Mini-Vacation

It's official: Will is taller than me and I'm the shortest in the family. First Sophie, 17, grew taller--she's now 5'-8"-- then Nick, 13, shot up. He's about 5'10." Last night, I caught a glimpse of Will, 13, next to me in the mirror. He was taller! I couldn't believe it. When did he shoot up?

Today, we head for two nights at Chincoteague. Usually we rent a house and go for two weeks, or at least, Roger and the kids do, and I drive back and forth from work. Ironically, this year I'm not working for the first time in seven years, except for freelancing, and I could use the long vacation more than ever. But two days of R&R will be wonderful too. I will try to post from there.

Poverty or Simplicity?

"Poverty does not mean scorn for goods and poverty. It means the strict limitation of goods that are for personal use. ... It means a horror of war, first because it ruins human life and health and the beauty of the earth, but second because it destroys goods that could be used to relieve misery and hardship and to give joy. It means a distaste even for the small carelessnesses that we see prevalent, so that beautiful and useful things are allowed to become dirty and battered through lack of respect for them."
Mildred Binns Young, 1956

I tried --and failed -- to find the pamphlet on-line from which this quote is taken, so if anyone knows ...

I'd hoped to discover whether the "It" of the sentence that begins "It means a horror of war ..." replaced the word poverty. Would poverty mean a horror of war ... or a distaste for the small carelessnesses ...?"

Reading a tiny tidbit about Quaker Mildred Binns Young, I found that she did write about functional poverty, so in the above passage perhaps her "it" really means poverty. I think in today's parlance we would use the term voluntary simplicity for her kind of poverty or perhaps simple abundance.

The sentence that struck me was "it means a distaste even for the small carelessnesses that we see prevalent, so that beautiful and useful things are allowed to become dirty and battered through lack of respect for them."

How many small carelessnesses have allowed the things in my life to become dirty and battered? Or more to the point, how much rushing and forgetting has led to things piling up, getting lost, getting dented or broken? We simply replace these things ... we live in a culture with a seemingly endless supply of inexpensive consumables.

But wouldn't it make sense to slow down, have less and take better care of what we have? I think of a saying of John Wesley's, Methodism's founder, which I heard: "Earn as much as you can, save as much as you can, give as much as you can."

Ok, Ok, that's the Protestant work ethic in a nutshell. And we can take work to weird, excessive levels in this wired culture. But there's a wisdom in not wasting that I think we've completely lost sight of.

If Young bemoaned waste around her in 1956, a time when people had about half of what they do now, what of the mountains of waste around us today? I saw a YouTube video that said that 99 percent of what we buy is trash within six months. And then, of course, there's the movie "Wall.e" which I will discuss in another post.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World part of the satire is that the "betas," the consumer class in a brainwashed world, are taught rhymes about replacing things rather than repairing them. It's high comedy, apparently, in the 1930s, to imagine a society in which people are taught to throw out sweaters that are missing a button. But that is more or less how we live. In fact, we give the sweaters away before they're missing a button!

When did all this go over the top? I think I can pinpoint two places when waste and excess started to be normative in our culture, both dating from the early 1980s. The first connects to the movie "Ordinary People," which won the best picture Oscar in 1981 (?). There's a scene early in the movie where Mary Tyler Moore, playing a housewife, is pushing her son's serving of French toast down the disposal. Someone in the movie must question her, because she says something like "you can't save French toast." I actually remember conversations with people at the time about this: can you save French toast? Is it OK to throw food away? Was this character being wasteful? I can hardly imagine having such conversations today. That was also the time when diet programs routinely discussed our guilt over wasting food and assured us that it would not feed any hungry person to throw away food we were too full to eat. Today, food waste isn't even mentioned.

When E.T. came out in 1982, I remember all the conversations about how many toys the kids in the movie had. We'd never seen such a surfeit of toys! The children had a whole walk-in closet stuffed with stuff! I remember discussions about how we had nowhere near so many toys when we were growing up. Nowhere. Near. But after that movie, the excess started to seem normal. It's as if the movie set a much higher bar for the "new normal" in toys. I know my children, born in the 1990s, have had far more toys than I did growing up, and I was not at all deprived.

What do you think? How do we control our consumption? Does it create a sense of abundance not to have to replace things? Can you pinpoint, what for you, were cultural moments when our notions of "normal" seemed to shift? Is this a spiritual issue?

