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    A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey
    A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey
    A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey

    By Bernard (Bernie) D. Bowman and Gerald W. Gibson

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    About this ebook

    A Mennonite Boy's Odyssey is a story of courage and discovery. Some individuals are fully content to embrace answers provided by their own elders to life's great questions. For others, their elders' way proves untenable. They must forge their own path, awakening through assimilation from alternate sources.
    A Mennonite Boy's Odyssey traces one such awakening, a life journey of spiritual development from growing up Mennonite in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, through decades of reading, thought, and enquiry. The book balances life experience with intellectual and spiritual transformation.
    This book is an accounting of a Hero's Journey, in the parlance of Joseph Campbell.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResource Publications
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781532602726
    A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey
    Author

    Bernard (Bernie) D. Bowman

    Bernard Bowman currently resides in Maryville, Tennessee, with his wife, Carol Gingerich Bowman. He is father to Megan and John, and grandfather to Witt. Currently semi-retired, Bowman had a thirty-five year career as CEO of three different not-for-profit retirement community organizations. He graduated from Eastern Mennonite University and holds a Masters in Hospital and Healthcare Administration from the University of Minnesota. He has enjoyed community service. While living in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, he chaired the Parks and Recreation Commission and the Planning and Zoning Commission before being elected to serve on the City Council. In Maryville he has chaired the United Way board of directors and the board of trustees of the Blount County Public Library. He currently serves on the Alcoa Aluminum Company's Foundation Community Advisory Board. His interest in genealogy and family history resulted in two books, George and Barbara Bowman: Immigrants and Bowman House Builders and A Tribute to Oma Wenger Bowman (And Her Valley Wenger Ancestors).

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      Book preview

      A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey - Bernard (Bernie) D. Bowman

      9781532602719.kindle.jpg

      A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey

      Bernard Bowman

      Foreword by Gerald W. Gibson
      9161.png

      A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey

      Copyright ©

      2016

      Bernard Bowman. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      , Eugene, OR

      97401

      .

      Resource Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      Eugene, OR

      97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0271-9

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0273-3

      ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0272-6

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      February 14, 2017

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Foreword

      Acknowledgments

      Chapter 1: A Beginning

      Chapter 2: A Damascus Road Experience

      Chapter 3: Me and My Father

      Chapter 4: Mennonite Experience in the Shenandoah Valley in the Nineteen–Fifties and Sixties

      Chapter 5: Mennonites, Their Anabaptist Heritage, and Me

      Chapter 6: Appalachian Mountain Religion

      Chapter 7: Continuing Journey with My Father

      Chapter 8: Moving Past Childhood and Youth

      Chapter 9: Washington, DC

      Chapter 10: Iowa

      Chapter 11: Influence of Joseph Campbell, Science Writers, the Jesus Seminar, and Jung

      Chapter 12: Maryville, Tennessee

      Chapter 13: Gilgamesh’s Answer

      Chapter 14: If I Were a Tinker

      Chapter 15: Who Am I Today?

      Chapter 16: A Book Ending for a Life Ongoing

      Bibliography

      Foreword

      Bernie Bowman is a thinker. Anyone who reads his story in A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey can have no doubt of that fact. The account of his odyssey reveals the breadth and depth of his thinking.

      Bernie is also a Thinker. The capitalization in this instance reflects his membership in a local discussion group with the name The Thinkers. This group of a dozen members was founded in the early 1950s, when Bernie Bowman was a child, but given its nature and his, it could have been created in anticipation of his joining in 2002. When Bernie began taking his turn as presenter, he quickly became a mainstay of the organization. The topics he selected were well-researched and far-ranging, with titles as diverse as Gilgamesh—A Man for Our Times, The Alimentary Canal: An Eclectic Inside Perspective, and Strings and Other Things—So What? The titles were always intriguing and the facts and ideas they included so stimulating that we could always count on robust discussion. No wonder The Thinkers came to look with excited anticipation toward Bernie’s next paper.

      I came to know Bernie long after he was a child, and my knowledge of the Mennonite faith was minimal until I read his story. From the title alone, it is clear that his odyssey had its origins in the Mennonite milieu of his youth. He speaks of his journey as a spiritual odyssey, and he elaborates on that fact with honesty in his book. It isn’t easy to write about things spiritual in the secular twenty-first century world, but Bernie has taken on the challenge of writing about matters of faith with courage and candor. Although his odyssey has carried him far from the strictures of the religion of his boyhood, he treats the Mennonite faith and its traditions with respect throughout.

