If there is anything harder to comprehend than 2006’s massacre of Amish schoolgirls in Pennsylvania, said the LOS ANGELES TIMES in an editorial, “it is the Amish community’s reaction to the tragedy. “No one would blame the Amish for feeling revulsion and rage toward Charles Roberts IV, the madman who took over the one-room Nickel Mines school and shot 10 little girls in the head, killing five. Instead, said Steven Gimbel in THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, the tight-knit Amish community publicly forgave Roberts and “opened their hearts” to his family, setting up a fund for his children and inviting his widow to a funeral service for four of the victims. Amid the all-too-familiar horror of a school shooting, we saw “a glimmer of the best part of humanity.”
Why is their forgiveness so mysterious? asked religious history professor David Weaver-Zercher in the PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE. The Amish, after all, are a Christian sect, and Jesus Christ was unambiguous about the importance of forgiving those who trespass against you. “Bless them that curse you,” Christ said, “and pray for them which despitefully use you.” In fact, if anything needs explaining, said Bruce Kluger in USA TODAY, it’s why other communities of faith find it so hard to practice the compassion their religions preach. Islamic fundamentalists have twisted the Koran into a “global death warrant.” Lebanese Shiites and Israeli Jews spent the summer of 2006 ignoring their respective holy book’s commandments that they treat all human beings with “decency and forgiveness and love.” In the U.S., a “small but rabid band of evangelicals” is trying to turn its judgmental and divisive reading of scripture into the law of the land. As the Amish laid their little girls to rest last week with dignity and grace, these gentle people have shown the world what genuine faith really means.
Forgive me for saying so, said Cristina Odone in the London OBSERVER, but I find the Amish readiness to forgive Charles Roberts “disturbing.” What’s being praised as Christian love is actually more like bleak fatalism. The Amish solution to the problems of the world is first denial — in the self-imposed exile of their closed communities — and, when that proves impossible, passive resignation. It’s one thing to forgive those who have wounded you, said Jeff Jacoby in THE BOSTON GLOBE, and quite another to forgive a man who slaughtered innocent children. What Charles Roberts did was simply evil, and shrugging off such atrocities as the will of God does not make the world a better place. “Hatred is not always wrong, and forgiveness is not always deserved.”
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THE CONTEXT OF FORGIVENESS: GRACE IN AMISH COUNTRY
Breakpoint commentary by Charles Colson, October 3, 2007
With the massacre at Virginia Tech and the chilling execution-style murder of four Delaware State students, it is not surprising that many Americans have almost forgotten an equally horrifying event that took place one year ago yesterday.
A demented gunman, Charles Roberts, took a school-room full of Amish girls hostage in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. Before he killed himself, Roberts had murdered five girls in cold blood.
But as shocking as this senseless act of violence was, it was what followed that sent the real shock waves through the nation.
Within hours of the shooting, several members of the Amish community visited Mrs. Roberts and her family, to express their sorrow over her loss and to say they did not hold anything against them. Another Amish man visited the killer’s father. A Roberts family spokesperson said, “He stood there for an hour, and he held [Mr. Roberts] in his arms and said, ‘We forgive you.’”
Four days later at the killer’s burial, some 70 people in attendance were Amish. And when funds began pouring in for victims after the shooting, the Nickel Mines community established a fund for the shooter’s wife and children.
Reactions to the news of this forgiveness ran the gamut from awestruck to disgust. Detractors like Jeff Jacoby opined in the BOSTON GLOBE, “I cannot see how the world is made a better place by assuring someone who would do terrible things that he will be readily forgiven afterward.”
But what Jacoby and others missed was the broader context of the forgiveness. It was not a cheap forgiveness that denied the pain and wrong of what had happened. From amazing grief through amazing faith came amazing grace.
In a new book titled AMISH GRACE, three experts on the Amish explain, “Our actions are rarely random. We all embrace patterns of behavior and habits of mind that shape what we do in a given situation.” As the authors note, there are “habits of forgiveness” in the Amish culture, Christian habits that come into clear focus. For instance, the Amish celebrate communion only twice a year, but they go through a month-long season of preparation. During that season of preparation, the Amish take seriously the admonition that if anyone holds a grudge against his brother, he is not to partake in the communion until he has put things right. A council meeting two weeks prior to communion is a time of admonishment, then there is a season of fasting, and sometimes the communion service is even delayed for weeks if there is more widespread disharmony among the community.
There is much more we could say about the wave of forgiveness that startled the world last October. Get the book AMISH GRACE, and read about it. You can even order it from our website, BreakPoint.org.
But the question is, how are we working in our own communities to build cultures of grace? Do we teach our children to forgive? Are we actively working to restore offenders and to reach out in aid to victims? And are we overcoming the evil in the world by good, as we are commanded to?
The Amish have given us a great lesson in the way to defeat hatred and alienation. It is the Christian worldview — the only one that makes such a magnificent response to such a horrible tragedy possible.
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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #12911]