Simplicity of the Mennonites, or Just the Martens?

One day in high school someone stole 15 dollars from my locker. Of course, I hadn’t attempted to make it difficult for a would-be thief – like all the rest of my lazy classmates, I had jammed my locker on the first day of school to avoid the hassle of dialing the combination between every class, but despite this I still thought it fine to hang my purse cavalierly next to my backpack while my locker door swung wide at whim. It wasn’t that I was stupid – I hope – I was simply naive. A 14-year-old at a private, Mennonite high school, I was shocked that such a thing had happened, or could happen at such a place. Since I had begun attending Bethany Christian Schools in sixth grade, the school, and my purebred Mennonite background, had engrained in me a deep trust in the surrounding community, and I had never before had cause to doubt the total security in which I lived.

Even this breach of that total security didn’t change my assumption of the general goodness of my community. I still left my locker open, and neither I, nor the classmates of mine who’d also been stolen from, pursued any sort of justice in this situation. It was simply a fact: somebody stole, but no one had a desire for vengeance of any sort, and no attempt to uncover the identity of the thief was ever made.

This is not to say that there was nothing that came of the event. When someone stole that negligible denomination from my locker, I suddenly developed an anxiety complex about wealth. Several classmates not so sympathetically pointed out that it had happened not just to me, but to three other students in my grade whose fathers, like mine, were all doctors, and therefore among the wealthiest of Bethany’s students. This implanted in me a deep feeling of shame and insecurity about, and, worst of all, awareness of wealth disparities amongst myself and my peers. Ignorance is bliss, and I had long been blissfully unaware of there being people in my community and even in my country to whom the adjectives “poor” and “rich” could be applied.

I had never before been given cause to think about the socioeconomic status of my family being any different from that of any of my classmates’ families, but after this jolt into awareness all I could think about was whether people perceived me as different, and if so, whether they resented me for it. I downplayed greatly my dad’s occupation and I became hypersensitive to any conversation in which matters of money are mentioned, even things as trivial as the price of a candy bar at the snack shop at school. I still haven’t been able to dull this aversion to matters of money, and while I’d love to chalk it up to that classic affliction of Mennonites – frugality – I know that’s not it.

In my Mennonite Literature class at Goshen College, we are keeping blogs on which to opine about the readings, lectures and/or activities from class. For one of my recent posts, I hopped up on my soapbox and bashed lightly (and, I hope fairly politely) on a former GC student whose essay on Mennonite Identity we had read in class. In it, the author of the essay, Ted Houser, wrote about his pride in belonging to a wealthy Mennonite community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and how he and his friends were all given cars for their 16^th birthdays and how they partied at their parents’ vacation homes.

Here I was confronted with someone who took pride in the thing I’d been long trying to shake – the affect of wealth – and it irked me. How could someone who calls himself a Mennonite be so proud of a lifestyle that seemed, to me, so overtly privileged? Because, despite my father’s occupation, my parents strived to live simply. The simple living value was instilled in me from an early age, and my assumption of it being something derived from our Mennonite faith and ethnicity rather than the whim and ethics of my parents was flipped on its head when I read Houser’s essay. There are Mennonites that have second homes, and cars for each child and don’t buy their clothes from Goodwill? What a disappointing discovery.

Growing up, I filled my bedroom with knick-knacks, candy, hair products and other random odds and ends that I had found in the basement of my dad’s parents’ miniscule house. It was a magical basement to me, crammed full of so many things to discover -- all of the unneeded things my grandpa had rescued from dumpsters around town, unused, and collecting dust, but unable to be thrown away. This seemed normal to me when I was younger – my 10-year-old self never suspected that dumpster diving wasn’t what all grandfathers did, or that it might be odd to have a house so tiny but so packed to the brim with totally unnecessary items that probably hadn’t been touched in a decade or two except to have more things piled on top of them.

After I developed the awareness that puberty often brings, I began eavesdropping on my parents’ conversations on the way home from a visit to the grandparents – “John, there is just so much stuff in that basement. What’ll we do with all of it when they have to move out?” and my dad’s response,

“Yea, that’s gonna be a hassle. But you know how it was for him – this is a compulsion. He’s a packrat.”

And that’s why the word “packrat” came to be part of my lexicon. As I was slowly exposed to more and more of my parents’, and grandparents’ history, and the stories of their parents, I started to understand the reason my grandfather was such a hoarder of things, incapable of throwing anything out.

My grandfather’s parents were among those Mennonites who had taken advantage of the beneficence of Catherine the Great and become farmers in Russia. As the Mennonites started to prosper there, their presence began to be resented, and they were forced to emigrate from Russia, and in this emigration faced great hardship. My ancestors – my grandfather’s parents and their children in the second wave of migrants – ended up in Canada, quite poor, and suffering from the memory of recently being near starvation. Forced to abandon most belongings during their exodus, it was difficult to regain their footing, and they remained impoverished for a long while in Canada.

So it is this memory of starvation and of always having less than he needed that has made my grandpa unable to resist his compulsion to collect things, and always fix rather than replace. And my father, growing up in his influence, has retained some of this, and some more. Despite the years my dad spent getting an education to become a surgeon, he’s started to feel the call of the land – a tellingly cyclical return to the occupation of his ancestors. Nearly every waking hour not spent at the hospital is spent trudging around on his “farm,” taking care of the cattle that have usurped the position of his real children, watering his huge garden, guarding his chickens from coyotes and coons.

This dying profession has captured his interest, the allure of the wealthy life of a surgeon completely gone, replaced with the allure of the simple life. It is this simplicity that I’ve come to most closely identify with my Mennonite ethnicity. And perhaps I only find it to be such a Mennonite value because it is what I grew up with – like the way little kids whose fathers have beards believe that all fathers have beards, that anyone with a beard is a father and a clean-shaven man couldn’t possibly be a dad – I assumed for a long, long time, and even still cling to the idea, that all Mennonites are simple people at heart, have the “plain people” –ness deep in them somewhere, defining them somehow.