Haban R ...me?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Holy Spirit visited the Catholic Church in a weird and wonderful way. A group of students and professors were on a retreat at Duquesne University, a Catholic college in Pittsburgh. They were all familiar with the Book of Acts, which tells how the early Church gets its start when the Holy Spirit comes on Pentecost and showers it with all sorts of spiritual gifts, healing, prophecy, and tongues being some of the more spectacular ones. The retreatants wondered why these gifts were not apparent in the Catholic Church at present. Could it be that they weren't around because nobody was praying and asking for them? The retreatants decide to lay hands on one another, just like in the Book of Acts, pray and ask, and, yep, that proved to be the way to receive those gifts, just like in the early Church. Those students and professors experienced a profound presence of God as well as all the spiritual gifts the early Church received on Pentecost. This Catholic Pentecostalism, later called the Charismatic Renewal, now spread like wildfire through the Catholic Church. Soon many parishes had charismatic prayer groups where people laid hands on one another, asking for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. They prayed for the Holy Spirit to give them a closer relationship with God. They prayed for healing, words of prophecy and the related gifts. They prayed in tongues. In short, these charismatic prayer groups resembled the early Church as seen in the Book of Acts. As a high school senior, I became part of such a group in my local parish, renewing my relationship with God and saying yes to all the wonder and weirdness that went with it. (Praying in tongues? Seriously? Yeah...)

Reading this book had a profound impact on me - 1969 edition!

The summer after my senior year in high school, several months after I became involved with the prayer group, I was pumping gas at a gas station when a hippie-esque guy at the next pump with a flannel shirt, long hair and a southern drawl struck up a conversation. He pointed to a copy of the then ubiquitous Good News for Modern Man New Testament I had lying on my dashboard. “Hey, man. Are you saved?” he asked. (Really, just like that...) I wasn't certain how to answer. “Saved” was not part of my Catholic vocabulary at the time. I hesitated, then said, “Well, I'm a Catholic Pentecostal...” The southern gentleman's eyes got real wide and he said, “Wow! Cool, man! I didn't know Catholics were allowed to do that!” (Really, just like that...)

Up until this point, I thought my spiritual renewal/prayer group experience was a uniquely Catholic thing. After my gas station encounter I was left with questions: If the hippie-esque guy didn't know that Catholics were allowed to do “that”, what other religious groups out there did he know that were allowed to do “that”? Was what I was experiencing now in my spiritual life not a uniquely Catholic thing? Two months later I started my freshman year at a state college, rubbing shoulders with all different flavors of Christians. I found out that, indeed, I was “saved”, and I certainly fit the description of being a born-again Christian, having given my life over to Jesus Christ in a decidedly committed way. I remained a Catholic Pentecostal/Charismatic and was accepted as such by most of the other Christians I met on campus, though, like the guy at the gas station, some were puzzled by the Catholic/Pentecostal combo of this Catholic born-again-saved Christian girl.

In reading through the (small) Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren, Volume II,* I found several entries describing a life lived by the Hutterites in a decidedly Book of Acts manner. They relied on God for everything... just like in Acts; they laid hands on those they sent out to spread the gospel...just like in Acts; certain godly leaders had prophetic visions and dreams...just like in Acts.**
  In Johannes Waldner's introduction to his edition of the Chronicle, he highlights the second chapter of Acts, describing the coming of the Holy Spirit:

“...the power of God's Holy Spirit as it came visibly upon the gathered believers in Jerusalem at Pentecost. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in new tongues, telling in every language under heaven of the great things God had done.”

He then goes on to emphasize the part of Acts 2 that fleshes out the uniquely Hutterite call to hold all things in common, the life they sought to live for God's glory:

“They met constantly to hear the apostles teach and to share the common life, to break bread, and to pray. A sense of awe was in every soul and many marvels and signs were done through the apostles. Those who were now believers came together and had everything in common. They sold their property and possessions and distributed them to all, as the need of each required. All were of one mind, daily attending the temple together, breaking bread together in their homes and sharing their meals with heartfelt joy as they praised God; and the people looked on them with favor. Day by day the Lord added to their number those whom he was saving.”

Prophetic words, like those in the book of Acts, are related in a matter-of-fact manner. In a 1551 entry in the Chronicle, after describing an incident of robbery where the Hutterites did not resist the plundering, the chronicler credited God with both His forewarning and His deliverance.

“Certainly, the prophet spoke the truth when he said, “In all the neighboring places there will be a violent attack on all who fear the Lord. They will be like doves; not one will be spared. Their enemies will plunder and destroy all who fear the Lord. They will take their goods and drive them out of their homes. Then it will be known who my faithful people are, who have stood the test like gold in the assayer's fire. 'Listen, my beloved,' says the Lord, 'understand that the days of harsh suffering are here, but I will rescue you. Away with your fears and doubts, for God is your leader!'” And truly God rescued his people and led them, otherwise not one would have been left. They would have been swallowed up like water on dry earth. But God upheld them and protected their faith.”

