| |
Review of
Joe
Mackall's Plain
Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish
Beacon Press,
2007
By Todd
Davis
No secrets—plain or otherwise. I confess: I’m Mennonite. Not Amish,
but Anabaptist nonetheless. Another confession: I grew up in Elkhart
County in the state of Indiana, surrounded by Amish and Mennonites
of all stripes, and it’s one of the reasons that I became an Anabaptist,
although I was raised Presbyterian. These plain people—with their
love of family; their belief in community; their unwavering commitment
to follow Christ’s admonition to love our enemies, and their desire
to live simply, rooted for many in an almost Zen-like appreciation
for the sacred found in the natural world—made the gospel real to
me.
I bought Plain
Secrets, at least in part, because of these connections, and as
an English—(to many Mennonites and to all Amish I’ll always be English,
an outsider living among them)—I related to and was intrigued by Joe
Mackall’s status as an interloper and the ways he might tell a story
of friendship despite certain degrees of separation from a culture
in which he can never fully partake.
Mackall betrays no one in this loving rendition of a Swartzentruber
Amish family living in Ashland County, Ohio. As plainspoken as the
people he lives among, Mackall’s prose sets forth the difficulty of
friendship—how one we admire and respect and, perhaps, even love,
might live in ways that offend us, that might seem contradictory or
hypocritical at times, as our own ways must seem to them. In telling
the story of Samuel Shetler and his family, Mackall shows the rest
of us that living in difference is not only a possibility but also
a deeply rewarding approach to a world that seems bent upon stratification:
the like-minded living with the like-minded, idealizing, ignoring,
or condemning those whose ways seem foreign.
The true beauty of Plain
Secrets is summed up in the biblical charge that we ought to love
our neighbor as we love our self. It’s this kind of love that leads
Mackall to drive Samuel to his mother’s funeral in Ontario, Canada;
that causes Samuel and Mackall to show up at each other’s homes and
offer to help with whatever chores need to be done; that allows Samuel
to share his dream of moving west where land is cheaper; that thrusts
both Mackall and Samuel into the joy and grief of raising children,
sharing the burden of burying a child or watching one go astray.
It is truly a wonder that Samuel entrusts his story to an outsider
like Mackall, a trust that carries with it the possibility of grave
implications for his family and himself within this particular Amish
sect. But this is exactly what Samuel does: with love he trusts his
friend and with love he gives away the truth of his story. In return,
Joe Mackall writes a book out of the same kind of love, with an honesty
that seeks neither to hide nor to harm, one that is as much about
self-revelation as it is about a glimpse into the Swartzentruber Amish
way of life.
Todd
Davis teaches creative writing, environmental studies,
and American literature at Penn State University—Altoona. His poems
have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in such
journals and magazines as The North American Review, The Iowa
Review, West Branch, River Styx, Arts & Letters, Indiana Review,
Quarterly West, Green Mountains Review, Poetry East, and Image:
A Journal of the Arts and Religion. He is the author of two books
of poems, Ripe
(Bottom Dog Press, 2002) and Some
Heaven (Michigan State University Press, 2007). Poems from
Some Heaven have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The
Writer’s Almanac and in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.
|