Text: Luke 7:18-35
Speaker: Amanda Gross
In 1989, I was the first Mennonite to graduate from Kindergarten at Anne E West Elementary. This marked both the first of my 13 years of studies in the Atlanta Public School System and also the start of my defining Mennonite for non-Anabaptist audiences. When my brother was old enough for school, I was no longer the only kid educating my classmates and teachers about Mennonite identity.
Later in high school, a third Mennonite enrolled just in time for the fear and patriotic fervor that followed the 9/11 attacks. Out of 900 students, three Mennonites felt like critical mass. Or at least emboldened me enough to pen an op-ed for the school paper explaining my faith-based conviction for nonviolence, the only voice in the school paper against U.S. military retaliation.
Over those years, shaped by—not one, but two—Atlanta-area Mennonite church communities and by my Swiss German Mennonite family at home, I got plenty of practice providing context for my confused and often curious classmates and friends:
What’s a Mennonite? They would ask. I would respond from a drop-down list of options depending on my mood, the weather, and whether or not I thought they’d been to Pennsylvania. We’re like the Amish but with fewer horses and buggies. Or. We don’t believe in baptizing babies. Or. We’re pacifists, who don’t fight in wars and died for our beliefs. Or: We’re Christians from the Anabaptist movement in Europe that wanted to get back to Jesus’s Way.
Yet, as I got older, I began to learn some of the contradictions behind my educational talking points. For example, despite the emphasis on adult choice, in my home congregation young teens got baptized in clusters because it was the thing to do. Despite the ethic of nonviolence, there are Mennonite churches who have members in the military, in fact some of my extended family members have government or contracted jobs working on militarized technology. Despite that anti-Mega church stance, many Mennonite congregations today are theologically indistinct from other Christian denominations, and some are proponents of Christian nationalism.
In graduate school, I learned about the concepts of Chosen Trauma and Chosen Glory. Both of which have helped me more deeply investigate these contradictions. They’ve helped me begin to examine some of the dominant narratives of collective trauma, identity, and belonging within Mennonite and Anabaptist communities and to ask: how can we interrogate the stories we’ve been taught about who we are and to what and whom we belong?
A Chosen Trauma is a story a group repeats over and over about how they’ve been harmed. Chosen Traumas can prevent victimized groups from moving forward in healthy ways so that they develop a fixed identity narrative that reinforces “a sense of entitlement about what they are owed” and that “justify acts of aggression against others” as a way of reclaiming what was lost. On the other hand, a Chosen Glory is marked by “events in a group’s story that are a source of pride for a group, often but not always won at the expense of another group.” As the Little Book of Trauma Healing puts it, “A chosen trauma and chosen glory may be the same event(s).”
I’m thinking about how at the age of 4 I was invited to the front of the church sanctuary for children’s time to be read tales of my ancestor’s righteous suffering from the Martyr’s Mirror. Anabaptist historic persecution is often upheld in European Mennonite communities as a cornerstone of collective identity, a Chosen Trauma per say.
The problem with a Chosen Trauma/Chosen Glory is not in the remembering or honoring of our traumas—of the very real pain and suffering that has been generationally endured; the problem is how our chosen traumas/chosen glories become a monolithic narrative around which our identities revolve.
This overidentification with a chosen trauma/chosen glory can prevent us from learning the full scope of our histories. Which in this case, includes the history of European Mennonite assimilation into whiteness, role as settlers on Indigenous land, and contributions to US imperialism, capitalism, and even militarism. Moreover, this overidentification with heroic victimhood can prevent processing and healing and it can prevent working to repair the harm we’ve helped cause.
I may have learned about the violence done to my ancestors at the age of 4, but I wasn’t taught about the violence they’d participated in, specifically against the Lenape and Susquehannock peoples through the colonial settlement of Pennsylvania. Like many settlers, in the case of European Mennonite migration, we contributed to violence toward Indigenous peoples through the acquisition, displacement, and colonized cultivation of Indigenous land—land that we still occupy. Yes, we were suffering, dying, and landless (an added impotence to an agrarian people), but that doesn’t justify, excuse, or erase the role that we have played (and maintained) in creating structurally violent systems in what is now the US and Canada.
In the telling and retelling of such chosen traumas/chosen glories Mennonites become generational martyrs. In this dominant narrative, European Mennonites occupy the role of victim, which obscures responsibility for our impacts. Harmed and righteous, in a martyr narrative this suffering supposedly brings us closer to God.
What, then, is the psychological impact of this victim mindset? 500 years after the emergence of Anabaptism, how do chosen traumas keep us stuck? And in this moment of intense political upheaval how does it stifle our power to collectively respond?
