A dream for our youth and nation

Earl and I both grew up in relatively liberal Mennonite homes. He came from an Amish Mennonite (Sugarcreek) Ohio community;  I from Adams County. We both graduated from Bluffton College, a small Mennonite liberal arts college in northwestern Ohio that emphasized service as the defining characteristic of an educated person. When he was drafted as a conscientious objector to war he chose to spend his two years in alternative service in post war Europe working with refugees. As a new bride I tagged along.

There was still a lot devastation from the war in 1959. Blocks of bombed out buildings stood next to restored and rebuilt areas and refugee camps had an almost permanent feel. As long as I could remember, family and church Christmas preparations included packing Christmas bundles for refugees, so it was wonderful to actually help distribute them as part of our job. We even got to give out several that had been packed in our home churches. 

We lived in Vienna for 9 months where we met music students, diplomats, military and international personnel. There Earl's job involved 'packing food and clothing parcels which went to families trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Weekends we joined a larger unit of young men who were rebuilding the historic Karlschule in Vienna. Several times we went to Salzburg to help “Lee and Joe” convert an old barn into a dormitory for the 25 handicapped biracial children they'd adopted. When we lived in Enkenbach, Germany, Earl helped build houses for Polish refugees and I, at the ripe old age of 23, served as house mother for up to 25 men. My biggest challenge was creating tasty meals from canned and dried foods and post war rations. We ended our term in Guibweiler, France where we helped in a children's home.

Fortunately, our work required a lot of travel. We made trips to the Yugoslavian and Czechoslovakian borders, to Salzburg, Linz, Heidleberg, Bern, Holland in tulip time, England, and the Holy Lands. Each trip introduced us to new people, exposed us to new ways of thinking, being, and doing. It also exposed us to the “Ugly American” syndrome. Americans abroad can be so rude, arrogant, and disrespectful of local accomodations, customs, and practices. Most Sundays we worshipped in little German Mennonite congregations, but we also attended non-demominational American Churches when possible.

Those two years changed our lives. We went full of ourselves. We came home hunbled. We went to help. We came home having been helped. We went thinking we knew a lot. We came home with more questions than answers. We went expecting to change the world. We returned, the world having changed us.

I wish our nation required every young person, male, female, rich, poor, educated or uneducated to do some form of national service that took them out of their comfort zone. We have become so polarized and fearful of others. Working to help others could transform our nation. Living in a different country certainly made us better, more open minded, and more tolerant individuals!

Joyce Shutt is pastor emeritus of the Fairfield Mennonite Church.

A great dad

I am one of the lucky ones. I had a great dad. More of an intellectual and naturalist than a businessman, Dad compiled lifetime journals of wild flowers and birds. He did historical research on the Mennonites in this area, publishing his findings. He was the spiritual patriarch of our church.

Seminary students, missionaries, new pastors and their families lived with us until they found more permanent lodgings. We had frequent guests. Following one of mother's fabulous meals, Dad and his friends talked theology and politics. Like a moth attracted to light, I' was mesmerized by the flow of big words.

Dad read to us at bedtime. We'd take our baths, put on our PJ's, then snuggle beside him while he read aloud. After we left home, he read novels to Mother as she crocheted. We didn't get a TV until I was in college, but my Granddad had one. Sundays we went there to watch the Ed Sullivan Show. Dad believed the arts were integral to a good education. He took us to museums, concerts, the Ice Follies. He bought art books and records. We kids sat in the front row at the Community Concerts so we'd be first in line to get our programs autographed. One of our favorite pastimes was dressing up and playing opera. 

Dad was absolutely distraught the time William Warfield came to Gettysburg and couldn't find a local restaurant or hotel where blacks could eat or sleep. Not a sportsman, Dad still cheered for Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers. When we adopted our bi-racial boys, Dad was our greatest supporter. He hated racism and sexism. We went on rambling vacations.

Spring included wild flower and birding hikes. He taught us to garden. He grew roses. After a particularly virulent invasion of bind weed, he dug up the entire garden and sifted out the tiny bits of roots rather than use herbicides. He insisted we learn the value of money. He planted a half acre of strawberries, raspberries and blackberries, then turned their care over to us girls. For years I thought red raspberries tasted like green worms. He enjoyed cooking, specializing in salads, pickles and relishes.

Few understood my midlife desire to go to seminary. Dad did. He helped me study. He babysat when needed. He critiqued my papers. When our denomination refused to ordain me because I was female he led the congregation in finding another path to ordination. At his memorial service, a friend of Dad's remarked, “Joyce, you were the son your father never had.”

