Mosaic Mennonites

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Imagine … Conflict as a Gift

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The Space Between Us: Conversations about Transforming Conflict by Betty Pries (Herald Press, 2021)

Image… a church board, a work team, or a congregation engaged in difficult conversations, who disagrees yet does it with respect and intentional listening, and calls conflict “a gift.” Imagine … where conflict is a gift, there is an opportunity to understand ourselves better, to discover empathy for others, to build deeper and more meaningful relationships. Imagine … conflict that leads us toward developing healthier relationships and communities.

Differences exist. Don’t we know it! As a people of peace. with curiosity and acknowledgment of our differences, we hope to build respectful relationships. Of course, it is not easy. Difficult topics, especially those that involve our beliefs, practices, accountability, and policies, are not easy to maneuver. It is challenging to believe that I am one with those whom I continue to fundamentally disagree.

In his book, Daily Meditations, Richard Rohr writes,

“There are three things in life of which we can be assured: The first is that we are beloved. Regardless of what we have done in our lives or what has been done to us, this truth remains: We are beloved. We are worthy. Second, suffering will come. Life does what life does. In one fashion or another suffering will be thrust on us. This includes the suffering of conflict. And finally, third, when we are in our time of suffering a hand will reach toward us to pull us back to life. That hand may be a community, a friend, a stranger in line at the grocery store…”

I believe a book, such as The Space Between Us, can also be a hand that will pull us back to life.

In The Space Between Us: Conversations about Transforming Conflict, author Betty Pries, a mediator and facilitator, guides readers toward seeing conflict as an opportunity for personal growth, deeper self-knowledge, and a way to build resilience. Rooted in the conviction that conflict can strengthen our relationships and deepen our self-knowledge, Pries offers practical skills rooted in Christian practices of mindfulness, connecting with our most authentic selves and deep listening, to uncover new possibilities for engaging conflict and casts a vision for a more joy-filled future.

As we transform conflict, the space between us is transformed just as the space between us is healed.

Imagine … a book that gently guides, leads with helpful examples, and gives practical suggestions. A book to read, keep on your shelf, share with your church board, and reread. A free online study guide by Karen Cornies is also available through Herald Press and might allow for your entire congregation to read the book together. I personally give the book a 5-star recommendation.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr and His Legacy of Peace

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MLK Day is Monday, January 17, 2022, and we offer these quotes of Martin Luther King Jr. as a reminder of the timeless wisdom he offered. He stood for truth, justice, compassion, and courage. May you be inspired to continue the work of peace and justice as you reflect on these quotes.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.”

“A right delayed is a right denied.”

“I have decided to stick with love … Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

“We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.”

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend.” 

Looking for a hands-on way to honor MLK’s legacy on January 17?

Join Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and others in Mosaic Conference and beyond at The City School Poplar Campus (910 N. 6th Street, Philadelphia) or via zoom from 10am-12pm for the 5th Annual Mass Incarceration Service Day. To learn more or to register, watch the video or visit the website.

New York City, a Laundromat, and Jesus

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In May of 2021, my wife, Sandra, and I visited New York City to celebrate our 51st wedding anniversary. We were returning to the city that received us in the 1970s. We lived in New York City for eleven years and two of our children were born there.

New York City is “a planetary city,” as described by Colombian author Diana Uribe, because it has residents, communities, restaurants, and languages ​​from almost every corner of the world. When we first arrived in New York in the 1970s, we resided in Astoria, Queens, an area of mostly Greek and Italian communities. It was common to see ads in Greek and Italian and to hear these two languages ​​mixed with English. It was rare to find people who spoke Spanish.

Marco Güete and his wife, Sandra, celebrated their 51st anniversary in New York City. Photo by Marco Güete.

Our plan, as part of our anniversary celebration, was to visit some of the places where we lived. We wanted to walk the streets again, travel by train/subway, remember the stations, and identify where the shops, restaurants, and laundromats were. We wanted to go back to the past and live it again for a moment.

Everything had changed, or our minds played tricks on us trying to remember. We went down the stairs of a train station in Astoria, a station that we used several hundred times. We walked a block and to our left we discovered the place where the supermarket was located and where we bought groceries. We arrived at the corner and there in front of us, imposing and dazzling, was the apartment building that we welcomed our children, Zandra and Javier, as newborns, a year apart. What a surprise! To the right of the apartment building was our laundromat.

The laundromat near Marco and Sandra’s former home in Queens. 
Photo by Marco Güete.

Many years ago, on one bright, sunny, spring afternoon, my wife arrived at the laundromat. She was pregnant with our second baby. She rolled her laundry cart and our one-month-old daughter in her baby carriage. Until today, I never asked myself the question, how did she manage both?

