Amish dreams: visions of the disaffected

 

God, I have crazy dreams. . .

 I don’t usually even remember dreams, but once in a while I have a doozie – not really a nightmare (I don’t remember those either), but one that is so bizarre it defies any explanation. It means what it means, I guess. As Bob Dylan put it in Gates of Eden:

"At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means."

But this one - . Anyway, Bill and I were in New York (I think – at least, some teeming urban centre that I wasn’t familiar with, at all. Here we were in Gotham. The Big Apple. This Is The City.) We were standing at a sort of crossroads, a busy corner, although I had no idea where we actually were and even less idea of the names of the streets, what hotel we were staying in, etc. THEN – suddenly – I was sitting in a wagon. It was a wagon FULL of Amish people. Just chock-a-block. Not one of those smart carriages – this was a fairly primitive wagon, kind of like a covered wagon only un-covered. I didn’t quite know how I had gotten there, although I vaguely remembered climbing aboard. No kidnapping or coercion was involved.

But I was sitting next to this woman (she was on my right, maybe 30ish, very Amish in costume and demeanour, the kind of woman who already has a dozen kids) who kept talking and talking. It was Amish talk, but as usual I can’t remember much content. Pro-Amish, of course, though since I was not handcuffed, I didn’t think I was required to join the cult.

BUT. And this was the hard part. Though I had climbed aboard somewhere in the teeming downtown, I had no point of reference. I had no phone. Where was my husband? I wanted out (or “off”), but didn’t see a way. I could have, I guess, said (and I think I tried), “Stop and let me off”, but the Amish woman told me “no, we’re going up to the Lake country”. I envisioned being away to hell and gone in some isolated rural community living completely off the grid. It was a helpless feeling. I was cut off. I was part of this. . . group. Religion? I finally said, “Can you take me back to where I got on and just drop me off?” They looked at me in bafflement.

Like most of my dreams, it didn’t “end” but just sort of petered out. Of course, my mind wants to put puzzle pieces together, so I wondered if this whole thing was an allegory for the church I attended for fifteen years. THAT ended badly too, though I had been disaffected and unhappy for the last three or four. I stayed too long, and began to feel a creeping sense of “we-think” – in other words, if you start thinking OUTSIDE that box, you are no  longer welcome. This coincided with a horrible meltdown in leadership that I won’t even go into. But still I didn’t leave!

Eventually, as I regained my mental health and saw the light, my relationship with the church also petered out and I no longer wanted to attend. I was tired of the whole thing. I now see mainstream church attendance as something out of the last century. Big drafty 100-year-old buildings being used for two hours a week, doctrine and cant that is always vigorously denied, hidden agendas that create constant guilt and a sense of inadequacy, an INSISTENCE that everyone is welcome and people can interpret God any way they want . . . but if you go too far, the minister will summon you to his office for a friendly chat.

The pandemic has virtually wiped out "liberal" church congregations except in a very limited capacity. Some have gone to “hybrid worship”, which sounds to me like something out of Soylent Green or some other cinematic dystopia. I am not sorry, for so-called liberal churches are an anachronism. We didn’t really help anyone. If someone in need came to us, they were given a bus ticket and a token for the food bank, all the way across town. And that’s it. People grumbled about having to pay for those tokens and wondered why people didn’t just get a job.

Oh, but one time we tried. Having dutifully brought our canned food donations to the church, someone made the mistake of getting up at the front and saying, "We also need can openers." To a person, the congregation roared with laughter. Someone needs CAN OPENERS?

The Amish thing, well, I’ve never had too many feelings about the Amish either way, except to say that we often hear about alarming genetic diseases that have not even been heard of before. The Mennonites, Hutterites, Anabaptists and Amish have been profoundly inbred for centuries, but as young people leave in droves to live more normal lives, the gene pool is getting smaller and smaller. Marry your first cousin? Maybe you have no other choice. So you end up with a sort of horrifying Habsburg situation, with children stillborn, hopelessly deformed, or dying of untreatable medical conditions.

The only churches which are flourishing now are Pentecostals, led by evangelicals who prey on the weakest and most needy. Shameless grifters, the sort that preach at us from our TVs, buy private jets with the congregation’s monetary “seeds”, and eventually get into sex scandals. I’m so tired of it all. We have two gigantic churches in our area, very recently built, which I  have heard are full every Sunday. Pentecostals. The United Church is foundering on the verge of collapse, and is even thinking of converting some of those huge drafty buildings into low-income housing (an idea that horrifies almost everyone!).  I don’t care what is happening to my former church now because it outlived its usefulness thirty years ago.

 Now I’m thinking: if that cart was pulled by horses, why didn’t I see them or at least smell them? Was it an oxcart, perhaps? DID I ever get off? The dream tapered off before I could answer any of those questions. But I would not willingly climb aboard any sort of wagon now, Amish wagon, bandwagon, wagon train with no end. Stop the horses – I want to get off.