Crossposted from As of Yet Untitled

Occupy Love is an ambitious documentary. In an hour and 30 minutes, it attempts to offer a short history of Occupy Wall Street. It traces the roots of the movement back to the streets of Tunisia in December 2010 and through the plazas in Spain in the summer of 2011. In parallel to these clips from recent history, its interviews plumb the big ideas that undergird the Occupy movement. Interviews with activists, writers and thinkers run the gamut from the gift economy to western civilization’s estrangement from the natural world.

Through this eccentric tapestry, the film traces the thread of love. The filmmaker, Velcrow Ripper, asks everyone he interviews, "How could the crisis we’re facing be a love story?"

Ripper’s question brings unexpected responses. Clayton Thomas-Muller, a First Nations leader and an environmental activist, pulls aside his shirt to reveal a tattoo that says, "Love is a Movement."

"When you are born in a community that has been completely devastated by the energy infrastructure that’s been built on the back of our people all across continental North America," Thomas-Muller says, "you don’t choose to get involved in this work. You’re born to it."

The focus on love gives the film a tone of unreasonable optimism: hope against the odds. Perhaps this is necessary, given the alternative. On the very last day of 2007, I wrote a review here of What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, a look at the four ecological limits we are running into on this planet: peak oil, mass extinction, climate change and overpopulation. The movie delves deep in the suicidal structural problems in our system today but gives no clear answer to the question, "What can we do?"

In many ways, Occupy Love is the exuberant, bubbly daughter of What a Way to Go, which was released in 2007. It, too, is a personal essay with a clear editorial position, but the place in time and history is quite different. In the six intervening years, the global economic downturn has laid bare the silliness and sickness at the heart of the system. While political and economic leaders have battened down the hatches and refused to face reality, grassroots resistance and alternatives have blossomed. For many of us, there is no longer any question of the magnitude and reality of the crisis. The question is one of means, with the ends starkly and, often, mercilessly, in focus.

Love at the center of resistance

The questions of the means by which we resist domination and opression is no small one. There is a long history of embittered, violent resistance to empire from the Zealots to the Weather Underground. Occupy Love embodies a spirit of the age rejecting that paradigm of dehumanization and demonization. This is a movement investing in love.

"It’s not about confrontation," says Clayton Thomas-Muller, "it’s about communities coming together and marching to pray for the healing of the world’s largest and most destructive development in the history of mankind known as Canada’s tar sands."

While unequivocal in naming its opponent, the tone of the central message of the movement portrayed in Occupy Love gives the means of social change as much importance as the end itself.

This transition to a love-centered movement has not been by accident. In the film, womanist writer bell hooks articulates the careful wisdom that guides those in this militantly loving landscape.

"What is justice?" she asks. "The heart of it is really longing for people to be able to grow and develop freely in a positive and constructive way. So what are the conditions that allow for this? So we’re back to this idea that there can be no love where there is domination."

Others interviewed take a dip into the narrative of romantic love. "Great love stories involve yearning to be together and seperation by forces that seek to keep them apart." says biologist Rupert Sheldrake, "and certainly the big seperation that has happened here is the separation of humanity and nature, which has been brought about by a framework of thought and an ideology of development and domination and control and empire."

Sheldrake and hooks use language that dovetails with the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament concept of principalities and powers. At the same time, Occupy Love’s vision for transformation bears remarkable similarity to Jesus’ beloved community vision of enemy-loving and jubilee abundance.

"The lover knows that more for you is more for me too. If you love someone, then there happiness is your happiness." says author Charles Eisenstein. "Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. That’s love. Love is expansion of self to include the other. And that’s a different kind of revolution. There’s no one to fight. There’s no evil to fight. There’s no other in this revolution."

"Having people disconnect and see one another as enemies is so crucial to the maintenance of that dominator system." says bell hooks. "And love comes in and says, ‘There isn’t any difference that can’t be understood. There isn’t any conflict that can’t be reconciled.’ So that love becomes a major threat to the formation of any kind of culture of dominator-thinking and dominator-society."

These aren’t just abstract, idealized concepts for the chommunity behind this movie. They are the force that made it happen. The documentary was crowd funded using the open source fund raising tool Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Between the two campaigns, 903 people gave $80,911 to fund the film. It embodies the new robust face of love that author Clay Shirky names as a key factor in the open source movement: "When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love."

Those of us seeking to embody and live Jesus’ shalom vision have a lot to learn from this movie. Perhaps we can learn something from the way the wind is blowing after all.

If you can’t afford the $4 to watch the movie on-line, you can watch some of the short films that were made during the making the documentary here for free.

Update: You can watch the film for free if you email the makers of the film.

Photo caption: Woman photographs Overpass Light Brigade at Occupy Wall Street 1st anniversary celebration in Chicago, September 17th, 2012. Photo by Tim Nafziger

crossposted from As of Yet Untitled

It was five years ago in May 2008 when the Mennonite bishops of Lancaster (Pa.) Mennonite Conference finally allowed minsterial credentialing of women in their churches. Notably, they stipulated that women were still not allowed to become bishops.

I followed this story closely because I grew up in the Lancaster Conference until I was 13. I watched the damaging impact the anti-women culture had on my mother when she became Sunday school superintendent in the church where I grew up. Shortly after my grandmother’s brother left the church as a result of my mother’s new role, my grandmother came to visit. I’ll never forget listening to my mother tearfully explaining to my grandmother why she’d taken on the role. "No one else wanted to do it," she explained. She had hoped that the male leaders in the church would back her up, but they did not. They were both crying by the end of the conversation.

The generational impact of systematic sexism in the Mennonite Church will take an equally systematic and generational effort to overcome. Simply changing credentialing guidelines to include women is not enough. The Women in Leadership project of Mennonite Church USA is one such effort to "name and transform sexism in Mennonite Church USA." The project, co-coordinated by Hilary Scarsella and Joanna Shenk, began after a 2010 Women in Leadership audit found very few women in high-level leadership in Mennonite Church USA:

Currently the Governance Council of Mennonite Church USA, made up of the executive director, director of churchwide operations, agency directors, agency board chairpersons, the moderator and moderator elect, has 10 men and one woman.¹

The audit interviewed some of the women who declined high-level leadership positions in order to better understand their reasons. One woman pointed out the sexist assumptions underlying job expectations: "If I had a wife at home, I could take on that leadership position." Along with a wide range of other input, this led to Women in Leadership project focusing on empowering worship resources, telling women’s stories, mentoring and undoing sexism.

In today’s blog post I’ll be looking at this project and drawing on blog posts from the Women in Leadership blog that is part of the project. This work is crucial for the future of both men and women in our church.

Dumb yourself down and act tame

In A Transformation through the Values Based Leadership Program, Janet Treviño-Elizarraraz powerfully writes about the pressures that patriarchal culture put on women to play dumb and not be assertive.

"When I ran into my girlfriends," Treviño-Elizarraraz says, "I learned how to dumb myself down so as not to stick out." 

This post serves as a sequel to Treviño-Elizarraraz’s earlier piece in The Mennonite entitled "Do I fit in the Mennonite church?" in which she explicitly names a toxic mix of racism and sexism that beset women of color:

I’ve met people in the Germanic Mennonite culture who identify themselves without apology with this personality as well. But the difference is this: Most of those people I’ve met are men. It’s a lot easier to accept a man like me than a woman. Whereas in church leadership positions I may have excelled, in community, we all failed. In a church where community building is a high value, my personality, with its inevitable blind spot of considering others, created an even greater need for conversations that may include confrontation and conflict.

As I’ve processed this, I’ve heard from other minority Mennonites that to be in this church, you must act tame. “Find yourself a small group to be all you are, but while doing church, you’re to be the quiet version of you and not make waves.”

Treviño-Elizarraraz asks whether she can fit in a church that systematically oppresses its members (my words, not hers). What more powerful testimony do we have about the problems in our church? Our strongest leaders are not asking how they are called to lead, but instead whether they are can survive in our church at all. This is a crisis not only for women but for all of us who seek to be the whole body of Christ together. When women are empowered to bring their full, untamed voices to the table, as a community we can better "become agents of healing and hope in the world."²

The Women in Leadership project has led the way in naming not only how sexism, but also racism, affect women. Both of these oppressions are at work in Treviño-Elizarraraz’s story. Drawing on the work of writer bell hooks, Joanna Shenk laid out the challenge in her post Race and Gender: An optional conversation for feminists?

How often have I as a white woman forgotten to recognize race as inextricably linked to the work for gender justice? It’s easy for me to think of myself as only a woman working on “women’s issues,” whereas women of color cannot separate gender from race in their lived experience.

The conversation continued last month with a webinar entitled Women Leaders Engaging Race and Gender in the Church led by Regina Shands Stoltzfus, Linda Gehman Peachey, Joanna Shenk. Shands Stoltzfus began the conversation started with the story of Jarena Lee, the first women in the African Methodist Episcopal Church authorized to preach (although not ordained). Gehman Peachey took a close look at some of the ways those of us with privilege sometimes fail to see it. She reminded the audience of the importance of not putting responsibility back on women but to look at the system. I can’t help but think of the way my mother ended up being blamed for her decision to become Sunday School superintendent while the hurtful, sexist culture of the church went unchallenged.

It is precisely that challenging, that the Women in Leadership project is doing along with like-minded projects like Our Stories Untold and The Femonite.

I will end with a quote from Erica Littlewolf, a member of the steering committee for the project. In an interview by Hilary Scarsella she names the vision of a better world she is working for in response to Scarsella’s question, "What keeps you motivated?":

It doesn’t feel like work! It feels like a part of who I am, and the work I do feels natural and spirit-filled. I am also motivated by my nieces and the realization that I want a different world for them. I always wanted to change the world—the “world” being outside of me. I began to realize the biggest change I could make was through changing myself. Being willing to take on the hard work of self- transformation is the best way of ensuring that my nieces will live in a different and better reality than mine.

May we all come together to make it so!

Notes

1 These numbers are as of 2009. Everett Thomas offers this update: "The numbers will change after the Phoenix 2013 convention to four or five women: Elizabeth Soto Albrecht as MC USA moderator; Madeline Malonado will chair the MMN board; Melissa Miller currently chairs the MennoMedia board; Malinda Berry will chair the MEA board, and, if the delegates approve MHS Alliance becoming a denominational agency, Lee Snyder currently chairs that board."