Food for Thought

We hear a lot about food. From Supersize It to the epidemic of obesity to slow food, from vegetarianism to veganism to macrobiotics to the various diets formed around the explosion of food allergies, food seems to have taken on an increased complexity.

At my Quaker meeting, we try to juggle the needs of vegans with those allergic to soy, wheat, nuts, dairy, etc. ... There was a piece a few years ago in a Vogue (or perhaps Town and Country) magazine that I read at the hairdressers by a woman living in the south of France who got so tired of guests e-mailing her ahead time with what they weren't eating ("Please be informed that I'm on a no-tomato diet ... and of course, I only drink soy milk") that she refused to cater to anyone's food needs at all!

My children were transformed -- or perhaps traumatized in a good way!-- by seeing "Supersize Me" in school. This documentary records the ill health effects of a man who eats nothing but MacDonald's food for a month. Anytime he is asked to supersize a meal, he does. At one point, he throws up. Since seeing the movie, my children refuse to eat at MacDonalds. Truly, there is a God!

Anyway, Will tells me that MacDonald's no longer supersizes but instead offers "value meals." He also told the story of a friend's father who ordered himself three quarter pounders, two fries and two milkshakes at the drive-through window. The mind boggles.

When my children were in the early elementary years, their school was chosen to be part of a program in which all the children were given breakfast at school. The rationale was that breakfast helps children learn and yet a. some children in poverty weren't getting breakfast and their parents were ashamed to send them for free breakfast (which unlike lunch, most kids didn't participate in) and b. some children in before-school care were getting breakfast so early that they were hungry well before lunch.

I was happy about the idea -- as was told to us -- of children going to school and getting a balanced, nutritionally complete breakfast. Somehow, I pictured steaming plates of freshly cooked foods: eggs, bacon, French toast, orange wedges. What was I thinking? What the kids got was processed cold food in little wrappers pulled out of a bin beside the teacher's desk: packaged danishes, sweetened yogurts, milk and cereal boxes, bottles of juice. Nothing fresh, nothing warm. Not enough. Airplane food. It was a disappointment and, I thought, radically wrong to teach children that this is what "healthy" eating is. At the same time, I recognized that the school wasn't in the food service business, and wasn't going to hire short-order chefs to stand at the back of the classrooms and toss omelets for the little ones.

So I am surprised and delighted by the --dare I say?-- old-fashioned approach to food I've seen at Olney Friends School. After breakfast the last time I was there, I asked Helen where they bought the cinnamon buns.

She told me they do all the baking themselves, except for hamburger rolls, hot dog rolls and sandwich bread. I was amazed.

Eggs laid by their own hens, lettuce grown in their greenhouse, potatoes grown in their own fields and what we now call "free range" beef cattle grazing nearby. The school even has a gardener on staff. Real cooking from scratch. And the students helps out, from gathering eggs to harvesting potatoes to making maple syrup to planning and cooking a meal from time to time. It's almost like stepping back in time or into an alternative universe.

Real food. Locally grown. I can't get over it. I keep thinking there must be a down side but I can't figure out what it is.

At home, we try to cook and bake and make things from scratch, but also often fall back on carryout pizza (but never MacDonalds!) Last fall, we even made our own ricotta cheese, though we haven't repeated the experiment. I love having a garden, but this year, with the move, we haven't put one in. What kinds of things do you do to cook from scratch?

Plain Secrets: Jonas

In Chapter two of Joe Mackall's "Plain Secrets: An Outsider among the Amish," we meet Jonas, a young man of about 20 who has left the Amish community. Jonas will be a recurring figure in the narrative. He is the nephew of Samuel Shetler, Mackall's Amish friend and neighbor.

We learn of the custom of rumspringa, in which Amish youth are encouraged to take a few years and sow their wild oats in the "English" (our) world. However, the strict and conservative Swartentruber Amish do not practice it. At no point do they want their teens or young adults to leave the community.

Jonas, however, has for a long time felt a yearning to be part of the "English" world.

