Author Archive for Will Loewen

I’m not really that artic­u­late in per­son.  I man­age to fool a lot of peo­ple because usu­ally when they are lis­ten­ing the most atten­tively, I’ve had a chance to write things down ahead of time.  I nor­mally only make sense when I’ve first sat down to edit and rearrange my oth­er­wise gar­bled thoughts.

I was worse as a teenager, more so in the pres­ence of pretty girls. When I wanted to be clever, I sounded weird.  What I wanted to be charm­ing, I was just awk­ward.  Then, as if I wasn’t doing a good enough job mak­ing myself look bad, when we would gather as a group of friends to watch movies, the guys on the screen, who were already sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter look­ing than me, deliv­ered lines that made them sound clever, charm­ing and sensitive.

Now, as an adult I find myself still stum­bling on sim­i­lar inse­cu­ri­ties.  It should come as no sur­prise to you that I am inter­ested in the­ol­ogy and spir­i­tual mat­ters, and I hope to some­how earn at least part of my liv­ing in this field.  So, to sati­ate my inter­est I read books, I lis­ten to radio pro­grams and I attend sem­i­nars, etc.  In part also do this to see what the com­pe­ti­tion is doing.  It can be dis­heart­en­ing to see just how com­posed, con­fi­dent and artic­u­late they are, at least com­pared to me.

As for those roman­tic movies, the older and more mature I get and the more real life I live, the less cred­i­ble they become.  Nat­u­rally they are intended to be mind­less fun and an escape from real­ity, but numer­ous stud­ies show that they do in fact impact our per­cep­tions of what can and should hap­pen with regards to love.  If our expec­ta­tions in this area are affected, even a lit­tle bit, it can seri­ously impact our hap­pi­ness.  For­tu­nately, since that time, most of those girls have real­ized that they didn’t in fact want one of those kinds of guys and have set­tled for real guys.  Unfor­tu­nately, it was right around that time I had actu­ally made some strides towards becom­ing one of those types of guys.

When I see reli­gious pro­fes­sion­als doing well at their jobs, that should push me to become bet­ter myself or to get out of the busi­ness alto­gether.  But there are a few reas­sur­ing points I’ve learned.  When I lis­ten to a radio inter­view, it always sounds like the host is com­ing up with tough ques­tions off the top of her head as the con­ver­sa­tion goes on, and the expert guest is imme­di­ately giv­ing well thought out answers off the top of his head as well.  What isn’t obvi­ous though is that the host, with care­ful study and prepa­ra­tion, writes out those ques­tions weeks in advance and gives them to the guest ahead of time so that he has time to com­pile answers that he is sat­is­fied with.  Then, the two of them act as though their dis­cus­sion is a smooth and free-flowing con­ver­sa­tion, when in fact it is just as scripted as the romance movies I once watched so uncom­fort­ably.  It’s a win-win arrange­ment for them, since they both come out sound­ing artic­u­late and intel­li­gent, and the radio pro­gram is more inter­est­ing as a result.  If they are suc­cess­ful, I will run out to buy the author’s book, and I will con­tinue to lis­ten to the radio program.

Besides my pro­fes­sional inse­cu­ri­ties, lots of peo­ple (lay­folk and clergy alike) strug­gle in a sim­i­lar way with their own spir­i­tual con­vic­tions.  But in the same way that a boy­ish Leonardo di Caprio can alter one’s idea of true romance, a phe­nom­e­non that I call ‘sound bite spir­i­tu­al­ity’ can alter how we feel about our own reli­gious self-understanding.  Peo­ple are drawn to experts and pub­lic fig­ures with short, catchy and sim­ple answers to life’s pro­found spir­i­tual ques­tions.  But these ques­tions are ones that the human race have been strug­gling with since the begin­ning of time.  It’s wrong for the church to claim sole own­er­ship of the answers to these ques­tions but an overly sim­ple answer also insults any­one strug­gling with that ques­tion now, and any­one who’s strug­gled with them in cen­turies past.  What is it about our age that we are sud­denly able to solve these mys­ter­ies?  What was wrong with those who went before us, and why couldn’t they see the answer as clearly as we now do thanks to the old man with the British accent on the stereo?

