BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

THE VISION OF JEFF GUNDY

Daniel Hertzler

A Review of Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye. State University of New York Press, 2003.

The first time through this book I found myself wondering about its organization. Instead of beginning at a point and proceeding steadily to an end, it seems to go round and round. Then I noticed several things. An acknowledgment of sources shows that much of the book is compiled from material published elsewhere and now brought together in a single volume. So we may be prepared for some backtracking.

Also, in looking again at the introduction, I saw that Gundy has been on a search for his identity. In this book he reflects on that pilgrimage. "Here I am, a farmboy turned academic, a high school jock turned poet, a rebel turned family man, a skeptic turned churchgoer, a Mennonite by Birthright and—give or take my qualms and quibbles—by conviction" (3).

So this search provides a unifying theme for the book. What then are the issues which concern him? If we apply the grid proposed by Richard Foster in his book Money, Sex and Power, Gundy is most interested in power. There is an occasional overture to sex and some references to money, but what concerns Gundy is power, particularly the power of survival. To what extent has the radical Anabaptist vision been able to survive modernity and how will it function in a time of postmodern prosperity?

Gundy’s first and last chapters address a trip to Europe. In the first he reflects on worship: in cave, church, or cathedral, and aims to tie them together. The last chapter is based on a visit to distant relatives, descendants of Amish who stayed in Europe when Gundy’s ancestors came to America and found their way to the Illinois prairie where he grew up.

He writes of his ancestors on both his father’s and his mother’s sides as far back as great-grandparents. The families and the faith survived, but each has been subject to the pressures of passing time. He was raised as the oldest of six children in the Waldo Mennonite Church, an Amish congregation which became Amish Mennonite, then Mennonite as it adjusted to the pressures of modernity.

The piety was strong, and Gundy generally cooperated with the church program, but at one point he resisted. He declined response to the altar calls. But he eventually joined the congregation in his own way, for he writes that he was "baptized in the same congregation as my mother and her mother, and her mother’s mother and father, and that father’s father, though the church building burned down in 1933 and had to be rebuilt" (191).

Gundy is impressed by the ambiguities in life. He is interested in and wishes to practice the authentic Anabaptist faith, but wonders how this may be done in a society in which it is no longer illegal and he himself is wellpaid and quite comfortable.

Among the ambiguities is having lived on land from which Native Americans were separated against their will and where the farmers insisted that nature accede to their demands. All of the six children in his family went away to college, then one returned to farm with his father. "In some ways, though not in all, it [the modern North American system] is the most efficient food production system the world has ever known. The abandoned farmsteads, the decaying barns and torn down houses that illuminate the entire Midwest with their picturesque decay, remind us of the price of that efficiency" (85).

He is concerned about what this sort of farming does to the land, yet his life depends on it. "How shall we live in the world?" he asks. "Carefully, I might say. Gracefully. Mindful of our privileges and our blunders and the sacrifices we require of the world just that we may exist. Going as lightly as we can without falling into a joyless lifestyle Puritanism" (86).

Chapter 4 is subtitled "Depression, Silence and Mennonite Margins." I found myself wondering how a chapter on depression would fit into the book. I noticed eventually that he thinks his grandmother may have suffered from depression. This fits with what I have observed regularly: Persons who take an interest in mental illness are often close to someone who has suffered from it. He reports that his grandmother died in her early 60s. "Let her rest in peace now. But let her also not be forgotten. Let us remember that she needed a kind of help that even those who knew and loved her, who were close by and tried their best, could not figure out how to give her. Let us not blame them or her. But let us learn to do better" (114).

The Mennonite system has provided reasonably well for Gundy. He evidently found a wife in college and he has spent his professional life teaching in Mennonite colleges, first at Hesston and then at Bluffton.

In chapter 5 Gundy contrasts "the stance of the scholar, the theologian, the historian, the literary critic: a stance that claims objective knowledge, that analyzes and interprets, instructs and corrects" with "the stance of the artist, the poet: it testifies to inner experience, speaks without apparent concern for consequences, and insists that the personal cannot be ignored; in fact, it suggests that the personal is in some way the measure of the truth." He claims to believe in both. "I want to be a poet and an American and a teacher and an intellectual and a Mennonite" (117, 118).

So now it is out. Gundy wants to have it all these ways even though they may at times conflict with each other. In the end, he is still troubled by the ambiguities which confront Anabaptism, indeed any effort to practice a consistent faith. How is it possible "to discern what it might mean to pursue perfection without being driven mad by our inability to achieve it? The old Anabaptist answer is still the best one I can offer: that the struggle is bound to fail if taken up by a single isolated human agent." We need God, the Spirit and "a host of our fellow human beings who will support and critique us, who will both help and be in need of help" (189).

This calls to mind the late Guy F. Hershberger, whose brainchild, the Mennonite Community Association, was reaching floodtide at the time I entered churchwide activities. A sociologist and historian instead of a poet, Hershberger may not have been as free to acknowledge life’s ambiguities as Gundy, but I’m sure he sensed them. His solution was to gather academics, professionals, farmers, and small business types to reflect on ethical issues which surface in the activities of making a living.

Interest in this association declined as its groups focused on their own occupational concerns. But I can imagine that Hershberger might have recommended Gundy as a speaker at one of the association’s annual meetings. And surely he would be pleased to know that two generations farther on there is an advocate for the practice of clarifying and testing the faith within "community."

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, a long-time editor and writer, contributes a monthly column to the Daily Courier (Connellsville, Pa.).