BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

IF YOU NEED A SECOND OPINION

Daniel Hertzler

Review of The Body and the Book: Writings from a Mennonite Life. By Julia Kasdorf, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

If you have a perceived illness and your physician does not give a satisfactory answer, you may ask for the opinion of a second doctor. If you are puzzled about ambiguities facing Mennonites entering the twenty-first century, perhaps you should consult a poet.

Although you may not notice it at first glance, poets are different from ordinary people. For one thing, they pay attention to matters many people overlook. Poets notice things. Along with this, of course, they pay attention to poetic form. This can no doubt be learned, although I perceive that poets are born more than made. An additional important characteristic is a certain intensity. Poets are driven to express themselves when others may be willing to let well enough alone.

Julia Kasdorf is a poet. She has demonstrated this by having two books of poetry published by the University of Pittsburgh press. The first one, Sleeping Preacher, received the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett poetry prize. For this award her book was selected from among more than 900 submissions.

Now the poet has published a book of essays. Why does a poet need to write essays? Perhaps to explain herself to non-poets. Poems are not always transparent to non-poets. On my first time through the volume, I underlined freely and placed stars beside especially important passages. On a second time through, I inserted more stars. I’m still not completely sure what I have, but it grows on me.

In the preface, Kasdorf defines the book’s title broadly. On the one hand, body designates “the religious community . . . both as ‘one body’ and as the body of Christ—as well as my own and other bodies in all their blessed, fallen experience.” As for book, this is to indicate the Bible and also the Martyrs’ Mirror: “Throughout this collection, I’m concerned with the relationships between cultural tradition and innovation, collective history and individual memory, sectarian refusals and cosmopolitan desires; I seek to honor my distinctive Mennonite heritage even as I transgress and transcend its limits.”

This broad definition provides a wide tent into which the variety of essays included in the volume can easily fit. It appears, however, that two topics are of particular interest to Kasdorf: sexuality and power. Actually, when we stop to think of it, are there any other important topics?

Poets, like other artists, need to pay attention. When we marvel at the skill of a violin or piano player, we do not always stop to think of the hours of seemingly useless practice required to maintain their skill. As for Kasdorf the poet, “From fifth grade on, every night, even at slumber parties or on the bathroom floor I shared with the rest of the family, I shaped whatever happened that day into words. To have something to write each evening, I developed the habit of watching and converting experience into language” (11-12).

Her mentor has been Bertha, her father’s stepmother, who was also her mother’s aunt. When Bertha died Kasdorf lost “the only old woman I’d ever loved with my whole heart, a fierce woman who could judge and demand, who had a bossy streak as wide as the valley she came from but who could also love you wordlessly through the baking of wild hickory nut cake” (16).

Kasdorf evidently sees herself as a modern version of Bertha. Yet she will go beyond Bertha, for “to grow up as the kind of Mennonite I was and to write poetry that probes the reality of that experience is a serious contradiction. (A reflective essay also borders on embarrassing that sensibility)” (44).

Kasdorf’s preoccupation with power must eventually lead her to H. S. Bender, a man of power two generations ahead of her—he died the year she was born. He “looms large in my imagination . . . father of Mennonite studies, intellectual heavyweight in a dark, plain suit tailored in Lancaster County, PA” (121).

She notices also John Howard Yoder and the Concern Group, which “sought to recover the essence of Anabaptism, which was more concerned with revolutionary moves of the Spirit rather than with the material realities of tribal identity and sacramental objects” (134). She observes that “Yoder, arguably the most influential Old Mennonite thinker of his generation, will have trouble respecting the bodies of his female students” (135). Sex and power seem never far apart.

In chapter 9, “The Gothic Tale of Lucy Hochstetler and the Temptation of Literary Authority,” she exegetes the odd story of an Amish bishop taken to court for keeping tied his mentally ill daughter. She uses the case to point out the ambiguities in the efforts of John Umble, Guy F. Hershberger, and J. C. Wenger to defend the bishop. She herself identifies with both the mad daughter Lucy and Miriam, the bishop’s niece, who reported the story as best she could. “Will I be Miriam, the dutiful scribe, or Lucy, raging in my chains?” (157).

Kasdorf acknowledges that in her poetry she has in one sense preyed upon her parents and other acquaintances. “Only after a book was published did my guilt and curiosity cause me to engage the subject of those poems in conversations about how it felt to be represented, and I found those conversations almost too painful to bear” (159). Yet she concludes that “the true poem forces an imaginative reach, and thereby it unsettles, scrambles categories, unnerves. To make another variation on an old theme: no disturbance for the writer, no disturbance for the reader” (163).

Kasdorf has revealed aspects of herself throughout this volume. In the final chapter it comes out that she was sexually abused as a child by an elderly neighbor while on the way home from school and bitten by a copperhead while attending a summer camp. Both experiences, one would observe, were in a location which should have been safe but turned out to be a place of trauma.

In a concluding afterword she refers as she has before in the volume to an issue bedeviling our churches: how to relate to homosexuals who perceive that a covenanted same-sex relationship is an appropriate Christian lifestyle. She has no answer for this problem except to assert that “I am more certain than ever of the need to resist coercion and violence against the body” (192). Since none of the other “doctors” seems to have a definitive answer either, we may have to wait for further revelation.

As I reviewed these essays, I was struck by the few and fragmentary references to the biblical tradition. The Bible is full of poetry, much of it prophetic, some of it erotic. How has this poet not made more use of the biblical poetry? But then I recognize that she has evidently not studied the Bible professionally. She seems to have left Goshen College early before taking the definitive Bible courses and in university has studied the literature of other traditions.

I was impressed, however, to find a report in Mennonite Weekly Review (Sept. 6, 2001) of a presentation she made at Bluffton College, where she contrasted the Tower of Babel story with Pentecost and asserted “This is an amazing reversal of the Babel story, and it suggests to me that the truest sign of the presence of God is not sameness, conformity or consensus of identity but real understanding amid profound difference and diversity.” The article reports that “She urged new students to seek out new experiences, but not to lose the language of the past.” From one who has dedicated her life to words, it seems an appropriate exhortation.

I learn in the book that Kasdorf has left the Mennonite church for the Episcopalian. In doing this she has joined a line of those who have found Mennonite tradition in some way too narrow or otherwise unsatisfactory. Must our most creative people always leave? It appears our only hope for continued vitality is to accept persons from other backgrounds who find the Anabaptist vision as we have been able to interpret it meeting a spiritual need in their lives.

As Kasdorf finishes this book, she anticipates a move from Messiah College to Pennsylvania State University. “It feels as if I am closing a chapter of my life, drawing closer to the landscape and people of my origins even as I drift farther from its institutions” (192).

Some will still want to consult her for her second opinion. Recently, when visiting my alma mater to be inducted into the Old Grads group, I saw a poster with her visage and the announcement of a lecture. Even though she has not become “a prince of the church,” (139) some are listening. Comparatively few people in the world are granted as much.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, is author of a memoir, A Little Left of Center (DreamSeeker Books, 2000) and instructor for Pastoral Studies Distance Education. Hertzler also walks the dog, cuts wood in season, works in the garden, and keeps a few bees. He and wife Mary have four sons and nine grandchildren.