Sunday, November 21, 2010
Fifty years ago, when I was growing up as Mennonite farm girl in central Illinois, I had Catholic playmates, but we never went to each other's churches. I could not have imagined that an international Catholic-Mennonite dialogue would take place between 1998 and 2003. Twenty-five years ago, when I was discerning a call to teach New Testament at a denominational seminary in northern Indiana, I still could not have imagined such a dialogue. Ten years ago, when I was beginning a sabbatical at St. John's Abbey in Minnesota and my first foray into the hospitable space of Benedictine spirituality, the international dialogue had moved from imagination into reality. But Rome was far away, and I could not imagine that this dialogue might change my life.
Yet a few weeks ago I was one of the Mennonite respondents at a Catholic-Mennonite day of reflection in South Bend, Indiana. Together we were studying a new letter jointly drafted by Mennonite and Catholic members of the international dialogue and addressed to the World Council of Churches' Decade to Overcome Violence. It is a remarkable document in many ways, not least because it states that "we affirm Jesus' teaching and example on nonviolence as normative for Christians." As we gathered that Saturday morning at St. Matthew's Cathedral, speaker after speaker noted that not only the letter we were discussing but also the friendships that had taken hold among us seemed nothing short of miraculous.
For me, it is the Benedictus, Zechariah's song after the birth of his son in Luke 1:68–79, that throbs beneath, floats above and measures the cadences at the heart of what it means to be a Christian who participates in ecumenical conversation and an American who lives in a time of war. It was at the abbey, when I was praying the morning office with the monks, that the Benedictus began its slow work of formation in my life. It is with the Anabaptist Prayer Book (Take Our Moments and Our Days, Vol. 1: Ordinary Time), inconceivable apart from Catholic-Mennonite friendship, that the Benedictus continues to sustain me.
