Recently, while not dining on liver, onions, or hamballs at the Oregon Dairy, Lancaster, P. A., I witnessed the following exchange between two senior citizens whom I’ll call Bertha Strongberger and Les Hefthalter.

“Bertha! Do you know who this is? It’s Les Hefthalter. I used to work at the store.”

Bertha, with a flirty lean accessible only to elderly widows who wear knitted prayer coverings: “Of course. I’m turning 90 in the fall. Can you believe it? How old are you?”

Les, whom I imagine last worked at Strongberger’s Store when he was 20 or 25: “I’m 74.”

Bertha, despite the ghost of her husband whispering Bert! Be quiet!: “Surely you’re older than that!”

Les, with an inverted smirk pared by scores of humility: “Oh, I guess my hair does make me look older.”

Moments like this one lighten the load of those still-weighted words, “Lancaster County.” For me, as for plenty of North American Mennonites, Lancaster is a burden as unavoidable as it is unbearable. I went to Goshen College in the 1990s partly because it struck me as the antithesis of Lancaster-style Mennonitism. As it happened, a near-majority of my first-semester friends hailed from there. Another word for Lancaster, then, might be irresistible. As a Mennonite and a first generation non-native, Lancaster is a font of nostalgia for memories that are not actually my own. Yet, when old photos of plain coats and meetinghouses yield to present-day sightings of SUVs and Bible churches, I begin again to view Lancaster as embodying a kind of false theory of Mennonitism.

Every time I think I’m being too hard on the place, or fancy that I am finally mature enough to get over it, Lancaster goes ahead and confirms the caricature. The latest example is the likely departure of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference from the Mennonite Church USA, potentially reducing the denomination’s membership by 14 percent. The specific issue is homosexuality, but the willingness of the conference’s leaders to leave harkens back to the days when knitted coverings would not have sufficed. The connecting thread is the assumption that Lancaster, separate and above, is one of God’s preferred metaphors for Christian. Like many Americans, many Lancaster Mennonites have unthinkingly confused being big with being representative.

It’s a form of evasion, I know, but I often think that Lancaster is better seen than heard. And, for me, the seeing part includes place names on road maps or township signs: Elm, Ephrata, Bird-in-Hand, Terre Hill, any garden spot that is not directly off the dreaded Route 30. Such names remain strangely comforting, even enchanting, as long as I don’t fully pay attention.

I wonder if the secret middle ground between sight and sound is found in growing old and in the spirit of looking past that can come with age. Maybe it’s something you just come into. I hope so. This kind of aging, blunt but full of grace, is probably only possible when the parties involved have lived fundamentally upright lives, a contingency that is undoubtedly true for so many Lancaster Mennonites, whatever the qualms I have about their collective ethos. I don’t really know what was going on between Bertha and Les, but the goodness of their moment is what I am choosing to see, to hear, and to make into my own memory.

- Steven P. Miller