Perhaps a Boston Globe columnist expressed the thoughts of many Americans about how quickly and completely Amish parents and other relatives forgave Charles Carl Roberts IV for lining up 10 girls, ages 6-13, at a one-room school and methodically shooting them, execution style, before killing himself.
Less than a week after the Oct. 2 massacre in West Nichel Mines, Pennsylvania, Jeff Jacoby wrote that he admired the Amish's steadfast resolve to obey Jesus' command to turn the other cheek and return good for evil. Still, he asserted that hatred is not always wrong and forgiveness is not always deserved.
"How many of us," Jacoby wrote, "would really want to live in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered? In which even the most horrific acts of cruelty were always and instantly forgiven? There is a time to love and a time to hate, Ecclesiastes teaches. If anything deserves to be hated, surely it is the pitiless murder of innocents."
Since followers of Jacob Amann broke off from the Mennonite Church around 1690 in Switzerland, they have somehow managed the seemingly impossible task of separating themselves from society while living in it.
At first, it cost them dearly. The Amish and other Anabaptists were severely persecuted as heretics by both Protestants --- who drowned them, mocking their beliefs in adult baptism --- and Catholics --- who preferred to burn them at the stake. Attracted by religious freedom, the Amish started coming to the U.S. and Canada in the 18th century, continuing in ever greater numbers during the 19th century. Most became self-sufficient farmers because it offered the best opportunity to practice separation and simplicity.
And even a truly horrific act like the Lancaster County attack on children, where five girls died violent deaths and the 32-year-old killer was believed to have plans to rape all ten captured students, was forgiven literally within minutes after the families found out about the tragedy.
How is that humanly possible?
'Beyond comprehension'
Why didn't the victims' loved ones at least lash out at the murderer? Instead, Amish neighbors attended his funeral to comfort his own three children and wife. Later they even set up a fund for the non-Amish family from donations that poured in to Amish families to cover their uninsured medical expenses.
One media commentator noted that the bedrock compassion of the Amish was as "out of step" with everyday reality as their no-buttons black suits and horse-drawn buggies. Another pundit observed that such unbridled forgiveness was almost "beyond comprehension" in a world of terrorism, where religious-spawned revenge and atrocities are regularly featured on the nightly news.
"If we don't forgive, we won't be forgiven," said Sam Stoltzfus, an Old Order Amish member of the community. "We all want to go to heaven, so we need to forgive. Why not forgive? We forgot forgiveness on our way to modern life."
Donald Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, has written five books on Amish life. He says the group's cornerstone of forgiveness goes back to the 16th-century martyrs whose courageous stories are chronicled in the 1,200-page "Martyrs Mirror," which can be found in most Amish homes today. And the martyrs' testimony springs directly from the example of Jesus, who forgave his torturers while hanging on the cross and admonished his disciples to forgive 70 times seven times.
"Forgiveness is woven into the fabric of Amish life," Kraybill wrote recently in The Mennonite magazine. "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."
Imitating Christ
David Augsburger, professor of pastoral care and counseling at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, was raised as a Mennonite on the border of Ohio and Indiana, although his grandmother was Amish. His Anabaptist ancestors go all the way back to the beginning of the Reformation in Europe.
The ordained minister of the Mennonite Church was a spokesperson for the religious community on radio and TV before teaching at different denominational seminaries, including a Mennonite Seminary for 14 years. Since 1990, he has worked at Fuller.
"In terms of general practice and discipleship and commitment, both for Amish and Mennonites there's a clear imitation of Christ focus, which is closer to Catholic thought than Protestant," the 67-year-old scholar told The Tidings.
"There's also a strong commitment to the practices of your life demonstrated in the ethics of how you live and work with other people. A strong commitment to humility in the way you function. A strong commitment to nonviolence and nonresistance. And a strong commitment to concrete forms of service."
The main sociological difference between the two groups is the Amish have withdrawn from intimate contact with a world they think will lead them away from community solidarity, he points out. So they have rules against using electricity, owning cars or TVs and having telephones in their homes largely to maintain community boundaries.
"Enemy love" is another defining characteristic of the Amish, which was clearly on display at the school shootings. Augsburger says the concept has roots in the religious community's history of early martyrdom.