In the laundromat Sandra met a neighbor and her baby. They two began a conversation, and our neighbor told Sandra that she would like to introduce us to the pastor of the church where she attends. A few days later, our neighbor arrived at our apartment with the pastor, introduced him, and left immediately to take care of her baby, whom had left her alone for a few moments.

That day, with great wisdom, love, and knowledge of the scriptures, the pastor told us about Jesus and invited us to receive him in our hearts and become followers of him. That day my wife and I began the pilgrimage of discovering and knowing how to become followers of Jesus. This has been a wonderful learning process for over 46 years, where our trust and faith in God grows daily.

Flooded Out, Welcomed In

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Editor’s Note: The last names of family members were not used for privacy reasons. 

In early September 2021, the rain from Hurricane Ida soaked the East Coast. In the area around Blooming Glen (PA) Mennonite Church, flash flooding caused widespread damage to homes and businesses. The Pennridge Ministerium of area churches worked together with social service agencies to try and help those that had been flooded out of their homes.

With affordable, short-term, local housing nearly non-existent, at first, many of the displaced families stayed in hotels, sometimes at a great distance from their home community. This solution caused great inconvenience and additional expenses related to job commutes, transporting children to school, and feeding their families (hotels do not have kitchens).

The church participated in an Interfaith Hospitality network in past years, and we have classrooms with an adjacent full bathroom. What could we offer in terms of temporary lodging in our building?

Working with the school district social worker, a family was identified that needed a temporary living space. And that’s how we met Noe and Margarita and their children, Noe (son), Neftaly, and Scarlett, who lived in our church building for nearly three months.

Margarita described the day their rental property got flooded. “Our house is ¼ mile from the creek, so at first, we didn’t think anything would happen when it started raining. We lived 17 years in that house and no floods! But the water kept rising!”

Daughter Neftaly added, “All of a sudden, the road into our house was covered with water. I told mom, we can’t get out!” Water covered the first floor of their house and all of the family’s furniture and bedding was lost.

They spent that first night without a home at their landlord’s house. Then they stayed with friends who opened their home to them. “It was ten people from two families living in a small space,” explained Noe. “We looked but couldn’t find anywhere to move and stay in the school district and near our jobs. Everything we looked at either cost too much or required a long lease.”

“All of a sudden, the road into our house was covered with water. I told mom, we can’t get out!”

After the leadership of Blooming Glen processed the possibility internally, they reached out to the Pennridge School social worker. “Then the school social worker connected us with Blooming Glen,” Noe continued. “I didn’t think that such a thing was possible, that there would be people that don’t even know us, yet would help us.”

With furniture contributions from Care & Share Thrift Shoppes, congregants, and other area churches, several adjacent classrooms were turned into bedrooms. Couches and a coffee table turned a classroom lobby into a living room. The family moved into their temporary home.

The family has joined the congregation for Sunday worship services and fellowship meals, and congregants have gotten to know the family as they’ve brought in evening meals to share together.

“It’s been a good experience living here,” Neftaly commented, “I have made new friends in the youth group.” Neftali has also been preparing to get her driver’s license, and like countless teenagers before her, has practiced driving in the big, empty church parking lot.

“I want to stay here and not move back to our house!” said 7-year-old Scarlett. “I am always excited to go to Sunday school to see my new friends. I took my first Bible to school and was reading it to my friends.”

(from left to right) Noe, Margarita, Scarlett, Noe, and Neftali at Thanksgiving Eve worship service at Blooming Glen Mennonite Church. Photo by Mike Ford.

It’s been a wonderful experience for all involved, and Blooming Glen is considering ongoing possibilities for providing short-term emergency housing.

“We have met lots of nice people here, and we’ve been grateful to receive help,” Margarita explained. “I didn’t think anyone would help us like that in our time of need. But we needed an apartment, and you provided it.”

From Patient Waiting to Chaotic Celebration

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Last Christmas, despite the pandemic, my Aunt Marietta still made pierogies for Christmas Eve. She packed them up and dropped them off for the smaller gatherings of my extended family, for us to enjoy separately. Although we didn’t gather as we normally would for our Slovak Christmas Eve meal, with cousins, aunts, and uncles, my aunt still extended her care with these traditional labors of love, made from dough, potato, and cheese, even in the midst of a pandemic. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

Last year, I watched a sparse Christmas Eve mass from the Vatican. We didn’t attend gathered worship. And most human interactions were calculated with care for risk, vulnerability, and a recognition that maintaining distance was, in a strange way, an act of love.

This year I am looking forward to my aunt’s homemade pierogies with extended family. This meal connects me with my family story and legacy of faith.

My own last name, Kriss, comes from the Slovak word for “cross.” I am likely a descendant from generations of Roman Catholic Christians whose faith became so important to them that it became their family name. This traditional meal, without meat, on Christmas Eve marks a celebration of the birth of Christ “among the animals.” It will be good to eat together again.

