THE AMISH
CONNECTION
Our area sports a fair sized Amish population, some from Ohio and some from Pennsylvania. Their ethnic subculture and "old" ways present an enigma to many folks.
They are steeped in religious tradition which seems strange and even contradictory to the casual observer. I won't go into what could be hundreds of pages writing about they Why's and Wherefores of the Amish; suffice it to say that they are from a gentler, but tougher, more closely-knit-family time where morals, religion, and the good of society takes precedence. That's my opinion anyway, from what little I have learned and read about them. We have neighbors on either side of us who are Amish, the woods behind our home are owned by an Amish family, and my personal opinion of the Amish is high. They are and have been good neighbors. Now, naturally, unless I say SOMETHING about the Amish, I don't have much left for this page, do I? So, I will tell you a little of what I know of them, and a little about their presence in this area. A lot of folk are baffled by the seemingly illogical lifestyles of the Amish and that is what interested me in them. I may have many personal misconceptions of the Amish as I am "self taught", so to speak, so anyone who disagrees with any facts I mention here may feel free to call me on it and I will try to check it out Aye or Nay. No promises, however.
The Amish lifestyle in this area seems "last century", prior to automobiles, tractors, and the electronic age. I think they would have blended in smoothly in those bygone years, but since they have resisted modernization so heavily, it makes the unique in today's modern culture. They have several apparent "quirks" in their traditions and practices, and seem to fervently resist some modernization while cautiously accepting others. But, these are the things that allow the Amish to retain their identity and to survive in today's world. They have no TV, few radios, are not allowed to wear jewelry of any kind, will not ride on rubber tires, rely on horses for transportation, the ladies may not curl or cut their hair, shave their legs, or trim their eyebrows, and most do farm work, and believe in the good of society above that of the individual. The society however strongly protects the well being of the individual. As far as I know, no individual is allowed to go hungry. Their actual beginnings go back to Germany and Switzerland as the Protestants and Mennonites respectively, becoming the Amish in the late 1600s.
Here's a favorite picture of mine - A winter scene with a family on a horse drawn sled, the kids' sleds in tow, on their way to do some "modern day" sledding:
The teenagers can sometimes be rather gregarious; I remember once coming up the hill just down the road from us, driving at a reasonable speed on the snow/ice covered road, and suddenly being faced with a horse trotting around the corner and into the road, a sled full of kids in tow, flailing across the road like a water skier in a sharp turn. We all did a bunch of slippin' and slidin' and since they did this right in front of their own home on that corner, the split like jackrabbits to get away from me. I ended up laughing at the surprised look on their faces, but it sure scared the bejeepers out of me for a minute or so!
The Amish wear a distinctive set of clothing. The men's hats and their beards stand out to me.
The unmarried men do not
sport beards, but when a male Amish gets married, he grows a beard. It seems to
be the counterpart of our wedding ring which, of course, is forbidden to the
Amish because it is jewelry. I don't know the origin of this practice, but it
sure would be nice not to have to shave all the time! I think there is a
counter-tradition for the women, but I have not yet found out what it is.
It probably sounds silly, but I always get a warm feeling when I see a buggy pass by with one bearded and one unbearded man aboard; it means it is most likely a father/son going somewhere together.
The Amish do not attend
public schools. Rather they still have the one-room schoolhouse in most cases
around here. There is one about a mile from here so we have often watched the
children walking in groups to their schoolhouse. They are mostly well behaved
and respectful of passing automobiles, but one must watch closely as with all
children. When the winter cold hits, they are rather cute to watch, walking
down the road, coats held tight against the wind, their shoes so oversized for
their size that one thinks it must be their parent's shoes they are wearing. I
bet there are layers and layers of socks inside those shoes!
The Amish value tradition very highly. Their basic values are counter-intuitive for many of us. Things that we take for granted are keenly different for the Amish. In the book The RIDDLE of AMISH CULTURE by donald B. Kraybill, I found this list of the Amish basic values:
"The individual is not the supreme reality.
Communal goals transcend personal ones.
The past is as important as the future.
Tradition is valued equally with change.
Personal sacrifice is esteemed over pleasure.
Local involvement outweighs national acclaim.
Work is more satisfying than consumption.
Obeying, waiting and yielding are embraced.
Newer, bigger, and faster are not better.
Preservation eclipses progress.
Staying together is the supreme value.
It seems rather fitting here to mention the general garb of the Amish.