In a 1555 entry, a nobleman, pretending to be in sympathy with the local Hutterite believers, asked if the Holy Spirit came to a person through the laying on of hands. The “faithful servant of God” responded firmly, “Yes, but to varying degrees.” The nobleman did not want to hear that, but it was a very Hutterite/Acts/Charismatic answer. And throughout the Chronicle there are references to the Hutterites living a very Acts/Charismatic life. Prophetic words warn and encourage, people are prayed for and have hands laid upon them as they are sent off to be missionaries to the surrounding towns. God is called upon and trusted to do amazing acts of deliverance, quite literally, from prisons, not unlike the apostle Peter's supernatural jail break in Acts 12.*** All in all, the Hutterites were living life with the Holy Spirit.

It's been over 50 years since I first called myself a Catholic Pentecostal/Charismatic. If I had to describe what I am now, I'd say I'm still at heart a Catholic Charismatic, but one who finds herself on what is turning into a long and possibly permanent sabbatical in the Protestant evangelical church. I've come a long way since the gas pump epiphany, going from what I thought was a uniquely Catholic experience to a bigger vision, seeing myself as part of the larger Body of Christ. But as I look back at my Haban/Hutterite family history, I see that I did have a decided hereditary leaning to that Book of Acts life that my ancestors immersed their lives in. I found that Haban R...me.

* My primary source for details on the Hutterite life.  See https://habanrus.blogspot.com/2018/07/imnot-making-this-stuff-up-ihave-love.html

**I personally believe that everyone should read the Book of Acts once a year. Its a great picture of what the Christian life could and should look like in all its wondrous glory and weirdness. No wonder those retreatants at Duquesne University wanted in after reading it...

***You really so have to read Acts. Great stuff...

Written From the Haban Heart

Love of Letters - Sobotište

Part 2

“Blessings from the Heavenly Father!”

“We too thank God for our children and pray he will direct them in this complicated world.”

“The good Lord has taken her to Himself.”

“Easter is coming so I wish you and your dear family joy in the Risen Christ.”

“He keeps well with the help of medication, fruit, tea, cooked wine and faith in God.”

I could probably convince my readers that the above quotes are from some 19th century correspondence, or perhaps, excerpts from some foreign missionary's letters back home. They are, however, a sampling of excerpts from the collection of letters written in the 1990s between my mother and her Haban cousins in Sobotište and Moravský Svätý Ján. In my last post, I mentioned the 40 plus letters my mother had translated from Slovak to English so my aunts and my brother and I could be party to the correspondence. At the time I first read these letters, I saw them as a glimpse into the political workings of the new Slovakia, a country coming out of Soviet control in 1989 (the “Velvet Revolution”) and then the separation of Czechoslovakia in 1993 into two separate countries (the “Velvet Divorce”). There was much in the letters about life now free from Communist rule and the economic challenges of Slovakia and the Czech Republic going their separate ways. Recent readings of these letters, however, revealed a unique emphasis on certain subjects and use of certain language that I would come to see as distinctly Haban.

The above quotes were just a few of the examples of “God language” that naturally occurred in letters from many of Mom's correspondents. But more than the language and phrasing, the subject matter of the letters themselves were often spiritual in nature, church life and missionary pursuits a part of everyday conversation. Part of this natural emphasis on church life I'm sure is due to a new freedom to talk about such things after years of Communist suppression. Still, there is a distinctly Haban vibe in many of the letters, people who are intimately connected to the things of God as they go about their everyday lives.

The return of freedom of religion and the present priest shortage was a frequent topic in the letters, especially the ones from Sobotište, Grandma's hometown. Under Communist rule, religions of every flavor had been persecuted. The Habans in Grandma and Grandpa's hometowns were their own flavor of Roman Catholicism by this time as was the majority of people in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia. From the end of World War II until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Catholics in Slovakia were especially earmarked for persecution, not unlike many of their Hutterite ancestors. Catholic priests and leaders were imprisoned and the few priests that were allowed to remain publicly free were often elderly. Mom's cousin Cilka, daughter of Grandma's brother Josef a.k.a. Uncle Pepi writes:

Here in Slovakia there is a great shortage of priests because under the communist government they did not allow young men to study for the priesthood. Of those that did apply, they only accepted a small number and only those that would be loyal to them (the Communists). They would not accept any recommended by the local priests.

There were also whispers of an underground church, young ordained priests who had secular day jobs and hid their true calling to avoid being jailed. I had a faint recollection, as a child, of hearing about some relative in Slovakia who was a clandestine priest, forced to flee the country when the communists took over Czechoslovakia. I think it was the Father Cerny mentioned in the following letter. Mom's cousin Josef, Uncle Pepi's son and brother to Cilka, wrote in a March 1993 letter an interesting history of the priest shortage and what priest life was like under Communist rule:

...Under Communism even though many young men wanted to be priests, they would not take them. For the whole of Slovakia they only allowed 10-12 priests which was very little. Up until now from Sobotište we only had two priests, Father Baumgartner and Father Rafael Cerny.

