Refiner’s Fire: Wiebe: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

The prophet is always a problem for those who feel they have the answers.

When The Temptations of Big Bear was awarded the Canadian Governor-General’s Award in fiction in 1973, a large talent became public. Prior to that, we had known Rudy Wiebe as a prize-winning short story writer on the university scene. His first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, with its bluntly honest rendering of a wartime Saskatchewan Mennonite community, grated on evangelical nerves. Wiebe was, at the time of its publication, the editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald. He left the post soon after.

That first book, as awkward and angular as its young Mennonite protagonist, Thom, held much promise. His writing skill, combined with the anguish of honesty, has both deepened and grown, so that I find myself seeing Wiebe as Mrs. Wiens sees her son Thom at the end of Peace Shall Destroy Many: “Huge before her, staring skyward … driving them towards the brightest star in the heavens.”

Wiebe, who is a forthright Christian still active within the evangelical Mennonite Brethren church, looks every inch the prophet: a heavy beard, a straggle of dark hair, a high cheek-boned “lean and hungry look.” For a number of years a professor of Canadian literature and creative writing at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Wiebe last year was writer-at-large at the University of Calgary. His insights into the human condition have successfully transcended cultural barriers, so that he is profoundly credible when describing an Indian chief, a Metis rebel, or a Canadian Mennonite.

The insistent question of his novels, whether answered by the questioning Thom, the Christlike David Epp (Blue Mountains of China), the Cree Indian chief, Big Bear (The Temptations of Big Bear), or the Metis visionary, Louis Riel (The Scorched Wood People), is: “What does the Lord require of you …?” (Micah 6:8).

The common denominator between these disparate characters is a passionately spiritual sensibility with a deep sense of personal accountability to God, as well as a pacifist stance in a violent world. Both of these qualities are deeply rooted in Wiebe’s own Mennonite background.

Yet Wiebe’s characters do not always offer Christian answers to the questions of life. The Mennonite characters of his early novels wrestle with their problems in the light of Scripture and tradition. But in the characters Pre-Christian Big Bear, worshiping the Great Spirit with the help of fetishes and spirit mediators, or in the heretical Catholic Riel, revolutionary leader in The Scorched Wood People, the novelist copes with the great questions of life outside of an orthodox Christian framework. His stance in these novels is more like that of an Old Testament prophet than of a New Testament Christian. He proclaims a good God in a loving relationship to his creation. But, writing for an audience that no longer has Christian presuppositions, Wiebe’s message, particularly in his last two novels, is more pre-Christian than Christian. Having asked what the Lord requires, Wiebe’s characters live out the answer: “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Another question turning within Wiebe’s work is, “What is the nature of the Kingdom of God?” He shows the age-old conflict between the City of God and the City of Man. The peace-lovers find themselves in the position of being understood by none but God—and, perhaps, Wiebe. In considering who belongs to the kingdom of God, Wiebe’s answer is again pre-evangelical. He proclaims through his novels, “I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who hears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him” (Acts 10:34).

The concluding lines of The Temptations of Big Bear include one of the most moving passages I’ve encountered in modern literature. As Big Bear senses death’s approach, he realizes: “It was time now. To lie down; to finish the long prayer to The Only One that was his life … he said: ‘You Only Great Spirit, Father. I thank you. I thank you for giving me life, for giving me everything, for being still here now that my teeth are gone. So now I have to ask you this last thing, and I think it’s like the first thing I asked … I ask you again. Have pity’ ” (p. 414). What more could anyone, anywhere, pray?

Rudy Wiebe is a challenging novelist. His writing is not for the casual reader. And although his landscapes and characters are Canadian, his style is in the tradition of James Joyce and William Faulkner: He stands in a tradition of the finest of English literature. For his marathon paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness soliloquy or unpunctuated lyric description, Wiebe never apologizes. “I have nothing to say to the speed reader,” he says. From the bare starkness that marked his style in his first novels, he has grown in richness and fluency. Again and again you read a phrase that lights a writer’s heart with envy, a reader’s with joy, Christian’s with praise to the One who “gave gifts unto men.”

In his latest novel, The Scorched Wood People, a memorable passage is his lyric description of the joy of married life. Riel tells his wife, “Father Tache told me long ago, love is the sacrament between a man and a woman. Whatever they feel, whatever they do to make themselves happy, that is pure, that is holy.” With that theological instruction, Marguerite teaches Riel the joy of the sacrament. Since in much current literature, sex must be sordid to be sensational, illicit to be interesting, the Christian reader can give thanks for this celebration of sex within marriage.

Many Christians cannot appreciate a work that honestly exposes the questioning heart, the inadequacies of the best of our answers, the problems of saintly society. The prophet is always a problem, particularly to those who feel they have the answers, although they may have forgotten the questions. But Wiebe, widely recognized as a leading novelist of this century, must be accorded a place of honor among Christian artists. His work is that of illumination, rather than of teaching. Christian doctrine could not be deduced from his books but Christian compassion, and a sense that “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea” can be learned. In a largely non-Christian culture, Wiebe has the courage to give artistic shape to these concepts. He is, in the wasteland, “A voice crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.’ ”

Maxine Hancock, whose latest book “People in Process” is published by Revell (1978), lives in Alberta.

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