I wish all kids benefited from a dad like mine. But, as long as our social policies work against good schools and poorer families are penalized for trying to get ahead many kids won't be so lucky. Why can we can give tax breaks and subsidies to the Super Wal-Marts and the 1% but can't design a system that rewards the poor for working, saving and improving their lives simply by gradually decreasing their benefits rather than cutting them off at artificial lows. Financial security certainly helped my dad give us a great childhood!

Joyce Shutt is pastor emeritus of the Fairfield Mennonite Church. You can follow her blog at FairfieldMennonite Church.org

I am a depression , WWII brat. I remember those hard times with some fondness. Thrift and doing without was just the way it was. Hobos rode the trains to Orrtanna and Mother fed whomever came. I talked with the men as they ate. They weren't scary, just broken and sad. Everything was rationed; gas, meat, flour, sugar, milk, shoes. “Oleo” came in plastic bags with a little color bubble in the middle. We wore hand-me-downs, bought war bonds, gathered milkweed silk to make parachutes, recycled metal including gum wrappers, rolled old sheets into bandages, grew victory gardens, canned and froze anything edible. My dad got Mother a freezer and when Earl and I married years later we used that freezer for another 43 years! Resources then were just too precious to make junk! Patriotism meant everyone did their part. If wars are worth fighting then they are worth asking citizens to support them with higher taxes and a new series of war bonds.

My grandfather owned the Orrtanna Canning Company, so as the boss's brats we raided the ice cream freezers in the cafeteria, played in empty trucks, took turns falling into the cherry tanks! German POW's worked at the plant, since most men were in the armed services. We discovered POW's were people just like us. For years we sent food and clothing packages to their families and other post war victims. In 1959 Earl and I went to Europe to participate in post war efforts. We distributed food and clothing, helped build houses for refugees.

Every summer the community women canned fruit and vegetables at the Orrtanna Methodist Church. Hundreds of jars for the county home and needy! We kids peeled peaches and tomatoes, snapped beans, husked corn. Orrtanna's annual Halloween party was amazing. One guy, stuffed in a burlap bag and and dumped in the corner won first prize as a sack of potatoes. Winters we shoveled snow, built snowmen, skated on the cold storage pond, sledded down the schoolhouse hill.

Summers we kids picked cherries. We rode to the orchards in an old model T school bus that wouldn't start without a good cussing. Afternoons we rode our bikes to El Vista Orchards for a refreshing swim in their pool. August's “dog days” included feared polio outbreaks. 

If you had a phone, you had a party line. When mother called anyone her first words were “Aunt Verna, hang up!” Orrtanna had a post office and a general store. King's Store carried food, sewing supplies, sheets and towels, shovels, seeds, car parts, and local gossip. Dried beef was really cheap. We ate lots of dried beef. 

Orrtanna's school had only 2 rooms: the little side and the big side. We bought our own pencils and paper and walked home for lunch. Once we mastered our grade level material, Miss Miller and Miss Walters assigned research projects, book reports, had us tutor kids who weren't as far along. The school had pot bellied stoves and a stinky outhouse. We used old catalogs for toilet paper. When the Orrtanna Canning Company burned to the ground we kids stood by the school windows and watched.

Adams County may be more conservative than I'd prefer but it was a great place to grow up in. It still is!

Joyce Shutt is pastor emeritus of the Fairfield Mennonite Church You can follow her blog at Fairfield MennoniteChurch.org.

Get over yourself

I went to a mindfulness retreat the other week. I do silence fairly well, though focusing on my breath for 40 minutes was a bit much. I loved the outdoor walks being mindful of the newly awakened signs of spring. At lunch we were to chew each bite at least 30 times before swallowing, savoring the flavor and texture of our food. Not easy since my sandwich was dry and tasteless.

I loved the mindful exercises. Moving slowly and deliberately touched something deep inside me. In the afternoon we were instructed to sit or lie quietly while our leader led us in guided imagery. I was restless and lay down with some very “mindful” resistance in my head. As my mind wandered off I suddenly heard this voice inside my head say “For goodness sake, Joyce, get over yourself!” Laughing quietly at myself I relaxed and fell asleep, that is until my friend poked me. “You're snoring!”

At the conclusion of the day we gathered in a large circle “to share.” I confessed I'd come more out of support for my friend than for myself. My excuse for lack of interest was that I've worked at this “mindfulness” thing for years. I really try to “be present to the moment” as much as possible rather than worrying about a future that hasn't arrived or stewing over a past I can't change. Consequently, being reminded that I take myself too seriously and needed “to get over myself” was pretty significant. That made the day really meaningful.