...When the Communists came, they locked them all up, together with the rectors and bishop. When they were released they were put to work in factories. After many years he (Father Baumgartner) was assigned to a parish but died at age 64...Father Cerny this year returned from Rome. He was out of the country since 1950. If he had stayed home they would have locked him up as they did his brother priests who were sentenced to 15-20 years hard labor, digging in the mines for the Soviets to make atomic weapons. Many of them never came home but died in those mines. At the time of the sentencing, the Salesians (to which Father Cerny belongs) 43 received sentences of 188 years – 18 of them from Slovakia. Altogether there were 171 priests and religious sentenced, of these five were released and the rest received 756 years and 7 months. Those who were able to leave the country are slowly returning. The young priests are going to Russia. Last week nine of them left for Siberia to work in the missions. We here at home must make the best of it. The ones going to Russia are the young ones and the ones who are returning, like Father Cerny, are mostly old oriests. Father Cerny is working in a Salesian Seminary at Sastin. So many young men are signing up that they cannot even take them all. By us there were many well educated priests who worked as engineers, doctors, etc. These all held civilian jobs. Here in Sobotište two young men used to come to our house to visit. One was an architect and the other a chemist and they worked in Senica. In 1990 when all the changes came, the older one celebrated Holy Mass in our church. The people cried as no one knew he was a priest. The second one will be ordained in Bratislava and we are invited...Even the town of Senica has woken up. In the past 100 years they had no new priests and now they have three priests and two studying. Also two girls have entered the convent as did our Erka and Janka (Josef's daughters).

There were many letters from both Cilka and Josef in my mother's collection, almost all mentioning spiritual topics. The comings and goings of priests and nuns were commonly talked about and what mission fields they had been sent to. Cilka's daughter, Ludka, writes of a spiritual pilgrimage she went on. In later letters, Cilka tells of the pilgrimage she herself goes on. Sadly, Josef's wife dies during this time and his letter, informing my mother that "God called her to himself" also contained a listing of the nuns, priests and theologians that attended her funeral – five priests, two theologians and 30 nuns, a number not surprising since two of Josef's daughters were Salesian sisters. Subsequent letters from Josef talk of his daughters' mission work in Russia and the comings and goings of the young priests in Slovakia. Josef writes with some pride:

Our Republic is quite small but when it comes to religion it's pretty big. We have missionaries all over the world in Japan, Albonshu (Albania?), Modagshari (in Kenya?), Brazil, Equador, Ukraine, China and Russia, in Siberia.

Despite the ongoing priest shortage, there seemed to be a self-sacrificing pride about the number of missionaries sent to countries with an even greater spiritual need. How Haban...

 

Written From the Heart

Love of Letters

Part I

A few years back, in the cleaning out of possessions a.k.a. downsizing, I discovered I had kept every letter anyone had ever written to me...every single one... Since my letter writing career started in middle school, there were a LOT of letters, the bulk of them from my high school and college years, diminishing in number in the years after. I decided to be relatively ruthless in my getting rid of most of them, but not without reading them first. My history-minded son was appalled: “Mom, this is primary source historical material from the 60s and 70s!” With his words ringing in my ears, I did my reading cautiously, erring on the side of keeping more than I originally intended.

There were letters from high school friends away at other colleges, some describing the spiritual climate of their campuses. It was at the height of the Jesus Movement, and strangely, some of these letters read like Paul's epistles or the book of Acts, telling of the amazing things God was doing in their groups at school. These letters were keepers. There was post-high school gossip from back home and the sweetly awkward letters from guys who were “just friends” who were navigating relational dramas and college adjustments. These letters were read and tossed. Actually, most letters contained relational drama, girls away at school struggling with being separated from high school boyfriends in distant colleges. There was a large collection of letters from two high school friends, one telling of the history of the friend's relationship with the guy she would eventually marry and is still with fifty years later. The other collection told a similar story, but since I had lost touch with this friend several years after college, I had no idea how the story ended. I tracked both friends down, got their addresses and sent them each a large envelope full of the “primary source” documents of their early love. I hope they enjoyed reading those letters as much as I did. And, of course, I kept every letter written to me by my now husband back when we were dating long distance during his early years in graduate school.

My downsizing letter adventure, though a lot of work, was, for the most part fun, a blast from the past. It did, however, make me a little sad to think the texting/email generation is not likely to ever experience that same adventure, both the overwhelming trauma of wading through a massive stash of old letters and the “primary source” joy of finding both delightful and painful memories from their distant past. But maybe there is hope. I have a son who owns a manual typewriter and writes letters to friends which he snail mails.

In an earlier post*, I talked about the main existing primary source of Haban/Hutterite history, the combined volumes of the The Great and “Small” Chronicles of the Hutterian Brethren, a series of journals detailing the life of the Hutterites from 1517 through the 1800s. In many ways, these read like letters to the Hutterite people themselves, a communal history, the narrative peppered with personal plural pronouns and adjectives - “we”, “our”, “us”. The Chronicles may have all the trappings of history books, but at the heart of these writings is a letter-like familiarity toward all those Hutterites that were yet to be born. Those to come would want to know what God was doing among those who came before them, what relational dramas played out, even what community gossip there might have been...not unlike the kinds of writing I found in my long-kept stash of letters.

