Intentionally or not, Nancy’s family had given her a “thirst for knowledge,” fostered by books, magazines, and her mother’s “keen curiosity and interest in world affairs.” As a girl, she had fantasies about becoming a teacher or even a concert violinist. “I practiced a lot on my imaginary violin out behind the chicken house,” she told us. Eventually she set her fantasies aside, and after finishing the eighth grade, started doing household work for her aunt. She was baptized into the Amish church, with what she calls “a very serious commitment,” at the age of sixteen.
But her yearning for more education did not go away, and she soon did what very few Amish people do: she took eligibility exams and was admitted to college without a high school diploma. “I told my Amish bishop about my desire to go to college so that I could become a good teacher, and he reluctantly gave his approval.” Eventually, however, her professional pursuits became public, and the bishop rescinded his permission. Because her pursuits violated church standards, she was excommunicated just before her senior year of college.
“This was a very painful experience,” Nancy recalls, and describes meeting with her bishop a few days before her exit. “He was a deeply caring person,” she says. “I asked questions about education and sin. . . . I wanted to continue both my education and membership in the Amish community. He would not say that further education was sin, and he agonized to explain why excommunication was necessary if I did not repent. Both of us were sensitive and hurt deeply. We cried unashamedly.”
Nancy eventually received a master’s degree and became a social worker. Unlike many ex-Amish people who feel deeply wounded, even embittered, by their community’s decision to expel them, Nancy continues to have warm feelings toward the church of her youth. In fact, she credits some of her success as a social worker—her ability “to feel compassion and caring,” as well as her commitment to straightforward communication—to her Amish roots. “Like my Amish bishop, I’ve been able to set limits for others with a great deal of caring and love so that the limits are not interpreted as rejection.”
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A Retro Remodeler
Although articles and books about home improvement abound, Jesse, a forty-year-old father of six, needed remodeling knowledge of a different kind. Early in their married life, Jesse and his wife, Ruthie, bought a home on a three-acre plot of land. Jesse works in a furniture factory, so they didn’t need much farmland, but he and Ruthie wanted a place with a barn and some pasture for their horses and enough acreage for a garden. This property fit the bill.
There was one problem, however: the previous owners were not Amish. This meant that Jesse and Ruthie had to “de-electrify” the house when they moved in to make it comply with church regulations. “The first thing we did was to begin using bottled-gas lights in our house,” Jesse said. “This change announced, ‘This is an Amish home.’” They also hooked up a propane-powered refrigerator and stove to gas lines connected to a propane tank outside.
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Other changes followed until finally they faced their biggest issue: the electric water pump. “That was the hardest thing for me,” Jesse confessed.
The electricity to run the water pump cost only $15 per month, but Jesse and Ruthie had to pay $14,000 to install a small diesel engine to replace the electric pump.The diesel engine creates pneumatic (air) power to operate their water pump, washing machine, and Ruthie’s sewing machine.Their propane refrigerator cost twice as much as an electric one, said Jesse. In fact, “it would have been cheaper for us to stay electric.”
The de-electrification process took about four years. “Our ministers were very understanding,” Jesse said. “The main thing was to be headed in the nonelectric direction,” a direction that signaled to fellow church members that Jesse’s family took the church’s rules seriously. Today the shell of an electric meter remains visible on the outside of their brick farmhouse, but it hasn’t carried any current for years.
A Family That Accepts Death
Elam was an eighteen-year-old carpenter. One Wednesday morning, he fell from a roof and suffered serious head injuries. An ambulance rushed him to a nearby hospital, where medical staff placed him on a respirator and conducted tests to decide treatment.Within two days, however, the attending doctor determined that Elam’s brain was not functioning. His family, though grieving deeply, decided that they wanted to release him into God’s loving hands and cease medical intervention.
Trained to view death as defeat, the hospital staff resisted removing the respirator. Finally, on the following Monday, the family prevailed on the hospital to disconnect the machine. Elam’s breathing ceased, and doctors declared him dead.
“You will note that the obituary published in the Lancaster newspaper says that he died on Monday,” an Amish church member noted later, but “the time of death . . . was announced at the funeral as having been on Friday.” The Amish did not believe that a body forced to breathe by a machine was a living person, despite the insistence of medical professionals. “The truth was that his soul had fled,” a family friend explained.
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A Compassionate Community
In February 2007, a twenty-eight-year-old Amish schoolteacher named Leah King was making her way along a narrow road to the one-room school where she taught Amish children. Leah lived less than a mile from the school, and she walked to work almost every day. This particular morning was cold and icy, and Leah was struck by a pickup truck that hit a patch of ice and slid out of control. She died at the scene.
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Although grief-stricken by the death of their daughter, sister, and friend, many Amish people also understood the heartache of the driver, Earl Wenger, and his family. Shortly after the accident, the King family invited the Wenger family to attend Leah’s viewing, which in Amish fashion took place in a home. When the Wengers arrived for the viewing, an Amish woman urged them to sit with the other mourners. “Most persons . . . who passed by us extended their hands to shake ours,” recalls Wenger’s daughter, who accompanied her parents. One Amish woman told Earl Wenger, “It’s not your fault. It was God’s will.” When Wenger’s wife asked her name, she answered, “I am Leah’s mother.”
