Faith, hope, inspiration

Sourdough from East Coast to West and Even Zarephath

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It should be emphasized upfront: the primary motivation was neither self-improvement nor altruistic baking for loved ones. It was fear of shortages.

Along with family, I was out of the country when COVID-19 began its wildfire stage. We returned to grocery shelves mostly still normal except for whole corridors emptied of toilet paper. But just days later half-empty shelves became the norm.

Flour started to vanish. Especially wheat flour, my favorite for bread. And yeast. My alarm rose. Amid such big fears as socioeconomic collapse, loved ones getting sick, or I myself being infected post-heart surgery,  I was beginning to experience my day-to-day pandemic concern: fear of shortages.

What if I couldn’t have bread? Especially wheat bread? The antidote became clear after several days of researching the flour/yeast supply challenges: sourdough starter! You can grow sourdough starter from flour and water. Eventually it feeds its way into creating its own sour-tasting yeast mix.

That didn’t solve flour shortages. I’ve not figured out how to fix these by, say, growing and grinding my own grains, but only by watching for sources of the occasional five pounds here or there. I try to accept that as anxiety producing as the erratic supply is, the situation is dramatically less problematic than billions of people have long navigated every day.

So far the flour has not run out. More amazingly, the yeast keeps growing as the starter thrives on. I experience a bit more fully now the power of the Old Testament story of the widow of Zarephath, who has “nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.”

But the prophet Elijah, confronting barren land after God has stopped rain, is out of food. God promises the widow will feed him. Elijah tells her to keep implementing her plan but first to make a little cake for him and then one for herself and her son, because “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.” And so it happens (1 Kings 17: 8-16). It may not have been sourdough but it sure reminds me of it.

I‘ll never forget the surge, so intense I discovered the blood pressure I regularly measure had soared, when on the seventh day of feeding my sourdough starter doubled and more. And when dropped in water to test its potency, it practically leaped out, so energized it was.

My family is bewildered. This is not the Michael they know. He’s made it all the way to Medicare without even hinting at the urge someday to bake bread. Now he feeds his starters, Paulette (who eats unbleached flour) and Buddy (who eats wheat flour plus unbleached white) whenever they become exhausted.  In an effort to experience more hints of the Zarephath miracle, he also does not throw out starter discard (a byproduct of feeding the starter) but offers it to waffles and English muffins.

Lo, the recipients of this version of flour and oil are enthusiastic. They plead for an inexhaustible supply. I do my best to provide.

And recently I discovered the joy of providing not just the baked goods but spreading their source across the country. As so many of us have experienced worldwide, COVID-19 had inflicted trauma on West Coast children, grandchildren, and grandparents. Joan and I had previously relied on juggling vacations but often also work travels to include stop-offs in the West. But now such options to bridge the gap between East and West Coasts were blocked. We risked soon going for a year without visiting grandchildren growing up as fast as spring corn stalks. Various risk factors made flying seem unwise. Finally we settled on doing what we could with masks and careful stops to drive and meet halfway across the country.

What balm for traumatized souls. Older grandchildren Kadyn and Maya, eight and four, never before having experienced sourdough baking, each took delighted turns helping to mix and knead. Then my daughter Kristy had an inspired request: Could she take some starter back West? Carefully the feeding and dividing was done, and a starter child born from starter that had by now thrived across some 10 states headed forth across more states and miles.

A week or so later, as we mourned the renewed chasm of 3,000 miles between households came photos from Kristy: bread and muffins made from that sourdough.

When Maya who had helped make bread with me realized her mom was using a version of PawPaw’s starter, she was thrilled.

Through sourdough I’m nurtured—to my surprise given just trying to fix anxiety—in ways that help me grasp why so many new bakers have turned flour and yeast scarce. Sourdough doesn’t fix pandemic nightmares and deaths. But it can feel like healing balm on the wounds.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

hope, Teachings of Jesus

Getting Through

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Years ago after I had published some of her books, I slipped into a talk Mennonite author Katie Funk Wiebe was giving at a retirement community. Although I had long connected with Katie in relation to publishing, I had only met her briefly a decade before. Even back then she was at retirement age and writing particularly on aging. Now in her 80s she was still writing away and active enough to be speaking 1300 miles from her Kansas home.

