SEEKING THE TAPROOT OF ANABAPTIST SPIRITUALITY

Mary Schertz

My spirituality is rooted in my spiritual tradition, and beneath that perhaps even the farming family and community in which I grew up—but it took me a while to realize this. First I had to find my way through a lament I sometimes hear and have sometimes felt myself: that those of us who are heirs of the Radical Reformation have "lost our spirituality" in our quest for ethical faith. We need to look to other traditions to recover a vibrant spiritual life.

This lament surfaces occasionally in Bridgefolk (see www.bridgefolk.net), a group committed to dialogue between Mennonites and Catholics, in which I have been a grateful participant for the past several years. Bridgefolk is currently conducting summer consultations at St. John’s Abbey in the rolling hills of Steuben County, Minnesota—Lake Wobegon country. These are wonderful weekends—replete with Benedictine hospitality, lively discussions, Psalms with the monks, hymns with the Mennonites, and great (relatively cool) summer weather.

There is no question that Catholic spirituality, as well as other traditions, has much to teach us. The abbey has a home in my heart. In addition to the Bridgefolk meetings, I also spent a sabbatical at the Ecumenical Institute there working on my Luke commentary and worshiping with the monks. The experience was life-changing . When I returned to Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, I knew that some parts of my life had to change—for the glory of God and for my own salvation.

I realized that my "people" responsibilities were crowding out other, also God-given, responsibilities to reflect, to write, to read, to worship, to nurture my own relationship with God. I was burning out, and I was also shortchanging my students by trying to minister to them from a dry well.

So I made some changes—changes only named correctly later during a Bridgefolk meeting by one of my new Catholic friends. "Ah," she said, "you made a ‘rule’ for yourself."

She was right, of course, although I had not thought of it that way. In the spirit of St. Benedict, I had woven worship and work together into a more sane and God-conscious life. I had created a "rule" for myself.

I will always be grateful to the monks at St. John’s for bringing me to my senses in midlife, like Peter realizing his freedom in Acts 12. But I have no illusions that the source of these changes is Catholic spirituality. The Benedictines may have supplied the fertilizer and water for my growth—but the taproot is Mennonite spirituality.

Although I find much that is helpful in other traditions and want to be passionately and widely involved in ecumenical dialogue, I believe those of us within the Anabaptist and Mennonite traditions also have much we can draw on to move closer to God in our daily walk.

One of my early thoughts during my sabbatical with the Benedictines was I haven’t prayed so much since I left the farm. Growing up on a farm in central Illinois, attending and then becoming a member of a small Mennonite congregation, I was immersed in a vital spirituality—although we certainly would not have called it that then. In fact, in its rhythms and observances it had much in common with the Benedictine spirituality of St. John’s, although again at that time and in that context we would probably have resisted the comparison.

"Devotions" were a large part of our family ife. My parents had their private devotions before we awoke. They were not ostentatious about this part of their lives. Were it not for the chance encounter passing through the kitchen to get a drink of water, the well-worn and marked Bibles, or the casual comment on a Scripture text from the morning’s reading, we would hardly have known they were doing their devotions.

We also had family devotions, either at breakfast or supper, depending on the season of the year and the demands of farming. Part of setting the table was putting the Bible at my father’s place. We met for family meals three times a day and always prayed before meals. The morning prayer was the long one—remembering the church and the world as well as our own family concerns. The other two were short graces or sung graces.

In the evenings before bedtime we had recreational reading and then prayers before bed. My parents ended the day with kneeling beside their bed in prayer. Again, were it not for those sleepy trips to the bathroom, we would never have known they did so.

Devotions in my home were nothing out of the ordinary in my experience. Other families in our community were living their lives in much the same way. I also do not remember much of a sense of obligation, guilt, or legalism about these habits.

As we entered adulthood, there was a gentle expectation that we would adopt a devotional or "quiet" time of our own. The church adults gave us some help occasionally. We might discuss the value of reading through the whole Bible, although there were other suggestions as well. We were introduced to the ACTS prayer (standing for adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication), one I still find useful.

But for all our struggles with legalism, with all our attempts to live nonconformed lives in relation to dress, entertainment, the pledge of allegiance, voting, and many other issues, our devotional lives seem largely to have escaped becoming a list of "oughts." We did not name our particular way of "praying the hours" as nonconforming to the world. I see the quiet joy these devotions gave our lives, however, along with the nonlegalistic but obedient priority we gave them, as our finest acts of nonconformity and as a telling witness in our small world.