"Wrongdoing is not a valid reason for my not loving anybody," he explained. "So 'enemy love' is the floor on which forgiveness stands. We act in love toward anyone, no matter what they do towards us, unconditionally, if we are obeying Jesus' simplest, most basic teachings about love for other people as he says in the Sermon on the Mount. The Amish were practicing unconditional love towards the killer of their children and his family.
"Now when the Amish talk about forgiveness within the community, that's very different," he added. "That requires accountability, responsibility, repentance for reconciliation to take place. So for brothers and sisters in the community where there's something that falls short, they want accountability, responsible repentance and the work of restoring relationship."
This latter kind of deep forgiveness is countercultural in American Society today, which has become fascinated with retributive justice, according to Ausburger. He notes that the American criminal justice system cries out for an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Criminals must be brought to justice and punished harshly for their crimes. Even juvenile offenders are not cut much slack.
But what about lesser wrongs?
"In our culture, we don't practice forgiveness; we practice memory fatigue," he said. "When we're too tired to remember it anymore, then we give up and say, 'Ok, I'll just let the person off the hook.'
"But the Amish lean towards looking at forgiveness as being recognizing the co-humanity of the other person, entering into the conversation and process to seek to build relationship and reconnecting as brothers. They would take Jesus' teaching in Matthew 18 quite seriously, where Jesus clearly says that the goal is to regain your brother."
When asked why forgiving people is so difficult, the professor sighed, then smiled. He has written three books on that very subject.
"I think forgiveness is one of the hardest things one does because in true forgiveness you have to face the injury that was actually done between yourself and the other - and come to terms with the pain that exists there," he observed. "And then reach out in love toward the individual even though he may show no signs of recognition, and then seek to restore that relationship.
"That's hard work," he stressed. "That's all very difficult work."
State of vulnerability
Sister Darlene Kawulok, chair of religious studies at Mount St. Mary's College, agrees that forgiving is not for the faint of heart.
"It acknowledges your own vulnerability," she said. "And what you're basically saying is 'I messed up.' And then you're waiting to see what I do to you. Forgiveness is a state of vulnerability. Because what you're doing is putting yourself out there, and you're not sure how it's going to come back to you."
But for Christians, according to the Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, nothing is more important. For Jesus, forgiveness was vital. And today's theologians spend a lot of time still talking about reconciliation, which is the idea of making things right again - either with yourself, your neighbor or with God, she explains.
What do you do, however, if the other party wants no part of it?
"I think what you do is fall back on the modeling of Jesus," she said. "Jesus only invited. He never forced. And so he was a presence, and presence invites. Goodness invites people to engage and to communicate and be connected with. Presence invites people to look at situations in their lives. Presence poses the question."
As an example, the professor of social ethics gives Sister Helen Prejean, whose ministry to death row inmates was made into the movie "Dead Man Walking." By putting herself in situations between killers and their victims' families, the nun has been able to spark a relationship between the two.
But just as often, her efforts fail, which brings up the other reconciling strategy.
"Lots of reconciliation happens, I think, as a result of prayer," Sister Kawulok said. "So you pray for people who persecute you. It's that enemy love the Amish practice. You pray for people who are very obviously alienated or disconnected. And it's through that experience, too, that you experience connection."
She says it's tied to the Christian notion of "communio," or community, which Jesus modeled in his understanding of relationships and covenant. Reconciliation and forgiveness are simply the fruits of community. Because if people have an ongoing and close relationship, then it's a lot easier for them to ask for forgiveness when one is wronged.
The problem with the world today is that so many individuals and families live in isolation, cut off from neighbors, never mind people in other countries and continents. She believes the more disconnected people become, the more they rely on technology to communicate, then the less they realize their own humanity - and the more unforgiving they are.
Which brings us back to the Amish at West Nichol Mines.
"I think the fruit of their community, the fruit of their spirituality, just came through in their decision to forgive that man who murdered and maimed their children," said Sister Kawulok. "One of the things I admired was immediately they showed no animosity to this man's family. In fact, they reached out to his wife and her grief.
"For me what that says is about their deep understanding of community and the importance that relationships have in everything that we do. No one should be isolated. They recognized that she also had a loss, and her children had a loss similar to theirs.
"So there's this empathy," she added. "And empathy, I think, is a very integral part of our understanding reconciliation and forgiveness. Not only compassion, but to basically say, 'We share the same suffering.' That forgiveness of the Amish was a real modeling for the nation." |