3 Turning Away from Fear

Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living in better conditions.

—KHWAJEH SHAMS AL-DIN MUHAMMAD HAFEZ-E SHIRAZI, FOURTEENTH-CENTURY MYSTIC AND POET

I WANT TO TELL YOU the story of a community, my community, because it was shaped by fear—and for good reason—but found a way to use that fear to help others, experiencing great joy in the process. I hope that this story will give us the strength to challenge our fears in these times, as well as ideas for how to overcome our fear of those we perceive to be the problem.

Living in Fear

I grew up afraid. Not every day. The truth was much deeper than any particular experience or threat. Fear had embedded itself deep in my soul. I breathed fear, and fear shaped who I became. This type of irrational fear is shared by so many around the world in a time characterized by displacement, whether voluntary or involuntary. That is why it is so difficult to keep fear from defining community.

“The communists are coming!” For my community, this was a statement based on experience, not a vague anxiety. This fear was seldom expressed verbally, but it deeply affected the way my family and community lived their daily lives.

My parents and the several hundred other Mennonites who emigrated to our community in Abbotsford, British Columbia, from Ukraine after World War II shared a Mennonite mantra. Not “I think, therefore I am,” but “We flee; that’s just the way it is.”

Mennonites had been hunted and killed ever since the sixteenth century, when our founders, including Menno Simons, after whom we are named, refused to put any credence in their children’s, and their own, baptism as infants by the Roman Catholic Church. Called Anabaptists—with ana meaning “again”—they believed that the Bible taught that only voluntary “true believers” should be baptized. Because children were too young to make such a decision, baptism was to be reserved for adults. The Anabaptists stirred up a big problem. At the time there was little daylight in most countries between baptism into the church and membership in the society or state. The Mennonites believed that there should be a very clear separation between church and state. It is a long and complicated story, but, in short, the Mennonite way of thinking led to a lethal conflict between them and the religious and political authorities.

In the late eighteenth century, at the invitation of Catherine the Great, Czarina of the Russian Empire, my ancestors settled in the fertile steppes of Ukraine. There they lived in relative peace, and eventually immense prosperity, for more than a hundred years. By the late nineteenth century, some Mennonites had moved to Canada and the United States. But not my family.

Then, early in the twentieth century, the communists arrived, bringing revolution and chaos. Roving bandits and the warring Red and White armies put the Mennonites in their crosshairs: many were killed; at times whole villages were massacred. Though the Mennonites were pacifists by tradition, some were so frustrated and desperate that they fought back with small armies of their own.

After communism became the ruling system, the Mennonites, being land and factory owners, were forced to live on collective farms. Their churches and schools were closed, and their way of life was destroyed.

When Joseph Stalin took power in 1924, he was determined to force all of Ukraine to conform. In the reign of terror that ensued, the Mennonites were so beaten and afraid that some turned informant, betraying their neighbors to secure their own release from prison. Many Mennonites, including both of my grandfathers, were picked up at night and charged with treason—mainly for having Bibles in their possession—and were executed shortly after.

Stalin’s most vicious attack was his failure to relieve the region during the famine of 1932–1933, in which millions of Ukrainians died: some say this was a deliberate genocide to tame the rebellious region. My parents, my older cousins, and all the adults in the church in which I was raised survived this massive trauma, only to see Ukraine destroyed by the German attack on the Soviet Union during World War II. Though others were deeply affected, calm and stability reigned for the Mennonites for a few years under German occupation. The Mennonites, most of whom still spoke German, hated the communist political system; they had suffered so much at the hands of the Soviets that they saw the Germans as saviors. Indeed, the Germans allowed them to return to private farming and to reopen their churches and schools. Later, when sharing their stories of this time, most Mennonites said that they had not been aware of the German death camps and the ensuing Holocaust. Probably some did know.

In 1944, the tables turned again, when the Soviets got the upper hand over the Germans. As the latter retreated, they invited the Mennonites and other people of German background to go with them. The Mennonites, fearing the severe repercussions they would face at the hands of the Soviets for having collaborated with the enemy, fled the country. Many young men, including my father, were recruited at gunpoint at the end of the war to fight for the German army on the Russian front. As the Red Army caught up to the fleeing refugees, thousands were killed or sent back to gulags in the Soviet Union.

