PRAIRIE WIND

What follows is a rewritten version of a piece I wrote for Leap of Faith, by Ray Dirks, a compilation of Manitoba’s diversity in faith-based gatherings:

When I look back on the road I’ve travelled from a roughly 30-year distance, I notice a fork in the road. One road would have led me from a Master’s of Divinity degree towards ordination, a paid position as a minister with the United Church of Canada in one of its parishes —Melita, Selkirk or West Hawk. The other, led me from a broken marriage and single parenthood, to a farm, a loyal kind-hearted farmer, a large rambling house in south eastern Manitoba and an emerging circle of people seeking meaning in each others’ homes on Sunday nights.

I remember choosing the second road because I sensed it would take me home. Home, in that this circle welcomed my heart-pumping desire to claim what was beautiful and true and real, alongside the ugly and fraudulent and hurtful in my story, my Mennonite story. At the time, I had a hunch about my spiritual quest: If it was to hold meaning, it had to be done with others who shared this desire to claim and let go from within. I needed to let go of being the lead or leading with a pulpit between us. And I had a hunch that to do this well, to truly draw out the potential mosaic of voices within a circle, we would need to rewrite our models of leadership and structure, and listen for old and new practices that honoured this circle way of gathering. 

Grappling with angst and a desire to rewrite and tend to new ways of organization and structure, a number of us shifted from “the Sunday evening group” to a morning gathering. With a new name, Prairie Wind Mennonite Church (PWMC or PW), we unpacked our core values, one of them being our common faith inheritance, an Anabaptist version of Christianity, which focused on the peacemaking discipleship of Jesus. These roots branched out into a practice that attempted to live out an Anabaptist expression of that discipleship, including the “priesthood of all believers.” We structured ourselves, including the work of leadership, as a way of tending to the voices of our people.  Every person in the circle, child and adult alike, was to have influence on the way we gathered, the way we worshipped, the way we spoke, the way we listened.

Circle upon Circle, over and again, season after season of our lives, more and more core values emerged. PW grew into a tree of life, a place to belong for many travelling souls. And from its roots, more practices grew up through the trunk and into the branches and leaves of our tree. “Communities of care,” says Bell Hooks in her book Belonging, “are sustained by rituals of regard.” And now, almost 30 years later, this PW Tree is complex both in its root system and in its branches. Every person in our community would describe our “rituals of regard” differently; these are the ones that are important to me: 

Regard for our children: As we listened to the ways in which our children engaged in circle, we claimed a tactile language that awakened the essential within all of us. A physical altar held the focus of the morning. Natural and hand made objects evolved during the transformative season of Easter and Spring—a quilt, a painting, a mosaic, a wood carving, a cocoon becoming a butterfly, seeds growing into sunflowers. During the warmer seasons we gathered outside around a fire, or beneath the shade of a tree. During one gathering, we walked down a long driveway, on our own, picking up stones which represented a burden for us. Our leader then invited us to walk back with a partner, sharing as needed, the story each stone represented for us. Bookending our walk, we listened to pieces of wisdom, a prayer, and an invitation to throw our stones into a river, a surrounding forest, a fire, whatever felt appropriate, whatever would help us loosen our grip, to let some of it go. Through these rituals of regard, inspired by our children who live in and through their bodies, we discovered and claimed habits that engaged our physical bodies. As I look back, I wonder if the influence of our children became one of the most important and prominent sources of energy for PW, perhaps they are the trunk that feeds our branches.

Regard for Action and Reflection: As we listened to the desire for people to act, we found projects where we could build relationships and share our resources. Supported by money from our fundraisers, Utooni, a water conservation project in Kenya, has built around 15 water reservoirs and received visits from many people in our circle. PW has also provided annual support for their school, Starlight Academy. We built a timber frame gazebo for our town’s women’s shelter, renovated a home for refugees, spring cleaned for a single mom, walked together in the Steinbach Pride parade, and knit squares into a quilt for a grieving mother whose daughter had attended our circle for over a decade. As we tried to find a balance between our action and reflection, this ritual of regard disciplined us to understand that our inner work has an outward response and our outward response depends on our inner work. As we made room for the voices of every person in our PW circle, we longed for each of us to also have a voice within the circles of our larger community

