Amish country

Today, a friend told of his recent visit to Amish country.  He discovered through various conversations with the locals that there is a general distress over the loss of the younger generation.  Their children are leaving.  And they're asking themselves "why?"  What have we done?  How can we make amends? And, perhaps, at root, "Is what we're doing valuable, i.e., worth saving?"

The answer, of course, depends on the agenda.  What exactly are the Amish doing?  All America would like to know.  I have the suspicion that many of them don't exactly know.  Maybe they've got some vague idea of the value of community and relationships - things you cannot objectively measure or put on a spread sheet to determine their value.  And the irony is that while the Amish are at last losing their communities to modernity, post-modernity has become disillusioned with the its rootless lack of community. Empty-hearted America gazes longingly over its heaping armfuls of gadgets at the fertile Amish fields, dotted by community-constructed barns and homes, and wishes.  We wish we had their wisdom, their joy, their pace of life.  We wish we had the inter-dependence and even that we experienced the painstaking humanness of their earth-labors.  But not at the expense of our conveniences.

We want self-indulgent convenience as well as the joyful fruit of community.  But I suspect that the latter cannot have its deepest expression without the selfless investment of sacrifice.  Life only comes through dying.  The larger fruit of love in a community only comes from the smaller plantings of self-abnegation.  A relationship, like the soil, can only be cultivated when we choose to be "inconvenienced" by the digging.  And that means getting dirty.

And thus a community like that of Amish.