From 1948 to 1950, about eight thousand Mennonites emigrated to Canada—mostly women and children, because by this time the majority of the adult males had been killed or exiled. The book Women Without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War, written by Marlene Epp, traces this story.

Of the several hundred families that settled in Abbotsford, British Columbia, about a hundred of them, my parents included, eventually formed the Eben Ezer Mennonite Church. The name came from the Old Testament story of the ancient Jews who rested after their escape from Egypt and their wanderings in the desert at a place to which they gave this name, which means “God has led us thus far” (1 Samuel 7:12). Is it any wonder that I grew up feeling that Canada was a stopover, rather than my home; that we could and probably would be displaced, and sooner rather than later? Surely the communists (or someone else) would come, bringing destruction and death, and we would flee yet again—to another country, to a safer place. We saw ourselves, by definition, as displaced persons.

My parents and their friends had witnessed and experienced horrible things, and many had been forced to do horrible things. The need for support and healing bound our church congregation together. We prayed, sang, ate, worked, and played our way through the terrible memories, trying to make sense of our suffering.

Probably the most important thing we did was shape our identity. Together, we counteracted the negative effects of fear by building a healthy worldview that served us well. Our community’s network of relationships and our practice of mutual caring helped us manage our fear and shape our common and individual identities. Without community, most of our parents would have ended up hardened and depressed, and most of us, their children, would have become angry and bitter.

At first we were a community of poor farmers struggling to feed our families. But that did not last long. Though we did not own things collectively, we supported one another, sharing ideas and opportunities. If one farmer learned something innovative about raising chickens, the next thing you knew, all of us had several thousand chickens and were sharing use of the same feed company and egg-grading station. We learned about land development, about building houses, about buying and selling secondary farms. We prospered—together.

Belonging

I was reminded of my own early experiences of my community’s pilgrimage during a leadership course I took recently. We participants were given paper and different colors of markers to draw a lifeline. This was to help us understand our “mental models” and “ladders of influence”—how we think about the world and what experiences and influences have shaped our thinking. I was surprised by how vibrantly I drew my growing-up years. I used a lot of green, symbolizing growth and joy.

In the group discussion that followed, I shared that my childhood was filled with a sense of community. I was asked to recall the first time I experienced this feeling. It didn’t take long for me to remember, and then retell with great enthusiasm, the story of an annual pig-butchering day held on my family’s farm.

I was six years old, a big, strong boy with dark hair, chubby red cheeks, a huge smile, and an ample belly. I was excited by the prospect of a break from the daily routine of gathering the eggs, feeding the animals, and tending the garden.

Pig-butchering day started early. Extended-family members, neighbors, and friends (in our case, these were often the same people) congregated at our farm and started setting up. The tasks for the day included cutting the meat into roasts and chops, extracting hams and ribs, and packaging what was left to make pork sausage, liver sausage, ground pork, and headcheese (don’t ask).

Heinz Giesbrecht was a central figure in the butchering. He was the most knowledgeable about the process and carried many of the recipes in his head. We all called him Uncle Heinz, even though he was my dad’s uncle. The shortage of adult males in our community, as a result of the war and Stalin’s purges in Ukraine, often simplified relationships. Because of his gentle nature, I always imagined Uncle Heinz, the senior male in our extended family, as my grandfather.

Lunch was special on pig-butchering day. A long table was set up for everyone present to enjoy a meal together. On this particular day, Uncle Heinz asked me to sit beside him while we ate. I enjoyed the special attention that he showed me.

On the table were loaves of my mother’s famous fresh crusty white bread and Kotletten mit Eadschok mit Schmaunt Fat: meatballs made with ground beef and pork, mixed with garlic and onions and salt and pepper, fried in bacon fat, and smothered with a jar of rich, fresh cream mixed with what my mother called the “juice” left over from the frying—all of this served on top of potatoes. I would not recommend this meal for heart health, but let me tell you, on a cold fall day, after a morning of hard work, it was a real treat.

After a prayer, said at length by my dad, we all dug in and filled our plates with meatballs and potatoes, pouring generous helpings of creamy gravy over it all. As the meal was ending, Uncle Heinz saw that I had finished the potatoes and meatballs but still had plenty of gravy on my plate. He leaned over and said, “Paul, today I am going to teach you to be a man.” Whereupon he passed me a piece of bread and showed me how to scoop up every last drop of the gravy and eat the bread. My plate was clean and dry.