When I crept into the chapel where I was to help sell her books, I was instantly impressed. Why? Because we often view 80s as winding-down time. Such signals are even stronger as COVID-19 makes some see those over 60 (like me) as having few valuable years left. Yet there was a majesty to Katie that was riveting, even awe-inspiring, as she stood there framed by that head of white hair simultaneously dignified and wild and told her truths. I saw the Katie who in Border Crossing (DreamSeeker Books, rev. ed. 2003) yearned to have done more galloping “at breakneck speed. . . .”

A man likely still older asked Katie this: As we age, as ears and eyes, limbs, even brains fail, how is God with us then? And what are we worth then?

The next questioner wondered what it means to believe God remains present when dementia takes away everything we may have thought of as defining a person.

Katie pondered. She seemed not determined to get answers just right. She just offered the thoughts that came. A main response was to tell of walking with her daughter Christine. After years of failing health, Christine had finally moved in to be taken care of by Katie before dying.

Katie said some days were very hard with not much to be done but get through them. At the end of each day they’d sit with each other. They’d ask what in that day had been life giving, what life denying.

Sometimes they found life-giving things to be thankful for, even if as small as the sun shining. Other days, confessed Katie, they could think of nothing at all. The day had been grueling, even torturous. Those days they’d just sit with and sometimes hold each other and thank God that they still had each other.

In the midst of COVID-19 and so many chapters of the Christian calendar we’ve lived through in recent months, including Lent, Palm/Passion Sunday, Easter, Ascension Day, Trinity Sunday, and more, the Jesus story says that the great takes the form of the low, that God sometimes values the very opposite of what we do, that God is larger than death but also present in death and beyond. I suspect this matters as we confront—often squabbling over political implications—wrenching accounts of persons of all ages, often older but often enough not, savaged by COVID-19 and too frequently taken or grieving one taken.

And I think often that the upside-down Jesus is evident in Katie Funk Wiebe. I see Jesus in Katie’s head of white hair flaring, pondering with her questioners what is left to celebrate when we have little but dim eyes, failed ears, false teeth, a brain that may not even know who we are.

Amid worry that normalcy may not return soon or ever in its old forms, I remember Katie not fixing what can’t be fixed but sitting with dying Christine and even then being grateful for what remained present to be cherished. Both Jesus and Katie are gone now in bodily form, but I sense their spirits living on, intertwining not so much in answers to what lies ahead but in ongoing presence amid whatever each day brings.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

family relationships, Mental health

See Me

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A blessing of six grandchildren is the chance to learn again a key longing of being human: “See me.” The ache to be seen is fundamental. It shapes us from beginning to end and through everything in between.

But oh how it shapes us as we begin. I see this in each grandchild. And I’ve found that with each the moment when we mutually experience the seeing changes our relationship forever. I could give many examples; let me try three representative ones.

I’ll always remember Maya that day we Skyped across a continent. She was nine-ish months. I loved her. I worked at getting to know her. But it was work. I had to keep experimenting with how she wanted to be related to. Then that day she kept bopping her head up and down.

Some impish urge caused me to copy her. She stopped. She stared. She bopped again. I bopped. Again she tested me. I bopped. Suddenly she grinned. Bop bop bop. Back and forth across the miles we bopped.

When I next saw her, I bopped. She bopped. We were launched. Three years later the bond grows ever stronger. What had happened? I believe that in the bopping Maya grasped that she had been seen.

August’s parents needed a babysitter for most of a day. Would I consider it? Yes. I drove five hours to figure out how to engage August. Bopping didn’t cut it. He just stared at his grandfather with a gaze that said, “You’re even more out of it than I thought.”

Experiment with this. Test that. Nothing. No crisis. We were getting along but perfunctorily. He was tolerating me. Then I got on hands and knees and followed. Everywhere he crawled, I crawled. Until . . . aha! He realized he was in charge.

Grins and grins. Crawl a few feet then turn. Is PawPaw following? Yes! More dazzling grins.

Now he walks and talks. But if he gets grumpy all I have to do is follow him, to his room, to look at sheep, to any of his current interests. All he needs is the following that tells him, “I see you.”