He tries twice before he leaves successfully. The third time works only because he has friends on the outside willing to take him in on a long term basis. But even once "in," he faces huge problems. He has no social security number and no way to establish his U.S. citizenship. Like the other Amish, he left school after the eighth grade and has no high school diploma. He also happens to be functionally illiterate. On top of that, he has little knowledge of the world he's entering. For example, he's never heard of Elvis or Marilyn Monroe. And he can't drive.

Further, he has put his family, to whom he is close, in a difficult position. They are under a great deal of pressure to cut ties with him to make things as difficult as possible for him in the hopes he'll return to the fold.

At the end of the chapter, Mackall sums up Jonas's position as follows:

He would find out just how much there was to understand outside of a closed Swartzentruber Amish life, and learn how many of his ideas of what it took to make it in the English world would be tested. He would feel just how powerful and far reaching the tentacles of the church really were, realize how few resources he possessed to make it in the outside world and understand that his parents would have to choose between their son and their church.

Some say it's unfair of the Amish to stack the deck against their youth by, for example, denying them a social security number or a high school education. But couldn't it be argued that, were the tables turned, our culture could be accused of stacking the deck against our youth's entrance into the certainty, security and ecological balance (I'm deliberately leaving out faith issues) of Amish life? For example, most kids in this culture grow up with little knowledge of farming or sustainability.

Would it be "fairer" for each culture to educate their youth to be able cross more easily into the other culture? Is it really a choice to live in a culture if we're not given an education that would allow us to transition easily into an alternative culture? Or is this not an issue of "fairness" as much as that it would make sense for each culture to "cross train" it's youth in some areas? Would four more years of schooling benefit the Amish? Would a period of time on an old-fashioned farm benefit the "English?" Are such cross overs too "dangerous?" (I would define the Amish danger as the possibility of permanent division of their youth from God; I would define the English danger as too costly an education for too little perceived benefit.) What do you think? What do you think in general of the "trained helplessness" of both cultures?

Attitude or Behavior?

Cath made a comment about the Amish and our world:

The world I live in expects people to come to deep conclusions of values and attitudes and then adapt their actions to those values and ideals. The Amish engage in actions that they hope will promote certain values and attitudes--and judging from the rate at which young Amish ask to be baptized, I think they achieve their objective.

I tend to "accept" our culture's assumption that one determines one's values and then tries to live by them. This then leads to a hierarchy of values in which one discerns that some values are more important than others, and that other, secondary "values," can be jettisoned or dealt with as an afterthought. I also imagine this model leads to anxiety, because individuals inevitably will fail to live up to their values, especially without group support.

What do you think of this? Who and what determines your values? Do you have any knowledge of how other cultures (non-Amish, non-American) handle the connection between values and behavior?

Plain Secrets: degree of separation.

In the first chapter of Plain Secrets: An Outsider among the Amish, Joe Mackall offers a swift, thumbnail history of the Amish. The Amish began as anabaptists in 16th century Europe. Anabaptists rejected both Catholicism and Protestantism as it was then practiced, and believed that only adults could make a decision to be baptized as Christians. They wanted to live apart from corrupt society and in the manner of the early believers in the New Testament. Like the Quakers, they believed in living lives of peace and non-resistance, and like the Quakers, they refused to swear oaths. When they were persecuted in Europe, they took William Penn up on his offer to provide freedom of worship and came to America.

As mentioned yesterday, there are about 180,000 to 200,000 Amish in North America. (They have essentially disappeared in Europe.) The Amish population in North America has doubled in the past 20 years and Amish now live in 28 states and Ontario. However, 70 percent of Amish are concentrated in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.

Mackall's entre into the Amish community came when he drove his neighbor Samuel Shetler to his mother's funeral in Canada. Unlike other Amish groups, the Schwarzentruber Amish community of which Shetler is a part strictly forbids car travel, except in emergency cases. Because Samuel would have missed his mother's funeral if he tried to get there by buggy (it was a 10 hour trip by car), the local bishop allowed him to be driven.

Mackall introduces us to Samuel Shetler's work as a farmer. We also get a glimpse of the Amish ethic of nonviolence. When his girls are hit with soda (pop) cans thrown at them from cars by boys as a prank, Samuel asks the local sheriff to intervene by asking the boys to stop. Shetler leaves it at that. He has no desire to prosecute the offenders, who do, in fact, stop.

Mackall presents the Shetlers as hard-working, practical, frugal and worried about the growth of the non-Amish population in Ashland County, where they live, primarily because of the extra traffic on the roads.

