For all have sinned, it seems

Eigenheim Mennonite Church - Youth Farm Bible Camp Chapel

Friends: I'm working on developing a set of short stories/parables about the church as I've found it and as it might come to be. I've decided to share a draft of one and invite you to be an editor, tell me if it works or not, if you've spotted inconsistencies, faults in tense, word choice, etc. Append your comments to the post or copy and paste my email address and send to me privately. g.epp@accesscomm.ca. Thanks.

(Note: Ike is a young pastor of a rural Mennonite Church, his wife works in a nursing home in the city. Characters and situations are invented and are not based on any person or event.) 

Legend has it that the walking path along the bank of the South Saskatchewan was once an Indian trail, shared by them with periodic animal migrations. You take a left turn just before the bridge and onto a rutted, sandy set of tracks leading down to a flat where young people—Ike’s been told in coffee row—have come to fornicate for generations. 

     Today, beer cans and half burned logs in an improvised fire pit set Ike to re-imagining the night-time goings-on. He picks up the cans (fourteen at 10¢ a pop makes $1.40 at Sarcan) and tosses them into the trunk of his car.

      A joke: the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest was disappointed to find a pop can and an O’Henry wrapper when he finally made it to the top.

      But Ike is not here to clean up. He needs solitude after a tumultuous congregational meeting in which his pastoral sixth sense (or is it just personal over-sensitivity) detected a widening crack in the armour with which pastors are warned to arm themselves. When he shared this particular feeling with Sarah, she quoted Harry Truman: If you can’t stand the heat, get (the hell) out of the kitchen.

      “That’s not helpful,” Ike had said.

      “I think it’s helpful for you . . . and for me. Criticism can’t be avoided in our line of work.”

      “There’s criticism and then there’s criticism,” Ike said.

      This time it concerned Anne Gerling. Well, not so much Anne Gerling as the members of the nominating committee who accepted her as a volunteer Sunday School teacher’s helper. Donelda Fisher raised the question obliquely: "What considerations go into selecting the people who will guide and teach our little children?"        

     Everyone knew that this question wouldn’t have been asked except for something everyone also knew, namely that there was a faction that rankled at the presence of Anne and her love child in their midst with never a mention of the sin of the child’s conception, never a reckoning.

      Donelda Fisher, How long did you rehearse your question? What did you imagine the response to be? What response were you hoping for? Why didn’t you just ask why Anne Gerling is being allowed to assist in the primary Sunday School class?

      A seminary memory: “going into pastoral ministry should not be contemplated before dealing with the likelihood that a percentage of any congregation will oppose you, no matter how discrete, outgoing, theologically orthodox you may be. Don’t imagine your experience to be like movie pastors who always come out heroes after 90 minutes of turmoil. Art doesn’t imitate life after all; it imitates wishful thinking.”

      “In the real world, every day is laundry day,” Sarah says.

      Truth be told, the primary class will have three students: David Peters—who is not likely to be present Sundays unless someone makes the effort to pick him up; Sandra Thiessen (whose grandfather, church chair Adolph Thiessen, picks her up every Sunday because his son, Joel, is divorced and has announced that he won’t ever set foot in a church again because he has—in a classic case of displacement—asserted more than once that the church ((does he mean God?)) is to blame for his wife’s leaving him); and Aby (pet name for Abraham—how could Anne give the boy a Biblical name, after all?), but then, numbers don’t matter.

      Do they?

      Adolph Thiessen as chairman had to deal with it although you could almost see him chewing on possible answers to a question that—like a Seinfeldian mozza ball—just hung out there for a fifteen second eternity. He finally hit on the right answer: “Would someone from the education committee answer that please?”

      Silence . . . and then “I guess no one from the education committee is here.”

      Awkward.

      Ike stands up. “The truth is,” he says, pauses, “the truth is that it’s hard for the nominating committee—which is me and Anita this year—to find people to fill positions.”

       “So it’s anybody that can be found,” Pete Fisher says. Not in the form of a question. What is this, a tag team match? “Anybody will do?”

      “We don’t ask people unless we think they’re suitable for the position.”

      “And what do you have to be to be suitable for a position?” Donelda also has mastered the art of framing questions in the tone of statements. Probably learned it from Pete.

