Rachel and I drove around the Amish settlement in Daviess County today and came across this guy spreading manure. (Poor quality, I know.) It was still cold today but the strong sunshine felt like a promise.

After looking around the Odon Locker, we walked across the parking lot to a shop with a sign saying something about Amish goods, with the requisite buggy image. Turned out to be one of those faux Amish shops meant for tourists and church ladies. There’s a certain style of religious kitsch that you always find in these places. Signs made to look hand-lettered that say things like “gather” or “it is well with my soul.” Cookbooks with pictures that are typically described as “quaint.” A little section for the men with beard balm displays and shirts that say “Man of God.” You know that “wine mom” aesthetic you see at wineries? This is the evangelical version of that. We took one step inside the shop, looked at each other, and walked back out.

We visited more genuinely Amish/Mennonite stores in the country south of Odon. Groceries stores and variety shops and a shoe store that sells so much more than shoes. You can tell these places are meant to be the sort of place that sells everything one of the plain folk might need: groceries and bulk goods, herbal remedies, and copies of Ausbund, Luther’s German Bible, Rules of a Godly Life, and Raber’s Almanac.

The kitsch shops are frustrating because they represent that malignant power of the marketers to sell you the form of godliness while denying the power thereof. It’s fashion for those whose values run skin-deep.

The more substantial lesson we can learn from the Amish is the power of life under vow. I’ve been considering this a lot lately because it is a hard lesson, and one I’m not quite sure what to do with yet. Thankfully, it is neither marketable nor available for sale.

According to Steven Nolt in A History of the Amish, the split between the tradition-minded Old Order Amish and the change-minded Amish Mennonites happened around 1865, though gradually and not due to any single event. Among the Amish Mennonites there was a bishop named Henry Egly who had a powerful conversion experience during an illness in the 1840s. Whether the influence of American evangelicalism and revivalism on him came before or after this experience is not clear from the text. In any case, he came to insist that this sort of emotional experience was necessary for salvation, which brought him into conflict with his Amish Mennonite fellows. He refused to baptize people who did not have such an experience. He even refused to discipline one member, insisting that since she had never had a conversion experience, she wasn’t a member anyway.

About half of his church eventually left with him and came to be known as Egly Amish. I wondered what became of them so I looked them up online. Turns out, they’ve changed names over the years:

• Egly Amish, to
• Defenseless Mennonites, to
• Evangelical Mennonite Church, to
• Fellowship of Evangelical Churches

At this point they have 46 churches, over half of which are in Illinois and Indiana. But the point of this whole post is I wanted to tell you that there was a group at one point in history that had the extremely cool name of Defenseless Mennonites.

In The Amish Way, the authors describe patience as one of the key characteristics of Amish life. The lessons of patience are built into the structures of their lives—even the church services are three hours long, with one twenty-minute hymn that always precedes the preaching.

I will admit to a certain amount of anxiety as we await the huge snowstorm to hit here. We’ve lived through worse, to be sure. Last night we were remembering one storm that hit early in our marriage. Snowed in for days in that little apartment. When I finally went out and began scraping off the car in preparation for returning to work, I could see alternating, geologic layers of snow and ice. But, as we concluded last night, we were too young and stupid to be afraid.

Now I have an overdeveloped sense of what could go wrong. “What if … what if … what if?” While I’m aware of the irrationality of some of these fears, fear is not known for listening when rationality speaks. I know from experience that “talking myself down” only has a limited effect.

More effective, I’ve found, is voicing those fears to someone who cares—in my case, Rachel. Simply acknowledging them to a sympathetic person takes the edge off. If the self is a system of selves, then trying to silence one of those fearful selves (perhaps, in my imagination, a little boy who feels insecure) only makes it yell more loudly. Allowing that fearful self to speak calms him a bit.

I’m also trying to learn from the Amish. I am generally a patient person, though not always, of course. When the powers of nature exert themselves, it is natural to feel nervous. (Facebook makes it worse though. Shut that ding-dang app off for the next few days.) Like our ancestors have always known, it does no good to kick against the forces of nature. She will do what she wants, with no input from us. What is called for here is a patient bearing-with.

There’s likely a lot of snow coming over the next two days. There’s certainly bitter cold already here, continuing for the next week. Nothing to do about it except to make reasonable preparations and wait, patiently, for it to pass. It always does, with Spring following on.

This morning I read a section in The Amish Way discussing the prohibition of business on Sunday and it reminded me of a similar practice in the Holiness churches I grew up in.

The Holiness people lived by a strict set of behavioral and clothing rules they called the holiness standards. Not Amish-level strict, but they made folks noticeable. These were (nearly) universal and violation of the standards was considered sin.

There were also some disagreements between churches about rules considered at the level of holiness standards—wedding rings, for example. Jewelry was universally held to be sinful. Some folks made exceptions, though, for wedding rings. Fellowship was typically continued in the spirit of “agree to disagree.” At the same time, while some of the strictest churches would fellowship with some of the less-strict ones, they might not allow members of those less-strict churches on their pulpit (also known as the “platform” in other churches).

(Aside: Rachel and I were not married with wedding rings. When we left those churches, we bought first a cheap JC Penney set and then a set from a divorced friend. We wore them for a few years but we never had an emotional connection to them. And they were uncomfortable. So for the last several years we’re once again ringless. In all those ringless years, not a single woman has tried to pick me up! So strange!)

So there were universal standards and standards about which there was disagreement. There were also “personal convictions.” These were matters of conscience for an individual, and were not to be imposed on others. Depending on the person and the strength of the conviction, they may or may not have believed that it was a matter of sin if they failed in them. A classic example here is the refusal to eat in a restaurant that severed alcohol.

Another example was “Sunday dealing,” a.k.a., buying or selling on the Sabbath. For people who held this conviction, it also necessarily entailed the refusal of Sunday work. There were also some people who refused to work on Sunday but would certainly go to Long John Silver’s after church. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The ban on Sunday dealing was always a minority position in my time there and I suspect it is held by even fewer now. I don’t say this with any blame, simply with interest in how these things change over time.

Though taking a day off the money economy probably wouldn’t be the worst thing…

From Uncle Wendell’s latest:

Since his return, Andy has lived his story and his family’s in that place for sixty years. The place as it was when he returned is no more. It is now, to him, a strange country with a familiar story surviving in it. Port William’s fatal mistake was its failure to value itself at the rate of its affection for itself. Gradually, it had learned to value itself as outsiders—as the nation–valued it: as a “no-where place,” a place at the end of the wrong direction. So far as Andy has learned, the Old Order Amish, alone in all the country, have had the wisdom–the divine wisdom, it may be—to give to their own communities a value always primary and preserved by themselves.

Kingsnorth also talks about taking the Amish as your lodestones. We have a few significant Amish settlements around here; seeing them around and buying their goods is not unusual. It is a bit surprising how far they travel in their buggies to sell their goods; the idea of them as purely settled, never venturing far outside their community, is not quite reality around here. (It brings to mind Kingsnorth’s lament about smartphones on Mt. Athos.)

But it bears repeating–and is crucial as we imagine some future beyond the current situation–that the Amish have developed the essential insight that the adoption of technology must be aligned with the maintenance of their community. Each community is different in what it allows, and the decision is ultimately up to the bishop. In every decision, however, the preservation of the community is paramount.

The market economy, built as it is on dissatisfaction, will inevitably destroy every community.

How will all of this turn out. Is it the ending of a world? Or will something like the old “normal” return in a few years? I don’t know and I don’t think anyone does. In the meantime, I’m going to work on gratitude and satisfaction with what is at hand.