My youngest granddaughter, five months, needed figuring out. She responded to typical gestures, including my go-to, walking. But again it was work, a quest for what she really wanted.

One day I added speechifying to walking. I told her with some passion, including hand gestures, about grapes and raisins. I explained that she is a grape but raisins are grapes that have been aged and dried, that people my age are raisins, that her mother is half-grape, half-raisin. She was quite taken with the grandfatherly insights.

Then amid the speechifying her mom put her on a floor blanket. I got down with her. Her brow furrowed—What? What is he doing!—before yielding to a smile. I was joining her! I had seen her. Our relationship was a ballet from that point forward.

I ponder the state of the world. I ponder politicians who demand see me see me see me. I ponder their followers, who likewise want politicians to see us, cater to us, put us first. Perhaps by now it shouldn’t surprise but it does: Even as a pandemic sweeps the world, instead of pulling together many of us are splitting over whether COVID-19 is real, serious, to be fought against even if the economic toll is high—or is a form of fake news, perhaps serious but not that serious, not serious enough to shut things down. Once again the see-me cries emerge and revolve around you see me, not I will see you.

I wonder if we’ve corrupted the see-me transactions and attachments of childhood in ways that destroy. I wonder what would happen if we relearned to see each other at the primal levels I suspect the children within us all crave underneath the distortions of see me into which we keep falling.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Awe and wonder, gratitude, inspiration

Surrender’s Blessings

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Though we’d just met when hospital orderlies called us each from waiting room to preop,  she and I agreed: We didn’t want to go. Trained by a culture that prioritizes control over surrender, I asked my orderly, “What if I don’t go?” My new friend concurred: “We’re going on strike.”

Yet off we went to surrender our markers of control: wallets , rings, watches, glasses, clothes. Control was reduced to fumbling with a hospital gown to preserve dignity–barely.

Control had worked during the 40 years cardiologists reported, “Maybe someday you’ll need your aortic valve replaced, but probably not until your 60s, and maybe never.” Now an echocardiogram had shifted “maybe” to consulting a surgeon.

Still I pursued control. I doubled exercise, enhanced nutrition, lost more weight. Maybe I could still strengthen my heart enough to  skip surgery. I felt ever better; a painful challenge if forced into surgery would be relinquishing pre-surgery well-being.

Then another echocardiogram. The valve was leaking badly, its shrinking surface area raising pressures that would eventually destroy my heart. Mortality odds were soaring; maintaining control by resisting surgery would do me in. Any vestige of control now meant choosing surrender.

I grieved this into the final hours. Still, due less to strength of character than to bleak alternatives and a hospital system that sucked me into its inexorable protocols, surrender I did.

I most strongly felt the surrender as not just forced but ultimately embraced after tearful goodbyes to spouse, daughters, siblings gave way to the anesthesiology fellow pushing my stretcher with wheels as balky as some shopping carts down lonely halls. I apologized for her having to explain “He had a lot of good-byes” when an operating room phone call asked why we were late. Gently she told me, “It was moving to see the love.” It’s time to yield to care like this, I thought.

Such kindness was underscored as we reached the operating room, an efficient team inserted IVs, lines, whatnots, and that syringe slowly pushing in to take consciousness. All team members used my name and gave their names. They honored me as person with feelings and fears.

What a gift when offered to one on the cusp of being chilled 10 degrees below normal, chest sawed open, heart stopped, blood and breath circulated by machine, the symbolic and in many ways literal seat of being to be held in a surgeon’s hands as aorta is clamped off,  diseased valve removed, new valve sewed in. Would a clot break loose? Warmth ever return? Heart restart?

Then puzzling light and shadows. I remembered the man born blind reporting, after Jesus healed him, seeing men like trees walking. Through ICU windows I was glimpsing midday sun on hospital buildings.

Though pain and recovery lay ahead, I had awakened to so many gifts: discovering that the feared breathing tube had already been removed, that my incision had been minimally invasive, that I was . . . alive! My mind seemed still mine. The stuffed narwhal my granddaughter had given me, matching her own so we could together be comforted, was tucked in beside me. Love filled the room—first as compassionate staff cared for me, then as loved ones arrived.