2 That’s part of The Mennonite’s mission and a goal I hope we all share.

Photo: Pasadena Palm Sunday Peace Parade by Tim Nafziger

For more background on these themes, see my post, Anabaptist Camp follower revisited.

Two of my students have recently found a spiritual home in the radical Anabaptist tradition, having both become disillusioned with conservative non-denominational evangelical Christianity.

For what it’s worth, I’ve had several students over the past several years who have been leaving more conservative churches (Southern Baptist and Evangelical, in particular) for progressive peace churches. I don’t know what to attribute this to, but I certainly welcome it.

Could you share any more about this?

Well, this is a very conservative area, as you can imagine, and the vast majority of students at my university belong to extremely right-wing Southern Baptist and evangelical churches. Since I started working here in 2008, I’ve had something like eight or nine students come to me expressing their deep dissatisfaction with these kinds of churches. In at least two cases, the students were actually expelled from their congregations for questioning the pastors’ teachings.

Of these students, pretty much all of them have turned to various forms of Christianity ranging from the emerging church to UCC. About six of them (that I’m aware of) have been exploring Anabaptist Christianity—which is really hard, since there aren’t any Anabaptist congregations in the area.

The most liberal churches are Disciples of Christ and United Methodist, and neither of them are especially engaged with peace and social justice issues. This is a turn-off to these students, as they really want to live their faith through service to others.

In at least some cases students have changed their views as a result of studying philosophy, particularly the writings of Kierkegaard and other liberal (or just plain "unorthodox") Christian theologians and philosophers. I’ve personally directed a lot of these kids to Yoder, Eller, Ellul and the like.

If they are in any way representative of larger trends in American Christianity, then I, for one, am very heartened.

Can you say more about what they find attractive about Anabaptism?

It’s a combination of things. For one, I believe that students are generally attracted to what they perceive as the inclusiveness, open-mindedness and tolerance of progressive Anabaptism. For another, they are very interested in living their faith by serving "the least of these" and working for peace and justice in the world.

Beyond this, I think they are looking for a Christianity that is more deeply rooted in the Gospels. They are disillusioned with the inordinate emphasis on "salvation without works" that predominates in the conservative churches. They are interested in being disciples. They are not interested in condeming people to hell.

A lot of them have embraced open theism and universalism. A few are flirting with "unconventional" views of the Trinity. I guess Anabaptism is just more amenable to these kinds of spiritual explorations.

As I attempt to focus on the death of Jesus today, on Good Friday, I find it difficult. I’d rather check Facebook, read a magazine or stare out the window. Tonight there’s a church service that I’ll go to, but for now the ugly reality of death and violence feels far away.

What happens if I look more closely at that aversion: that sense of yuckiness? Recently, Rachel Halder of Our Stories Untold, shared with me a story that got me thinking about this in a different way. Rachel is a survivor of sexual abuse who has become an speaker and organizer around the issue of sexualized violence within the Mennonite Church in the U.S. She shared this story about an experience working with women in a Mennonite related project:

I brought up the fact that we needed to collect stories of women who have been abused. Again, as they always are, people were very hesitant about this. They were (perhaps rightfully?) worried that older women in the church would be turned off by overt language about abuse and they wouldn’t be willing to talk about any of their stories because of that "yucky" topic.

I too often find myself avoiding the topic of rape, sexualized violence or sexual abuse. These are topics that are extremely uncomfortable. I know they are important, but I’d rather let someone else talk about them. And this is where the yuckiness of the cross challenges me. In Philippians 2:7-8, we read that Jesus "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave… he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross."

Might following Jesus include engaging with the "yucky" topic of sexualized violence? What is behind the way way I and so many others avoid it?

On On March 17, 2013 the verdict in the Steubenville High School rape case in Ohio brought the topic of rape and rape culture into the spotlight. Two days later, Rachel put out a call for submissions on Our Stories Untold. In it, she offered a specific challenges to Mennonites:

Is the church going to examine Steubenville and see it for what it is—an event that could happen (DOES happen) in our communities? An event that points out the way we favor young athletes and charismatic Christians? The way we victim-blame in our institutions, churches, and congregations?

The resulting posts in "Steubenville Reflection Series" are well worth reading. Here are a few of them:

• Your Sexual Morality is Not My Responsibility - Brooke Natalie Blough challenges the way Anabaptist values of modesty are expressed in ways that blame women for men’s thoughts. The message is that "boys that they are sexual animals, incapable of controlling themselves." Instead, she proposes, modesty can be a statement of inner beauty that emphasizes that women are not objects.
• A Mennonite Pastor’s Open Letter to the Youth of Her Churches - Sylvia Klauser distills her wisdom as a theologian, ethicist and chaplain into a pastoral letter to the youth that makes Anabaptist sexual ethics remarkably readable. Starting with the reminder that rape is about power-over, not sex, she challenges the church to talk about sex, not just intercourse. She closes with a challenge young men in particular to "speak up about rape and stop using force in sexual relationships."
• Your Sexual Morality is Not My Responsibility (halfway down page) - Beth Lambier reminds us that 73% of sexual assaults happen with friend or acquaintance. She challenges the conventional wisdom that "only certain types of women are raped" and the tendency to blame victims for somehow provoking the attacks.
• A Call for Gender-Neutral Dialogue - Luke D. Nofsinger looks at the high incidence of sexualized violence against juveniles in detention (12% are victims while imprisoned). The majority of these attacks go unreported and Luke points out that many men and boys don’t report rape because it is seen as a crime exclusively against women and girls.
• Rape, Alcohol, and the Wild West - Melodie Davis looks at the role that "winking at alcohol abuse" on college campuses creates a destructive culture of binge drinking an how this enables and feeds rape culture.
• Finding hope and empathy through Steubenville - Allison Yoder emphasizes the opportunity we have to teach empathy to boys, an attribute rarely valued in teenage male culture in the U.S. She says, "The problem in that is [society] does not foster an awareness of how to be relational and value other human beings." She closes with a hopeful story of a male social work colleague of hers who is doing work in this area at a high school where he visits classrooms "to tell stories about how sexual violence has impacted him and women in his own life."

The number of writers (9 in all) and quality of writing speaks volumes to the need for the space that Rachel has opened. Along with blog posts, Our Stories Untold features stories from survivors of sexualized violence. These are all anonymous accounts. Story 4 – The Ebb and Flow of Healing in particular brought home for me the life long trauma of sexualized violence:

I get angry. I cry. I run home and lock myself in my bedroom. I sob. I run to the bathroom, throw up, come out with a smile and return to the dance floor. I pretend. Because who wants to be friends with someone who is always sad? Who is constantly triggered by sights, sounds, smells of things around her?

The writer goes on to describe the impact of her rape on her relationships with her whole community.

Yesterday, as the sun set on Good Friday, I was reminded that this is the yuckiness that Jesus invites us to face into: the hidden, painful wounds of those on the margins. The case of sexualized violence is particularly important for me as a man, who has the privilege to look the other way: to cross by on the other side of the road. I need to commit to the difficult work of challenging rape culture and the broader sexist culture in which it swims. What will you do?

A page from the Martyr’s mirror depicting Geleyn Corneliss, who was hung by his thumb while his torturers played cards. Modified illustration from Third Way Cafe

Crossposted from As of Yet Untitled

Yesterday, March 6, 2013, we in the US learned in The Guardian that our government put torture and death at the center of our policy in Iraq. According to the article, Jim Steele, who was heavily involved in the El Salvadoran death squads, was called in to replicate the model in Iraq in 2004 with millions of dollars at his disposal. This strategy, known as the “Salvador Option” was apparently known and discussed at the highest levels of the US government and supervised closely by General David Petraeus. These actions are consistent with US policy since the end of World War II: torture and mass murder in support of US economic interests.

This is no aberration: it is the norm for empire. Nevertheless, many will hem and haw, rationalize and suggest this is still a few bad apples, albeit 4 star general apples. Tragically, most in the United States will simply ignore it. But what about us, as Mennonites: as Anabaptist Christians? What will we do?

Throughout our 400 year history, Mennonites have said no to war. But our “no” has been a passive, quiet one: over in the corner, tending our flocks and fields. We have not placed ourselves in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets with their unmistakable, angry indictment of injustice and violence in their community. We have often missed the connection between the stories in the Martyr’s Mirror and the ongoing torture of those outside our walls. Instead, the message we took was: resistance will be crushed. Redemption or not, our foremothers and fathers died horrible deaths. We were loath to follow and instead focused inward: protecting our own.

Gradually, over the last 50 years, Canadian and US Mennonites have been pulling our heads out of the sand. Our commitment to service put Mennonite Central Committee volunteers in contact with those most brutalized by US foreign policy. These volunteers have brought these stories with them to existing Mennonite organizations and structures, but they also helped to form new initiatives, like Christian Peacemaker Teams.

Yet the majority of Mennonites who voted in 2004 chose George W. Bush, mere months after the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse broke. John Kerry would unlikely have been better and President Obama promoted General David Petraeus. However, that vote for Bush in that particular time and political space signaled a profound blindness on our parts to the same practices and patterns of this world that tortured and killed the early Anabaptists.

More recently I have anecdotal experience of this attitude. The Guardian clearly traces their investigation on these torture centers back to the release, by Wikileaks, of hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. In November 2010, On the day of that release, I wrote a post naming the tactics of Wikileaks as “cutting edge peacemaking” I said:

I believe the work they are doing is on the emerging edge of resistance to U.S. imperialism. The releases not only unmasks the powers in meticulous detail, but threaten the very mechanisms through which empire seek to influence, control and coerce.

Most of the comments in response focused on the personal ethics of theft and hypothetical lives put at risk by the leaks. There was a strong sense of “us” identified with the United States government and its policies and a remarkable unwillingness to discuss the unhypothetical deaths of Iraqi civilians and many others around the world by US empire.*

We, as Mennonites in the US and Canada, are unwilling to look systematically at the evil of our rulers, the authorities and “the cosmic powers of this present darkness.” (Ephesians 6:12, NRSV). Instead we focus only on the personal sins and our piety. The whole armor of God becomes a cutout for the felt board in Sunday school rather then a road map for resistance to the domination system.

Jesus’ whole life, death and resurrection was a witness against the project of empire and domination, both personal and social. We are inheritors to a tradition of dissent: of refusal to play by the rules of that game. If we let them, our faith can be our guide in challenging the colonization of our minds, our communities and our country by the principalities and powers. The same powers that set up the torture centers where Iraqis were beaten, shocked and raped in the name of our security and economic prosperity.

