative” that posits Old Order Anabaptist groups as symbols of virtue where vice should not reach is “a poor approach to these tragedies [the Nickel Mines tragedy and the sex scandal in Bolivia]” and concludes:

The Old Orders within the historic Peace Church tradition deserve more than facile narratives of nostalgia and woe when terrible events like these happen…. Instead, these groups merit deeply contextual understandings of their particular problems and concerns by people who would approach them for what they are: lived religious communities of human beings with their own sets of rituals, values, symbols and, to be sure, their own very human problems as well. Continue reading →