Tongue Screws and Testimonies

I just watched Cruz Cordero‘s “Onward Martyrdom Rap,” and wish I had found this back when I was compiling TST. It’s one of many great resources available from MCC as part of their peacemaking curriculum and DVD for high school age youth, Thermostat.

I’ll just post a few excerpts here. Get the DVD to share with your favorite youth group! It’s available in English and Spanish.

What was Dirk thinking?

It was Christ on his mind.

What was Dirk drinking?

A special kind of wine,

instrumental for the mental,

giving sight to the blind,

a living light that shines bright

like the sunshine.

Cordero encourages his listeners to approach the stories of the Martyrs Mirror themselves:

Let us converse with the past

let us grasp

what we can learn from these excerpts.

Historical records are not

just for the experts

They’re there for those

who want to learn

without lectures.

He describes Margareta and Michael Sattler as “true disciples/ executed by self-righteous psychos.” When we hear in Cordero’s persistent rhythm that

Michael’s tongue

was sliced off

It wasn’t nice y’all.

the stories lose some of the patina of 350 years and feel fresh and urgent once more.

This week, I opened the Summer 2011 issue of Rhubarb to find essays by TST contributor Jessica Penner and our fellow Shenandoah Valley Inkslinger, Alisha Huber…and then turned to the back to find a splendid (long, attentive) review of TST by Dora Dueck. You should find a copy–or better, subscribe–and read it all, but two points bear repeating:

1) Dora picks up on the “vague anxiety” weaving its way through the book, starting with the intro material. Amen to that! I was in sustained, low-grade panic about the book’s reception for the last six months before TST saw publication. And for what? No one has burnt me at the stake. No one has even tried. From whence comes this anxiety–both in my work and other pieces in the collection? I don’t think I’ll attempt an answer today…maybe sometime when I feel wiser. Comments, anyone?

2) A discussion of what martyrdom means in the Russian Mennonite context. I’ll quote:

There was…no Martyrs Mirror in my Russläender Mennonite home, nor in any home I entered as a child. Within the 1920s Russläender tradition, the martyr period Mennonites share as a founding story has been thickly layered over by more recent experiences of suffering and loss. Martyrdom for us is set against liberation–be it rescue or escape–and our iconography concerns trains and train station platforms, where we also sang, first in farewell and then in thanksgiving. i note this as the context of my reading, but also to suggest that Mennonites who did not absorb Martyrs Mirror as children will gain from this anthology a better understanding of the unique burdens and gifts of their Swiss/German co-religionists.

Grateful for the thoughtful reading. If you haven’t seen Dora Dueck’s award-winning novel, This Hidden Thing, you may find it at CMU Press.

Tongue Screws is visiting churches this month–I did a short-notice Sunday morning sermon/reading at Paoli Mennonite Fellowship in southern Indiana while visiting my family, and on the 10th I’ll read with Community Mennonite Church contributors Anna Maria Johnson, Esther Stenson, and Jeremy Nafziger at CMC’s retreat.

I’m at the Mennonite convention in Pittsburgh this week and got to attend a session with Gerald and Carrie Mast about Teaching Peace with Martyrs Mirror. They make creative use of some material from TST, particularly Chad Gusler’s story.

Thanks to Mennonite Media, née Herald Press, for arranging a reading this morning, and to the contributors who were present this week to read or offer encouragement. I didn’t take any pictures today, but this photo is from my reading at Tusculum College in April. I wore the same dress, so all you need to do to get a sense of today is squint and imagine me surrounded by many Mennonites and some splendid writers.

Over at the new DreamSeeker, see this thoughtful reflection on TST, Mennonite history, and personal identity from the perspective of someone who married into the culture. Cynthia and I are cousins-in-law.

An excerpt:

I feared I might leave the reading feeling guilt ridden because I had not made sufficient sacrifices for my faith, but I left with a lilt in my step.

But was it the evening I had hoped for? Had I seen inside the fence? What was there? I saw struggle, discomfort, and uncertainty. Kirsten captured it in the book’s opening essay:

“The distance between me and the Martyrs is a comfortable one. I can imagine them from afar like classical heroes. . . . If I pursue them and they turn back to close the gap and grasp my hand, what will I do?” (Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror, Herald Press, 2010, p. 38).

What will I do?

As I sat in my cold car and started the engine to head home, I felt a little sorry that I didn’t have a big book of my own that was a pivotal point of my history. That feeling has surprised me. Was I lacking something? Or was my jealousy a reaction to their cultural pride?

Read more.

TST will be at the Mennonite Church USA convention in Pittsburgh. Any contributors who will also be there are invited to read. Friday, July 8, from 11:15 to 11:45–let me know if you can join us!