Many of the effects of surrender in this context were so intense as to be almost mystical beyond words, but truth-telling does require reporting that not all was peaches and cream. After catheter was first removed a combination of anesthesia aftereffects and my reaction to lost privacy completely froze my bladder. This continued for so many hours that if I had not surrendered to some, shall we say, very direct interventions, what I had always anxiously assured my spouse could happen on too long a plane flight would have happened: something would have burst.

But let me ask you, if you had trouble managing some of your affairs in public and you were told somebody always had to be with you, what would  you do?

Or suppose you at last negotiated that you would be allowed to try by yourself so long as you stayed near the call button. By now even the most rules-affirming staff–who were, after all, just trying to obey the rules to keep the patient safe–realized creative alternatives must be sought. Then suppose every time you started to unfreeze you could hear your heart monitor, wi-fi carrying it out to main hall and nurses’ station for all to enjoy with you, beeping and cavorting with every move while you waited for someone to race in and code  you. What would you do?

Well, what I did was this: I yielded to catheterization whenever the freezing had gone on too long to remain unaddressed. And I turned to my post-partum daughters, who had in total delivered six babies and had learned, I now began to grasp in fuller ways by far than before, what it means to give up all privacy and bodily control. Minute by minute and hour by hour–thank you dear children–they coached me through.

Frozen body functions remained, however, far outweighed by learning like never before the power of being cared for in body and spirit. One nurse, sensing the exhaustion Joan and I were feeling due not only to recovery intensities but also constant night interruptions and noises, proactively conceptualized the entire night so she could structure it to give us the longest periods of unbroken sleep.

Another night, Eun-Hui and Bryna needed to take extra care of the endless array of wires and tubes attached to me and into me, into my chest, arms, carotid artery, and even, I was intimidated to learn, the very core of my heart. There at 3:00 a.m. they stood on either side of me, Eun-Hui supervising as each took turns checking bandages, adding ointments, in a few wonderful cases taking this or that out for good.

Off to my left,  an utterly worn-out alien slept on a fold-out chair. It was my poor spouse, ears muffled in noise-canceling headphones, each eye looking like a magnified fly’s eye under a black mask. A nurse herself who had once cared for people in my situation, knew the dangers, and had endured months of worry long before the traumas of supporting me through surgery, now she could rest into the gift of other nurses taking over. She particularly deserved that after the first night, when with no place in to stretch out while I was in intensive care she had slept sitting straight up except with head bent onto my bed.

So now on both sides of me for over half an hour Eun-Hui and Bryna painstakingly worked. Carefully, gently, skillfully, they created what came to seem to me a holy time, a period of understanding as well or better than I ever had in worship the healing effects of the laying on of hands. When they were done, Eun-Hui asked how I was doing then as they turned to leave of all things thanked me, adding with a smile, “You were a very patient patient.”

I realize, with sorrow, that millions who deserve it don’t get such care, including as overseen in this case by a surgeon whose colleagues kept volunteering that I was in world-class hands. I realize as well, after starting to see the enormity of the claims my bills are making on Medicare, that anyone who thinks the challenge of health-care costs is solved simply with hard work and personal responsibility has not tried having a heart valve replaced in the U.S. health system.

So I am profoundly thankful as I remember those hospital days, just three but with effects that shaped not only my body but also my spirit for the rest of however many days I still have. I feel grief for a culture that shapes me and us to learn so  much more about control than surrender. And I feel sheer gratitude at having been invited to learn that surrender offers not only curses but also mystic blessings.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, Church structures, Doubt, Faith, formation, Future of the church, Mennonite, Mennonite church, worship

Enriched by the Churched and A-Churched

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When I became a seminary dean in 2010, polls were showing that membership and participation in traditional Christian denominations was falling. As the decade proceeded, the unraveling gathered speed. In an October 17, 2019 update, Pew Research Center reported that “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.” Across some 10 years, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as Christian is down some 12 percent to 65 percent. Meanwhile “the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’ now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.”

