Amish Confidential (8 page)

Amish weddings are considered hugely festive occasions. Nothing for the Amish is more joyous than seeing two of their own joined in wedlock. It’s the culmination of every parent’s dream from the time the children are born. Before the wedding, both the bride and
groom will join the church and be baptized. That alone is cause for a sigh of parental relief. A marriage is a promise to continue the faith, and everyone hopes that the happy couple will soon be starting their own very large Amish family together. Those things all call for major celebration.

People often ask me if the Amish have arranged marriages. I laugh and say, “I hope someone arranges a good one for me.” The truth is, Amish parents don’t actually choose who their children marry, but they do have a voice. A minister won’t agree to preside over the ceremony if all four parents don’t approve of the union. And the Amish aren’t above a little pre-wedding mediating. My father tells me that as a deacon, he often has to smooth the way before a wedding can take place. The boy’s family thinks the girl’s family isn’t devout enough. The girl’s family worries the boy won’t be stern enough to raise righteous children. It could be anything.

The plans are kept quiet until two weeks before the big day. No sparkling rocks on the bride-to-be’s third finger. No save-the-date cards. No pre-engagement parties. Only then, when everyone’s agreed and both families have given their blessing, are the couple’s plans “published” and the congregation is officially informed. But even before that, it’s hard to keep things totally secret. Some little signs can hint beforehand that a wedding might be in the works. Watch for the celery. As soon as a girl tells her parents she is planning to marry, they will plant an extra patch of celery near the house. Celery is considered lucky for an Amish couple. Lots of it will be served on the wedding day. So a sighting of feathery celery leaves can always get the local women buzzing.

You won’t find Amish parents touring local wedding halls. And the young couple won’t be planning an island destination wedding.
How would they even get there? Most weddings are held at the bride’s family’s home. But with such large families, the guest lists are rarely short. Two hundred to three hundred of their closest friends and relatives will likely attend, as many as the house can hold and then some. Those who come from far away will hire a van and driver. No church member wants to be seen driving a car up to an Amish wedding.

The day starts with a long church service held right there at home, complete with many hymns and a long sermon. The Amish are used to that. The wedding ceremony, which is fairly simple, follows immediately. The ceremony begins with the minister counseling the bride and groom, making sure they understand that Amish marriage is permanent. The couple is then asked to make their vows. As you might expect, the Amish aren’t too big on writing their own.

I wouldn’t call the vows especially romantic. The minister’s questions are designed more to have the couple restate their religious faith, with a little caring thrown in. “Can you both confess and believe that God has ordained marriage to be a union between one man and one wife, and do you also have the confidence that you are approaching marriage in accordance with the way you have been taught?”

And “Do you also have confidence, brother, that the Lord has provided this, our sister, as a marriage partner for you?” And “Do you promise your husband that if he should in bodily weakness, sickness or any similar circumstances need your help, that you will care for him as is fitting for a Christian wife?” And “Will you with love, forbearance and patience live with each other and not part from each other until God will separate you by death?”

Once the bride and groom have agreed to all that, the union is blessed, and a final prayer is said.

The bride and groom do not kiss. The minister doesn’t pronounce them “Mr. and Mrs.” But with the minister’s hand covering the bride and groom’s clasped hands, they are married.

Then it’s party time.

The jubilation begins immediately with a large, noontime, celery-accented meal: cut-celery appetizer, roasted chicken (my mother calls it hingleflesh) with celery stuffing, creamed celery as the main vegetable, grumbatta mush (that’s mashed potatoes) and gravy, salads, cheese, bologna, bread, butter, honey, jelly, fruits, pies, pudding, ice cream and little centerpiece jars with celery stalks on every table. The tables are arranged around the edge of the living room and throughout the first floor of the house, wherever there is wall space. A special table, called an Eck, is set up in the corner for the bridal party. The bride takes the traditional seat to the left of her groom, symbolizing where she will sit in their marriage buggy. The single Amish women sit on the bride’s side of the room. The single Amish men sit on the groom’s side. The couples’ parents and siblings sit together in the kitchen. Why they do that, I don’t know.

After everyone’s finished eating, the wedding cakes—plural—are brought out. Some are made by the neighbor women who pitched in to help prepare the feast. But there’s usually one from a local bakery, saved for later in the day.