First some general terminology - this is all from the aforementioned book, so I am not sure how closely all of these apply to our local genre of Amish. Childhood is defined in four stages:
Babies, of course, are infants up to the age of about 1. Little Children is used to describe children from the time they start to walk until they start school. Scholars are the youngsters from six to about 15. They are Young People from their mid-teens until they become married.
Young girls apparently wear head dress similar to that of adults and are usually white in color. Teenage girls will usually wear a black covering. The styles may vary but they are always unmistakably Amish. Usually the women wear an apron over their skirts and a cape that covers that top half of their dress. For her wedding the bride will wear a white cape and apron, symbols of virginity, changing them for a colored cape and black apron. Single women up to the age of thirty also wear the white cape and apron but at the age of 30 exchange them for the colored cape and black apron. Women aged 40 or more wear a black cape and apron over nearly any color of dress. White stocking are the order of the day from birth to age 2, after which the stockings are to be black.
Now the boys wear dresses until around one year old by tradition. They start wearing garb very similar to the adults at about the age of four. Their suits may consist of trousers, suspenders, hat, and a vest with or without a coat. Their hair is cut even with the ear lobe, not parted, and bangs to about the middle of the forehead. Sideburns are prohibited unless they also sport a beard. Hats must always be worn outdoors, and can be made of straw in the summer and felt in the winter. Men must be clean shaven until they marry, at which time they must grow an untrimmed, ear to ear full beard. Men over 40 grow the same beard as those of their younger married counterparts. Their upper lip, however, is shaved. It seems the moustache is forbidden because it was once associated with military personnel from years gone by. Other items such as gloves, scarfs, and sunglasses are permitted based on the weather.
The color of death is white. Men and women alike are buried in white clothing. Special clothing is made for the funeral, and the man also wears his best dress shirt while the woman wears her white bridal cape and apron.
To most, the horse has turned out to be the universal symbol of the Amish presence in areas where they settle. Anyone who has driven in an Amish area has seen the yellow horse and buggy signs along the roadside denoting their presence and advise caution in watching out for them. The horse does indeed seem to be their central most valuable asset, which is not a far cry from last century. They use lighter, smaller horses for transportation such as pulling their buggies to town and back, often bought from race tracks. Workhorses and mules will be found around the barn and in the fields. Horseback riding is strongly discouraged as the horse is an animal of work, not pleasure. It seems it is too close to a "worldly sport" for the Amish to ride horseback. The horse is more or less a sacred link to their history and their beginnings. The automobile and tractors of course are strictly forbidden in most instances. As in any culture there are exceptions, but I am writing here about the local Amish - I do not believe you will see a car in this area, parked any where near an Amish house unless it is a customer or visitor.
Amish church services and weddings are always an interesting sight to us "outsiders". The services, in one form or another, may last all day. Church events are also highly communal events with many things happening besides services. It is a chance for them to talk, discuss the issues and problems of the day, advance new theories, read, and socialize in general. The services are not held in any one spot but rather rotate from one homestead to another. When a church service is held nearby, we will see what seems like hundreds of horses and buggies clip-clopping by. Waking to the clip-clops in the early morning is a sure sign there is a service being held nearby. If you should drive by the place where the services are being held you will see all the buggies and horses parked nearby in the fields. And then of course as evening draws near you have the clip-clopping of the horses as they return to their own homes.
Outwardly, though they seem so "strange" to many, the Amish are a friendly people. They constantly wave when they pass or you pass them. Politeness is rampant. They may see us as "outsiders", "worldly," and "high consumers" to mention a few things, but their respect for others is laudable in my opinion. When I first started noticing them moving in to this area, I looked at them pretty sideways as they waved away while they bought a house, ripped out the plumbing, removed all the telephone poles, and generally seemed to trash the place. But today it's amazing how cleaned up and good looking those old, falling down farms look. Even with their quaint two-holers added on to the kitchen and pantry areas.
"Some of the most important beliefs held by the Amish are: separation from the outside world, vow of obedience, and closeness to nature. There are other regulations over societal customs such as dress, use of inventions and no formal education beyond elementary school. The fear of being shunned and excommunicated keeps the Amish from being tempted by the outside world. The moral beliefs of the Amish Church are based on the Bible and most of their views stem from literal translations of the teachings of the Bible. The Amish do not try to recruit members from the outside because that would be seen as consorting with those that are shunned." (Hostetler and Schreiber)
I can't resist listing a few URLs for you to go to where you can learn a lot about the Amish. However, none of these sites, or any others that I could find, talk about our local Amish population. We have a mixture here.
