Category: Features

The witness of Margaret O’Gara — two reflections

Margaret O’Gara

We are grateful to the authors for permission to share two reflections on the life of our departed friend and colleague, Margaret O’Gara.

“Fully Human, Spiritual, Religious, Christian” is a reflection that Margaret’s husband (or “spousal colleague”) Michael Vertin shared at both her Toronto, Ontario and Collegeville, Minnesota funeral masses in August.

“The Ecumenical Mountatin” is the homily that Fr. Rene McGraw O.S.B. shared at the Collegeville, Minnesota funeral mass.

Our earlier announcement of Margaret’s death may be found here. 

“Deeper spirituality” by Andre Gingerich Stoner

The following article appeared in the August 20 issue of Mennonite World Review

In the mid-1980s, Dawn Ruth Nelson was part of a group of young mission workers trying to live out the Mennonite values of community, discipleship and nonviolence amid “the troubles” of Northern Ireland. When the communal living experiment ended explosively a few years later, she came to the painful awareness that her spiritual resources were not enough to sustain the ideals she was trying to practice. This led to a “desperate need for a more meaningful prayer life, a deeper spirituality, a closer connection to God” and her first silent retreat at a Catholic monastery.

When she returned to the U.S. she also began to explore the spiritual practices that had sustained Mennonites of earlier generations. Continue reading ““Deeper spirituality” by Andre Gingerich Stoner” →

Catholic youth conflicted about war, reports US Catholic magazine

Conflicted generation: Millennials and the war on terror
by Ruth Graham
US Catholic, August 21, 2012

Caleb is a 22-year-old Navy veteran who headed to boot camp as soon as he graduated from high school and quickly found himself in Iraq, where he spent most of his time patrolling rivers. He’s also a devout Catholic; he and his wife attend Mass every week and serve as lectors at their parish. Caleb is a confident, experienced man, but when asked to speak about both of these things at once—his support for the war and his faith—he wavers.  Read more.

 

The Mennonite features Mennonite Catholic visionary Gene Herr

Holy restlessness leads to home in Christ:
Gene Herr became a spiritual father to many people in his lifetime.

by Laurie Oswald Robinson

Cover story, The Mennonite, June 2012

 
June 2012 cover of The MennoniteA few days before he died on Jan. 1 in Hesston, Kan., the late H. Eugene (Gene) Herr said to his daughter, Ellen Awe, “I don’t understand why I am not going anywhere.”

The comment didn’t surprise Awe. Her father, a leader and visionary in the Mennonite church, had always lived with a holy restlessness. It was born from his passion to follow God’s call, even when to do so required leaving safe and familiar lands for  daring and new territories.

To his family and friends, he seemed he was moving as a pilgrim on his way to the promised land. They saw his movement as not born of one who was lost and trying to find his way “home” alone. They believed it as born out of passion for being truly found in Christ. He desired to give himself so fully to Jesus that no mile of God’s intended journey for him would be left untraveled.

But on this day, it was time for him to rest a bit before traversing the final leg of his earthly trek.

Awe replied to her father, “It’s because you    really can’t go anywhere right now, Dad. It’s OK for you to just be here and to let us love you. …”

“He accepted this and put his trust in us and graciously let us make decisions for him,” she says. “The concept of his ‘terminal’ illness included both moving and resting. … He was terminal but not as in an end. He was in a terminal, the place where one waits for the next leg of one’s travels.”

As he battled brain cancer for two years, it seemed God was calling Herr in his final days to integrate his doing with being. The integration was a model of the Christian discipleship Gene and Mary, his wife of 56 years, shared with fellow believers in the Mennonite church and beyond. Continue reading “The Mennonite features Mennonite Catholic visionary Gene Herr” →

“Spirituality versus Religion: Or maybe it’s not new….” commentary by Jana Bennett

Current debates over “traditional religion” sometimes track partially with ecumenical dialogue between Mennonites and Catholics.  The following blog by University of Dayton theology professor Jana Bennett may therefore be of interest to Bridgefolk.  

I’ve been reading a lot lately around the blogosphere from people who find themselves at odds with “traditional Christianity,” by which seems to be meant “the version of Christianity I grew up with.”  One of the most interesting is here at Rachel Held Evans’ blog: Kim Van Brunt describes leaving traditional worship services, in part because she felt the traditions themselves – the bulletins and Wednesday night prayer services and so on – were stilting her family’s ability to hear and live the gospel.  Many of the commenters complained that she seemed to be advocating a church of one, an individual’s paradisaical version of Christ’s body – so before readers here jump to that conclusion, let me just say that in her own response to the comments, she now belongs to what would probably be called a “house church” – an informal gathering of people meeting to support and witness to each other.