This is truly a big day for everyone. So even after the long ceremony and huge servings of food, the Amish wedding rituals have barely begun. Amish nuptials have an added secret agenda. Single young men and women know that late fall isn’t just wedding season. It’s also meet-your-mate time. Many of the activities are designed to
pair off the bride’s and groom’s single friends, a key responsibility of every newlywed couple. An especially large fuss is always made over “going to the table.” After the noon meal is over, the unmarried women ages sixteen to thirty are invited to sit in one of the upstairs bedrooms. The men walk out to the barn, where, I know from painful experience, they stand around uncomfortably and joke with one another about what is coming next. Two married couples—friends of the bride and groom—join the young men in the barn and, in a key part of the tradition, convince them to go upstairs. That’s where the pairing off will begin. Each guy has to enter the bedroom filled with anxious, giggling girls and ask one of the young ladies to “go to the table.” When the new “couple” finally emerges, a roomful of curious eyes follow as they walk down the stairs hand in hand, then sit together at a long wooden table for the next round of food.

This is tradition, and all Amish guys have been through it. That walk down the stairs can be painful if you’re shy. More than once, I’ve wondered if the parents of the girl I’d asked to the table weren’t watching me closely, judging my suitability for their daughter. I have no idea how I might have measured up. But mostly, it’s good fun for the wedding guests, whether they are involved or not. There’s a lot of nervous laughter and sideward glances involved. The hope is that a few boy-girl connections will be made and romantic sparks will fly. The older folks watch all this knowingly from chairs and benches around the house, often breaking into song with rousing hymns. The singing continues for hours while more food is served and young people get better acquainted.

At some point in the evening, the unmarried women are invited out to the barn to mingle with the unmarried men. This can be especially entertaining if any fresh boy-girl connections have been made.
It can also be torture. At weddings of friends, I’ve experienced both. The bride and groom try to make sure that all the unmarried men and women have partners for the evening, even if some of the pairings don’t click perfectly.

As the evening rolls on, everyone wanders back to the house. The heat is up. The gaslights are glowing. Some of the men might take a nip or two of homemade liquor. There is another meal, more talking, and the hymnals come out again. Finally, sometime around ten or eleven o’clock, everyone shuffles out to the buggies and vans for the groggy ride home.

Amish newlyweds might not get right down to the business of starting a family on the wedding night. They usually spend their honeymoon weekend at the girl’s parents’ home. The new husband stops shaving immediately. That beard will become his Amish wedding ring. Then the happy couple spend the next few months traveling each weekend to the homes of different relatives, being fed and feted and collecting furniture, quilts and other wedding gifts. Only then are the young newlyweds ready to move into a home of their own. By then, the husband’s beard should have grown out a little, letting everyone see immediately that he is a married man.

S
o does this whole system work? Does it bring together suitable Amish couples who love each other, stay together and go forth and multiply like they are supposed to? The numbers say yes, absolutely. The divorce rate is down near zero. Family size vacillates between giant and huge. And the vast majority of married Amish couples stay together the rest of their lives. Some of this “commitment” is surely because of the powerful social pressure the Amish live with every
day. Those who get divorced are usually forced to leave the church as well. So their busted unions often don’t get counted as failed Amish marriages. Statistics aren’t supposed to lie, but they don’t always tell the whole truth, either.

It’s hard to prove for certain one way or the other. My own personal impressions tell me . . . mostly, yes. Most Amish marriages achieve what they are supposed to.

And it really does make sense. From what I’ve seen, most Amish people seem to get along fairly well with the people they’ve married, probably as well as people in any other faith. Maybe a little better, in fact. The Amish start their marriages with a big advantage over many other couples. For the most part, they’ve all been raised alike with expectations and experiences that are extraordinarily similar. What does the newly married couple have in common? Almost everything!

There are other things to take into consideration when trying to explain the staying power of Amish couples. As a group, the Amish aren’t big complainers. When they suffer, they tend to suffer in silence. They’re told to take their burdens and offer them up to the Lord.

Other religions worry constantly about empty churches, shrinking families, intermarriage and loss of faith. Those aren’t really problems in the Amish community, and the rituals of Amish mating serve to reinforce all that.

I’ve given a lot of thought to this in my own life: If I had found an Amish girlfriend and gotten married to her, maybe I would have stayed Old Order Amish. Maybe I would have gotten baptized in the Amish church. Maybe I would have had ten or fifteen children. Maybe I would have led a very different life.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

As things turned out, that path wasn’t my path. I was born into the Amish community. I stayed very much in the Amish community. But I continue to find my own route through life.

I’m not sure if that makes me a success or a failure, but it definitely makes me who I am.

CHAPTER 7

SO ORDERED

“Y
ou should ask that one out,” my mother told me.

She was talking about an Amish girl, the daughter of a friend of hers, who was—let me be frank here—just about the last girl on earth I would choose to date.

Then my mother focused on another girl, who made the first one look like Kelly McGillis in
Witness
.
“She’s very nice,” my mother insisted. “That’s the one you should take out. You’ll like her—definitely.”

