Philip Yancey's Blog, page 17

A Cloud over Christmas

On Friday Janet and I will be headed to Newtown, the town drenched with sorrow that the whole world is watching. Walnut Hill Community Church, a thriving congregation with 3500 members, has arranged two community-wide meetings, Friday and Saturday, Dec. 28-29, on the theme, “Where Is God When It Hurts?” and then two church services on Sunday. (Click on the “Events” tab for more details.)  I’ve known the pastor, Clive Calver, for years. Before taking this church he headed an organization called World Relief; his experience directing a global disaster response team with 20,000 employees, he told me, barely prepares him for the local disaster he now faces in his own community. After all, he lives in Newtown and knows many of those affected by name.

I’ve had some tough assignments (Virginia Tech, Mumbai, Sarajevo), but this one is horribly unique. I would truly appreciate your prayers this week as I prepare and then New Year’s weekend as we travel to Connecticut. With her background as a hospice chaplain, Janet is a master at the conversations that will inevitably take place, and she’ll do very important work alongside.

Healing and comfort–that’s what I want most for these dear people. Words can only do so much, and certainly cannot take away the pain, yet I hope that this event could be a time of safety and honesty when people can bring their grief and come away with a new appreciation for why the gospel is good news–even now, especially now.

(This is a generous country at such times: United Airlines is comping both our tickets and two of my publishers are donating some 2000 copies of my books on questions no doubt being asked: Where Is God When It Hurts? and What Good Is God?  They’re also offering free downloads to the community that weekend.)

Givers and Getters

For a Christmas meditation this year, I turn to William Willimon, who served as dean of the chapel at Duke University, then spent eight years as a Methodist Bishop in Alabama, and recently returned to Duke as a professor:

We enjoy thinking of ourselves as basically generous, benevolent, giving people. That’s one reason why everyone, even the nominally religious, loves Christmas. Christmas is a season to celebrate our alleged generosity. The newspaper keeps us posted on how many needy families we have adopted. The Salvation Army kettles enable us to be generous while buying groceries (for ourselves) or gifts (for our families). People we work with who usually balk at the collection to pay for the morning coffee fall over themselves soliciting funds “to make Christmas” for some family.

We love Christmas because, as we say, Christmas brings out the best in us. Everyone gives on Christmas, even the stingiest among us, even the Ebeneezer Scrooges. Charles Dickens’ story of Scrooge’s transformation has probably done more to form our notions of Christmas than St. Luke’s story of the manger. Whereas Luke tells us of God’s gift to us, Dickens tells us how we can give to others.  A Christmas Carol is more congenial to our favorite images of ourselves. Dickens suggests that down deep, even the worst of us can become generous, giving people.

Yet I suggest we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story–the one according to Luke not Dickens–is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers. 

We prefer to think of ourselves as givers–powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are. Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to demonstrate that we–with our power, generosity, competence and capabilities–had little to do with God’s work in Jesus. God wanted to do something for us so strange, so utterly beyond the bounds of human imagination, so foreign to human projection, that God had to resort to angels, pregnant virgins, and stars in the sky to get it done. We didn’t think of it, understand it or approve it. All we could do, at Bethlehem, was receive it. A gift from a God we hardly even knew.

—William Willimon, taken from an article in The Christian Century, Dec 21-28, 1998

 

God Gets His Family Back

Jürgen Moltmann, who came to faith as a captured German soldier in a British POW camp, returned to his homeland where he went on to serve as a pastor and professor in the church hierarchy.  Later, though, he began to question a religious system that ranked bishops, priests, and laypersons and defined them all against the nonbelievers.  Had not Jesus labeled his followers as brothers and sisters, implying something more like a family than a corporation?  Doesn’t God reign over all the world, including those outside the fold?



“The church is where Christ is,” Moltmann decided.  The manifest church includes those who recognize Christ, who embrace the gospel, undergo baptism, celebrate the Lord’s Supper.  “But Christ is also in the place where the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the prisoners are to be found: ‘As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’  That is the latent church.”  From the manifest church Christ sends out his followers to spread the good news of forgiveness and new life; in the latent church Christ awaits.  Christ-followers thus stand in the middle, charged with a mission to welcome into the family orphan children of God.



In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about.  I have settled on this: “God gets his family back.”  From the first book to the last the Bible tells of the tortuous lengths to which God will go to reclaim wayward children.  Many of Jesus’ stories center on the theme of lostness, captured most beautifully in the story of the prodigal son: “this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”  In Revelation the entire biblical drama ends with a huge family reunion.  The lost will be found.



How differently might we relate to nonbelievers if we viewed them not as evil or unsaved but rather as lost.  For some that word comes freighted with echoes of revival preachers who rail against “the lost.”  I mean it, though, to express empathy and compassion.  Several times while hiking in the mountains of Colorado I have missed markers along the trail and wandered off.  I stare in confusion at my map and compass, trying not to panic, aware it can be dangerous to spend the night unprepared in a high-altitude wilderness.  At last I see another hiker who, when I reach him, kindly takes my map and shows me where I am and where I need to go.  The route of my futile wanderings matters little; anxiety fades as I realize I’m no longer lost.  I know the way home.



As a model for communicating faith to the uncommitted, simply look to the apostle Paul’s speech in the cultural center of Athens, as recorded in Acts 17.  Instead of condemning his audience to hell for practicing idolatry, Paul begins by commending their spiritual search, zeroing in on one of their idols devoted to an “unknown God.”  He builds his case from common ground, quoting two of their own philosophers who affirm that in God “we live and move and have our being” and “We are his offspring.”  God planned creation and human life, Paul told the Athenians, so that we “would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.”  With humility and love and abiding respect for his audience, Paul circles the themes of lostness and estranged family before pointing them to a deeper understanding of a God who cannot be captured in images of gold, silver, or stone.



There is a time to critique the surrounding culture—especially when it beckons down false trails—and a time to listen, as Paul did: to awaken a thirst already present.  “I went looking for spirit and found alcohol; I went looking for soul, and I bought some style; I wanted to meet God, but they sold me religion,” the rock star Bono used to shout at concerts. 



As Jesus makes clear in the Beatitudes, the restless and discontent—the latent church in Moltmann’s phrase—may be nearer to God than those who seem content in this world.  The rich tend to act as though this life will never end; the poor know their appetite for more.  Those who mourn feel the rupture of a world severed from God and thus edge closer to the Father who seeks to make all things new.  Peacemakers and the merciful, whatever their motivation, convey some vestigial sense of harmony, of a human family restored.  The pure in heart look to God alone for satisfaction, not to counterfeits.