This year I enter the season of Christmas with deep gratitude. I am grateful to readily gather with family and friends. I have been enjoying Advent-gathered worship (this season I’ve worshiped with Philadelphia (PA) Praise Center, Zion (Souderton, PA), Salem (Quakertown, PA), and Doylestown (PA)). While life is still different because of the pandemic, there is a resumption of rhythms that are life-giving. I want to embrace these celebrations, remembering what it was like to reframe holiday practices and to resume them with more depth of intention and appreciation.

Advent is about waiting. It is an attempt to go slowly and thoughtfully. For many of us, the pandemic has stretched our patience. It has frayed our sense of community and connectivity. Yet, I have also seen the pandemic open our creative process to figure out how to extend love and care in a precarious time.

Christmas is about the inbreaking. While Advent is often slow and reflective, Christmas can be chaos and frenzied. The past 21 months has felt like a combination of the two seasons: a long, arduous wait combined with chaos and frenzy.

The inbreaking of Christmas is about the love of God incarnate, about God crossing the spiritual and social distance between us for the sake of redemption and abundant life. The coming of Jesus is an extension of the love that created all things.

This season as we gather, as we remember a year without gathering for some, may we remember the love that compels us to cross distances, to share what we have, to be transformed through the waiting and even through the chaos.

What One Day Was, But is No Longer

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Translated into English by Andrés Castillo

Editor’s note: This is part two of Dania Hernández’s call story. Part one is available here. Hernández is Pastor of Peña de Horeb, a Mosaic congregation in Philadelphia, PA.

Life for Hernández in the US began in a less conventional way. Confident that this was what she wanted, she did not look back for a single moment and moved forward. Her relationship with her boyfriend strengthened and soon she became his wife and the mother of his three children. They put down roots and decided to fight for life in the country of opportunity.

That’s how the first twenty years passed, years in which Hernández experienced great joys, along with deep sorrows. Among the moments she counts as blessings is having been reunited with God and overcoming the many challenges she encountered along the way.

Hernández felt a deep desire to serve God and was called to be a pastor. Doors opened for an opportunity in a Mennonite faith community called Peña de Horeb in Philadelphia, PA. Everything seemed perfect. She had what she had always dreamed of: a cozy home and economic stability.

What happens when all this begins to fall apart? How do you deal with fear? How do you face the moments of darkness that enclose your life? How do you coexist between what once was, but is no longer?

Divorce and a Dead End

Love is defined in many ways: a feeling of affection towards another human being or one thing; the free decision to feel affinity for others or others; the greatest force that moves the human being. Love never comes without wounds.

Life had begun to become difficult for the married couple. The constant psychological abuse and humiliation that Pastor Dania experienced from her husband made her lose herself in a dead-end. Her self-love waned to such an extent that this was reflected in her gaze, her body, her skin, and the constant anxiety she experienced. Pastor Dania was followed by pain generated by the separation from her husband.

“A part of one always knows that it can all end,” Hernández said sadly. “She perceives it, discerns it, but doesn’t understand it. The signs or red flags that appear on the road are as obvious as the coldness of a conversation, the loneliness in each other’s company, the silence generated by the distance, the uncomfortable looks. One becomes blind out of fear of letting go, when in reality letting go is the most beautiful act of freedom.”

Pastor Dania would have loved for the story with her ex-husband to have been different. Unfortunately, her story, her wounds, and her scars cannot be erased. They remain there to remind her that if she had not traveled this path, she might not have become the woman she is today: a tolerant, compassionate woman, full of love and courage, who, in the midst of the deepest dark waters, was able to come to the surface and raise her head high.

Pastor Dania’s call story will conclude next week with part III.

Book Review: How to Change the World, One Penny at a Time

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“How to Change the World, One Penny at a Time: The Story of Claude Good and the Worm Project” (208pp. illus. Masthof Press, 2021, $14.00)

This book serves as a tribute, not only to Claude Good and the “Worm Project,” but also to the book’s author, Dawn Ruth Nelson. While writing the book, Dawn Ruth Nelson was diagnosed with cancer; fellow writer, Beverly Benner Miller, finished the book when Dawn could no longer continue the project. 

This book offers fascinating insight into mid-twentieth century, rural, Pennsylvania, Mennonite life, especially for those, like me, who are uninformed.  Claude Good began life with plenty of challenges, including a difficult family life. But even from his earliest days, he (and his wife, Alice) seemed to be followed by a wonderful sense of call and purpose.

