In his recent book Twelve Rules for Life, the populist philosopher and psychologist Jordan Peterson claims that the fullest life is achieved by finding the sweet spot between chaos and order. Some academics have scorned Peterson, alleging that he is more dilettante than philosopher and that at least in some instances he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
I certainly hope he’s wrong about the need for chaos because if he isn’t, I grew up in a near cemetery.
My early formation happened almost entirely among the Amish and plain Mennonites, a people who are, for all their inscrutabilities, steeped in rigid order. Anything that hints of a challenge to that order is quickly identified and exorcised. Except in the areas of farming and construction, there is little place for innovations, dissent,and questions. We have even retained the old German word for order: ordnung. Seemingly, any area of life where chaos might surface has been anticipated so that it can be dealt with promptly.
Detailed dress codes keep anyone from creating turbulence through excessive self-expression. Males are asked to wear button-down shirts and black shoes for all church services. Females are required to wear a cape dress, an ethnically-inspired, Swiss-German sartorial evolutionary leftover; no woman must ever once deviate from that hallowed garb if appearing in public.
Likewise, with feelings and emotions. Instead of giving vent to their feelings, members are expected to embrace a simple four-letter word: obey. If as a child you feel unheard and neglected, then you should obey. Equally, as an adult; if you feel uneasy or wistful about how the church handles an issue, you may voice that, but you must ultimately obey. For both children and adults, a failure to squelch any rising feelings, a failure to simply obey, can lead to reprimanding and accusations of antagonism and faithlessness.
The Bible, also, is kept in a static cocoon of order. In the last century, the unspoken corporate hermeneutic has remained rigid, heavily influenced by Fundamentalists/literalists such as Daniel Kaufman and Ken Ham. In most communities, alternative interpretations are not seriously entertained.
I could go on. I could say much more about the Amish-Mennonite fixation with ordnung. I could tell you about the church my family attended when I was a teenager, where the rules specified what color car you were allowed to drive. (Black was preferable; anything north of yellow was considered prideful or even damnable.) I could tell you about the one-camera-per-family-rule, or the Christmas-is-pagan-and-must-not-be-celebrated rule, or the all-men-must-wear-beards rule. But I’ll stop now. I think you get the picture.
And really, as caustic as all that may have sounded, I don’t mind the order as much as I used to. In fact, the older I get, the more I concede the wisdom of it. Well, some of it at least. I still don’t see the need for regulating the tassels and phylacteries on dresses and headgear for perfectly capable and sensible adult women. Or decreeing that no member must ever be caught listening to the radio. (The Internet is allowed though, presumably because of its usefulness for business, and of course the playback podcasts of almost every radio station under the sun are freely available online.) Or the rule about public school being anathema in every situation. Or…ok, I said I would stop.
Seriously, I can tolerate most of these absurdities and inconsistencies, however egregious, because I know they bring corresponding strengths. The deep sense of community, the longstanding tradition of well-behaved children, the industriousness—these are sought-after qualities for more than a few people outside our churches.
And here’s the thing. I sincerely doubt the positive traits would continue among conservative Anabaptists if you took away the unflinching structure—arbitrary and exasperating though it may be in some facets. The pervading sense of spelt-out order actually binds the community together. And the many quirks? Unreasonable as they are at face value, they give the group social cohesion and deep belonging.
I get all of that. But I still have lingering questions.
What if all the energy we pour into maintaining this ordnung isn’t worth the benefits? Furthermore, have those perceived benefits actually been established, using hard data? Per capita, do the Amish and Mennonites experience less violence, destructive sexual activity, and drug abuse than do other demographics? If so, is it because of the rules or despite them?
Is the apparent order a kind of lethal stagnation, or is it real, hard-won order? Is there a profound chaos going on just beneath the surface that we would do well to address?
Does our sense of order keep us from other important values, such as being able to empathize with (and learn from) those whose lives are wrecked and they know it?
Maybe these questions are ill-founded and unhelpful. Maybe the Amish and Mennonites really have found the perfect balance between chaos and order, to return to Jordan Peterson’s motif. Maybe we are living out the original monastic insight of enrolling ourselves under a predetermined rule rather than freewheeling down the path of our own devices.
Maybe it’s everyone else who is wrong, and we have simply found a way to “let our ordered lives express the beauty of God’s peace,” as the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier has it in a favorite Mennonite hymn.
I am left with questions. I feel deeply ambivalent about the issue of ordnung. But as I wait for further epiphanies, I am also hopeful. I know the Christ is working to reconcile everything in every crevice of the Universe: bond and free; Republican and Democrat; slum-dweller and suburbanite; respectable sinner and desperate sinner; male and female; heaven and earth; and, yes, even chaos and stagnation. I find comfort and rest in knowing that it isn’t Anabaptism or any other ism that is heading up this reconciliation, but the eternal Christ.
Regardless of the degree of order in your church, that’s a message to get excited about.