During my downsizing adventure I found a stack of letters that hadn't even been written to me, but to my mother, letters I somehow inherited. My mother, who was fluent in Slovak, corresponded with several cousins in Slovakia until her death. Most she had only met once during a trip to Czechoslovakia in 1938, but she knew them for years through their letters. For about a twelve year period in the early 1990s through 2002, my mom thought it a good idea to take every letter she received from those relatives in Slovakia and translate them into English and pass copies on to whoever might like to read them. A second rereading of this collection of letters revealed lots of what I can only call “Habanisms”, phrases and sentiments common to those with Haban background and totally missing from contemporary letter writing in this country. They'll be the subject of my next post.

In the pre-texting, pre-emailing and pre-affordable phone culture letter writing is what people did to keep connected. While this letter writing was common for the time, I wonder how much of the Hutterite/Haban chronicling gene has come down the family line. Has it shown up in the family letter writing? In addition to my mother's ongoing correspondence with cousins, Grandma also wrote her brother and cousins in Sobotiste. Grandpa wrote his sisters in Svaty Jan. According to my mother's memoir of Grandma and Grandpa, Grandpa had a particularly frequent correspondence with his sister Anna, called Nanina. She wrote long newsy letters, would sometimes write about her dreams and would send pieces of poetry to Grandpa. So much writing. Has the chronicling gene been behind my mom's memoir of Grandma and Grandpa, my cousins' documentation of their own father's life and military career? Is it why my son writes letters on his typewriter? Is it responsible for me embarking on this open-ended chronicle-like writing project blog because, well, Haban R us?

*https://habanrus.blogspot.com/2018/07/imnot-making-this-stuff-up-ihave-love.html

 

Written on the Heart

Love of Lettering

Amid my large collection of art paraphernalia, I find I have a disproportionate amount of calligraphy materials – books, print outs of fonts, nibs and pens, ancient Speedball textbooks. I've always been interested in lettering, so some of these materials are mine, acquired for various printing projects. The majority of materials, however, I inherited from my mother who enthusiastically pursued calligraphy in her retirement years. Mom always had an artistic bent and briefly attended Cooper Union as an art major back in day when Greenwich Village in New York City was the cool place to be an art major. She eventually decided that the art school was a bit too cool for her and her style of art and left to pursue a career as a secretary. When she retired in her 60s, she immediately started taking art classes. There were oil and acrylic painting classes as well as watercolor, but her most repeated classes were always calligraphy. Birthday cards to me and my kids were masterpieces of simple painting and ornate hand lettering. She did a few commissioned pieces for friends and her church, but mainly she lettered because she loved it. And she was good at it.

I always assumed I inherited my artistic abilities from my mom, including my interest in calligraphy, but never thought to look further back than Mom for this seemingly hereditary interest. In researching our Haban roots, I came across an article* about Hutterites and calligraphy. I already knew about their long association with painted pottery, but was surprised to find that they had a long history as calligraphers. This history starts before the Haban, even before the Hutterites themselves, and goes back to the early Anabaptists at the time of the Protestant Reformation.** Initially, the Anabaptists made use of the Fraktur script, a medieval German lettering that was made on geometric principals using a ruler and a compass, then “fractured” (broken up) into the letter design. It is somewhat similar in appearance to what is called Old English lettering, most often associated with Christmas cards and carol titles. This Fraktur lettering survived well past the Middle Ages as it became the go to lettering of the printing press in the early Gutenberg days. The literate Anabaptists jumped at the chance to print their books and Bibles, but when persecution caught up with them, as it always did, they were banned from using the printing press and resorted to hand copying their texts. The ornate Fraktur lettering was initially used, but as divisions occurred among the Anabaptists and they were chased all over Europe, they ended up in different places and were exposed to different lettering. Mennonites went west, taking Fraktur with them. The Hutterites went east with their Fraktur lettering, but now were exposed to the classical Roman lettering know as Antiqua. This became their new go-to lettering for copying Latin texts, keeping the old Fraktur lettering for the “barbaric” languages. The Hutterites were also exposed to Turkish and Arabic calligraphy in the then Turkish-occupied Hungary. The Hutterites may have adopted some of the stylings of the Arabic calligraphy, but more significantly they copied the reverence and perfection with which the Turks copied the Qu'ran. The Hutterites applied this reverence to the copying of the Bible, and both boys and girls were taught to read and copy the Bible carefully by hand in the Hutterite schools. As a result, Hutterites were often respected in the illiterate rural communities they had settled into, protected and employed by the upper class because of their literacy and precise calligraphic skills.

Fraktur

Antiqua

The Hutterites who fled Grandma and Grandpa's towns, choosing not to stay and become Haban, took their love of lettering with them. Hutterite girls in the Dakotas and Canada incorporated the Fraktur and Antiqua lettering into their hand embroidered samplers. But examples of lettering still exist in Haban towns as well. The picture of the book below, found on the facebook page Habánsky dom o.z. Moravský Svätý Ján, is a good representation of the Fraktur lettering, the book possibly a copy of one of the Hutterite chronicles. From the neatness of the lettering I suspect that the book was printed on a press and not hand-lettered. (I have no idea what is written on the open pages, though the side bar of the facebook page, written in Slovak, contains the names Cederle, Tschetter, Pullman, Wirth, Baumgartner, Muller and Kleinedler, all Haban names related to Grandma and Grandpa in some way.)

