As we walked down to the village we talked, although it was more like thinking out loud about what we had witnessed. The results were inconclusive. We walked down past the nursery and found ourselves outside the house of Deborah and Abram, where we were welcomed in by Deborah, a thin and pale Canadian woman with glasses who already seemed to know who we were and seemed to be expecting us.
Deborah was busy preparing food and tending her baby, who was still very small and seemingly not able to sleep unless she was being moved about and rocked backwards and forwards. Before I was aware it was happening we were suddenly engaged in the deepest of conversations about family, faith and the bible. It was a recurring theme throughout my stay with the Mennonites that we seemed to very quickly get round to talking about the ‘big stuff’ within what seemed like minutes of meeting someone.
What also became blindingly obvious almost straight away was that in meeting Deborah we were meeting an anomaly in this community. Here was a woman who had not been born a Mennonite or a Christian. She had been born to a Jewish mother and her parents had since divorced, she grew up in a very Catholic area had studied, lived with boyfriends, had jobs, traveled in Europe everything I had done really. An underlying feeling for her had always been that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world. She had been inspired by ‘simple life’ as a way to live and had lived in various ‘intentional communities’ including a kibbutz at various stage of her life. However her experience of these communities were not good ones and she felt that even where there are the best of intentions peoples egos always win out and these communities are destined to fail. She had come to live with the Mennonites a few years ago, attracted by their dedication to the simple life but still not a Christian at that point. Something happened to turn all that around as she was born again into the Mennonite faith moved to a community in Tennesee and then last year married Abram and moved back to Barton Creek. Here we had a woman who didn’t need to ask how it worked in our world, she’d already lived there, and what’s more she hadn’t liked it and chosen this place instead. I had many conversations with Deborah over the next few days, many of which I would leave cherishing; she truly is an amazing woman in an amazing community.
It wasn’t long before Cornelius came bumbling in to find us and inform us that the lunch was ready. We gathered Abram and walked round the back of the house and through two small hand plowed fields to a large house bursting with children. We had arrived at the home of Cornelius and Catharina Friesen and, yes, count them, their 10 children. Philemon, Abigail, Joel, Gideon, Lazarus, Esther, Boaz, Obed, Job and 1 week old Zadok were all sat around what seemed to be a giant table spread with food. Catharina had only just given birth to Zadok and so, as is the custom of the community, another family were making all their meals for the next month, it was quite the feast. I was sat next to Abigail, 14 year years old or ‘the second oldest’ as she took great joys in telling me. She seemed very keen that I eat well and took turns in offering me a bit of everything that was on the table, be it thick chunky vegetable soups, homemade peanut butter and cassava flour biscuits or once again the delicious gloopy fruit stuff; all washed down with some ‘freshly squeezed’ milk I might add. It was Abigail and her mother that I would sit with for nearly 3 hours after dinner tending baby Zadok and talking about our vastly different lives while Jonathan sat with Cornelius in the other room talking about bombs and conspiracies.
I think the thing that struck me the most at that point in the proceedings was how little this society was based on fear. They were genuinely inquisitive about my life and very open to sharing details of their own but they had obviously never been fed any falsehoods about the ‘worldly’ life, at times I felt they understood it better than I did. Coming from the ‘worldly’ life I can see how increasingly we exist in a culture of fear and how this fear keeps us behaving in set patterns. These patterns are of the lives we are told we are supposed to have and they are patterns that give us something to compare our life favorably with the live of others. So far, my ideas about religious communities such as this have been mainly based on stereotypes. I guess these stereotypes would include the idea that communities such as this can only survive when fear of the other world exists. There was no such fear however and neither was there ego, they were very clear about what they were choosing to do but ultimately very happy with their choice to do it. I had heard that the Amish, when they reach a certain age get a ‘year off’ to go and encounter the world and see if being Amish is something they want to do for the rest of their lives. As far as I could ascertain no such thing existed in this community however I did wonder if they needed it, they all seemed so bloody happy to be there. The interesting thing was that for every little thing they did there was a reason that could always be explained with a quote from the bible, if there’s one thing they know it’s the bible. For a while I mused how much easier it must be to trust in something so ultimately, to have everything down to the clothes you wear, whether you cut your hair or not and what you eat decided by a book. It would seem in this case that with all of these things taken care of, all these decisions made for you, you are free to concentrate on what really matters in life which for them seemed to be family and their relationship with God.
After a few hours I was feeling completely relaxed but at the same time totally overwhelmed. Jonathan had gone out to the fields with Cornelius and his sons to witness and possibly partake in some plowing by hand. I had witnessed this a little earlier on and I have to say I didn’t fancy it much, I admired it, but I didn’t fancy it. It’s a very traditional society in that the women stay at home to cook, wash, stitch and care for children and the men go out and plough, plant, harvest and sell (however if you have ever witnessed a Mennonite father with his children you’ll see he doesn’t fall short on the caring capacity either). I would love to rant about how it all offended my feminist principles but in truth I have few of them these days and you would have to be an idiot to argue that this model did not work perfectly in this community. So, instead I said my goodbyes and stumbled home to Deborah, fully embracing my role as a woman by looking after her baby for the next few hours, something I was surprisingly good at. We ate another incredible meal with them when the men returned from the field and here was the second thing. Everything they eat there, they have grown and produced themselves. Just think about that for a minute. These are not trendy London lefties sat in their Stoke Newington flats droning on about ‘sustainable living’ and not buying air freighted products, these are people who literally take only what they need and eat only what they produce. The more I think about that the more I realize how hard it is to think about. Its just mind-blowing. It was possibly precisely this thinking that put me to bed at no later than 9pm; this time in a real bedroom, with a double bed, windows, oh and a night pot…just in case it was all starting to feel a bit too normal.