When we were teenagers, my parents suggested that we limit our extracurricular activities to two a year to leave time for church, family, and ourselves—as my mother phrased it. It was not that school and community activities were devalued; they were in fact highly valued, and we had every sense that we were making difficult choices among many good things. But even in those quieter, less frantic decades, making time for God and each other in our schedules was a highly nonconformist act.

At the time, of course, I would have cited the dancing and movies we were beginning to enjoy somewhat surreptitiously as the key matters of nonconformity—and here I was more likely to resist than to embrace noncomformity. With the passing of the years and the generations, however, I am more aware of just what an effective, if matter of fact, witness this lifestyle had in my community.

This spirituality had strengths and weaknesses, as do all spiritualities. One strength was its clear trinitarianism. We related to God, Jesus, and the Spirit with a fair amount of balance. We prayed to God and looked to God for providence, care, and judgment. We followed Jesus in life, cross, and resurrection. We assumed the presence of the Spirit in us as individuals but indisputably more so in the gathered community.

Such spirituality also built community. We practiced communal prayer, and that led us to reach out to the community around us. Wednesday evenings were prayer meeting nights. The adults (high school and up) spent the largest part of that meeting in prayer. After singing and reading Scripture, the concerns of the community were mentioned, then we "entered into a time of prayer." Silent prayer and intercessory prayer were both used.

Sometimes we discussed prayer. Some pieces of advice I remember from those meetings include the following: Prayer should not be entered into lightly. Humility and self-examination are encouraged. Prayer is not to be used against people, or as "sanctified gossip." Since prayers will be answered, we need to take responsibility for our requests and be willing to be part of the answer to the prayer.

Taking that responsibility, of course, led us out into hospitality. We took turns hosting a family with an alcoholic father. We provided garden ground for poor families in Peoria. We responded to disasters and other social needs.

This spirituality had weaknesses as well. Concrete social needs, both local and global, were attended to with ardor and conviction but without much real understanding of or commitment to the deeper issues of justice underlying many of them. Over the years, my father sensed very little support from our congregation for his interests in root causes.

Liturgy and the sacraments did not feature largely in this spirituality; consequently, reverence and awe were sacrificed. Twice a year footwashing and communion were celebrated with the solemnity that befits certain understandings of these practices but excludes or plays down other, more celebrative or joyous understandings. Aesthetics did not play a large part in this spirituality, and our artists and poets have suffered a critical lack of appreciation.

In addition to these strengths and weaknesses, some attributes cannot easily be characterized as strength or weakness. One was evangelism. Evangelism—sharing the gospel, reaching out to the lost—was valued. But oh my, did we ever struggle with it. We were simply not a glib people. Articulating our faith was something in which we believed mightily and did conscientiously—but ours was not the joyous, natural, outgoing evangelism of the Baptists down the road.

Another of those difficult-to-categorize attributes was experience itself. Visons, mystical oneness with the divine, God’s direct voice were not unknown among our people. But neither were they expected, sought after, or made large.

In both these cases, evangelism and experience, we certainly avoided some of the worst kinds of misuse and irresponsible behavior with our rather taciturn matter-of-factness. But we also undoubtedly cut ourselves off from some of the richness and variety of the faithful Christian life.

In my exit interview with Patrick Henry, the director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John’s, he used a curious expression to describe my contribution there. He told me that I had "handed them back themselves." I am, to this day, not exactly sure what he meant by that—maybe it is impossible to tell from that angle.

But I can articulate the opposite phenomenon. What my encounters with Catholic spirituality have done for me is "hand me back myself." I have a deep, warm appreciation for the monks, the abbey, the ecumenical institute. I have learned much from their expressions of faith, their liturgy, their practices and disciplines. I love them. But their greatest gift has been a renewed appreciation of my own tradition, my own heritage, my own disciplines of faith, along with a renewed determination to lively freely and practice fully following Jesus in that way.

It is not that Mennonite spirituality is superior to Catholic spirituality. Any expression of faith has its strengths and weaknesses. But Mennonite spirituality, though not so formally articulated or institutionalized, is well worth some attention. The extension of that grace to me may have been Benedictine hospitality at its finest.

—Mary H. Schertz, Elkhart, Indiana, is Professor of New Testament at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary and Director of the Institute of Mennonite Studies. Although this version of "The Taproot of Anabaptist Spirituality" was prepared for DreamSeeker Magazine, it is based on an earlier version published by Bridgefolk and available at Bridgefolk.net.