For Better or Worse

As a fellow who travels for a living, I especially love being home on the weekend. My wife and I usually start each Saturday with a trip to our local Farmers Market. It’s a great venue, open air, with lots and lots of local producers and artisans peddling their crafts and products. Corn, squash, and tomatoes in season, gravy and biscuits, cider, watercolor and wooden bowls. All sorts of things from all sorts of people.

One of the more notable families that show up each week is an Amish looking family. A mom and dad, four or five kids, all in traditional Amish wear. They’re always one of the first vendors to arrive, and they’re always in the same place, right between the bluegrass band and the gourmet coffee booth.

I’ve long been curious about the Amish people. I don’t know a lot about them. They sure do make good apple butter and rocking chairs, but other than that, I can’t think off-hand of a single thing the Amish people, as a whole, have ever contributed to our society. A low profile bunch- they never run for office, don’t think they ever served in combat, and you won’t find one quarterbacking in the NFL. They remind me a lot of hoot owls, hoot owls and prairie dogs. When you can find one, they’re usually flying right below the radar. Face it. They just don’t like to be bothered.

One week I noticed a stack of paperbacks in addition to the usual array of greens, herbs, and jellies the family had laid out. It was a biography, the story of the dad, and his journey of discovery from Amish to Pentecostal. I never really thought about a journey like that so I bought a copy for my reading pleasure.

The story the author painted of this fellow’s Amish Pennsylvanian roots sounded, well almost like heaven. She described big family farms, big family dinners, herding sheep and milk cows, raising chickens, raising corn and hay; all against a backdrop of meadows, running streams, and orchards. The families stayed in cozy farm houses, with big fireplaces, and big wooden barns, wore homemade clothes, they ate well and rode around on horse drawn carriages. Put me immediately in mind of a John Denver song. No drugs, no rap music, just a clean God fearing community. I was surprised to learn the Amish people only held a religious service every other week, and then it was in someone’s home. And the men folk seemed to be in charge of the whole place, had a real strong-hold, a lot more than I had imagined.

As pleasant as it sounded, their history had not always been quite so idyllic. Apparently due to the oppression of other Catholic and Protestant forces, and we’re talking being burned at the stake, or tied up in large sacks and being drowned, and other equally undesirable methods of execution. Anyway Amish families in Europe started heading west to our shores as early as the mid 1600s.

Fast forward to 2005. It seems the Norman Rockwell type neighborhood and getting to church twice a month just wasn’t cutting it for the dad in our story. No he was yearning for something deeper, a little deeper with a lot more Jesus is how he phrased it. My hats off to any guy trying to find himself. Men, and usually young men, between the ages of 18 and 30, well say 18 and 60; we can be the worst at that. Whether it’s on a golf course, a sweat lodge, or at a Texas hold’em table, seems like us guys spend a lot of time trying to figure out our purpose in life.

Somehow this dad’s search for true Jesus brought him from the cozy amber waves of grain down to our little coal mining parts in Southwest Virginia, to the Pentecostal Church and the Reverend So and So. Me with so many questions and the solution just down the road. Who would have ever thought?

But this journey wasn’t as smooth as you might imagine. There was a spell of about six months when he would load the whole family in a borrowed van and drive several hundred miles each weekend just to get to this one true church of God. I’ve been to church quite a bit in my day and I never thought there was that much difference, especially not enough to make me want to drive six hours and cross three state-lines just to get to the service.

Again, changing one’s opinion as we get older, that’s not any big deal. But what astounded me the most was everybody else’s reaction. The poor wife, well she wasn’t quite as spiritually adventurous as the dad, not as eager to dive into the beliefs and mores of these Appalachian Pentecostals. From my interpretation, it sounded like she was on the verge of an emotional breakdown, letting chores go and staying in bed for days on end.

Everybody back home, the usually mild mannered man clan sans moustaches, well this fellow’s striking out for a new church didn’t sit too well in their collective craw either. They pondered, and prayed, and pondered some more and then they put it to a vote. They had a big vote and actually banned the dad in our story from the ranch. He was banished from the dad-burn homestead. It read like the scene from Dances with Wolves, all the men Indians sitting around in the tent talking one at a time. The only difference was that the Indians wanted Kevin Costner to stay. These Amish bastards, they kicked our buddy out of the camp faster than you can say friendship bread and potato salad. Banned? Can you believe it? In 2008 and just for thinking something different? You would have thought it was 1950 and he just came out of the closet, or had gotten busted on one of those under age sex stings they used to show on TV. Isn’t that amazing.

Let’s see, they ride wooden boats for three months crossing the Atlantic to get to a place where they can practice religious freedom, then dad here tries to freely practice his religion and they drop the hammer on him, give him a big ole boot. It’s a good thing they didn’t carry firearms.

The story ended there, but my thinking on the subject didn’t end there. Life goes on. See it wasn’t just the dad who joined that Pentecostal Church that autumn Sunday. In lots of families, the dad really is the spiritual leader or just the leader period. Whenever and wherever old dad goes, everybody else just sort of tags along in lock-step, a lot like little baby ducks following momma duck, only under a whole lot more pressure. I’m pretty sure that’s how dog fighting and shooting squirrels keeps getting passed down. The kid years can be a very impressionable time. Don’t ask questions son, just get in the car.

For this family, and in this circumstance, the dad was the one who did all the leg-work, the religious research if you will. He’s the one that first had the doubts, and then the questions, and was going through all the motions for some sort of personal discovery. Well once he found the answer, heck everybody else in the family just jumped on his same band wagon. In the flash of eye, and a few dips in the North Fork of the Holston River, they all became Pentecostal. Whether they understood it or not I’m guessing, that’s how they all changed their religion.

But I was wondering what if the same thing happens say ten or fifteen years from now. Suppose the daughter, and she was a cutey; just suppose she comes home one night and breaks the news. She tells mom and dad that she’s met Mr. Right, only her Mr. Right is a Baptist, or worse maybe a Jehovah Witness. Or maybe one of the boys will get to missing all that apple butter and decide to move back north to Pennsylvania and reacclimate to the land of no TV. I wonder what dad, the man who’s figured it all out and been in the very jaws of the vice of the religious freedom debate, I wonder what he’d do then. Yep, what would he do when it’s one of his own blood on the line?

What’s a father to do?

What would you do?