Don’t Cry For Me, Sarajevo

On a book tour last month, as we were driving along the highway from Croatia to Bosnia, traffic came to a sudden stop near the border.  Car doors opened, drivers stepped outside for a smoke, and everyone speculated on what had caused the backup.  An accident?  Road work?  No, as it turned out: personnel were sweeping the adjacent fields for mines left over from the war that ended 17 years ago.  Welcome to the former Yugoslavia.  More than five million mines were planted during that war and they continue to maim or kill unsuspecting farmers, hikers, and children.

When we finally reached the border, the world abruptly changed.  A four-lane superhighway narrowed to a windy, potholed two-lane road.  Road signs now used both the Roman alphabet of Western Europe and the Cyrillic alphabet of the East.  Most obviously, every other house was vacant, its interior gutted by fire bombs, a relic of the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing campaign to force Croats and Bosnians from Serbian areas.

“Who owns these homes now?” I asked my Croatian host.  “Probably the people who were chased away and live somewhere else now.  But would you want to go back and reclaim a home in the same town where your neighbors raped your daughter and slit your wife’s throat?”

In Sarajevo, our destination, East and West meet on the same street.  Standing in the bazaar, if you look one direction you’d swear you were in Austria with its neat buildings, onion-dome churches, and sidewalk cafes; look the other direction and you’d think you were in Istanbul with its tea shops and covered Muslim women browsing in the spice market.  Indeed, not far from here bloody battles stopped Islam from taking over Europe centuries ago, and no one has forgotten.The Balkans dominated the news back in the 1990s.  International leaders stood by wringing their hands while the horrors of World War II seemed to be playing out again on miniature scale.  I could never keep the adversaries straight back then, much less pronounce them, and the villains seemed to change weekly.  Who can make sense of the former Yugoslavia?

Under communism Yugoslavia forced three major groups (as well as other minor tribes) to live together: Croatian Catholics, Orthodox Serbians, and Bosnian Muslims.  Before the 199os war Sarajevo had a large population of each; now the city is 90 percent Muslim, with greatly reduced Orthodox and Catholic populations and only a sprinkling of Protestants (perhaps 800 out of 400,000).

For just shy of four years Serbian soldiers who inherited most of the Yugoslavian army took up positions in the hills that surround Sarajevo and strangled the city in a brutal siege, the longest in modern times.  An average of 329 grenades rained down on the city every day, and on busy days ten times that number.  Snipers cruelly picked off easy targets: a seven-year-old Muslim girl, a 70-year old grandmother, a medical worker administering aid.  At least 11,000 civilians died during the siege, including 1600 children.  Bodies floated down the river that now picturesquely winds through town.  Cemeteries filled up so that the dead had to be buried in a soccer field just down from the site of the 1984 Olympics.

This was modern Europe, where such things were not supposed to happen again, especially not here, the exact site of the assassination of an archduke that triggered World War I.  But it did happen, for 1443 horrific days of bombardment on a city that had no electricity, no heat, gas, or telephone service.  (Imagine the inconveniences of those affected by Superstorm Sandy in the East, for four years, plus relentless bombardment.)  The main source of water was a brewery that generously opened its supplies to those brave enough to dare the snipers who fired down on them at will.

The residents of Sarajevo lived on a diet of beans, macaroni, and rice, humanitarian aid supplied largely by air from the UN and NATO forces who controlled the airport.  It took four months to dig a half-mile tunnel under open fields to the airport, and at night as many as 1000 Sarajevans crowded the tunnel to fetch the heavy loads of rations that kept them alive.  The entrance to the tunnel provided a new target to snipers, who targeted any who braved the run during daylight hours.

Few buildings have been fully repaired even today, 17 years after a cease-fire.  Most bear the scars of bullet holes and shrapnel.  Plaques mark the spots where grenades fell among civilians: 27 died on this corner, 40 in that pedestrian mall, 70 in a nearby food market.  I stayed in a Franciscan monastery, now restored, that had received 42 direct hits from grenades.

n the world exists only one human; everything else is statistics,” said Jorge Luis Borges.  Speaking with a few who had endured the siege, I heard some of their poignant stories:

• “For nine days in a row we ate plain pasta.  We had no spices, no meat, no flavoring.  My mother was so desperate for flavor that she went out and gathered grass to sprinkle in just to add a bit of variety and color.  When we got something different, like rice or powdered milk, we would throw a party.”

• “Without heat, we would burn anything at hand in the winter to stay warm.  I had a newborn baby, born in the midst of that hell.  We chopped up heirloom furniture with an ax.  You go numb after a while.  One Christmas a friend brought me a priceless gift: the dirt-covered root system of a tree he had found somewhere.  I cried.  I have never received a Christmas gift that meant so much, and I still have it.  I could not burn it.  I tell you with shame, that gesture moved me more than hearing that thirty more people died.”

• “The worst thing is, you get used to evil.  If we knew in advance how long it would last, we would probably have killed ourselves.  Over time, you stop caring.  You just try to keep living.”

• “I have two brothers.  One joined the Muslim army to fight against the siege.  One escaped and served with the Croatians.  My sister was married to a Serb, who was conscripted to serve with the forces besieging us.  So many marriages were mixed like that—Serb/Croatian, Croatian/Bosnian, Bosnian/Serb—and many of them broke apart.”

• “Why such brutality?  These were our friends, our neighbors, now shooting at us, blowing up our homes.  Hannah Arendt writes about the banality of evil.  The biggest criminals were nice fathers and husbands, people I knew.  They were like the Nazis who would gas Jews in the day and then go home and listen to concerts with their families.”

Croatia was the first region to resist the Serbs, who sought a Greater Serbia comprising most of the former Yugoslavia.  The Croats had no army to speak of, just a few tanks left over from World War II and a handful of planes used for crop-dusting.  Improvising, they learned to drop propane tanks and water heaters out of the crop dusters onto Serbian forces.  To get around an international arms embargo, they released some  Mafia-type gangsters from prison, gave them trucks full of money, and commissioned them to find a black market in weapons.  (As a reward, some of these criminals now hold high government posts.)

Dubrovnic, Srebenica, Vukovar—these names stand out as sites of the worst brutality, crimes that are even now being tried before the International Criminal Court.  More than 100,000 people died in the wars.  In Srebenica Serbs rounded up every male over the age of fifteen, 8000 in all, tied their hands behind their backs, and shot them.  Workers are still digging up the mass graves in an attempt to identify the bodies.

