Crossing Over (8 page)

Fourteen

Today is Loretta's birthday. We are planning to freeze ice cream for supper tonight with the fresh snow. . . . In a couple of weeks we will have our ninth wedding anniversary. (Time goes on) but we don't know how long. Ann will be 2 in September. She is more fine-featured than the rest were. Her hands are no bigger now than Harold's were at birth.

—L
ETTER FROM
E
LSON
(B
ROTHER)

O
f all the letters I received from my family after leaving, my oldest brother's were the most consistently kind. They were the kind of correspondence you'd expect from a relative, filled with warm updates about a family's day-to-day activities and rarely carrying a judgmental air. On one of his letters, he even had his children trace their hands so I could see how big they'd grown. They wrote their names in the white spaces of the palms and each drew a little smiley face.

I've heard Elson took flak for choosing to be nice—to be brotherly in his letters—especially from my father. But Elson, bless his heart, is his own person, determined to right the wrongs of previous generations.

On any given day, one can find Elson working in his cozy, odorous blacksmith shop behind his house along 110th Street, holding court with the English who come by word of mouth to have their horses shod. There, he melts globs of carbide onto glowing orange, hot-fired horseshoes—drill-teching, they call it—to reduce the wear on the shoes, and on this day he is refitting a huge, tan Belgian draft horse that is cinched tightly in a harness.

He gets nine dollars a shoe for the drill-teching; twenty-eight dollars a shoe for the refitting, which involves digging out, clipping and filing the hooves, shaping the shoes with a hammer, and deftly driving nails into shoe and hoof.

Elson's work has given him the forearms and biceps of a professional wrestler and, with his reddish beard, sunglasses, hat, and bulk, he looks a little like country-and-western singer Hank Williams Jr.

But he is neither fighter nor reveler. He is a dedicated thirty-something husband who recognizes—and in some cases deplores—the contradictions and biases of the Amish faith.

In that way, we are alike.

He has simply chosen a different path. His calling from God, he says, is to stay among the Amish to help them with their problems, and to forgive our father for his transgressions, something I continue to struggle with.

Elson has a sense of humor that is rare among the Amish, and he sometimes used it to brighten our childhoods. One summer, when I was ten, Bertha, Aaron, Elson, and I were walking a gravel road to deliver a cake to an elderly Amish woman when Elson suddenly made a beat toward an electric cattle fence.

“You suppose it's hot?'' he asked.

We all nodded.

“Bet it's not,'' he said, and he put his hand on the fence to prove it.

“Well,” he announced, “it didn't shock me, so it must not be hot.”

He asked us if we'd like to touch it, too, and Bertha, cake in hand, reluctantly agreed after declining several times. But when she put her hand on the fence, a surge of electricity coursed through her arm, she let out a squeal, jumped several inches off the ground, and dropped the cake.

Elson had fooled her, purposely failing to show how to time the syncopated pulse of the current by listening to it.

Even today, Elson possesses a playful wit. His job, he'll tell you, laughing, takes a strong back and a weak mind, the latter referring to the apparent stupidity of embracing an occupation that requires so much labor.

Still, he loves his public work. And he loves his private life as an Amish husband to Loretta and father to six children.

He dusts off the seat of a white plastic chair near the door of his shop and begins talking about growing up in the Miller family. A rooster crows brazenly just around the corner. Skipper, a scrawny, cat-sized, black-and-white dog with unbridled energy, scampers in and out of the shop, collecting white hoof shards and using paws and snout to bury them in the mud outside.

A doctor from Iowa City used to visit to buy the shards at five dollars a bag so he could feed them to his dogs—in lieu of store-bought milk bones.

“I don't really know if they have any nutritional value,” Elson says, shrugging his shoulders.

When he talks, Elson is deliberate, trying to make every word count, every thought both humble and accurate.

He'll tell you he was beaten by our father with leather straps when he was a child, usually for accidents that couldn't be helped. Like breaking a window. They weren't well-thought-out whippings to make a point, he'll say. They were an inflicted pain born of blind rage.

“I know Irene had her struggles with Dad, but really, plain to speak, I don't think she knows what it was like to be abused like I was.”

Our father, Elson will say, had little tolerance for people's weaknesses and would often poke fun at people—his children included.

To this day, he'll tell you, he has trouble controlling his own rage, and on several occasions he's had to apologize to his children when he's flown off the handle. He prefers to “have a listening ear and to work things out together.” But rage, he says, is still his first impulse, even though it's something he doesn't want to repeat.

