Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [21]
“I told him, ‘It says that God made Adam and Eve, and when He made Adam He made him with a beard the way he is now. If He gave him a beard He must have done so because He wanted it that way. Now by what right do you cut your beard off?’
“Then the fellah who was with him said, ‘This man is right.’ Boy, you should’ve seen the look on his friend’s face.”
A listener with a reddish-brown beard chuckled. “People ask me on what ground I let my beard grow. I say”—he pointed to his cheek—“on this ground.”
“There is a Mennonite church where they don’t fellowship with anyone who lets their beard grow.”
“Do the Beachys still grow beards?”
“The younger ones, no, but the married still must,” continued the main speaker. “Some of them have got it down just to a shoelace. That’s how it looks. Once when I went up to Hiawatha for a funeral, there were some of them sharing a motel with us, and it took them three quarters of an hour in the bathroom just getting their beards trimmed.”
(I happened to know that the “Beachy” Amish were a liberal sub-sect who drove cars. Beachys viewed Old Order sects like this as hopelessly uninformed about salvation.)
“In George Washington’s time no one wore beards,” interjected a fourth man, “but by the Civil War they did, with every president until William Henry Harrison. Then they stopped.”
“When I was at the neighbor’s I saw a newscaster on TV give a speech who wore a nice beard.”
Someone pointed out that one Mennonite church would allow bearded Beachys to preach but not unbearded.
“Boys without beards represent a youth problem,” concluded the most vociferous member of the group. “When they have beards, there’s not much of a generation gap.”
The last comment alluded to the fact that this settlement permitted beards among unmarried men—an unheard-of concession in the Old Order.
As the conversation wound down, I wondered who of the speakers were “native” and who transplants. The man who spoke of the presidents seemed suspiciously well educated, but then the fellow who clamored for trimming may have also revealed a certain heterodox leaning.
But whoever they were, one thing seemed clear: some of my first impressions may have been too hasty. Their beards were not mere customary trappings, nor were they features of a costume. The roots, if you will, went deeper. Behind the discussion of facial hair lay the attempt to tease out a common vision of the life they were attempting.
Liberal Amish groups like the Beachys consider such matters cosmetic and trivial. What difference does the number of buttons, color of clothing, or length of beard make to a God peering into someone’s soul? But to take the discussion in this way is to misconstrue it. I sensed a deeper theology—perhaps a theo-ecology. One religion may focus on God and the supernatural. Another may make nature a God, like the Druids or Science with a capital “S.” The unique contribution of this bunch was to connect the two—to link heaven with nature, covert cause with overt effect. In a world saturated by God’s influence, (or substitute here your own word for the hidden impetus underlying and uniting visible phenomena), certainly nothing is unimportant; everything in some way impinges on everything else. Admittedly there are some fuzzy areas, but that was precisely where the discussants came in. In the appointed order of things, there is a middle realm of human influence and refinement. A balance must be struck between wild overgrowth and bald control, a humanizing amount of trimming and shaping.
If I had joined the discussion, I might have put in my own two cents’ worth. I knew about Kalahari bushmen and the fact that they couldn’t even grow