To read the eyewitness reports from the international court in the Hague is to read a litany of horrors: of pregnant women cut open, their unborn babies smashed with rifle butts; of gang rapes of girls as young as nine; of toddlers decapitated, their heads placed in their mothers’ laps.  There is only one explanation for what happened, one Bosnian told me: “God overslept.”

I came across this poster promoting my talk on suffering posted in a Zagreb bar window!

I came to this part of the world because two of my books, Where Is God When It Hurts and What’s So Amazing About Grace, had just been published in the Croatian and Bosnian language.  I had prepared talks on grace, informed in large part by the splendid work of the Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, a faculty member first at Fuller Seminary and now Yale Divinity School.  With one exception, however, I was asked to speak on suffering, not on grace.  When I asked, “Are you ready for reconciliation,” not one person answered Yes.  The wounds are at once too fresh and too old, for these disputes go back more than seven centuries.  “Every compromise is defeat,” said one Serbian leader.  And another: “Any reconciliation is betrayal.”

To be sure, all sides shared guilt, not just the Serbs. Two Croatian generals were sentenced for their crimes, and mujaheddin fighting with Bosnians and Albanians fighting in Kosovo also committed atrocities. Though the war ended, in part because of NATO bombing and the Dayton Peace Accords, the disputes have not ended. The one nation of Yugoslavia split into seven: Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Slovenia. Serbians ended up with the largest share of territory, but ethnic minorities remain in each country, including a “Serbian Republic” within the borders of Bosnia. Conflict in the Balkans could erupt up again.

Today Syria dominates the news, with a reprise of the kinds of atrocities I heard about firsthand.  It happened in Rwanda, of course, and continues today in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Nigeria.  I could not help thinking of Gandhi’s remark that if you take the principle “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” to its logical conclusion, eventually the whole world will go blind and toothless.  I have never visited a place in such need of grace and forgiveness, and yet so resistant to it.

One afternoon in Sarajevo we were escorted by a cheerful Franciscan monk named Ivo Markovic.  He took us first to the Jewish cemetery on a hill high above the city, one of the main lookout posts for Serbian snipers.  Every grave had been marred in some way, pockmarked by bullets, gravestones overturned.  I had read of Markovic in Miroslav Volf’s book Free of Charge.  In his village, Muslim Bosnians were the villains, massacring 21 men including nine members of his family—all senior citizens, his 71-year-old father the youngest of them.

The Franciscans lost most of their church members as Catholics moved out of Sarajevo. Yet the monastery stayed behind, leading the frail peace movement and distributing food and practical help. After the war stopped, Father Markovic visited his home village. I will let Volf tell the story:

Occupying the house in which his brother used to live was a fierce Muslim woman. He (Markovic) was warned not to go there because she brandished a rifle to protect her new home. He went anyway. As he approached the house she was waiting for him, cigarette in her mouth and rifle cocked. She barked: “Go away or I’ll shoot you.” “No, you won’t shoot me,” said Father Markovic in a gentle but firm voice, “you’ll make a cup of coffee for me.” She stared at him for a while, then slowly put the rifle down and went to the kitchen. Taking the last bit of coffee she had, she mixed in some already used grounds to make enough coffee for two cups. And they, deadly enemies, began to talk as they partook in the ancient ritual of hospitality: drinking coffee together. She told him of her loneliness, of the home she had lost, of the son who never returned from the battlefield. When Father Markovic returned a month later she told him: “I rejoice at seeing you as much as if my son had returned home.”

Did they talk about forgiveness? I don’t know. And in a sense, it doesn’t matter. He, the victim, came to her asking for her hospitality in his brother’s home, which she unrightfully possessed. And she responded. Though she greeted him with a rifle, she gave him a gift and came to rejoice at his presence. The humble, tenuous beginnings of a journey toward embrace were enacted through a ritual of coffee drinking. If the journey continues, it will lead through the difficult terrain of forgiveness.

ur last day in Croatia we toured an odd tourist site that has gained acclaim for its originality. It mainly displays items donated by lovers who have broken up. Some are nostalgic: a wedding dress, the chiffon top worn the night he told her it’s over, the sticky roller he used to remove her cat’s hair. Others are bitter: an ax used to chop up her music collection, a framed photo shattered into pieces, the side mirror of his car that she broke off when she found it parked in front of a rival’s apartment. A few items refer to other kinds of broken relationships, such as the a Newsweek cover featuring Barack Obama with the note, “I really wanted it to work out.”

The Museum of Broken Relationships, it’s called, and I can’t think of a more appropriate symbol for that part of the world. A visit to the Balkans gives a stark picture of what can happen among human beings apart from grace. As I wrote in What’s So Amazing About Grace?

If you ask a bomb-throwing teenager in Northern Ireland or a machete-wielding soldier in Rwanda or a sniper in the former Yugoslavia why they are killing, they may not even know. Ireland is still seeking revenge for atrocities Oliver Cromwell committed in the seventeenth century; Rwanda and Burundi are carrying on tribal wars that extend long past anyone’s memory; Yugoslavia is avenging memories from World War II and trying to prevent a replay of what happened six centuries ago. Ungrace plays like the background static of life for families, nations, and institutions. It is, sadly, our natural human state.

On Top of Our World

After we moved from Chicago to Colorado a friend invited my wife and me to accompany him on a hike up a 14,000-foot (4,300-meter) mountain, one of 54 such “14ers” in Colorado.

Without thinking, we agreed. Sunshine Mountain barely makes the list, slouching in at a measly 14,001 feet. We hiked up, huffing and puffing all the way, then stood for a moment on the summit to catch our breath, awestruck by the glorious panorama of the Rockies that you only see from atop one.  Invigorated, we hiked over to a neighboring peak, Red Cloud, took a “shortcut” down and learned a lesson about improvised shortcuts by finding ourselves stranded on cliff bands.

Since that day in 1993, we’ve climbed a few 14ers every summer.  On the easier climbs the trail begins at 9,000-10,000 feet and it takes five or six hours to ascend the peak and three or four more to descend.  The more remote mountains require a long hike to the trailhead and an overnight camp. Around a third of Colorado’s 14ers demand no real climbing moves, just a vigorous hike in reduced oxygen. Another third call on all four limbs to scramble up boulder fields and rock formations; the remaining third have scary exposure and can be downright dangerous.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, in 2007 I had an auto accident and for seven hours I lay strapped to a backboard while doctors tried to determine whether my neck fracture had nicked a major artery—if so, they said, I would die before they could get me to surgery.  I make my living as a Christian writer, I thought.  I should come up with some final reflections in case they are my last.  I’m embarrassed to say that one thought overwhelmed all others: I can’t die yet—I’ve climbed 51 of the 14ers.  I’ve got three more to go!

