For saying this, you may well call me deranged. And you are allowed to call me deranged but please do so only if you are willing to define deranged as it has been defined truly by the people and beliefs that history has proven most decent—in the definition of deranged that relates to a lack of appreciation for silence and meditation and the divine, deranged as a lack of realization that happiness can best be found in the everyday wonders of the natural order, and deranged as a failure to acknowledge that the most ancient and basic practices such as conversation, eating, and singing will never be surpassed by any manmade invention.

I will not allow you, however, to define deranged according to the twisted, unprecedented cultural norms that have darkened the human scene within the last century, the ideas and agendas that are seeking to convince us all that these aforementioned most ancient and basic practices are only something to endure, something to expedite us toward the unknown, unnatural, elusive ‘other pleasure’ so fervently marketed by the one percent—the greedy, powerful corporations.

All of us should try to, at least once a month, do something that is not lemming-like. With the current socio-economic system that is in place in the West, this is extremely difficult. But still we must try. Just maybe deleting this blog from the internet can serve, for me, as this month’s small act of defiance to the oppressive, increasingly totalitarian system.

So yes, on February 24, exactly 803 years after St. Francis took his voluntary poverty oath, I will delete this blog. Thank you for reading my posts this past year and several months. To date, I have some 60 subscribers and over 16,000 hits. Not that that should define my success or fulfillment but it does feel good to know that I have friends who empathized with me as I grappled with life, patiently kept reading as I worked on developing my writing voice, and most of all care about the issues I wrote about during my time of blogging.

It is my hope that I helped somebody think or grow but your best hope for growth is still, I can assure you, to go off to a quiet place and read ancient wisdom. Read the Bible. Read the early church fathers. Read Thoreau. Then read nothing at all and say nothing at all. Just listen. Let your soul be healed from the oppressive blight of noise that has infested our land. Revel in silence. Revel in trees. Revel in the fact that there is a spiritual reality.

And may you find that reality. May you take part in something each day that is as ancient as time itself. Stoop and drink cool, unprocessed water from a forest stream. Walk through summer grass with your lover. Visit an elderly man who lived his life well, who, in his youth, traded the path of least resistance for the Unidentifiable Quest. There you can learn more real knowledge in a single moment than you will learn by combing the entire internet.

And finally, I must leave you. Thank you for being alive in the most real sense. Thank you for your passion for of all gifts passion is most precious. Thank you, my dear friends. Thank you very much.

Here is the second of Davin Martin’s articles on Mennonites. He lives in Lancaster, PA.

So how are the current Conservative Mennonites, Beachy’s, Mid-Atlantics, etc, etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, doing on following the commands of Jesus.  (The reason I put that string of Latin words in was because I didn’t feel like listing all the denominations.  The list would be so long I would be nauseated until I was done typing it.)

I am going to be making boxes (Jesus’ commands) and commenting on them.  This requires massive generalizations, which can never be fair.  But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be helpful.

Last time I said the main difference between Anabaptist-Mennonites and other Christians (another massive, unfair generalization) was the Mennonites take Jesus’ commands seriously and try to live them out.  So here we go.

“Don’t get rich.”  What! Jesus said that! No, he said, (I wish my writing could take on a majestic preachy tone right now) Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth where neither moths nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal.  Of course, we know that Jesus did not want us to be foolish.  We should live at about the same economic level as society around us.  And so we can clearly see that Jesus was talking about excessive wealth, not just the normal amounts.

What we added was human reasoning to Jesus’ commands to justify our wealth.  We get upset when evangelicals say, “Of course fighting in self-defense would be okay.”  But it seems like we do the exact same thing with wealth.  We start reasoning and rationalizing to get around this hard saying of Jesus.

I am writing about wealth because that is probably the biggest hang-up I have with Jesus’ commands.  Even Proverbs has lots of good things to say about wealth that is gotten by hard work.  (Mennonites love these verses!)  I want to be wealthy.  I get annoyed when my wife tells me to stop worrying about making money all the time.  The reason it annoyed me was because it was truer than I would like to admit.  I want stuff.  I want things.  I want a stable income. I want enough money so that if a big bill came in I … wouldn’t have to trust God.

