It knots you

Reporter Jonathan Starkey finds a fresh angle for the high gas prices story: “Even Amish fret about high fuel costs.”

It may be hard to imagine that the Amish, known best for their horse-drawn buggies, are as susceptible to the sting of rising oil prices as people who rely on gas for everyday transportation.

But for those who milk cows, build cabinets or saw timber for a living, the pinch is real. Pressure from fuel prices even reaches into Amish homes, where they use gas to power washing machines and freezers.

Amish people are banned from driving cars and trucks because leaders worry that faster transportation could “pull the community apart,” but the prohibition does not extend to fuel-powered motors and engines like those used to run power tools and washing machines, said Donald B. Kraybill, an Amish scholar at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa.

“I don’t know that there ever was a categorical taboo on the engine,” Kraybill said. “They used steam engines in the late 19th century.”

So despite their old-fashioned separatist image, the Amish are squeezed by high fuel prices just like everybody else.

… “We used to get it for half the price,” [Harvey] Yoder said of the gas. “It knots you.”

I hadn’t heard that expression before, but it’s wonderfully apt. The doubling of fuel prices really does “knot you.”

Donald B. Kraybill, quoted above, heads the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown and has become the go-to guy for reporters writing about the Amish. Most of his many books deal with the Amish, the Hutterites and the other Old Order Anabaptists.

But I’m most grateful to Kraybill for his one book that wasn’t about all that: The Upside-Down Kingdom. That book is a wonderful, humbling, challenging, leper-hugging, pacifist brick through a window. It’s gently subversive and perhaps even subversively gentle. It knots you:

Our normal tendency is to scramble up ladders as fast as possible. The disciple of Jesus works to serve the powerless at the bottom. This may be in the form of personal ministry or through changing the structure of the ladder itself. The Christian is more concerned about the plight of those at the bottom than about advancing his own position on the ladder.

That sort of thing. The main problem with the book is that for all of his talk about how “the Christian” behaves, Kraybill doesn’t offer many real-world examples of actual Christians actually behaving this way. But then I don’t really think that’s his fault.

Incidentally, I’ve been to Elizabethtown College once or twice, many years ago. My old roommate’s band played there and we learned that E-town is where students from Messiah College, 30 miles away, sneak off to dance. (I hope no administrators from Messiah are reading this.) I suppose that prohibition against dancing offers another option, an alternative, upright vision to compete with Kraybill’s upside-down one. But if you’re not allowed to dance, then you’re probably not allowed to join that revolution.