Becoming Amish

By Jeff Smith

Amish are blessed with “learning life skills and weaving faith and work and family into a more seamless life fabric.” 

Jeff Smith is an old friend while living in Minneapolis in the 1980’s.  The friendship came together through my brother and continued after he moved away.   Jeff and I once took a trip with our young sons, TJ and Trevor to the Black Hill, taking in the Badlands, Silvian Lake in the Black Hills, and Mount Rushmore. Jeff the author and I with the career in aviation didn’t have much in common on a literary sense.  He once said that he and my brother felt I took on the persona of Cliff Claven of Cheers.  Yeah that left a well deserved mark.  I have since taken a real appreciation for the magic found in words.  Jeff moved away to Traverse City and I moved to Arizona in a new career selling airliners around the world.  On airplanes I have read a lot of books.  With the mark still intact, I learned through FaceBook that Jeff has published a book.  Wow I say someone I went to high school with, an old friend is published, and not just in the phone book.  And yes, Jeff towers over me in his writing prowess.  Hence his work goes to the top of my reading list.  My first thought; JEFF what caused you to write about Becoming Amish?

The answer:  In our relationship Jeff and I would often speak about our neighborhood adventures.   Though separated by three years and different circles of friends, the stories had a common thread, of life in the ‘most white’ homogenized city in America as Jeff refers to it.  Jeff writes about this in his book and hence captures me for a deep emersion into the journey of Bill Moser, yet another high school peer.  Jeff often spoke of his best friend in Michigan Bill Moser.  And it turns out its Bill who leaves the ‘most white’ American life as a young architect, for the Amish life style.  In the transformative moments that take Bill in a new direction his guiding compass is submission.  Submission to your superior on this earth who eventually submits to God.  It is the rule of the head master, the Amish way.

As I was reading the journey I came to appreciate the natural transgression of one decision to another.  The prime protagonist of the journey was Bill’s wife who was searching for a deeper meaning to life.  In this most white community that we grew up in a Detroit suburb of the 60’s and 70’s a person could get away with simply going through motions without thinking much through.  We had experienced the 67 race riots and learned little other than we were a divided community. Yet we gave little thought.  We had Motown, a booming auto industry with guaranteed jobs and little reason to be uncomfortable.  Bill’s wife, Tricia felt this and longed for a sense of community.  She left the Catholic Church where that communal sense was not manifest in her and looked to the Anabaptist movement.  While subtly presented in the book; a direct definition is good for the reader to know about the movement.  Under Ulrich Zwingli and the city council in Zurich, the Reformation was proceeding. But Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, and other associates of Zwingli didn’t feel the Reformation was going far enough. They wanted to do away with the tithe, usury, and military service. Further, some of these radicals wanted a totally self-governing church, free of government interference. 

Wow separation of Church and State!  Well really it ended up as Amish in America where such separation found fertile soil, a more of a fealty arrangement akin to the Ottoman Empire.  What you also come to appreciate in the Amish story is a sense of community where the word of Christ is woven in to your every day movement through life.  In essence you didn’t go to church on Sunday mornings and cuss at the kids on the way home.  The phrase practice what you preach comes to mind.  In with this prime tenant becomes an Amish way of life that hold a community structure the puts your neighbor on the exact same plane as yourself.  Removed are all the technological advancements that lure one’s focus beyond that of good will toward your neighbors.

In reading the journey, step by step, the reader is romanced by the good things that came along the way and transition to horse and buggy was the least of their worries.  Electricity was not such a problem either.  There is much discussion in the book about which technologies are allowed and the rationale behind the decisions.  What the reader learns is there are many ‘seekers’ that make the transition.  There are many Amish communities and each has a population limit.  Once the limit is reached a new community is established.    There are varied levels of technology in each community, but the religious foundation remains the same across all.  Technology decisions from one community to the next are founded in the same principle, which is to conform to a life dedicated to brotherhood in Christ.