That is where the issue really lies.  Do we trust God or don’t we trust God?  The wealthier we are, the less we have to trust God.  Of course we sing ‘Tis so Sweet to Trust in Jesus’ while we continue to heap up “rainy day” funds so we don’t have to trust Jesus.  We also sing ‘I Need No Mansion Here Below.’ This doesn’t make sense.

Mennonites are wealthy, but they are struggling with wealth.  Most of them give a lot, but almost all of them still keep a lot.  That puts us in the class of the rich men who gave less than the poor widow.  I also think that more wealth means less non-resistance, more assimilation, less spiritual vitality.

Jesus said, “Don’t resist evil with force.”  Mennonites don’t kill.  I’d say Mennonites do okay with this one.  It gets preached a lot.  It is the big Mennonite thing, so of course, we do well with it.  Of course there are the sticky issues.  Does that mean we can’t evict a renter?  Can we use a collection agency?  Do you see how wealth would influence these questions?

Jesus said, “Do not divorce and remarry.”  It is easy to legislate this one, but much harder to offer the compassion and support to those who are dealing with difficult marriages.  So we’ve created “counseling centers” where we mail couples with difficult marriages and we expect them to be fixed when they come back.  This is not all bad, but the community needs to be working with and supporting marriage problems, not just sending people to counseling centers.  I have a relative whose first several years of marriage were horrible.  She says she would have divorced if she could have.  Today she has a wonderful marriage.  I know that not all problems can be worked out like this, but many can be.  It is not enough for us to pat ourselves on the back and say, “We don’t have any people who have divorced and remarried in our church,” when we have some broken marriages.

Do not be conformed to this world.  To see if we are doing okay on this one, we take a picture of ourselves, hold it beside a picture of a “worldly” person and compare.  That might be a start, but we forget about our vehicles, way we run our business, interpersonal relationships, and all the difficult stuff.  This one often brings lots of legislation in our churches.  No buttons on suit coats.  Cars must be black.  There is nothing wrong with these rules; what is wrong is that lots of people comfort themselves with being nonconformed because they follow these rules.  Real nonconformity means constantly seeking Jesus and changing as we learn to know him better.  It is not obeying rules.

Gideon told me not to go over 800 words, and I already have overdone it.  So thanks for reading.

Taize is an ecumenical monastic order. That alone is enthusing but what I really love about Taize is the music. Simple and haunting, it convinces me of another reality like little else.

The other thing I love about Taize is their emphasis on silence during worship. We had the good fortune to attend a Taize service the other night in Berlin. Over 30,000 people were present, most of them young people. At one point there was total silence in the building for 10 minutes. Since then I have been thinking about silence and here is a list of 4 points I thought about specifically.

Silence is a viable form of communication. I heard a conversation once about Christian involvement in filmmaking. One point from the conversation I agreed with: Christian films are lousy films. The other point, which I am slower to agree with, is that Christians should develop acting because it’s a relevant form of communication. The young people who participated in the corporate silence the other night in Berlin, who were from the most secular backgrounds imaginable, could teach something to the trendy Christians who had this conversation. Silence does not equal nothingness. Ancient practices do not equal outdated practices. Rock star, mega-church pastors take note.

If you can’t find words, it might be worship. I have been contemplating a truth that was made clear to me right around the time of my wedding: the holier an occasion is the harder it is to find appropriate words. Are the noise level, the abundance of words, and the task oriented agenda at most modern worship services any indication of the level of holiness and divine connection?

Our smoke alarm doesn’t know about silence. Recently my mom sent us a smoke alarm. I think she had been planning to send one ever since she heard we live on a top floor apartment building and that the main Polish Fire and Rescue pad is not directly beside us. But then I told her how we forgot to blow out the candles several weeks ago after a romantic dinner at home and how the next morning when we woke up they were just starting to simmer. This sealed the deal and soon an oblong package arrived marked US Postal Service. It was the smoke alarm. It goes off at slightest thing and it is LOUD.

We should start a silence movement. I know this would mean folding this blog for starters because blogs are by definition the enemy of silence. We could also make New Year’s resolutions to find total silence every day. And how about a global day of silence? August 1? Oops, I think that’s the day of that big church conference.

Hey, but then again, why not?

