Holy restlessness leads to home in Christ:
Gene Herr became a spiritual father to many people in his lifetime.
by Laurie Oswald Robinson
Cover story, The Mennonite, June 2012
A few days before he died on Jan. 1 in Hesston, Kan., the late H. Eugene (Gene) Herr said to his daughter, Ellen Awe, “I don’t understand why I am not going anywhere.”
The comment didn’t surprise Awe. Her father, a leader and visionary in the Mennonite church, had always lived with a holy restlessness. It was born from his passion to follow God’s call, even when to do so required leaving safe and familiar lands for daring and new territories.
To his family and friends, he seemed he was moving as a pilgrim on his way to the promised land. They saw his movement as not born of one who was lost and trying to find his way “home” alone. They believed it as born out of passion for being truly found in Christ. He desired to give himself so fully to Jesus that no mile of God’s intended journey for him would be left untraveled.
But on this day, it was time for him to rest a bit before traversing the final leg of his earthly trek.
Awe replied to her father, “It’s because you really can’t go anywhere right now, Dad. It’s OK for you to just be here and to let us love you. …”
“He accepted this and put his trust in us and graciously let us make decisions for him,” she says. “The concept of his ‘terminal’ illness included both moving and resting. … He was terminal but not as in an end. He was in a terminal, the place where one waits for the next leg of one’s travels.”
As he battled brain cancer for two years, it seemed God was calling Herr in his final days to integrate his doing with being. The integration was a model of the Christian discipleship Gene and Mary, his wife of 56 years, shared with fellow believers in the Mennonite church and beyond. Continue reading “The Mennonite features Mennonite Catholic visionary Gene Herr”
The American Benedictine Academy has chosen as the theme of its 2012 annual meeting, “Seek Peace and Pursue It: Monasticism in the Midst of Global Upheaval.” The conference will be held at St. Scholastic Monastery in Duluth MN. Bridgefolk board member Weldon Nisly will be one of the featured speakers. (Those planning to attend the Bridgefolk conference in Minnesota in late July should note that the ABA conference is the following weekend, approximately three hours away.)
A keynote address by Br. Jeffrey Gros, FSC, to the 2011 National Workshop on Christian Unity last May has recently come to our attention. In it he called attention to the use of footwashing at a historic service of repentance and reconciliation, in which representatives of the Lutheran World Federation confessed 16th-century persecution of Anabaptists as a sin. This “icon” should serve as a model for planning similar commemorations as Christians around the world mark the 500-year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in 2017, he said.