There was one hopeful note in this story. Neil Smith was the only US solider willing to go on camera to discuss US involvement in the torture centers and he did so because of his faith:

He now lives in Detroit and has become a born-again Christian. He spoke to the Guardian because he said he now considered it his religious duty to speak out about what he saw. “I don’t think folks back home in America had any idea what American soldiers were involved in over there, the torture and all kinds of stuff.”

I pray that these revelations today will wake us up as Smith woke up. Our slumber is destroying the dreams of millions.

P.S. For a related discussion of the ways that communities, including Mennonites, have responded to repression by creating redemptive narratives, see my comments at the end of the Iconocast interview with Noam Chomsky

*The most troubling response, because of its source, came from the editor of a mainstream Mennonite publication, identified publicly in his comment as “managinged” who also emailed me. He offered an article by Canadian Christian ethicist Margaret Sommerville. In an email to him, I pointed out that her arguments were from a Constantinian just war perspective that saw the US empire as a fundamental good and responded in detail to the way she so strongly identified with the apparatus of empire. He did not respond to any of my points, but instead asked me whether I would publish a leak from a Mennonite church institution - implicitly refusing to make a moral distinction between the institutions of the church and state. He concluded by asking whether Wikileaks wasn’t trying to “play God” by putting their hope in human judgement rather than trusting God as they should.

The other day I had a good conversation with Mark Van Steenwyk, a writer and activist who lives in the Mennonite Worker community in Minneapolis, Minn. The conversation brought me back to concept of Anabaptist camp followers (ACF’s) that I first dealt with in December 2009, in Levi Miller, peace and justice and the Mennonite chattering class, a response to a piece by former Mennonite publish Levi Miller that took a jaded look at “peacenjustice” as a fading marketing ploy and coined the phrase Anabaptist camp followers. In the last paragraph of my article, I offered a challenge to Mennonites to welcome this generation’s ACF’s:

Today, we are seeing a new wave of “Anabaptist camp followers.” As with the earlier wave, many of them come from evangelical backgrounds looking for the missing peace and justice. I’ve heard many first and second hand stories of young evangelicals walking into Mennonite churches longing for the whole gospel only to find a church doing its best to blend in with all the other Christian churches in town. Will we once again blame them as naive idealists and turn our back on them as we focus on keeping those inside the fold happy?

Since then, the importance of ACF’s has become even clearer to me. I was part of the conversation that led to Widening the Circle: Experiments in Christian Discipleship, which is a conversation between ACF’s who have been drawn to the Mennonite church over the past 50 years and cradle Mennonites drawn to radical discipleship. From California to Georgia, the book looks at the seeds that have grown when ACFs have interacted with the Mennonite church.

Unicycle demonstration at Papa Festival at Plowcreek Fellowship in Tiskilwa, Illinois on June 20, 2008

I talked with Joanna Shenk, editor of Widening the Circle. As someone who grew up with parents who were former Mennonite, she’s embraced the Mennonite church as an adult, and so falls into both the ACF and cradle Mennonite camp. In an interview for this blog post, she said:

And I found that in many cases (but not all), my peers who had grown up Mennonite (”cradle” folks), weren’t that energized by the theology that had given me so much hope. It was just old hat to them… or a reason to be arrogant toward other Christians. That was disappointing.

I think those new to Anabaptism and those who have been around it for awhile need each other as conversation partners–the potential is for all of us to be challenged to look at our faith and commitments in new ways. In what ways have some of us taken the tradition/theology for granted? In what ways have others of us idealized it? What does it mean to learn from the complicated history of Anabaptism and allow it to shape the church/us today? We need each other for those conversations.

Joanna is continuing the conversation through a Widening the Circle mini-series on the Iconocast. She’ll be interviewing chapter authors about their journeys since contributing to Widening the Circle. Her questions include: What has changed? How has their thinking deepened around the themes they wrote about? What do they see happening in the discipleship community movement currently? What is taking shape in their community/organization? What have they let go?

I’ve also come to understand better how inhospitable Mennonites have been to ACF’s. In November of 2011, I wrote here about the cool reception Vincent Harding received when he challenged Mennonites to become more involved in the civil rights movement. Mennonite leaders were dismissive of any responsibility to become involved:

Mennonite voluntary service director Edgar Stoesz compared the civil rights struggle to World War II, in which Mennonites didn’t participate, but showed up afterwards to clean up. Mennonites “decline to participate in the interracial conflict but seek rather to bring reconciliation and goodwill.”

Harding incisively named this clean-up-afterwards strategy as Mennonites commitment to being the rear light rather than the front light.

Leonide Begly talks with Mark Van Steenwyk at a workshop at Papa Festival in Tiskilway, Ilinois on June 21, 2008

This leads me back to my conversation with Mark. In the paper issue of The Mennonite JoannaShenk interviews Mark and he shares both affirmation and critiques of Mennonites. He names the dynamic in which cradle Mennonites make everyone else feel like forever outsiders:

I’ve met folks who have been Mennonites for decades who still feel like outsiders. We welcome folks with our words but often push them away with our actions and cultural hang-ups. To be a Mennonite, for me, means accepting the reality that I’ll never be as Mennonite as other people.

In preparing this blog post, I asked Mark to share further thoughts about the relationship between ACF’s and others in the Mennonite church:

Regarding what Mennonites can learn from ACF’s … I think that newly emerging Anabaptists understand the points of tension between Anabaptist values and cultural trends. Legacy Mennonites, however, are still defined by the tensions of previous generations. For example, Vincent Harding understood the direct conflict between racism and Anabaptism in ways legacy Mennonites did not. They already determined that their role was to helpful stabilizers–because that is a role they had adopted over centuries.

Today, you can see this with younger radicals who see the violence of globalization, banking, sexism, heteronormativity, but Mennonites tend to be so focused on the predefined issues that they tend to be blind. The only reason homosexuality is an issue discussed by Mennonites is that it threatens unity, and is not seen—by many Mennonites—to be an issue of justice.

I look forward to the conversation between ACF’s and cradle/legacy Mennonites continuing.

PAPA Festival was one such space for conversations between ACF’s and Mennonites since it was hosted by a Mennonite community. For more of my photos and thoughts from that gathering, see my blog post from July 2008: PAPA Festival: A Report.

For more on the conversations between Mennonites and the emerging church from YAR see the submergent category archive.

This past month has been a busy one for me, starting with two and a half weeks in Chicago to help lead training for new trainees joining Christian Peacemaker Teams. One of the highlights was this video of the public witness to close Guantanamo and end torture in which I did some videography and my first ever voice over narration.

This past weekend was the first in our two weekend Peace, Pies and Prophets west coast tour. On Friday night, Jan. 25, we raised over $5,000 at Seattle Mennonite Church. It was a rousing good time, with Tim Ruebke at his most hyper auctioneering level that I’d seen yet.

On Saturday night, January 26th, at Portland Mennonite we had a great turnout and all our pies went for over $200. After expenses, we raised over $7,000 for CPT.

It seems like with every show, the auction becomes more and more central in what makes the night exuberantly fun for all ages. Part way through the evening, Ted and Tim suggested that some of the little girls sitting in the front row pool their money to buy a pie:

Charletta let them borrow her CPT hat to go around and collect money from the audience. After they counted their money, they picked out a pie from the pie table and brought it up to the front. We had a special flash auction in which they bought their chosen pie for $300. In this photo, you see the spokesperson for the group of girls heading up to hand over the money to Ted for the pie:

If you read this blog and live in Oakland or Los Angeles, stop by and say hi! I always enjoy meeting readers of this blog. Event details here: Ted and Company event page.

Photos by Charletta Erb

For each of the 12 days of Christmas, Christian Peacemaker Teams is honoring a specific CPTer for their peacemaking work. Here are the first six honorees. I wrote the first three and the last three were written by Sarah Thompson, CPT’s outreach coordinator:

Pierre Shantz

For the first day of Christmas we’re thanking Pierre Shantz for his 15 years of full-time service with CPT, working for peace and justice first with the team in Hebron, then in Chiapas and, since 2001, in Colombia. Pierre is the longest serving field-based peacemaker, and also the silliest CPTer. Here’s a portrait I took of him while I was visiting the Colombia team this summer.

Sandra Milena Rincon

For the second day of Christmas, the feast of St. Stephen, we’re honoring Sandra Milena Rincon, project support coordinator for the Colombia and Iraq teams. Sandra Milena has been a full-time CPTer since 2003, serving on the Colombia team before she moved to her current role as project support coordinator.

Through her work and life, Milena has both embodied and articulated the importance of CPT’s relationship with our partner communities. Here’s how she put it in a 2009 address to the Mennonite World Conference in Paraguay:

Truly, [CPT] would not be where we are now if it were not for the local communities who have given us the opportunity to be present in their struggle and to support their nonviolent resistance to powers that will not allow them to live in their land with dignity.

Milena gave this presentaion on the 25th anniversary of the speech by Ron Sider that catalyzed the formation of CPT. Milena’s speech exemplified the vulnerability and honesty that we are called to as peacemakers. She names both the way CPT has fallen short, but also the way we have pushed ourselves in new directions:

“After twenty-five years, CPT must face an even larger challenge, one that is no less rich. It calls us to work in a global context where the struggle to keep hope alive continues to be at the root of bringing the Reign of God to life. Being present in the way has not been, is not, and will not be easy; there is much work to do and our strength easily falters. Nevertheless, as CPT, we continue to answer the call of God that we hear in the voices of the communities we accompany and that we feel through the support of our own faith communities.”

It’s appropriate that we honor Sandra Milena on the feast of St. Stephen, who served the alien, the orphan and the widow, and at the very end of his life, on the brink of martyrdom, had the courage to call them out for their killing of the prophets and stiff-necked clinging to power.

You can read Sandra Milena’s entire presentation: “The Challenge Continues.”

Chris Sabas

For the third day of Christmas, we’re honoring the work of Chris Sabas. Chris graduated from CPT training in August 2011. She joined the Aboriginal Justice team in Toronto on Jan. 3, so make sure to wish her a happy anniversary on the 10th day of Christmas.