      In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes. Ike sang that line once when the drama class in high school did the play. A catchy tune. Ear-worm.

      “To teach Sunday School, you need to be a member in good standing, need to be in agreement with the confession of faith, and you need to be sensitive to the needs of your students,” Ike recited from the handbook. “And you need to be motivated to do the job, of course.”

There’s a place about a hundred metres down the path where an indentation in the bank, a patch of grass and a leaning poplar form an ideal spot for someone to sit and while away a summer afternoon . . . and fish, possibly. Ike remembers that his dad satisfied his need for solitude by going out to the garage to tinker with old lawnmowers and chain saws. He’d spend most evenings out there, filling the air with cigar smoke and country music on the radio. He didn’t take kindly to being disturbed.

      Someone has left an old aluminum and plastic-strapped lawn chair folded and propped against a tree as if intending to return soon. Ike unfolds the chair, moves it to a shady spot and sits. The muddy waters here gurgle around rocks and form permanent eddies that must have been swirling there for hundreds of years, Ike thinks. 

     The river is higher than usual; a slide on the opposite bank has left a black scar. Uprooted trees lie half-in, half-out of the water, the current tugging at their branches. Everything changes. 

 

“I think we need some leadership in this place. We’ve been letting things slide.” This from Selma Kroeker who happens to be Donelda Fisher’s sister. Ike had a hard time remembering which was which when he first arrived in Barnsville, even though they barely resemble each other. At least not in appearance.

      “Like what?”

      “I mean . . . like morally. Our morals are going to the dogs.”

      Mrs. Kroeker, are your morals going to the dogs, or whose morals are you talking about? And if it’s true, that the dogs are being bombarded with remnants of our discarded morals, is it really because you/we don’t have a leader to keep us on track? And is that how you see my job, ensuring that congregants behave morally at all times? And is attacking Anne Gerling from behind like this a moral act?

      The question fizzles like such questions always seem to do. A few tentative walks around the morality issue and whether or not other people’s “moral lapses” should or shouldn’t affect our behaviour toward them. “We’re condoning sin, plain and simple,” is Donelda Fisher’s summation.

Chairman Adolph closes debate: “I think the nominating committee—read “Pastor Ike”—has heard the message—and what is the message?—and we’ll just have to trust them.”

Ike hears the faint and far-off barking of a dog. Sarah suggested a dog; turns out she’s partial to German Shepherds; she grew up with one named Bingo; she never mentioned this until recently.

Someone’s been cutting firewood. Ike reaches down and picks up a handful of chips and tosses one into the eddy, watches it float around and around like a tiny ship-to-nowhere until it ventures out too far and is caught by the force of the current. It quickly disappears; Ike visualizes its journey through Prince Albert, through the forks where the two Saskatchewans join, into Lake Winnipegosis, then the mighty Nelson and on to Hudson Bay, finally sinking into the North Atlantic—hell, to a wood chip. Or heaven, if the ocean has always been its dream.

      Ike tosses in another chip. It behaves exactly as the previous one.

      As does the next.

      Until one—for reasons that aren’t at all apparent—floats unobtrusively into a quiet pool and rests there among some twigs and leaves bobbing gently against a rock, the likelihood that it will ever leave home again very much in doubt.

      Ike throws all the remaining chips into the river, folds the chair, leans it against the tree where he found it and walks back up to his car. I could live here, build a little cabin and spend my days fishing and thinking and praying and reading and writing and watching the river. On the other hand, I’ve only been here for half and hour and I’m already too restless to stay. Why can’t I relax?

      Ike thinks about meeting with Anita and discussing the appointment of Anne to the role of Sunday School assistant in the primary class. As he drives, he thinks about telling Anne that the council is concerned about her as a Sunday School assistant in the primary class.

      I know what the congregation expects me to do in this situation. Nothing. Doing something would be far too dangerous. It’s not the desire to effect change that motivates the Fishers and the Kroekers; it’s the joy of the attack. They’ve got it out of their systems. They’ve already won.

      Ike knows what he will do. Absolutely nothing. Anne will never know that Pete and Donelda Fisher obliquely called her out at the council meeting. No one will talk about it openly.