The Chris­t­ian faith is a jour­ney.  Along that jour­ney it is nat­ural to face both hills and val­leys.  The hard­ships that we face don’t mean that we don’t belong on the jour­ney or that oth­ers are jour­ney­ing bet­ter than us.  We are allowed to strug­gle on our Jesus jour­ney.  Imme­di­ately sim­ple sound­ing solu­tions to our strug­gles should not be met with our shame or frus­tra­tion at not hav­ing been able to see the answer sooner, but rather with sus­pi­cion at why this per­son is speak­ing with such con­fi­dence when so many for so long have struggled.

We’ve looked every­where.  There is no sign of our cord­less phone any­where in our apart­ment.  We only had the one, and the bat­tery was finicky to begin with, so we sus­pect it ran out of power shortly after it was mis­placed.  The rea­son it went unno­ticed for so long is because we used our cell phone much more reg­u­larly, and by the time we thought to call the phone to find it, the bat­tery was already dead.

We’ve retraced our steps to the best of our mem­ory dur­ing the few days when it must have gone miss­ing, but still there is no sign of it.  That has led us to nar­row our list of pos­si­ble cul­prits to one: our one year old daugh­ter.  Her love of tech­ni­cal devices gives her a motive and her new­found walk­ing abil­ity gives her oppor­tu­nity to have car­ried out this offense.  But the most impor­tant step in mak­ing her the prime can­di­date is hav­ing first elim­i­nated our­selves, her parents.

Of course there is the obvi­ous incon­ve­nience of not hav­ing a phone, but that is tem­pered by the fact that we own and pre­fer to use our cell phone.  Any­one who knows to call our land line also knows our cell phone num­ber, and if they don’t, they are prob­a­bly try­ing to sell us some­thing any­way.  It also offends my Men­non­ite sense of eco­nom­ics that I am pay­ing the phone bill to main­tain our con­nec­tion despite not hav­ing the phone, but our inter­net arrives through the same ser­vice provider, so the cost prob­a­bly isn’t that great.  Even­tu­ally we may have to deal with the pos­si­bil­ity of replac­ing it, but for now the great­est incon­ve­nience at this point is the nag­ging pos­si­bil­ity that it is  out of my own idiocy that it is miss­ing in the first place.

I’m a bit of an opti­mist.  I have a feel­ing we’ll find it some­time soon, if only acci­den­tally.  Assum­ing we find the phone, the worst case sce­nario is that we find it a while from now and it’s in a place that makes it obvi­ous that I put it there.  Var­i­ous fac­tors play in to mak­ing some kind of best case sce­nario.  If I find it tomor­row morn­ing, that’d be great.  If I find it lay­ing next to a few other items I’ve lost over the past few months, that’d be nice too.  For a while I was think­ing that the best case sce­nario might be if some­one would come to the door and give us the phone and say that they inad­ver­tently took it dur­ing a recent visit.  Then I thought an even bet­ter sce­nario would be if I don’t find the phone, but a note scrib­bled in crayon that says, “You shall find your phone when you solve these rid­dles three.”  It would make not hav­ing the phone much eas­ier to take if it meant that it was all a trick being played on us by our prodigy of a daughter.

I can’t be the only one with this par­tic­u­lar kind of neu­ro­sis.  When faced with a dif­fi­cult and poten­tially embar­rass­ing sit­u­a­tion, I hold on up to the last pos­si­ble moment to the hope that some­thing will be uncov­ered that will reveal me as innocent.

On a broader scale, we often seek redemp­tion when these sit­u­a­tions come upon us.  This kind of redemp­tion hap­pens in var­i­ous ways.  Maybe some sci­en­tist will dis­cover evi­dence that our recur­ring char­ac­ter flaw is some­how a prod­uct of our evo­lu­tion­ary past and so it’s quite nat­ural.  We might see a guest on Dr. Phil who over­came a sim­i­lar prob­lem to ours and so we have hope.  Or worse, we’ll see a guest on Oprah who used your same prob­lem to become a huge suc­cess story.

