Penn's Dream
Californians are tempted to pronounce it with drawn out vowels after our own desert city, LAAN-CAAST-ER. When you leave Philadelphia headed west you find yourself in the correctly pronounced LANK-UH-STIR. Perhaps the Dakotas have gotten into me a bit but I recognized it as amazing farmland with beautiful hills that rolled off the road to the north and south as we drove west. It is, in fact, the most productive non-irrigated farm land in the United States.
Lancaster is Amish country. K and I shared in the absurd excitement of seeing our first horse and buggy waiting at the side of the highway. The horse seemed undaunted by the cars that were passing at speeds hovering in the 40s and 50s. When the appropriate time came the buggy master tugged the reigns and the horse bolted onto the highway.
The founder of Pennsylvania as an English colony, William Penn, imagined it as a “holy experiment.” After suffering considerably for his Quaker faith, he created a place where religious tolerance was the highest virtue. His forest became popular with the oppressed believers of the old world and soon his colony flourished with Mennonites, Iberian Jews, Huguenots, Lutherans – most strains of Protestantism that suffered in the restrictions of either Catholic or Anglican society, including the Amish. 
The Amish were concerned about family values far beyond any present charades. One reason that they shunned modernity was that they knew technology would break the family apart since travel would be so easy. Even though All Families Are Psychotic, the modern family today isn’t so bad. Though my immediate family has been on the same continent for the last year, we spent 10 years with the Atlantic between us. Despite this I’d argue that our connections are every bit as vibrant (even more so; distance can be good) as they were in the outskirts of Nairobi, where we lived together for 9 years.
My connection to the “holy experiment” was larger than I’d ever imagined growing up; one large group of beneficiaries to this place of free belief was the Mennonites (from whom the Amish are an extreme segment). Unlike the Amish, who didn’t travel, Mennonites were committed missionaries and a tiny school they founded was where I spent my years of adolescent and teen angst. And it was their unassuming, quiet, and tolerant form of Christianity that has most influenced my own.
In a world where people died over adult baptism, sacraments, and indulgences, Penn dared to believe that it would be okay for each to choose his or her own path without assistance from a government. Perhaps if we see the present in the context of history, we’d dare to believe that we’ll be okay too.
Perhaps it’s only fitting that what remains of his dream is still so beautiful.
10:02:19 PM 
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