I may have resented chewing that dry sandwich 30 times per bite but today I eat more slowly and chew more deliberately. Which is good. And, I've done a lot of thinking about the experience and realize how important my own definition of mindfulness is to me. For me, Mindfulness is shaped by gratitude.

Gratitude. I am grateful I can feel the sun and rain, soft and strong breezes. I am grateful I can see and enjoy green grass and blooming flowers. I am grateful I am still able to breath, walk, eat, see, laugh, talk, read, and enjoy just being alive. I am grateful for friends. I am grateful that little things make my every day life beautiful and precious. In fact, I can't remember when I've had a really really bad day. Bad things happen like getting a flat tire, the pressure cooker blowing beets on the ceiling, the pipes freezing and the kitchen flooding and the ceiling coming down, a beloved family member dying. But even then the power kept working, folks helped out, the sun rose and set. In fact. painful experiences simply put the wonder of every day life in perspective. But I do ache for the Syrian refugees or others in desperate situations who aren't as fortunate as I.

Retreats are nice, but the real challenge comes in being mindfully grateful for my humdrum days. Being open in mind, body and spirit. Being willing to adapt, change, respond. Letting go of the need to be right, safe, secure, in control. Embracing new ideas and ways of being. Reaching out to the God within and the God without. Being gratefully and intentionally aware of just how blessed I truly am.

Joyce Shutt is pastor emeritus of the Fairfield Mennonite Church. You can follow her blog at www/FairfieldMennoniteChurch.org

Neither prejudice or fear

January 1967. While admiring the babies through the nursery window at Gettysburg Hospital I noticed a dusky brown infant whom gossip had was the product of local “white trash” and a migrant. When someone behind me said, “God love him, who'd want him” I heard myself say, “We would.” That baby was placed with us in foster care and two years later we formally adopted him, then adopted a second bi-racial child.

Our extended families were always supportive, though my husband's mother later confessed she'd had mixed feelings until watching a TV news clip of the Selma march and police brutality, she gasped, “that could be my grandson their hurting!”

Have things really changed? Almost weekly we hear of another unarmed black being gunned down by white police, of racial profiling. Blacks and Hispanics are incarcerated at a much higher rate than whites. Their sentences are longer. Why are we so afraid of each other? Why do we teach our children to hate based on skin color? Why are we so threatened by our religious or social differences? Aren't we all God's children? Our boys bleed red just like our girls. Their kisses are just as sweet. 

True, we've made progress since the 60's. For instance, inter-racial families are fairly common these days. In 1969 ours was the first inter-racial adoption in Adams County. We quickly discovered others depended on us to set the tone so they'd know how to react to us. That included some funny incidents. One day a drunk (white) staggered up to me in Gettysburg and snorted, “Got yourself a black one this time, didn't you?” I was still laughing when we got home!

While we taught our kids that skin color was just like eye or hair coloring, they still experienced the ugly face of prejudice. More than once our girls got in trouble at school for hitting someone who'd called their little brothers the “N” word or the boys came home crying. One night we watched the movie “Old Yeller.” In a scene where the father is roughed up by a gang of whites, our youngest, about 6 at the time, threw himself at me sobbing, “why does everyone hate me?” What could I say? What can any parent of a black or brown child say? “Just because your skin is darker?”

After years of searching, our youngest finally found his birth mom. On the internet, of course. Last Thanksgiving we met her. We marveled at the ways our lives had intersected because she'd loved her child enough to give him up for adoption. We thanked her for giving us the most precious gift possible: her beloved child. She thanked us for giving her “a life” as she took advantage of not being a teen mother and put herself through college. Today she is a successful dress designer for celebrities in Vegas.

Our nation was founded on the principle that all are created equal. Too many of us are still limited by prejudice and fear. It is crucial we come together to ensure that neither race, gender, sexual orientation, wealth, nor religion define who is allowed to succeed and who to fail. As Martin Luther King said, what matters is not the color of ones skin but the character of ones soul.

Joyce Shutt is pastor emeritus of the Fairfield Mennonite Church. You can follow her at www:FairfieldMennoniteChurch.org.

For better or worse

The rabbi's wife challenged her husband's glowing “60 years of wedded bliss” with “ you've got to be kidding. 30 years at the most! 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, a day here, a week there. That comes to about 30 years of wedded bliss.”

Marriage is less about romance than commitment. In fact, staying in love with our partner may be the hardest thing one can do. Working with another to create a relatively functional, relatively happy family unit is very demanding!

When hubby and I walked down the aisle we didn't anticipate the broken hearts and broken dreams that shaped our years together or that 50 of our 56 years would be shaped by chronic illness. That a significant part of our story would be shaped by teen addictions. That two of our four would drop out of high school, one be incarcerated. That my father's untimely death necessitated caring for my mother. 

