Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (12 page)

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Authors: Donald B. Kraybill,Steven M. Nolt,David L. Weaver-Zercher

BOOK: Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy
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Anabaptist Habits
 
Our actions are rarely random. We all embrace patterns of behavior and habits of mind that shape what we do in a given situation. When we consider the behavior of groups, we call such patterns
culture
. One way to understand culture is to compare it to a musical repertoire. A repertoire is a set of musical pieces that a performer knows especially well from frequent practice. It reflects an artist’s background and training, and serves a performer in a situation in which there is no time to learn something new. When a musician is asked on short notice to “play something,” or a choral group finds that its manager has suddenly scheduled a concert for next week, these artists fall back on their repertoire—the material they can perform almost instinctively. It’s not that musicians can’t learn new music; they often do. Even then, however, a repertoire forms the core around which new material is added.
 
Culture
is the term we use for a group’s repertoire of beliefs and behaviors. It involves assumptions and conduct that are so deeply rooted and so often practiced that most people are not even aware of them. Culture reflects people’s history and teaching, and is especially visible in times of stress that demand immediate response, when there is no time or emotional energy to think through all the possible actions. Like musical repertoires, cultures change over time, but they change in ways that extend present patterns.
 
Although the Amish are far from static, their culture draws on values and practices set in motion hundreds of years ago, amid events in Europe’s tumultuous sixteenth century. Out of that era of religious turbulence, which saw Reformation figures such as Martin Luther and John Calvin charge the powerful medieval church with corruption, a small but feisty group of reformers called for more than just reform of the church. These radicals insisted on a new concept of the church as a voluntary gathering of those committed to obeying Jesus’ teachings. They symbolized their commitment with adult baptism. But because all of them had been baptized into the church as infants, these new baptisms constituted, in the eyes of church and state officials,
second
baptisms. So the radicals received the disparaging nickname
Anabaptists,
which means “rebaptizers,” and found themselves condemned as heretics.
 
Both Catholics and mainstream reformers wanted a state-supported church, which the Anabaptists challenged. For their part, the Anabaptists insisted that they were simply trying to live as Jesus had commanded, relying on an uncomplicated and often literal reading of the Bible. They renounced self-defense, the swearing of oaths, and military participation. As they held one another accountable to lead Christian lives, they sometimes resorted to expelling members from their fellowship (excommunication) as a sort of shock therapy to jolt the unrepentant into mending their ways. But the Anabaptists would not use violence, nor would they ask government officials to coerce or otherwise maintain religious belief. In fact, they believed that the faithful church should not rely on state support or sanction at all. For them, any links to the state were a sure sign that the church had compromised its primary commitment to God.
 
Such ideas immediately earned Anabaptists the ire of both Catholic and Protestant church leaders, who saw their authority undercut, and civic officials, who relied on religious fear to keep citizens in line. Condemned on all sides, Anabaptists soon found themselves imprisoned and even executed for their beliefs. Although the Anabaptist movement was never large, it accounted for 40 to 50 percent of all Western European Christians who were martyred for their faith during the sixteenth century. Of course, martyrs are a minority in any movement, and most Anabaptists never faced the prospect of capital punishment. Nevertheless, brutal death has been a part of the Anabaptists’ story from the time they began creating their cultural repertoire.
 
By the 1540s the notoriety of one Dutch Anabaptist leader, Menno Simons, was such that the name
Mennonite
came to label many Anabaptist descendants. Then, in 1693, a disagreement among Anabaptists produced the Amish. A fervent Anabaptist convert, Jakob Ammann, feared that Anabaptists in Switzerland and eastern France had become too eager for social acceptance. The emergence of religious toleration, which some Anabaptists greeted as a breath of fresh air, struck Ammann as a dangerous temptation to seek worldly approval. Under Ammann’s leadership, Amish churches formed, with a determination to distinguish themselves from the surrounding society, which they considered to be corrupt.
 
Within a generation, both Mennonites and Amish began immigrating to North America, where many settled in the same communities and recognized one another as fellow Anabaptists, even while cultivating distinct traditions. With some exceptions, Mennonites engaged the wider society more readily than did their Amish counterparts. By the twenty-first century, many Mennonites were seeking to harmonize Anabaptism with higher education, professional pursuits, and urban and suburban living, while Amish people embodied their Anabaptist convictions in rural areas and in traditional customs that they called an “Old Order” way of life.
 
Anabaptist habits that undergird Old Order Amish culture include their responses to violence, crime, and undeserved suffering. These are not the only situations in which Amish people practice forgiveness, but they are circumstances of stress, pain, and grief in which the Amish repertoire of values creates particular patterns of practice. These values incorporate a willingness to place tragedy in God’s hands without demanding divine explanation for injustice. They also include a desire to imitate Jesus, who loved those who harmed him and who refused to defend himself. Wider society’s police and judicial powers merit respect, and even appreciation, the Amish say, but as institutions of “the world” they are fundamentally alien to the Amish, who do not use them to seek revenge.
 
We examine these and other Anabaptist habits in more depth in Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine, where we explore the roots, spirituality, and practice of Amish forgiveness. For now, we turn to a sampling of stories that illustrate Amish habits in the face of crime—stories that are part of the larger repertoire of faith that stood behind the Amish response to the violence of Nickel Mines. These stories, filled with both pain and grace, tell us that the Amish reaction to the shooting, remarkable as it was, was neither exceptional nor rare.
 