That moment, more than any other, brings back deep memories of community. Yes, pig-butchering day was a communal effort to prepare food for the winter. Yes, it was a time to be with family, creating a sense of togetherness. Yes, it was a day of giving to the less fortunate at home and overseas through Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). And yes, it was an occasion for elders to teach the ways of a people to children. But for me, this day was special because of an uncle’s gesture that told me who I was and where I belonged. Cleaning my plate spoke volumes about who we were as a community: simple and frugal farmers who had survived near-starvation in a frigid climate and near-death in a hostile political climate.

I knew who I was, and that I was needed, and that I needed everyone who was there. We had endured not because of our individual efforts but because we had stayed together. Children were reared, people were helped, and work got done—together. No matter how bad things got, as long as we had one another, we could survive and even thrive.

These experiences shaped my identity as a refugee, as an underdog who would need to work hard to succeed in life. Frugality and simple living, sharing and faith—these became a deep part of me.

A Caring-Based Community

Small wonder that I grew up identifying with the story of the Chosen People’s exodus from Egypt and forty-year search for community. It was my story. While studying to become a pastor, I wrote a paper that focused on the approximately one dozen biblical passages that describe a particular command to the Jews: “You were once ger in the land of Egypt; therefore treat the ger in your land as you would have wanted to be treated.” The Hebrew word ger is loosely translated as “strangers, sojourners, wanderers in the land.”

This directive was part of what led me to a career in community development. I suppose that taking this career path may have been a way to ensure the security of my family, my people. If we do good to others, maybe, just maybe, God will keep the communists from invading Canada and we will all be safe.

The death and destruction experienced by the Mennonites is more than any one people should have to endure. Our fear provided the context for how we organized ourselves: the work we did, the food we ate, the friends we made, the things we did when we were not working.

We were farmers, and so were most of the Mennonites with whom we went to church. We were farmers not only because that was what most of us knew and had done in Ukraine but also because farming enabled us to be more independent: we could live off the crops we grew and the livestock we kept; the skills we had acquired would hold us in good stead should disruption come. Farming was a highly transferable skill for self-preservation.

Each summer my family filled our cellar with jar upon jar of canned fruits and vegetables. We canned watermelon, cucumbers, peaches, apricots, and cherries, and made relishes from carrots and cabbage. The summer cellar in our basement was huge and certainly the most important feature of our home. Along with our kitchen, it was our home’s inner sanctum. Next to this cellar were two massive freezer chests, each the size of a small car, which we filled with the pig and cow we butchered every fall, dozens of chickens, and more home baking than we could ever consume.

Eating food—lots of it—was important to us. We took the saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die” literally. We had piles of meat, often two or three kinds, at every meal. A typical breakfast was fried eggs and jreewe, or cracklings, little bits of bacon stored in pig fat.

And for breakfast dessert—yes, breakfast dessert—we ate fresh homemade bread dipped in thick cream with several tablespoons of sugar mixed in. Sometimes we skipped the main course and just ate dessert. Making a perfect start to our day were halva, a sweet, sesame-based fudge, with fresh buns, a favorite from Ukraine, and Napoleon torte, a dozen crispy, cake-batter crepes, layered with thick, creamy vanilla pudding and left to soak overnight.

As Mom would say, “Eat, eat; who knows what tomorrow might bring?”

An Act of Building Community

Jake Tilitzky, the profoundly humble, simple, and deeply spiritual pastor of our church, dedicated his life to us. Even in his eighties, he is still presiding over funerals (including my parents’, several years ago). He had experienced the same terror of war and famine but somehow was able to rise above the fear and help us bear the burden and make sense of the senseless horror of it all. His sermons were filled with stories of our past. As I remember, he acknowledged the pain we had experienced but placed it in the context of God’s will for our lives. Even for those who doubted a God who would allow so much pain and death, his words offered deep comfort, an important lifeline to a people who otherwise might have experienced mass insanity.