Mom's love of lettering may have been more caught than taught, though I don't think she had any inkling of the Haban heredity that might have influenced her foundness for fonts. As for me, my choice of lettering when I do letter is less Fraktur and Antiqua and more Drops of Jupiter and Skinny Caps. Still, after finding this lettering connection to the Haban and Hutterite writing, I find myself wanting the precision and reverence of my ancestors to come through in my calligraphy. A perfect and holy Harlott font, perhaps?***

*Maria H. Krisztinkovich, Historical Hungary as Background for Hutterite Needlework in Canada, Hungarian Studies Review, Vol. VIII, No. 1 (Spring 1981) (Don't ask. I run across some of my information in the most serendipitious ways...)

**Check out https://habanrus.blogspot.com/2018/07/thecurse-of-martin-luther-churchhistory.html and https://habanrus.blogspot.com/2018/07/tobaptize-or-not-to-baptize-or-when-to.html if you need a review of Anabaptist/Hutterite/Haban history.

***Yes, this is a popular lettering style.

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. - Jeremian 31:33

 

A Few Tattered Shreds, Redux

Back in the early days of this blog I wrote that I had read somewhere memoirs are about what we remember and not necessarily about what actually happened...and I could not accurately remember who said that. I also wrote about one of my favorite writers, John Gierach, and his amusingly believable essay on remembering. He says our recollections are influenced and made up of many variables – mood, surroundings, other people, various levels of self-perception - “and a few tattered shreds of what actually happened.”* This certainly proved true in both Grandma and Grandpa's baptism stories. Grandma always celebrated her birthday on December 29, but her official birthdate, according to the baptismal records was December 28. What was the actual day of her birth? Who knows? Was she born at midnight? Maybe. Overall, this one day discrepancy is probably not a big deal in a culture where name days – the feast day of the saint one was named after - were more likely to be celebrated than birthdays. The bigger deviation from remembered facts, however, is more significant in the names, numbers and birthdates of Grandpa's sisters.

In my mother's memoir of Grandma and Grandpa, Remembering Mama and Papa, she writes of Grandpa's sisters:

Papa was brought up with five sisters. Two other sisters died at birth...Papa had one sister who was younger than him, Katerina...

Mom had written this memoir a number of years after Grandpa had died, so she was writing from memory of Grandpa's memory of his family. He was 92 when he died, and, granted, he was a sharp 92, but his memory was probably less than perfect in remembering the exact ages and order of the sisters that surrounded him growing up, most of whom he had not seen in close to 70 years. In the interest of accurate family history, I will use the baptismal records and Mom's memoir of Grandpa to attempt to make sense of the house full of girls Grandpa grew up with. (Remember, names and spellings are pretty arbitrary in the historical records and family usage.)

Julianna and Maria, twins, were the oldest. Maria died at or soon after birth. Julianna, referred to as Julia, lived into her 80s or 90s.

Theresia was next. According to the memoir, she died of pneumonia or diphtheria as a young married woman leaving behind a despondent husband who killed himself. Their young son was raised by his father's relatives in Vienna.

Then comes Maria, known as Mary. She is the second Maria, and unlike her earlier namesake, she lives to a ripe old age. In her later years she lives in the family home in the Haban section of Moravsky Svaty Jan. She is best know in this blog as the sister whose picture makes it into the book, Hutterite Society.**

Photo of Grandpa's sister, Mary, taken from the book Hutterite Society by J
ohn Hostetler, (1997)

Rosalia dies at birth. This is one of the two infants that is not mentioned in the memoir, and I never heard Grandpa speak of her, though she would have died almost four years before Grandpa was born.

Catharina is referred to in the memoir as the one sister younger than Grandpa. She is, in fact, two years older than he. She was know as Tecinka Katina and was godmother to my mother and two of her sisters. She lost a husband in World War I, remarried, then moved to Sobotiste, the town Grandma grew up in, where she and her new husband ran a grocery store. She died suddenly in her 50s.

Grandpa – Andreas/Andrew – is the seventh child and only boy.

Amalia/Amelia lives for only a month after her birth. She is the other infant that is never mentioned. Grandpa was only two when she died, so would not remember her. Interestingly, my daughter named her second child Amelia, not knowing that it was a family name.

The youngest is Anna, nicknamed Nanina. According to the memoir, Grandpa was closest to her of all his sisters. They wrote each other long letters frequently over the years. She, too, was in her 90s when she died, eight months before Grandpa died. He had outlived all his sisters.

So, that's the updated story of Grandpa and his sisters. It was kind of fun going through what passed for a data base in the late 1800s, searching for those few tattered shreds of what actually happened and finding the names and dates for all those siblings. It was also encouraging to see the historical shreds were slightly more than a few and probably less tattered than they initially appeared.

Julia, Anna and Maria, rocking the best of Haban women's fashions

*See post from June 8, 2018, A Few Tattered Shreds...