As should be obvious if you’re reading this, I didn’t die that day. Enter a new friend, Eric Alexander, who had trained and helped guide the first blind person to summit Mt. Everest.  (You can read about Eric’s exploits on his website, www.highersummits.com.)  Eric sent this message through a mutual friend: “If Philip needs any help climbing the last three 14ers, I’ll be glad to lead him.”  I jumped at the chance, figuring that if he could get a blind guy up Mt. Everest he could get me up anything in Colorado. Later that summer, a few months after having my neck brace removed, I climbed my 54th and last 14er.

Or so I thought.  You see, I had climbed ten of them without my wife, who suddenly got the bug. She had always claimed, “Philip climbs with the singular goal of reaching the top. I climb with the goal of identifying 25 species of wild flowers on the way up, and if I reach the summit, all the better.” When Janet learned how few women had completed all 54 peaks, however, she became more focused and together we attempted those last ten (some of them with the help of patient Eric). On September 16 this summer, at 9:26 am, we reached the top of Ellingwood Point, Janet’s last unclimbed Colorado 14er!

We have had some wonderful experiences along the way.  We’ve seen bighorn sheep stand on their hind legs and head-butt each other with a sound that echoed like thunder.  We’ve watched baby mountain goats scramble up in 20 seconds the same rock-strewn gully that took us 45 minutes to maneuver.  We’ve lain on sleeping bags and tracked satellites across a Milky Way galaxy that sparkled like diamond dust. On the summit of one mountain we stood in complete quiet and heard the plaintive bugling of a bull elk hidden in the trees some 4,000 feet below.  We’ve nearly stepped on a nesting ptarmigan, a bird perfectly camouflaged to look like a rock in the summer, only to lose its feathers and grow pure white ones for the winter snow.  Early one morning we startled a flock of mountain bluebirds who flew up and suddenly caught the sunlight with an explosion of color like silent fireworks.  You only get these sights by hiking into the wilderness, and then you realize you’re the only persons on earth graced by such a thrilling encounter with God’s creation.

The mountains have given me two indelible images of grace. Sometimes I’ve taken ill-advised detours and sometimes I’ve simply gotten lost. Wandering around in search of the trail, I’ll turn a corner and see a lush carpet of wild flowers: columbine, Indian paintbrush, elephant’s head, bishop’s cap. God has lavished this planet with beauty that shines forth whether anyone notices it or not. God is both a giver and an artist, and what God creates shouts back wordless praise, as the Psalms remind us.

The second image comes from the water that begins in melting snowfields near the top, trickles down to form runnels, then lovely Alpine lakes, then streams, and finally roaring rivers at the bottom. Grace, like water, always flows down.  You cannot read the Bible without hearing the loud message: God cares for the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed, the humble, the needy—and so should we.

Of course, the mountains themselves are the main players in this drama.  You keep looking up at the summit, gauging how much distance remains, checking clouds for the potential of deadly thunderstorms.  Some mountains bear plaques memorializing a young climber killed by lightning.  I have never been so miserable as the time I hunkered down under a rock overhang for almost an hour with an icy waterfall pouring down my back; my legs were cramping but I dared not venture out into the meadow, where lightning bolts were crashing like percussion bombs.  And I have never been so terrified as inching along a tiny ledge trying not to look down at the thousands of feet of empty space below. Anne LaMott says her two favorite prayers are “Thanks!  Thanks!  Thanks!” and “Help!  Help! Help!”; climbing offers splendid opportunities for both.

It’s hard not to think of the mountains as sometimes angry or sinister—a “pathetic fallacy” as the literature professors would say.  (Indeed, the Psalms do not hesitate to use such pathetic fallacies: “Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy.”)  Yet in truth, as the great climber Reinhold Messner reminds us, “Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous.”  Another renowned climber, Ed Viesturs, puts it this way: “Mountains don’t kill people, they just sit there.”

My wife likes to repeat yet another comment by Viesturs: “Getting to the summit is optional, getting down is mandatory.”  Sometimes we’ve had to turn back a mere few hundred yards from the summit due to thunderstorms or wind, a wrenching decision when you know you’ll have to repeat the arduous climb at a later date.  There’s a strong chance, however, that I survived to write these words because on occasion I did turn back, albeit reluctantly.

I have no desire to tackle other mountains, like Rainier, Denali, or (horrors!) Everest.  Janet and I had no idea when we first ventured up Sunshine Mountain what would lie ahead.  We’ve experienced the magnificent state of Colorado from its 54 highest peaks, and that is more than enough.  Our boots have lost their tread, our hiking poles are bent, our legs bear the scars of unstable rocks.  Our bodies—and yes, our marriage—have passed a difficult challenge. Writing from the comfort of my basement office, I feel like we’ve reached the summit. Somewhere I read this observation from a fellow adventurer: “Climbing a 14er is like love—anticipated with pleasure, experienced with discomfort, and remembered with nostalgia.”  Indeed.

 

Death on a Beach

On a visit to France last week I visited some of the sites of D-Day. More American soldiers died on the first day of that massive invasion than have died in eleven years of war in Afghanistan. Twenty-seven war cemeteries in the region hold the graves of 110,000 dead from both sides, for June 6, 1944, marked only the beginning of a vicious month-long battle for Normandy.

Today the battlefields seem like overgrown golf courses, with open expanses of grass and wild flowers interrupted by shallow depressions—not sand traps, though, but bomb craters.  Some of the thousands of concrete German bunkers survived the bombers’ aerial assault, and crouched inside them you can imagine the scene as a teenage soldier rubbed his eyes the morning of June 6, 1944 and looked out at a massive flotilla of 6,000 ships disgorging troops and tanks on the beaches of Normandy.

Some of the soldiers had sloshed around in a historic English Channel storm for 72 hours before landing, jammed together shoulder-to-shoulder on flimsy landing craft and puking their guts out. By the time they hit the beaches, said one general, “They would have taken on the entire German army single-handed rather than get back on one of those ships.”  In a scene captured in the movie Saving Private Ryan, they jumped from their boats to fall on a beach littered with war debris and the dead bodies of their comrades.  Smoke bombs all but obscured the view, perhaps a mercy as the Germans trained artillery, machine guns, and grenade launchers on the exposed strip of sand.

