Forgiving is woven into life of Amish

Their forgiveness of a killer mystifies. But anger and revenge simply aren't an option.
By Donald B. Kraybill
 
The blood was hardly dry on the bare, board floor of the West Nickel Mines School when Amish parents sent words of forgiveness to the family of the killer who had executed their children.

Forgiveness? So quickly, and for such a heinous crime? Out of the hundreds of media queries I've received in the last week, the forgiveness question rose to the top. Why and how could they do such a thing so quickly? Was it a genuine gesture or just an Amish gimmick?

The world was outraged by the senseless assault on 10 Amish girls in the one-room West Nickel Mines School. Why would a killer turn his gun on the most innocent of the innocent? Questions first focused on the killer's motivations: Why did he unleash his anger on the Amish? Then questions shifted to the Amish: How would they cope with such an unprecedented tragedy?

In many ways, the Amish are better equipped to process grief than are many other Americans. First, their faith sees even tragic events under the canopy of divine providence, having a higher purpose or meaning hidden from human sight at first glance. The Amish don't argue with God. They have an enormous capacity to absorb adversity - a willingness to yield to divine providence in the face of hostility. Such religious resolve enables them to move forward without the endless paralysis of analysis that asks why, letting the analysis rest in the hands of God.

Second, their historic habits of mutual aid - such as barn-raising - arise from their understanding that Christian teaching compels them to care for one another in time of disaster. This is why they reject commercial insurance and government-funded Social Security, believing that the Bible teaches them to care for one another. In moments of disaster, the resources of this socio-spiritual capital spring into action. Meals are brought to grieving families. Neighbors milk cows and perform other daily chores. Hundreds of friends and neighbors visit the home of the bereaved to share quiet words and simply the gift of presence. After the burial, adult women who have lost a close family member will wear black dresses in public for as long as a year to signal their mourning and welcome visits of support.

In all these ways, Amish faith and culture provide profound resources for processing the sting of death. Make no mistake: Death is painful. Many tears are shed. The pain is sharp, searing the hearts of Amish mothers and fathers as it would those of any other parents.

But why forgiveness? Surely some anger - at least some grudges - are justifiable in the face of such a slaughter.

But a frequent phrase in Amish life is "forgive and forget." That's the recipe for responding to Amish members who transgress Amish rules if they confess their failures. Amish forgiveness also reaches to outsiders, even to killers of their children.

Amish roots stretch back to the Anabaptist movement at the time of the Protestant Reformation in 16th-century Europe. Hundreds of Anabaptists were burned at the stake, decapitated and tortured because they contended that individuals should have the freedom to make voluntary decisions about religion. This insistence that the church, not the state, had the authority to decide matters such as the age of baptism laid the foundation for our modern notions of religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

Anabaptist martyrs emphasized yielding one's life completely to God. Songs by imprisoned Anabaptists, recorded in the Ausbund, the Amish hymn book, are regularly used in Amish church services today. The 1,200-page Martyrs Mirror, first printed in 1660, which tells the martyr stories, is found in many Amish houses and is cited by preachers in their sermons. The martyr voice still rings loudly in Amish ears with the message of forgiveness of those who tortured them and burned their bodies at the stake.

The martyr testimony springs from the example of Jesus, the cornerstone of Amish faith. As do other Anabaptists, the Amish take the life and teachings of Jesus seriously. Without formal creeds, their simple (but not simplistic) faith accents living in the way of Jesus rather than comprehending the complexities of religious doctrine. Their model is the suffering Jesus who carried his cross without complaint. And who, hanging on the cross, extended forgiveness to his tormentors: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Beyond his example, the Amish try to practice Jesus' admonitions to turn the other cheek, to love one's enemies, to forgive 70 times seven times, and to leave vengeance to the Lord. Retaliation and revenge are not part of their vocabulary.

As pragmatic as they are about other things, the Amish do not ask if forgiveness works; they simply seek to practice it as the Jesus way of responding to adversaries, even enemies. Rest assured, grudges are not always easily tossed aside in Amish life. Sometimes forgiveness is harder to dispense to fellow church members, whom Amish people know too well, than to unknown strangers.