In recent years I’ve left to others the challenges and opportunities of running seminaries during such a time as this.  This has given me more energy to focus on the reality that this isn’t just an institutional matter; it’s deeply personal. When I was growing up I don’t recall knowing anyone in my immediate circle of loved ones being other than Christian and a regular churchgoer. Now the majority of my friends and family are what I might describe, respectfully, as “A-churched” in the Greek sense of “A-” pointing to an absence of.

As Pew indicates, and whatever the trajectory may become in future decades, for now this trend seems only to be strengthening among those I love. It has perhaps also intensified as political polarization separates Christians into camps who can only shake their heads in disbelief that the other camp could be understood to be truly Christian.

This came to mind as I was discussing with one of my pastors participating in a ritual of congregational healing in preparation for treatment of a leaking aortic valve. At the same time, my wife Joan was working out logistics of an informal ritual with a circle of her friends who had supported one of their group also needing heart treatment. They were now offering this ritual to me.

I value both settings, I realized. As one formed in the church before I even knew who I was, I continue to experience the power of a community gathered in Jesus’ name in hopes of offering to each other and the world at least glimpses of being the Body of Christ.

And as one who has personally spent periods traveling through many of the “A-” dynamics of our age—A-theism, A-gnosticism, A-churchgoing—I also was moved to envision support organized not against but outside of traditional congregational structures.

I‘m grateful that at the moment I’m not responsible for envisioning how this plays out institutionally, as congregations, church schools, denominations, and faith traditions wrestle with what it means to thrive—or not—amid current trends. My time of institutional leadership as the trends gathered force showed me I didn’t have failsafe initiatives.

But as I ponder the personal dimensions of all this, I do draw some inspiration from simultaneously experiencing the power of both formal and informal communities of care. When I discussed some of this with Joan, she reported wondering how even informal communities of healing will continue to be available, given how often they spend capital inherited from formalized faith settings.

Joe Hackman, the pastor who helped shape the Salford Mennonite Church ritual before he shifted roles to MennoMedia, saw connections with Joan’s feedback. He noted that

For spirit and the spiritual, we have been able to rely on the deep spiritual wells of our grandparents, but once those wells are depleted and we have not created our own wells, there’s nothing to pass on to our children other than moral values.  Maybe that’s enough, but I’d like to think we could pass on something more.

So  I hope instead of pitting them against each other, as we sometimes do, we can be flexible enough to learn about the gifts of each type of community. I hope we can be enriched by comparing and contrasting the life stories that cause each of us to navigate joys and dangers of being churched, A-churched, both, or more.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

God, grace, inspiration, love of God

Hemmed in by God’s Love, a guest post by Jen Kindbom

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Caffeine is a mixed blessing for me. It gives me the laser-beam focus especially handy in creative endeavors (such as writing these words) or monotonous tasks (such as grading hundreds of papers). Not only that, it almost instantly relieves those headaches that a couple of Aleve, a nap, and a big glass of water just won’t touch.

But caffeine also makes me jittery, shaky, and paranoid. For example, I distinctly recall sewing in my attic and fearing acutely that at any minute I would be arrested and hauled off to prison–for what offense, I do not know. How to express my relief when I realized it was no accidental crime haunting my conscience, just the frozen mocha. . . .

Then I think of Psalm 139, which I’ve studied with my first-year character ed classes for the past six years or so. Psalm 139 conveys the depth of God’s love for God’s people on a very personal level. We see God’s hand upon each of us at our very core. We see God’s knowledge of each of our thoughts before we’re aware of them, and—one of my favorite images, particularly as one who sews—we see God’s love hemming each of us in. There’s no escaping a good hem.

I find it particularly comforting that the message of this psalm is not one of conditions. The words do not say “You perceive my thoughts from afar and abandon me when they’re too much.” The words do not say “You love me unless my thoughts are off the deep end irrational, or too fast for me to keep up with.” The words do not say “You hem me in until I’m afraid and I can’t quite pin down why.”

No.

They say “You hem me in, behind and before.”

When children are overwhelmed by questions that seem too big or even too irrational, loving and thoughtful adults at their best respond kindly to them. So it is with God, so we see in the psalm. What if it rains inside? What if the house blows away? What if there’s a bee in the field?