In the last four days, Chris has launched one of the most effective CPT Facebook campaigns ever. In support of Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike (more background here: http://www.cpt.org/cptnet/2012/12/21/aboriginal-justice-cpt-stands-chief-theresa-spence-hunger-strike), Chris has solicited nearly 50 photos showing CPTers (and others) holding signs supporting Chief Spence. One of the signs, showing CPTer Laurens van Esch and his wife, Janelle, in the Netherlands, has gone viral with over 940 shares in the last 24 hours and counting (see here). As of this writing, that’s going up by about 7 shares a minute. You can see all the photos from the Christmas blitz here.

Chris didn’t expect her week to go this way. Here’s how she tells it:

“The idea came to me as I was walking back to the CPT house after church, on Sunday. I actually was to leave that day for a week long modified silent retreat. I went to bed Saturday night quite conflicted about that. had I gone, AJT basically would have been ’shut down’ since the rest of the team is on holiday … not the ideal time for that with this historic moment.

And that’s what this is: historic. I’ve said many times that this just ‘feels’ different. Prior to the national day of protests, I’ve have turned my nose at flash mobs. I thought what’s the point, they don’t work and are a waste of time …

But then the images started coming in via social media. One-thousand people reportedly turned out in downtown Toronto, shutting down an area called Dundas square for at least 15 minutes. Incredible. That’s when I knew that this was different. And that’s when my angst began, as I was to leave Sunday.

That’s when my Christmas morning blitz came to me. I knew there had to be a way to make a point and be noticed … and what better way to do that than Twitter. I knew Chief Spence had a twitter account as well as Harper and a member of Parliament had followed us, prior to #idlenomore, who is quite supportive with indigenous issues. And I knew I could reach out to media.”

But I stayed and don’t regret staying … not at all. Far from it. Many were concerned that with Christmas, the momentum may lose steam. I thought … what an opportunity for CPT. We can maintain the perimeter sort of thing, being the voice on behalf of our partners … just in a ‘different’ way.

This is more than Bill C45 and Chief Spence; that blew the powder keg off. I read a report from the Toronto protest that an elder said that he was waiting for this moment “all his life.” Social media is playing its part again today: round dance/ flash mobs, from all over Canada.”

Chris’ creativity and commitment in standing with our partners exemplifies CPT’s work for to transform violence and oppression.

As you can tell from Chris’ account, her social media work is not taking place in isolation. Rather, it’s happening in concert with thousands of people across Canada who are participating in events on the street from flash mobs, to the blockade of the railroad near Sarnia. You can read CPTer Alan Slater’s report on his visit here: http://www.cpt.org/cptnet/2012/12/27/aboriginal-justice-reflection-visit-aamjiwnaang

Appropriately enough, this third day of Christmas is the feast day of St. John the evangelist. Like the other disciples, John was part of the incredible growth of the early church as the way of Jesus spread like wildfire across the Roman Empire. Though the means are quite different today, we hope that the message of justice and peace for First Nations communities across Canada can spread with the same fervor today.

Kathy Thiessen

For the fourth day of Christmas, we’re honoring the work of Kathy Moorhead-Thiessen. She has been working with CPT for two and a half years all in Iraqi Kurdistan. She trained in summer 2010 and says “I have a wonderful husband who supports me in the unusual lifestyle of going to IK for five months/year.” Chris Sabas, Aboriginal Justice Team member nominated Kathy, saying, “What I have noticed about Kathy is her willingness to learn, be vulnerable, and try.”

The feast day of the fourth day of Christmas is the “Feast of the Holy Innocents.” It is timely to honor Kathy today as she has reported extensively on the impact of the cross-border bombings on the children of Iraqi Kurdistan.

In her nomination, Chris continued, “Kathy was to have a co-leader on their last delegation and he was denied entry. While she did have another teammate with her, it was a formative experience for her–from logistical headaches, to having important conversations with delegates. She is brutally honest and intuitive, and willing to have the hard discussions. She’s cognizant of the many privileges she has, whether she’s in Iraqi-Kurdistan or in her very home city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. She and her husband lent their support to AJT’s Christmas morning blitz call for assistance, and took the time to stand in solidarity with Chief Theresa Spence, from Attawapiskat, who began a hunger strike December. No matter where she is, she’ll take the handle of justice.”

In this picture Kathy examines the work created by Kurdish school children, “the holy innocents” of Sunneh village … Their school was bombed three times nearly annually. The teachers taught class in the IDP camp one semester. Uncertainty aside, the school was re-built as a labor of love by the teachers and community.

For all the innocents who die or suffer or languish by our violence, indifference or greed, Lord, have mercy. Thank you Kathy Moorhead-Thiessen for helping the world get a step closer to a place of sharing, safety and love.

- Sarah Thompson

Tarek Abuata

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me … 5 GOLDEN RINGS, but better yet, Tarek Abuata!

Tarek is one of CPT’s Project Support Coordinators He’s a Palestinian-American who knows something about true love. Upon his return from Palestine recently, he gave a speech to the D.C. Metro Friends of Sabeel gathering, saying:

“Jesus’s message is to love your neighbor and love your enemy, but what if your neighbor is your enemy? Love doesn’t cancel love; we have to love our neighbors twice as much in this case!”

One day after Tarek and a friend finished an exhausting patrol of the old city of Hebron, an Israeli settler approached them and spit in their faces, calling them Nazis for helping Palestinian children. Tarek recounts his emotions, “Do you think I thought ‘It takes love to fight an Occupation?’ No, no! At that moment I said to myself I would like to slap him!”

Yet a few days later, six 5-year old Palestinian children were detained by six Israeli soldiers for playing with toy guns on Eid. Looking at the scene Tarek said his heart was softened. “I stood back wondering which kids are getting abused more, those 5 year olds with toy guns or those 18-year-olds with real guns? I could only feel compassion for all involved, including myself.”

“I learned that with love,” he concluded, “we become a mirror to someone’s actions. Jesus asked us to turn our cheek, not our eyes. I look into a soldier’s eyes directly for him to see my soul through my eyes, and in the process, he sees his own soul through that mirror, connecting us at a profound level that can’t be verbalized, and waking us both out of our societal self-inflicted nightmares.”

Thank you Tarek, for sharing your gifts and experiences with CPT and the world, showing us that love works—and for your awesome style—the aesthetic value of 5 golden rings is not lost on you! Merry fifth Day of Christmas, everyone!

- Sarah Thompson, Outreach Coordinator

Julián Gutiérrez Castaño

On the sixth Day of Christmas, the feast day of the Holy Family, CPT is honoring Julián Gutiérrez Castaño. Julián first began his peacemaking work with CPT on the Colombia team in 2005. He brought with him to the team strong skills in political analysis, which came through in his writing for the team on the relationships between multinational mining companies, the Colombian government and CPT’s partners.

Here’s a quote from a 2006 article he wrote on perspective of CPT’s partners, small-scale artisanal gold miners:

“In contrast to multinational corporations, the miners do not think in dollars; they think in families, children, future, rivers, trees, mountains,animals, earth, mining and crops. Just as Indigenous Colombians do, they fight for the right to develop their own way of life.”

After three years on the Colombia team, Julián joined the Aboriginal Justice Team (AJT), as the first person from Latin America to serve in a CPT North American project. He’s also one of the few full-time CPTers who have served extensively on more than one team, providing health cross-pollination.

AJT Teammate Chris Sabas describes Julián’s work with the team in this way:

“Innocence and fragility is what first comes to mind when I think of Julián.” That might not appear to fit with his physical image; his bulging biceps and gregarious dreadlocked hair … yet “what I’ve enjoyed most about working with him, spending time with him, is his innocent curiosity about … everything … anything. He embraces life. He enjoys it. I can hear his laugh as I type and can see the tears of joy fill in his eyes, as they often do when he tells a story,” like this one. But he is also committed: very committed to advancing the voices of the marginalized.

Julián himself is marginalized often in Canada, and residency here is challenging. As a Colombian, “when he first arrived to join team,” Chris says, “he couldn’t leave to visit his homeland because Canada would not issue him the type of visa that would permit multiple exits/entries. He had to remain in Canada for over a year until he could travel to his beloved home country. This is where the fragility comes in; that is not the only example of Julian having to bear the brunt of a racist, colonial society/ government. At times, he’s reminded that he is Colombian, and reminded in a way that is not shall we say positive or embracing.”

Chris also spoke to his ability to deal with different perspectives: “He can have a hard, challenging conversation. But another thing I admire about him is his ability to walk away from it, meaning that he doesn’t live in the past, can move on and to continue to embrace the moment.”

Julián is preparing to lead AJT’s spring 2013 delegation to Grassy. Sign up here.

Merry sixth Day of Christmas (Feast day of the Holy Family).

- Sarah Thompson and Tim Nafziger, Photo provided by Tim

If you’d like to see the rest as they come out, like the CPT page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/cpters) or tune in next week.

This is the funniest book about the pain of suicide you’ll ever read. It may also be the most profound. By diving deep into what it means to lose your comedy partner, Ted Swartz squeezes us through windows of surprising grace, lubricated by laughter.

Scene 2 of the book tells the tragic story of how Lee Eshleman “succumbed to a fatal illness known as depression” in 2007, as Ted puts it. Lee was the other half of Ted and Lee, the only full-time professional Mennonite comedy company that I’ve ever known. His death sent Ted into a spiral of anger, guilt, debt, depression and holey underwear as his business collapsed, and he got into debt.

But that’s not where Ted’s story begins. It begins, where mine did, in a little Mennonite community in Pennsylvania. Although 30 years apart, the familiar Swiss German Mennonite markers are all there: footwashing, no dancing, no television, no alcohol and, of course, the guilty Mennonite love affair with The Sound of Music. The similarities were uncanny at points. Like me, his diversionary entertainment during the church was limited to two Scotty dog magnets, one black and one white. There must have been some secret Mennonite how-to-manage-your-kid-in-church book that both our parents read.

We also both grew up in communities that were gradually leaving their cape dresses, plain suits and coverings behind them. It seems that Franconia Mennonite Conference must have been a few decades ahead of Lancaster (Pa.) County Mennonites. When Ted’s father abandoned the plain suit (as mine did), he was told by a fellow church member, “You are going down.” Ted’s wry comment on the incident speaks to the way Mennonites of that time and place used the threat of hellfire as a means for passive aggressive social control:

We were pretty sure he wasn’t going to deck Dad. Good Mennonites didn’t hit anyone. Damning them to hell was much cleaner, and somehow sanctified.

