Cowshit and Butter

Ethnicity and Reality

Reality isn’t what you’re told it is.

I felt like I had to state that up front after, within the span of a week, I heard two comments about reality that caught my attention. The first was an offhand comment someone made: “I grew up being told by my parents to just accept [their] reality.” And I suddenly worried: “I sure hope that this is not what anyone hears me saying when I write about “a compassionate consent to reality”! (That’s certainly not what I mean.)

The second comment was from a student, Tanya, who wrote: “Basically, I was taught a brutal consent to reality was essential.” Similar as it may sound, this is closer to what I do mean because even though the process can indeed be “brutal” (and brutally necessary), it’s not necessarily being told which reality is owed your consent. But this second comment also threw me back into thinking about what my own ethnic background taught me about reality.

So let’s start there: ethnicity and reality.

Ethnicity is a powerful shaper of what we come to believe is real. My ethnic background (on both sides) is Mennonite, and more specifically Dutch Mennonites who moved to Prussia (near Danzig) in the 17^th century to escape persecution and then, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, to Ukraine (at the time southern Russia) to receive an offer of farmland in the fertile steppes and freedom from military service. Russian Mennonite life was hard but prosperous until the First World War and Bolshevik Revolution led to chaos, violence and malnutrition. My mom’s and dad’s families, through very different routes, both eventually ended up in Canada, and I grew up in a Winnipeg suburb in which Mennonites were plentiful.

While I couldn’t tell you exactly how I learned this, I absorbed that a core part of reality was that it was foundational to live as someone who was faithful to God and to people, and this involved being hardworking, honest and responsible. The phrase “a brutal consent to reality” fits because it was always made clear that life was more often hard than easy, and open-eyed dedication was especially required in the harshest of circumstances. We were a grounded people, trusting in God and in having each other’s backs.

I never did speak much Low German (which is the official sign of being appropriately ethnic enough among Dutch/Russian Mennonites); I learned only High German, which was the cleaner and thinner language of church. This means I missed much of the proverbial wisdom that came through the less lofty teaching in farms and kitchens. Aside from the personality-revealing, “Don’t be such an old nose,” which I heard often, one of the few proverbs I was able to hear and translate was this one:

“If ‘ifs’ weren’t just ‘ifs,’ then cowshit would be butter.”¹

Brutal reality was where life was lived (in old Russia we didn’t ask about being tired), not in wish-dreams. Ours was not an especially imaginative culture.² Nor, I think it’s fair to add, was life to be lived wasting energy on messy emotions (those who have work to do have no time for tears) or worldly ambitions (high trees catch a lot of wind and enough is better than a sackful).

I recall my first (only?) success in writing: in my late 20s, I’d written a short story for a graduate course on marriage and family, and at my professor’s encouragement submitted it to a denominational periodical. It ended up receiving a North American church press award for best fiction feature, and some judges said some fine things about my story. When I read the award notice in the magazine out loud to my mom, apparently too enthusiastically, she said, “Well, you know it’s God that gets the credit.” (I must have gotten too close to this one: “Self-praise stinks.”) Hhmm. Three seconds of happiness was all I was permitted before pride, apparently, threatened to take me down.

I’ll say it again: ethnicity is a powerful shaper of what is real (as the parents sing, so chirp the youth). Clearly this is often a gift. I’m deeply grateful that my heritage made it easy to have confidence that faithfulness was a required virtue and that mutual aid (true friendship freezes not in winter) and nonviolent love for enemies (who preaches war, is the devil’s missionary) defined the kind of life that Jesus revealed and asked us to follow.

But I’ve needed other communities to show me that emotions are a rich part of life, that survival, work and quiet prayer are not the only responses to trauma. And I could say that I needed other communities to show me that it’s ok to challenge some traditional church teachings, but it may be truer that it was the original free-thinking Anabaptists who first taught me that (and another proverb:)

Wua aule dautselwje denkje, doa woat nijch fäl jedocht.
Where all think the same thing, there will not be much thought.

The reality that matters, that is owed our consent, is not the one that our parents and ethnic forebears impose on us (though that is probably more reliable than what contemporary media imposes on us!), but the reality that meets us in our honest engagement with life, reflected on with intuitive and wise discernment and in open-minded conversation with others. Some of this will confirm what we were taught, and some of it will make us question, doubt and shift our beliefs. Any reality that is not open and flexible enough to accommodate these honest changes and adaptations is not worthy of our consent.

Reality isn’t (always) what you’re told it is. We consent to a reality that we’ve participated in discovering and constructing. It’s the task of each generation and individual to interact with what’s been handed down, “extracting the precious from the worthless”³ (and, of course, the many things in between that are precious in the right context and worthless in others).

Our consent to reality is not about hardening our reality; consent is not pounding in a stake, binding us to an immoveable reality at which we’ve finally arrived. Reality is living and dynamic, and we know it best when we learn from deep roots and when we’re open to the Spirit that blows where it will, helping us discern newer, life-giving interpretations.

I should come back around to the student’s comment at the beginning because I’m grateful that she saw this. Her fuller quote was:

“Basically, I was taught a brutal consent to reality was essential. The compassionate part comes in when we start to attempt to see through different lenses.” - Tanya

Amen - but at this point, I should stop because it’s also good to remember:

Ne lenjre Räd, een kjleena Senn.
A longer speech, a smaller mind.

1. To balance things, another Low German proverb is manure brings flowers. This and the rest of the proverbs I’ve sprinkled in come from Mennonite Low German Proverbs from Kansas (2008) - a book that you should definitely all get except that it’s over $200 on Amazon, (or you can order an ebook via Lulu, like I did, for $4.94 [Cdn]) because you should: Save in the [present] time, so you have in need. .

2. Thankfully, there is a sense of humour. For example, on the theme of butter, it is noted: Who has butter on his head, must stay out of the sun, (still pondering this one - but fair enough!) and more practically: all mushrooms are edible, many only one time.

3. Jeremiah 15.19