      Because in all of us lie the most powerful of desires; to fulfill our biological destiny in an unrestrained splurge, in a burst of glorious copulative union. It’s a box we don’t really want to see opened lest it expose our own nakedness. Moral? Immoral? When God decided how procreation would happen, did he really set forth a law to prevent it happening except under strict prescriptive guidelines that no human could be expected to follow all the time, in every circumstance? Is God engaged in a fight against his own creation?

      “Face it,” Sarah says at supper. “We didn’t come into the world as separate, creative choices of God. We all resulted from sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse is a good thing. We also decide if we’re going to allow our pleasurable interludes to result in a new person or not.”

      By now, Sarah and I could have had a child or two.

      Ike is surprised she didn’t use the F word; she occasionally does, especially when she’s angry. Ike hates the F word. It grates like sandpaper across sensitive skin. How can Sarah talk so easily about something so, so personal and sensitive?

      Also, it reminds him of Moose Jaw.

      “I sincerely hope you don’t share that particular thought publicly.”

      “If your parents had postponed having sex for one day on the night you were conceived, you . . . that is, the you you are . . . wouldn’t exist, although someone who looked quite a bit like you might.”

      “I know. And if my parents had decided never to have children, I wouldn’t exist, Annette wouldn’t exist, etcetera, etcetera. It reduces everything to, what, biological mechanics and . . . and the whims that come upon us, who knows how?”

      “Yes it does, and aren’t biological mechanics great? Except that we make it so complicated that we lose all the joy of it. Make of it another reason to quarrel. But whatever God decided about procreation—if you want to think about it in that way—he clearly chose to place the whole business into human hands. We are the deciders of who lives and who doesn’t.”

      “But if we’re following Christ, surely the spirit should guide our decisions.”

      “Yesterday we—that is Doctor Friesen, I and Mrs. Branson’s family—decided to remove their mother from the ventilator. She was the mother of fourteen children, by the way. All still living.”

      “How old was she?”

      “Although it’s irrelevant, she was seventy-three. She suffered with cancer for at least five years and . . . and hadn’t been conscious for two weeks. Her body could have lived for an indefinite time with life support.”

      “What does it feel like. I mean to make such a decision. I imagine you had to do the disconnect.”

      Sarah pushes her dinner plate away. “The chaplain says we’re ‘playing God.’”

      “But what do you say?”

      “I’m not playing God; I’m serving God. If God is love, then he wouldn’t . . . I don’t know . . . punish Mrs. Branson and her family by keeping her body alive day after day when her mind left it weeks ago.”

      “I can’t imagine that her husband and all her children were agreed,” Ike says.

       “Actually they either were . . . or they chose not to object. That woman raised a remarkable family.”

      The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

      Ike tells her then about his day. Right down to the wood chips and the drive home—but without mentioning what he’d decided about Anne. The nursing home is a place where the teachings of Jesus actually assume their crucial intent. Emmanuel Mennonite is the place where everything about Jesus, the great healer and teacher, is cloaked in the safety of the theoretical. Things of great moment are talked about; deeds of great significance are debated. What ought to be done is fervently hashed over.

Sarah actually lives the great moments, does the significant deeds. Could be she’s whom Jesus was talking about when he assured his disciples that they would do even greater miracles than he ever did.

      Ike changes his mind.

      Before he can chicken out on Monday morning, he phones Anne, the Kroekers and the Fishers and asks them to meet in his office on Tuesday evening to talk. His invitation is brief; he doesn’t tell them who besides them individually will be there. Ann wants to know if she should bring Aby along and Ike hesitates and then says, “That’s probably not a good idea, Ann.”

      “I’ll have to take him to his grandpa then, I guess . . ..” she says.

      Ike is about to say something like, ‘well, in that case bring him along.’ But he catches himself before he can make again the don’t-rock-the-boat choice that’s always been so easy to make. “I’m sure he’ll be fine with his grandpa for an hour, don’t you?”

      “I guess . . ..”

      Ike can hear the question, ‘what’s this about?’ in her voice. He doesn’t answer it.