A stark granite column rises atop one of the most picturesque sites of Normandy, a sheer hundred-foot cliff that Army Rangers climbed in the face of withering fire in order to seize German artillery.  As the Rangers attempted to scale the cliff, some using ropes and some clawing their way up bare-handed, German snipers leaned over the edge and picked them off one by one. Of the 225 who began the assault, 90 survived to take the German positions—only to find that the artillery had been moved and replaced with decoys.

Following a friend’s advice, I visited not only the famous American cemetery, with its rows of white marble crosses and Jewish stars marking the graves of 9,387 American soldiers, but also one of the German cemeteries—less dramatic, more somber, holding the graves of some of the 77,000 Germans who lost their lives. Touring through Europe, you face constant reminders of the centuries of bloodshed: the Hundred Years’ War, the Second Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Wars of Religion, the Crusades, two World Wars, the Balkans’ Wars, the Norman Conquest, Napoleon’s wars. Restored forts and castles preserve the scenes, museums tell the stories, cemeteries mark the outcomes. Some, like World War II, are commemorated as “good” wars: brutal and destructive, yes, but necessary to restrain a greater evil. Others seem petty, absurd, ridiculous.

“When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer heat with air-conditioning—when we have overcome all these and much more besides, then there will abide two things with which we must cope: the evil in our hearts and death.”  Nicholas Wolterstorff wrote those words in his poignant tribute Lament for a Son. On the battlefields of Europe—and not just Europe— those two things converge.

Traveling Blind

The publisher of my books in Poland put me in touch with Hanna Pasterny, a young Polish Christian woman blind from birth, who is researching how to help people who are both blind and autistic.  I cannot imagine the sense of isolation someone with both disabilities must feel.

Hanna works as an assistant to the President of the European Parliament and has coauthored a book, Tandem on a Scottish Background, with a Scottish professor living with Asperger’s syndrome. The professor, Helen Halpern (pseudonym), is also a brilliant engineer/inventor of devices for the disabled and speaks 13 languages. The book recounts their journey through the Scottish countryside on a tandem bicycle and how they form a deep friendship despite differences in nationality, religion, temperament, and how they interpret the world through the lens of their disabilities. Unfortunately, the book is not yet available in English.

A grant from Joni Eareckson Tada’s organization helped make possible Hanna’s first trip to the U.S.  I had hoped to connect Hanna in Colorado with Temple Grandin—the remarkable autistic woman who was featured in the HBO movie Temple Grandin, earning actress Claire Danes both an Emmy and Golden Globe award—but they could not coordinate schedules.  (My wife says everyone should see that movie!)

On her trip to Hanna visited group homes, schools, disability programs, and family retreats.  Though not the focus of her trip, she later reflected on some of the barriers a visually impaired foreigner faces on visiting the US.  Her challenges began with the visa application, an online form which relies on mouse movements whereas blind people have to depend on the keyboard to move from one block to another.  The American embassy in Warsaw bans cell phones and electronic devices, though the blind use electronic notetakers and readers and need cell phones to contact their waiting guides.

If you’ve ever traveled overseas you know about the entry and customs forms handed out on airplanes just before landing.  Hanna got a flight attendant to help her with the form, only to learn on the ground that she had filled out the wrong form and needed a different one designated for foreigners.

“The multicultural nature of the USA is very positive,” she says before proceeding to describe what it’s like to be assigned an assistant for disabled travelers who has only a basic knowledge of English.  When I land in some U.S. airports, even I have a hard time understanding the heavily accented “Welcome to the United States” greeting and explanation of customs and passport procedures; to a non-native speaker the message must be unintelligible.  In addition, an autistic person may require a very quiet place to wait, preferably with no other people around—try to find one of those in a busy airport.

Transportation posed another problem for Hanna.  Many taxi drivers have poor English and limited knowledge of their city.  They can hardly rely on a blind, foreign passenger for directions.  When Hanna called to ask for a taxi driver who spoke English well she was told that such a request is discriminatory.  “I didn’t agree, explaining that I am a client, I pay, so I can have some expectations and special needs and I won’t pay for such an unsafe trip anymore.”  One taxi driver let her out in the middle of the street.  And how would a blind person know where and how to hail a cab with hand signals?

When it comes time to pay, U.S. currency is very confusing because, unlike most countries’ bills, they’re all the same size.  Unscrupulous taxi drivers routinely hit the “30% tip” option on the meter without even asking the sightless passenger.  And some taxi drivers won’t accept a blind person with her guide dog because in their religion a dog is considered unclean.

Hanna found some good things about the treatment of the disabled in the U.S.  Airports do, after all, provide companions for special-needs passengers, accompanying them to the door of the plane.  We have many group homes and support services for independent living.  American schools have a high ratio or staff in classes with disabled students.  And the U.S. offers many opportunities for the disabled to get a job or find meaningful volunteer work.

Like most foreign visitors, Hanna learned that the United States is not the Utopia she had anticipated, especially not for a disabled person.  Most of the barriers she faced, though, could be surmounted by a friendly person who saw her struggling and volunteered to help.

That, in the end, is the lesson I took away from Hanna’s report: to be more sensitive to the needs of the disabled and to foreign visitors.  Sometimes it takes a blind person to open our eyes.

Undercover Evangelical

Gina Welch is a smart, young, citified Jewish writer who grew up in Berkeley, California, and graduated from Yale.  In a desire to know more about evangelicals, whom she kept running into when she moved to Virginia, she decided to attend Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg.  As a bonus, she thought her unlikely pairing with Falwell could provide the grist for a book.  In her words, “I considered him a homophobe, a fearmonger, a manipulator, and a misogynist—an alien creature from the most extreme backwater of evangelical culture.”  (Falwell described himself as a fundamentalist, not an evangelical, a distinction lost on most in secular culture.)

As for Welch herself, “I cuss, I drink, and I am not a virgin.  I have never believed in God.”  A neophyte to religion, Welch didn’t know you could just show up at church.  She thought you had to qualify somehow, like pledging a sorority or being invited into a country club, so she signed up for a Connections class designed for people interested in membership.  Soon she found herself immersed in an exotic subculture with its own rules: no swearing, drinking, smoking, premarital sex, plunging necklines, spaghetti straps, facial piercings, short skirts, or R-rated movies.