Here is the first of two short articles written by a friend from Lancaster, PA for this blog. My friend believes that to be part of a tradition like the Mennonites, one should be all or nothing. One is also allowed and even indebted to critique that tradtion. Read on.

During the summer months, when I work in Philly, I get asked a lot, “Are you Mennonite?”  To tell you the truth most times the question annoys me because the question is insincere.  Kind of like asking a jutting-jawed man if he is a caveman.  I feel like a museum specimen.  A thing to be handled, poked, prodded, flipped upside down, dissected, but not a thing to be taken seriously.  I think the Anabaptist-Mennonite faith should be taken seriously.

I admit it probably is our fault that people don’t take us seriously.  When asked what we believe in we say, “Coverings.”

Are you serious?  You believe in coverings?

Then we proceed into the biblical reason for coverings and usually that is the end of the conversation.

Here’s how I think the conversation should go, and you may modify this however you wish.

“Are you a Mennonite or Amish?”  Yes, I am.  The museum inspector type will be satisfied with this and will not ask for more explanation.  They should be given no more explanation.

But if they start asking questions (and maybe you could stimulate them to ask questions) they will probably ask you how Mennonites are different than the world.  Here is the typical response to the question.

We don’t have radios and TV, we don’t fight in war, our women have to wear coverings.

To most people in society what you have just told them is that we are eccentric, technologically- deprived wackos who aren’t brave enough to fight and we force our women to dress like pioneers.  Not very compelling.  So they march off, and we rejoice that we have suffered for Christ’s sake.

A better response.  One difference between Mennonites and other Christians is that we believe Jesus was serious when he said stuff.  And that he honestly thought it would be possible for people to live out all of what he said.  And we are trying to live out the life he lived.  Jesus said, don’t resist evil with violence and so we try not to.  Jesus said, don’t divorce and remarry and so we don’t.  Jesus said, give to the poor and so we do.  Jesus said, let your yes be yes and so we don’t swear.  You get the point.

I really think this is where the central difference between Anabaptist-Mennonites and other Christians come in.  We don’t try to get around the hard sayings of Jesus.  We, with the Holy Spirit, try to live this life out now.  We pray, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.  That means what Jesus said he meant for today, not for some future kingdom.  Of course we fail, we don’t do this perfectly, we have lots of room for improvement, but we are seriously trying to live this out.

This is the kind of answer we should be giving the serious person who really wants to know.  As for the people who look on us as museum artifacts ….. I’m really not sure what to say.

In my next post I’d like to critique how current conservative American Mennonites are doing on these things.

Our Christmas tree is

not electrified, is not

covered with little lights

calling attention to themselves

(we have had enough of little

lights calling attention

to themselves).  Our tree

is a cedar cut here, one

of the fragrances of our place,

hung with painted cones

and paper stars folded

long ago to praise our tree,

Christ come into the world.

-Wendell Berry

He said: Good. So they will come twice a week. I said: IF I COULDN’T THINK OF SICKER JOKES I WOULDN’T EVEN TRY. He said: I will show you the curriculum I recommend for their level. I said: IT’S OUR FIRST YEAR OF MARRIAGE AND WE WOULD RATHER AVOID ALTOGETHER ANY ENDEAVORS THAT MIGHT LEAD TO GENOCIDE AND/OR RACE EXTINCTION. He said: They can’t speak English of course but they do know a few words like the colors and a few basic verbs. I said: TEACHING EVEN ONE 8 YEAR OLD IS MONASTIC-SCALE INNER REFINEMENT.

On the first day, they came and they looked like angels. There were 5 of them. Nowadays in Europe it’s not unheard of for 8 year olds to be studying three languages. They got out their notebooks as though language study came as naturally as eating. They will be okay, I told myself cheerfully.

But I had forgotten that within the hearts of young language prodigies there exists a sinister side. If the first week was a pleasant time of playing learning games and miming action verbs, then the third and the fourth week had my wife and me mentally composing a sequel to Lord of the Flies.

We have run the gauntlet far enough now that Christmas vacation is in sight. Nevertheless, I will tell you now that at the end of this short writing there will be no tidy ending. I doubt there will be a small huddle of teachers and students with soft hearts wiping tears either. Storytellers don’t feel comfortable telling lies of this magnitude until at least a decade has passed.