Forgiveness is woven into the fabric of Amish faith. And that is why words of forgiveness were sent to the killer's family before the blood had dried on the schoolhouse floor. It was just the natural thing to do, the Amish way of doing things. Such courage to forgive has jolted the watching world as much as the killing itself. The transforming power of forgiveness may be the one redeeming thing that flows from the blood shed in Nickel Mines this week.


 

"The degenerative and loony should never be denigrated but, rather, thanked. In their absence, the rest of you would be obliged to fill congressional seats... positions naturally unsavory to the sane and honorable."

Thorax

I couldn't be near as forgiving.

SMSB

"Let's Go Downtown" - Flight of the Intruder
 

http://www.327infantry.org/second/c_co 

Same Mud Same Blood - NBC documentary filmed 1967 RVN, chronicle Frank McGee

Having grown up in the heart of Amish Country, not terribly far from where this tragedy occured, I have taken this whole incident to heart.  It is for that reason that I have stayed away from responding to the threads started in response to it. 

Please permit me to forward an email my dad sent me, which was an editorial from a newspaper, local to this tragedy.

The little girls are gone, buried in the rich and fertile earth of tranquil Amish cemeteries. The shooter, too, is gone, his life ended by the same gun that took the little girls. The tiny school is now surrounded not only by a tidy white picket fence, but also by ominous yellow crime tape. Boarded-up, the building is eerily vacant, silent. The shots have stopped, but the horror continues, and we who live here in God's Country are left to deal with the hellish aftermath of a terrifying rampage that we're struggling to understand.

The pastoral hamlet of Nickel Mines, a village of 27 households, watched in somber grief as 4 funeral processions clip-clopped by yesterday; one more is happening today, on this rainy Friday. Our coroner reported that she counted twenty bullet holes on the body of the child who was held by a state trooper as she died. We hear of the blood and the broken glass and the small desks barricading the door. With every new and gruesome report, we can't help but ask the question that our Amish neighbors don't feel is necessary to answer: Why?

The Amish call us the "English." They are separate from the world; we are of it. They have no cars, no televisions, no mp3s or CDs or DVDs. They have no electricity, no computers, no violent video games to corrupt young minds. The Amish are indeed separate from the world, but this past week they were thrust into it with a dreadful force and horrendous heartbreak never before experienced in this community of innocence and faith.

It was surreal to hear the lunchtime news on an ordinary sunny Monday, and to see the breaking alert that the Nickel Mines one-room school was apparently, inconceivably, under some kind of attack, with mysterious reports of a possible hostage situation. The speculation soon became chilling confirmation: a gunman had opened fire and taken multiple victims. There were helicopters and police cruisers and ambulances and reporters. There were the families and relatives gathered by the schoolyard, regarding the scene in dazed disbelief. Even the horses seemed shocked: eyes wide with terror; their skin rippling and trembling as the after-effects of gunfire reverberated throughout the county. There was confusion and crying and despair and the echoing questions: Who? Who would have - could have - done such a thing? Why? There was a dead gunman, and a row of shattered little girls bound together below a poster reading "Visitors Brighten Up People's Days."

Three swings now sway gently, empty, in a place that usually rings with the laughter of children. Across the fields are three immaculate farmhouses, all within view of one another, in which the funerals were held. Heartsick families have spent the week meticulously sewing the white burial gowns. Dressed carefully, respectfully tended by their mothers and grandmothers and aunts, the children are laid to rest in plain handmade wooden coffins.

"These are my babies," says Rita Rhoads, a local midwife who delivered several of the victims.

