Amish Way of Life Still Relevant

Every month or two, my wife and I travel out to what we call Amish country. On Hickory Hill Road, Stone Arabia Road, and Route 5 near Palatine Bridge in Montgomery County, New York, there are Amish farmhouses where women rise early to bake bread, sticky buns, cookies and pies to sell to the public. For someone like me, who finds the Amish to be one of the most intriguing groups in America, talking to these people is as sweet as the baked goods they sell.

I have been interested in the Amish since I was a child, even though none lived near my hometown of Bangor, Maine. My mother, however, grew up in Pennsylvania and used to tell me stories about the Amish. When I was 18, I spent more than a day's wages on a book called "The Gentle People: A Portrait of the Amish" by James Warner and Donald Delinger.Because of my mother's stories and the photographs in the book, I wanted to make my pilgrimage to Lancaster, Pennsylvania but was never able to. The few times we drove through Pennsylvania, my father was in too much of a hurry to stop. As it turned out, however, I didn't have to go to Lancaster, because the Amish began moving into Montgomery County shortly after I moved here in 1978.

Originally my interest in the Amish was that of the average tourist. Visiting them was like going to a zoo and a museum at the same time. The Amish were an exotic species of the human animal, surrounded by the grandfather clocks, plows, kerosene lamps and buggies from another century.

As I matured, my outlook on the Amish matured also. I now see their lifestyle as a viable alternative to the life that most of us accept without questioning. The Amish do not live in the past, as so many of us believe. Indeed, they have been forced to make compromises with modern life and sometimes seem to have a better understanding of the complexities of modern society than we do.

I have not only visited the Amish but have researched their way of life and even considered becoming one. Many others over the past few decades have had the same interest. The Amish call us "seekers." In the November 1989 issue of Family Life, an Amish publication, the editor deals with the subject of seekers. He attributes the steady increase in the number of seekers to the way the tourism industry and the media have portrayed the Amish, and to the way outside society has deteriorated.

Although the editor has a soft spot in his heart for seekers, he nevertheless takes a realistic view of the barriers in becoming Amish.

First, there is the language barrier. Although most Amish speak English, their church services are in German, and their language gives them a sense of identity that the non-German speaking seeker would not have.

Then there is Amish work. Most of the men are farmers, carpenters, or do some other form of manual labor. The women have large families to look after and spend long days cooking, canning, sewing and gardening. They do all of this without electric stoves, microwave ovens and programmable sewing machines.

It finally became clear to me that these barriers are insurmountable for most people, including myself. On the other hand, there is a middle ground between seeing the Amish as museum pieces and converting to their religion and way of life.

For me that middle ground means, first of all, questioning the role of technology in society and in the home, because this is where Amish life differs so markedly from my own. The Amish do not reject all modern technology. For example, they use battery operated calculators in their workshops. They do, however, put all technology on probation. As one old woman said in "The Riddle of Amish Culture," by Donald B. Kraybill, "The telephones are still on probation." The television and automobile have completed, and failed, their probationary period.

This middle ground for me also means emphasizing simplicity, family, the sense of belonging to a larger community, helping one's neighbors, and traditional morality. It means viewing hard work as something to embrace rather than to avoid. It means faith in God is something that must be evident not just on Sunday but throughout the entire week. These are the values that have made the Amish attractive and successful both in Pennsylvania and here in Montgomery County, New York.

Not everyone will want to accept these values. I can't help but think, however, that everyone would be enriched, not just by buying Amish baked goods or handmade products, but by allowing the Amish way of life to be a mirror for reflecting on our own way of life.