Good evening, we assemble on the MS Viktor Glushkov on the Dnieper River, having just left Zaporozhye, in an act of remembrance; specifically, we want to remember the victims of Stalin's inferno which burned most fiercely sixty years ago, in 1937 and 1938.

We do this in a number of contexts: tomorrow in Winnipeg, leading Mennonite historians gather in a conference to discuss this period and also plan how to write about it more effectively. There is therefore a powerful current North American context to our memorial. Then there is the context of our own voyage these past few days as we have visited, revisited, explored and rediscovered the Mennonite presence in South Russia. There have been some extraordinary experiences and you have already begun to share these with us.

I think also that some of you would like to make linkages tonight to some of the continuing common threads of Mennonite religion and spirituality which might help us to better understand and focus the varied experiences we have brought with us and those which we have rediscovered in this land. I sense that you would like to understand your historical Mennonite identity in some new way.

I am not qualified or trained to do this for you. Nonetheless I will attempt something - simply because I feel it must be attempted before we go much further on this cruise.

Mennonites came to this part of the world because they wanted to practise their religion in peace and safety. There were economic and social motives to be sure, but the spiritual objectives were always clear and paramount.

"What," you have asked, "were the hallmarks of this spiritual and religious quest?" We have talked about them, suggesting a number of principles such as non-violence, concepts of justice and the differentiation between church and state. We have talked about inner and societal renewal, about individually getting right with God and about collectively creating the appropriate institutions of the Kingdom here and now. Let me tonight suggest some verbs, phrases and images which have helped me to read our Mennonite history.

Mennonites have always been a Bible people, a "people of the book". There have been varying scriptural emphases at various times, to be sure. We certainly began quite consciously as a New Testament community, desiring to live our version of Christ's teachings seven days a week.. We have also been an Old Testament folk, rather tribal and exclusive at times, perhaps even overly (male) patriarchal and hierarchical. We have certainly been a Pauline people with lots of exhortation, sometimes more scared into the Kingdom or goaded into "salvation" than drawn into it. Nonetheless, as a people of the book we have always maintained the priesthood of all believers, the right of all individuals to interpret the book.

Our history has not been entirely wholesome. As sometime Germanophiles and loyal Russians, we have imbibed of anti-Semitism.

We have had a "roller coaster ride" in trying to achieve a balance between a personal and social gospel - yet we have always been keenly aware of both and our history is full of attempts to correct what seemed to be the imbalance of the day. To my mind, we have always lived a gospel of action. Further, I think we are special heirs to the gospel of suffering. I have sensed this more recently as I have contemplated our early Dutch history of martyrdom as an initial marker of peoplehood and the Soviet inferno as a late marker.

There is an interesting historical footnote here, at least I find it intriguing. There is an informed point of view which says that our young Russian Mennonite men and women in the Sanitätsdienst of World War I, and there were literally thousands of them as we now know, who having served in the hospital trains and on hospital ships, having been under fire retrieving the wounded from the front lines, having contracted their diseases, reflected deeply on these horrifying experiences of war and carnage, including Civil War and anarchy too. These young men and women, along with their cousins in North America, then developed, in 1917 to 1920, the rationale and arguments which would allow Mennonite leaders to formulate the wonderful mission objectives of the Mennonite Central Committee in the early 1920s.

I do not want to emphasize this point of view too much. MCC had other roots in Mennonite history, solid roots to be sure, but it seems to me that we feel very close to the young Mennonite hospitallers this week. In our mind's eye we see them clearly. We saw their headquarters in Dnepropetrovsk just around the corner from the KGB dungeons, powerful contrasting images of life and death.

Perhaps, just perhaps, we have made too much of the Selbstschutz, the Mennonite armed Self Defence organization of 1918 & 1919. Of course it occurred, but its opposite was at work too and that legacy, the legacy of the wounded healer, has proved most providential. If that is historical fact, what good might yet evolve out of the experience of the Aussiedlers? Let us not be too surprised!

As I said, I think we are heirs to a gospel of action: tent missionaries on one side - MCC on the other. We are also heirs to a gospel of suffering, of "wounded healers serving in the name of Christ".

To continue - we have always been believers in community. It's hard, I think, to be a Mennonite in solitary Antarctica. Our early history is one of shared religious values and this sense of community became extremely well developed in the South Russian experience. We were thrown almost entirely on our own resources here. The keeper of the resources was in large part, the church, often the village church. This also heightened our already well developed instincts of clanship; we could only trust the family in an alien environment.

Next - we are a people which has too often been obsessed by notions of purity and extreme piety. The search for holiness, to my mind, is laudable and healthy. The intense, obsessive search to be "correct" while maintaining others quite close to us as not correct enough, not Biblical enough, not Christ-like enough, is not healthy. It might be helpful to remember Jesus' own indictment of the "politics of holiness" and his affirmation of the "strategies of compassion". We need to be conscious that we know too much of schism, acrimony and factionalism in our Mennonite history.

I'm coming to the end - but I want to say a few words first about intellect and faith in the Mennonite story. Our earliest leaders were well educated, great thinkers, great debaters. We then developed, to my mind, an unhealthy aversion to things intellectual. At times we greatly distrusted higher learning, believing it would inevitably destroy faith. Instead, we destroyed imagination, individuality and creativity for periods of time. Yet, when we look over the longer expanse of our Mennonite history, our great leaders and reformers in all periods were invariably well educated, imaginative and colorful, even eccentric. Finally - I am reminded that as our current Mennonite historians look at the period we are remembering tonight - the Stalin period - I have heard them lament deeply the loss of Russian Mennonite intellectual leaders, promising teachers, writers, theologians, artists, historians, scientists, inventors, agriculturalists, horticulturalists, business geniuses, all snatched away from us.

So - as we call out the names of the verschleppt and the martyrs tonight - our small stream of the unjustly condemned in a veritable Soviet ocean of victims -

Let's remember them as:

- People of the Book , for whom the Bible was important and the greatest personal resource

- People living the gospel of action, especially in their most trying days and hours

- Members of a religious community, our community

- Members of families, our families

We remember them and mourn their loss, because so much greatness, inventiveness, joy, goodness and personal achievement was taken away

Taken away from their loved ones, their families, their communities,

Taken away from this country and from this world which needed them so badly.

Walter Unger, Ukraine, 1997

See also a Psalm of Remembrance by Alan Peters, Remembrance by Elfrieda Heinrichs, Gerhard Christian Hamm - my father, by Marguerite Bergman and The Widows' Trail by John. W. Martens

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