I was born, the eldest of three children, in a small country hospital 45 minutes
from my house in western New York. Eventually, in the same room, delivered by
the same nurse, my brother would be born three years later, and my sister two
years after that. The year I was born both my parents turned 30. My father was
one of six children born to factory workers outside of Painesville, Ohio. My
grandfather was a World War 2 vet, adamant blue-collar Democrat, and man
haunted by the suicide attempts of his mother. My grandmother was an
unaccredited college graduate with a great style and collection of beautiful
self reflective journals that catalogued her desires to enter ministry, and the
crippling self-doubt that kept her a bus driver. Their six children would all
marry, attend college. Four would become teachers and thrive on the education
their parents hoped they would. By the time I entered the world I was the
fifteenth of 21 grandchildren born. Now our family, all marriages and kids
complete, number 81. We have gathered my whole life every
Christmas, summer, and fall to swap stories of my grandparents crowded,
three-bedroom house, in the basement where we all used to sleep on bunk beds
pushed together. My mother was the second of three children born to a military
family from Elkins, West Virginia. My grandmother was a thin waif of a child
the youngest of eleven and a railroading family who lived in the mountains.
My grandfather was one of ten boys and one girl who had skipped in
and out of prison and hard times and drinking and gambling. Their marriage was
both the downfall and saving grace of my mother's existence.
Avoiding vacuum cords and having guns pointed at her twelve-year-old head seemed to pale in
comparison to the lives her cousins led, where incest and sexual abuse and drug use was commonplace.
My mother left her childhood home with smarts and
a rickety car and enough desire to fuel it. We don't talk to her brother anymore.
Her sister is seven years younger, but she looks 10 years older. We return each
Easter and sit on her front porch while she draws on cigarettes and sighs long
sighs with gray hair blowing in her thin lined face.
And she, with my mother, count on their hands the cousins living and dead.
Jack is barely alive, Johnny shot himself in the head, Virginia died of cancer, Carol had
that heart attack, Sissy's still selling herself. My parents, both 18, left
those homes and went to the same College. They were acquainted. I loved looking at
photos of my mother with long the flowered hair sitting next to my dad in
bell-bottoms on the quad. But when they left, dad turned to mom and he said "well
Nancy, I guess I'm probably never gonna see you again." Within two years they
ended up at Ohio State both in graduate school. Mom looked up alumni from their
alma mater, found dad, they reconnected and began going to Columbus Mennonite
Church. Within two years they were married, finishing graduate school, and
surrounded by the friends from that congregation. By the time I was born,
these friends would be established as lifelong and I we would vacation
every summer and attend every Thanksgiving with them. And I would lay
on the cold wooden floor and soak in the sounds of Nick playing his steel guitar
and Tom belting the mournful tones of old Mennonite sorrow songs.
These lifelong friends are now my lifelong friends. Eventually their eldest daughter
was a bridesmaid in my wedding. After my parents left OSU, they moved to Maine
and then to the small town in western New York where my father got a job as a
painting professor and my mother as a counselor at a small Christian College called Houghton.
When my parents drove the 45 minutes from the hospital the day
I was born to the house, they brought me to the place I would forever call home.
Houghton is the kind of small town where everyone knows
everyone. It's a town of 500. People who changed my diaper, have had children who
I changed the diaper of, that are now changing the diaper of my friends children.
When we grew up my friends and I all went to the same church.
Our parents work together. We would all
spend our evenings biking through fields and woods and down dirt roads, catching
toads, and skinning our knees, and swimming in the river. And when we were
old enough, we went to the same public high school in the next town over.
We college prof kids, mixed together with 40-ish other foster kids in beat-up
clothes, trailer park kids whose family hadn't
had good work since the railroad left 80 years before, Farm
kids with dark circles under their eyes. My first day of kindergarten, I was
assigned a cubby next to John Murray. My last day of high school I cleaned out my
locker that sat next to John Murray. In between, I had studied abroad in Germany,
had played varsity volleyball, had roles in school musicals. And John had saved
enough money for college only to have his mother's steal it for drugs, had
found his father dead of a heart attack in bed one morning, and been molested by
our music teacher. In some ways, these things separated us profoundly. In other
ways they connected us. He studied German, was pretty dang good at it by the time
he graduated, and I attended his father's funeral and realized what losing a
parent meant. And together we graduated in a class of 49. And I went to college, I
made friends, I found myself swimming in people like me: weird Christians who
really believed about a Friday night with The Princess Bride, popcorn, and
Kierkegaard, was better than any night of drinking. Kids who had traveled the
world as missionaries, but never had seen a pg-13 rated movie. We poured ourselves
into each other. In college, I was officially baptized into my Mennonite
faith, surrounded by conservative friends and head covering,s and hippie liberal
mennos with dreadlocks and big smiles who knew the numbers of my favorite hymns.