“I don’t think so,” I told my mother.

“You should do it.”

“You can’t just go over and ask them out,” I said, reaching for excuses. “It has to be someone you already know.”

“Just do it,” my mother said.

“You don’t understand.”

It wasn’t just my mother. I know my father felt the same way, though he wasn’t quite as vocal with the dating advice. Both my parents wanted me to find an Amish girlfriend—and not because they were concerned about my social life. Thanks to Rumspringa, my
social life was going great. My parents wanted me to get an Amish girlfriend, because they believed that might be the only way I would quit dragging my feet about getting baptized in the Old Order Amish Church.

I was in my early twenties. After five or six years of Rumspringa, many of my friends had gotten baptized. Some of them had also married. It was almost always the same scenario: The Amish guy got an Amish girlfriend. The girl wanted to get married. Both of them knew the rules: To get married in the Old Order Amish Church, you had to be baptized in the Old Order Amish Church. With every new baptism and marriage, the Anabaptist faith of Jacob Ammann and others would be handed down to another Amish generation and on and on, as it always had been and probably always will be. And the young couple’s lucky parents would be blessed with grandchildren, too.

My mother did not give up easily. I know she and my father were getting pressure from people at church who wondered what was up with “that Levi.”

“If you die young,” she said to me, test-driving another argument, “it would be best if you were baptized.” All of this was sincere, I know. She didn’t want her youngest son heading off to hell.

I didn’t tell my parents this, but the girls I liked were mostly English. Nothing super serious or long-term had developed yet. I hadn’t ruled out Amish girls. I’d have been happy to settle down with one if we connected, but that hadn’t happened so far, no matter how many daughters my mother’s friends might have had.

As far as I was concerned, there were arguments on both sides.

I believed in God. There was no doubt about that. I was raised Amish and felt Amish. Amish was what I knew. I embraced the
core Amish values of love, support and community. But when I was truthful with myself, I also knew I’d been experiencing doubt for a long time that the Old Order Amish Church was the one way to heaven for me. I had some real problems with how things were run.

The rigidity. The contradictions. The hypocrisy. The fixation on hard-to-explain rules. The iron-willed authority of bishops who seemed to be making it up as they went along—and then sometimes disagreed with the bishop up the road. The weird inconsistencies that had been weighing on my mind for years. I couldn’t find any of that in the Bible. Should you really shun someone you love just to teach them a lesson? Was it really okay to bully families you thought weren’t devout enough? Even Jesus wasn’t that judgmental!

Then there was my behavior. For several years already, I’d been doing things that would not be permitted once I joined the church. Driving, drinking, dressing English, playing in a rock band, watching TV, thinking about certain girls in certain ways—so many things I couldn’t have listed them all in one of those black-and-white composition books we used to carry to Amish school. I’d been experiencing so many things I found I enjoyed, and none of it was church approved. I knew if I got baptized, I’d be promising to give all those things up.

But here was an interesting wrinkle: No matter what I’d been doing until this point, I hadn’t broken a single rule of the Amish church. Not one. The reason for that was simple: Even though I’d been raised in an Amish home by Amish parents, even though I started going to Amish services before I got my first black hat, I hadn’t yet been baptized in the Amish church. So I wasn’t officially
Amish. I was beholden to my parents. I lived under their authority. They had every right to be mad at me or disappointed in me or worried about me. But I wasn’t bound by the Ordnung. None of the church’s rules applied to me, yet.

Nice technicality, huh?

Once I got baptized, though, that would all change. From that point forward, I’d also be responsible to the church.

Believer’s baptism, free-will baptism, adult baptism—call it what you will. That’s what the Anabaptist tradition is all about. Your faith and commitment aren’t imposed on you in childhood. You accept them or decline them once you become an adult.

To me, this was serious business. I had friends who’d been living loose and free like I had. They got baptized and married, promising before God and the church and everyone to follow the straight-and-narrow path. Then they broke that promise almost immediately and just kept living like they pleased. It seemed to me it would be better not making promises in the first place, if I didn’t plan on keeping them. Baptism, I believed, was a permanent, solemn vow to follow the church and the many rules of the Ordnung. I’m not saying those rules aren’t bent and broken by plenty of Amish people. But I knew that if I kept doing the things that I’d been doing in my Rumspringa time, I’d be shattering that vow into a million pieces. I could be punished, shunned or excommunicated, and I’d probably feel awful about myself. There’s not a lot of wiggle room after baptism.

“I’m thinking about it,” I told my father when he asked me about my intentions. “I just don’t know.”