We who live here in Lancaster County echo the midwife's sentiments: they are all of our babies. We watch the news and we drive past the solemn buggies and we hold our own children tight. We hug them goodbye as they leave for school in the morning, and we hope that they come home in the afternoon. We pass the multitude of one-room schools, and we view them with new eyes. We smile at the boys hitting baseballs as if this were just a regular day in a commonplace week. We know that they are hitting more than just the baseballs; they know that we are trying really hard to smile as if all is well with the world. We wave and go on our way. We no longer honk at the buggies moving slowly in the lane ahead; we go to great efforts to make kind eye contact with the children peering shyly from the backs of the buggies. The feeling is not unlike that after the attacks of 9-11: we're being nicer to one another, more patient, friendlier. We're all in this together.

I myself attended one year in a one-room school in Lancaster County; not because I'm Amish; because the brand-new many-roomed school wasn't built until the summer before I entered Second Grade. Even in the new school, there was a number of Amish students. Back in the 1960s, the Amish didn't feel such pressing need to build their own private schoolhouses. School was safe. Students respected teachers. All through my Lancaster County school years - 1964 to 1976 - I never saw a police officer in school. I never saw a fight. My son attends the same high school I graduated from: Garden Spot, in the heart of Amish Country. The students now see at least three fights a week; often three fights a day. There are police in the school every day. It's a sad state of affairs. Paradise isn't perfect anymore.

There have been three school shootings in America in the past week. It doesn't always happen somewhere else. This time it happened here. Here. At home, in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. It can happen here. It can happen anywhere, and we have to work together to make it stop happening in this country, and everywhere.

Last night, driving my 16-year-old son and three of his friends to a local fair, I asked the boys if they felt safe in school. There was a typical teenage pause, while I realized that these strapping males would never admit to fear in school, and then one of them spoke.

"I think about it a lot," he said. "I'm kind of scared in school. It's even worse now. If it could happen in an Amish school, it's a thousand times more likely to happen in our school."

The other boys coughed nervously, my son turned up the radio, and then one said, "Well, we only have a year and a half. Hopefully . . . we'll get out safe."

I didn't know what to say, so I just turned the radio up even more. Sometimes there are just no words . . . And no easy solutions.

We English rely upon our Amish neighbors for certain things. We depend upon them for fresh eggs, and sweet apple cider, and creamy pumpkin pies for our Thanksgiving dinners. We buy their chicken pot pies and their shoofly pies and we relish their chow-chow. They churn butter and ice cream, and we enjoy the fruits of their labors. We drink the milk from their cows, and we stop frequently at their roadside stands, picking up reasonably-priced watermelons and peaches and tomatoes. We can always count on the Amish for those things. We can also count on them to hold firm to their faith, to their belief in God, to their traditions, and to the way of life that can't be an easy road to follow.

The Amish are human, and they are grieving. Their pain is beyond understanding. They're weeping and they're praying and they're numb. Most striking of all: The Amish are forgiving. These humble people forgive the man who took the lives of their babies. It's a point they make again and again, as their faces are captured on film by hundreds of photographers from across the world that they never desired to be a part of. They forgive. This is God's will. They must trust that this was meant to be; it is best. Their girls are in Heaven.

The names read like poetry: Naomi Rose. Marian. Anna Mae. Sisters Mary Liz and Lena, who are buried together. Five little girls, dressed in white, laid in wooden boxes. Five more little girls lying in city hospital beds, their flesh ripped apart by a man who said that his heart was full of hate.

Marian's little sister is one of those hospitalized girls, and she began talking yesterday, relating a tale of courage and bravery. Marian asked the killer to shoot her first, and to allow the younger children to live. Even in the last moments of her life, Marian was looking out for her little sister. That gives the parents some comfort.

The teacher, 20-year-old Emma Zook, went to visit one of the girls in the hospital. Her knees buckled. Emma told our local newspaper how the murderer came into the schoolhouse, and how she ran to a nearby farm for help upon seeing the gun. A slight figure, Emma's eyes are haunted with memories and mourning. Never again will a school day be the same for Emma Zook, who says that she plans to return to teaching.

Charles Carl Roberts left suicide notes for his wife and children. He wrote that he was grieving for a stillborn daughter, Elise, who would have been nine. He wrote that he was angry at God and angry at himself; that he'd long-ago molested two female relatives and had dreams of doing it again. He wrote that he wouldn't be coming home.

