Ghosts of Identity

courtesy callmetaphy.blogspot.com

Faith, Place and Cultural Memory

En Jeista

The Jewish Cemetery at Penang

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,

That pave with level flags their burial place,

Seem like the tablets of the law, thrown down,

And broken by Moses at the mountain’s base.

    “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” – Longfellow

In a patch of flattened weeds in front of the graves

where a Kohane’s stone-carved fingers part to bless

the remains of Penang’s departed congregation,

barefoot Malaysian boys were playing badminton,

a sagging string strung pole to pole their net.

Our Chinese trishaw driver, too old to read

the map without his glasses, with five hairs long

as my five gingers growing from a mole,

waited for us.  He’d found the street although

the tourist map was wrong:  the name no longer

Yahudi Road, but Zaimal Abidin.

Maintaining the Lineage of our Faith

ne Frädhoff (en kjoakjhoff)

Cmetarz mennonitow (Mennonite Cemetery in Poland) (c) A. T. Przechlewski

    Often it is only historians and new mourners who worry about the upkeep of our ethnic heritage sites such as graveyards and cemeteries.  Perhaps the time has come to consider the need for a national (international?) Mennonite foundation to begin looking after this aspect of our shared and endangered diasporaic heritage.  For an ethnicity of historic religious and political refugees, these remnants of our periodic stops along the Martyrs’ Trek, are essential historic markers preserving the dignity and truth of our group narrative and missionary outreach.  While many have traveled to view the graves of our ancestors in Amsterdam, Danzig, Poland and Ukraine, future generations will likewise look towards graveyards in Litchfield, Henderson, Coaldale, Steinbach, Yarrow and Chinook for traces of their (our) family stories – and signs of the historic faith that led our faith predecessors to migrate and to establish new homes.

    Recently (25 April 2012), Jennifer Stultz alerted us via the Peabody Gazette of the challenges of maintaining this shared heritage.  She quotes Catlin Cemetery upkeeper Don Stutzman, “We’re having trouble maintaining the cemetery and could use some help. … There is a lot of history to learn here yet and we are searching for a way to sustain the upkeep,” (Stultz, see below).

Forgetting the Dead

en Denkjemol

    As Mennonites, we seem to have a complicated relationship to the dead.  Officially, we, as Brüderthaler, seem to have a belief against honoring the dead.    Interestingly, my grandmother reiterated this when I questioned whether or not she wanted to view Grandfather’s grave in the country churchyard.  “No,” she replied, “he is not there – that does nothing to remind me of him.”

    This is despite the fact that she often joins her non-Mennonite family in recognizing their duty to decorate and clean the graves of her non-Mennonite family located in the city cemetery an hour away. 

    Half-Swedish, I also belong to a Scandinavian culture that has often historically blurred the lines separating the living from the dead -- the paradoxical personal resolution of the opposing cultural beliefs that I have had no problem resolving in favor of the Swedes. 

    The theory behind the Brüderthaler tradition is that in the graveyard, we have merely buried a husk and that the essence of the person is now in Heaven with the Heavenly Father.  If we want to speak to them or miss them, the appropriate response is to not waste one’s time in an empty graveyard, but instead to live a Holy life so that we too might join them in paradise.  The bodies are of no account, merely resting in storage, carefully arranged so that they will raise facing Jerusalem (east) when they are called for at the end times Resurrection.