After an early career as a butcher (with only one dramatic accident), Ted was asked by members of his congregation to go to seminary, all expenses paid, in order to become their pastor. After five years in seminary, he realized his real calling was acting. A central thread in the book is Ted’s struggle to prove that comedy was as worthy a vocation as preacher.

Ted’s stories also speak to the use of humor in every day peacemaking, including one incident after he, Lee and their fellow company member Ingrid De Sanctis had been arguing ferociously:

Ingrid’s sister, Kathy, is a close confidante of Ing’s, and they talk often. After leaving the Books-A-Million, while the air was still crackling with tension, Lee pulled out his phone and whispered urgently, his voice filled with horror, “Kath, it’s Lee … They’re fighting again, Ted and Ingrid. What should I do? … No, no, I tried that … I tried that … I tried that. Do you think I should let either one drive? … Okay. Do you think they’ll try to kill each other? … No, no, I took Ingrid’s gun earlier today; she was shooting out the window.”

But the peacemaking work that has most impressed me is Ted’s “I’d like to Buy an Enemy” show. During the course of 2012, I worked with Ted & Company on the conception, organizing and production of “Peace, Pies and Prophets,” which combined the show with a improv comedy pie auction to benefit Christian Peacemaker Teams. I’ve watched the show eight times and I still haven’t gotten tired of watching the way Ted and Tim Ruebke satirize our military machine and the cult of death that supports it.

If you live in Seattle, Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, southern Ontario or Henderson, Neb., you can see the “Peace, Pies and Prophets” yourself this winter. We also have a likely show in McPherson, Kan. Show dates are here. Here’s a little glimpse into the spirit of the show. It opens with Ted driving to the first show of the tour in Akron, Pa.:

I’ve spent many a mile in the front seat with Ted driving between shows. The man I’ve gotten to know is the same person so honestly and openly revealed in this book. That’s because Ted’s art is not one of masks. In the trailer for the book, he says, “Acting is not putting something on so no one can see you. Acting is taking things off so everyone can see you. You’re stripping yourself naked so people can peek inside.” That openness is at the center of this book: from moments of utter failure to the pinnacle of artistic success and celebrity (as conflicting as that is for a good Mennonite). And everywhere in between.

Acting has been an anathema for Mennonites for 400 years, but Ted practices it in a way that embodies the best of Anabaptism. That is: vulnerability as the glue of our community. It’s not about how we dress or whether or not we wear makeup. It’s not even about our committee meetings and our service projects. Anabaptism is about coming together in our shared brokenness. After all, that’s what sharing time is all about.*

You can get a hardback or ebook of Laughter is Sacred Space from MennoMedia here.

*I didn’t realize until this year that not all protestant churches have a time for anyone in the congregation to stand up and share. Todd Davis writes beautifully about this space here.

I had a dream last night that kept repeating all night. Time travel was invented. A conservative Amish-ish sect used it to swap the past for the future with everyone else. They kept going back one year so that they wouldn’t have to experience all the new developments. But this kind of time travel only worked by swapping places with people in the past. So they swapped with people who wanted to skip ahead and get their new iPhones sooner and watch the new Mad Men season earlier. This seemed like a harmless and good deal for everyone involved. But it emerged that each year (a la Groundhog day) the retro sect was using their knowledge of the future to secure enormous power over the world. But it actually turned out well because the sect used their power to prevent wars, famines, etc…

Maybe Mark Tooley was just off by one sect. Zack asks for movie credit from anyone who makes the movie.

Photo by Tim Nafziger

In her introductory post, Why Femonite?, Hannah talks about her identity as a Mennonite "… I have found myself, again and again, drawn back into Mennonite and Anabaptist theology and communities, because of its continual focus on the narrative and life of Jesus, and not just his death."

Hannah’s introduction to the sexism "in earnest" came working in Mennonite institutions. Unfortunately, this fits with the stories I’ve heard from many of my Mennonite female peers working in church institutions. Hannah also names the hope she feels in so many people and communities who are finding Anabaptism for the first time and identifying with the story. This paradox captures the struggle of our generation: how do we embrace the incredible richness and potential of our faith tradition while challenging institutions shot through with oppressive patterns?

Even though this blog is only 7 months old, it’s already opened an important space to wrestle with this question. I’d like to share with you a few of the excellent posts that have been written there over the past month. In some cases I’ve added my own commentary while in others I’ve simply summarized the post. In all cases, I’d encourage you to click the titles and read the whole post on The Femonite. The first three articles I’ve shared are from a series on Mennonite Identity that looked at the question: "What does it mean to be a Mennonite woman?"

What does it mean to me to be a Mennonite Woman? - Malinda Berry

Malinda reflects the deep connection between her identity as a Mennonite and as a feminist. Malinda writes with poetic conciseness on the work of Doris Janzen Longacre, best known for compiling the More-with-Less Cookbook in painting a vision of organic theology. That is: fruit-focused faith that doesn’t get hung up on "heresy-proofing" or creeds. It’s not about appearances but about the everyday work that brings about shalom.

Mennonite, Feminist, & Woman - Hilary Scarsella

Hilary’s reading of her identity as Mennonite and feminist acknowledges some of the ways these identities can feel like they conflict: "I’ve absorbed the idea that a ‘good Mennonite woman’ is one who blends into the background and delights in helping others into the limelight." she says. Feminism has been an important tool for challenging that pattern in herself, but she feels that her identity as a feminist, "seems to pose a potential threat to my credibility" among Mennonites. In conclusion, Hilary names the importance of a community centered around faith, justice and reconciliation, hile and also naming the struggle "to feel justified in seeking out and accepting my own gifts, talents, and successes" that comes with her Mennonite identity.

Just a Joke?: Encountering Sexism in Surprising Places - Anna Groff

Anna shares the story of a sexist remark from a police man on the street in Phoenix and her challenge to his joke. I appreciate the way she grounds her post in a specific experience and her own processing of it, but also points out that this is part of a broader pattern in society.

Anna’s story reminds me of a quote from Marilyn Frye that we use in the Undoing Sexism module of Christian Peacemaker Teams training. Frye compares the effects of sexism to a bird cage:

Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere;

Unfortunately, the response to Anna’s blog post illustrates this point all too well. A commenter named "Jim Kirk" (perhaps a reference to the womanizing captain of the Enterprise?). Rather than empathize with Anna’s experience, he claims that it was "actual harassment" and belittles her personally. Like so many men down through history, Jim refuses to empathize with a women’s experience and look at the way this one wire is one of many.

Full disclosure: Anna is my editor at The Mennonite.

Why We Need Each Other - Amy Yoder McGloughlin

Amy writes about "the cost to being an ally" as a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church (GMC), the oldest Mennonite congregation in the United States. She looks at the parallels between the scarlet letter worn by Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel and her own experience of rejection for the welcoming stance that GMC took toward the queer community.

Amy attended GMC for many years before her decision to become a pastor. In fact, her pastoral call was shaped by night the congregation was expelled by Franonia Conference for welcoming queer people. After graduating from seminary she was looking for a job as a pastor and and was turned down as a candidate at a church because "they were worried I’d bring the queers with me." In another case, she was told directly by one Mennonite pastor: "How in the hell do you ever expect to get a job in the Mennonite church with GMC on your resume?"

How many other Mennonite seminary graduates have quietly sacrificed their principles in order to get a job? How many of those who already have jobs dare not speak their views in public due to the risk of losing them?

In Remembrance of Bat-Jiftah: Judges 11:29-40 - Leo Hartsorn

As part of series on the blog about sexual violence, Leo Hartsorn writes about Jephthah’s murder of his daughter, one of the "texts of terror" in the Bible. He looks at the way the story fits the patterns of abuse of women and the way the church has encouraged violence against women through history. These patterns continue through today, including among Mennonites, as shown by a recent study that shows domestic violence among Mennonites in Winnipeg at the same level as the general population. Leo challenges us to remember Jephthah’s daughter, an anonymous victim of domestic violence, in a way that breaks the patterns of patriarchy in our own communities.

Rethinking God the Father after 3 Weeks of Fatherhood - Justin Heinzekehr

Justin, Hannah’s husband and regular contributor to the blog, talks about reclaiming fatherhood as a metaphor for God from a feminist perspective. "After experiencing fatherhood first hand, I am still angry about the way that God the Father has been misused" he says. Rather than authority, he suggests an image of loving responsibility for God’s relationship to creation.

As man drawn to feminism, but not myself a father, I really appreciate Justin’s report back on his learnings so far. He talks about his struggles as a father who wants the best for his daughter, but doesn’t have all the answers. "We use trial and error, which has the drawback of producing lots of errors." he says, "In the end, we find some things that seem to work (for now) for the three of us." Perhaps, in the same way, God the Father is striving alongside us to get things to work out.

Another YAR contributer who has posted at The Femonite is Becca Jayne (a regular contributer here until 2008 as BeccaJayne): http://www.femonite.com/2012/08/10/guess-whos-coming-to-dinner-mothering-of-a-different-kind/.

I look forward to watching this new blog grow and thrive as a space for Anabaptist feminists of all ages to interact and challenge all of us. May their threads be nurturing and their comment moderation policy strong.

Two weeks ago, Newsweek published a calculatedly inflammatory cover story in response to the “Innocence of the Muslim” protests in the Middle East. The cover featured a photo of protesters faces contorted in anger with the caption “Muslim Rage”. Newsweek also started an accompanying Twitter hashtag: #Muslimrage. Newsweek was fueling the flames that we already there: U.S. righteous disdain and disgust for the anger of Muslim protesters in response to a Youtube video.

For those of in the United States, I think this is a Matthew 7:5 moment. It’s comforting to settle into our moral high horse as we look at the killings in Libya of the U.S. ambassador. Certainly these deaths are tragic and wrong. But let’s consider what the plank in our own eye might be in this situation.

A week ago, I was listening to NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show. A woman named Sheila called in expressing her anger that neither of the presidential candidates were saying anything about the ongoing war in Afghanistan (full transcript here):

Can anybody there on the panel tell me what of value is going to happen between now and 2014 that is worth one more life? More to the point, why has the congress, the campaign trail, the White House, Romney—this is the third rail. They don’t even mention this war, which is so costly economically. My only grandson just left on Wednesday. That’s heightened my interest but, believe me, I have been interested for six years…

This is not a subject that people want to discuss. And you and I know that the military puts out a few lines about how well it’s going. I did get a letter back from Obama telling me it was just fabulous. So what I’m asking is how can we galvanize American attention and get these people to quit talking about whether or not Mitt Romney drove with a dog on his car and let’s get on to something that might affect real lives.