      His bravado wanes in the intervening time and once or twice, he almost decides to call the whole thing off. Sarah supports his decision to face the matter head on, but thinks he should have begun by talking to Donelda and Selma and their husbands first—and to Anne. She wasn’t sure why, but she said, “they’re gonna feel manipulated when they walk into your office and see who else is there.”

      Ike had thought about that, kind of, and decided it was time to show leadership and pull the life support off this particular antagonism in the church family. The metaphor seemed apt to him until he had actually set up a circle of chairs in the back of the sanctuary, had made the coffee and placed the thermos in the centre of a card table with mugs and a plate of chocolate chip cookies he’d baked on Sunday night.

      At 7:25, he’s still rehearsing the opening of the meeting that feels so odd, even before it commences. “What have I done? Lord help me do this right.”

      They all arrive almost precisely at (can you be ‘almost precise’?)7:30.

      Ike invites them to help themselves to cookies and coffee, a gesture that feels absurd. They do, however. Donelda remarks on the quality of the cookies and asks him to pass his compliments on to Sarah. Ike thanks her and says he will.

      Time to pull the plug.

      “The reason we’re here, Anne, is because you, Donelda and Selma, raised concerns at the council meeting about Anne’s suitability to teach Sunday School. The reason you gave was that Anne’s having Aby . . . uh . . . out of wedlock . . . had never been acknowledged and, if I understand you right, you wanted that to be dealt with. Am I right?”

      Donelda takes on a ‘how dare you’, demeanour; Selma’s face has turned pinkish and she seems focused on her half-eaten cookie. Their husbands are stoic, both, amazingly, turning slightly to one side in a ‘just leave me outta this’ pose.

      “You and I both know that fornication is a sin, Ike, and sin requires that we repent and ask . . . ?”

      Ike interrupts. “Don’t tell me how you feel, Donelda. Tell Anne. She’s got a right to hear it directly.”

      Her turning to face Anne resembles the redirecting of an ocean liner. “You and I both . . .”

      “It’s OK, Mrs. Fisher. I heard it.”

      Six people sitting in a circle. Two are wrestling with the what-happens-now. Two are deciding to cover up their embarrassment by helping themselves to more coffee. What the other invitee is thinking can be read in clenched hands and lips. What Ike is thinking is: “What the hell was I thinking?”

      And then Anne says what Ike had never even contemplated her being capable of.

      “You can’t know, Donelda, how much—and how often I’ve repented of getting carried away at a grad party, (long pause) drinking way too much and ending up getting pregnant.” Long pause. “And you may as well know the whole truth. I’ve no idea who Aby’s father is.”

      She should be crying. She’s not. She’s defiant. Ike can see the wheels turning as the story is rewritten in the minds of the listeners. Who was in Anne’s class? Which nephew, son, neighbour’s kid does Aby look like? How is such a thing possible?

      “I don’t need you to forgive me, Donelda. I didn’t harm you in any way. Nor do I need the congregation’s forgiveness. I didn’t harm any of them, except maybe some guy who took advantage of a drunken girl in the back seat of a car and knows he could be the father of her son and is . . . feeling guilty, but is totally relieved that . . . that he’s, well, TOTALLY OFF THE HOOK.”

      Now Anne is crying. And Selma is wiping tears. Ike finds himself convulsing internally with the cloying closeness of Anne’s emotional outburst and the effort of staying level.

      Anne straightens up, shoves a tissue into her jacket pocket. “Here’s what I decided. I have to forgive myself every day. I have to be the best mom on earth to Aby because he has no father. I made a wrong choice. And that’s how I will repent of my sins. I just hope Aby doesn’t have . . . doesn’t have a reason to forgive me.”

      Donelda is cowed. She is overwhelmed with, well, Ike can’t tell for sure but she’s pressing down hard on her knees as if she could manually stop whatever is happening here with sheer force. We make our beds and therefore deserve to lie in them as they are made.

      And before she walks out, Anne throws back over her shoulder—probably unnecessarily—“If you, too, want a piece of me, I’m sorry, but you’re not getting it!”

***

It’s peaceful down by the gurgling and eternal river. A fat walleye quivers among the rocks, fertilizing the eggs a female has laid there in the gravel. Not only will the fingerlings when they hatch not know their father, their mother might also be any large stranger they meet in the stream.

      It might even be the one that accidentally eats them.