The chapter also introduces, although not explicitly, a theme that runs throughout the book, the separateness of the Amish. It's illustrated in this chapter by how different the Shetler's lives are from most other Americans. Samuel Shetler lives close to the land, running a family farm. His does not leave home to go to an office that takes away from his wife and children. His family is close at hand, his children underfoot. And he does not respond angrily or fearfully to violence by retaliating against the boys who throw the "pop" cans at his children or by suddenly deciding his children must ride to school in a buggy or be walked to school by adults.

While Mackall gains the friendship and trust of Samuel and Mary Shetler, he never makes the least inroads with any other member of the Amish community. Not even Mary's father, who lives on Samuel's farm in an in-law house, will invite Mackall in for a visit. Samuel will be open and welcoming to Mackall when it is just he and his family and Mackall, but if other Amish are around, Shetler changes and distances himself from his friend. He can act as if he scarcely knows him and can give off a cold "get lost" vibe if he is talking to another Amish. Mackall knows he's unlikely to be invited to the important community events in the Amish world. When he invites Samuel and Mary to his daughter's wedding, they do not come.

As a result, Mackall's friendship with the Shetlers comes across as somewhat clandestine and he definitely is treated, albeit politely, as a second-class citizen when he meets up with Amish society. The Amish are hospitable to him, but not intimate.

The Amish have been a closed group since the beginning in order to keep separate from the world. This has helped them maintain an identity and not be assimilated into the wider culture. They avoid anything beyond polite interactions with the outer world. Do you think such a severe level of separation is necessary for a religious group to maintain its faith?

Related questions: At what point does a religious group's separation become dangerous or unhealthy? The Amish, while separate from mainstream Christianity, have never, to my knowledge, been labeled a cult. They have never been accused of not being Christian, despite the fact that their pacifism, avoidance of politics, and community ethos runs counter to the militarism, attempts to influence public policy and individualism of some strains of Christianity. Why do we, in general, see them in a positive light?

Plain Secrets

In "Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish," English and journalism professor Joe Mackall writes about his friendship with the Shetlers, Amish neighbors of his in northern Ohio. The Shetlers provide Mackall a window into one of the most conservative of the Amish orders, the Schwartentrubers.

Mackall does not want to use his limited experience of one Amish group, and in particular, one family, to generalize about the "Amish" as a whole, a group which, at 180,000 to 200,000 strong in North America, outnumbers Quakers. In fact, he's at pains throughout his book to distinguish between the different groups within the Amish: Old Order, New Order, Weaver, Swiss, Beachy Amish, etc. He also doesn't want the book to focus on what he calls "appropriation" of the Amish as a means to self-discovery or as convenient symbols for pushing a particular ideology, be it nostalgia for an idealized past or a back-to-nature quest.

What he wants to do is to focus on one family, the Shetlers, and how they live as Amish.

Yet by deliberately separating themselves from us, the Amish can drive us into introspection. Mackall will spend a good deal of the book as a character in his own personal drama, the hapless "English" interacting with the Amish, and as a narrator, he will repeatedly ponder his own mixed response to people who are simultaneously both his friends and his subjects.

How do you view the Amish? I once saw them as quaint oddities on the outer fringes of society. Later, I began to grasp that religion, not rejection of technology or of the twentieth century, was the basis of their community. I recognized that the allure of modernity to them was secondary to supporting and nurturing community. While I could probably never become Amish, they've come to shine for me as an alternative to the way the "rest of us" organize society, a challenge to the notion that the way we do it is the "only" way or the "right" way. Apparently, people can thrive in a very different setting and in a society organized on very different principles. There are other ways to live.

I remember getting lost once with Roger en route from Philadelphia to his parents' house in York. I perked up as we drove by barn after barn, tidy farmhouse after tidy farmhouse and field after field of corn. I felt a deep sense of relief and comfort that so many family farms were still thriving in this country. A little while later, as we passed several buggies, I realized we were in Amish country. I remember feeling both deeply disappointed that these weren't "mainstream" farms and at the same time grateful for the existence of the Amish and the wedge they provide against modernity.

Back to the question: How do you view the Amish? What do you think we can learn, if anything, from them? And if you are Quaker, do you find it surprising that there are more Amish than Quakers in North America?