What the Amish Teach Us by Donald B. Kraybill

Author:Donald B. Kraybill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

PATIENCE

Slow Down and Listen

An old Amish saying—the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese—reminds the cheese-loving Amish that patience guides their journey. Patience marks the mood of every Sunday service, with its slow hymns that seem to go on and on forever. And patience permeates the silent prayers before and after every meal.

Every buggy that plods along a modern highway proclaims PATIENCE. “The horse is our pacer,” explained an Amish man. “We can’t speed up like you can in a car. Our horses set the pace for life and slow things down.” Riders in an open-window, gadget-free buggy can see and smell the countryside and nod to friends along the way.

The most traditional Amish do not set their clocks ahead an hour each spring or back each fall, as other Americans do. These slowpoke Amish—who favor slow time, God’s time, regulated as it is by the rising and the setting of the sun and the changing of the seasons—appear antiquated. Yet a national twenty-first-century movement, now gaining momentum, aims to end Daylight Saving Time in order to “make everyone’s lives just a little better . . . a little happier . . . a little safer,” reminding us that the stuck-in-time Amish are once again ahead of the rest of us and are already living lives that may be “better, happier, and safer” than our own.

Consider what happened to all the time that vanished with the avalanche of “time saving” electronic gadgets that have arrived since the mid-twentieth century. These devices were supposed to free us up to live more leisurely lives but now seem to strain our schedules. Yet we demand more and more, faster and faster—instant downloads, blistering news feeds, express mail, and rushed everything. We crave quick service, speedy gratification, split-second profits, and we want them now. Fast is never fast enough. We hate delays. We rage at long and sluggish checkouts, traffic bottlenecks, and software glitches. Amid our rage, patience has vanished, a casualty of our supersonic 5G world with all its crushing speed.

The late French scholar Paul Virilio saw speed—intoxicating, recklessly accelerating speed—as the dominant marker of hypermodernity. Daredevil velocity leaves no time for deliberation or a measured response. It triggers violence. And it kills.

Amish people stubbornly resist the breakneck speed of hypermodernity. They demonstrate uncommon patience as they slowly make their way in our perilous world. Their resistance to a speed-at-all-costs society is shaped by their spiritual practices.

Their three-hour church service is a big slowdown. The gathering offers no quick fixes for life’s problems, no stop-and-go religion, no instant gospel of prosperity, no well-crafted mini-homily—just a slow-motion service where everyone sits in a quiet patience that hearkens back to a medieval monastery and reminds the faithful that they are pilgrims plodding through a high-speed world that’s not their final home.

The worship service is also an incubator of patience for children. No faith-formation classes by age groups here, not even special classes for children. For hours, young children sit quietly on wooden backless benches or in a parent’s lap.

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