I
n my crowd, there were some families who were far more rigid than my parents were. They insisted their children not live at home during Rumspringa if they were going to flaunt their bad behavior. Afterward, if their children decided against joining the church, many of these stricter families cut off all contact with them. These parents were raised to believe “you’d be better off losing a child through death than having him not be baptized.” It was an extreme way to feel but understandable, I guess. Their whole lives they’d been taught at church that their most important duty in life, after saving their own souls, was to raise their sons and daughters to be the next generation of Amish, carrying on the faith.

I was lucky. Even though my dad was a deacon, my parents were more tolerant than that. They actually believe the “free” part of free-will baptism, that a decision as important as this one really should be voluntary.

From the day their sixteen-year-old joins a youth group, many Amish parents start looking for signs of
unzufriede,
the Amish word for “discontent.” Is he going on trips to far-off locations, too far for a horse-and-buggy? Is she hanging around with non-Amish friends? Is he taking a date to an English restaurant? More alarmingly, is he dating non-Amish girls? Is he suddenly interested in higher education, maybe even taking the GED or a class at the local community college?

I knew I’d been displaying plenty of
unzufriede
.

The adults around me had seen my sort of reluctance before. They didn’t panic. My parents, my aunts and uncles and the other grown-ups at church, they understood that some young people, even
devout young people—maybe even themselves back in the day—may need a little time to stretch and breathe. It was okay for young people to test their freedom, my folks believed, so long as it didn’t become a permanent state of affairs. In their view, youthful freedom was meant to be a passing condition, kind of like voice-cracking or acne.

As I wrestled with the decision, I took some comfort in knowing that if I chose not to get baptized in the Old Order Church, I could still have a good relationship with my family. That was important to me.

If I’d been convinced, truly convinced, that the Old Older Amish rules were really the will of God, there’d have been no inner struggle. I would have been baptized freely in the Old Order Amish Church. I would have thrown away the car keys and said good-bye to my guitar, sent my regrets to the next band hop, found a nice Amish girl and given her the life she expected. But ultimately, I wasn’t convinced. I came to see that my God was more open than my church was. As far as I could tell, the church was more dependent on the arbitrary decisions of men than anything that was coming down from heaven.

When I was truthful with myself, I knew that I’d been experiencing feelings of doubt from the time I was still a child. Those doubts never really died away. Maybe it was my natural sense of curiosity that got the better of me. But I was never truly satisfied with the explanations for the rules of the Ordnung. I had never stopped feeling Amish. I had never stopped knowing I was Amish. I will be Amish for the rest of my life. But after a lot of self-reflection, I came to believe that my version of being Amish—there are many, as I keep discovering—was leading me on a parallel but slightly different path. I decided to be baptized in the New Order Amish Church.

The New Order Amish are similar in many ways to the Old Order. They share the same history, tradition and culture and many of the same beliefs. But some of the interpretations are a little different. The most important difference is a greater tolerance for the secular world and a stronger emphasis on finding our own Amish ways.

This was the right answer for me. I could still be a genuine part of the Amish community I felt so close to. My parents would take comfort in the fact that I was baptized in a church they were familiar with that carried on many of the old traditions. But I could have the distance that allowed me to be truer both to the Amish community and to myself. In unexpected ways, I found that I could honor and protect the Amish even better with one foot outside my family’s community. It gave me perspective, independence and the power of truth.

“If you don’t want to be baptized in our church, find a good one,” my mother had counseled me. I know she was relieved when I told her I had.

At age twenty-four, I was baptized in a beautiful ceremony at the Spring Garden New Order Amish Mennonite Church near White Horse in Lancaster County. Most, though not all, of my family was happy for me. All my sisters and brothers came that day. My mother and father seemed proud to be there by my side.

One of the other people who was baptized with me, a guy about my age, was at the church entirely alone. His Old Order family was so upset with him, they refused to attend at all. He seemed so lonely sitting there. I felt really bad for him.

The baptism ritual was exactly the same as the one used in Old Order churches. I’d been thinking about it since I was a boy. I knew the three questions by heart.

“Can you renounce the devil, the world and your own flesh and blood?” the bishop asked.

“Can you commit yourself to Christ and His church, and to abide by it and therein to live and to die?

“And in all order of the church, according to the word of the Lord, to be obedient and submissive to it and to help therein?”

The Amish don’t dunk anyone in a lake like some religions do. But after three clear yeses to the three big questions, a deacon ladled water from a bucket into the bishop’s cupped hands. The bishop let the water drip over my head. Then, with a ceremonial holy kiss, the bishop said a blessing and invited me, the newest baptized member, into the fellowship of the church.

I felt like I had made the hardest decision of my life, and I’d made it right.