**See post from June 22, 2018, Mary, Mary Quite...Haban

In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer. ― Adam Sisman

 

Baptism – Adults only, please...or not

Back at the very beginning of my Haban discoveries, the historical item that first caught my attention was the journal entry regarding infant baptism.* Up until this point in Hutterite life, babies were not baptized. They may have been blessed or dedicated or committed to God's purposes, but babies were not baptized in the Catholic way of assuring their eternal salvation. Baptism, as such, was a decision for adults who fully understood they were acknowledging they had a new life in Christ. Infants and children, until they reached an age where they, too, could understand this acknowledgment of a new spiritual life, were not to be baptized. In Grandma's town of Sobotiste, this issue between Hutterite belief and Catholic doctrine came to a head in the mid 1700s:

1733: In this year came the terrifying mandate that we should not baptize our newborn babes, but that we must take them to the priests for baptism or suffer a heavy penalty. The elders and the superintendent together with the brethren met at Sobotiste to consult regarding this unheard of order, and decided not without many tears and twangs of conscience, to obey this order, since there was no other way out of this tyranny. This decision caused a great deal of dissatisfaction in the church, and resulted in a division.**

By the time Grandma and Grandpa were born, the Haban attitude toward infant baptism had radically changed in both Sobotiste and Grandpa's town of Svaty Jan. Instead of the insistence that baptism be reserved for those mature enough to make an acknowledgment of faith in Christ, newborns were quickly – very quickly – baptized. In a time of high infant mortality, the Habans had taken on the very Catholic practice of baptizing a baby as soon as possible just in case the worst happened, which it often did. In a later blog post I will go into a thorough historical study of all that happened in Grandma and Grandpa's towns regarding this conflict and subsequent division between Hutterite and Catholic beliefs regarding baptism. For now, I will look at what infant baptism looked like in Grandma and especially Grandpa's family at the time they were born.

According to the story told to her as a child, Grandma was born on December 29^th on a cold and snowy day. She was promptly baptized in the Haban Catholic chapel two days later during a blizzard even though her mother was not yet recovered from her birth to attend the baptism herself. The actual baptismal records back this up...sort of. According to the records, Grandma was born on December 28^th, not the 29^th and baptized on December 31^th. Grandma always celebrated her birthday on the 29^th and it's possible the church records, more interested in recording the baptismal date, got the birth date wrong in this case. Maybe without Grandma's mother present to set things straight, Grandma's father may have given the wrong birth date. Either way, Grandma was baptized quickly.

Grandpa was one of nine children and the only boy.*** Three of his sisters died in infancy, five survived to adulthood. According to the baptismal records, Grandpa and all of his sisters were baptized within one to two days of birth. The first of Grandpa's siblings, twins, were baptized the same day they were born. One of the twins didn't survive. Grandpa himself was born on April 17^th and was baptized on the 18^th.

Below, I've included snips of the actual entries from the baptismal records of Grandma and Grandpa and his sisters. The information given is as follows: First column is what number the child was that year in that church/town. Grandpa (Andreas) was child number 39. Second column is the day of birth, third column the day of baptism. Fourth column is first name of child. Fifth and sixth column is male or female, seventh and eighth column is legitimate or illegitimate birth. The ninth column in the father and mother's names and religion. The tenth column is a mystery – perhaps the name of the priest officiating the baptism? The eleventh column is the names and religion of the godparents. The twelfth column is the baptismal name of the infant, though in most of the cases it does not differ from the given name. There seems to be a note in the second entry for Maria, perhaps because she was the second Maria baptized in the family, the first Maria being the twin that had died. The last column, “observationes”, seems to be a place for comments, though it is mostly used to note if a child survived infancy or not. A small black cross was an indication that the child did not.

(A click on the snips should open them in a larger screen that is easily readable.)

So, the Haban, by the time Grandma and Grandpa were born, had come quite far from their Anabaptist/Hutterite belief of adult baptism only, and now fully embraced the Catholic practice of infant baptism. This departure from the tenet of faith that gave the Anabaptists their very name does seem to be a drastic turn around. After all, these people were persecuted and chased all over Europe for refusing to baptize their infants. The events that led up to this 180 reversal were not pretty. But that's a story for a future blog post...

*That story can be found in the post from June 1, 2018,  Stumbling into the Past, Part 2

**Journal entry found in The Story of the Mennonites by C. Henry Smith

***Fun fact: Grandpa, Andrew Cederle, was the only boy with eight sisters. His son, also Andrew Cederle, was the only boy with four sisters as was his son, another Andrew Cederle, again, the only boy with four sisters. There were at least two more Andrew Cederle's before Grandpa, his father and grandfather, but I have no information regarding their siblings.

The snips of the baptismal records are from the Family Search website, a great collection of old records. (Family Search.org Records Slovakia Church and Synagogue Books, 1592-1935 Roman Catholic (Rímsko-katolícká cirkev) Senica Moravský Svätý Ján Baptisms (Krsty) 1877-189... (Inv. č. 1477 (pokrač.) They can be challenging to decipher since they are all handwritten and vary in quality. Thankfully, whoever was doing the entering of data in the baptismal records of Grandpa's hometown had a relatively clear, neat handwriting. Not so in Grandma's hometown.

 

Now, Where Was I....?

It's been over four years since I last posted on this blog. I apologize, but life got in the way of my writing, and I've been seriously distracted in these intervening years.* And of course, once I got out of the habit of writing and posting, it was hard to get the momentum going again. I think I'm finally at a place where I can resume my research and writing and hope to be more consistent in my posting of all things Haban.