In retrospect, there were two main dramas to deal with this fall with the 8 year olds. First, each of the students is a boy except one—Olivia, who has dimples as well as an apparently unlimited thirst for male attention. The second drama has to do with Victor who is the smartest. Or at least the most diligent. Most teachers will say diligent equals smart. Yes, he is my unabashed favorite.

Victor was talking several months ago one day after the lesson while all five of them were in the hall putting on their jackets to go home. The school secretary told me later she heard the other children tell to Victor close his pig’s snout. The next day I decided to crack down on all this heckling. I became emotional. I tried to speak in Polish because it’s difficult to communicate with someone in English whose most complex sentence in the aforementioned language is ‘I can fight.’ I went for the worst case scenarios. A German dictator’s name was invoked and my bright, innocent language prodigies were forever insulted at having been implicitly compared to him. You would not have wanted to be there. I was far from eloquent.

Still, an incident took place in class several weeks later that was encouraging. Someone accused Mateusz, the largest boy in class, of heckling Victor. “I no do that, I no are Hitler!” he shouted as though he had been anticipating this. I felt jubilant. But of course it is a fool who babbles of resolution in the middle of a saga.

He thinks about it that Christmas is coming. He wants to celebrate. He’s always believed that celebration is good. It helps break up the mundane because you can look forward to a celebration long before it happens, when it’s still the mundane. But now, sitting in his flat that looks identical to ten thousand others in the city, cup of coffee in hand and Walden close by, he begins to grasp the oppressive reality that this holiday most people are going to behave mundanely. Odious consumerism disguised as gift shopping is a poor excuse for advent.

The people in the world suddenly look trapped to him and he wonders at the words of the messiah who repeatedly said he came to bring freedom. The greatest freedom, in his current state of mind, would be to have a Thoreau-like independence from anything but the land, the guileless land. If such a messiah’s claim can be substantiated he should have hero status, he thinks. He reads in the gospel of Luke and is impressed how his desires and actions were always pure and free of societal dictates.

He thinks briefly yet of a violinist he heard about who played his very best during the five o clock rush hour in a metro station and not even one person stopped to listen. But of course that night when he performed in a prestigious music hall hundreds showed up and they spent thousands if not millions to have come.

He decides quality does exist but that he would never profane it and himself by letting society dictate it. And in this way he has finally made a genuine Christmas wish, to be true to himself and his creator.

Paul was not afraid of misrepresenting the truth. Which is why I think he would be tremendously unfashionable if he would live in Western Europe today.  He didn’t pander to Republicans or Democrats, to Roman Catholics or  Evangelicals, to his constituency or to his lobbying group—he just said things. The reason we can take it off of him today is that his teaching, which put his physical life in grave danger, was clearly not flippant or hypocritical.

In the centuries after Paul, there were plenty of people who also asserted their teaching as gospel truth. The time would fail me to tell of Constantine, of the German dictator who worshipped “a platonic Aryan Jesus”, of the US Army rifle machining company that recently inscribed scripture verses on the sights of the guns they manufactured. Their problem wasn’t a lack of assertiveness.

Recently, I was in a conversation with other members of the small mission here in Poland. The pastor and his wife had just returned from America and they were telling us how unusual it was to see scripture everywhere. When they said this, my own experience aligned and I remembered overhearing conversations in the post office about Uncle Jim, the deputy sheriff, passing away and boy, was he a good Sunday School teacher. This overt religion that is so widespread in America, while it may be sincere in some cases, just could be false. And I happen to know that sometimes it is false. I don’t need to go into great detail or give examples. I did this is in too many vagarious, probably overwrought previous posts.

To at least a certain degree, I’m a product of my generation. And that means, with my specific generation, that it’s somewhat politically incorrect to make hard, fast statements. But living in Poland, where people express their faith entirely differently than rural Americans, has led me to be equally dissatisfied with the ennui of secularism.

My quest in writing this post is simple: I’m trying to find a way to live, speak, and even teach with authority, the Gospel I believe in. It seems that people in Europe err in never speaking about it in order to be politically correct. Others (Michelle Bachman, we think you’re fantastic—as a mom) err in always speaking about it, with a desire for self-justification or political gain.

