Mennonites and Wilderness
ne Wiltness
Faith Mennonite’s sermon on 02
September was “Learning from the
Wilderness,” (Deut 4:1-2, 6-9; Mark 7:1-8; 14-15, 21). Dan
Leisen and Gerald Schlabach
spoke on their wilderness experience at the International Boundary Waters, a
popular national wilderness area that excludes all forms of modern convenience
that do not run on muscle power alone. I
took two observations away from this presentation – both men departed from my
traditional understanding of the Deuteronomy passage as pertaining to the
development of the interior life of the individual and of the
congregation. Instead, they focused on
the rules that allow you to enter the wilderness, such as “Leave no trace.”
Heidi
Wall Burns wrote her masters’ thesis at Iowa State on changing perspectives
of “wilderness” in United States’ literature – indicating and exploring shifts
between fear and terror to Romanticism and Exploitation to Preservation. Leisen and Schlabach would seem to be
representative of the latter.
Similarly to American culture, the
Mennonites have gone through many different periods of fear and romanticism
regarding wilderness. The 1860s and
1870s were decades of unrest in the frontier amongst the Cherokee, Sioux and
other Western tribes – the Custer incident occurred as late as 1876 – two years
after the initial immigration of Russian Mennonites to Nebraska and
Kansas. The Sioux Uprising of 1862
enabled Federal troops to evict the tribes from treaty lands in southwestern
Minnesota, further opening up space for Mennonite expansion into that area as
well.