Forgiveness as First Response
 
Forgiveness seemed to come quickly for an Amish mother in northern Lancaster County when her five-year-old son was hit by a car in 1992. The boy was riding his scooter, crossing the road that separated their house and barn, and his injuries were so severe he didn’t survive to see the next day. Still, as the investigating officer placed the driver of the car in the police cruiser to take him for an alcohol test, the mother of the injured child approached the squad car to speak with the officer. With her young daughter tugging at her dress, the mother said, “Please take care of the boy.” Assuming she meant her critically injured son, the officer replied, “The ambulance people and doctor will do the best they can. The rest is up to God.” The mother pointed to the suspect in the back of the police car. “I mean the driver. We forgive him.”
 
In this case, an expression of forgiveness came swiftly, at the accident scene, before the driver’s breath alcohol test and before the victim’s death. Still, three years later, the mother again asserted her forgiveness of the driver in the pages of a short book she wrote titled
Good Night, My Son
. Forgiveness did not take away the pain that still tore at the parents’ hearts, nor was their acceptance of their son’s death without struggle. Yet upon reflection several years later, the mother did not retract the forgiveness she had offered at the scene of the accident.
 
Another story that highlights the speed with which an Amish family extended forgiveness in the aftermath of tragedy came to us from the recipient of that gift of grace. In late October 1991, Aaron and Sarah Stoltzfus had enjoyed a happy day together. Married in an all-day wedding at her home the previous Tuesday, the couple had set out on their honeymoon. Unlike English couples, who might fly to a Caribbean island, the Stoltzfuses, following traditional Amish honeymoon custom, arranged to visit extended family for several weeks. During that time they received gifts, enjoyed a break from their work routines, and became better acquainted with their new in-laws. Now, five days after their wedding, they were returning home on Sunday afternoon after their first honeymoon visit.
 
That same day, seventeen-year-old Joel Kime came home from church, grabbed some lunch, and headed to a soccer game with his brother and two friends. Driving his family’s old AMC Concord station wagon, and eager to show off its power, he had already hit seventy miles an hour when he topped the crest of a hill on a narrow country road, only to find a buggy one hundred yards ahead. Unconcerned, he decided to “blow past those guys, because I thought it was so incredibly cool!” His daring turned into terror as the horse began to turn left into the passing lane. At his high speed, Kime had failed to see the buggy’s turn signal. Newlywed Sarah died in the hospital that evening.
 
According to Kime, Amish forgiveness transformed this tragedy in many ways. On Monday evening, the day after the accident, Kime’s parents took him to the Stoltzfus home. He had never been to an Amish home before and was frightened. To his surprise, Aaron’s grandmother hugged him and expressed her forgiveness. So did Aaron’s father. It happened again when Sarah’s parents, Melvin and Barbara, put their arms around him and said, “We forgive you; we know it was God’s time for her to die.” In Kime’s words, it was “unbelievable. It was totally, absolutely amazing. . . . They proceeded to invite my family to come over for dinner. . . . I cannot express the relief that floated over me.”
 
In a back room of the farmhouse Kime met Aaron, the shattered husband, staring at his deceased bride in the wooden coffin. “Like his parents, he came to me with open arms,” Kime recalled. “I said, ‘How can I ever repay you?’ He simply forgave me. We hugged as the freedom of forgiveness swept over and through me.”
 
Some time later, Kime and his family had dinner with Sarah’s parents in their home, along with Aaron and some of his family. “Never once did they attempt to make us feel bad. . . . I still have a pile of at least fifty cards that I received from various Amish people across the county. They were constantly encouraging and pointing me to God.”
 
At his trial, expressions of Amish grace surfaced again. “Numerous Amish people wrote letters to the judge begging for my pardon, asking that I be acquitted on all counts.” Legally it was impossible for the judge to acquit Kime, but because he was a minor, he was able to bypass prison.
 
The relationship between the Kime and Stoltzfus families continues. They get together about once a year in each other’s homes. In Kime’s words, “I came to realize that [my] relationship with Aaron and the rest of the Stoltzfus family had grown into a legitimate, normal relationship. They had forgiven me and never went back on that decision. Five years after the accident I invited them to my wedding, and they came for the ceremony and reception, bearing gifts.” Later, when Kime and his wife spent time overseas as missionaries, the Stoltzfus family supported them financially. “Forgiveness, they taught me, is not a one-time event,” Kime concluded.
 
Forgiveness in the Media Spotlight
 
Other tragedies, and the Amish responses that followed them, have been much more public. The murder of Paul Coblentz, a twenty-five-year-old Amish farmer, on August 19, 1957, drew intense national media attention to the Amish settlement in Mount Hope, Ohio. Around 10:30 P.M. two young non-Amish men looking for cash randomly targeted the rural home of Paul and Dora Coblentz. Robbing the young couple of $9 and beginning to assault Dora—who was seeking to shield their seventeen-month-old daughter—one of the intruders, Cleo Peters, shot Paul twice at close range. The robbers then fled, first in a stolen truck and later in a stolen car. A cross-country manhunt eventually cornered the two in Illinois, where they shot a county constable before surrendering to police. The subsequent murder trial flooded rural Ohio with reporters and photographers. The case even appeared as a feature in a true-crime magazine.
 
In 1957 Amish-themed tourism was still in its infancy, and few Americans even knew of the Amish, let alone anything about their culture and beliefs, so journalists arriving in rural Holmes County struggled to interpret the story for their readers. They were particularly puzzled by the fact that the Amish “revealed no hatred against the fugitives” and that “no wish for vengeance was expressed by any member of the dead man’s family.”
 
Reporters focused much of their attention on Coblentz’s father, Mose, who spoke freely with them before and during the trial. Mose seemed to express the grief typical of any parent in that situation “as he wondered aloud how he could go on after everyone left and he would be alone to think of his loss.” But he astonished observers by going to visit his son’s killer, Cleo Peters, in prison. Afterward, Mose reported that the meeting was emotionally very difficult for him, but in the end he had managed to tell Peters, “I hope God can forgive you.”

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