Community, Theology and Mennonite Poetics in Jeff Gundy's Work

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Community, Theology, and Mennonite Poetics

in the Work of Jeff Gundy

"Every telling of that story is a covenant with the past. . . All remembering is equally a forgetting. Which is a reminder that we Christians can take the risk of remembering, and forgetting, that task we currently call history, because we know that God rightly remembers all those who constitute the communion of the saints."- Stanley Hauerwas from "Whose Church? Which Future? Whither the Anabaptist Vision?"

Introduction--Confessions of an Eavesdropper

At the end of his comprehensive discussion of Mennonite poets in the United States, Jeff Gundy exhorts his fellow Mennonites to pay closer attention to their poetry writing sisters and brothers. "I believe we will benefit from listening to our poets," Gundy writes, "I doubt that they will save us, but I believe they can make us a little less lost" (39). Such listening is precisely what this essay attempts to do, to consider Gundy's poems in Inquiries and Flatlands as they speak in dialogue with his recent non-fiction work, A Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara. I will argue that this dialogue between Gundy's prose and poetry produces a distinctively Mennonite poetics of community and a compelling response to the literary and cultural landscapes of postmodernity.

Before taking on this task, however, let me quickly apologize, in the philosophical sense, for my position as listener. I am an eavesdropper. I stand outside Mennonite life and traditions, listening surreptitiously and, sometimes, wistfully to your talk of community, your ongoing theological tradition, and, in this particular case, to one of your poets. From my position as overhearer, I will likely get some or much of the poetry and its import wrong. Correct me then. I don't want to be like the tourists I heard about in Central Illinois' Amish country who were convinced, from a safe distance, that those folks in black hats and coats and simple dresses were really Orthodox Jews. "We didn't know you had 'em like that out here," they said.

An eavesdropper's stance should invite a large measure of humility, one of the literary and critical virtues Gundy embodies and extols in so much of his writing. At the very end of A Community of Memory, he writes about his own tenuous grasp on the truth, on the failures and risks of interpreting the world's text:

And yet what do I know. Every fall in the pollen season my wife's bodily defenses go to red-alert and flood her system with histamines and misery while I blunder mildly onward, breathing easily. I am reminded each time of how little my senses really deliver of what goes on. I am reminded to beware of claiming too much certainty of whatever kind; there's more going on than I can explain or understand. We may be surprised, overtaken, drowned, raptured--tomorrow or today. (154)

Barring such apocalyptic interruptions and yet hoping for surprises, I would like to read through three key concerns that emerge in Gundy's work: his rendering of community and history, his implicit and explicit theological questioning, and his resulting poetics.

Community--"The risk of remembering"

To those Christians (and non-Christians) who listen and watch from outside Mennonite circles, no ongoing reality appears more attractive (and, for some, more frightening) than Mennonites' understanding and practice of community. And as theoretical and political paradigms shift towards a broader cultural embrace of the idea of community, those traditions which have consciously embodied such practices become sources of envy and curiosity to other Christian traditions attempting to correct and redirect the individualistic excesses of our churches and culture. Neo-anabaptist theologies, analyses of discourse and interpretive communities, and communitarian movements abound. One well-known Methodist theologian and ethicist actually calls himself, "A high-church Mennonite" as a way of describing his attempt to suggest "an image of the sort of church I thought not only should exist, but must exist for faithful witness to the Gospel" (Hauerwas 66).

Similarly, literary and political theories gravitate more and more towards theories of activism and interpretation grounded in something(s) called communities. For some twenty years literary scholar Stanley Fish has been arguing that to interpret texts, and lives, we must conceive of persons "not as free agents, but as extensions of interpretive communities, communities whose warranting assumptions delimit what can be seen and therefore what can be described" (152). A range of communitarian political and environmental coalitions also ground themselves in a similar recognition of the necessity of social ties and limits; the most prominent of these groups, The Communitarian Network , articulates its vision and mission in terms of shoring up the nation's:

moral, social, and political environment. We are a nonsectarian, nonpartisan, international association. We believe that individual liberties depend upon the bolstering of the foundations of civil society: our families, schools, and neighborhoods. It is through these institutions that we acquire a sense of our personal and civic responsibilities, an appreciation of our rights and the rights of others, and a commitment to the welfare of the community and its members.

For all their insight and noble intentions, Hauerwas, Fish, and The Communitarian Network run the risk of forgetting that when speaking of communities we are not talking of abstractions, or institutions, or stances alone. We cannot simply invent a "high-church Mennonite" or an interpretive community. We inherit such worlds, sectarian, partisan and local, and we necessarily experience them in particular collections of people (others and ourselves) situated in particular places with distinct histories, stories, rituals, languages, and geographies that shape us and involve us in their shaping. For such remembering, we do not need theorists. We need storytellers and poets.

(The essay appeared in its full form in The Mennonite Quarterly Review and in Migrant Muses: Mennonite/s Writing in the U. S.)