Every once in a while, a person can say something that finds a place of immortality in time. Such a thing happened to me over twenty years ago when I told a story to a few Mennonite families who, while very wonderful people, seemed stuck in a time warp I could not comprehend.

I was interested in the way they lived. They had peculiar ways I wanted to understand but lacked the cultural premise to do so. We were fortunate to be billeted with a family whose father was a minister in the community church. This provided me with many opportunities to listen to what the community believed as a whole and how they lived it. I noticed that while some expectations were strictly adhered to, others seemed a bit less stringent. Nonetheless, while I was intrigued by what the culture entailed, I was more interested in how this had come to be and why it was not only expected but culturally enforced with serious community push back when violated.

I eventually came to the conclusion that this mindset had come from high up within the religious hierarchy, and few people were interested in pushing back against that. Wanting to illustrate how fear and ignorance can often be perpetuated, I retold a tale I had heard years earlier. It went like this:

While a family was celebrating a holiday, a young girl observed her mother cutting a ham in two and putting each half in a separate pan to roast. Being an astute home educated girl, she queried her mom about what appeared to be a silly procedure and why she did not simply use a bigger roaster. Her mom could not answer other than to say her mother had taught her to cook a ham in this fashion. Not satisfied with the answer, the girl suggested they go ask grandma if that was the proper way to prepare a ham. Grandma said yes. When the girl asked why, they all decided to question great grandma about the need to split a ham before cooking.  Great grandma replied that she had had to do this because she never had a big enough roaster to cook an entire ham.

Everybody found the story hilarious and it lives on in the Mennonite community to this day. I cannot count the number of times I have reheard this story and I remain baffled by the fact that not many actually get the moral of it. Sometimes we just do what we have been taught or told without ever questioning why.