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Crazy Quilt: Pieces of a Mennonite Life
Book by Yoder, Cynthia
- GenresMemoir
Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
3 people are currently reading
20 people want to read
About the author
Cynthia Yoder
4 books189 followersI write (and read!) memoir, essay and some fiction. My first novel, Mennonite on the Edge: An Unlikely Romance, was published in 2015. My first book, Crazy Quilt: Pieces of a Mennonite Life was one of the first Mennonite memoirs published (in 2003). My second book, Divine Purpose: Find the Passion Within, was inspired by years working as a life purpose coach. The book is a journaling book to help readers discover greater meaning and purpose in work and in life.
I live and work in New Jersey.
I live and work in New Jersey.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 22, 2020
When Cynthia left her New York City lifestyle to spend a year in Pennsylvania with her Mennonite grandparents, she brought along an audio recorder to capture their stories and insights for the book she would write. In the process of learning about their lives, Cynthia came to see her own life journey with a new meaning.
Her relatives’ love for the land, the hardships they overcame, community meals and gatherings intertwined with spiritual experiences.
Through Cynthia’s story, we learn how our present interior experience of life is impacted by the experiences of our ancestors. As a reader of “Crazy Quilt,” you will feel enriched and inspired to explore your own connections.
Her relatives’ love for the land, the hardships they overcame, community meals and gatherings intertwined with spiritual experiences.
Through Cynthia’s story, we learn how our present interior experience of life is impacted by the experiences of our ancestors. As a reader of “Crazy Quilt,” you will feel enriched and inspired to explore your own connections.
November 14, 2021
The author visits with her grandparents while struggling with her marriage. An interesting look at Mennonite culture, from conservative to modern. You’ll fall in love with her grandmother!
April 19, 2020
Cynthia Yoder’s memoir elucidates the diverse range of faith and practice among individuals in or from a conservative Mennonite community in eastern Pennsylvania. Her description indicates that the Mennonite fellowship, as a whole, defies neat classification into any of the categories proposed by Max Weber, H. Richard Niebuhr, or Bryan Wilson.
Yoder uses the story of about a year in her life after college graduation and marriage as the linchpin that holds together a comparison of her struggles with conventional Mennonite mores and the struggles of her relatives, still in Pennsylvania. Interwoven with her autobiography for that time period are the recollections that her grandparents, Henry and Elizabeth (Betts), provided after she returned temporarily to her community of origin.
Yoder’s perspective is hybrid, with both internal and external features. On the one hand, her approach is rooted in conservative Mennonite culture. Her father and grandfather were ministers who strove to maintain cultural mores. On the other hand, she was raised in a largely non-Mennonite town, fully aware of practices within the larger society in which her family forbade her to participate. During and after her college years, she tended toward the practices of the larger society and questioned her traditional religious beliefs.
Matters came to a head while she was in graduate school. She experienced symptoms that she found disturbing. I would summarize her description by calling the symptoms depressive with hallucinatory features. She and her husband began a temporary separation, during which he reconnected with the people and places he had experienced as the son of Mennonite missionaries and she began psychotherapy and returned home to collect oral histories from her grandparents and other relatives.
Both the therapy and the oral histories represent parallel processing. Yoder made progress with the help of a therapist whose background resembled hers at least in terms of his being a Mennonite with professional training and socialization outside of the group’s mores. Thus, the success of the therapeutic relationship may be explained as a product of the therapist’s helping her chart a path in some respects like his own. Likewise, Yoder’s grandparents turned out not to be the perfectly conservative individuals of her memory. They expressed frustration with some aspects of conservative Mennonite culture that they found limiting, even stifling. In this respect, while Yoder and her grandparents followed different paths, they did so in response to their struggles with the same issue. All three answered the question of position on the continuum that has separation from and rapprocehment with the larger society at opposite ends. Of course, they answered the question differently. The grandparents reconciled themselves to the expectations of their conservative parishioners while the author rebelled against the expectations of a later Mennonite generation.