An Amish man embraced Charles Roberts Sr, a man who'd given his son the same name. He held Mr. Roberts as he sobbed. "We forgive," the Amish man said, again and again as the killer's father wept. "We forgive."

We of the world have things to learn from those not of it. We too need to forgive. We need to hope and we need to heal. We need to have faith, and we need to find a solution to the sickness that's invaded the very soul of our nation. We need to help our children, and their children, and everybody's children . . . before it's too late.

On the morning of four of the funerals, I drove across the back roads of Lancaster County, heading from my home to the winding and quiet roads of Nickel Mines. Joining the media center's throng of reporters, I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with writers from Manhattan and Philadelphia and Florida and Washington. Being a longtime journalist, I'm accustomed to the usual competitive jostling atmosphere of a media center set up to accommodate crowds of reporters all hungry for an exclusive coop. The astounding thing this time was that the competition did not seem to exist: we were all just writers or reporters doing our jobs, trying to arrange words of the English language into sentences that would try to make sense of these horrific events. We were all just human beings with hearts that ached as we tried to find the words to describe the scene. We were mothers and fathers and grandparents, brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and sons and daughters.

"We really appreciate how respectful you news people have been," commented one Amish man.

"I never knew that the world cared about us," said another. "We are so moved."

An Amish woman teetered downhill on a rickety bicycle, snaking between the graves among which lay the infant daughter of the killer. She stopped to talk. Her name was Mary Zook, and her words will remain with me forever.

"I think those ten little girls must have been very special to have God choose them for this," Mary said. Her gaze was steady; her eyes clear; her smile sincere. I thought it was an incredible way to look at the events that had taken two of her relatives: Mary Liz and Lina.

"I'm so touched by the way that the English people have responded to this," Mary Zook said. "I see things differently now. I look at you in a different way."

The night before, Mary had attended the open-casket viewing of her two young relatives. She was now on her way to the funeral, bicycling, clad head-to-toe in black.

"The girls looked so beautiful last night, dressed all in white," she stated. "They looked sweet and innocent; just like they were sleeping. They were the sweetest girls you'd ever want to meet: always smiling; always kind."

Mary was calm and composed, glowing with an inner peace and assurance that all was well. I, however, was the blubbering one, as I explained to Mary Zook that my husband's grandparents had been Amish. In fact, their names, too, were Zook. Eli Zook committed suicide back in 1962, hanging himself in his barn a month before my husband John was born. His wife Nellie accepted state assistance after Eli's death. She was ex-communicated for that reason, but Nellie relentlessly held tight to a love and respect of her Amish background. I explained all this to Mary Zook, and noted the fact that she was probably related in some way to John's family. Mary's children had some of the same blood as my son; the slain sisters, too.

"Please pass our sympathies and condolences to the family," I said to Mary. "Please tell them that we are so sorry, and that we hurt for them. Tell them that we can't stop thinking about them . . . And that . . . We can't even begin to imagine . . ." I crumbled, breaking down in a way that professional media people aren't supposed to do.

Mary and I embraced. "I'm usually not one for hugging, but . . ." Mary said, her voice trailing off as we wrapped our arms around one another.

When I asked Mary Zook if the Amish community was aware that flags across our state were being flown at half-mast in honor of their girls, her eyes welled up for the first time.

"Thank you," she said quietly. "Tell everyone thank you. I'll tell the families about the flags. They'll appreciate that."

Another conversation that brought me to tears was one that I had was with Jacquie Hess, the aunt of Charles Roberts' wife Marie. Jacquie lives next door to the Roberts family, and she and I stood in the driveway between the two homes, talking of the 32-year-old man Jacquie had known for more than a decade.

"Charlie is not the man who did this," Jacquie declared. "The man who did this is not Charlie. When I heard the news, I actually went down to the schoolhouse and asked to see the body. I just couldn't believe it was Charlie. I thought that someone must have stolen Charlie's ID; someone who went and shot those girls. I just couldn't believe it was Charlie. I still can't believe it was Charlie."

