BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

THE SPIRITUALITY OF GEOGRAPHY

Daniel Hertzler

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris. Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

I have been interested in history and geography ever since I can remember, but especially in history because it is more apparent as a defined discipline. We learned geography in elementary school, then went on from there. Historians have a more respected place in society. Geographers just appear as someone to be consulted as needed.

Yet the two are interactive. The story of our faith is related to the geography of the region where it originated. We are told that Abraham left a power center at the east end of the so-called Fertile Crescent. He moved westward and ended up on the land bridge between the two ends of the crescent. It has been an area both geographically and politically unstable.

The political instability has been documented repeatedly. The geographical limitations are not as often mentioned. Yet Daniel C. Hopkins reports that "The amount of level land for agriculture was generally restricted, and the Mediterranean climate, while well suited for farming, was highly erratic and caused hardships three or four years out of ten." From "Life in Ancient Palestine" (The New Interpreters Bible, vol. I, 215). The story itself provides inadvertent support for this by references to famines during the travels of the patriarchs and their families to Egypt.

But when we read the Bible it is history more than geography that we dwell on. Our attention is called to the exodus from Egypt, the development and the downfall of the Israelite monarchy, the exile and restoration, and particularly the story of Jesus Christ. If we have gone out into the wilderness and come back, it is the story which has drawn us back.

Kathleen Norris has gone into the wilderness and returned. She tells her story by stages in Dakota. She was a child of church and Sunday school, but when she encountered new ideas from a professor of religion, she began to question her faith and realized "I needed liturgy and a solid grounding in the practice of prayer, not a demythologizing that left me feeling starved, thinking: If this is religion, I don’t belong." So she dropped out "for nearly 20 years" (92).

She came back to the church after she and her husband moved to Lemmon, South Dakota, to the house her grandparents had built in 1923. The extended family did not want to lose the house, but no one else was adventurous enough to move there. This move from New York to South Dakota thrust her into a stern geographical and social environment. She writes, "More than any other place I have lived . . . this is my spiritual geography, the place I’ve wrestled my story out of the circumstances of landscape and inheritance" (2). Geography and history, of course.

There is a lot to be learned in the Dakotas. The weather itself is a hard disciplinarian, with extremes of cold and heat, drought and floods. In 1936 a town in western North Dakota set a record of temperature extremes within the same year: from 60 below zero to 121 above. Norris writes of "a day so cold it hurts to breathe; dry enough to freeze spit" (25).

The weather affects the economy and the economy the people. Dakota people tend to be independent and conservative, sometimes their own worst enemies. "It seems to me," Norris writes that "especially in Western Dakota we live in tension between myth and truth. Are we cowboys or farmers? Are we fiercely independent types or community builders? One myth that haunts us is that the small town is a stable place" (8).

In truth, she says, the Dakotas have never been stable. As many as 80 percent of the original homesteaders left, and today the Dakotas are a place to get away from. Regarding those who remain, Norris is impressed by the wisdom she found, wisdom sharpened by the need to cope with the weather. "The farmers and ranchers of Western North Dakota can wait years for rain. I remember that at the height of a four-year drought, rain came only once all summer, on July 11" (18). She also commends "the language of unschooled people, the language I was not much exposed to within the confines of the academic and literary worlds" (19).

On the other hand, she is distressed by those unwilling to open themselves to outside influences, even by reading. She writes, "Who could be more impoverished than the man, who on hearing news of a former teacher, exclaimed in a tavern, ‘That old cow. She used to make me read. Said I couldn’t graduate till I read all she wanted. Well I showed her; I haven’t read a book since’" (51).

Nevertheless, Norris reclaimed her spiritual heritage on the Plains. For one thing, her own Protestant past came back to her. "It was a shock to realize that, to paraphrase Paul Simon, all the crap I learned in Sunday school was still alive and kicking in me" (97). She also discovered that spiritual sensibility had been in her family. She had had two religious grandmothers, one a fundamentalist, but the other with "a livable faith and tolerance that allowed her to be open to the world" (99).

Norris did not stop there. She found a Benedictine monastery on the Plains where the monks were in some respects better able to cope with the environment than the farmers and ranchers. Benedictine theology helped her to define more effectively the faith within her which had not yet matured. They helped her to come up with what she considers a more satisfactory definition of sin. "‘Sin in the New Testament,’" a Benedictine told her, "‘is the failure to do acts of love.’ That is something I can live with, a guide in my conversion. It is also a much better definition of sin than I learned as a child: sin as breaking rules" (97).

To get the benefit of the Benedictines, she has become an "oblate, or associate, of a community of some sixty-five monks" (17). She is thus able to participate in some aspects of monastic life such as retreats. She observes that "pray and work is a Benedictine motto, and the monastic life aims to join the two. This perspective liberates prayer from God-talk; a well-tended garden, a well-made cabinet, a well-swept floor, can be a prayer" (185).

So this is the tale of Norris who found God again in the Dakotas. Hers is a distinctive story. What does it say to people with different histories and less severe geographies?