Cynthia Yoder and her husband reunited and now live in a pluralistic area of New Jersey. She does not indicate clearly where she ended up on the continuum of rebellion against and reconciliation with her family’s religious tradition. This inconclusive conclusion is appropriate because, to make an out-of-context application of an ethical principle articulated by Rudolf Bultmann and Joseph Fletcher, she is still alive and presumably determines daily, in accordance with the day’s challenges, the respective roles of her family’s conservative Mennonite heritage and the more permissive norms of the larger society in her selbstverständnis and lifestyle.
Scholars of contemporary American religious practice should find Crazy Quilt an engaging account. As the author notes, this memoir is not reflective of Mennonite culture as a whole. However, it contributes to the anthropological study of Mennonite society by providing a firsthand, intergenerational account of the similarities and differences of three individuals’ approaches to their shared Mennonite tradition.
Yoder uses the story of about a year in her life after college graduation and marriage as the linchpin that holds together a comparison of her struggles with conventional Mennonite mores and the struggles of her relatives, still in Pennsylvania. Interwoven with her autobiography for that time period are the recollections that her grandparents, Henry and Elizabeth (Betts), provided after she returned temporarily to her community of origin.
Yoder’s perspective is hybrid, with both internal and external features. On the one hand, her approach is rooted in conservative Mennonite culture. Her father and grandfather were ministers who strove to maintain cultural mores. On the other hand, she was raised in a largely non-Mennonite town, fully aware of practices within the larger society in which her family forbade her to participate. During and after her college years, she tended toward the practices of the larger society and questioned her traditional religious beliefs.
Matters came to a head while she was in graduate school. She experienced symptoms that she found disturbing. I would summarize her description by calling the symptoms depressive with hallucinatory features. She and her husband began a temporary separation, during which he reconnected with the people and places he had experienced as the son of Mennonite missionaries and she began psychotherapy and returned home to collect oral histories from her grandparents and other relatives.
Both the therapy and the oral histories represent parallel processing. Yoder made progress with the help of a therapist whose background resembled hers at least in terms of his being a Mennonite with professional training and socialization outside of the group’s mores. Thus, the success of the therapeutic relationship may be explained as a product of the therapist’s helping her chart a path in some respects like his own. Likewise, Yoder’s grandparents turned out not to be the perfectly conservative individuals of her memory. They expressed frustration with some aspects of conservative Mennonite culture that they found limiting, even stifling. In this respect, while Yoder and her grandparents followed different paths, they did so in response to their struggles with the same issue. All three answered the question of position on the continuum that has separation from and rapprocehment with the larger society at opposite ends. Of course, they answered the question differently. The grandparents reconciled themselves to the expectations of their conservative parishioners while the author rebelled against the expectations of a later Mennonite generation.
Cynthia Yoder and her husband reunited and now live in a pluralistic area of New Jersey. She does not indicate clearly where she ended up on the continuum of rebellion against and reconciliation with her family’s religious tradition. This inconclusive conclusion is appropriate because, to make an out-of-context application of an ethical principle articulated by Rudolf Bultmann and Joseph Fletcher, she is still alive and presumably determines daily, in accordance with the day’s challenges, the respective roles of her family’s conservative Mennonite heritage and the more permissive norms of the larger society in her selbstverständnis and lifestyle.
Scholars of contemporary American religious practice should find Crazy Quilt an engaging account. As the author notes, this memoir is not reflective of Mennonite culture as a whole. However, it contributes to the anthropological study of Mennonite society by providing a firsthand, intergenerational account of the similarities and differences of three individuals’ approaches to their shared Mennonite tradition.
February 27, 2025
Beautiful insight into the mennonite community and a persons struggles and development
March 7, 2018
This one is about a Mennonite family that lives in my hometown- I highly recommend it, esp since it has recipes for fashnauts and dutch goose!
January 23, 2020
A love story and a journey home back to the author's Pennsylvania German Mennonite roots in rural, Eastern PA.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews