Free Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) by Rhoda Janzen

vikjeada ? Would she cease telling me her stories and dismiss me as worldly? For many Mennonites of her generation, getting a Ph.D. was practically sinning against God. But now she had asked point-blank, and I had to 'fess up to the book-learnin'.
    I said soberly, "I'm a teacher, Marta. I teach in a college." She turned to face the Sea of Azov, and in the gathering twilight I thought I could see disappointment settling her lips into a frown. She looked out at the water without saying anything. Finally she turned to me, reached up, and patted my shoulder. "That's okay," she reassured me in German. "You're a good person anyway."

    Obviously my own parents did not share Marta's bias against higher education. Both my mother and my father have graduate degrees. But they prayerfully chose to study in areas that would not take them afield of their faith. Nursing seems quite consonant with Jesus's biblical ministry to heal the sick, and theology bases its entire raison d'être on the supposition that God exists and cares about what happens to his creation. My parents must have been concerned when I picked an academic field that invited, even demanded, philosophical questioning.
    Among my many rebellious behaviors is my refusal to ask God for stuff, especially before meals, especially out loud. Requests for divine intervention usually strike me as jejune and quixotic. Why should God grant one request when another supplicant is asking for the opposite? Why should one believer have the hubris to think her needs deserve special attention in the global schema? I do like the idea of prayer as a way to foreground one's blessings. It unselfs the self, as the theologian Eugene Peterson would say. It's when people start expecting divine intervention that I get nervous, because that's when they start hearing the voice of God telling them, for instance, to go kill a bunch of people in Iraq.
    But there was my father seated in front of me at a booth in Denny's, big hands folded, handsome head bowed. Not only did he pray as if God was listening; he prayed as if God might be standing right there, waiting with a salad, like the server. When you're with your parents, old habits die hard. In spite of my embarrassment that the server was trying to contain her amusement, and in spite of the fact that the cute guys who'd been checking me out were now clearly horrified, I bowed my head and shut my eyes. Fearless.

FOUR

    Wounding Words

    A unt Rhoda," said Allie, "do you want to come play Super Scrabble with us?"
    "You bet," I said.
    My sister and I had not yet had a moment to ourselves. We were very close, however, and it was easy to communicate in indirect glances and oblique smiles. We were each other's port-in-the-holiday-storm. I had been on the West Coast for several weeks now, and Hannah would demand a detailed account of what it was like to be plunged back into the Mennonite mainstream. She and I were both waiting for a time when we could grab a cocktail and debrief. Right before my parents and I had arrived, she and her husband, Phil, had been hosting Phil's sister Yvonne, and I was anxious to hear the news on that front.
    Hannah's husband was fabulous. Among Phil's many excellent qualities was the expression of zero interest in leaving his wife for a guy he had met on Gay.com. Yet he did have a fatal flaw. Phil's special bugaboo, his personal kryptonite, was his sister Yvonne. Specifically, he had a problem with Yvonne's hair. This criticism we understood to include an implied catalog of behaviors, incursions, and habits that offended him. He returned again and again to the fact that Yvonne's hair looked not unlike a glossy, nest-shaped wig, and that she, his own flesh and blood, ought to know better. He did have a bird's-eye view of the Nest, as he was fully six foot six, a vantage point from which the Nest would have been nigh impossible to ignore. It sat smartly on her head, like the tall black hats worn by beefeaters at Buckingham Palace.