At first the lingo confused her: insider phrases such as “feed my lambs,” “soul-winning,” and talk about spiritual gifts.  Over the next months she played by the rules (mostly) and faked her way into a singles ministry called EPIC: Experiencing Personal Intimacy with Christ.  She attended worship services, learning in time to appreciate the rousing “praise music” that at first seemed jarring and distasteful.  With some misgivings she went forward for conversion, got baptized, and even volunteered for a mission trip to Alaska, all as part of her undercover journalism and without revealing her true identity.

Predictably, Welch encountered some things that made her uncomfortable.  Her initial introduction to the ministry of Thomas Road took place around Halloween at an elaborate haunted house called Scaremare which featured fake aborted fetuses, attack zombies, and an actor hanging on a cross with his head lolling on his chest.  Fear seemed ubiquitous, with Falwell predicting the rapture in 2006 and a Gospel magician delivering a scary talk to children about hell.  In one of her most unsettling experiences Welch presented the plan of salvation at Children’s Church, reciting such phrases as “Jesus the savior took our sins to the cross,” and “The Bible says, ‘and without the shedding of blood is no remission.’”  She adds, “When I finished my segment I virtually ran to the side of the room.”

Though she objected strongly to Falwell’s politics and cringed at his fundraising techniques and hucksterism, over time she found herself captivated by his charm and charisma, so much so that she felt genuine sadness at his death in 2007.  She dared not tell her other-world friends about his effect on her, for they were repulsed by his right-wing views and the anti-gay policies of his church and his school, Liberty University.  “Unable to explain the odd couple of my affection for Jerry Falwell and my loathing of his ideals,” she nevertheless attended the memorial service after his death.

To her credit, Welch genuinely wrestled with the main points of evangelical theology.  The Trinity baffled her, as did the Atonement: How could Jesus taking on our sins satisfy an angry God?  She listened to her teammates explain the gospel in Children’s Church.  “The message—it’s okay that you do bad things, because everyone does bad things, and everyone can be forgiven, but you should try to be as good as you can be anyway—was a nice one.  But the phrasing of it—Jesus loves you in spite of the fact that you’re a dirty rotten sinner—how could that provide children with solace?”

Everywhere she turned, theology seemed a conundrum.  The Bible contains apparent contradictions but is inerrant; we are completely forgiven but still must do good works; Jesus died to please God yet somehow was God.  The book that records her experience admirably avoids a tone of condescension about doctrine and those who believe it, though in the end she remains unconvinced.

—#

I have read other undercover accounts of evangelicals reported with far less empathy.  Indeed, Gina Welch accepts at face value the transformed lives of those she meets: a former cocaine addict now a student at Liberty University, recovering addicts serving on the staff of a rescue mission, couples who selflessly adopt children as part of their pro-life commitment.  After she herself responds to an altar call in order to seek baptism, she writes, “I was supposed to have a kind of flinty satisfaction and sense of homecoming, as if I could fall into the crowd and be received in a soothing embrace as intensely familiar as a relative’s laugh.  But I felt more like a knock-kneed fawn at a meeting of wolves, my wolf-hide disguise slipping out of place.  Because even though I had just had my first hint of what Evangelicals feel that make them so passionately devoted, and even though it would be some time before I found myself called upon to pray out loud, I was still not a Christian.”

Eventually Welch did learn to pray out loud, a terrifying experience that she prepared for by practicing at her desk at home.  She liked the sense of calmness that prayer produced, and even the informality that evangelicals use in talking to God.  The friendliness, optimism and, yes, genuine happiness of the people she got to know surprised her.  As she recalls, “what I envied most about Christians was not the God thing—it was having a community gathering each week, a touchstone for people who share values, a safe place to be frank about your life struggles, a place to be reminded of your moral compass.  Having a place to guard against loneliness, to feel there are others like you.”

The worship services eventually won her over too.  She was amazed by the church members’ generosity in giving and their passion in singing.  Some raised their arms high in the air, like rockets about to take off, alarming her at first until she decided that people at sports and political events showed just as much passion with less at stake.  The stirring song “Days of Elijah” became one of her favorites.

After almost two years Welch abruptly ended her experiment.  Friends at the church were hurt that she broke off contact, not even returning their phone calls.  As she turned to writing the book, her experience at Thomas Road continued to affect her.  Impressed by what she had learned about forgiveness, she met with a former teacher to seek reconciliation over a past dispute.  She watched old services on her laptop and to her horror found herself singing along.  “I felt awful if I slept late on Sundays, couldn’t figure out how to organize my day, couldn’t relax.  I missed hearing Ray [one of the pastors] preach.  I really missed my friends.  I missed the warmth, the easy smiles people offered me when I walked into the room.  I missed singing at the top of my lungs in church…. I was sick from lying.  I had a sour stomach all the time.”

In a revealing passage, Welch describes the effect of hearing a sermon on Psalm 139.  “God-love, the love in the psalm, the love in Jesus loves you—that was Mobius strip love, love with no beginning or end, love that was both calm and complete, unflinching in the face of anything you could reveal about yourself.  Who wouldn’t want that?  I certainly did, especially in that moment—knowing the secrets in my own heart, knowing that soon they’d be revealed.”  She ends the moment of longing and vulnerability with this line: “But wanting it still didn’t make me believe it.”

After a long break, almost two years of no contact, Gina Welch returned to Thomas Road and met separately with a former friend named Alice and with Pastor Ray, who had guided her during her stay there.  She came clean, telling them of the project, sparked by her desire to write a book that would help people understand evangelicals better.  She admitted the deception, the questionable ethics of what she had done.  She ended the project after the trip to Alaska in part because she felt uncomfortably close to the people she was lying to and in part because she knew it was wrong to feign belief in something others staked their lives on.  They took it well.  Pastor Ray even prayed for her, and for the book, which would be published the following year as In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church.

The conversation with Alice took a different tack.  Alice talked about her feelings of abandonment, of betrayal.  “I thought we were friends,” she said.   She imagined Gina looking at Caller ID and deciding not to answer her calls.  Welch apologized for hurting her, but not for the project itself.  She quotes Joan Didion: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

Church had changed her, Welch admitted to her friend Alice.  She writes, “I loved having that sense of community and also that serious, regular self-inquiry.  Our relationship had changed me; feeling so happy in our friendship had made me think differently about Christians.  But just like her, I couldn’t imagine ever believing anything other than what I believed.  I had no choice in that.”

