Amish Grace

Even as outsiders were responding with compassion for the Amish community in the wake of the shooting, the Amish themselves were doing another kind of work. Softly, subtly, and quietly, they were beginning the difficult task of forgiveness.

The Amish quickly realized that Roberts’s widow and children were also victims of the shooting—victims who had lost not only a husband and father, but also their privacy. Unlike the Amish victims, the Roberts family had to bear the shame of having a loved one inflict such pain on innocent children and families. Within a few hours of the shooting, some Amish people were already reaching out to the killer’s family.

Amos, an Amish minister in one of the nearby church districts, described it to us like this: “Well, there were three of us standing around at the firehouse on Monday evening. We just thought we should go and say something to Amy, Roberts’s widow. So first we went to her house, and no one was there. Then we walked over to her grand-father’s house and no one was there. So we walked over to her father’s house and she, her children, and her parents were there alone. So we just talked with them for about ten minutes to express our sorrow and told them that we didn’t hold anything against them.”

That same evening, several miles away, an Amish man went to see the killer’s father, a retired police officer who provided taxi service for local Amish residents. Dwight Lefever, a spokesperson for the Roberts family, later told the media that an Amish neighbor had come to comfort the family. “He stood there for an hour, and he held that man [Mr. Roberts] in his arms and said, ‘We forgive you.’” In the next days, Roberts’s parents received many visits and calls from other Amish people who also expressed forgiveness and gracious concern.

The day after the shooting, Amy’s grandfather visited one of the bereaved Amish families, one for whom the gunman had hauled milk. “I knew the father and grandfather of the children who were killed. We met in the kitchen and shook hands and put our arms around each other,” recalled Roberts’s relative. “They said there are no grudges. There’s forgiveness in all of this. It was hard to listen to, and hard to believe.” Describing what happened in the following days he said, “There have been many Amish stopping at Amy’s house and expressing their forgiveness and condolences and bringing her gifts. I can see them from my window when they come to her house.”

Other Amish people in the Nickel Mines community expressed their commitment to forgiveness in different ways. At about 5:30 on Wednesday morning, two days after the shooting, the sleepless grandfather of the two slain sisters was walking by the schoolhouse, reflecting on his loss. A little more than twenty-four hours earlier, he had made grueling trips to two different hospitals only to see the young girls die in their mother’s arms. Suddenly TV cameras caught him in the glare of floodlights, and a reporter stepped toward him.

Later that morning, an Amish woman from Georgetown, appearing in silhouette on CBS’s Early Show, also spoke about forgiving the killer. “We have to forgive,” she said. “We have to forgive him in order for God to forgive us.”

Another story, widely reported in the national media, involved the grandfather of another of the victims. Looking at his granddaughter’s mutilated body lying in a coffin in her home, he told the younger children surrounding him, “We shouldn’t think evil of the man who did this.” This spirit of grace was echoed by an Amish craftsman in Georgetown who had relatives in the schoolhouse. He told the Associated Press, “I hope they [Roberts’s widow and children] stay around here. They’ll have lots of friends and a lot of support.”

Amish grace soon moved beyond spontaneous words and personal gestures. The parents of several of the slain children invited members of the Roberts family to attend their daughters’ funerals. More surprisingly, when the Roberts family gathered on Saturday to bury the gunman in the cemetery of Georgetown United Methodist Church, more than half of the seventy-five mourners were Amish. Amos, an Amish neighbor who was present at the gravesite, thought it was simply the right thing to do. “A number of us just talked and thought we should go,” he said. “Many of us knew the family very well. So we met at the firehouse, just informally, and then we walked across the back way, behind a long garage. We waited there until we saw them bring the body to the cemetery. . . . Many of our people went up to Amy and greeted her and the children.” In fact, some of the parents who had buried their own children just a day or two before offered condolences and hugs to Amy at the gravesite.

The funeral director recalled the moving moment: “I was lucky enough to be at the cemetery when the Amish families of the children who had been killed came to greet Amy Roberts and offer their forgiveness. And that is something I’ll never forget, not ever. I knew that I was witnessing a miracle.”

A Roberts family member, also an eyewitness to the “miracle,” described it this way: “About thirty-five or forty Amish came to the burial. They shook our hands and cried. They embraced Amy and the children. There were no grudges, no hard feelings, only forgiveness. It’s just hard to believe that they were able to do that.”

The presence of Amish mourners at Roberts’s burial may have been the most dramatic expression of their grace, but it was not the final one. Several weeks after the shooting, a meeting took place at the Bart firehouse between members of the Roberts family—Amy, her sister, her parents, and Charles’s parents—and the Amish families who lost children. It was a profound time of grief and healing, according to some present. “We went around the circle and introduced ourselves,” an Amish leader said. “Amy just cried and cried and cried. We talked and cried and talked and cried. She was near me, and I put my hand on her shoulder, and then I stood up and I talked and cried. It was very moving and very intense.” In the words of another Amish participant, “There were a lot of tears shed that day. There was a higher power in the room.”