Graduated, got my masters, married the love of my life. a fellow Houghton
grad from Gettysburg Pennsylvania. the daughter of a carpenter
with a master's in divinity. and this is where I need to pause because, really,
I have been asked to talk about authentic identity and so far I'm reciting family
history and you probably don't know why you should care about it.
Well in the Mennonite tradition, we have a saying, "Christ is the center of our faith.
Community is the center of our life. And reconciliation is the center of our work."
I have spent a great deal of my life unpacking that, and what it means to me,
and to my authentic identity. And what I have come to embrace, as perhaps the most
important part of my identity, is ironically, that it is not mine.
My identity does not exist without my community. The day I was born in that
country hospital, I was born into a community, into all of the communities I
have just told you about. They raised me, they fashioned me with stories, they
challenged the dichotomies of my life. It doesn't matter that my name is Sally, but
it does matter that I am known to my mother's family as little Sally, the girl
with her grandmother's name and the hope that she would get to do things that she
couldn't. I am my family's history. I hold a relationship with friends
carefully, so that I might not take what they are giving me for granted. And I
volunteer at fire departments or church services because I am acutely aware that
I am a part of their whole. If we don't participate in our community, our
community ceases to exist, and we, in turn cease to exist. I won't pretend this
belief isn't crushing sometimes. A few years ago, a friend who I spent every
Christmas Eve and countless summer nights with, died. The last time I saw her
we were gathered around her parents dining room table while we drank tea and
talked and candles burned low around us and comfort and friendship. And she died
in a run-down house, completely alone, with an aerosol can in her hand.
Addiction her last companion. And that's hard. It's hard to think of people dying
and it's hard to think of people dying alone. Without her, I and my community
stand to lose a piece of our identity. And it's work to live in the pain of her
death, of anyone's death, but to keep remembering and remembering and that is
my identity: to remember, to show up, to support, to be a part of my community, and
in return, I am loved, and I am a part of a greater whole and I drip with the
privilege of somebody who's wanted in this world. This summer was Sarah and
I's wedding. Neither of us had ever been the type to dream of white dresses or
color schemes, but we found ourselves giddy at the idea of bringing everyone
we loved together. We gathered our church, our families, our friends from high
school, from college, the Mennonites from Ohio, Houghton people, in front of all of
them, in a traditional marriage in the round, we said our vows: to love each other,
to respect each other, and then we made our vows to our community to love them,
to support them, to use our means to support justice and inclusion, to be a
part of their greater whole before our individual. In essence we made a pledge
that our authentic identity would always be found in them.
At the end of our wedding, we sang the Mennonite song "Guide our feet" which I
would like to sing with you all today. One of the ways Mennonites express their
community is through singing. We practically never stop and our singing
ends up being a lovely metaphor for what I'm talking about.
When we sing in four-part harmony, or in singular line, we are supporting each
other. It is never about the solo. Rather it is about what we are making together.
Now I don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable, so if you don't like to
sing, you do not have to. I recognize that this is an interfaith space, anybody
coming here with any sort of religion faith or nothing, so if you don't want to,
sit back and relax. If you do want to, the lyrics are at the
bottom [shows handout given to attendees]. I've also done a rather cruel thing to you all and I'm not playing it
through for you to hear, so it's like jump in, swim, or drown. But I hope you'll
swim with me. But this recording is actually a recording of my church back
home, as was the song that you heard when you were walking in, and I think that's
also a lovely reminder that my community is traveling with me. And I do want to
say in closing, that the reason that I want to share this song with you, is
because now you, Elon, my friends here, are now a part of my community. And so now
you are also a part of my authentic identity. And I could think of no better
way, as a Mennonite, like praise together with you, that newfound part of
my authentic identity. So thanks. Take it away, Kerry.
Also I'll say, while she's figuring that, so this is a call-and-response song, so
the first "guide our feet" is sang by like, a leader that's going to sing it, and
then everyone else can jump in. So like if you feel nervous about this, then you can also, like, sit
through the first verse and then join in. [Guide our Feet music plays in the background]