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I stopped at an inconvenient place, right in the middle of looking at basic Hutterite beliefs and how they were or weren't reflected in the lives of Grandma and Grandpa and their descendants. I'll pick up where I left off, but some of you may want to review past posts to refresh your memories of where I was going with all this. I myself had to reread all I had written to figure out where I was headed in my narrative.

In the last several blog posts before my hiatus, we've taken a look at some of the Hutterite beliefs and how they have appeared to filter down into the family line and show itself in the more recent generations. (See the blog post from August 9, 2018 - "Believin'" - if you need a refresh on the beliefs that distinguished the Hutterites, or check the brief cheat sheet below**) We've looked at Grandma's love of reading the Bible, Grandpa's quoting of his wise mother's sayings a.k.a scripture verses ("Word!") and Grandpa's Hutterite-inspired draft dodging ("Put down that sword"). We've taken a virtual tour of the Haban areas of Grandma and Grandpa's hometowns and seen the houses and settlements they and their ancestors lived in in community, sharing all things in common ("We are all in this together."). Today we are going to look at the other areas of Hutterite belief less visible in the lives of Grandma and Grandpa.

Separation of Church and State...a radical idea

...No swearing (of oaths, that is...)

These two Hutterite beliefs were no longer plainly visible in the lives of Grandma and Grandpa's ancestors when they became Haban. I saw no strong manifestation of these two beliefs among my family members when I was growing up. Of course, separation of church and state, no longer the radical idea it was in the days of the European Hutterites, was a given in the twentieth century, especially in the United States. My grandparents would not have to choose it. It was chosen for them. And the society they lived in didn't require any swearing of oaths, except, perhaps, if they were called to give testimony in a trial, something I don't remember either of my grandparents having to do. Overall, I'd say they took gospel writer Matthew at his word and let their yes be yes and their no be no.

Ban 'em...

Obviously, Grandma and Grandpa had no authority to ostracize baptized believers from their company. Grandma, however, was always concerned about who my brother and I chose to hang out with. Were they good people of good behavior and character? Grandma was quick to judge anyone I was dating, and I've said I married my husband because he was the only one of a string of guys that finally met Grandma's approval. (There was one guy of dubious character I had dated who Grandma begrudgingly liked because he used to stop by after work and bring her platters of “leftover” deli meat and cheese as a bribe for her affections. “I like him, but I think he's a wolf,” Grandma decided. She had judged him correctly, and my relationship with him was short-lived.) On the whole, Grandma's attitude toward those she judged as not quite up to par was quite similar to Pride and Prejudice's Mr. Darcy: “My good opinion once lost is lost forever." So, I guess you could say there was a mental ban on some people...

Leading the way...

When the Hutterites became Haban, their alligance was necessarily transferred from their organic leaders to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. As a child, we were taught to have great respect for the priests of our church. In the post Vatican II atmosphere in our parish, by the time we were in high school, we would hang out with the seminarians (pre-priests in Grandma's eyes) and be involved with service and social activities with the young priests assigned to our parish. They were friends to me and my brother, but they were still priests to Grandma and she watched carefully to make sure our friendships were always respectful.

Let's keep Communion...

Though the Hutterites did not believe communion to be the actual and literal body and blood of Christ, they held the celebration of the Lord's Supper in high regard. For them, this meant a once-a-year celebration of taking communion on the day after Easter. They considered this a highlight of their church year. One wonders what the Haban thought when they were forced into Catholicism and had access to the Lord's Supper every day. In our house, we went to church and received communion every Sunday. If Grandma could manage to drag us to weekday mass, we would receive communion more often. When Grandpa retired, Grandma would convince him to come to church with her almost every day. When he gave up driving, she would walk the scant mile to go to daily mass. A younger neighbor, her kids all in school, started going to church everyday because she said she felt guilty seeing Grandma walk past her house every morning when she herself had a car to drive her and the time to go as well.

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A careful reader of this blog will note that as I have looked at Grandma and Grandpa's connection or lack thereof to the nine basic tenets of the Hutterite faith, I have yet to delve into an important Hutterite belief, one that figured prominently into the Hutterites becoming Haban – the issue of infant vs. adult baptism. That deserves a blog post of its own...

*Some of the distractions: two unrelated cancer diagnoses, surgeries, treatments and long recovery times, a pandemic, two granddaughters born, dealing with a major sewer repair while preparing to sell a house, buying a new house and relocating, limping around for five months waiting for hip replacement surgery, and finally having the surgery and all the recovery time that entails. It's a good time to start writing again...

**Review of Basic Hutterite beliefs:

Word! -the importance of the Bible

Baptism – Adults only, please – no infant baptism

Separation of Church and State...a radical idea – no church/government cooperation

No swearing (of oaths, that is...) - no taking of oaths of any kind

Put down that sword - pacificism

Let's keep communion – reverent celebration of the Lord's Supper once a year

Ban 'em - ostracize those baptized adults that don't live a godly life

Leading the way – godly church organization and leadership

We are all in this together – communal lifestyle

Stalking the Haban Houses...

I'm a stalker...I freely admit it...