We didn't anticipate the ways we'd both change. I am not the same compliant girl he married. He is not the same laughing romantic I dated. We've had to re-choose each other many times over. There have been times when I've thought, “this is not what I signed up for,” But the reality is, this is exactly what I signed up for. Our marriage vows stated, “for better for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.” Fortunately our shared faith, values, and goals helped us survive the challenges life dealt us, even making us softer, gentler, wiser, more accepting individuals.

Somehow we muddled through crisis after crisis, thanks to family support, marriage counseling, 12 step programs, individual determination, a strong church family. When I complained to a favorite college professor that I felt stifled and my brain was dying he suggested I go to seminary. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself and start thinking about what it's like for your family to feel responsible for your unhappiness. The only person you can change is yourself, so do what it takes to make yourself a better wife and mother and go back to school.” What good advice!

Arranged marriages involve fewer expectations of romance or hot sex since they are basically business arrangements. We feed our young the rosy promise that love and sexual compatibility will solve every problem and romantic passion will never go away. Thus few of us are prepared to get gobsmacked with the challenges of marriage, work, and family. Those of us who realize our spouse and children are not responsible for our happiness have a fighting chance to succeed. It takes friends, challenging jobs, meaningful hobbies, support groups, community involvement, and a strong faith to diffuse the demands of raising a family. Marriage, after all, is all about sharing your life with someone you mostly recognize, sometimes understand and occasionally like.

Looking back I am grateful for every challenge that came our way. We are both better persons for walking a different path than the one we anticipated that hot summer day we said “for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, till death do us part.“

Joyce Shutt is pastor emeritus of the Fairfield Mennonite Church. You can follow her blog at www.Fairfield Mennonite Church.org

The high cost of prisons

With primary elections this spring an important question is: “How do you want your money spent, Adams County?”

Here are some numbers to consider. $9,653,089 to run the prison. $566,184 for central processing. $2,455,152 for Probation. $1,102,122 to fund the court. $798,721 the district attorney. $566,184 for the public defender. $818,040 for the sheriff. $148,612 for the law library. Together these “services” come to over 38% of the county's budget! Does Adams County really that dangerous?

Just as our local prison eats up over a 4^th of our county budget, the states corrections budget is its largest growth item. More arrests, higher fines, and longer sentences have created a huge marginalized population that's a horrendous drain on society. Since 1980, Pennsylvania's corrections budget grew 1000%, going from $94 million to $2 billion. Pennsylvania's prison population grew 600%, going from 8,000 to over 54,000 and 9 state prisons to 28! Our so called war on crime has not reduced crime; it has simply created a prison industrial system that's turned the US in the world's incarceration nation.

Since racism did not die with the Civil Rights Movement those in power deliberately chose to use the justice system to marginalize blacks. Today we don't lynch black men. We incarcerate them. Over 68% of all black men in the US are enslaved by our “justice system.” That's more than were slaves in 1850! Over 78 million US citizens today can't vote, find decent jobs, housing, or receive benefits because they have been incarcerated or arrested!

What can we do locally? Become better informed. Attend the Prison Board meetings the 2^nd Tuesday of the month. Attend Prison Society meetings the 3^rd Wed of the month. Encourage the Criminal Justice Advisory Board to focus on grants for rehabilitation. Many inmates need GEDs or high school diplomas, others long term intensive drug and mental health services, with quality follow up once released. Warden Clark dreams of turning part of ACACC into an accredited long term treatment facility for those arrested for drug and alcohol related crimes. Support him! 

Encourage our judges and probation department to experiment with creative sentencing. Challenge the DA to be more lenient when possible. Incarcerating non-violent criminals should be the last resort, not the first. Treat everyone equally, black, white, rich, poor. If someone violates probation, incarcerate them on weekends instead of forcing them to serve the rest of their sentence in state prisons, forcing them to lose their jobs and impoverish their families. Create re-entry housing and jobs training programs for those coming our of prison so they can get back on their feet.

We have turned our justice system into a commodity, for sale to the highest bidder. Justice is determined by ones ability to pay. Our courts and prisons charge inmates exorbitant fees for basic services such as medical, telephone, commissary. Excessive fines for those who can least afford them results in a system whereby those already down and out are perpetually in debt to the “justice system” because each failure results in more fines.

Yes, changing our system and establishing rehabilitative programs will cost money, but far less in the long run than our broken system which doesn't work.

Joyce Shutt is pastor emeritus of the Fairfield Mennonite Church and co-chair of the local chapter PA Prison Society.