Forgiveness also flowed in the form of dollars. When the Nickel Mines Accountability Committee formed two days after the shooting, committee members discussed their desire to help the Roberts family. In searching for a committee name, they decided to forgo the word Amish and instead use Nickel Mines, said one committee member, “because this is a community tragedy beyond us Amish. We want to reach out to the Roberts family as well.” In the ensuing discussion, another committee member asked, “Who will take care of them now since they will have no income? It’s not right if we get $1,000 and they get only $5.” After contacting the Roberts family, the committee designated some its funds for the killer’s widow.

In addition to assisting the Roberts family through the Accountability Committee, Amish people contributed to the family personally by making donations to the Roberts Family Fund established by the Coatesville Savings Bank. Dozens of Amish people donated money to the fund, said one knowledgeable source. One English man recalled making a contribution at the bank, turning to leave, and finding two Amish people behind him in line waiting to donate.

These concrete acts of grace were not lost on the widow’s family. “It’s hard to accept what has happened,” said one of Amy’s relatives, “but the kindness of the Amish has helped us tremendously. . . . It helps us to know that they forgave us.” Another relative agreed, echoing what many commentators had already noted: “If this had happened to some of our own [non-Amish] people, there would have been one lawsuit after another. . . . But this experience brought everybody closer together.” In a public statement released ten days after the shooting, the Roberts family specifically thanked the local Amish community: “Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you.” A confidant of the killer’s parents said, “All of the expressions of forgiveness provided a great freedom that enabled them to move on with healing despite all the sadness and sorrow. It gave them hope for the future and released them from the heavy burden.”

A friend of the killer’s widow said, “The forgiveness and generosity of the Amish had a powerful impact on Amy. She was overwhelmed and very moved by it. Many Amish neighbors came to visit her in the weeks following the shooting. They came to the burial, they brought flowers to her home, and they brought meals.”

These simple acts of Amish grace soon eclipsed the story of schoolhouse slaughter. On Wednesday, two days after the shooting, the media calls we received suddenly turned from questions about Amish schools to questions about Amish forgiveness. How could they forgive so quickly? Did their leaders demand that they do it? Or was it all a gimmick, designed only to garner good publicity for their community?

As the media gathered answers to these questions, Amish forgiveness became the focal point in hundreds of news stories around the world. From the Washington Post to USA Today, from NBC Nightly News to Larry King Live, from the Christian Science Monitor to the Christian Broadcasting Network, from the Khaleej Times to Australian television, journalists found themselves reporting a story they had not set out to cover.

The initial news stories were soon followed by legions of commentaries and editorials reflecting on the virtues of forgiveness, dismissing it as emotionally unhealthy, or asking what might have happened if the United States had responded with forgiveness to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Ordinary people entered the conversation as well; thousands of reader letters reflected on this surprising extension of grace and wondered whether it was a model for others to emulate. (We explore some of these reactions in the next chapter.)

What these letters and media stories often lacked, however, were accounts of the concrete acts of Amish grace that we have just noted. Given the reluctance of Amish people to talk with the media, this dearth of information is hardly surprising. In this instance, however, the silence cannot be reduced to the fact that Amish people do not boast to the media about what they do. In this case, they did not talk about their forgiving acts because, to them, granting forgiveness was a natural, spontaneous, and quite ordinary thing. Refusing to forgive “is not an option,” said Bishop Eli, a welder. “It’s just a normal part of our living.”

How did the Amish decide so quickly to extend forgiveness? That question brought laughter from some Amish people we interviewed. “You mean some people actually thought we got together to plan forgiveness?” chuckled Katie, a seventy-five-year-old grandmother, as she worked in her kitchen. “Forgiveness was a decided issue,” explained Bishop Eli. “It’s just what we do as nonresistant people. It was spontaneous. It was automatic. It was not a new kind of thing.” Every Amish person we spoke with agreed: forgiveness for Roberts and grace for his family had begun as spontaneous expressions of faith, not as mandates from the church.

That the outside world was surprised at Amish forgiveness in turn surprised the Amish. “Why is everybody all surprised?” asked one Amish man. “It’s just standard Christian forgiveness; it’s what everybody should be doing.” Sadie, a bookkeeper and mother of three, was similarly taken aback by the national attention Amish forgiveness had generated. “Before the media made such a big deal of forgiveness, I never realized that it was so much a part of our life. I just never realized before how central it is to us.”

