Why Must We Keep Axing Chickens?

I am sobbing like a baby or, more accurately, like a very sad adult.

I just finished reading, “a complicated kindness,” a book I tried to tackle a year ago, only to putter out on the twentieth page. This time, it was effortless. I picked the book up yesterday, and today, between napping, playing with puppies, and re-watching Dr. Horrible, I finished the entire thing. Three hundred pages. Less than thirty hours. Not bad for the world’s slowest reader.

And the crying? Is it for joy at my overwhelming sense of accomplishment? Um, no.

The book follows an intelligent young woman coming of age in a Mennonite community in Manitoba - the sort of Christian town that puts my own stoic upbringing to shame. It follows the central character, Nomi, doing the sort of things that people do when they’re trying to hold onto contradictory paths - getting headaches, smoking pot, wearing too much eye makeup and listening to loud music on repeat. Her older sister left town, three years prior, following a similarly painful conversion to apostate-hood. Shortly thereafter, their grief-stricken mother was excommunicated and disappeared. The plot continues.

Present day, I’m crying out of anger, at my own Christian childhood. I’m crying at hellfire and damnation, and the brilliant minds who teach this, every day, to young children who have no concept of metaphor or choice. I’m crying at the slow and agonizing feeling of ripping out my own roots to make life make sense, even if it means I might one day burn forever in Hell. And I’m crying sobs of relief at the simple fact that someone understood what I was feeling, at least enough to write a book about it, even though I’m not a Mennonite, just Pentecostal.

My mother read this book, last year, and I’d asked her about it, and she had made vague comments about the practice of shunning and how it seemed so severe. And now I think of her, reading it, and attributing all the young girl’s problems to shunning, to the specific practices unique to the Mennonite sect, or to her drug use, or to her mother’s adultery. Maybe it was premarital sex. That was the problem. Not Christianity, or brimstone, or obedience by fear.

I think of the options available to good, Christian girls, and the inevitability of teenage marriage, babies, and teaching Sunday school. If you don’t get married, you become a missionary to convert the heathens of foreign locales. This was so close to being my life. The thought makes me physically sick.