Canadian Mennonite
Volume 11, No. 18
September 17, 2007
Watching Dad pray
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Dad had keys to our church when I was a boy and occasionally we would go there to pray, just the two of us. He would leave the lights off and, in the sanctuary’s mystical darkness, I was awestruck. I was supposed to pray, but I seldom did. Instead, out of the corner of my eye I watched Dad pray.
He certainly had lots to pray about. I later learned that he disliked his stressful job as a life insurance salesman, but needed the pay cheque to support his five children. His string of heart attacks began when he was only 34. His reliance on prayer continued throughout his life, recently giving him strength to care for our mother during her three-year battle with cancer.
I thought of Dad’s prayer habit recently when I was at his bedside at Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie, Ont. A stroke in April had paralyzed his right side.
Even worse, he has global aphasia, a medical term which means he can’t understand oral or written language. Words of love from family and friends make no sense to him. And when he tries to express his thoughts and feelings, it sounds to us like unintelligible babble.
His speech pathologist says that, to Dad, it seems like everyone else uses a foreign language. But there is a wonderful exception to this bleak scenario. He can still pray. Shut off from regular communication with the world, he remains linked to the God who has long guided and strengthened him.
Here’s what it’s like at his bedside. Someone takes his small cross from his end table and puts it in his one hand that works. His face and eyes light up and he kisses the cross. Someone starts a familiar prayer—”Our Father, who art in heaven…”—and his lips make the appropriate movements as he follows along silently.
A medical expert might have a logical reason why the victim of a massive stroke can still participate in spoken prayer even though he doesn’t understand language. But I consider it grace.
I also feel that, inside his stroke-struck body, Dad may still have an interior prayer life. Medical texts report that some people who have recovered from aphasia have said that, during the time when they couldn’t communicate, their minds worked fine and they created mental puzzles to break the boredom. Knowing Dad, he’s praying as fervently as he is able.
I’m grateful to God for leaving Dad the solace of prayer. And I’m also grateful to God for giving me a father who prays, a life-long model of a man trying in all circumstances to stay aligned with God.
After leaving the stroke ward to return home, my wife and I went camping for a weekend with our three sons. We were far from our home church on Sunday morning, so the five of us held a makeshift service around a campfire. While praying, I looked up and saw my 11-year-old son. He was supposed to be praying, but he wasn’t. Out of the corner of his eye, he was watching me pray.
Moral authority and divine diplomacy
After more than 20 years, Kreiders bid UBC farewell
Vancouver
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On a June afternoon Evan Kreider, wearing one of his classic bow ties—which he sews himself—walked from his associate dean of arts office at University of British Columbia (UBC) to the campus library, where he took his wife Janice’s hand and they stepped into retirement.
Janice worked at the UBC library for almost 25 years, initially as a science bibliographer and then as assistant university librarian. In 1975, Evan came to UBC’s School of Music to teach medieval and renaissance music history; he became associate director at the School of Music and, in 2000, was invited to become associate dean of arts, helping to oversee four schools, 16 departments and two museums.
For the Kreiders—graduates of Goshen College, with roots in Swiss Mennonite communities in Ohio and Indiana—the move from New York State to Vancouver required some adjustments. Janice was pregnant, they were in a new country, had few acquaintances, and were unfamiliar with Russian-descended Mennonites.
“It was a different Mennonite culture here,” says Evan of Canada’s west coast.
“And not just the food,” adds Janice.
The Kreiders were used to a stronger emphasis on the peace position and a simple lifestyle. “We were surprised at the level of political involvement among Mennonites here,” says Evan.
Evan and Janice are founding members of the Menno Simons Centre (a student residence) and the Point Grey Inter-Mennonite church that meets there. “The centre and the church has a lasting impact on young lives,” says Janice. “There’s great value in living together in a Christian community.”
Evan and Janice are central in the life of the congregation, where she is church treasurer and Evan is the church’s unofficial, unacknowledged and unpaid pastor. He leads services, organizes liturgies, and performs marriage ceremonies, child dedications and funerals. Both take their turn as Sunday speakers in this small church that has no paid staff. At Evan’s suggestion 20 years ago, the church’s discussion time following each sermon provides time for interaction and reflection, much like a seminar.
The integration of faith into a secular work situation was never a problem for Evan or Janice.
“The church was the main patron of music before 1600, so much of the music dealt with Scripture and I’d get to talk about it,” Evan says of the classes he taught, where he noted an increasing biblical illiteracy among students. “I’d be surprised if 10 percent of the students know any Bible stories.”
Of his time in administration, especially in the dean’s office, Evan says: “I viewed this as a calling, as an extension of church work. Much of what I did with students and faculty was relational. The most important thing is to listen…. I tried not to offer solutions before people were ready to hear them and tried to make the university’s complex impersonal system work humanely. I try to avoid confrontation.”
At a recent retirement event for Evan, UBC’s dean of arts described Evan as “a person of sage wisdom, enlightened judgment, sharp wit, divine diplomacy, literary elegance and unparalleled standards.” He was known throughout the faculty for his “wisdom, moral authority and delightful sense of humour.”
Evan and Janice were known throughout the campus as wise, calm people who were gracious to all; exemplary colleagues; and inspiring models of ethical leadership. Judy Barry, Evan’s administrative assistant, says, “Evan brought to all of us a sense of his strong religious belief. I learned from Evan that death is a part of life.”
Evan is modest about his impact on students. “A number of students have said I’ve changed their lives. I’m not sure how,” he says.
In retirement Janice will have more time for gardening and volunteer work, while Evan will do some much needed healing—some of it on the golf course! He continues to sing in two auditioned choirs. And their church still needs them.
A powerful theme in their lives is that God is found in right relationships, not in dogma and doctrines. A colleague says of Evan, and it’s equally applicable to Janice: “He seems unobtrusive until you notice that he is the calm at the center of the storm. There’s no need to say more, it wouldn’t be the Mennonite way.”