So my question to you, Saint Paul: how do you walk a knife edge and even walk it with confidence?

What Good is God, by Philip Yancey. Esther bought this book a few months ago for her friend Clara’s birthday. Then I, like a bum, started reading it even though it was plainly Clara’s. Now, this weekend, Yancey’s coming to Warsaw and we’re going! Of course I remembered the unfinished book and thankfully I was able to borrow it and finish it. Riveting. His best so far. Mostly, it contains the speeches Yancey’s given, the settings ranging from the Virginia Tech school shootings to the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, as well as a bit of a background to each speech. When I see him in Warsaw I wish I could tell him two things: (1) sometimes his action verbs are conspicuous and unwieldy but other than that he’s a bloody good writer and (2) I envy him his rich life so filled with travel and adventure.

Washington Square, by Henry James. My introduction to the male Jane Austen; he enters the mind of his heroine with convincing precision. Fearing a pretentious slog, I was relieved to find a plot that moved gracefully without excessive prolonging between turns. James’ masterful use of language, while bordering on verbose in places, provides a diversion for the literary senses but hardly a diet. Overall, I’m glad to have read it, if for no other reason to educate myself about several of the archetypes dealt with in the book.

Radical, by David Platt. As I read this, I was considering Platt’s burden in writing: calling people to action, specifically people in comfortable settings who are naïve or else willfully unaware of the egregious spiritual and physical needs of billions around the world. And I thought, if the guy thinks we need action why is he writing books? Hundreds of books already lie dusty on the shelves of bookstores, not the least the Bible. But I must say Radical seems authentic and timely. It contains some church speak and I was disappointed to learn Platt has been writing serials to it; but all in all it’s the heartfelt burden of a man who, on realizing he’s the youngest mega-church pastor within nominal Christianity (whose founder never had more than 12 disciples), started a revolution of sorts. Or, I should say, revived a revolution.

I wish you all a good week and I’ll leave you with a paragraph from Radical: “We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. A nice middle-class, American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn’t mind materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who would not expect us to forsake our closest relationships so that he receives all our affection.  A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts, because, after all, he loves us just the way we are. A Jesus who wants us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who, for that matter, wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American Dream.”

May the American Dream and every other dream be extinguished by the fire of God’s dream.

But were I to write a book, it might be titled something like, The Extinction of Strangers: How I’ve Come to See Everyone in Their Underwear. Now that, Daniel Defoe, is what I call a subtitle. I don’t mean to be risqué; the ‘everyone in their underwear’ line comes from the respected American pastor Calvin Miller in his Life Is Mostly Edges where he says he overcame his fear of public speaking by imagining everyone in the crowd to be in their underwear. Read for yourself. Try it for yourself.

I won’t, however, be publishing my book until I have met all the rigorous, self-imposed restrictions looming over me, not the least being to read every classic book originally published in the English language. The one caveat is that I get to define which book is a classic and which isn’t. When I’ve read every classic, providing I’m not 107 and/or scurvy-ridden by then, I will sit down to write my book on the obsoleteness of strangers.

You see, strangers don’t exist. People you haven’t spent time with or really gotten to know, yes, those do exist—in fact, they might be living under your roof. I know I’m getting technical here but I really do think I have a point. And it’s a good idea. To have a point. If you wish to write a book. Although of late it doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite.

But why is it so important to make the distinction between stranger and a person you just haven’t met yet? Again, buy the book. But in short, when we approach people as strangers we’re sure to be intimidated by their facades.  It’s better to approach people with the confidence that there is a certain universal alikeness in all humans. For some, this humanness has lain dormant for many years. But if you’re disarming, real, and reasonably halitosis-free, you may be rewarded with a valuable friendship.

Finally, think of all the people you love now that you didn’t know ten years ago. At some point inaccurate first impressions were overcome, facades were removed, and now you know each other. It’s hard to imagine but there may be just as many wonderful new people that you’ll meet in the next ten years. And one of them just might become your spouse or your mentor (but hopefully not both).

This and so much more is what you can look forward to in my upcoming book. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go read Hawthorne.