Several times a year, Jake stood at the pulpit and prepared us to take Communion two Sundays hence. He was aware of the toll that fear can take on a people: of the mistrust, unresolved anger, and mental anguish that could tear us apart. Communion, under Jake’s leadership, was a time for each of us to reconcile not only with God but also with one another.

Though he was a short, balding man, to a child sitting in the front row, as was the custom in our church, Jake grew larger in the pulpit during his sermon when he spoke the words “In two weeks’ time, we will be taking Communion”—the way he said this indicated that the practice was not optional—“and should there be anyone in this congregation who is not right with someone in the congregation, I encourage you to reconcile. He that is not right with another cannot be right with God.” If you were so much as angry with another person in the congregation, you could not take Communion. And if you did not show up for Communion, it would be only a matter of days before Jake would show up at your home and ask if there was anything you wanted to tell him.

Shortly after we arrived home from church on the Sundays when that sermon had been preached, my dad would start pacing around our house. My parents, as they began to make more money from farming, also bought and sold farms and houses as investments. At times these properties were bought from or sold to others in the congregation. More often than not, some mistrust and friction surfaced, rising from our shared trauma.

So my dad would pace. At first he would deny that anything was wrong or that he was to blame. If he had done something wrong, he would say, it was up to the person wronged to call. Mom and all of us kids knew to hang low and wait it out. And sure enough, several hours before Communion, my father would pick up the phone and make the call, dissipating the tension and angst in our home. He had chosen joy over fear.

This simple act of building community and choosing joy over fear gave us a distinct advantage. We were team players in a society that was organized on the basis of individualism. We needed less and could do more. Most important, we learned very quickly and shared what we knew with one another, whether improved farming techniques or how to buy and sell land or where to get the best deal, a key advantage in our business affairs.

As I grew up, I never questioned why we might work for a better world together. My sense was that what we were doing for Mennonite Central Committee, a worldwide relief agency, we did because it had helped us in our time of need and now we wanted to give back. Whenever we made soap or quilts, or sent care packages or money, something inside me was renewed.

I often wonder if the only way we can ever really transcend the collective evil we endure as people is to do good together. Maybe loving our enemy and repaying harm with good is the only way to achieve true healing—and, in turn, joy.

The Mennonite Turn

My community’s definition of itself based on fear ended up being largely positive. Why did that happen? How did that happen? Are there insights for us as we try to understand how we can deepen community?

You could call this transformation in the community of my youth “the Mennonite turn.” Fear usually begets more fear. While we could have let fear destroy us, we turned away from it and helped those inside and outside our community who were consumed by it. Our pacifist faith taught us that lashing out was not an option, which meant that all we had left was to make things better—at first for ourselves, but then for others too.

Think about this in our times of high unemployment and underemployment: I never knew a person in our church to lack work or go hungry. We were well organized collectively to prevent this from happening. Helping one another was recognized not so much as “doing good” as expressing our solidarity with those who were in need. Funerals and weddings were catered by the women in our church, which brought the cost of the massive gatherings down to only dollars per person. Whenever there was a need, someone stepped up and helped out the best they could. Creating intentional ways to support one another and to show that we cared for the other was critical to the health of our community. It was more than the right thing to do; it was just what you did. We had experienced so much hardship as a people that we decided, collectively, not to allow such hardship again.

Fear also led us to reach out to others beyond our community. Many Mennonites from Ukraine had been helped by Mennonite Central Committee, an organization formed in the 1920s to address turmoil and famine after the Russian Revolution. This organization grew to help many Mennonites to move from Russia to Canada, Paraguay, and the United States. MCC had helped most, if not all, of the members of our church.

Our congregation donated money to MCC’s work overseas through such fundraising events as the annual Mennonite Relief Sale, for which we made massive kettles of borscht and fresh-baked goods (my mother’s buns always sold out before the official start of the sale). Women in the church spent the entire winter quilting and making care packages, and families got together to make soap.

The collective nature of giving back was an important part of our healing process as a people. I often think of the alternatives. One might have been to do nothing. We were all poor and tired and in need of healing, so our attitude could have been to let someone else do the good work. Another might have been to lash out or get revenge or justice for what had happened to us, investing resources to get even and feel vindicated. A third alternative might have been to invest in memorializing our plight and making heroes of the victims.