Imagine these are your thoughts, as they have certainly at times been mine. Imagine God putting tender hands on each side of your face, kissing your forehead, and then taking your hand and walking with you, listening as we talk it out, answering your questions in ways that acknowledge that to you, the fear is real and also that you are safe. In that moment—as in every moment—God hems you in. God hems me in, behind and before.

The psalmist prays for God to search me and us, to know our anxious thoughts, caffeine-induced or otherwise. He prays for God to let us know of any offensive way within me and you—not to condemn us or to add a brick to the wall between us and God but because God knows the possibility of an unhurried mind. And God desires that for each of us: thoughts and a mind at peace in the hem that is God’s love.

—Jen Kindbom, an Ohio-based writer, teacher, and designer, is author of Cadabra (DreamSeeker Books, 2015)  (2015) and the chapbook A Note on the Door (2011). Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Connotation Press, Literary Mama, and other journals and anthologies. Jen is interested in lifting the veil of poetry for her students, and pursues ways to integrate poetry and creative writing into her high school English classes.

God, inspiration

Brightly Beams the Mercy

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When I was growing up in Mexico, son of missionaries who saw Jesus as light to share with those they believed lost, I listened for endless hours as around and around on the Wollensak turned the tapes on which Roy, Stateside supporter, had recorded countless gospel songs.

Amid culture-shock-related traumas, those songs saved my life. When little else brought comfort, those tapes assured I was tenderly watched over as the storm passed by, hope whispered, I walked in the garden or talked in the fields, or rested, with the Lord my shepherd, beside the still waters of peace.

The day would come when many of the lyrics, more passionate about saving inner souls than bodies lost to injustices shattering communities, would trouble me. When HIV-AIDS struck so hard in one context that funerals for those lost to it became a weekly ritual, a worship service enveloped in gospel lyrics sung as if souls sailed serenely on while bodies shipwrecked in storms of oppression and rejection unsettled me.

Yet I recall loved ones for whom gospel song metaphors motivated  soul salvation and inviting compassion for human sisters and brothers drowning in life’s daily wreckages.

I wonder what such loved ones, mostly gone, would make of today’s Christians who love old or new gospel songs but now mesh saving the lost with policy cruelties. If you’re not the right kind of good Christian American, whatever must be done to you to keep me safe just must be done.

Even this doesn’t entirely shock: I’ve never made sense of a loved one who so nurtured my love of gospel songs that to hear her favorite ones stirs tears. Lovingly she’d minister to prisoners’ souls. And passionately she’d preach, this Mennonite follower of the Jesus whose love for enemies she did embrace, that their bodies should be executed.

I don’t know how to navigate such complexities as cruelty becomes an ever more popular go-to across political and theological viewpoints. But recently I stumbled across a gospel song that encouraged continuing to seek light. “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,” by P. P. Bliss, was supposedly inspired by evangelist D. L. Moody’s story of a ship that wrecked in a terrible storm. The captain could see the lighthouse, but with lower lights meant to reveal harbor channel hazards extinguished, disaster still ensued.

Though my boyhood self had loved that song, when the algorithms of Spotify threw out almost miraculously a version by The Lower Lights band, I heard it afresh.

For Bliss, the lighthouse beams God’s mercy. But humans also must “trim your feeble lamps,” those lower lights along the shore for which the “eager eyes” of sailors fainting in the angry billows “are watching, longing.”

Yes, the focus remains on spirits and sins. Yet in The Lower Lights version I also seemed to hear the metaphor spreading to bodies and communities the tendernesses, the compassions, the divine mercies we humans are to share as well as experience. I could imagine trimming harbor lights not just to beam out our own visions but also to illumine safe harbor for each other. It seemed fitting, then, to learn that many Lower Lights band members have connections with a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that some who love P. P. Bliss would reject.

How do we get theologies just right? I still don’t know. But I yearn with soul and body for faith expressions reaching beyond cruelty to blend harbor lights with Mercy brightly beaming.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

 

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, human finitude

Good Job!

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The going was slow, but I was meditating on how fit I felt compared to when I started biking again the week before.

Some sort of whooshing commotion blew by on my left. Before I knew what it was I heard “Good job!” On she sped. When I crested the hill, she was already far ahead, bike light flashing in the distance like a rocket’s red glare.

