Gardeners of the Soul: Life Mentors on a Journey of Faith

By Mary Elizabeth Nelson

Mary Elizabeth Nelson was raised in the area of Wisconsin known as the Holyland. Her early understanding of life and God was shaped by the culture and her mentors in this German Catholic environment. Life events challenged her belief in God until, as a young adult, she gradually recognized Jesus as a real, historical person, and as the Son of God. Mentors have continued to be God’s provision, “gardeners of her soul” through their example and words.

Gardeners of the Soul highlights some of the most influential people in Mary’s life. This includes Dorothy Mannenbach Krebsbach, and Aloys Krebsbach, her parents; Elizabeth Mannenbach, her grandmother; Father Benjamin Blied, her parish priest; and Sister Agnessa her high school art teacher; her husband Lindy, seminary professors and writers; and friends from the churches at which Lindy pastored in Belvidere, IL, Brooklyn Center, MN, and Minocqua, WI; coworkers from Lakeland High School and the Marshfield School District; along with the lifelong examples of Marshfield, WI and missionary friends serving around the world.

You make known to me the path of life;
You will fill me with joy in your presence with eternal pleasures...
Psalm 16:11 (NIV)

About the Author
Mary enjoys studying the Scriptures, reading great writers, gardening, hiking and traveling with her husband, and visiting her children and their families on the East Coast. Mary and her husband live in Wisconsin, where Lindy is a hospital chaplain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aneko Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781622451920

Mary Elizabeth Nelson

Mary enjoys studying the Scriptures, reading great writers, gardening, hiking and traveling with her husband, and visiting her children and their families on the East Coast. Mary and her husband live in Wisconsin, where Lindy is a hospital chaplain.

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Gardeners of the Soul (SM Front).jpg

Gardeners of the Soul

Life Mentors on a Journey of Faith

Mary Elizabeth Nelson

Contents

Ch. 1: Life in Wisconsin’s Holyland

Ch. 2: Student of the Scriptures

Ch. 3: Seminary Challenges

Ch. 4: Pastor, Teacher, Common Threads

Ch. 5: The Art of Learning, the Art of Teaching

Ch. 6: To Feel God’s Pleasure

Afterword

Meet the Author

To Lindy, my lifelong love and stalwart partner in Christ

Drawing Class

If you ever asked me

how my drawing classes are going,

I would tell you that I enjoy

adhering to the outline of a thing,

to follow the slope of an individual pear

or the curve of a glossy piano.

And I love trailing my hand

over the smooth membrane of the bond,

the intelligent little trinity

of my fingers gripping the neck of the pencil

while the other two dangle below

like the fleshy legs of a tiny swimmer.

I would add that I can get lost

crosshatching the shadow of a chair

or tracing and retracing

the slight undercarriage of a breast.

Even the preparations call out to me –

taping the paper to a wooden board,

brushing its surface clean,

and sharpening a few pencils to a fine point.

The thin hexagonal pencil

is mightier than the pen,

for it can modulate from firm to faint

and shift from thin to broad

whenever it leans more acutely over the page –

the bright yellow pencil,

which is also mightier than the sword

for there is no erasing what the sword can do.

We all started with the box and ball,

then moved on to the cup and the lamp,

the serrated leaf, the acorn with its cap.

But I want to graduate to the glass decanter

and learn how to immobilize in lead

translucent curtains lifted in the air.

I want to draw

four straight lines that will connect me

to the four points of the compass,

to the bright spires of cities,

the overlapping trellises,

the turning spokes of the world.

One day I want to draw freehand

a continuous figure

that will begin with me

when the black tip touches the paper

and end with you when it is lifted

and set down beside a luminous morning window.

– Billy Collins¹

1 Billy Collins, Drawing Class, Mississippi Review, Fall 2003, University of Southern Mississippi; or The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems (New York, NY: Random House, 2005).

Chapter 1

Life in Wisconsin’s Holyland

The protocol for hanging fresh laundry (outdoors, of course) began with washing the clothesline so the clothes didn’t get dirty. Clothespins were never left on the lines when not in use. They too became dirty. Whites were hung with whites, colors with colors, as long as that did not prevent putting unmentionables on the inside lines, where they wouldn’t be seen by the neighbors. Every item had a specific direction in which it was properly hung.

Laundry told a story for the world to read. How often did your mother change her brassiere in a week? Was everything properly mended? (Another specific and frugal skill of life in the Holyland.) Did you do your laundry early enough to have everything dry, properly folded into the basket, and in the house before dark? This required foreknowledge of the anticipated Monday weather forecast via the radio broadcast.

In the winter, sheets and towels could still be hung outdoors to freeze dry. Grandma used her large, second-floor, covered, airing porch for this, which meant she climbed from her basement wringer washer and rinse tubs to the second floor with each basket full of wet linens. My mother (Grandma’s first-class protégé in most things German) hung our laundry in the old, stone-walled basement of our house during the winter months. Dad fastened the lines high and taut so nothing hung on them would touch the old floor. If it was your job to take the dry laundry off those basement lines, you descended alone to the darkened basement. The few bare bulbs that were screwed into ceiling sockets cast dim light into corners of the large rooms. Singing at the top of your lungs the entire time, so the mice residing there during the winter months would stay in hiding, you finished your work and fled.