“It takes more than just deciding not to be that way. It takes a lifetime, I think. I'm not expecting that it's just going to fade or go away on its own.

“The biggest thing is if you believe in the grace of God, I guess. That's the only way I can handle it. God truly helped me to forgive my dad.

“And I think, you know, as far as for me, logically speaking, I think Irene's biggest problem was she couldn't stand it. And as far as for her, she can't forgive dad for what he did. That must be what she's still working on evidently, or she wouldn't. . . .”

His voice trails off but the implication is evident: I wouldn't still be away from the fold.

He says he believes that Ottie and I can make it as a couple. His only concerns are that I married a much older man, and one whose ex-wives are still alive. As understanding as Elson is, the latter still constitutes adultery in his world.

But on other matters of Amish doctrine, he is less understanding. He doesn't believe that only the Amish can be saved.

“There's more and more Amish people feeling that way,'' he says. “The more people I hear making remarks like that, the more it infuriates me. And for me, I got no problem telling people how I feel about that. There are some people that avoid me for that fact.

“I guess I feel that if they do have that attitude, they don't have any more chance than the outside people. God's gonna look up everything. And if people have that attitude that they're gonna have a chance above anybody else, they missed the point already. That's totally taking something into their hands that they have no right to.”

Elson will also tell you that people who criticize the Amish for not doing missionary work outside the community have a good point, although he has an answer for the naysayers.

“If I want to be truly forgiving and be a Christian like Christ was, if I want to be Christlike, I have to lay things down . . . the biggest mission field is here at home, isn't it? Don't we have many Amish people in need, just like they do on the outside?

“Just the very people who think they're the only ones who are saved are the ones in need.”

A bell chimes several times outside the shop where Elson sits, startling a visitor.

“Is that the dinner bell?” the visitor asks. “Yeah,” Elson says. “But that's just the children playing for the sound of it.”

He goes on, without missing his place: “We're all born with the same chance. It's up to us if we're going to try to live for Christ, or we're going to try to live for ourselves and try to hurt other people.”

Ten years ago, he says, he had a nightmare that had a profound effect on him. It was one of those dreams that makes a person suddenly sit upright in bed, trembling.

“I dreamed that the world had evaporated and I was lost. I was going to hell.”

In the final analysis, he says, God will assess a person's character and commitment and decide who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.

“After all, God is the one that is going to right the end. R-I-G-H-T. He will right the end.”

Fifteen

If you have questions about the ban and marriage, the answers are plain in the prayer book you have. It's in the articles in the prayer book. The last couple of pages are the list of ministers and elders who read, approved, and adopted these articles as scriptural.

—L
ETTER FROM
M
OM

T
he letter I knew would come arrived about six weeks after leaving the farm. It was from my uncle, Elmer T. Miller, the bishop of our community, and it formally closed the door on my past.

Dear Irene:

Greetings in Jesus' Holy name, unto thee every knee shall bow and every tongue confess.

Had a nice shower today and cooled off nice. Oats are in shock and corn is growing, making a beautiful scene of God's creation.

It is now past six weeks that you left home, family, neighbors and church—in search of ???? This leaves a hollow, empty spot in the above mentioned places and also in my heart, as I at times think it can't be true.

According to the scriptures, we cannot feel this is pleasing in the eyes of the Lord, as Jesus himself spoke: ‘That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery, and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.' Matt. 5:32. In Gal. 5, verse 19, we read of the works of the flesh, and adultery is named among them and concludes by saying that they that do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God.

We may think that God forgives, but God only forgives when we repent, and unless we repent we will never be able to inherit the Kingdom of God.

As you well know, it is the duty of the church not to tolerate such things in the church. So, by voice of the church, you have been excommunicated from the church. This was done yesterday.

You may now think that nobody likes [you], nobody wants (you), etc., but wait, my heart still aches for you and your soul as many a tear has been shed since you left.

Oh that you may repent while living in the days of grace.

This is written out of love and concern.

Your neighbor, uncle, and bishop,
Elmer T. Miller

The verdict was hardly a surprise. In fact, it was somewhat anticlimactic. The real gut-wrenching stuff had occurred several weeks earlier when my family had called our house in Uno to tell me precious little time remained before the church rendered its decision.