How striking it is to hear the grandmother of a soldier as one of the few remaining voices speaking out against the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yochi Dreazen, one of the panelists on the show responded to her call with a clear and concise analysis of the situation:

Frankly, I think the caller a moment ago was right, not that this is a third rail but it’s a forgotten rail. No one talks about it, not because they’re afraid that there’ll be massive political repercussions but because there is no political upside ’cause no one notices or cares. It’s something that’s been forgotten—if you look at the polling data—by both parties when—it’s something that just no one remembers. That’s more troubling than the idea that it would be politically untouchable.

That’s right: we’ve forgotten we’re at war. If asked, polls suggest a higher percentage of those in the U.S. oppose the war if Afghanistan then opposed Vietnam, but most of us aren’t asked and really couldn’t care less. It’s gone so far, that Associated Press reporter Deb Riechmann dubbed it our “forgotten war.”

A big part of the reason is that fewer in the U.S. have any personal connections with those in the military anymore. Furthermore, soldiers and their families increasingly live on fewer, larger bases (then a generation ago) where they are isolated from the rest of U.S. society.

This leaves the family members of soldiers (like Sheila) as the only ones with strong and compelling personal reasons to end the Afghanistan war.

If that isn’t enough, the drone killings in Pakistand are a war where we are two worlds away from the deaths: forgotten US soldiers are using remote control drones to kill forgotten tribal people in Pakistan.

But we’d rather tut-tut disapprovingly at the protests and riots in the Middle East as if they appear in a vacuum. Might there be some connection with the continued killings by the U.S. military there? Might there be some connection with the increase in drone attacks? Might there be some connection with the decision by Obama to hit targets a second time to kill rescuers who arrive on the scene?

I must confess my own lack of involvement with anti-war work over the last few years. Despite my full time work for a peace organization, the last time I was out on the street against the war in Afghanistan was in London in 2009. It’s really easy to forget about the drone strikes or figure that Obama will have everything fixed up by 2014, but as long as politicians can count on us to say nothing, the interests of corporations and generals will have the day.

Those living in Pakistan or elsewhere in the region can’t simply forget the drone attacks. A recent study on the drone killings found that, not surprisingly, they “terrorize” civilians in rural Pakistan and cause “substantial levels of fear and stress” day and night. Imran Khan, former cricket champion, has built his rising presidential campaign in Pakistan around his opposition to the drone attacks. In a recent interview with a British television channel he puts it bluntly: “We believe that these strikes are killing people indiscriminately.” He continues, “All it does is it turns more people against the US, hatred grows and the beneficiaries of this insanity are the militants.”

But we in the United States can’t be bothered to notice.

It’s been less than 24 hours sine the tragic shooting this Sunday in Wisconsin. We grieve for all the victims, their family and their communities. The LA Times is reporting that the gunman had tattoos and biographical details which lead officials to conclude he had a “political agenda”. While we don’t know for sure what that political agenda is, the attack does fit a pattern that in which Sikhs have been mistaken for Muslims in attacks by Islamophobic extremists since the 9/11 attacks.

This is another opportunity for Christians in the US to reflect on our response to the ugly Islamophobia that bubbles just beneath the surface and spills out in attacks against all people that appear Middle Eastern.

There would plenty of examples I could cite, but the prominent Christian leader Franklin Graham exemplifies this anti-Muslim trend. From 2002 through 2011, Graham has consistently made comments that stoke fear and paranoia towards Muslims in the US, saying that Islam “preaches violence” (2002) and is “evil” (2009). Last year he offered this:

“The Muslim Brotherhood is very strong and active in our country. It’s infiltrated every level of our government. Right now we have many of these people that are advising the US military and State Department on how to respond in the Middle East, and it’s like asking a fox, like a farmer asking a fox, “How do I protect my henhouse from foxes?” We’ve brought in Muslims to tell us how to make policy toward Muslim countries. And many of these people we’ve brought in, I’m afraid, are under the Muslim Brotherhood.”

(all quotes from Franklin Graham and Samaritan’s Purse, Sheila Musaji)

Its no accident that these lines could just as easily been from Joe McCarthy, with communists substituted for Muslims. When these kind of statements are made by mainstream leaders, they stretch the acceptable discourse deep into the hate zone, which becomes a jumping off point for Christian extremists. While Graham surely would not advocate violence like what happened today, his rhetoric nurtures the culture that feeds it. After all, if war against Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan is such a great thing (according to Graham), why not at home?

In 2006, when Franklin Graham spoke in Winnipeg, Mennonites publicly debated whether to support his presence, but because of his militarism, not his Islamophobia. Mennonite Central Committee Manitoba director Peter Rempel actually cited his fear of Muslim attacks on Mennonite mission workers as a reason for Mennonites not to support him. “I’m thinking about the safety of our workers and Mennonites in other countries,” he said (see Mennonite Weekly Review, April 17, 2006)

This is an area where I have some person experience. On March 10, 2006, my CPT colleague my colleague Tom Fox killed by men who claimed to be Muslim extremists. I won’t deny that Rempel’s logic of tribal safety (whether it be CPTers or Mennonites) is compelling. But in the example of Jesus’s relationships to Samaritans we find a different model for why and how to challenge Islamophobia.

Jesus and the Samaritans

By the time of Jesus, the Jews had loathed the Samaritans (and visa versa) for several centuries―at least since the return of the Judeans exiled to Babylon. The apocryphal Wisdom of Ben Sirach 50:25-26, written around 200 B.C. notes, “There are two nations that my soul detests, and the third is not a nation at all: the inhabitants of Mount Seir, and the Philistines, and the stupid people living at Shechem [i.e. Samaritans.]”

Similarly the Mishna, the first major edited version of Jewish oral tradition (ca. 200 CE) declares: “He that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like one who eats the flesh of swine (Mishna Shebiith 8:10.)” The Samaritans were publicly cursed in the synagogues; and a petition was daily offered up praying God that the Samaritans might not be partakers of eternal life.

It’s likely that the feelings went both ways. In Antiquities 18.30, Josephus tells of a time passover feast in Jerusalem nine years after the birth of Jesus. The gates of the temple in were open past mid night as was the custom. A group of Samaritans snuck in through the gates and scattered human bones throughout the temple. The Jews were outraged at this act of inflammatory and deliberate desecration and increased security.

What would it have been like for Jesus’ listeners to hear his parable of the Good Samaritan with the story of the temple desecration by the Samaritans fresh in their memory? When Jesus told his listeners, ‘Go and do like the Samaritan,’ who had lavished extravagant compassion upon the wounded man, what fears came up for them?

But even among Jesus’ disciples, the hate for Samaritans was strong. In Luke 9:54, James and John ask Jesus to “call fire down from heaven to destroy” a Samaritan village that didn’t welcome them in for the night. But the fact that Jesus and the disciples even stopped at a Samaritan village suggests that Samaritans were part of the Jesus movement. We can only imagine that after Samaritan women at the well and her village followed Jesus, many others joined in.

It’s not enough just to talk about loving Muslims and opposing Islamaphobia, we need to consider what it looks like to live out Jesus’ radical hospitality in our lives. In the last year Christian Peacemaker Teams has begun welcoming Muslims into our teams. This was an attempt to respond to the example of radical hospitality that we see in Jesus. How can each of our communities welcome the people who we are taught to fear most?

Post Script: I would be deeply remiss if I did not mention the witness of Al Geiser as an example of Christ-like risk taking for peace. Geiser, his Afghan business partner, Al Shukur and their employee were shot and killed on July 22, 2012. Al and his wife Gladys continued working in Afghanistan even after Geiser and his business partner, Shukur were kidnapped in 2008 and then rescued months later.

Having experienced the impact of the 2005-2006 kidnapping on CPT as a community, I am in awe of the strength and commitment of the Geisers and Al Shukur. Their commitment to working for peace together in the face of incredible risk is a testimony to all of us.

Thanks to Al’s nephew Duane Steiner for reminding me of the Geiser’s story here in the comments.

On the first night of the institute we gathered around the fire to sing songs and talk together at dusk (above). Aside from lodging, the event was hosted by Ched Myers and Elaine Enns in their house and their yard, which is entirely given over to vegetables, fruit trees and native plants. Mornings were spent doing Bible study and studying permaculture and afternoons were spent doing hands on learning of permaculture techniques in the garden. Evenings were practical workshops on a variety of subjects. Chris Grataski and Melissa Shank taught us about permaculture and herbalism.

The Bible studies led by Ched focused on stories from Scripture that highlight the relationship between the Israelites and the places where they lived. Understanding our relationship with the land around us in this way has been mostly lost. For example, in this video Ched looks at the story of Ahab taking Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21:

However, this wasn’t just about bioregional discipleship as an abstract idea. The institute was in the Ventura river watershed, so we went down the river banks and listened to Elaine share about the story of the river:

We also got our hands dirty in the garden:

Melissa shared about the wise woman tradition of healing that has been nearly lost. This tradition draws on herbal knowledge that was traditionally passed down from mother to daughter over the generations. Melissa talked about the place of this tradition alongside modern medical techniques:

Ched shared a bit about the way we’ve become less aware of the natural spaces we live in:

We did our best to get some time outside the human-built environment by hiking through some of the native Chaparral and oak savanna areas in the valley to learn more about their history:

During the entire week, Dimitri Kadiev and Lisa Slavick worked on a mural telling the story of Elaine’s Russian Mennonite ancestors during the Russian revolution (for more of the story see Pilgrimage to the Ukraine by Elaine). The mural included a Mandala layer that everyone in the institute was invited to add to. This layer that peaks through the final mural layer in a few places:

I did my first ever time-lapse of the mural creation process as it went along:

As always, there are many more photos I took that I didn’t have room for here. I’ll leave with this photos of an oak tree silhouetted against the sunset from Ched and Elaine’s house. White ledge peak is in the background:

P.S. For those of you who made it all the way to the end of the post and wondered what Wolf’ems are, here’s your answer, brought to you by the young theatre prodigy Thomas Apel, of the Guadalupe Catholic Worker. Hint: Wolf’ems ingredients are: fire, a stick, pillsbury biscuit dough, whipped topping and jam:

Over the years here on YAR, discussions about the differences between the approach of the (Old) Mennonite Conference (MC) and General Conference (GC) have cropped up now and again. This comment from AlanS from 2010 is probably one of the most insightful. For non-Mennonites or those who have joined in the last 12 years, these reference are mysterious. Nevertheless, for those of of us working for change in the Mennonite church, understanding these differences are critical. To that end, here is my interview with Lin Garber, the convener of Mennoneighbors and a writer and editor. Lin graduated from Goshen College in 1957 and is a member of The Mennonite Congregation of Boston.