Her voice wavered, and she took a deep breath, clutching an 8X10 framed photograph to her chest.

"This is how I want Charlie to be remembered: as a loving and kind father. He's not a monster or a sexual predator. He was a good man. He loved his family."

Jacquie held up the photo, and her face softened as she carefully touched the glass. "This is Charlie and Marie, right after their baby Abigail was born," she says. "This is how I want Charlie to be remembered. Not by that picture in the paper. That made him look like a killer. Charlie was not a monster. I hate that they're portraying him like that."

I couldn't stop looking at the photograph. They were lovely: Charlie and Marie and the baby Abigail.

Jacquie Hess's eyes, puffy behind sunglasses, locked upon the Roberts' home. "If you walked inside there, you'd feel the love," she said. "The love that Charlie and Marie had for each other and for their children. It's all over that house. There's such deep love in there."

I, too, stared at the house. A modest yet well-kept abode, this is obviously the home of a family who cared about their property and their children. On the porch and in the yard are toys: the toys that parents buy to make their babies' lives fun. Through a window, a wall plaque is visible. It reads "God Bless This Home."

Jacquie said that the Roberts family was a churchgoing family. They worshiped. They prayed. They went to Bible Study. In fact, Marie was at a Bible Study while Charlie drove to the one-room school. Ironically, Marie was attending her usual weekly session in which women pray for all the children of the community.

Jacquie's family was invited by the Amish to the funeral services. Marie Roberts, surrounded by loved ones in an undisclosed location somewhere in Pennsylvania, is making plans to meet with the families of each and every victim.

"We think of Marie and the children as victims, too," said one Amish man. "We hold no ill feelings. We don't think evil of them, or of the man who was the shooter."

"We accept God's will," added his wife. "We don't ask why. We are as little children, walking in faith, and we know that we must go on."

"The world is watching you," I told the couple. "The world is watching, and listening, and we are all so impressed. We're impressed and we're humbled and we're in awe of your abilities to forgive. We need to be more like you."

"And we," said the Amish woman, "couldn't do it without you. We are very thankful for the support. There's always something for which to thank God."

I told the woman, a mother of 8, that I'm a children's book author and that I'd be donating books to Nickel Mines School . . . Whenever and wherever it may exist once again. That's still a question that the Amish are grappling with.

"These children do need to get back to school," said the father. "They need to return to normal . . . Well, normal isn't really there anymore. But they should feel as if it's normal."

The English students of a nearby public high school have volunteered to help take care of the Amish farms - milking cows and collecting eggs and feeding chickens - while the community grieves and meets and tries to figure out what to do and where to go from here. Where can we all go from here? That is the common question echoing throughout every corner of our county, and we struggle to make life feel normal. We've had a show, though, of hope. The morning after the shooting, hundreds of commuters saw a rainbow arcing brilliantly over Route 30. There was no rain, and no storm on its way. Some say it's a sign that things will be fine. This Monday, at 10:45 a.m., church bells will ring all across the county, and we will stop our busy lives and be quiet for a minute. The hush will fall, and we will remember. It's been a week - seven strange days - and we're different now. We're different, yet the same, and we will - we hope - be okay.

As a lifelong resident of Lancaster County, I've never seen the Amish and English coming together in this way. There is amazing grace. My own wish is that this tragedy will build bridges of understanding and reconciliation. Respect of one another's religions could solve a lot of problems in this scary world; I believe that it could put a stop to wars. Forgiveness can build bridges on the road to world peace.

The Amish are a people of peace. We who are of the world need to watch those who are not of it, and we need to learn. The little girls are gone, buried in the fertile earth, but we are still here, and we will go on, and we will remember. We will make things better in this world: for our children, for their children, for everybody's children. We must.

And we'll do it in honor of those ten little angels who were special enough to be chosen for this.

Linda Oatman High