Mennonite History
The
Amish---History,Beliefs and Practices
The National
Committee for Amish Religious Freedom
An Amish
Woman's Diary
An Amish
man's Personal Account
Lehman's Non-Electric Catalog - Everything families need to live happy without electricity. Serving the Amish and others without electricity with products for simple, self-sufficient living since 1955.
I think one of the most interesting and important aspects of the Amish is how they band together to insure the welfare of the community through support of the individual. They have their own sort of social security in that they are always ready to help their neighbors. Whether it's getting a sick neighbor's work done or raising a barn after a fire, they are always there.
Their support sometimes even reaches beyond their own, so to speak, as evidenced in the severe Ice Storm that crippled the area in 1998. The Amish pitched in to make sure that their "worldly" neighbors, without power for some number of weeks in many places, got their cows milked, fed, and taken care of. There are many, many stories of how they helped out in that time of need. For them, it was business as usual, but for us, it was catastrophe, being left without electricity, gasoline, fuel oil, and many other necessities of modern life. For me it was a humbling education.
When I am better able to get around, I plan to make an excursion to get more
data on the Amish, and hopefully some better pictures that more accurately
reflect the local population.
The Amish lifestyle and religion have a set of expected behaviors called "Ordnung". It's sort of a combination of discipline and ordinances, a code of conduct if you will, from what I can figure out. It allows the church to strike that balance between change and traditions that so obviously marks the presence of the Amish in our modern world. The Ordnung defines their style of clothing, buggies, the use of horses, sometimes the German dialect, the orderof worship services, and marriage among many others. It also prevents such things as using automobiles, tractors for field work, using electricity from the electric power lines, lawsuits, joining worldly organizations or the military service, using modern electronic devices such as TV, radio, calculators, flying in aircraft, and divorce to name a few. For the Amish this is a sacred set of rites that sets them apart from the rest of the world and maintains their lifestyles and beliefs. The children are brought up in it, much the same as we are brought up in whatever religion our family has chosen. There are some vast differences, however, in their rites as the children age.
Before they are baptized, children are under the care of their parents and the church has no official power over them. This creates a rather nether-area of their lives where they are not in and not out of the church. It also explains the non-conformity of the teenage Amish children. If they never join the church, they will never be baptized, and thus will have done nothing wrong in the eyes of the church, which means they won't be ostracized or shunned since they have not broken their baptismal promises.
Teenagers must make the decision whether to join the church. Those who decide to join will kneel for baptism and promise to submit to the Ordnung for the remainder of their lives, so it is no small decision to make. Should their faith falter, they will then run the very real possibility of being shunned by the church and will likely be banished from the community forever once having accepted baptism. When one considers that a child is reared under the Ordnung, and it provides everything from romance to land, family, and community, it is not surprising to me that 4 out of 5 (according to claims) promise to join the church and community by accepting baptism. Well established roots and community experience usually wins out in recruiting the teenagers. It is also worthy of note that Amish ministers will never marry any non-Amish person. Marriage partners must be Amish in order to be married. Not a difficult requirement though since their lives and community are so tightly bound to the faith.
Turning again to THE RIDDLES OF AMISH
CULTURE BY Don Kraybill, Chapter 7, I offer some of the seeming oddities of
Amish life; riddles of technology.
The telephone has long been an item of
contention in Amish life. Phones are forbidden in the homes. The leading reason
seems to be simply that they made gossip too easy, it was worldly, and had no
religious purpose. But the USE of the phone was not banned - only its presence
in the homes. They will and do indeed use the telephone for such purposes as
notifying others of a death, disaster, or other things of great importance.
Church districts vary widely on the permissivity of phones in shops and barns
even today. The phone is allowed today in community shanties, near shops and
barms, thus supporting their historic opposition to it but allowing it to be
present to support industry, safety, and health concerns.
Amish homes do not have electricity and
though they do use electricity, it does not come from the worldly power lines
running by their homes. Batteries however may be used for starting gasoline
engines and flashlights. The gasoline engines may very well be electrical
generators also, which are used to power the conveniences of the home, shop,
and barn. When made and used without a connection to the outside world (the
power lines), they made concessions to allow it use. It is not the electricity
that the Amish object to - it is the sloth, laziness, and other worldly things
it brings that they object to.
This is only small tidbit of the information
in that book and many others like it. Highly suggested and interesting reading.
I'll call this to a close here because I can see that I will write volumes on
the subject if I'm not careful, and I am relying too much on what I've read and
not personal experience. So, with that in mind, this chapter closes. At least
until I have had the thrill of collecting more firsthand knowledge.