We had heard through others that the Kalona Amish were convinced I had been drugged and held against my will, or that I had become pregnant and fled out of embarrassment. It was logical, then, when my parents repeatedly asked me during the phone call if I was okay.

“Did he give you drugs?'' my father asked.

“No.”

“You sure he didn't give you a shot or something?” my mother inquired.

“No. Everything's fine.”

Most of the conversation was not as lucid. My parents spent a lot of time crying and wailing, and that brought tears to my eyes and made it difficult for me to speak. I knew the only way I could ease their sorrow was to say I was returning, and that was not something I was prepared to do.

By the time Elmer got on the phone, I was so devastated, I could do little more than listen and sob as he discussed the church's stance on shunning. It is spelled out in the Mennonite Confession of Faith, the same document I had been baptized under:

“As regards the withdrawing from, or the shunning of, those who are expelled, we believe and confess, that if any one—whether it be through a wicked life or perverse doctrine—is so far fallen as to be separated from God, and consequently rebuked by, and expelled from, the church, he must also according to the doctrine of Christ and his apostles, be shunned and avoided by all the members of the church (particularly by those to whom his misdeeds are known), whether it be in eating or drinking, or other such like social matters. In short, that we are to have nothing to do with him; so that we may not become defiled by intercourse with him, and partakers of his sins; but that he may be made ashamed, be affected in his mind, convinced in his conscience, and thereby induced to amend his ways.”

The ordeal continued when my brothers and sisters got on the phone. They tearfully described how my leaving had cast a pall over the family, how my parents were losing their minds and might have to enter a mental institution, how my mother was experiencing heart pains and didn't know how much longer she could hold out.

“She takes sleeping pills at night,” one of them said, “energy pills in the daytime, and she doesn't eat anymore.”

“What has Ottie done to you?” another asked.

“Nothing,” I said, weeping. “I love him.”

I stood up to the barrage only once—when my father recited a biblical phrase he had mentioned several times in his letters:

Ephesians 6:1–3: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honor thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise; that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.”

I told him bluntly he should read the next verse, too:

Ephesians 6:4: “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”

From that moment on, he never again raised the issue of honoring mother and father. He must have known he couldn't pass muster with the fourth verse.

Later, I bristled at other inconsistencies in the behavior of my family and the rules of the church. My uncle had said in his letter that the ban was done “out of love and concern,” but there is nothing loving, nothing Christian, about shunning.

Those who are put in the ban and remain living among the Amish are ignored in social settings. When meals are served, they eat separately, and others are instructed not to pass food to the accused, lest the sins should pass from hand to hand. The only acceptable excuse to talk with someone in the ban is to try to show them the error of their ways and encourage them to repent. In short, the life of an excommunicated person is a lonely one, akin to solitary confinement, or worse, a leper colony.

I once mentioned to my father how ironic it was that the Amish follow the teachings of Jacob Ammann, who himself was excommunicated, albeit voluntarily. But my father dismissed it as nonsense. Most Amish either don't know the history of Jacob Ammann or choose to ignore it.

I was also miffed that my parents had not tried to see me in Kentucky, even though we had given them our phone number and address, and invited them to visit. If they, in fact, believed I had been shanghaied, wouldn't they do everything in their power to free me? Wouldn't they hold off on the excommunication until they could be sure of my circumstances?

I don't know the standard length of time before shunning someone who's left, but I've been told by other Amish that six weeks is on the hurried side. Why the rush, especially when so much was at stake? Why didn't they come see for themselves first?

These thoughts further galvanized my determination to stick with my decision and make a life for myself on the outside. And they softened the blow just a little when the bishop's letter arrived.

I was tired of the drama, disturbed by the contradictions, and reasonably certain that God would not abandon me in my time of greatest need.

The Amish believe that if a person dies in the ban, they will forever be condemned to hell. It is yet another fear tactic to keep people in line.

But it seemed to me that the God I knew wouldn't approve such punishment—that his own son, when he was on earth, never turned a person away. The God I knew was kind, considerate and forgiving. And I was praying to him still—at home and in church.

“Well, I guess it's official now,” I said after opening the bishop's letter.

I had no tears or regrets—at least not on that day. It was over.

But only for the moment.

Even though I was no longer Amish, I felt like a cast-off, and there was a part of me that wanted to find a way to have the ban lifted, if for no other reason than to bring a symbolic peace of mind.

Just as disturbing, I didn't know when I would see my family again.