As a one-time farmer and inveterate gardener, I keep an eye on the weather. In southwestern Pennsylvania we have had occasional droughts and also a snowstorm or a rainstorm once in a while; we’ve even had tornadoes. Our weather is not the sort of heavy taskmaster Norris found in the Dakotas. Yet each of us has a context in which we are challenged to respond to the ultimate question once formulated by Waldemar Janzen as "the question of a new ‘ontology’, in philosophical terms or, more simply, a new answer to the question: ‘What is really, really real?’" (Still in the Image: Essays in Biblical Theology and Anthropology, Faith and Life Press, 1982, 32). If we are listening and looking, geography and history may help us find an answer.

My community has had its own peculiar historical geography. Some can be read on our historical markers. Outside Scottdale, next to the St. John’s Catholic Cemetery, a marker commemorates a 1891 explosion at the Mammoth No. 1 mine which killed 109 miners. Seventy-nine are buried in a mass grave in St. John’s Cemetery.

Scottdale is a town with a history of opulence it can no longer match. The size of the houses on Loucks Avenue testifies to this. A historical novel, Milltown Yank, by Matt Miller, is based on the fact that from 1929 to 1931 Scottdale had its own minor league baseball team.

So Scottdale was once a prosperous, smoky industrial town. But I have been told that with the coming of the Great Depression, every industry either closed or moved out except Mennonite Publishing House and the U. S. Casket Company. In due time the latter would also close, and recently even the former has been dismembered.

I have not been sitting in bars and restaurants enough to be able to quote directly the local perspectives as well as Norris has done. But I had the impression that for at least a generation many felt nothing really good could happen in Scottdale. Of course, many of the social and economic changes affecting us have happened in the whole country: urban renewal tearing down the small shops in the downtown area, followed by between-the-towns mallization and eventually Walmartization.

The two Mennonite congregations in the Scottdale area are exploring merger in an effort to respond to forces which have reduced attendance and resources. If schools and banks are presumed to be more effective by merger, can churches deliver a more effective witness by coming together in one meetinghouse?

I’m interested in the summary of Benedictine spirituality Norris has reported: a slogan combining prayer and work and even viewing work as prayer. Some have wondered about a connection between Benedictines and Anabaptists, particularly in the person of the martyr Michael Sattler. Arnold Snyder writes that "Close comparison of reformed Benedictine literature with Sattler’s writings has led one scholar to the conclusion that Sattler’s christocentric emphasis, as well as his stress on the church as the pure and separated community of saints, have significant intellectual roots in Sattler’s monastic experience" (Mennonite Encyclopedia, vol. 5, 794).

The prayer discipline of a Benedictine monastery is specific and rigorous. Norris has noticed that they go "to church four or five times a day. . . . It’s not for the faint of heart" (185). Neither, as some have noted, is Mennonite faith and practice. But people with families and careers do not perceive that they can spare that much time for formal prayers. Still it is of interest to see that worship has emerged as an important subject in Mennonite conversation. Special resources are published for use in our congregations during Advent and Lent.

What of Mennonite geography and history? It appears that Mennonites and Amish who migrated to North America have been able to preserve aspects of the radical Anabaptist heritage the descendants of those who stayed behind in Europe let slip. Were such trends caused by geography or history? More likely the latter, and the political systems that were determined to squeeze out the radicalism, particularly the Anabaptist unwillingness to participate in war.

It seems ironic that the German Mennonites evidently resisted the military oath but agreed to join the army. In a report to the Mennonite World Conference in 1948, Dirk Cattepoel told of how Mennonites "unreservedly resisted the oath." However, "The preachers, elders, and deacons were drafted into the army" ("The Mennonites of Germany" in Fourth Mennonite World Conference Proceedings, 16-17). We can imagine that resisting the draft in Hitler’s time might have subjected the church once again to martyrdom.

Now Mennonites are found throughout the world where we encounter a variety of geographies and develop a variety of histories. Indeed, one of the more creative Mennonite projects in recent years has been the preparation of a world Mennonite history. Several volumes of it are due ouy this year. As they come together in a worldwide assembly, Mennonites speak to one another and, I trust, seek to learn from one another.

Some of them today live in countries in which violence appears to be a way of life. Others have suffered from drought and food shortages. Famine, in the end, is just is effective as violence. As I write, the question of whether the 2003 assembly will be able to meet in Zimbabwe, as scheduled, is yet to be finally determined.

I have been told, however, that we should look for a conference somewhere this year. And wherever we meet, the coming together of Mennonites from around the world will be a way of exemplifying that a common faith is possible even though our geographies are as varied as the world is wide.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, a long-time editor and writer, currently contributes a monthly column for the op ed page of the Daily Courier (Connellsville, Pa.). He is also author of A Little Left of Center: An Editor Reflects on His Mennonite Experience (DreamSeeker Books/Pandora Press U.S., 2000). He first read Dakota in connection with a seminar on "Writing as Contemplation" directed by Kent Ira Groff of Oasis Ministries, Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.