If we just wait long enough, the thing that’s wrong with us might just be re-interpreted as a strength and we will be vin­di­cated.  Whereas in the past, peo­ple would try to hide their flaws, today we are encour­aged to take own­er­ship of them, and some­how that way we can over­come them or use them to our ben­e­fit.  We are told to believe that really there is noth­ing wrong with any of us.  We are all spe­cial and valu­able etc.

While I often crave the com­fort that gives, I fall back on Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy which pro­vides much more com­fort to me in the long term.  Yes, I am spe­cial in God’s eyes and part of his won­der­ful cre­ation, but as a human, I am fun­da­men­tally flawed.  We as a church make it a require­ment that our mem­bers accept and admit that we are flawed and then we work it out together.

The for­mula makes it sound eas­ier than it really is, but I just wish find­ing our phone were that formulaic.

That was going to be the title of my book.  After hear­ing a num­ber of peo­ple in my home com­mu­nity strug­gle with the con­cept of being Men­non­ite in var­i­ous cul­tural con­texts, I thought a book like that would help to give clar­ity to the argu­ment.  Essen­tially I was going to say that some­times peo­ple are Men­non­ites by seed (ie. being born into a Men­non­ite fam­ily), by creed (ie. adher­ing to an Anabap­tist Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive), or by deed (ie. act­ing in a way that is sim­i­lar to other Men­non­ites), and that all of these are valid and unde­ni­able expres­sions of Men­non­ite iden­tity whether they are doing so inten­tion­ally, will­ingly or oth­er­wise.  Is it a bad thing that I could sum­ma­rize the whole book in one sen­tence?  Maybe the clever title would sell me a few copies alone.

My book was going to be infor­ma­tive, uplift­ing, inclu­sive and hope­fully a lit­tle humourous as well.  A few things hap­pened along the way to get in the way of putting together a man­u­script: first, I real­ized I was nowhere near qual­i­fied to assem­ble such a vol­ume, sec­ond, I started to actu­ally meet Men­non­ites in other cul­tural con­texts and finally, I got sick of the argu­ment and didn’t want to pub­licly align myself with any of the annoy­ing groups who spoke loudly on this subject.

For me, and all the peo­ple in my church and fam­ily net­works grow­ing up, being Men­non­ite meant a few things.  As Mex­i­can Men­non­ites, we were all first or sec­ond gen­er­a­tion immi­grants in south­ern Ontario, so we car­ried many of the reg­u­lar stig­mas attached to that label.  It meant we were sup­posed to adhere to either a fairly con­ser­v­a­tive or very con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tian­ity with low to mod­er­ate evan­ge­lism.  Those who were cham­pi­ons of the cul­ture then also cel­e­brated the value of com­mu­nity and humil­ity.  Those who rejected the faith and/or cul­ture did so because they opposed the rigid­ity with which the tra­di­tions were imposed, they despised the enforced self-deprecation and low self esteem, and/or they wanted a larger guilt-free con­nec­tion with main­stream soci­ety.  When youths (or oth­ers) there would accuse the lead­ers of being hyp­ocrites in that con­text, it gen­er­ally meant that they opposed the Phar­isees in Jesus’ time, but lived out an empty rit­u­al­is­tic form of reli­gion all the same.

When I got to Uni­ver­sity I met more dis­en­chanted Men­non­ites.  What sur­prised me was that these were rich kids, of rich par­ents, who knew about and engaged with the world around them, and attended (if only irreg­u­larly) churches that both nur­tured the indi­vid­ual expres­sions of faith as well as the com­mu­nity expe­ri­ence.  To me, they were Men­non­ites with­out all of the embar­rass­ing bag­gage I asso­ci­ated with the term.  As I lis­tened to their sto­ries, I began to hear about more ways that Men­non­ites could be hyp­ocrites.  There’s no need here to go into details, but themes of hoard­ing wealth while boast­ing about their char­ity and cul­tural nar­row mind­ed­ness were common.