A week later, an Amish newspaper carried a letter written by Leah’s mother urging Amish people across the country to “keep him [Earl Wenger] in our thoughts and prayers.” She also included Wenger’s mailing address, in case “anyone would like to send a few lines his way.”
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In response the Wengers received over eighty sympathy cards, many of them addressed to “Dear Unknown Friends” or “Dear Ones.” Each note was different, but the sentiments were always the same, full of compassion and concern. One note came from a fifteen-year-old Amish girl who, in the course of two pages, told the Wengers about the weather, her family members, and the joy of making maple syrup. She added, “I can only imagine how you must feel. But please don’t blame yourself. Accidents do happen sometimes.”
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A Peculiar People
Few Amish people would find the preceding stories remarkable. Non-Amish readers, however, might understand why the Amish have sometimes been labeled “a peculiar people.”
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These unusual stories—and we could add many more—suggest that peculiar is an apt description.
To call something peculiar implies departing from a benchmark, in this case the dominant values of modern life—which, we might add, the
Amish
find quite peculiar. In mainstream society, desires for wealth, choice, status, justice, and personal acclaim run very high, so high that they sometimes jeopardize people’s health, their families, and their friendships. Most people rarely question these values; in fact, even recognizing them can be difficult.
Amish people are surely not peculiar or countercultural in every way. With few exceptions they believe in free-market capitalism, political democracy, and conservative family values. They value meaningful work, enjoy leisure, prefer pleasure over pain, marry for love, treasure their children, and grieve the loss of loved ones. On many fronts, however, the Amish do resist mainstream culture and challenge dominant assumptions about the good life. Some symbols of their resistance—horses and buggies, for example—are easy to spot. But such visible signs of Amish life stand on deep assumptions about contentment and the meaning of life.
The Amish don’t talk much about resistance. They are much more likely to speak about “obedience to God” or “separation from the world,” phrases that remind them that God-fearing people often find themselves out of step with the larger society. They also use the term
uffgevva
, a Pennsylvania German word that literally means “to give up,” to describe their rejection of self-centeredness. In other words, Amish resistance springs from their willingness to give themselves up to God and to the church.
Although media images of the Amish may conjure notions of Buddhist-like nirvana in which selfish desires have been overcome, Amish people don’t talk about their lives that way. For them, the giving-up process—yielding themselves to God’s will and submitting to the church’s expectations—is a lifelong struggle. It begins in childhood, ends at death, and punctuates many moments in between. A day rarely passes when an Amish person doesn’t feel the need to give himself or herself up to God and community.
Giving up is not easy, even for committed Amish people. “Hen nature and human nature have a great deal in common,” writes one Amish farmer-theologian; human beings, like chickens, would rather be free to do as they please. Nonetheless, he continues, “true contentment is found in submission and obedience and in seeking God’s will.”
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This writer’s claim, deeply rooted in Amish spiritual resources, shapes a host of Amish practices. Many of those resources, reaching back some four hundred years, are found on the bookshelves of Amish homes, as we will see in the next chapter.
CHAPTER TWO
Spiritual Headwaters
Christ is our fortress,
patience
our weapon of defense . . .
—ANABAPTIST LEADER (1539)
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W
alk into an Amish home and you may find a hefty book sitting on a bookshelf or end table.
Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith
spans almost six hundred pages and weighs four solid pounds.
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Even more striking than its size are the large Gothic letters across its front cover and down its fat spine.The Gothic English mirrors the traditional German script in the Bibles used by Amish people. In fact, were you to open
Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith
, you’d find a two-column format of German text alongside an English translation.
Mary M. Miller, an Amish woman in Indiana, compiled the volume to provide her people easy access to prayers, songs, and scripture readings used in their worship and devotional life. What is interesting about this distinctly Amish book is just how ordinarily Christian it is. The table of contents sounds familiar to Christian ears. It begins with “Holy Bible,” then moves on to “Prayers,” “Church,” “Baptism,” “Communion,” and similar topics. Lengthy Bible passages appear at many points, and the prayers frequently address “our beloved heavenly Father” or “the Lord Jesus Christ.” The English text recalls the King James Version of the Bible, with “thees” and “thous” sprinkled throughout.
Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith
may seem old-fashioned, but it is unmistakably a Christian book.
And that is a key point:
Amish spirituality is a form of Christian spirituality
. Shortly after the Nickel Mines shooting, we asked an Amish carpenter to explain Amish forgiveness. Puzzled at first by our question, he paused and said, “It’s just standard Christian forgiveness, isn’t it?”
Generic Christians?
The carpenter’s response speaks volumes about how the Amish understand their spirituality. For them, the Amish way is simply the Christian way, begun by Jesus Christ and carried forward by his followers.
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They worship the triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit); affirm the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who alone can save them from sin and death; and view the devil as their adversary. They believe that the Old and New Testaments of the Bible are the written word of God with spiritual truths to be learned and obeyed. Every Amish home has at least one German Bible, most also have an English one, and many have an Amish-published edition with Martin Luther’s German translation alongside the King James English text.
c
Not surprisingly then,
Our Heritage, Hope, and Faith
begins with a lengthy section on the Bible, which Miller notes is “the traveler’s map, the pilgrim’s staff, the pilot’s compass, the soldier’s sword, and the Christian’s charter.” The scriptures, she says, should “fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet” of every Amish person. More than any other text, the Bible shapes the Amish way and those who walk it.
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