After the reader is totally romanced by the journey he gets to read that there are Amish that leave their communities.  This is where the reader meets a sense of the disheartened.  The western minded reader is left with a sense of acceptance of the Amish, but also a sense that perhaps their modern high tech easy lives of shallow  thinking is not for them.  Perhaps a conclusion that is equally disheartening.  I close with this ‘judge not….

In a follow on book I just now read on an airplane back from the Holy Land on Zen, ironically coincidental, I read the story of the four horses, one faster than the shadow of the whip, one as fast as the crack of the whip, one as fast as the whip, the fourth responsive to the whip; living in the world not of the world.  In Zen the fourth horse is the prize horse………which makes me ask is the Amish movement more universally appreciated around the world, and us westerners, void of religion and fraught with individualism  doomed.  So I will leave you with this thought, Things are themselves by themselves …………without judgment.

Notes from the book that formed my thoughts:

Page 34:  They [Bill & Tricia] wanted to spend days together as a family and stay focused on the relationships with their children, and those relationships would be guided by the Bible.

Page 43:  The head covering draws people together.  “Most Christians who believe in head covering had a strong sense that Christians should be a community, submitting to one another, being accountable to one another,” says Bill. “So it is no big thing.”

In most churches in America people gather for Sunday service and in somewhat scripted ways- meetings to discuss topics, or issues or Bible study.  “Your involvement is programmed around certain things instead of the simple fact of being community.” Bill says.  To him, it wasn’t a natural way to bond with fellow believers.

Page 48:  “Most mainstream Christian churches, evangelical, Protestant, would believe that once you give your life to Christ, you are born again and you are sealed for the rest of your life.  Nearly regardless of what you do, you can’t fall away,” Bill says.  But the Amish and Mennonite churches believe you can fall away and be in a lost condition, a condition that would be even worse than if you had never accepted Christ to begin with.

Page 51:  But while the statement of faith clarified many questions Bill and Tricia had, they were still looking for something that spelled out the rules for Amish living, the boundaries for negotiating daily life.

Page 60:   The Mosers learned that the key aspect of Amish and Mennonite life is that their lifestyle and work are incorporated into their faith.  “They don’t want to compartmentalize their lives, Bill says.  “They want their lives to be whole.  We can worship while at work, and that gives a different mindset.”

Page 80:  Looking back on the transition – the nearly miraculous and instant finding of a buyer of a half-built house on a back road in Michigan’s thumb, the coincidence of the Fisher name, the carrying out of the design vision – Bill and Tricia see evidence of the hand of God ushering them down their chose path.

My comment:  Coincidence!!!  We are all marveled by them.  When we pay close attention they occur more often that and occupied person would normally think.  So just reflect back on the Amish lifestyle mindset.  Mentioned in on page 60.  Call it the hand of God.  Call it divine order.  Call it karma.  It just is…the natural unfolding of the universe as simple as the blooming of a rose.

Page 84:  “I [Bill] see it as a scriptural command that I cannot live apart from that, no matter how bad it gets, I have to be part of a community;  living in a community is living out being part of Christ’s body, his church.”

My comment:  In the end is this point compromised?  Or is a Mennonite church sufficient, and then is a Protestant or Catholic Church sufficient?  Where is the line and how is it drawn?

Page 87:  But an Amish family needs more than one horse, and soon the Mosers picked up a second horse from a family that was leaving the Manton Amish church.  The Mosers traded an old fifteen-passenger van “that had a lot of miles and some issues”  and a thirteen-year-old original Macintosh computer for a horse named Rex that had once been a racetrack trotter.  The swap presented and odd juxtaposition that stayed in Bill’s mind, one family joining the Amish life, another family leaving the Amish life.

Page 92:  Tricia immediately connected with the wife and felt comfortable in the home. “She is my kind of person,” Tricia says.  But more broadly, Tricia and Bill were captivated by how the community pitched in.

Page 95:  Tricia says “like barn raising, like canning, work bees for butchering became another rich example of the community gathering to serve one another and to practice their faith in that way.”

Page 98:  The core reasons get back to the idea that the Amish are not guided by political ideology, and so the success formula involves both conservative and business values, a deep ethic of self-sufficiency and even entrepreneurialism (although Bill says the Amish would not use that word and might even reject the idea as prideful or individualistic and a near socialistic cultural ethic to help other Amish families achieve a health standard of living.