      Bernie’s Mennonite upbringing was not so different from my own upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian home in the South. As I read A Mennonite Boy’s Odyssey, that fact struck me and was followed quickly by the question: Why did our odysseys take us to such different destinations? My spiritual journey, like his, had its twists and turns, but our epiphanies were not the same. Other readers, whatever their starting points, will surely find in these pages echoes of their own quests for truth and struggles to reconcile faith and reason. Bernie Bowman’s sincere, well-written account of his own odyssey should prove valuable to all who read it in the spirit of its writing.

      Dr. Gerald W. Gibson

      President Emeritus

      Maryville College

      Maryville, Tennessee

      Acknowledgments

      The phrase No man is an island is never more true than in the production of a book. This book is no exception. Jim Sturgeon gets special credit for his quiet persistence over the years in telling me my story should be shared. He also read the first pages, offering encouragement to keep writing. Linda Weaver provided many invaluable editing suggestions and assistance with formatting. John Hershberger, PhD, Gerald Gibson, PhD, William Meyer, PhD, and Rufus King all read the manuscript and offered constructive feedback. Gerald also provided the Foreword. Carol, my wife, has been a steady anchor for me to what really matters in life, through all these many years. And, of course, the folks at Wipf and Stock Publishers, in the end, made it possible.

      1

      A Beginning

      An epiphany is a magnificent thing! That moment, suddenly, when it hits you that words—your own or someone else’s—perfectly describe what you’ve known as truth, intuitively. It is that instant when your head and your heart bond in shared understanding. One such epiphany gripped me when reading Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled.

      Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it, once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—than [sic] life is no longer difficult, because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

      Struggle is what forms us; it makes us whole. The easy button may bring a smile to our face, it may promise respite from the struggle, but if we think genuinely about it, an easy button for all of life would be a catastrophe.

      This book shares my journey of understanding about life over time, my spiritual odyssey over this three score and almost ten years. I do not dwell on personal struggles, not because they were absent, nor because they were inconsequential, but because as I came to understand and accept their countless worth and inescapability, they no longer mattered, in keeping with Peck’s insight.

      I do not pretend that my journey is unique or in any way more extraordinary than that of others. It is with that juxtaposition of great humility and great pride that I participate in everyman’s journey of conscious development, of asking questions in life. As Leonard Mlodinow so eloquently reminds us in his book entitled The Upright Thinkers, our evolving to homo sapiens sapiens from homo sapiens about 40,000 BC brought with it our inquisitiveness, our seeking of answers, our asking, Why? And that, to pirate from Robert Frost’s poem, has made all the difference.

      As you will see in the coming pages, I have made a life by begging, borrowing, and stealing from any number of sources. From that gallimaufry of others, both ancient and contemporary, common threads have come together into a coherent life. Someone has said that the source of all genius is to forget one’s sources. I lay no claim to being a genius, so I have tried to give credit to my sources throughout. Any omissions are inadvertent and unintended. My story has been a gradual evolvement over time, mostly; however, there have been high points such as the epiphany highlighted above and the Damascus Road experience which follows in the next section. If this, my story, offers any value to you, consider it a gift.

      This book is not a criticism of my father. I hope you don’t read it that way. My father parented with the best of intentions. He felt it was his God-given obligation to raise up his children in the way of the Lord. It was just that his way of the Lord, so untiringly avowed as the only way, became progressively unworkable for me. I had to find a way of my own, and in so doing I countered, at times, his way. That is reflected in this odyssey. I carry, to this day, with pride and great appreciation, much of what I heard and saw from my father as relates to one’s personal dealings with others. I have tried to reflect that as well in my telling.

      Several years after having left my parents’ home, I was back home at tax season. One of my uncles did accounting and tax returns as part of his business, so I stopped by my uncle’s office to catch up and to have him prepare my taxes. I could tell he recognized me, but he just stared at me, saying not a word in response to my rambling greeting. Perhaps it was my long hair, maybe my changing accent from living elsewhere, and no doubt what he considered my hippie attire. I stopped talking and waited; then he said, Whatever happened to you, boy! in that slow, Shenandoah Valley draw. Looking back, what had happened was that I had begun my odyssey, my journey, to something other than what he had known of me as a boy.

      2

      A Damascus Road Experience

      It was a Damascus Road encounter. Fall was in full regalia, trees ablaze, with the sun setting in the west behind me as I drove along a two-lane paved road sandwiched between ready-to-harvest corn fields in northeast Iowa. It had been almost two decades since I had taken leave, in my conscious awareness, of the stark heaven or hell dichotomy of the religion of my childhood and adolescence. But somewhere, deep within me, the haunting pull of that religious viewpoint must have retained

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