Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [70]
I probably always believed there was a God, a sort of dark and frowning force. I just didn’t believe in him, not to the extent that I thought he could or would make an actual difference in my life. I tried to believe, in my heart. But I couldn’t, in my head. I’d heard about him all my life. But if he was everything the preachers claimed he was, he sure had a strange way of hiding himself from people like me.
And because we, Sarah and I, could not address the God we claimed to serve, because we could not as a couple even speak to him from our hearts, our relationship was doomed to fail.
Sometime late in 1985, I entered a land of looming, fearful shadows, a mental zombie zone, from which I would not emerge for several years. And gradually, I descended into a world of real depression. There was no diagnosis, because counseling was not an option. Requesting counseling, back then, would have been tantamount to admitting one was insane. Not that I would ever have thought of considering it, anyway. I wouldn’t have known enough to consider it. So there was no help for me. The darkness would have to be faced alone.
Those were surreal days, in retrospect. I walked about in a fog of pain and silence, walled off from those around me. I wasn’t angry. Only sad. And not particularly because of them. It was not their fault. They were who they were. And I was who I was. They could not communicate. I could not communicate. We didn’t know how. We were never taught how. So we stirred about, passing each other like blind men stumbling in the night.
Had I been less intense or less honest, I might have squelched the doubts, ignored the depression, as most Amish youth somehow manage to squelch that inner drive, the inner hunger to know and live outside the box of Amish life. Some few probably never even wonder what’s outside or, if so, only sporadically, lacking any real passion to find out. Some have vague perceptions that there is another world out there. Most decide to do what needs to be done, and they stick with it through sheer force of will.
But for me, that was impossible. I was trapped. The walls were closing in. Imminent disaster loomed. Those around me simply looked on in disbelief as I slowly sank before their eyes. In their defense, they offered what they could, which was little more than the broad, meaningless bromides I had heard all my life: “Can’t you just decide to do what’s right? Reject the ‘world’ and accept the Amish way? Really and truly, once and for all?”
In the troubled fog of those days, Mom sought me out one day and tearfully spoke to me of Jesus and how he could help me, if only I asked him. Her words came from her heart, and she believed them. And I did not doubt them, necessarily. But what she said was hopeless. At least to me. I had tried that a few times. Praying. Never seemed to do much good. Maybe my prayers weren’t heard. I doubted that they were. I’d done a lot of bad stuff, possibly even committed the unpardonable sin. Blasphemed the Holy Spirit, that horrendous act about which Amish preachers often thundered at great length and warned against. None had ever, as far as I could remember, defined that unpardonable sin. What it meant to blaspheme the Spirit. But it probably applied to me and the things I’d done. Who could tell?
I turned from Mom in silence. She did not approach me again, not like that.
My father, too, troubled by my traumatized state, admonished me kindly, or with what passed as kindness for him. The Stud’s death, he decided, was the real source of my problems. The reason I was depressed. A horse is a horse, he told me encouragingly. There were other horses out there, as good as or better than the Stud had been. He even offered to buy me another one, any horse I chose. It was a generous, although somewhat desperate, gesture, coming from a tough old man like him.
But from him, too, I turned in gloom and silence. And he did not approach me again, not like that.
The days crept by. I still faced one major task, an ominous task, fraught with