—#

I learned a lot from In the Land of Believers.  Aside from its dubious ethics, her project offers a fascinating and instructive glimpse into a subculture that is rarely examined so respectfully from the outside.  In fact as I read her book I recalled my own days growing up in exactly the opposite environment from Gina Welch.  I knew virtually no one but evangelicals.  I too had to learn the Christian phrases that soon became clichés, went forward again and again wondering if this time might be genuine, practiced praying aloud to sound spiritual, puzzled over my lack of feelings during such solemn events as baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  Those who grow up in the church and those who approach it as a sociological experiment face the same danger, that it may become a comfortable pattern of behavior insulating us from reality rather than expressing it.  Jesus criticized the most spiritual people of his day, the Pharisees, for precisely that.

Through the grace of God, and after a time of tossing aside the subculture like a stifling and unwelcome costume, I found that the words and practices can convey reality as well as hypocrisy.  I must disagree with Welch’s conclusion, “I couldn’t imagine ever believing anything other than what I believed.  I had no choice in that.”  Surely we do have a choice, and Welch made one in turning away from what she observed at one particular church.

Even so, Welch’s account reminded me of the true attraction of the evangelical church to someone who approaches it with inbuilt hostility.  In the New Testament, Jesus, Paul, John, and James each stress one principle above all others: Love God and love your neighbor.  Church surveys show that 80 percent of all conversions come about as an outgrowth of friendship.  Thomas Road follows the Southern Baptist tradition of programmed evangelism, yet all the expensive and well-designed programs of evangelism combined produce only a fraction of the results of simple friendship.  In the words of Tim Keller, “Don’t think in terms of what used to be called friendship evangelism.  Think in terms of friendship.  Your evangelism should be organic and natural, not a bunch of bullet points and agenda items that you enter into a conversation hoping to get to so you’re almost like a marketer.”

I doubt Jesus keeps track of how many theological arguments his followers win; he may well keep track of how we love.  Even the Apostle Paul, who worked as hard as anyone in history to bring people into the kingdom, had to admit, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”  Gina Welch has moved on to other writing projects, and I imagine the mysteries and knowledge she heard about in Lynchburg will gradually fade away.  Her experience of being loved, even by those she deceived, likely will not.

Under the Scope and Scalpel

Last week I had arthroscopic surgery on my left knee to repair two tears in the meniscus, a pad of cartilage-like material that separates the upper leg bones from the lower ones and absorbs some of the force as you walk and run.

Thanks to such Colorado activities as mountain climbing, mogul skiing, and trail running I had abused the dear meniscus until finally it gave way. Frayed ends stuck into surrounding tissue like hangnails, causing pain every time I took a step. I lived with it for a few weeks until finally, on a long international flight, my knee announced firmly that it had had enough.

Having a knee scoped is something like a rite of passage in Colorado, mainly because of ski injuries. If we had a state surgery to go with our state flower and state animal, it would be repair of a torn meniscus; the clinic I used does some 400 per year. Brits call the procedure “keyhole surgery,” with good reason. The doctor makes three tiny incisions, pumps saline solution into one to expand the working area, then inserts ingenious devices that resemble a plumber’s snake into the other two. Staring at a computer screen with nary a glance at the patient, he guides one camera-equipped cable on a tour of the ballooned knee, while the other instrument snips loose ends here and there, smooths arthritic bones with a tiny burr saw, and vacuums out the debris.

Apparently the clinic’s main fear comes from the possibility of operating on the wrong knee. I had to circle the left knee on a diagram, write a big “YES” with an indelible marker on my left thigh, and have it signed by two attendants before they sent me into dreamland with general anesthesia. Even so, as a failsafe the clinic schedules all right knees together, then all left knees—the drugged patient, after all, can’t answer questions and most knee injuries aren’t visible from the outside.

Nicky Gumbel, vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton in London, told me he had been “scoped” three times, the third under a local anesthetic that allowed him to watch the progress on a monitor. I’ve observed some surgical procedures while researching the books I wrote with Dr. Paul Brand, but I’m not sure I’m ready to watch one in real time being conducted on my own body.

(In Mumbai, India, in 2008 I stayed with a surgeon who knew Dr. Brand and asked if I wanted to assist at a liver surgery the next day. When he sensed my hesitation he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll have you in scrubs and antiseptic. At most I’ll have you hold a retractor to help keep open the area I’m working on.” He cautioned me that he’d given the honor to several other guests who found it challenging. Some grew squeamish immediately; some kept loosening their grip, which narrowed the area he had to work in. “One man was remarkably calm, though. He kept up strong pressure on the retractor the entire time so that I had a wonderful window into the body. When I finished I looked up to congratulate him and told him he could let go. Nothing happened. It seems that sometime during the surgery my friend had fainted. The weight of his body leaning backwards was what was keeping the retractor taut!” I never got to test my own fortitude because that was the night of the Mumbai terrorist attacks which killed more than 170 people. The city went under lockdown and the hospital had to cancel all non-emergency procedures.)

As I lay in the recovery room after my own minor procedure last week, I breathed a prayer of thanks for whoever invented the devices that allowed surgeons to maneuver inside my knee without leaving ugly red scars on the surface. For most of human history, people with a torn meniscus or a thousand other ailments would simply have to live with the pain. And especially I am grateful for physical therapists. I worked with one for several months after a broken neck in 2007, and learned that physical and occupational therapy training may include as much basic anatomy as might be offered in medical school. More, therapists have close and extended contact with patients, whereas doctors are under constant pressure from insurance companies to limit face time. Any honest surgeon will admit the limits of the craft: healing and full recovery depend on what happens after surgery, and in that process the physical therapists play an indispensable role.

As it happens, my physical therapist also climbs mountains. We’ve both summited the 54 14,000-foot mountains in Colorado, and as he massages and manipulates my knee we relive our exploits: lightning storms, hail and snow, close calls from rock falls, animal sightings. If all goes well, and I follow his instructions over the next few weeks, I’ll eventually tackle a few more—with renewed gratitude for modern medicine which has mastered the art of repairing that marvelous structure that creates a necessary hinge in the legs that move us through life.

Sometimes You Can Go Home Again

I've been reading memoirs lately, and I finally got around to Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, which had a most unexpected run atop the New York Times best-sellers list a couple of years ago. Rhoda Janzen, its author, created a fresh and original voice: funny but not cruel, irreverent but not hostile to faith, poignant but not maudlin, risqué but not indecent.

