This past weekend my wife and I made an impromptu road trip to Kansas. It is worth mentioning that we do not live anywhere near Kansas. As in we had to drive across 5 states to get there. Big ones.
We were there for a funeral. My wife's extended family are Mennonites. Not just any Mennonites, but Holdeman Mennonites. The men wear beards, the women cover their heads, and they live very simply. No TV or radio (too worldly), no mirrors (too vain), and education beyond high school is strongly discouraged (too prideful). However, they have not shunned modern technology completely--they have cars (and drive them great distances, especially, it seems, for funerals), fax machines (used primarily for mass communication with extended family), and apparently, at least a few of them use the internet.
What I find interesting about them is that they are difficult to distinguish theologically from the evangelical (Baptist) Christianity in which I was brought up (and no longer embrace). Their essential beliefs about God, Christ, and salvation are, as far as I can tell, the same.
To be fair, I am sure they would not share this assessment.
Clearly, something in their interpretation of Christian doctrine leads them to lead lives completely apart from the rest of the world. It is a fundamentalism, to be sure, but to their credit, not one that they seem hell-bent to inflict upon the rest of us. Which is more than I can say for the Baptists...
To be an outsider visiting among these people is to be the very definition of conspicuous. Still, I found them to be welcoming to us, especially in light of the fact that my father-in-law and his mother had been excommunicated from the church many years ago. (Avoidance of the excommunicated is a defining practice of the Holdemans.)
Other observations:
--The group of people that seemed to be most wary of us were the people our own age and younger (I am 28). My wife and I are particularly unusual to them, in that we have advanced degrees and no children. Most people our age have at least three. The older adults were more inclined to talk with us at length; perhaps because they are more comfortable with their own identity, or perhaps because they've known my father-in-law since childhood.
--In that vein, one of my in-laws (a great uncle) with whom I spent a lot of time talking, didn't believe me when I told him I was 28. He thought I was much younger. Maybe it was the lack of beard. Or the well-rested look that only the young and childless enjoy.
--The Holdemans are more suspicious of the government than I am. As will likely become apparent in future postings, this is really saying something.
--For me and most of the people with whom I grew up, grief is an intensely private thing. This is not to say that emotion isn't shown at funerals and such, but it is usually restrained. Particularly among men. The Holdemans, for all their generally serious demeanor, are not ashamed to express their grief openly, to such an extent that I felt genuinely uncomfortable being witness to the raw emotion of people I do not know.
It was explained to me that to hide one's pain from public view is a form of pride.
--The doctrine of not loving the world seems to result in a general view that life is something to be endured, and that death (and the afterlife) is the reward for enduring it righteously. This is especially apparent in the context of a funeral.
While I think that acknowledging the inevitiblity of death and accepting it is admirable and healthy, to anticipate it is strikes me as very sad. I cannot wrap my brain around a god that would create a world so full of wonderful experiences and expect his people to eschew it so completely. If one believes that life is a gift from God, asceticism seems akin to placing that gift on a closet shelf and never pulling it out.