Regard for our Story: As we listened for everyone’s voice and the particular and nuanced ways we carried our truth, we engaged in a story-based interpretation of sacred texts that we inherited or discovered. As we told and retold our old stories, we structured our gathering to tell our own stories. Thanksgiving Sunday became a circle around a “cooking fire" where we wove food stories—a story about a memorable school lunch, a story about food hospitality while travelling—while a cook, in our midst, tended to a soup or stew over the fire. All Saints Day became a circle around an altar of candles where we would weave the stories of our dead and our own mortality—a story about an inheritance from a loved one, how we said good bye, a song we may want to have sung at our own funeral—followed by an invitation to light one of the many candles. By tending to and drawing out each other’s story, we soon realized that story, rather than ideas—theological positions, political or social ideology—created bridges between us that helped us turn towards each other. 

Regard for Silence and the Stone: There is a line from the Quakers that says, “Speak when your word will improve upon the silence.”  We are only beginning to dip into the rich mystery of holding collective silence. We tend to this ritual by regularly passing a grandfather or grandmother stone around the circle in the cycle of the sun, reminding each other to hold the stone in silence, listening to its wisdom and the wisdom within the circle before speaking our own word. Ron Peters, an elder in our midst who died a number of years ago, and his wife Doris brought the stone and its ritual to our circle from their time with the Saulteaux-Ojibwa people of Manitoba’s Bloodvein First Nation. During one of Ron’s last Sundays, PW people surrounded his bed and passed around one of the wooden bowls he carved. In between his favourite songs, each person held the empty bowl, spoke their gratitude and grief then held the bowl in silence. This ceremony, as I remember it, gave me a profound language to name my love for Ron and his gift to our circle as he moved to the other side. 

Regard for Gifts: Prairie Wind decided, early on, to sprinkle our gatherings with invitations to others who had had an impact on our people, asking them to share their journey with us. We also invited people who worked at agencies or NGO’s that we supported—Touchstone FASD, Utooni, the women’s shelter, and Salvadoran earthquake relief. Along with covering fuel costs and the speaker’s fee, we always added our thanks with pantry gifts—home processed maple syrup, frozen strawberry jam, a loaf of bread, a hand made candle, a jar of pickles, a sunshine squash.  We wanted our giving to build upon layers of connection and thus create a reciprocity of giving and receiving. Along the way, this reciprocity built further relationships and nourished all of us. 

Regard for the Rhythm of the Seasons: As we willingly and, at times, uncomfortably sat with each other’s differences and preferences, we embraced the many paths that create meaning and understanding—the ones that lean in on science, on literature, on physical movement, on guided meditation, a particular faith or humanism.  In acceptance of each other, we have leaned toward the universal cycle of our seasons while, at the same time, inviting each person to bring their spiritual inheritance or wisdom to our mosaic. 

Regard for Longing: When we began calling ourselves PWMC, we wrote into our “faith and organizational statements” that these words were not fixed in time but words for the journey and needed to be revisited and rewritten at least every two years. With every season and a regenerative way of being in community, we were called to remember, rewrite and reclaim our rituals of regard. When I look back over our years of gathering, I believe PW’s health depended on doing this reflective work. The PW tree of life, like any other tree, goes through seasons when it loses all of its leaves, naked and stripped down into the quiet and at times restless season of dormancy. With deep gratitude, I thank the people who have lived within this circle, faithfully listening for the gritty, loving way of dormancy and growth. When I read John O’Donohue’s words about the tree in Eternal Echoes, I heard what, during many seasons, I experienced with PW:

A tree is a perfect presence. . .. The tree is wise in knowing how to foster its own loss. It does not become haunted by the loss nor addicted to it. The tree shelters and minds the loss. Out of this comes the quiet dignity and poise of a tree's presence. . .. A life that wishes to honour its own possibility has to learn too how to integrate the suffering of dark and bleak times into a dignity of presence. Letting go of old forms of life, a tree practises hospitality towards new forms of life. It balances the perennial energies of winter and spring within its own living bark. The tree is wise in the art of belonging.

Prairie Wind, its determined way of gathering, regardless of the number of people present, the time of day or the year, the resistance within and without, is a wise and emerging circle in the art of belonging. And I am grateful. 

Prairie Wind gathers weekly in homes and yards, trails and forests, and through the pandemic, via Zoom and Facetime, continuing to emerge and become a beloved community.

Thanks to Priscilla Reimer, a part of the Prairie Wind community, for editing this piece.