Adults sometimes ask, “Must daily life be so awful?  Can’t I just go off by myself and live a simple, holy life?” Christians pray God not to deliver them into temptation. Wordsworth laments, “The world is too much with us.” The humorist shouts, “Stop the world! I want to get off!”

Have you spoken lately with twenty-something hard chargers in today’s hi-tech workplace? Unless they teach or work for government, their employer may allow them almost no vacation time in their first year. Their likeliest personally selected career strategy calls for deliberately changing employers every couple of years. It means working 70 hour weeks, burning out, exhausting themselves and making inhumanly little time for personal growth, for bull sessions, for church, for thinking, for recreation. 

Many young professionals are appalled by  boss-tolerated misbehavior of their well-paid colleagues. Co-workers openly put down people for their race. They harass women. They download pornography onto their company-supplied computer monitors. They then and commend the smut to others in the office. They boast of distant sales trips planned around affordable adultery-for-hire. Many American workplaces are at a far remove from Eden. 

Neighborhoods are not always much better. Ditto country clubs, bowling leagues and deer hunts. If you don’t believe me, take a 25 year old to lunch and ask her what it is like to live and work in America today while trying to be good.

It appears God’s plan that there be people, lots of them, all around us. Most of us are glad of that fact most of the time. But Jean Paul Sartre felt that “Hell is other people.” And who will deny that some people do construct and breathe upon others their personal hells. Leaders of society divide populations into law abiders and criminals. If the crimes become too gross,  criminals are forcibly separated from life or liberty.  Many go to prison for  months, years, for life. To protect itself, society either shuts off or shuts out  misbehavers.

That still leaves a lot of children and adults not in jail who make life miserable for people with different eyes or overweight. How does a young professional or business person stay morally afloat amidst the bullies? Well, people can and do secede voluntarily from society or at least from certain situations. Paul Gauguin went to Tahiti to paint. Saint Simon Stylites lived atop a column in the desert and preached. Thomas Merton retreated to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. Ann Lee created celibate Shaker communities.

In July [1998] my wife and I withdrew for a week to a splendid Elderhostel course on “The Plain People of Lancaster County.” We were addressed by Amish, by Mennonites, by Amish-Mennonites and by a member of the River Brethren. We visited an Old Order Mennonite farm family. We listened to lectures on buggy colors, buttons and hooks, quilting, use or non-use of electricity, mules vs. horses vs. autos, one room schoolhouses and other elements of life of the Plain People. Our genial host institution provided comfortable, up to date lodging and ample, delicious German cooking. We were in the Mennonite Church-related Black Rock Retreat in Quarryville, Pennsylvania. (See its web site at www.brr.org.)

Plain People are world class experts at balancing withdrawal from society with varying degrees of interaction. Still, within the larger Anabaptist community of Amish, Mennonites, River Brethren, Dunkers, Hutterites and others there are always difficult personal and family decisions being made. Just how far does God’s Scripture want people to go in withdrawing  supernatural religion from worldly America? Some Amish or Mennonite individuals and communities from time to time secede because they want to become less worldly. A stronger trend, however, is  to slip ever deeper into the world. You cannot, therefore,  be sure whether a person described as “Mennonite” will dress as her ancestors did 150 years ago or as a typical teenager of today’s America. A young Mennonite professional’s grandparents might have been German-speaking, horse and buggy Old Order Amish, while his parents were English-speaking, automobile driving Reformed Mennonites. Today’s young Mennonite is statistically  likely to be  a peace person whose church life looks much like any main stream Protestant group. The more powerful trend is to sanctify, not run from, the world.

A delightful paperback from Lancaster County is by Emerson L. Lesher: a 1985 publication of Good Books, Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Its title is 

THE MUPPIE MANUAL: THE MENNONITE URBAN PROFESSIONAL’S HANDBOOK FOR HUMILITY AND SUCCESS (OR HOW TO BE GENTLE IN THE CITY). 

"the professional, the academic, the radical, the church Muppie, the artist,  the Non-Muppie Muppie and the Non-Urban Muppie.”
 
• Church Muppies “Have a quilt and/or antiques in their office” and “Get a lot of invitations for credit cards.” 
• Radical Muppies “make other Muppies feel uncomfortable.” Non-Muppie Muppies “Are more ‘laid back’ and not as goal-directed as other Muppies” and “are Type B personalities.” 
• The Non-Urban Muppies “Are often consulted by non-Muppies regarding how and where to do things in the city (e.g., How do you get to the zoo?)” (pp. 26-30).

This sinful world needs more good Muppies: saintly interactors with the world, people who are quietly, reassuringly decent in the office and in the neighborhood. But staying good, keeping the eye on the prize, gets harder and harder. Young professionals, whether Mennonites Lutherans, Jews, Bahai or Moravians, can resist only so much temptation. They somehow, sometimes have to get away, take time out. In the end, however, supernatural religion is of its very nature  a sign of contradiction to today’s hedonistic world. Living such religion begets pain and taking up your cross daily. G.K. Chesterton defined the saint as someone who hates the world so much that she wants to save it. But she also loves the world so much that she thinks saving it worth the effort.

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for Asheville TRIBUNE