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by Danilo Sanchez, Conference youth formation pastor

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table for our monthly worship planning meeting. As usual, we started out with “Dwelling in the Word” and prayer. For our “Dwelling in the Word,” we watched a video that illustrated the emptiness we often experience as humans in the world, whether an empty tank of gas, an empty fridge or bank account, or the emptiness we feel from the loss of a loved one.  The music was dramatic and called on my heart to think of its own emptiness.

I could relate to the father sitting in front of his computer looking at an empty bank account.

I could relate to the young girl who sat in a room full of people but sent a text to her friend saying, “I don’t know … I guess I just feel empty.”

About a minute and a half into the video, the mood shifted. Words faded in at the bottom of the screen: “Emptiness often means disappointment, misery, heartache, anxiety … except when it doesn’t.” The music swelled and cut to a scene of Mary Magdalene bursting into a room full of the empty-feeling disciples. She proclaimed, “Peter, it’s empty!”

What a powerful message.

As we reflected on our responses to the video, one person in our worship planning team said, “Oh, I’m sure you pastors never feel empty. You’re doing God’s work and I’m sure your personal prayer time is just amazing. I mean how could it not be?  I would love to just sit and listen to you praying to God.”

I didn’t know how to respond in the moment, but I had two reactions. First, I thought to myself, do I appear as “too holy,” like I never have problems or am never empty? That’s certainly not true. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt empty—in my role as a husband and father, from work demands, from being a pastor. Working on empty as a pastor is never good. Repeated patterns of taking on too much often lead to burnout. Learning to say “no” and have boundaries is something that every leader needs to learn, but for some reason it’s always hard to put into practice.

My second reaction, which was much deeper than the first, were feelings of guilt and shame because my prayer life is mediocre at best. After all the praying I do in front of others or for others, it’s hard for me to want to pray privately because that feels too much like work. I’ll admit there have been periods in my life that I’ve been too empty to even want to pray to God, my Creator. With my spiritual director, I’ve been exploring different ways to pray beyond words, like coloring or sitting in silence before a dancing flame candle.  I’ve been using my body to pray through yoga; as I inhale, I say, “Christ in me” and as I exhale, I say, “Christ through me.”

This year during Lent, we have emphasized how we come to God empty, needing to be filled. In my emptiness, I long to find joy in the one who created me. I long to be refreshed and claimed by God, not because I’m a pastor, but because I’m a child of God. In the empty tomb, I long to find the Resurrected Jesus who fills my life with mystery and wonder.

This Easter season, in your emptiness, may you find the belonging, hope, and joy that only Jesus can provide.

by John Ruth, with Joel Alderfer, for the Mennonite Heritage Center

 America’s love affair with 35mm. slide transparencies ran from the late 1940s into the 1970s.  Fortunate indeed are those stuck to Kodachrome – whose authentic colors have not been diminished by half a century of casual storage.  Over a quarter-century span, countless family gatherings were transfixed and bored by the marvel of colored photographs glowing on a screen.  Returnees from trips proudly proved that they had been to the Grand Canyon, stood under the redwoods, or strolled Florida beaches in winter.  In comparison, there were fewer family scenes, and many of them were posed portraits.

By the end of the 20^th century, the endless travel pictures had become hopelessly dull and irrelevant to many, while the occasional shot of local, daily work and play were accruing a growing fascination. Ironically, many families of affluence have little to show of the domestic habits of their grand-parents. Not so with the family of John and Lizzie Bean Guntz, farmers near Royersford in western Montgomery County, and parents of a daughter Anna Elizabeth, born in 1913.

The Guntz farm, where Anna lived for most of her life, had belonged to her parents and her grandparents before that. They were a conservative Mennonite farming family, members of the Vincent congregation based across the Schuylkill River in Chester County.  Anna found employment doing housekeeping in the Collegeville area, including for several upper-class families in town, where she was loyal and much appreciated.

In the early 1950s, Anna bought an Argus C3 camera and began taking pictures on slides. What she lovingly recorded was the unfolding, trans-generational life of her extended family, transpiring simply around her on the home farm where she lived with her parents.  With no photographic training or strategy, this self-effacing and sensitive woman with no children of her own poured the love of an aunt into what grew into the most endearing visual record we have of Mennonite family life in her community and time.

A poignant aspect of Anna’s bounty of slides is in their coming to us from when one had to buy film and pay for its developing from modest wages.  Instead of taking 40 digital shots and discarding 39, as is common today, in 1952 one might frugally allow oneself one or two exposures, with the hope, while waiting for the film to be processed and mailed back, that the subjects had not blinked.  It is remarkable, then, that of the several thousand slides Anna has left, over three hundred remain as iconic of the context of her life.

Asked how she had learned composition, Anna seemed indignant.  Composition?  What is that?  “Why, these were my nieces and nephews!”  She leaves with us a celebration of life in a setting now almost strangely superseded, but intimately, even lyrically, made available to viewers through her loving lens.

A photo exhibit of selections from the color slides of Anna B. Guntz, as well as family farm artifacts, are on display at the Mennonite Heritage Center until June 15, 2019.

(Some of the items on display – click for larger versions)