She came from solid Mennonite stock (her father once headed the Mennonite Conference for Canada and the United States) and, like many before her, rebelled against her strict upbringing. Standing six-foot-two as a teenager, her height amplified by high heels and a bouffant dyed-blond hairdo, she must have seemed like a creature from another planet to her Mennonite classmates with their long skirts and clunky shoes and their hair tucked into neat buns covered with lace doilies.

A week before I read Janzen's book I visited the largest settlement of Mennonite and Amish, in Ohio. I spoke at a few events, the first time that I can recall anyone in my audience arriving in a horse and buggy.  I have known and worked with Mennonites over the years and have also had some contact with the Amish, commissioning them to build a few pieces of furniture when I lived in Chicago and sharing a meal in an Amish home in the oddly named town of Intercourse, Pennsylvania.

Mennonites trace their roots to Menno Simons, a 16th-century Dutch pastor who opposed infant baptism and believed strictly in nonviolence, forbidding his followers to join the army. European churches and governments responded with vicious persecution, causing the Mennonites and other Anabaptist groups to flee to other countries. Later a man named Jacob Amman led a group of reformers who broke off from other Mennonites and became known as Amish Mennonites.

Schism has often occurred among the Mennonites and Amish. There are Old Order and New Order Amish, Beachy Amish, Swartzentruber Amish, Kaufman Amish Mennonites, Conservative Mennonites, Reformed Mennonites, Holdeman Mennonites, Stauffer Mennonites, Progressive Mennonites, and Wisler Mennonites, a mere sampling of the scores of groups who can now be found in more than sixty countries.  Most of these branches have their own distinctive list of do's and don't's, with the Amish generally being the stricter.

The most conservative Amish will not use motors, paint, or compressed air though some factions allow machinery that runs on compressed air but not electricity. The carpenter who made my furniture used tools powered by compressed air generators but had no telephone; once a week he would travel on horseback into town to use the telephone and report on progress. As if to defy all stereotypes, in Ohio I met an Amish shopkeeper in traditional button-only black clothing who was operating two laser wood-carving machines. Go figure.

Some Amish men wear only one suspender, considering two a mark of pride. Some allow a tub and toilet inside the house but keep the sink outside. Not wanting to be ostentatious, some use only reflective tape, not a triangular warning sign, on the backs of their horse-drawn buggies, and stain their leather harnesses black. Their more lenient brethren, the Old Order Mennonites, began permitting automobiles in 1927, but only plain cars painted black, thus earning the name "Black Bumper Mennonites."

It is easy to caricature such minority groups, as cartoonists and comedians do. Americans have a fascination with nonconformists, and a genre of "Amish fiction" has recently emerged, as well as several Hollywood movies and television shows centering on this subculture. In one controversial reality-TV program, Amish in the City, Amish teens were exposed to the broader culture by living together with non-Amish, which they call "English." In the Midwest, and especially Pennsylvania, Amish settlements attract hordes of tourists with their intrusive cameras.

In my travels I have gained great respect for the quiet, simple way that Mennonites and Amish practice their faith. In Africa and Asia when I have asked, "Which relief and development organization does the best, most efficient work here?" inevitably the answer comes back "Mennonite Central Committee."  And the whole world took notice of the Amish spirit of forgiveness after the Nickel Mines massacre of schoolchildren in 2006. All Anabaptist groups have a long tradition of martyrdom, which no longer takes them by surprise. "We sin too," explained one spokesman with eloquent simplicity, and more than half of those who attended the murderer's funeral were Amish.

A visit to Amish and conservative Mennonite country shows it is possible to resist the materialistic, sex-saturated, celebrity-obsessed culture of modern America. It seems like a time-travel trip back to the 1950s, which is not all bad. Few of the people I talked to have radio, television, or Internet. The women wear little or no makeup and both sexes dress plainly. I spoke at a mostly-Mennonite high school chapel service where no student used the time to text friends or read magazines; they paid rapt attention.  Mennonite children are more likely to aspire to the viola than the guitar.

In contrast to the Mennonites, most Amish do not even go to high school, much less college. They have a mandatory eight grades of education, usually in one-room schoolhouses, after which they assume their roles on the family farm or shop. Clean living results in a cancer rate among the Amish only 56 percent of the national average. Though crime rates are low in Amish and Mennonite communities, not all is peaceful. Some groups practice a harsh shunning of anyone who breaks the rules. Divorce is rare, but rumors of physical and sexual abuse persist. In a case that has shocked the peaceful Amish, this year several Amish are standing trial for forcibly cutting off the beards of members of a different sect.

Despite their strict rules on behavior, the Amish and conservative Mennonites have a tradition called rumspringa, or "running around," in which their teenagers indulge in normally forbidden activities (partying, drinking, movies) for a year or so before deciding whether to join the order as an adult—sort of a prolonged Mardi Gras before Lent. A large majority of them, as many as 90 percent, return to the fold even after tasting the broader culture.

I have written about Mennonites and Amish together when they can be quite different depending on the branch. Amish retain their distinctive dress unless they "jump the fence" to join the Mennonites. The more progressive Mennonites wear modern dress, use modern technology, and on the outside seem virtually indistinguishable from their neighbors. They would probably offer the rejoinder, "Yes, but it's what's inside that counts."

Rhoda Janzen, author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, would surely agree. Her own rumspringa lasted far longer than a year and she is still sorting out her faith while teaching writing at Hope College in Michigan. She wrote the memoir at age 43, a year that turned her whole life upside down. Her husband announced he was leaving her, after fifteen years of marriage, for Bob, whom he had met on Gay.com.  That same week a car accident left her with serious injuries. And a short time later Rhoda faced breast cancer and a double mastectomy. What does a person do in the midst of a personal hurricane?

If you're a Mennonite you return home, and that's what Rhoda did, making her way back to the land of Borscht, fattening cookies, and corduroy-covered Bibles. She is blessed with parents who, though quirky in ways that give her rich material, welcomed her with open arms and provided a safe place for recovery.

Many Mennonite readers don't like the book, judging it shrill, overstated, and unfair to their heritage.  Most non-Mennonites love it, perhaps because it taps into a wistful longing we all have. It's both tempting to cast off the shackles of childhood and fun to mock the foibles of whatever insular group we grew up in. And let's face it, groups like the Mennonites don't have the bright lights and sex appeal of the rest of society. (A local retail store in Ohio sells hand-cranked radios and blenders but no smart phones.)

When you really need comfort, though, when your world crashes in around you, you want a community that will welcome you back. Rhoda Janzen found just that.