Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (23 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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Like most people we know, the Amish place a high value on love. They draw their inspiration to love from Jesus’ command to love others and, more generally, from the idea that the God they worship is a loving and gracious Father. They do not love one another perfectly and, like many non-Amish people, they do not always know what the most loving response should be. Still, they value the ideal of love and, for the most part, they pursue that ideal in their families and their churches.
Love, like forgiveness, is a complicated concept. What does it mean to love another person? Endlessly debated by philosophers, poets, and heartsick college students, this question has no simple answer. We can say this, however: Amish views of love, like many of their beliefs, are not always the same as those of their English neighbors.
Is forgiveness always the loving thing to do? Most Amish people would probably say yes—if forgiveness means replacing bitterness in one’s heart with compassion for one’s offender. The Amish would point to God’s work in Jesus Christ as the clearest example of this link between love and forgiveness. “Herein is love,” notes one Amish writer on the topic of forgiveness, quoting 1 John 4:10, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent His Son . . . for our sins.”
But if forgiveness means pardoning an unrepentant member, then the Amish believe that forgiveness is
not
the loving thing to do. Because they consider the sinner’s eternal soul to be at stake, their understanding of love in this situation is akin to parents disciplining a child. To fail to discipline would not only neglect their God-given responsibility, it would, in fact, be the unloving thing to do. If, however, the sinner expresses remorse for his or her actions, pardon and restoration of fellowship would be the loving response.
not
the loving thing to do. Because they consider the sinner’s eternal soul to be at stake, their understanding of love in this situation is akin to parents disciplining a child. To fail to discipline would not only neglect their God-given responsibility, it would, in fact, be the unloving thing to do. If, however, the sinner expresses remorse for his or her actions, pardon and restoration of fellowship would be the loving response.
This is not a common notion of love in twenty-first-century America, at least as it pertains to the church. From the outside, Amish-style discipline may appear harsh, judgmental, and even cruel. Those who have experienced shunning by their Amish churches often agree. Indeed, like the media critics who accused the Amish of hypocrisy when they forgave Charles Roberts, ex-Amish members may wonder how the Amish can forgive outsiders and still shun their own religious offspring.
The Amish answer to this question will never satisfy all the critics, but at least their answer is clear. It is also quite logical, at least from a perspective that considers life to be short, eternity to be long, and heaven and hell to be real. For a people who believe choices have eternal consequences, there are two sides of love, and to forgo one or the other would bring spiritual tragedy to everyone involved.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Grief, Providence, and Justice
“Do your people ever ask, ‘Why did God let this happen to us?’”
Yes, probably a million times!
—AMISH MAN, in response to the question
I
n the days that followed the Nickel Mines shooting, the Amish grieved their children’s deaths and committed them to God at their funerals. They believed that the girls who died were now in heaven, a conviction that made it easier to navigate the terrible loss. Still, religious faith in no way makes the death of a child
easy
. Make no mistake: many tears were shed in Amish homes. Despite what some outsiders thought, Amish parents grieve the death of children as deeply as non-Amish parents do.
n the days that followed the Nickel Mines shooting, the Amish grieved their children’s deaths and committed them to God at their funerals. They believed that the girls who died were now in heaven, a conviction that made it easier to navigate the terrible loss. Still, religious faith in no way makes the death of a child
easy
. Make no mistake: many tears were shed in Amish homes. Despite what some outsiders thought, Amish parents grieve the death of children as deeply as non-Amish parents do.
The Nickel Mines Amish, like nearly all people coping with trauma, pondered the meaning of their loss. As a people with a deep and abiding faith in God, the Amish often cast their questions in terms of God’s involvement in the tragedy. Was the shooting part of some larger, mysterious plan? Did it carry a divine imprint or message? Was it something that God hated but would nonetheless use for good? All of these questions gained a hearing in the Nickel Mines Amish community, and no single answer carried the day. As with their commitment to forgiveness, however, the answers to these questions drew from a well-spring of distinctive Amish resources.
The grief of the Amish parents and community members at Nickel Mines exhibited a particularly Amish flavor. Like many aspects of Amish life, their public grief was restrained, not marked by uncontrolled weeping or anguish. The funerals were quiet, solemn affairs, but they were hardly emotionless. Shedding tears in public is not uncommon, and friends and family who gathered at the viewings and funerals cried freely, if often silently. And tears continued for months afterward. Mary, who was not closely related to any of the victims, admitted that she continued to cry every day for several months after the shooting.
And it wasn’t just women who wept. One Amish minister recounted his first effort at preaching after the tragedy. Given the rotation of preachers in the Amish church, this man had not had to deliver a sermon until six weeks after the shooting. Even then, his pain was still raw. “I stood up [to preach], but I just couldn’t get started,” he told us. Standing in front of the congregation, “I just cried and cried, until finally I was able to say Psalm 23.”
An Amish grandmother who lives close to the school said, “We felt a deep sadness. It overshadowed anger in a real way. Our hearts were bleeding, sadness filled our eyes, we were in shock and disbelief and felt overwhelmed with grief for the families.” Another woman, knowing the depth of her anguish and that of her Amish friends, wondered if Amish people grieve more intensely or more willingly than non-Amish people. After all, she said, “The English can just turn up the radio and try to forget it.”
It would be difficult to establish that the Amish grieve
more
than the non-Amish. They do, however, allow more structure, space, time, and silence for grief than most Americans do after the death of a loved one. Apart from the personal emotions of grieving, the Amish have four rituals of mourning that tap into the resources of their community and aid the grieving process.
more
than the non-Amish. They do, however, allow more structure, space, time, and silence for grief than most Americans do after the death of a loved one. Apart from the personal emotions of grieving, the Amish have four rituals of mourning that tap into the resources of their community and aid the grieving process.