So, it was with some inter­est that I have been read­ing the ongo­ing dis­cus­sion that has been printed in the Cana­dian Men­non­ite about faith and cul­ture.  After expe­ri­enc­ing the cross-cultural highs of the most recent Men­non­ite World Con­fer­ence gath­er­ing, it is nat­ural to ask how this con­nec­tion can be strength­ened and main­tained, and nat­u­rally our ten­dency to cul­tural preser­va­tion is brought up as a road block.  Terry Smith’s let­ter to the edi­tor cau­tioned us not to hold on too tightly to our cul­tural iden­tity.  Mr. Smith is him­self an edi­tor, and wrote a while ago in The Mes­sen­ger, the jour­nal pub­lished by the Evan­gel­i­cal Men­non­ite Con­fer­ence where I was once a mem­ber, that we should dis­con­nect our under­stand­ings of faith and cul­ture.  His sug­ges­tion was that we should only refer to our faith/denomination as Men­non­ite, and use other terms for our cul­ture, such as ‘Low Ger­man’.  At that time, I still thought my deed, seed and creed book idea might work so at the very least this would dis­rupt my pub­lish­ing career.  I wrote my own let­ter to the edi­tor, essen­tially say­ing that a name change wouldn’t work and that a mind change was more pos­si­ble and nec­es­sary.  Also, it seems to me there were always school­yard con­se­quences to giv­ing your­self a nickname.

Instead, I think we should feel free to use the term Men­non­ite to apply to a greater num­ber of cul­tural groups.  There are fourth and fifth gen­er­a­tion Men­non­ites in DR Congo, cer­tainly they qual­ify as cul­tural Men­non­ites.  There are sub-cultures all over the world where the only thing that dif­fer­en­ti­ates them from their neigh­bours is that they adhere to Men­non­ite teach­ings.  That sounds like a Men­non­ite cul­ture to me too.

Much of the cur­rent strat­egy to level the eth­nic play­ing field revolves around high­light­ing the role that peo­ple of all cul­tures play in Men­non­ite churches, schools and orga­ni­za­tions, espe­cially non-traditional eth­nic groups and assign­ing these peo­ple into posi­tions of lead­er­ship is a very tan­gi­ble way of doing this.  (Please don’t read this and think that I am sec­ond guess­ing any spe­cific lead­er­ship assign­ments that have been made.)  As a white male with a name like Loewen, I stand to lose from any kind of affir­ma­tive action selec­tion process, but my oppo­si­tion to this mind­set isn’t purely self­ish.  Mostly, I don’t like this kind of top down men­tal­ity.  The solu­tion is not to give more power non-traditional groups, but for all of us to have less power together.  If we are using cul­tural par­ity at the lead­er­ship level as our only mea­sur­ing stick, I think we are neglect­ing the more impor­tant work that is hap­pen­ing at the grass­roots level.  Almost all of us have expe­ri­enced some form of Men­non­ite cul­tural dis­en­chant­ment, but we can’t respond to it by adopt­ing an in and out men­tal­ity.  We need to live out an ongo­ing simul­ta­ne­ous cri­tique and repair of our­selves and our com­mu­ni­ties.  The next gen­er­a­tion of teenagers will have issues with us no mat­ter what.

The big news in South Korea right now, although it’s get­ting sur­pris­ingly lit­tle press, is that there was a flash flood on Sun­day that killed six peo­ple in the north­ern part of the coun­try.  The peo­ple who were killed had been camp­ing and were caught com­pletely off-guard by the sud­den surge in water level in the Imjin River.  It was under­stand­able that they would be sur­prised because there hadn’t been a lot of rain lately in that region, and there was no rea­son to believe that there had been a lot of rain on the other side of the bor­der where the flood waters came from.

Things in South Korea always get more inter­est­ing when it involves their only land bor­der.  There are a num­ber of dams on the North Korea side, and it quickly became clear that either there was some dam­age and the water was released acci­den­tally, or that this was all part of some orches­trated plot.  If it is a mali­cious inci­dent, it comes at a time that is con­fus­ing most inter­na­tional observers.  The North Korean regime recently made head­lines inter­na­tion­ally for releas­ing two US jour­nal­ists who had ille­gally crossed the bor­der from China.  Per­haps less note­wor­thy inter­na­tion­ally but still impor­tant in South Korea was the release of a fac­tory worker who had been held there for a num­ber of months, as well as a group of fish­er­men who were taken into cus­tody after their boat crossed into North Korean waters.  As fall is approach­ing, so too are the newly arranged reunions between fam­i­lies in the South and their rel­a­tives in the North that have been sep­a­rated since the war ended over fifty years ago.

