'Blessed Assurance'
Flyover People
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
A biting north wind whipped the canvas funeral tent. Unyielding clouds darkened the sky.
We gathered at this hilltop cemetery to bury one of our own.
The extended family huddled for warmth under the green tent. In the brief committal service, the Mennonite pastors offered prayers and we sang “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”
Ella Schultz Dirks, my grandmother’s sister and lone survivor of her generation of Pawnee Rock Mennonites, died recently at the age of 102.
She was a widow for five years. Harvey died before they could celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary. Their son Homer passed away unexpectedly two years ago and Leon, another son, had been killed in the Korean War. A daughter, Beverly, survives.
On the morning of Ella’s funeral, it was dark when I left Emporia. Light didn’t reach the ground for at least an hour. The sky was heavy. Rain streaked my windshield.
At the mortuary in Great Bend, I embraced my second-cousin Darla. We had been grade-school classmates but attended different high schools. Ella was Darla’s grandmother.
Ministers Todd and Lynn Schlosser of the Pawnee Rock Bergthal Mennonite Church led the service.
“I’ve marveled at her strength and her resolve over these years I’ve known her,” Rev. Todd Schlosser said. “Ella has been our eldest church member for some time.”
Rev. Lynn Schlosser made frequent home visits and said, “It has been a joy to know Ella. I found a note from another pastor and she wrote, ‘Ella is unfailingly cheerful… .’”
“What she would do when sleep wouldn’t come was to sing over and over ‘Blessed Assurance’ and then repeat the Lord’s Prayer,” she said.
“My, how she loved all of you,” the pastor smiled, addressing the family. “Even at her age, Ella knew each of you individually.”
“One visit stands out — the only time I spent with her that I wasn’t able to get a smile. She cried and she shared how much she missed Harvey and Homer and Leon.”
“Ella’s song was her love for family; her story was her love for life,” she said.
This was a personal eulogy. I could easily picture the minister on a home visit, tucking in a blanket around this elderly woman.
And that’s why we were all there — to enfold Ella Dirks with love, to gently send her on her way.
In one clear moment, I realized what I was missing for having left the fold of my hometown church.
Even though I’ve been away for 30 years, the members know me. These people heard me wail in the church nursery, made me draw maps of Judea in Sunday School, and directed me in the Sunday morning choir.
This church is made up of those with similar beliefs, but more than that, it is family. Many of us are related, descendants of the Mennonite immigrants who came to the area from Russia in 1874.
These stoic Mennonites are not the sort of people who rush at you with open arms, but they offer generous hospitality and will be at your side during a tragedy.
I saw their compassion reflected in perfect stitches on quilts that would be sold to help the needy and in the hundreds of carefully packed health kits prepared for children overseas.
Each time I return to the Bergthal Mennonite Church, there are fewer and fewer of the German faces that once filled the sanctuary. Velma is no longer there to play the organ. Her sister Glennis is gone. So too, Cleo, Olin, Ethelena, Daisy, Dan and Dauvina, Eldon and Irma, Maxlyn, Helen and many others.
These elders have gone on ahead, but they’ve left us their stories, they’ve left us their songs.
Rest well, Aunt Ella.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
- Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.