How to feel? Affirmed? Ashamed?

Just a week before I had had an appointment to make sure I understood Medicare. Just the day before I had checked our online phone account to see why our landline had been ringing almost, it seemed, every minute. I found some 40 calls. Most were marked “Spam?” and followed by variations on the word Medicare. Many want to benefit from my aging body even as I need to make sure to handle insurance carefully, since my heart may need a new valve.

Good job. I pondered again how to feel. I was certainly tempted to pedal harder and prove how wonderfully I was retaining my youth no matter my body’s age and condition.

I thought about a generation earlier encountering Carl Jung’s idea that an aspect of the first half of life is developing ego, skills, mastery. Key to the second half is falling into soul and spirituality, with ego taking a servant role.

I thought about Jesus and his teachings that to gain our lives we have to give them up, that except a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it can give no fruit, that the first shall be last and the last first, that rather than amass power for its own ego-driven sake, a true leader kneels before those served and washes feet with a towel.

When I was younger I did seek to live out such insights of Jung and Jesus. But the paradox of pursuing this while developing a career and presence in the world posed complexities and confusions about how to integrate ego with soul. So many of the tasks of life’s first half run more with the grain of ego—its inclinations simultaneously bolstered by a culture idolizing the pursuits of wealth, status, privilege, and power which are ego’s delights. Now Christians court presidents and even Anabaptist-Mennonites long committed to basin and towel are often concluding the time has come to claim our places at the tables of influence and preeminence.

I thought about the final years of my parents, who though passionate Christians and believers in the teachings of Jesus found it hard (as do I) to embrace the reality that at the end there is no reprieve from the body’s failings.

Good job! I decided to smile. I decided to embrace the encouragement. Oh, I’ll still bike and walk and hope doctors and medicines keep me young-ish and vigorous for years yet. But maybe my cyclist encourager generously intuited that in fact at this stage being a failure in contrast to her cycling prowess is nevertheless a success.

You’re getting old, I hear her say. You’re falling behind the younger pack as it becames ever clearer that, as Psalm 103 reminds, we bloom like flowers of the field then vanish with the wind. Still you’re climbing on. Good job, Michael!

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

family relationships, formation, grace

Connecting Our Souls’ Carabiners

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“Dad,” said the brilliant negotiator, “you have a choice. If you agree to listen to what I’m doing in college without judging or punishing me, I’ll tell you the truth. Or I’ll just lie about what I’m really doing. Which do you prefer?”

That story has so shaped our relationship over the decades and still so informs my thoughts and feelings about accountability, human relationships, and moral formation that I often return to it. Should I have found some different solution? Should I have explored consequences for this brazen acknowledgment of readiness to lie?

As my daughter’s phase of family building suggests she may someday face that riddle, I remember my mother watching me, her once argumentative teenager, parent my children. When Mom witnessed a trying interchange I’d see a sweet but sly smile. She was sinfully enjoying watching the son once sure he knew more than she confronting daughters confident they knew more than he. If my daughter faces her own reckoning with “or I’ll lie to you,” what should she do?

I‘ll have to let her cope while I smile. Yet maybe she should conclude, as did I, that she has been outfoxed. One reason I didn’t call my daughter’s bluff was that it was no bluff.  She really would hide what she was up to.

I grasped this from knowing her but also myself: I had done the same thing to my parents, if less courageously. I simply invented something like a five-year statute of limitations:  Here’s what was going on then that I didn’t want you to know, like the time I stole a banana when I was a boy in Mexico City, ran across the busy street to throw the peel in the grassy median strip, forgot to check traffic on the way back, got hit by a Jeep but not tragically so, hence pretended running happily on was just my James Bond-esque style.

But a key reason I accepted my daughter’s deal was that I loved her. I loved that teenage mix of bravado and precisely the openness of soul that had led to her to offer terms that would let her stay open.

The years to come were challenging. I’d wrestle with okay, now I know this. Now what? How to honor the bargain when some choices  terrify me and could  lead to bad things that underdeveloped frontal cortex isn’t fully grasping?

