through all the talk about when and how you forgive, it made everything else in our daily lives appear small in comparison. The story spread everywhere because it was so extraordinary. These people found in their hearts the ability to forgive in a way that most of us couldn’t even imagine. They did something so counter-intuitive, so out of the ordinary, that it struck people with astonishment: If they can forgive the murder of their children, then what can we forgive in our own lives? It offered us all the possibility to create a more forgiving and loving world.”
Such immediate and inclusive forgiveness, however, was also met with skepticism, leading some to question not only its authenticity but even its appropriateness. “You cannot imagine the horror, it’s every horror that every parent, husband, lover, even every friend has,” says Monsignor Albacete. ”But the Amish forgiveness is not just words. They go at once to search out the man’s wife and embrace her, to accompany her in this moment of loss and shock for her, because she didn’t know. They don’t sue her because she should have known. They embrace her. They become friends. And yet,” he pauses, “in the end, to me, this could be dangerous. It is detached from the human context, the victim seems beside the point. Forgiveness doesn’t occur because of a change in relationships with the victim but because they are obeying the will of a transcendent power. It is noble, it is awesome, but it scares me more than it encourages me for it is not mediated by the human experience. Forgiveness, if achieved, has to be real. It has to deal with not simply obeying a transcendent power but also with what was done. The Amish have their relationship with God but it isn’t one that I would want to have—one of blind obedience.”
After writing a Boston Globe article about the Nickel Mines shooting entitled “Undeserved Forgiveness,” conservative commentator Jeff Jacoby was flooded with emails and letters from Christians, some of them very angry. ”They wrote to say that I should understand that this is what a Christian is expected to do, that God is love and that we must love everyone. And I would write back to some of them and say, ‘Are you trying to tell me that God loves Charles Roberts, the murderer in this case, as much as he loves the girl that he fired twenty bullets into? Do you really want me to believe that the God that you worship and the God who you say is love has equal love for both people?’ And in many cases they would write back and say, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.’”
While quick to show his respect for the Amish commitment to their beliefs and values, and sympathetic to what he describes as “a horrible, pre-mediated, and bloody atrocity,” Jacoby still is not convinced. An intense scholarly man in his thirties, he proceeds carefully. It is clear this is an important subject to him. “I admire the fact that they were trying as best they could to live up to their Christian ideals, even amidst such heartbreak. They take literally the admonitions in the New Testament to return good for evil, to pray for their enemies, and to turn the other cheek. At one level I admire that, but at a different level it really chilled me. I believe in God, but I don’t believe in a God who can’t distinguish between a murderer and the murder victim, between Hitler and the children dying in a gas chamber. God is with the victims. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where nobody got angry when children were murdered. I don’t think that makes the world a better place, and I’m very troubled by this idea that you just instantly forgive even the most horrific and evil act. How many of us 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? I believe that hatred is not always wrong, and forgiveness is not always deserved. And I firmly believe that there are times when you’re not supposed to forgive, when you are supposed to retain your anger, which, on occasion, has been a great engine of progress in civilization.’”
Certainly, the Amish beliefs lie outside of most people’s everyday experiences. To live and believe as they do demands a deep commitment and, as Rabbi Irwin Kula stresses, “practice.” For Rabbi Kula, a religious leader known for his provoking questions, the Amish are the “great spiritual athletes of our time. They don’t just wait until the tragedy arrives that will require their forgiveness skills, but they practice it daily, wrestling with everyday petty grievances and the forgiveness that follows. It is a thickly layered approach, for imagine the intense internal discipline it took to hold that stand at Nickel Mines. Does it come at significant psychic cost? As an outsider it seems so, but only they know for sure.”
David Weaver-Zercher, chair of Biblical and Religious Studies at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, believes that “surrender” is the defining word. “If you choose to become Amish you agree to give up a lot; individual desires and even individual feelings are frequently sacrificed to the community. You give up a car, you give up your right to wear what you want, you give up any possibility of higher education. And in the same way, forgiveness is also about giving up. It’s about giving up one’s right to revenge, and eventually giving up the anger that one naturally feels.” He pauses. “However, I think this can be a danger in Amish life, or in any community that values forgiveness as highly as the Amish do, where people are compelled and coerced to feel something that they just don’t know how to fully experience.”
Ray Gingerich, a theology professor at Eastern Mennonite College, agrees. He has a personal insight into the world of the Amish as he grew up within their community before leaving to become a university professor. It took years for his Amish family to accept his decision to leave, and traces of the world Gingerich left behind still remain, such as his beard and a fierce concentration on moral issues. “Despite the fact that I’ve left the Amish and have many reservations about things in the Amish culture, my initial reaction to the horror that happened at Nickel Mines was one of great admiration that they were able to say ‘I forgive.’ It was particularly extraordinary to see this happen right at the time when the U.S. as a whole was at war and making threats about getting even with the people who flew into the Twin Towers. I looked at how we, as a country, responded to 9/11 and the anger that was felt by so many people; it seemed that we were just making more and more enemies. And then we contrast this with the Amish. Their illustration of forgiveness came without any negotiation, without even a lot of thought. It is as though there is something in the Amish character and community that has the power to just transcend, to rise above the death of their children, to rise above this immense tragedy and simply say, ‘we forgive.’ Instead of an eye for an eye, they gave good for evil, they absorbed the evil and offered forgiveness. And that has a religious or spiritual or even transcendent quality to it. Forgiveness in its deepest form is taking what society usually thinks of as weakness and passivity and saying no, this is the real power that transforms. They take the pain and suffering and transform it into something very positive. The negativity of woundedness and murder is actually taken up and reprocessed so that a positive component comes out of it.
“But I have to come back to the flipside of this.” While deeply admiring the Amish ability to transcend horror, Gingerich also questions the personal authenticity of this versus obedience to religious doctrine. “Every time I hear the Amish saying, ‘Forgive those who sinned against you for if you do not forgive them neither will your Father in heaven forgive you,’ I feel impelled to ask, is this really life-giving if I do it just so I can find salvation? Maybe it is. I don’t want to be too hard but it feels legalistic. It feels as though it is not coming from the depths but rather from the demands of religion.”
Monsignor Albacete echoes this uncertainty about whether the Amish commitment to unconditional forgiveness comes from a genuine experience or from an unquestioned religious belief that could, in the long run, be damaging. “Forgiveness does not come immediately after the offense. It actually comes before, because it is based on a blind obedience, in this case to the words of Our Father, to the prayer of Jesus that makes your own experience of forgiveness dependent on how you forgive others. So already you are disposed to forgive. If nothing too bad is happening then such an attitude can be very inducing of peace, whatever it is you will just be able to forgive. But when something really awful happens—like when someone kills your child—then what? And when the Amish say that they have forgiven this man and express it in the best possible way by caring for his wife, it’s not that I don’t believe them. It’s that I want to say:
