Growing Up Mennonite

Guest Post for C Smash Reads by Dr. Leona Stucky

We looked enough like a normal Midwest farm community that you might not guess we were Mennonite unless you knew our history, motives, thought processes, or noticed our controlled impulses and abundant gentleness. What you couldn’t see revealed the most about us. Underneath our disciplined exterior burned passion. We focused it on doing what Jesus wanted.

Our faith, the well from which we drank our identity, defined what our lives should be. We learned how to judge each event and where to place our trust. We knew another world loomed out there, a bad one that often dismissed our re-purposing of Jesus’s sermon on the mount. My family didn’t touch or taste that world, and seldom did that world intersect ours. Being held in Jesus’s love and resting in His arms was poignant enough for us.

– The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God

Perhaps the one identity in which we were allowed to show pride, and not feel sinful about self-promotion, was in being Mennonite. That was the right thing to be and as a young girl I was certain I could be proud of that and of having a long line of forbearers who were also Mennonite as far back as anyone could remember or discover, on both sides of my family. I thought of myself as Mennonite through and through and had no desire to be anything else, in fact, I couldn’t have guessed what ‘anything else’ might have been, other than wrong in the eyes of God.

And, as is characteristic of most faith stories, when doubts or cognitive dissonance ruffled my brain, I found ways to get back into the straight and narrow, at least for a long time.
Here is the story of one such experience told in The Fog of Faith.

One Sunday when I was seven, our tribe came to church late. Embarrassed, Dad and we big kids—Mom tended her babies in the nursery—tiptoed into an empty pew at the back of Hopefield Mennonite Church. I was expecting another mind-numbing repeat of the good things we’d heard and said before. Dad pretended to tickle me, and I squirmed and slid down the pew to escape.

“Da-a-ad,” I whispered, giving his title three syllables. “We’re supposed to be quiet. You’re not helping!” Gradually I settled into boredom, until the spoken word about the Biblical David sounded a discordant note.

“What does this mean?” I mumbled to Dad. “David did all those bad things and God helped him? God even made him kill a giant and lots of other people?”

He shushed me, but my thoughts ran wild. Didn’t God tell us never to kill anybody? Wasn’t that our Church’s point? We didn’t believe in killing anyone, not even bad people! I was guessing that God was no better than the rest of the evil world, when a safer idea landed—this must be a bad minister who preached bad stories about a bad God. How dare the preacher tell us that God is not as good as Mennonites!
I poked Dad’s side and said, “How come our minister says that God does bad things, even killing people?”

“Honey, he’s asking us to think about things a little differently.”

“It’s more than a little different if you say God likes killing! Isn’t that what the rest of the world thinks? Those who go to war? I thought we weren’t supposed to like killing. That’s what the Bible tells us.”

Dad’s red face sprouted purple lines. Beads of sweat rolled down my back. I stood up, thinking I might run.

“Is what he says about David actually in the Bible?” I continued.

“Yes, it’s in the Bible, but in the Old Testament, in a time before Jesus.”

“Are you saying that God was mean before Jesus came, but then He got nice?”

“Sort of like that,” Dad said, motioning for me to sit down and hush up. I wanted to stomp my foot so bad it ached from holding it back. I sat with my arms crossed, fingers digging into my skin, and glowered at our minister.

But I considered that I was in church and I should be kind. Because … Because … Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam. I was no dumb bunny. I knew that for sure.

I should also confess to you blog readers that when I was young, and throughout most of my life, I harbored a deep desire to be a good girl. Few things are more boring to readers than good girls. As the old adage says, good girls don’t make history.

That simple fact separates my memoir from most other stories. I am not a heroine. I did not inherit a swift and decisive mind, a strong will that demanded others conform, a sense of justice that made me react instantly when I was marginalized, a body build that allowed me to win at sports, or an extroverted demeanor that dominated discussions and the moods of people around me. No. The classic heroine lives at the opposite end of the personality spectrum from where I land.

Thus you, as a reader, are in for an unusual experience if you pick up the book. Readers say that once they start the memoir they can’t put it down – that it moves fast and is thrilling and scary each step of the way. But the speed, I can assure you, has nothing to do with the grounded molasses that is me. I’m guessing that partly due to my lack of heroine qualities, Ms. Magazine calls The Fog of Faith a great summer read, and some critical reviewers have called it both a fascinating story and an important read. I wonder what your experience will be.