In the passage from Luke, we hear a question. It’s written not once, but twice: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”
John the Baptist and his people want to know: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” I’m guessing they wanted some assuredness, a little certainty with all their troubles. Perhaps they wanted to know if their past sacrifices would pay off, if the risks they’d taken were worth it, if their suffering would have meaning after all. Please, they asked Jesus, confirm or deny.
Then Jesus responds by talking about healing and children and dancing and funeral songs.
Jesus’s response has me questioning my own need to make meaning out of the difficulties in my life. His words have me wondering if maybe meaning making is a form of entitlement. Or to be more specific, maybe the confirmation of purpose, the assuredness that sacrifice will pay off, the idea that suffering is righteous, the expectation of a return on the investment of risk are the illusive privileges of this worldly arrangement we find ourselves in, what bell hooks aptly calls “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Or as Otis Madison said, “The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people, not Black people. For Black folks, guns and tanks are sufficient.”
“The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people…” There is comfort in knowing a way, in believing there is a right way, a safer way. There is existential relief in believing that a system works well enough, or at least well enough for me. There is the privilege of a soothed nervous system in trusting that a society built on stolen land, stolen people, and stolen labor has internalized enough checks and balances to persist. (And what is it exactly then that we are hoping persists?)
In his piece “How Fascism Came” Chris Hedges writes:
“…Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.”
Or to rephrase, for those of us who identify as Democrats—or Mennonites, for that matter—we are as guilty as them.
Despite the influence of European Anabaptist history on my childhood, the Mennonite spaces I grew up in weren’t actually that white. My home congregation was founded as an intentionally interracial fellowship. By the time my family attended, several families were multiracial and multicultural with roots in Mexico, Ethiopia, India, and the Congo. In fact, the third Mennonite student who joined my brother and I at school came from a Puerto Rican family.
The Mennonite Church today—our contemporary Anabaptist communities—are a reflection of both the martyred suffering of 16th century Europeans and a reflection of European colonization, imperialism, missions, and engagements in the civil rights and apartheid movements. Our diversity, as well as our power dynamics, are likewise a reflection of European Mennonites’ access to state power.
So how do chosen trauma/chosen glories erase the identities, cultures, and contributions of non-European and non-cradle Mennonites?
One of my graduate professors at EMU named, “Mennonites have a host/guest culture.” I take her words to mean that Mennonites of European descent have a culture of hosting others as guests. We welcome the stranger, we lay out the table, we offer tea and cookies. There’s an “us” as the hosts and a “them” as the not us. But do we let ourselves be influenced by the stranger? Do we let ourselves be changed? When do they cease being stranger, neighbor, and guest? When do they become us? When do we belong to them?
In a moment when “No matter, where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor” centers the host’s welcome, there is the danger of reifying the power of the welcomer to extend welcome, shared identity, and belonging. What then is the discomfort that might shake us up enough to move toward the solidarity of deeper belonging?
I’m curious if there are any fiber artists in the room? Any knitters? Anyone crochets or quilts or sews?
I’m a hand weaver and in weaving, in any of these forms of fiber craft, tension is very important. Too much tension and the warp strings will snap; not enough and the cloth loses its integrity.
There is tension in moving toward collective identity and the solidarity of belonging, especially for those of us who have been racialized as white and are trying to unlearn, undo, and reject the ways whiteness has offered a shared identity and belonging based on perceived superiority. Because of the ways whiteness is both normalized and rendered invisible, it can be hard—at least for white folks—to realize the ways it’s become deeply embedded in our psyches and bones.
“The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people…” and so we desperately need alternative identities and ways to belong. The communalism that is within Anabaptist theology and historical European Mennonite communities have threads of collectivist wisdom—and are relatively rare ones within the individualism of white identity. But communalism, like other chosen traumas/glories is also not a pure thru line. Retrieving that wisdom necessitates going back into the pain of authoritarian bishops and conformity as trauma response. It requires untangling the messy knots of shunning, host/guest culture, and chosen traumas/chosen glories.
How can we complexify our histories, identities, and the sense of what, whom, and how we belong? It is messy and painful work. It is also work that we get to do together. Perhaps we could even think of this going back through and coming back out anew as a re-birth; a re-baptism of sorts.
My mom just bought the new fancy pants Anabaptist Community Bible, which I borrowed in preparation for today. At the end of our Luke passage, there was commentary worked on by a community of Anabaptists that said: “We often face this temptation—wanting a Jesus who looks, acts, and speaks as we think he should instead of looking to Jesus and changing our options.”
The first time I skimmed it though, I read the commentary as: “We often face this temptation—wanting a Jesus who looks, acts, and speaks as we think he should instead of looking to the Jesus of changing our opinions.”
May we look together to the Jesus of changing our opinions. May we center the work of healing and children and dancing and funeral songs. May we loosen our grips on our chosen traumas so that we may more fully belong.
