Feast of Saint Mark, evangelist
Last Friday, I took my students in ENG 364 to the largest Amish settlement in the world, in Holmes and Wayne counties here in Ohio. We visited the Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin where we were given a tour of a 265-foot cyclorama that, with the help of a narrator, tells the history of the Amish and Mennonites—in particular, their experience of persecution for their beliefs in adult baptism, separation of church and state, and pacifism.
We visited the shop of an Old Order Amish man who crafts buggies. The buggies are beautiful. I asked him how he learned to build buggies. An apprenticeship perhaps? No, he said. He took apart his own buggy and then put it back together again. That’s how he learned to build a buggy.
We encountered Anna. She is among the Swartzentruber Amish. The Swartzentruber Amish are the most tradition minded of the Amish. They will not put windshields on their buggies. Too worldly. They will not put gravel on their driveways. They will not plant shrubs around their houses. They will not put upholstered furniture in their homes. Rather than install natural gas powered refrigerators in their homes, they harvest ice in the winter, store it in an ice house, and use it to chill their food in ice chests during the warmer months. They cook on wood-burning stoves.
Hochmut and Demut.
This is the choice for the Amish. Hochmut is high-mindedness. Demut is humility. Hochmut is about self. Demut is about community.
I couldn’t be Amish. For one thing, I love all that I learned as I pursued my PhD. An eighth-grade education (Amish don’t go beyond the eighth grade) could not be the end of my education. I needed more.
But as I spent 15 years studying the Amish in order to write my book on Amish Country tourism and as I took my students to the Amish settlement in Holmes and Wayne counties last Friday, I have to say that their witness matters. The Amish are not just the purveyors of well-marketed potato salad.
They mean it. They mean to be humble as Christ calls us to be humble. Their witness to a plain and simple life is for real.
If we have eyes to see, the Amish humble us. They oblige us to see ourselves. Are we following Jesus?
I pray that I am. I know not whether I am.
—Sue Trollinger