There are others feeling compressed by “tradition”.  One of the big ones, of course, is the viral video “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus” which was followed up with numerous posts about being spiritual but not religious.  In another vein, there have been Catholics thinking through the contraception debates in relation to feeling like the “hierarchy”.  In still another vein, members of the “emergent church” who feel that “traditional” forms of Christianity are increasingly irrelevant.   Continue reading ““Spirituality versus Religion: Or maybe it’s not new….” commentary by Jana Bennett” →

Naming the pain: a Lenten reflection on transforming the wounds of war

Carolyn Holderread Heggen

chapel address
Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary
February 28, 2012

 

Carolyn Holderread Heggen
Carolyn Holderread Heggen

PeaceSigns, a publication of the Peace and Justice Support Network of Mennonite Church USA, recently published the following chapel address by Carolyn Holderread Heggen, psychotherapist specializing in individual and communal trauma healing.  The article caught our eye because Holderread Heggen dedicated her address to Fr. William Mahedy, a former military chaplain who experienced a “profound crisis of conscience and dedicated the rest of his life as a social worker in San Diego, starting Veterans Centers and writing profound pieces about the spiritual woundedness of Veterans.”  Her talk does more than illustrate a profound “exchange of gifts” between Mennonites and Catholics seeking peace and reconciliation in the world.  As we enter more deeply into the Paschal mystery during Holy Week, it also serves as an appropriate Lenten reflection.  


Years ago a Vietnam Christian Vet came into my therapy office, carrying a Bible, and he said, “If you want to know what it feels like to be me, read these verses.” He started pointing to some of these verses Michele read this morning (Psalm 38). I don’t know specifically what precipitated the Psalmists despair that caused him to write these verses, but I do know that I have been told by numerous Vets that it’s a good description of what they feel like. Thousands of years after those words were written psychiatrists and psychologists came up with an official diagnosis, and a new name for an old malady, a malady as old as war itself. And in 1980 the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD as we commonly call it, was coined and since then has become part of our medical and lay vocabulary.

Throughout history, different names have been used to describe the effects of the emotional and spiritual pain people who have been asked to kill experience. Continue reading “Naming the pain: a Lenten reflection on transforming the wounds of war” →

Margaret Pfeil and Gerald Schlabach suggest fresh Lenten practices in America magazine

Two Bridgefolk board members, Margaret Pfeil and Gerald Schlabach, are among four writers who suggest positive practices to “take up” for Lent in order to move beyond typical practices of “giving up.”   Schlabach suggests ways to “Love the Enemy in Your Pew” by inviting fellow Catholics with whom one most disagrees to share their back story face to face.  Pfeil invites readers to “Feed the Hungry with Local Food.”  In her article she recounts how the Catholic Worker community in South Bend, Indiana, has created a grocery co-op in  its mostly African-American community and made baked goods from nearby Amish communities a popular item.

The article is in the February 20 issue of the Jesuit magazine America and is available online to subscribers at http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13259.

Larry Miller reflects on 22 years at the helm of Mennonite World Conference

Mennonite World Conference
news release

by Phyllis Pellman Good

“As long as the wind is in its sails. . .”

Larry Miller remembers one moment clearly when, as a 38-year-old, he was weighing whether or not to accept the nomination to lead Mennonite World Conference. The year was 1988, 23 years ago, and he was sitting in a university library in Strasbourg, France, where he lived.

“I was working on my dissertation, and I looked up and noticed a book by one of my professors on a shelf. I pulled it down. It was dusty, and no one had ever checked it out. I suddenly realized that I was poised to write those kinds of books!”

Miller speaks at the 2009 Executive Committee meetings in Paraguay. To his left are Danisa Ndlovu, incoming MWC president that year, and Nancy Heisey, who was completing her term as president. Photo: Merle Good

Miller was finishing his doctorate in New Testament and was under consideration for a graduate-level teaching position in that field in the Protestant faculty at the University of Strasbourg. But something unexpected had come his way. The European Mennonite churches had together nominated him to be Executive Secretary of Mennonite World Conference. Continue reading “Larry Miller reflects on 22 years at the helm of Mennonite World Conference” →

Advent issue of The Mennonite features cover story on Mary

For Advent this year, the cover story for the December issue of The Mennonite asks how Mennonites should think of Mary as “model and mother.”  A related article reflects on Mary’s Magnificat, and two poems portray the role of Joseph and Elizabeth in the drama of Jesus’ birth.  Another article, by Bridgefolk board member Darrin Snyder Belousek, recounts his story of returning to faith through friendship with Roman Catholics.   The Mennonite is the official denominational magazine of Mennonite Church USA.

Click here to access the December issue of The Mennonite.