You may have read that President Obama is vacationing with his family on Martha’s Vineyard. Today he bought three books to read, including To Kill a Mockingbird. If he’d asked he could have borrowed the copy I just finished on our vacation.
In Japan, where they’re trying to locate all of the country’s centenarians, they discovered the remains of a 104-year old woman in her son’s backpack. OK, she’s not really 104, because she’s been in there for the last nine years. The son said he couldn’t afford to bury her so he stuffed her in there with his copy of Algebra for Sophomores and a package of #2 pencils.
The walls of our living room and the floor are entirely covered in plastic, so I’m ready to scrape the popcorn off the ceiling...or host a party for 2-year olds. Tomorrow I’ll use my garden sprayer to wet the popcorn and then scrape it off with a tool designed for that purpose.
I don’t have complete buy-in from my body on this business of getting back into cycling after an almost three week layoff. Ouch. Tomorrow’s “long” ride will be long relative to what I did the last two Saturdays (zero miles), not what I did the last time I rode on a Saturday (40 miles).
The second time we hiked up to Heceta Head Lighthouse we saw a group of about 30 elderly Amish people. I know they were Amish because I asked one of them. Old Order Menonites will wear similar clothing, the women will also have the distinctive white bonnet and the men will have the same neatly trimmed beard but no mustache. The man I talked to told me they were from Nappanee, Indiana, a city with a large Amish population.
Huh? They don’t drive vehicles because they’re considered modern and therefore sinful.
When we got back down to the parking lot at the bottom of the hill I saw several of them boarding the tour bus. That’s how they got all the way from Indiana to Oregon.
It’s not OK for an Amish person to drive but it’s OK to ride in a vehicle that someone else drives.
One summer several years ago, when we lived in Michigan, I loaded my bike into the car and drove south to Goshen, Indiana, another center for Amish residents. I went there because I wanted to learn more about the Amish and hoped I could meet some and interact with them. I went for hours-long bike rides, and when I came across a buggy I rode beside it and struck up a conversation. Fascinating conversations about their lives and theology. One of the men driving a buggy invited me to their farm for a drink of cold water. (The females, mom & daughters, hustled inside as soon as we got to the farm and didn’t come back out.) I learned that many of the men work in the mobile home factories around Goshen.
“How do you get to work?”
“We get a ride with one of the Englishmen who live nearby and also work there.”
(The Amish refer to non-Amish people as English.)
So I wasn’t completely surprised to see Amish people from Indiana climbing on a bus in Oregon. But it does strike me as hypocritical. If it’s immoral to drive how can it be right for someone else? And how does it work to ride in the vehicle?
Observant Jews can’t have any form of leaven in their house during Passover. The custom is to sell any food containing leaven to a Gentile neighbor and then buy it back for slightly more money after Passover has ended. This means they can keep the food, but not technically own it during Passover.
Kosher, or hypocritical? Gaming the system?
At the risk of self-righteousness, this seems to me to be one of the pitfalls of legalism. Construct a religion around a set of rules and human nature is such that adherents will always find away to work around the rules. Legalistic Christians do the same thing. You can’t go to movies, but you can watch DVD’s at home.
Do Christians, whose relationship with God is based on faith in Christ’s substitutionary death, sometimes (often?) act hypocritically? Certainly! But it seems like a different kind of hypocrisy. It’s professing one standard while living to another, inconsistent standard. The Amish hypocrisy looks for loopholes, angles that allow them to feel righteous by adhering to the strict letter of some law while avoiding the spirit of that law.
Maybe that’s what it comes down to - letter vs. Spirit.
IMHO
3 comments:
I have a friend who works at a library in an Amish area who helps Amish load music from the Internet onto their blackberry. This is when they are not busy checking out you tube or watching DVDs. gotta love the double standards.
We were staying at a hotel in Israel over the Sabbath several years ago. They have a Shabbat elevator which stops on every floor so you don't have to push the button (that would count as kindling a fire, I guess). Apparently it was going too slowly for one Orthodox Jewish man, so he lugged his double stroller up several flights of stairs. I don't get it.
Where DO you find all of these coffee lines? = )
Aww, man. I didn't want to know all that about the Amish. Especially the library stuff. My bubble is officially burst.
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