So with all that good­will dis­played so recently, why would this gov­ern­ment turn around then and respond with this kind of aggres­sive action?  None of the Eng­lish lan­guage news sources I’ve read have made this con­nec­tion, but I think I’ve fig­ured it out.  I think there is also another man who knows exactly why this has hap­pened, and that man is likely the busiest man in the coun­try for­mu­lat­ing a response, and that’s because it was directly squarely at him.

Lee Myung-Bak, the pres­i­dent of South Korea, has faced a fair bit of crit­i­cism dur­ing his short time in office, and every now and then he shuf­fles his cab­i­net, seem­ingly to dis­tract everyone’s atten­tion away from him­self.  In that light, it was hardly news when he announced that he was replac­ing six cab­i­net min­is­ters and the prime min­is­ter.   One of the newly appointed cab­i­net mem­bers is Kim Tae-young, the new Min­is­ter of Defence. He is known for his ‘hawk­ish rhetoric’ toward the North.  He has said things in the past along the lines that the South was ready to attack the North in respond to any kind of nuclear attack, and that the South sim­ply can­not allow the North to act aggres­sively as they have in the past.  Cer­tainly Kim Jong-Il has noticed his appoint­ment and his­tory has proven that he likes to demon­strate his opin­ion about things and I’m guess­ing the dear leader is wait­ing to see what kind of ‘hawk­ish rhetoric’ the new min­is­ter of defense will roll out.

When I saw the news­pa­per arti­cle about the cab­i­net shuf­fle, I thought the defence min­is­ter looked vaguely famil­iar for some rea­son, then I sud­denly remem­bered that I had actu­ally met him before.  It’s really an unlikely story, but it’s all true.  I was dri­ving with some friends to attend a meet­ing of peace minded Chris­tians within a cer­tain part of South Korea.  We were plan­ning to stop briefly to pick up the pas­tor of “Peace Church” and then con­tinue on our jour­ney.  Then, as we neared the church, which also dou­bles as a seniors home, we found out that a four-star gen­eral was com­ing for a short visit and we would be delayed a bit.  I guess when you are among the 12 most pow­er­ful mil­i­tary men in the coun­try, peo­ple make room for you in their sched­ules.  We arrived at the church before the gen­eral, where we greeted the seniors and sang a few songs with them.  Many of the res­i­dents were expe­ri­enc­ing some level of demen­tia, and most received almost no vis­i­tors.  The pas­tor told us that the church can­not talk about peace if it is not pre­pared to help peo­ple like this, who would oth­er­wise be abandoned.

I asked those around me why the gen­eral was vis­it­ing.  Was he inquir­ing about the polit­i­cal inten­tions of a church with peace in it’s name?  Was he vis­it­ing a res­i­dent who was related to him?  I received no clear answers until he arrived with his entourage.  He had a dri­ver, who stayed with the expen­sive car while some of us kicked a soc­cer ball around on the front yard.  He had a few men who car­ried clip­boards and brief­cases and stayed close behind him con­stantly.  The answer came to me how­ever when I saw the final young man in cam­ou­flage step out of the car with a fancy look­ing camera.

It was clear to me that a man only vis­its a nurs­ing home with a pho­tog­ra­pher in tow unless you want to use those pho­tos to fur­ther your career.  “He’s try­ing to get in to pol­i­tics,” I told my wife.  “We’ll hear his name again.”  These pre­dic­tions I make are gen­er­ally untrue, but this was has come true in short order.