© 2021 Masthof Bookstore and Press

This call and purpose saw them both overcome not having opportunity to go to high school, yet eventually each earned a degree at Eastern Mennonite College (Harrisonburg, VA). Claude even continued to receive a graduate degree in sociology at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) and pursued theological studies.  In 1960, with additional training from Wycliffe Bible Translators, the Goods, sponsored by the Franconia Mission Board, settled in the remote town Chicahuaxtla, Mexico. Chicahuaxtla was home to an indigenous native tribe, the Triqui. 

The Goods raised their family (three daughters and two sons) in the village for the next 25 years (without electricity for ten years). Over that time, the New Testament was translated into three Triqui dialects.

The Goods (and the Blank family, who joined them in 1961) found themselves occupied with a great deal of makeshift primary healthcare work, as medical facilities in the region were scant.  Yet the fruits of their work, such as conversions, baptisms, and the beginning of a small church in 1974, were evident.  Sadly, social and political unrest caused the Good family to relocate to the US in 1985. 

Claude continued to helped with translation of the Triqui Bible while also doing ministry in local Franconia area churches.  Alice finished a Master’s in Education and became a chaplain at several retirement communities.  They settled into Souderton (PA) Mennonite Church, and it seemed as if the Goods might have finished their direct ministry in Chicahuaxtla.

But, in the early 1990s, “The Worm Project” began.  The Goods had long been aware that digestive problems, specifically intestinal worms, were a major health problem for the Triqui.  Claude discovered that, by simply including Albendazole tablets into their diet, the intestinal worm challenge would largely be abated. However, these tablets were not readily available to the Triqui people.  When one reads Claude’s reflections from that time, it almost seems that at the age of 69 he had finally found his life’s calling.

The rest of the book details how “The Worm Project” took on shape.  Claude gave himself tirelessly to this project, with efforts that achieved great things, not only for the village of Chicahuaxtla, but throughout the world. In the end, Claude’s wide network of collective work brought a good deal of recognition to him and his humanitarian work, centered on the fight against intestinal worms throughout the globe. 

The book ends with Alice’s death in 2008 and Claude dying peacefully in 2019, at age 90. 

A story like this points out that even an impressive, challenging, worthy, first 25 years of ministry can still be preliminary preparation for an even greater work to follow.  For Claude and Alice Good, that certainly seems to have been the case.

To purchase a copy of the book, click here. Proceeds from the sale of this book will go directly to The Worm Project to purchase medicine to treat even more children from parasitic worms. 

More information about The Worm Project is available at their website. 

What Happens at the Cabin, Stays at the Cabin

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I recently enjoyed my annual trip to our family hunting cabin in pursuit of the elusive white tail buck. While I had a wonderful time, the word elusive accurately describes my three days spent in the woods of Columbia County, PA.

This year my brother-in-law distributed t-shirts bearing the proud name of Camp YO-HO. The back of the shirt appropriately declares, “What happens at the cabin, stays at the cabin.” I sense some of this is to initiate newcomers with the most important rule of Camp YO-HO.

Photo by Terry Travelpiece.

I am sure many have heard similar comments during family trips or gatherings of friends. While this humorous saying is usually harmless, I am often intrigued by the secret-keeping that is common within our families and faith communities. For example, while at the cabin, my gift-giving brother-in-law shared that the football team, coached by his son, is under investigation for using racial slurs towards an opponent. I was surprised to learn he only knows about this because his daughter-in-law, not his son, informed him. We were asked not to tell other members of the family.

I immediately went online and found no less than four stories of the alleged accusations. It seems so odd to treat a public story with such secrecy. Yet I bump into this approach on a regular basis in our faith communities too.

Randy Heacock (first row, center) with family members at the cabin, wearing their new shirts. Photo by Terry Travelpiece.

Though rarely identified, I have discovered a slew of reasons why secrets are encouraged. Image is a big factor. We often fear what others will think if less than positive realities are named publicly. We do not want a loved one or respected friend to be seen in a negative light.

At times, our fear of conflict also keeps our lips sealed. More difficult decisions will need to be made if known struggles are stated clearly. Public acknowledgement can raise tension or even harm an institution or business. Hence, it may be easier to keep silent than to name known abuses. Such abuses can take the form towards children, money, power, corruption, or manipulation. Most notably this has happened in the Catholic Church, Penn State, and the USA Gymnastic program. We must also admit that it happens within Mosaic Conference, our churches, institutions, and individual families.

The interesting thing is that we often keep secrets to keep unity and peace. However, secrets do not deliver either. The writer of I John declares, “If we walk in the light, as God is in the light, we have fellowship with one another” (I John 1:7a, NIV). To walk in the light is to expose or be transparent. When we learn to live exposed, transparent lives, then, and only then, will we experience genuine relationships as God intended.

When and for what are you most tempted to keep secrets? May we pray for God’s wisdom to help us live in God’s exposed light. May we have the courage to build families and create communities of faith that graciously expose all to God’s light. Just maybe, we will begin to experience relationships as God intends!