If Anything Could Work This Might

I am certain one of the answers parents I meet want me to give them is “How can I prevent this happening to my child.” It’s an important question, and while I don’t have a simple answer I am beginning to learn that community and connection play a huge part in the wellness of any individual. That sounds like a play on words, but we just don’t do well alone, and yet we are slowing driving ourselves to isolation.

When Lauren had reached the stage that everyone who is addicted does, they are stuck in addiction, want to stop, and even hate it, yet keep using. She read an interesting book called Chasing the Scream by Johan Hari. It presents a very eye-opening view of how we are trying to stop drug trafficking and how we treat the addicted. She wanted me to read it which I did. The last night of Laurens life I spoke to her about the book and thanked her for encouraging me to read it. I told her that although I hadn’t quite finished the book and there was still a part of the message of the book, I wanted to see how it panned out, it had stretched my thinking and helped me see things in a better way. In Hari’s latest book Lost Connection, I saw something very powerful in research performed between 1976 and 1980 by J. A. Egeland with the Amish in Indiana. It revealed that the Amish have significantly lower levels of depression than other Americans. There has been several smaller studies done since that support the findings. Hari also shows an incredible principle revealed through an unusual Amish ritual Hari mentions called “Rumspringa”. When Amish children turn 16, the rules change. They’re encouraged to experiment and explore. The idea is that teens will come back to the church after tasting the modern world. For most, this means a tentative foray — a trip to the local movie theater, or driving lessons. But for some, the experience, called Rumspringa, is all about sex, parties and fast cars. You can read more about Rumspringa in Tom Shachtman’s book “Rumspringa: To Be or Not To Be Amish” and the article “Rumspringa: Amish Teens Venture into Modern Vices” .

While I have lots of questions about this practice, honestly it does not make sense to me, the choice that participants make is shocking. Over 80% of those teenagers that live a riotous lives for two years, often completely contrary to all they have been taught return to the Amish life. The reason can be summed up in one word “community” but community at an extremely high level. In the book Hari interviews a member of an Amish region:

“Freeman Lee loved a lot of things about the outside world, he told me—he still misses watching baseball games on TV, and listening to the latest pop songs. But one of the reasons he came back is because he believed an Amish community was a better place to have children, and to be a child. Out in that world, he felt like “you’re always just hustling. You have no time for family. You have no time for kids.” He couldn’t understand what happens to kids in a culture like that. How do they grow up? What kind of life is it? I asked him how his relationship with his kids would change if (say) he got a TV. “We could watch it together,” he says, shrugging. “We could enjoy TV time together. It still doesn’t do justice [compared] with going out in the backyard.” Hari, Johann. Lost Connections (pp. 185-186). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Another individual that met Hari was Freemon Lee Miller who said to Hari about growing up:

“This meant that if one adult wasn’t around, “you had another party to steer you the right way.” You were constantly surrounded by adults and other kids: “So yeah, I definitely got enough attention,” he said. They didn’t have a concept of spending time with the family, because you were always with the family. Often, “spending time with the family was going out and working in the fields or milking the cows.” Other times, it meant the constant family time of eating and social events. An Amish family isn’t like an English family, he explained. It’s not just your mom and dad and siblings. It’s a big interconnected tribe of about 150 people—all the Amish, in fact, who live within walking or buggy distance of your home. There’s no physical church for the Amish. You take turns gathering in different people’s homes for the Sunday service. There’s no permanent hierarchy at all—people also take turns serving as pastor, and it’s allocated randomly. “We’re going to have church in our house Sunday,” he said, and there will be his immediate family, but also all the other rings of Amish members, some of whom he knows very well, some of whom he knows only a little, “so it just builds another relationship … It’s all about connection. Affection, in our community. And I guess that’s where we go in a crisis—all of a sudden, you’ve got people showing up.” Hari, Johann. Lost Connections (p. 185). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Later in the conversation with a man named Lauron Beachey, Johann Hari writes this

“As we talked longer, he started to compare the Amish to the groups out in the English world all around them, like Weight Watchers, where you gather together to lose weight and support each other. You’d never be able to resist all that food on your own; but as a group, banding together, checking each other, encouraging each other, you find you can. I looked at him, trying to process what he was saying. “So,” I asked, “you’re saying the Amish community is almost like a support group for resisting the temptations of an individualist civilization?” Lauron thought about it for a moment, smiled, and said: “That’s one big benefit, yes.”

I know talking about the Amish lifestyle invokes lots of questions for some of us, the aspect, I am trying to highlight is simply the power of community and connection in a persons life.

As a parent of a young child desiring to help their children navigate life, I would say work hard at building strong community into their world, not just your family, but beyond that.

There are lots of ways and places to do that but none so effective as a good church. This is a mandate to the church from the Bible, to experience true community. A question church leaders should be asking is are our churches a safe place where people with lots of baggage can come and feel welcomed and safe, we should be?

Imagine with me how powerful this can be in the life of somebody suffering with addiction, mental health and just struggles of finding our place in life. Is it possible that we can build community into the life of someone ravaged by addiction and begin to move them toward healing. In this video I talk about how Lauren in many ways struggled with connecting to community. I wish I had understood the power of community more when I was trying to help her.

This weeks featured image is a montage of some of Brooke Shaden’s new exhibit called “Begin Again”. It runs from June 13-August 31, 2019 at the at the JoAnne Artman Gallery 511A West 22nd St. | New York, NY 10011

To read more about the affects of modern life on our mental health and I believe addiction check out this study Effects of Modern Life