Gen­eral Kim Tae-young has said that the South can­not allow the North to con­tinue mak­ing aggres­sive actions toward the South.  Now he is finally in a posi­tion to do some­thing about it, but every­one, includ­ing Kim Jong-Il, knows that the dynam­ics of the sit­u­a­tion dic­tate that he will allow the North to con­tinue their aggres­sive actions.  While that Gen­eral is now a super pow­er­ful man within the gov­ern­ment, that pas­tor con­tin­ues to spend his efforts main­tain­ing a small church in the moun­tains and car­ing for peo­ple who have long since for­got­ten the names of the fam­ily mem­bers who have long since for­got­ten them.  I think the lat­ter is accom­plish­ing more for the good of the country.

So, I had a post ready last week.  I saw a per­fect news story.  As I was rumi­nat­ing in my mind what I should write about, more devel­op­ments came along mak­ing it more inter­est­ing to me and more fit­ting for this forum.  It was all com­ing together so well in my mind that I began to think that if only sto­ries like this would come up more often, I could make a career out of writ­ing about them.

The news story was Stephen Harper’s com­mu­nion con­tro­versy.  When it first broke, the report was that he had accepted a com­mu­nion wafer given to him at Romeo LeBlanc’s funeral, and promptly after receiv­ing it had stuffed into his pocket (which any tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion­ist would tell you is an incred­i­bly offen­sive thing to do to the actual body of Christ).  The next report was that he had in fact eaten it, but that since he is an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, then accord­ing to Catholic law, he shouldn’t have accepted it, let alone con­sumed it.  This was right up my alley.  I had all sorts of com­mu­nion the­ol­ogy stuff I was going to write.  The church and state issue would have been easy to write about.  I had some Ref­or­ma­tion era debates I could refer back to as well.  I even had a clever title plucked from the pages of the King James, “Whoso­ever eateth and drin­keth unworthily” which nar­rowly edged out the pro­ceed­ing words (with my gram­mat­i­cal revi­sions) “eat­ing and drink­ing con­dem­na­tion onto himself”.

The Prime Min­is­ter even­tu­ally responded to the issue, say­ing first that it was a low point in Cana­dian jour­nal­ism (which was fine by me since I saw myself as report­ing on the report­ing of it as much as I was actu­ally report­ing on the actual story) and sec­ond that it was per­son­ally impor­tant to him that he always accept com­mu­nion when it was offered to him.  It was as though the story was writ­ing itself.  The high­est gov­ern­ment offi­cial in the land was speak­ing about the individual’s right to per­sonal reli­gious expres­sion and the reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion involved was speak­ing about laws and reg­u­la­tions.  I could hardly believe the way it was unfolding.

Of course, the wheels even­tu­ally began to fall off.  I couldn’t find the right way or the right place to include the dis­claimer that I thought I needed, that I was merely com­ment­ing on the issue at hand and not stat­ing any kind of polit­i­cal stance.  Then I won­dered if even the inclu­sion of that dis­claimer was an insult to me and any­one read­ing.  Also, my wife’s been telling me for a while that I need to make my writ­ing more pos­i­tive sound­ing, and I it seemed that no mat­ter how I put the words together, it always sounded unnec­es­sar­ily crit­i­cal of Catholics.

This issue was still on my mind this past Sun­day when we gath­ered with our con­gre­ga­tion for com­mu­nion.  Beside me sat a vis­i­tor who was cur­rently on staff with a local Chris­t­ian char­ity.  He asked if he was allowed to par­tic­i­pate, and I imme­di­ately insisted that of course he was.  As he and I walked together to the table in the mid­dle of the room, I thought about what was implied in my answer.  In some ways I was unfairly say­ing that we have an open table, unlike those Catholics who prac­tise incor­rectly.  A closer inspec­tion of my views on com­mu­nion revealed that per­haps my views were more strict than theirs.  I don’t believe that the com­mu­nion table is open to every­one, in fact I think it is closed to any­one, includ­ing mem­bers of my own con­gre­ga­tion, if they are not in right rela­tion­ship with God, a line I myself was dan­ger­ously close to crossing.

I was for­tu­nate to par­tic­i­pate that morn­ing, not because I was the right kind of per­son or because I was in the right kind of church, but because a gra­cious Lord poured him­self out for unwor­thy sin­ners like me.