We chose instead to invest in helping those who were still suffering, whether they be our own people or others who were refugees from famine and war. Our conviction came not just from our biblical understanding of service but also from our own need to make sense of the atrocities that had been committed against us. We chose to interpret this as an awakening and a calling to help those who were now suffering the fate we once endured. I believe that this was a form of collective healing.

What Are We Afraid Of?

What is the fear that resides in many of us today? What can we learn from those who have been afraid and acted as communities in terrible ways? What can we learn from those who acted differently, who overcame fear and hatred to live peacefully? Can we learn to work together, to bind ourselves together in communities that do good for one another?

As global climate change ravages the world as we know it, will we work together to help one another, or will we build walls to keep those most affected away? Will we wage war to obtain lands that are least affected? Will the desperate among us wage war against those we believe to be holding us down?

Will Africa—the continent that has contributed the least to the environmental crisis but is suffering the greatest effects—rise up against the West? What if those whose lands are drained dry by drought and whose cities are destroyed by increasingly powerful storms decide that protecting themselves means eliminating those who continue to pollute and consume vast amounts of the world’s resources?

What about terrorism? After 9/11, we were led to believe that anyone and everyone is suspect. Were those men who got into planes, hijacked them, and crashed them into buildings not ordinary people living next to ordinary people before they did this? I must admit, every time I flew during the following year, I found myself observing those who looked like the terrorists we saw on TV.

Fear can pull us apart, or it can bind us together. It can cause hatred and genocide, or reflection and altruism. Fear is a huge motivator for community. It can bring people together to destroy others or to make the world a better place. Both expressions of fear, both responses to fear, are community. We will need to choose. We have a choice. In these times we would be wise to stay together, take care of one another, and work together for a better world.

The Challenge

What I have shared is a story of being defined by community. Born a Born, I was a part of the Mennonite community and all it entailed. However, very few of us today have the experience of being defined primarily by our community. Indeed, I and many others who did grow up defined by our community are faced with a decision: Do we let our longing for community past freeze us in time (if that is even possible), or do we use that experience to develop and fuel a process of defining and choosing community?

The challenge we face today is how to define community when the complexity of life means it is no longer able to define us.

Sociologists from the late nineteenth century on have documented the fragmentation of our experience of community. As Max Weber points out, for example, the move from agrarian to urban society, the departure of so many people from the faith of previous generations, our ability to travel far from the place of birth and childhood, the speed of communications, displacement because of famine or war—all these have jammed our community signals. We may long for a time when community defined us, but we must face the reality that today it must be defined by us.

Why are so many of us finding it difficult to deepen our experience of community? What do we need to do? Where do we find the energy for the effort required to deepen our experience? The questions all of us face are many: Will we throw up our hands in the face of complexity and settle for shallow community? Or will we join hands together to choose, to create, deep community? Will we allow fear to foster antagonisms that drive us away from and against one another, or will we make the turn to transcend our fear, seeking and finding joy by helping those who fear?

Some have likened the rooted, predictable, consistent experience of community in the past, when society was less complex, to sitting down with family and friends at a table and partaking together in several courses of a good meal. They say that the contemporary experience of community, in contrast, is akin to eating at a smorgasbord: we don’t necessarily know the people we are eating with, and it is up to us, individually, to decide what we will eat and in what quantity.

My sense of community when I was growing up was very much like a predictable and sumptuous dinner eaten with those whom I loved and who loved me. But the times being what they are, I have had to let go of that experience, at least as something that can be attained to any significant degree.

While I will always be grateful for what I had, and will always draw on it, I believe that, today, we must make a virtue of the smorgasbord approach. Acknowledging the fragmentary nature of smorgasbord dining does not require us to make poor choices in what we eat. It is possible to choose wisely in such a venue—to fill our plates with plenty of vegetables and fruit: lots of fiber and not too much red meat. Similarly, in the process of deepening community, I may weight my experience of my faith community to the point of giving my time, resources, and presence to its efforts in its neighborhood and limit my love of baseball to attending games when the spirit moves me—not because I have season tickets.

And besides, what is to keep us from turning to the anonymous diners around us and asking them to join us? What is to keep us from turning them from strangers to neighbors? What is to keep us from surrounding them with love and, in doing so, finding deep joy together in these chaotic times?