Much of this fresh, clean, dry laundry would then be sprinkled with water, rolled up item by item or in like groups of items (pillowcases), and put in large, zippered laundry bags, set aside to thoroughly dampen for ironing – clothing, bedding, brassieres, and boxer shorts included. Fortunately, my mother liked to iron, and only certain people were to be trusted with doing it correctly.

Martha Stewart, I notice you and many others have pages and pages of Internet instructions on how to hang laundry – all quite humorous. Grandma and Mom could have written the book on all things laundry, cleaning, and home care. And Grandma, if she’d had time left over, could also have written the books on sewing, mending, vegetable and flower gardening, canning, and baking. To this day, I procrastinate on dusting due to permanent emotional damage from the childhood trauma of it all. Our son left Dust me messages on dressers when returning to college after a home visit.

Growing up in close-knit, German Wisconsin, agricultural communities involved strict cultural mores that we, as children, never considered unusual. Daily life revolved around family, extended family, faith, church, and school, and though social life and religious practices were very structured, they also included fun and many celebrations.

A settlement area historically known as the Holyland lies north of State Highway 23 and is bordered on the west by Lake Winnebago. Traveling along Highway 151 north from Fond du Lac at the southwestern corner of that area, then east on that highway as far as New Holstein, a person can turn south, completing the circuit of ten communities within the Holyland by returning to Fond du Lac via Highway 23. The European settlers who migrated to this area were Germanic Roman Catholics. This area was settled via chain migration, as the earliest European settlers (beginning in the 1830s) wrote about it and sent for others from their homelands, extolling the merits of the farming region and life. My maternal ancestors emigrated mainly from the areas of Rieden, Germany, and Hessis, Germany, near Alsace-Lorraine, France, arriving in the United States around the 1850s. Paternal ancestors emigrated from the Kirsbach and Welcherath, Germany areas, also arriving in the 1850s.

These people settled and developed clustered agricultural communities, each of which had a Roman Catholic Church and a Catholic elementary school to serve the faith and educational needs of the families. Both were crucial to these immigrants. There were no other churches and no public schools.

Johnsburg, the farming village I grew up in, is named after John the Baptist, and it was my paternal grandparents’ home community. My maternal grandparents lived in Mt. Calvary, along with other relatives, seven miles away. There were uncles, aunts, and cousins in St. Cloud, another five miles beyond Mt. Calvary. Some of the surrounding villages were named Jericho, St. Anna, St. Peter, and Marytown; the Holyland label makes sense when perusing a Wisconsin state map of the area.

Thinking outside the box independently was not acceptable in this culture in the 1950s and 1960s, and resulted in extended periods of loneliness for me while growing up. Being the oldest daughter in our family and the oldest granddaughter on my mother’s side of the family (of the thirty-nine maternal grandchildren), I had many responsibilities at an early age, beginning with sibling caretaking. Cultural pride and high family expectations resulted in no lack of self-importance or bossiness on my part. I was faithful to our religion and God, to what I was taught at home and in our Catholic elementary school, working my way to heaven via great doses of obsessive guilt, which was far from obvious to me until adulthood.

God, in faithful, gracious love, sprinkled my life full of good, tangible mentors and teachers, beginning in these childhood years. After I’d come to understand the gift of these people and their guidance, patterns of God’s provision became evident. Webster’s dictionary defines a mentor as an experienced and trusted adviser; a guide; trainer or teacher. This is an intentional relationship and is true of some who’ve influenced me. The movement of teachers into, through, and out of my life has been continuous. Others who’ve altered my life direction or thinking have done so through writing or being fully committed to what they’re called to be. Some have modeled maturity, provided confidence, or exhibited generous hearts. People offering genuine friendship, busy changing themselves – who they were and what they lived – drew me in. Deeply. Spiritually.

Each of our stories is unique. No two siblings or cousins experience or own the same family story. Most people’s stories include more suffering and difficulty than my own, but none are without God’s providing knowledge of Himself² and His walking alongside each of us.³ I believe the advantages of growing up in a family and culture of limited income – with far less emphasis on physical things, money, and career status – outweighed the disadvantages. It curbed some of my pride and contributed to a strong work ethic and focus on people and God. My personal understanding of and appreciation for these individuals and spiritual leaders continues to grow in this world of people often consumed with themselves. May the brief glimpses into these lives add appreciation for those God has provided in your life.

* * * *

Dorothy Mannenbach Krebsbach, my mother, influenced my life for sixty-two years. As in many parent-child relationships, ours went through drastic changes throughout that time. Learning experiences can be, in retrospect, positive by choice, even if periods of the relationship and the experiences themselves were not. My earliest memories of Mom were of a ceaseless, working, family organizer. With the help of our father and grandmother, she adapted to the addition of three younger siblings who followed my older brother, John, and me. I remember the flurry of activity and visitors – especially Grandma – who came to stay, cook, and bake, when Mom came home from the hospital with each of my younger sisters