Tim: Lin, in a comment on The Mennonite website* you discussed the differering approaches of General Conference (GC) and the "Old" Mennonite Church (MC) to Section III ("Clarification on some issues related to homosexuality and membership") of * you discussed the differering approaches of General Conference (GC) and the "Old" Mennonite Church (MC) to Section III ("Clarification on some issues related to homosexuality and membership") of Membership Guidelines for the formation of Mennonite Church USA (2001). For those who have never heard of the terms GC and MC, can you briefly explain some of the history?

Lin: Today’s Mennonite Church Canada (MC Canada) and Mennonite Church USA (MC USA) took their present forms around 2000 in what was termed a "transformation" (as opposed to discarded language like merger and integration). What had been the Mennonite Church, often informally and unofficially referred to as the "Old" Mennonites (MC), stemmed largely from 18th-century immigrants to North America with Swiss and south German origins. It had conferences in both the United States and Canada, a few of which had congregations on both sides of the border, but the bulk of its membership was in the United States.

What had been the General Conference Mennonite Church came out of a movement within the "Old" Mennonites of southeastern Pennsylvania in 1847 that in 1860 organized as the General Conference of the Mennonite Church of North America. A main stated goal of the group was to unite all Mennonites into one body. It grew slowly over the next dozen years as a few congregations decided to join it, but starting in 1874 its membership exploded with the influx of immigrants from central Europe and especially from southern Russia, mostly the Ukraine. The bulk of these immigrants were of Dutch-Prussian (i.e., north German) descent, and those cultural influences came to dominate. At the time of the "transformation" around 2000, the membership of the GC was roughly balanced between the United States and Canada, with the United States having a slight edge.

The GC heritage, then, weighs heavily in MC Canada, where it is shared by roughly two-thirds of the membership, whereas in MC USA it applies to barely more than a quarter of members.

Tim: Can you talk about how you’ve seen historic differences between Old Mennonite Church and General conference polity and their approach to "authoritative statements" continue to play out in Mennonite Church USA today?

Lin: It is important to add one more significant historic ingredient to the stew: the Amish. The Amish division of 1693, in Switzerland and south Germany (which at the time included Alsace) was long ago healed in Europe, but it has persisted in North America to this day, manifested most conspicuously by the Old Order Amish, but also in numerous splinter groups such as the Beachy Amish and their many offshoots.

Often forgotten by today’s "mainstream" or "progressive" Mennonite adherents is just exactly how many of them have an Amish heritage as well, and that extends throughout both the GC and MC heritages. The c.2000 "transformation" was preceded, beginning in 1917, by the mergers of three "Amish Mennonite" conferences with their "Old" Mennonite counterparts. The Central District of today’s MC USA, once an independent body that joined the GC and soon merged with that group’s Middle District, began, in part, as the liberal Stuckey Amish group in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. It epitomizes the unexpected characteristic that it has often been those of Amish heritage who are leaders in adopting innovative ideas and methods. The Amish Mennonite conference in Ontario did not finally cede its separate identity until 1987, when it became part of the Mennonite Conference of Eastern Canada (although it had dropped "Amish" from its name in 1963).

The ideal of congregational autonomy, often ascribed to GC heritage, actually comes just as much from the Amish heritage. What I see as the critical divide on polity and adherence to "authoritative statements" is less that between GC and MC heritage than it is between the old line traditional conferences of southeastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, and the rest of MC USA, including not only those conferences that were formed by mergers between MC and GC conferences (e.g., Pacific Southwest and Pacific Northwest from the old Pacific District of the GC and the old Southwest and Pacific Coast Conferences of the MC), but also some conferences, both MC and GC, that have not yet accomplished such mergers (Western District vis-a-vis South Central, or Illinois, Indiana-Michigan, and Ohio vis-a-vis Central District).

One reason this history is so difficult to "briefly explain" is that for every pattern that seems to be valid, there are exceptions. So, in southeastern Pennsylvania, we have the relatively liberal Atlantic Coast Conference of MC (and very significantly, of Amish Mennonite heritage) sharing geography with what remains the most authoritarian of MC heritage conferences, Lancaster (the only MC USA conference still to have a "board of bishops"). But we also have Eastern District, where the whole idea of the GC was born, with an odd little historic quirk that they welcomed the formation of MC USA because for the first time it gave them a mechanism by which to expel congregations. Contrariwise, at least one of the newly formed merged conferences has declared that, along with exclusively GC heritage conferences elsewhere, it does not recognize any such mechanism.

Tim: Can you describe what you mean by "authoritarian"?

Lin: Reliance on external agencies to govern one’s response to circumstances, vesting in those agencies an immunity from any kind of questioning based on new information or new circumstances. Dogma, received tradition, hierarchical structures—and inability or refusal to recognize how selective one’s application of those mechanisms must always be given that no mortal has ever known everything that ever happened or can ever happen, and why.

Tim: Thanks for your insights and thoughts on this history, Lin.

For more background on the “Membership Guidelines for the Formation of the Mennonite Church USA” (2001) and the earlier documents it refers to, Lin recommends The Logic of the Mennonite Church USA “Teaching Position” on Homosexuality by Ted Grimsrud

Endnotes

*Lin’s comment is not currently available on this site because commenting is turned off, so I am quoting it here in its entirety because it is important context for the interview above. Note that the first sentence (in quotes) is a quote from an earlier comment in the same thread by someone named Harold:

"Can you join me in saying it’s okay for the current discernment of the gathered church (expressed in 1986-86 and 1995 and 2001) to impact and shape our Assembly?"

Harold, you probably remember some of the extended exchanges you and I (with some others) had on MennoLink back in the last century. Now, as someone who was baptized 12 years before you were born, who finally became fully aware of and grateful for the sexual orientation with which God gifted him when you were two years old and met his life partner when you were seven years old, I will gladly welcome you into my church as soon as you stop minding that I am in it.

Further, as someone who was present at two of those gatherings you cite as if they had the weight of Nicene Councils (1995 and 2001), my perspective on how that "discernment" has actually played out is quite different from yours. In brief, the leadership has not honored key understandings contained in those statements.

For now I offer just one example to support that contention. Within the 2001 document (a/k/a "Membership Guidelines for the formation of Mennonite Church USA") is a section that was submitted, with the rest of the document, to congregations for discernment prior to the assemblies that would be considering it. My recollection is that most then-General Conference congregations voted that it be deleted, but amajority of those in the much larger Mennonite Church favored it, so the document was presented to the Nashville assembly for a vote with section 3 included.

Some of us who were against its inclusion were told by denominational leaders that we should nevertheless vote for the whole document, because otherwise the "transformation" of the two denominations into, uh, what turned out to be two other denominations divided along anational boundary, could not take place. In any event, we were assured, that section to which we objected would not be included in the bylaws of the new denomination (the one on the U.S. side of the border; the one on the other side of the border had already pretty much decided to ignore the whole thing). It was further pointed out the objectionable section internally stipulated that the whole document was to be reviewed in 2007, some 6 years after its adoption.

What happened in 2007? Again, prior to the gathering in San Jose some of us called attention to this approaching deadline and asked that we be allowed to provide input into the process of review. We were first told that the matter would not be raised until after the convention was over. Then we were told that it would be dealt with at a joint session of the Executive Board and the Constituency Leaders Council. That date came and went, and all that came out of denominational headquarters was the sound of crickets chirping.

On later probing, I was told that the gathered hierarchy had approached the whole issue with fear and trembling and had decided that no changes needed to be made. I have no knowledge that this decision was ever so much as communicated to the delegate body two years later, let alone presented for ratification. Since then, I have had further assurances that the matter would be brought up at subsequent meetings, and again nothing has been reported about it. I do hope this gives you some insight into why my trust in how MC USA does discernment is not all that robust.

There may be one tiny sign of hope: among the topics to be given an hour and a half of time in the "conversation room" at Pittsburgh is this: "The Church, the Role of Teaching Positions, Dialogue and Discernment." I expect that to be a lively exchange, albeit within the envisioned tightly controlled parameters of the venue.

Photo of celebration at Living Water Community Church, by Tim Nafziger, May 2011.

In watching the movie, it was tempting at times to distance myself from the Roman Catholic Church. After all, I’m Anabaptist, and we don’t believe in the church hierarchy or that priests are a necessary bridge to reach God. But I realized that the story of the men in this documentary is my story as a Christian man.

The most moving scene in the film is the ordination of women as priests by a woman bishop. The scene brought unexpected tears to my eyes. My mother experienced deep pain from the Mennonite church where I grew up. Her call to leadership as Sunday school superintendent led to some members leaving the church, and she felt abandoned by male leaders. The story of these women joyfully entering the priesthood is my mother’s story and it is my story.

In many ways the documentary is the story of the women at that ordination service and the aftermath: their excommunication. This is also my story as a man in the church. Unless I am an ally to women struggling for a voice, I am no different from the hierarchy who excommunicates them. I grew up swimming in affirmation of my gifts in leadership while my Mennonite female peers had to fight for recognition. Many gave up and embraced their role as "helpmate," settling for being "separate but equal" in the body of Christ. Those that didn’t still bear the scars.

Identifying with the narrative of this movie also means that I can claim as a role model Father Roy Bourgeois, now at the edge of excommunication for speaking out publicly in support of ordination of women. Throughout the documentary, he speaks powerfully about his call to speak out, not just for women priests in the abstract, but alongside specific women who he has seen called to the priesthood. He names their specific gifts in the struggle for peace and justice.

My calling as a faith-based peace and justice activist came at the gates of the School of the Americas (SOA) in Fort Benning, Ga., during a Eucharist led by Father Roy and others of SOA Watch. It would have been very easy for Father Roy to say the SOA is my struggle, not women. To say: I can’t risk my role as a priest. And in in fact, Father Roy’s stand has cost SOA Watch the institutional support of many Jesuit institutions who previously supported them financially and sent busloads of students to the annual vigil.