Suddenly the Amish had a new problem, one as challenging for them as forgiving the killer and his family: living up to the high expectations of the outside world. “The news reporters have set a high standard for us because of all this talk about forgiveness,” an Amish craftsman who lives near the school told us. “It’s a new burden that’s hard to carry,” lamented another community member. Many Amish turned the overwhelming attention that they were receiving into an opportunity for self-reflection. A perplexed young father asked, “Why is the world so hungry for forgiveness now? It humbles us. It gives us a big responsibility. We don’t want to be exalted. Now we’re under the public eye, being scrutinized to see if we really do forgive. We wonder: can we Amish people really be what the public expects of us now?”

Over and over again, the Amish with whom we spoke expressed anxiety about being placed on a pedestal by the media and the watching world. For people who seek humility and avoid publicity, garnering praise from the larger world caused deep discomfort. “Everybody knows who we are now,” said a grandmother who lives near the village of Bird-in-Hand. That puts the Amish community on “thin ice,” she continued. Not only are people thinking about the Amish, but “everybody puts us up so high. . . . We are not exactly like the reporters say we are. We are being put up on a pedestal as ‘too-good’ people.”

Amish concern about being placed on a pedestal stemmed in part from their awareness that, long before the school shooting, some non-Amish neighbors had thought the Amish received too much favorable treatment in the press. Irritated at times by slow-moving buggies on high-speed roadways, some locals “think that the Amish don’t do anything right,” Gid, a minister and farmer, said. “It makes them annoyed when we look so good in the media because they think we can’t really be that good.” In fact, in the weeks following the school shooting, some English neighbors grumbled about ungracious encounters with Amish employers, including Amish employers who had fired English employees.

More than worrying about outsiders’ appraisals of them, however, the Lancaster County Amish worried about God’s expectations, which to them seemed clear: their lives should demonstrate humility and avoid vanity. The last sentence of the Lord’s Prayer, which the Amish revere, reads, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory” (Matthew 6:13; emphasis added). Suddenly the “glory” had focused on them. Jesus’ words about practicing one’s faith in private troubled them greatly; they didn’t want to be lumped with the hypocrites who Jesus condemned for their public displays of piety. Yet in the media maelstrom that was engulfing their community, practicing their faith in private was hardly an option.

Motivated in part by this discomfort, some Amish people made special efforts to speak publicly about the foundation of their faith. The father of one of the children who was killed emphasized that “God is the one who should get the blessing in this when it’s all over and done. It should be God, not us.” The parents of another girl who died in the schoolhouse wrote a letter to a Lancaster newspaper saying, “It is only through our faith in Jesus Christ that forgiveness is possible. He is the one who deserves the praise and glory, not us Amish.”

Speaking publicly about faith is not a common practice in most Amish communities. Generally, the Amish do not support or engage in organized evangelistic work; in fact, the Amish are criticized by some evangelical Christians for their lack of missionary zeal. Preferring actions over words, the Amish provide material aid to refugees and disaster-stricken people rather than try to convert others to their views. In their minds, verbal evangelism involves the subtle use of coercive persuasion that focuses on individual conversion rather than community faithfulness.

For this reason, the Amish are drawn to the metaphor from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: a light on the hill that shines in the darkness and provides a witness to God’s grace by faithful practice. An Amish shop worker referred to this image as he considered how stories of Amish forgiveness had spanned the globe: “This forgiveness story makes me think of Matthew 5 and a light set on the hill. ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid’” (Matthew 5:14).

“Sometimes some of our people think we should do more evangelistic work or begin a prison ministry,” said one Amish farmer, reflecting on all the press coverage of forgiveness. “But this forgiveness story made more of a witness for us all over the world than anything else we can ever do.” Gid agreed: “Maybe this was God’s way to let us do some missionary work. Maybe He used the media to help spread the word.” Not every Amish person drew this missionary-minded conclusion, but some clearly did. “The message [of forgiveness] really was a light to the world,” said Amos, the minister. “We’re supposed to be a light to the world, but we’re not supposed to say, ‘See what I’m doing.’ . . . It’s important that we put the honor where the honor belongs [to God].”

A father who lost a daughter at the schoolhouse stressed again and again that forgiveness is more than words. Sitting at his kitchen table, he told us, “Our forgiveness is not in our words, it’s in our actions; it’s not what we said, but what we did. That was our forgiveness.” At the bottom of his faxed correspondence, another Amish man included a phrase that he had borrowed from a church sign: “Preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.” The Amish were preaching, but rarely with words.

When forgiveness arrived at the killer’s home within hours of his crime, it did not appear out of nowhere. Rather, forgiveness is woven into the very fabric of Amish life, its sturdy threads having been spun from faith in God, scriptural mandates, and a history of persecution. The grace extended by the Amish surprised the world almost as much as the killing itself. Indeed, in many respects, the story of Amish forgiveness became the story—the story that trumped the narrative of senseless death—in the days that followed the shooting. Amish grace, and the way it affected the world, did not rob the tragedy of its horror, nor did it eradicate the grief of those left behind. Still, it may have been an answer to Amish prayers that somehow, somewhere, some good would come out of this terrible event.