In the Lancaster settlement, after a death, grieving families typically have visitors every evening for the first two or three weeks, followed by a year’s worth of Sunday afternoon visits. On Sunday afternoons in the first weeks after a burial, it’s not unusual for twenty to thirty visitors to be seated in a circle of chairs at one time in the living room of a bereaved family.
A second ritual that facilitates the Amish grieving process is dress. Women wear black when they are in mourning. One of them explained, “We dress completely in black whenever we go to public or social gatherings.” This includes, of course, church services and the times when visitors come to their home. The length of time women wear black varies by their relationship to the deceased: six weeks for the death of a cousin; three months for an aunt or uncle, a niece or nephew; six months for a grandparent or a grandchild; and an entire year for a child, brother, sister, or spouse. This ritual reminds others in the community of the death so they can respond with appropriate care for the bereaved.
Another common grieving ritual involves writing memorial poems to express gratitude for the deceased person’s life and anguish for his or her death. These poems, typically written by the adult children of the deceased, may be fifteen verses or more in length. Sometimes published in Amish newspapers, the poems are also printed on card stock and distributed to family and friends. When one Amish minister died of natural causes on his eighty-first birthday, his children composed a thirteen-verse poem that included the following lines:
Oh, Daddy, dear Daddy; how can it be
That you are now in eternity?
It was so hard to let you go
For Daddy you know we loved you so.
Happy Birthday we sang; did you hear us, Dad
As we were standing around your bed?
We prayed, we pleaded, we sang through our tears
We wondered, yes wondered, if our Dad still hears.
But time passes on, and if we would be true
We must keep on singing, even tho’ we miss you.
And hope to some day all sing together again
With that happy band, where time knows no end.
This poem demonstrates the depth of grief felt when someone dies under ordinary circumstances. These survivors were not mourning the death of a child, but they clearly felt real pain, real grief. Although the poem reveals confidence in an afterlife, it does not express a stoic, unemotional acceptance of death, even of the elderly.
So much greater, then, was the grief felt after the schoolhouse shooting. These heart-wrenching deaths produced poetry as well. The sister of a boy who was in the schoolhouse wrote a song a few weeks afterward. The lyrics recount the good things: “People helping, people praying / God is touching lives of people near and far.” But in the midst of these affirmations, the pain wells up: “We miss them so much it hurts. / When will the pain just go away? / They were our friends and sisters too.”
A fourth distinctive ritual of grieving involves “circle letters.” Amish people in different states who share a common experience—anything from raising twins to having open-heart surgery to caring for children with a particular disability—contribute to a letter that is mailed from family to family. The writers in the “circle” often keep in contact for many years. Some circle letters connect people who are grieving: widows, widowers, parents who have lost children to sudden infant death syndrome, or parents who have lost children in accidents.
On occasion, Amish people who experience loss find additional help outside their tradition, such as through grief support centers in their communities. One such center in northern Indiana facilitates support groups that include both Amish and English participants. An Amish couple volunteers for the center as trained group facilitators; the center also provides Pennsylvania German translators for groups that include Amish preschoolers who cannot speak English. Amish participants easily bond with English people who have experienced similar losses, according to center staff. The non-Amish social worker who directs the program stresses the universal nature of grief, but also notes a difference: “It’s clear when you listen to them [the Amish participants] that their faith gets them through. And they’ll talk about it—not evangelistically but matter-of-factly. They turn things over to God—they’ll say that—more than the other participants.”
Other Amish people develop their own, more private rituals. Some write in diaries or compose memoirs. Said one, “I felt the need to express my feelings on paper in order to dispose of my thoughts and get them out of my system, for they were like poison inside me. Writing down my feelings has done the work of a psychiatrist for me.” Some of the parents of the Nickel Mines children also found writing to be helpful therapy for their grief. Nonetheless, a father who lost a daughter said, “The best counseling happened when we parents got together and talked. That’s where we got our most support.”
Communal care, mourning rituals, bereavement groups, and belief in God: as valuable as these are, they do not stop grieving members from asking hard questions about suffering. The Amish join people of faith throughout the ages in pondering one of the most disturbing theological questions: why does God allow bad things to happen? In fact, when a questioner in a public forum in the fall of 2006 asked an Amish man, “Do your people ever ask, ‘Why did God let this happen to us?’” the man’s response was immediate: “Yes, probably a million times!”
Providence, the idea that God “unceasingly cares for the world, that all things are in God’s hands, and that God is leading the world to its appointed goal,” holds an important place in the Christian faith. Indeed, all three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have traditionally claimed that God cares for and sustains the world in an ongoing way.
God’s providence has both miraculous and everyday dimensions. Christian author Philip Yancey says that apart from miracles, the Bible also “emphasizes an ongoing providence of God’s will being done through the common course of nature and ordinary human activity: rain falling and seeds sprouting, farmers planting and harvesting, the strong caring for the weak, the haves giving to the have-nots, the healthy ministering to the sick.”
Still, it is one thing to say that God sustains and cares for the world; it is another thing to know what that means in a world in which bad things happen—in a world where little girls are shot in the head. The overwhelming evidence of evil in the world has produced almost endless theological reflection. How does the notion of God’s providence fit with the problem of evil?
Generally speaking, Christians have proposed three answers to this question. One is that God’s decision to grant human freedom—to allow humans to do both good and evil—may sometimes require God to take a hands-off approach in order to fully respect that freedom.
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