I stumbled onto two responses: One was if you do X or Y, dear daughter, other authority figures may impose unhappy consequences; keeping me in the loop won’t spare you. The other was to repeat, in so many conversations such as that classic one over chicken and pasta, that like mountain climbers supporting each other, my rope is clipped to your soul no matter what rock face you climb or cliff you fall off.

What I could glimpse then but more clearly years later is what a gift she gave us both. Social and church glues fail as angers and alienations sever us from each other’s hearts. Rising anxiety, depression, suicide intersect with cruel social media and political worlds that encourage being the best—how many likes do I have?—or one-up: No, I won’t seek the Light with you; I’ll exploit your weaknesses to impose my ways. Mutual-accountability ground between whatever feels good and zero tolerance shrinks.

What if instead we connected the carabiners of our souls to confront life’s mountains and cliffs with ropes clipped together?

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

beauty in blemishes, inspiration, popular culture, Teachings of Jesus

Oatmeal

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Oatmeal. When I was a child I liked cooked oatmeal. Then when I grew up, to echo the Apostle Paul, I put away childish things. Every now and then my spouse Joan, an oatmeal fan, would urge me to consider the possibility that Paul wasn’t speaking in 1 Corinthians 13 of putting away oatmeal. I resisted.

Then the cholesterol test. Not terrible but high-ish, I still think probably, as I told my doctor, due to weeks on the road and too much rich eating. Still the test unsettled me.

I watched Joan cook oatmeal. Hmm. Worth trying? Even as a grownup should I take the advice we give children, try it you’ll like it? Yes.

Wow. Steel-cut oatmeal. With raisins. Some brown sugar. Milk. Wow. I had let glitz and glamor and shiny-object foods overwhelm an humble wonder. Now I find it hard to get through the night while awaiting another oatmeal breakfast.

Then next I was going to criticize the focus on beautiful everything Instagram offers. Along with millions of us, I’ve been unsettled by ways social media appears to be distorting our lives. I’ve barely explored Instagram, but I do know you don’t post photos to Instagram without running into filter options that allow automatically making a picture look better than it is. This struck me as a metaphor for how our sensation-loving culture pursues image over reality.

And oatmeal seemed to me to symbolize the antidote. You can’t get much more basic than oatmeal. It is what it is: a beige-ish concoction whose texture vaguely reminds me of old paint going lumpy. We need to live more beige-ish, lumpy lives of not chasing the latest latest shiny shiny. This is the Jesus way.

But then I used what was once the latest shiny but now feels more like a water supply company though with more worldwide networked power for good or ill—Google. To make sure Google agreed with my view of oatmeal’s humble role I looked up . . . “oatmeal on Instagram.” The very first articles that came up had titles like these: “Oatmeal Has So Much Instagram Clout Right Now” and “Sorry, cereal! Oatmeal is the Instagram-worthy breakfast of choice right now.”

Just minutes from being eaten as soon as this crazy (and unfiltered) photographing is done: real oatmeal cooling quickly in a non-artisanal bowl from a mass retailer whose wares a real Instagram influencer would be too embarrassed to use.

I was stunned. When I started this post, I thought I was a pioneer, with oatmeal as prism for exploring society possibly a stroke of inspiration from above. I thought oatmeal would be of no interest to the way-cool people, like the ones I read about this morning, who can make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars by being Instagram “influencers” paid to oh-so-authentically feature products we all ignore if pushed on us through oh-so-inauthentic ads.

Yet instead of being counter-cultural, instead of being faithful to Jesus against seductions of the day, I am just one more schlub who missed the tiny sidetrail of Jesus’ narrow way and with the zillions of us am on the broad path that leads to destruction.

Actually I’ve seen no evidence that oatmeal leads to destruction except if you eat too much and put on it precisely what I like to put it on it. Oatmeal really is good for you. It really does help lower cholesterol and more.

Now what? The only thing I know to do is let oatmeal lead the way. I am as ordinary as I thought oatmeal was. Sometimes even the broad way has its merits. And maybe it’s okay for the beige-ish lumpy things to have their occasional day.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column. He emphasizes that the photos in this post are of a real, authentic bowl of oatmeal prepared for an actual breakfast rather than to influence Instagram fans.

 

 

Extending DreamSeeker Magazine through posts from Michael A. King and guests