The little girl who sat on the floor of the dining room in my mother's house, randomly reading out of the set of encyclopedias in the bookcase, searching for any bits of interesting information, has grown into a mature woman who loves the internet. I love google and all its search engines. I love google maps. I love google translate. I love facebook. I stalk in a quiet fly-on-the-wall sort of way, but I do stalk. This blog has given me many opportunities to justify my stalking. It has led me to lots of interesting information and photos and websites, some of which I'd like to share with you today.

As I mentioned yesterday, any Hutterite remnants in our family line of holding all things in common appeared to have faded away by my generation. So I thought I'd like to examine the historical physical remains of the the Bruderhofs in Grandma and Grandpa's home towns, the houses where their ancestors lived when then did share all thing in common.*

Sobotište, Grandma's town, has an intact Habánský dvor, or “Haban Court”. Sobotište had been a large Hutterite settlement and the only Bruderhof that continually existed during the Hutterites' time in Europe. (Unfortunately, there is no street view for the Haban Court.)   There appears to be a concerted effort to restore this part of Hutterite/Haban history into a museum area.  If you are interested, check out this video.  It's in Slovak, I can't figure out how to translate it, but has great shots of the Haban Court and its interiors and it's worth the viewing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV5bp95nP1o

Want more?  I believe the following link to be a proposal for the development of the museum area of the Haban Court.  Scroll down for lots of great pics  (If you want to dig deep, cut and paste into google translate to get the specifics...)

https://docplayer.cz/39889076-Sobotiste-pamiatkova-zona-habansky-dvor-zasady-ochrany-pamiatkoveho-uzemia.html

Old photo of the the Haban Court, Sobotiste

From Hutterite Society by John A. Hostetler

Google maps view of Habansky dvor or Haban Court within and around the loop of road.  Yellow mark in upper right is where Grandma's house is located.  Stodola is barn, mlyn is mill, kluciaren, I have no clue...

Using google maps street view, I did some stalking to find Grandma's house. Below is the house from my blog photo and the street view house as it looks today.  The yellow mark on the above aeriel view shows the location of the house in relation to the Haban Court.  It also shows the long, Bruderhof-style construction.  I don't know the age of the Grandma's house, but I think it is not as old as the houses in the Haban Court.

Grandma's house circa 1938?  That's Grandma's mother in the Haban outfit.

I think this is Grandma's house as it looks today.

Grandpa's town, Moravský Svätý Ján, also has a Habánský dvor, though it appears that it is somewhat behind in being developed into a museum area.  Unlike Grandma, Grandpa's family home was in the the Haban Court.  In a letter to my mother in the 1990s, one of her cousins bemoaned the fact the house was now empty and abandoned.  I did as much stalking on google street view as I could, but again, no street view for the Haban Court in Svätý Ján.  Here is an aeriel shot of the Court, similar in layout to the one in Sobotište.

Haban Court in Moravsky Svaty Jan.  Similar in layout to the one in Sobotiste.

Haban Court in Moravsky Svaty Jan.  Similar in layout to the one in Sobotiste.

Another view of the Haban Court from a Svaty Jan website.  You can see the chapel prominently placed in the center of the Court.  The blue circle is where I think Grandpa's house might still be standing

Below is an old photo of Grandpa's home.  The roof was a classic method of Hutterite construction, clay and thatch, which was both durable and fireproof.  It was later replaced by a shingled roof.

Grandpa's Bruderhof home

Illustration from Hutterite Society by John A. Hostetler, showing the classic thatched clay roof of the Hutterites, just like the roof on Grandpa's house

Looking into the Moravsky Svaty Jan Haban Court area from the outside.  This might be the area where Grandpa's house is located.  Unfortunately, it might be quite run down by now.

If you are interested in more Haban Svätý Ján and are on facebook, check out Habánsky dom o.z. Moravský Svätý Ján.  Translated as "Haban House", this page has old photos and interesting articles and artifacts of the Haban, including the Haban pottery.  The translations are a bit awkward, but mostly understandable.  The photo below is from the facebook page.  I was intrigued by the similarity between this photo and the one above of Grandpa's house, right down to the chickens and geese feeding in the front yard.  This photo is believed to be from the 1930s. 

So like Grandpa's house...

At this point you may be thinking, "Hey, this isn't really stalking, just good historical research."  Well, my "good historical research" into the undeveloped Haban area of Moravský Svätý Ján led me to real estate ads and online news articles about the area.  I noticed the same person's name kept popping up as a byline, as a photo credit.  The person had the same last name as Grandpa's sister Mary's married name.  I looked him up on facebook, read profiles of him on his online newspaper website.  He had pictures of himself attending the annual Habani festival they have in the Habánský dvor section of Moravský Svätý Ján.  A great grandson of Grandpa's sister? (Moravský Svätý Ján is, after all, a small town of about 2,000 people.) I did send him a facebook message, and tried emailing him at work, briefly telling him how we might be related, and if we were, asking if he had any photos of the old family home.  I have yet to hear back from him, so I won't include his name or photo. I'll just end this tour of the Haban courts with an ad for this year's Habánske Hody or "Haban Feast" in Moravský Svätý Ján.  Who knows?   Our maybe cousin may show show up again in the photos.  New opportunities for stalking...

Party like a Haban...music, pie, ceremics

*Don't panic at the size of the pictures. If you click on a photo, it will come up in a larger format.