In my journey since my Eucharist at the gates of the SOA, I have been privileged to walk with many Catholics struggling for justice in their church and outside it. Pink Smoke makes it abundantly clear that the struggle for women’s ordination is not in isolation from the struggle against racism and militarism. Patricia Fresen, a nun stripped of her order for her ordination as a priest, took a courageous stand against apartheid before its fall in South Africa.

The one missing piece in this narrative is the struggle for LGBTQ people in the catholic church, which is not mentioned. Organizations like Dignity USA have been working for ordination of LGBTQ people since 1969 here in the United States, including women. Unfortunately, no one identified with that movement was interviewed or mentioned in the film.

It is clear that the faith of these women is not only personal, but also communal. Fresen, a theologian, shares about her call to ordination as a bishop after she had already been ordained as a priest. The man who ordained her knew that he didn’t have much time left as a Roman Catholic priest. Fresen said that she wasn’t sure she felt ready, but the pro-ordination bishop told her that her ordination as a bishop wasn’t about her, but about the community calling her. The recurring theme of community and equality deeply resonated with me as an Anabaptist.

Interspersed with these women’s stories is an interview with Rev. Ronald Lengwin, spokesperson for the diocese of Pittsburgh, who spoke for the church’s official position of sexist exclusion. After each of his arguments against women priests is made, there is a careful and thoughtful response from the other interviewees which laid bare the stark sexism at the root of Lengwin’s statements.

At the end of the movie, Lengwin’s final argument seems to be that, for the "unity of the church," these women (and the men who ordain them) should simply go elsewhere, essentially giving up on the universal claims of the Roman Catholic Church. But those working for women’s ordination are having none of it. The women who have been thrown out of the church powerfully claim their Catholic faith and identity despite their excommunication. It is their home, and they will continue their struggle to make it their space again.

Crossposted from As of Yet Untitled.

It was June 22, and we had just heard that platanos sapplings on one of the community member’s farm had been ripped out. In Las Pavas, calling the police won’t do any good. It was up to the community, their lawyer and two Christian Peacemaker Team members to investigate. The vandalism came on the last day of a visit by INCODER, a government agency responsible for deciding whether or not Las Pavas will get title to their land. They had agreed to accept photos of the dead plants into their report. But we needed to get the photos before dark.

As we headed up the river, I felt nervous. Why had the vandals acted while there was an international presence in the community? Two days before, the man likely responsible for the sapling destruction was part of a verification hike we were on as part of the INCODER visit. It seemed clear that supporters of the palm company were trying to send a message that the farmers of Las Pavas would not be allowed to plant their crops. How far were they willing to go in their attacks on Las Pavas?

When we arrived at the farmer’s plot five minutes up the river, the extent of the devastation became clear. Over 250 freshly planted trees had been ripped out of the holes in the ground and repeatedly cut to avoid any possibility of replanting. Some of the plants had been thrown into the river. There were also 40 cows missing. Their loss is estimated at around $15,000. I thought of my father-in-law who buys calves and raises them over the course of a year. What would it mean for him to lose his entire herd in one swoop?

This is the farmer with one of the 250 plants that were killed.

Beyond the immediate economic impact of the attack, there was also a clear message for the community. As one leader looked at a plant that had been repeatedly slashed into small pieces (as in the photo above), he wondered out loud if hands would be next. "This is a message of war," he said.

For a community committed to nonviolence, these are the times of trial. There is no space for retribution or revenge attacks, just a continued commitment to the long and lonely struggle for the land they need to raise food for themselves and their families.

My colleague Chris Knestrick takes notes on testimony from community members while others look at the photos they took of the dead plantain trees.

See more photos from the trip to the plantain field here.

I’ve been here in Colombia with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) for a week and a half. This week I’ll be visiting Las Pavas, where CPT has been working with 123 families since 2009. They have been struggling to get title to the land where they have lived for decades while A palm oil company has been trying to push them off.

My colleague and I will be a presence with Las Pavas during an official visit by INCODER, the Colombian agency who grants land titles. I’m looking forward to meeting the community personally for the first time since I’ve been hearing about them for so many years.

Here’s a brief summary of the Las Pavas story from an article last year by the Colombia team.

The people of Las Pavas are a sustainable farming community in the southern Bolivar department (province) of Colombia. Through the years, paramilitary violence has forced community members to leave the land but each time they have returned. In 2006, the community was in the process of claiming its land rights under Colombian law when a Daabon consortium bought the land from absentee owner, who had lost his rights to the land due to years of abandonment. On 14 July 2009, the Colombian riot police forcefully removed the community of Las Pavas.

On April of 2011, the community returned to their homes. But their struggle has continued, with the state prosecutor’s office claiming in December that the whole community of Las Pavas as well as CPT were lying about their displacement.

Land has always been a huge issue here in Colombia. Today, 0.4% of landowners own more than 60% of privately owned land (source). Those 0.4% justify this inequality by claiming that subsistence farmers aren’t “productive” because they aren’t creating monetary income. Instead they should be growing African palm, Colombia’s current monoculture for palm oil, the export of choice in tierra caliente (hot lands). In the view of the large landowners, everyone else should be an agribusiness employee. Or better yet, move to the city and become a factory worker in the free trade zones.

However, under Colombian law, if a farmer can show they have been on the land for 10 years or more they can claim title. Landowners have traditionally dealt with this through threats of violence, and when necessary, massacres.

Indeed, it was one such massacre that is credited with beginning “La Violencia” that led to the Colombian civil war. On a Sunday morning in December 1928, Colombian soldiers fired machine guns into a crowd of striking banana workers and their families killing hundreds. The killing were influenced by US pressure to protect the interests of United Fruit Company, the target of the strike. Read more in Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre

So what does this all have to do with CPT? Our project work here in Colombia has been part of making massacres like the more difficult for landowners. CPT’s Body Shop campaign has made the struggle of Las Pavas community visible in the international community. Actions like this one I was part of organizing in 2009 in London were part of that campaign to convince the Body Shop to stop buying palm oil from Daabon Organics, one of the companies that had pushed Las Pavas off their land:

Similar vigils were held outside stores in Chicago and other North American cities. In October 2010, when The Body Shop stopped buying Palm oil from Daabon, Abondano Alfonso Dávila, vice president of Daabon Group was quoted in El Espectador complaining that, “…some activists stood in front of The Body Shop stores in Chicago, so the company decided to terminate the contract.”

This work, along with many other organizations, opens the space for their struggle towards the day when they will be able to live ‘neath their vine and plantain tree, in peace and unafraid.

Next week, watch this space for photos of some of those trees.

On May 23, Charletta and I will be leaving Chicago for a year’s sojourn in California. As I sit down to share this with you, I realize that most of my writing on this blog is opinion or analytical. And I usually only post photos on my blog for The Mennonite. It’s rare that I write about developments in my life. But this one is too big not to mention.

Some of you may remember my post, “In the garden after the rain in California,” from more than a year ago. That trip began a discernment process for Charletta and me on whether to move to live and work with Ched Myers and Elaine Enns. They live in Oak View, Calif., a small town on the edge of Los Padres National Forest and 70 miles west (and a bit north) of Los Angeles. To the right is the view of the mountains in the National Forest from their house.

During our year in California, I will continue in my work with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), web design and photography. Charletta will work with Ched and Elaine as part of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, part time in their office and part time as a counselor with the Peace and Justice Academy in Pasadena. The year will also be a space of discernment about what’s next for the two of us.

Photos from California

I’ve paired photos from last year’s trips with my thoughts about what I’m looking forward to in this new place.

Water, mountains and trees

Here Ched describes how water has carved smooth channels in the rock over millenia and how close these features have come to being destroyed.

One of the things I realized on last year’s trip was that Ched and Elaine are really serious about loving their watershed. I’ve written here before about the idea that, “You can’t save what you don’t love, and you can’t love what you don’t know.” But I have a long way to go in figuring out what it means to actually live this out. Ched and Elaine are further along that journey. We’re looking forward to learning from them.

They also took us to see two massive oak trees that have been there for hundreds of years. We shared a time of prayer and reflection with other visitors beneath the vast branches of this tree.

This is the view out Ched and Elaine’s window of snow capped mountains in the distance. Living near mountains like this will be a completely new experience for me. I grew up in the rolling hills of Lancaster County, Pa., and moved from there to the flat Midwest in Goshen, Ind., and then Chicago. London, England had a few hills, but no mountains. I’m looking forward to spending time with a different topography.

This image for me is about wide open spaces. Since I left Goshen in 2003, I’ve lived in cities of millions and millions of people. Living in a small town of 4,000 people will be a very different experience.

Hospitality

From the minute we walked in the door, Ched and Elaine welcomed us with avocado omelet, potatoes and fresh orange juice from their orange tree. Hospitality is a central part of their ministry and who they are. During the two weeks we were there, they hosted 14 different people (including us). We have warm memories of the role of hospitality from our time at the London Mennonite Centre and understand how it can foster cross-pollination between communities and movements. We hope to support them as this part of their work grows.

The Pacific

My trip in March was my first real interactions with the Pacific Ocean. I look forward to getting to know the people, animals, plants and fish of the world’s biggest ocean. I love exploration. That was always my favorite part of the adventure games I played as a kid. I remember how much fun it was in England to see the world from a new angle and bringing my camera with me.

I’m also looking forward to watching sunsets over the ocean. During my time in Chicago, I’ve only made it up early enough for sunrise a handful of times. Sunsets should be a little easier to fit in to my sleeping patterns.

New communities of Christians working for peace and justice

As part of my work with CPT, I’m looking forward to connecting with communities up and down the West coast, in a similar vein to the work I did with the Anabaptist Network in the UK. I know that there are Anabaptist communities and others committed to radical peacemaking and challenging the politics of empire. I look forward to learning from them and growing in my vocation.

Ched and Elaine host three Bartimaeus Institutes each year studying a variety of themes. Three days after we arrive, their week-long summer institute will focus on the theme “Rooting Faith: Theology and Practices of Bioregional Discipleship.” What a wonderful way to start out in a new place!

Finally, I look forward to meeting readers of this blog who live in the Southwest and on the West Coast. Please drop me an email up if you are in the Los Angeles area and would like to meet up or if you are in the Southwest or West Coast and would like to host me to talk about Christian Peacemaker Teams in your community. I can be reached at timn@cpt.org

The next year will bring with it a lot of new moments and discoveries. I look forward to sharing them with you here.