TST continues to generate discussion and gather audiences. Some recent events:

• An animated Sunday School discussion at Parkview Mennonite church here in Harrisonburg, Va. We enjoyed learning how folks encountered the Martyrs Mirror and hope to continue reflecting on what it means to be spiritual and/or genetic descendants of the martyrs.
• A May reading at CMU’s spring literary festival in Winnipeg. Joanne Epp reports that they had a very appreciative audience.
• An April reading at Tusculum College–I’ll post photos soon.

Over at her blog, borrowing bones, Dora Dueck shares some thoughts about the book.

It’s been, at times, a surreal experience, reading of burnings and drownings and the other torments of the martyrs, and all the while the house so quiet and the weather so cold these days, the snow still thick , the sun bright, yes, but shining with a serene beneficence rather than heat. How far it all seems from the noise of those long ago public spectacles, and the rising flames and the rising songs (except, of course, when the tongue screws prevented them), though I’ve been stirred just the same, as I often am by words, such a diversity of them, some pulling me close to the fire, to feel it, others pushing me away, to consider what to think of it all.

More here

Pastor Fred Redekop reviews the book over at Canadian Mennonite. Interesting comments on insiders and outsiders.

Tongue Screws and Testimonies, a book of essays, poems and artwork reflecting on the Martyrs Mirror, is written by insiders for insiders…For me, two of the most provocative essays are those by Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Stephanie Krehbiel. Kasdorf chronicles a story of personal abuse and the community’s reaction to it while Krehbiel writes about her coming to the martyr stories later in life. Both writers see themselves as on the edge of the Mennonite/Anabaptist world, but I experience their essays as very much from the inside.

More here

Martyr ‘sacred text’ inspires

(Feb. 28)

By Melanie Springer Mock

On my desk is Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror, edited by Kirsten Eve Beachy, published by Herald Press, 2010, 309 pages, $16.99.

The anthology, a veritable who’s who of contemporary Mennonite writers, provides a thoughtful, accessible reflection on and response to the Martyrs Mirror: a text that has bedazzled, haunted, informed and influenced Anabaptists since its 17th-century publication.

Although most readers of Tongue Screws and Testimonies will have some familiarity with Theileman J. van Braght’s Martyrs Mirror and its history, Beachy’s introduction provides an excellent primer to the mar­tyr­ology that has shaped Anabaptist thought. The martyrs, Beachy notes, are an important part of a Mennonite’s identity. The martyrs’ stories are “a testament to faith and steadfastness, to a profound spirit of dissent that counts the cost (tongue screws, thumbscrews, burning iron, drowning, the sword) as little.”

Beachy’s introduction also considers the significant role Martyrs Mirror has played in the Mennonite literary tradition and — along with the excellent foreword by Julia Spicher Kastorf — provides a convincing apologia for the anthology and its contemporary refraction of a foundational (and to some an inviolate) text.

Read More

Tortured Prose, Poetry Inspired by ‘Martyrs’

Jo-Ann Greene, Books Editor.  Feb. 3, 2010

Alongside the Bible, another religious book dwells in many Mennonite and Amish homes: the “Martyrs Mirror.”

Though first published in 1660 to document Anabaptists and others who died for their faith, it is still making an impression on readers, as is evident in the newly published “Tongue Screws and Testimonies.”

Here is a collection of poems, stories, essays and art harking back to the teachings, images and people of “the book,” while offering a personal, contemporary and thoughtful, but not always reverent, take on them.

Consider a short story titled “OMG!! Geleijn Cornelus Is Hott!!” It’s Chad Gusler’s account of a newly baptized 14-year-old girl’s irreverent response to her grandmother’s gift of a family-heirloom version of the celebrated tome.

More here.

In this moving article in The Mennonite, Lisa Schirch references our martyr history. Lisa is a peacemaker, director of the 3D Security Initiative and is, I’m proud to say, a colleague at EMU and a member of my church.

I come from a long tradition of self-identified pacifists dating back to the 1500s in Switzerland, where my ancestors scratched my last name into the town castle’s torture chambers. Perhaps they were tortured for something less noble than pacifism, such as public drunkenness. As for many other Mennonites, pacifism has been a point of family conflict. In the last few generations, my Mennonite-born uncles and grandfather served in the U.S. military.

But the legends of early Mennonites loving their enemies made a profound impact on my psyche and professional life. My faith draws on images from the Martyrs’ Mirror of Dirk Willems pulling the armed guard who was chasing him out of the frozen river, only to then be arrested and put to death for his beliefs. Or Janneken Munstdorp, who, shortly before being burned at the stake in 1573 for refusing to recant her belief in Anabaptist pacifism, wrote a letter to her children similar to the one I have written to my own children should anything happen to me while doing my work in peacebuilding.

Read the article