Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [8]
After the five-minute prayer was over, we all scattered to our separate ways.
The children to school.
The older boys to work in the fields or the barn.
And Mom and the older girls to their cooking, canning, sewing, and seemingly endless stream of housework.
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From the outside, it might seem that Amish kids must be bored. Nothing to do but work and play around the home and farm. No TV, no video games. No computers. Not even so much as a bicycle in most communities. Children have only their imaginations, homemade toys, and maybe a little red wagon. But I can’t recall ever being bored.
We were always tackling some project—building dams across the little creek behind the barn after a hard rain, chasing some adventure in field and woods and pond. And working, of course. From about age three, each of us had our own chores to do.
With all that going on, we didn’t have time to be bored, although there was one possible exception: church, where we had to sit, silent and still, on wooden, backless benches for what seemed like an eternity.
And it quite nearly was, because Amish church services are long affairs, usually lasting around three hours, sometimes longer. Services are held in homes, a practice dating back to our Anabaptist roots during a time when the authorities actively hunted and prosecuted those they deemed heretics. In an effort to avoid unwanted attention, our forefathers were forced to hold church services secretly in their homes.
In Aylmer, it was always a big deal to host church at your house. Around eight thirty in the morning, buggies would begin to trickle in. After letting the women out at the house, the men would proceed to the barnyard to park their buggies. After unhitching the horses, they always spent time at the barn, standing around and visiting in somber, black-clad groups.
Eventually, the preachers would slowly amble toward the house, followed by the older men, then younger men, and so on, all the way down to the teenage boys. (Seating was ordered strictly by age. It was considered an insult to step ahead of someone even one day older than yourself.) After everyone was seated on the long benches, one of the married men started the first song.
Amish songs sound a lot like Gregorian chants, but they are absolutely unique in flavor and tone. Written in old Lutheran German, the tunes are mournful, slow, ponderous, mellow, beautiful, melancholy, swelling, and up to twenty minutes long.
Legend has it that these songs date back to the time when our nonresistant Anabaptist forebearers were persecuted and burned at the stake by authorities of the Catholic church. Tradition says that they sang hymns as they were led to the stake in the public square and as the fire crackled at their feet. As they sang—or so the story goes—the worldly bystanders would dance to the faster upbeat hymns, stopping only after the flames and heat had extinguished the song. To combat such blasphemy, our plucky ancestors developed tunes that were much slower—so slow that dancing would be impossible. I have never been able to verify that such dancing actually occurred. In fact, I seriously doubt that it did. But it made for fascinating legend, and I believed it for years.
Like the German hymns, the rest of Amish church services are slow and somber and measured throughout. And stiflingly boring for the kids.
After several hymns, and after the preachers returned from their Obrote conference, the first preacher would stand and deliver a “short” sermon, as in twenty to forty-five minutes long.
After the first sermon, we’d all kneel for prayer. Next, the deacon would stand and read a passage—usually a chapter—of Scripture.
This would be followed by the main sermon, which was delivered by