My comment:  I leave it to the reader to capture the full context of this excerpt by reading the book.  It takes a political left-v-right perspective that makes it ok to put “individualistic and a near socialistic cultural” in the same sentence.

Page 112:  One of the biggest surprises I had as I spent time talking with Bill and Tricia Moser about their Amish years is how they had become connected to what seemed like a multitude of people not only within their community but all across the nation. …

Connectedness.  The media presents the idea as if connecting to people is a new trend, and the way it exists is through, say, clicking “like” on Facebook….Those digital means constitute a connectedness at some level…..I saw in the Moser’s lives was a connectedness that was so much more rich because it was based on conversation, handshakes, shared meals; spending nights at people’s homes and inviting people into their homes on a remarkably frequent basis.

Page 120:  For the 1685 edition of Martyers Mirrors, Dutch illustrator and engraver Jan Luyken created 104 copper plates illustrating scenes of persecution retold in the book.  The most famous print still adorns the current edition’s cover and is the iconic image for Anabaptists around the world.

Page 121:  The executions [o Anabaptists]  were not the result of spontaneous mob violence or of impromptu riot battles between one religious sect and another, rather the executions were coldly official and formal affairs, sanctioned by both religious and government leaders, because when these executions took place government and religion were joined.

Page 142:  As the Amish see it, the education of their children doesn’t stop [at 8^th grade], it continues toward the important goal of learning life skills and weaving faith and work and family into a more seamless life fabric.

Page 143:  Bill’s kids read so much every day, they are constantly reading, constantly learning.

Page 153:  Bill sees the decisions as more about achieving a goal of preserving a way of life than achieving a goal of blind adherence to a technology standard.  …. Bill explains: the rules  are intended to achieve uniformity among members, help tamp down our natural tendency to cultivate and obsess over our individuality.

Page 161:  The passage is a touchstone for all Amish and other Anabaptists, words that help them define boundaries for living both with and without the modern world – in the world by not of the world.

My comment:   And who says that Zen doesn’t exist in Christianity?

Page 184: [Technology limits]  “You need to understand that we are relatively new community.  We’ve been here nine years, and even the whole Christian community movement is only twenty years old, so we are dealing with people who have made the choice to be here, the people who said, ‘We like your package.  I want to come live like you are.’”  The everyday seeker from general American society just accepts the rules, is looking forward to living in that plain and novel way.  

….. We actually find that people  from an Amish background find it harder to understand why we have the technology limits we have.” He says

Page 191:  Bill and Tricia understood why in the Amish community, having and English-speaking family in the congregation caused concern among some members.  A pillar of the Amish faith is to function separate from general society.  The uniform clothing the Amish erects a dike against the flood of mass culture.  Driving a horse and buggy erects a dike.   But the greatest society barrier between Amish and general society is speaking a language that has essentially no instructional tools.

My comment:  Having said what I did in my review about the magic of words, it seems the Amish would be doing themselves a great service by developing instructional tools.  You’re not teaching individuality but rather uniformity.  Words are the code that binds a people together. 

Page 206:  Measures such as ex-communication, shunning, and its milder form, avoidance, are overt and calculated efforts to leverage those potent emotions to convince people to stay in the fold.  …Anabaptists believe is a biblical dictate – say it is designed to draw church member s back to the community, to create a longing so the person rejoins the body of Christ,  Opponents say shunning is too damaging psychologically and emotionally and should be stopped.

Page 216:  [of working together]  For Bill, these moments of coming together and the discussion he had was as affirming as moments in church, because conversations in the hay fields went beyond superficial chat of daily life.  The men discussed scripture and big issues of life, and in that setting, connected so directly to the earth and the creation of God, those conversations seemed deeply steeped in the richness of faith and embodied so clearly Jesus’ instructions to lead a simple life.

Page 217:  In song there must be unity.  There must be harmony.  For Bill and Tricia, singing was a literal representation of ideal community - people working together in a common goal, in unity and harmony.