CHAPTER TWELVE

“Do your people ever ask, ‘Why did God let this happen to us?’” Yes, probably a million times!

In 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.

Amish Grief

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.

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.”

God’s Providence and the Reality of Evil

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.

A second perspective holds that while God has given humans freedom of choice, God retains ultimate control and sometimes wills or allows certain things to happen for particular purposes. Although these purposes may not be obvious at the moment, if one were to have God’s big-picture perspective, one could see how something bad in the present will eventually be part of a greater good.

A third approach to this problem is similar to the second but wrapped in more ambiguity. It basically says this: evil happens in the world under God’s watch, and human beings will never know why. This view draws on the biblical book of Job. In it, a suffering man named Job listens to three friends explain to him why he is undergoing adversity. In the end, God scoffs at their explanations and challenges Job to consider his finite status relative to the One who created the universe. Job can respond with only, “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee?” (Job 40:4).

There are of course other solutions to the problem of evil. The most prominent of these is an outright rejection of God’s existence. Many atheists have cited the problem of evil as grounds for their unbelief, asserting that a God who allows suffering is not God in any meaningful sense. We do not wish to belittle the objections of those who, after wrestling with the problem of evil, find belief in God impossible. Nevertheless, the Amish have not found that conclusion thinkable, let alone attractive. In all our conversations after the shooting, not one Amish person questioned the existence of a loving God. What then did the Amish say about God’s providence in the face of this horrific event?

Amish Views of Providence

Unlike some religious traditions, the Amish do not place a high priority on systematic theological reflection. They do affirm the Dordrecht Confession of Faith, an Anabaptist statement written in 1632. This confession, reviewed by bishops with those preparing for baptism, says that “there is one eternal, almighty, and incomprehensible God.” The confession also asserts that God “continues to rule and maintain his creation by his wisdom and by the power of his word.” By confessing that God governs the world and yet is ultimately incomprehensible, Dordrecht provides some clues to the Amish view of providence, yet the ideas it expresses are hardly unique to the Amish tradition.

To gain more insight into the Amish view of God’s providence, we interviewed people and read their letters in two Amish correspondence newspapers, The Budget and Die Botschaft. To this vexing question about God’s providence, Amish people offered various answers, many of which were similar to other Christians’ responses to tragedy. At the same time, the Amish emphasized the Old Order view of God’s providence, a view that facilitated the Amish ability to forgive the killer.

Affirmations, Questions, and Struggles

If there was one overriding theme that emerged in the correspondence newspapers, it was this: God was in charge. “What can one say?” asked a woman in her letter to Die Botschaft less than a week after the shooting. She answered confidently: “God is still in control.” “We trust him, yes,” said another writer, even though “what happened that Monday was enough to shake a person up, nerves and all.”

Despite the affirmations, the Nickel Mines shooting brought hard questions into sharp focus. In a discussion we had with several people around a kitchen table in an Amish home, one person suggested that the shooting was part of God’s plan. That assertion set off a vigorous debate between two brothers in their sixties about whether God causes things to happen or just allows them to happen: “Can angels stop things?” “If everything is preplanned, why pray?” “Do our prayers change God’s mind?” “Was this a battle of good and evil that touched down at Nickel Mines like a violent tornado?” The wide-ranging discussion produced no conclusions as they struggled with the questions. But even the person who thought the tragedy was part of a “plan” was not ready to say that God had willed it. In fact, a preacher at the funeral for one of the slain children was very clear: “It’s not God’s will that people kill each other,” he declared.

Human choice was a theme that emerged in circles of conversation across the Amish community as members searched for answers to explain the nagging questions. A middle-aged Amish mother was emphatic: “It wasn’t God’s will. God doesn’t intervene and stop all the evil in the world. God doesn’t stop people from making evil choices.” “We have free will,” offered a grandfather, “and the Devil also has things in his mind too.” Others underscored that point but often added, “But God doesn’t make mistakes.”

A Greater Good

How could these two views—God did not will the killing but God was in control—be reconciled? Many Amish believe that God allowed the shooting to occur but then brought some greater good out of it. Bishop Eli recounted a conversation he had with one of the families who lost a daughter at Nickel Mines: “I have no idea what good will come from the event, but perhaps some.” Many others agreed that God could bring good from dreadful circumstances. “It wasn’t His will that someone would do such an awful thing,” wrote a correspondent in Die Botschaft, “but He only allowed what He chose to allow, and hopefully it can be used for our spiritual good.”

As they sought to solve the riddle of divine providence, Amish people frequently cited the example of Jesus’ death on the cross. “Where was God when the school shooting happened?” asked one bishop. “I like to say he was at the same place he was when Jesus died on the cross.” A building contractor explained it this way: “When Jesus died for us, it was a bad thing, but he did it to help us. Look how much good came out. The shooting was evil, but the good that came out touched a lot of people.”

One Amish woman found a parallel in the New Testament book of Matthew. Recalling that King Herod had slaughtered “little children . . . in Bethlehem long ago,” an act that “God allowed to happen,” this woman wrote, “We don’t know why, but [we] do believe He can make good come out of all such happenings.” Amish elders concurred: “[God] will not force everyone to be good. But He will bring good out of every situation, if we allow Him to do so—no matter how evil the deed.” A letter in Die Botschaft suggested that family members’ deaths were God’s way of turning the minds of survivors heavenward. “If our precious family circle never was broken here below,” offered the writer in rhyming verse, “would we truly long for heaven where our loved ones we shall know?” Someone else cited the fact that two outsiders who had been embroiled in a conflict were reconciled by the story of forgiveness.

A few Amish people, revealing a somewhat more evangelical bent than most of their fellow church members, advanced more specific reasons for why God might allow such an evil event to transpire. Pointing to the way the story of Amish forgiveness had been reported around the world in the shooting’s aftermath, one man observed, “The Lord works in mysterious ways. Is this his way of spreading the Word?” Another man told us that “an atheist wrote to us and wanted to know more about forgiveness.”

A mother who lost a daughter in the shooting summed up her own feelings, and likely those of many other Amish people, in these words: “Knowing that the forgiveness story has touched so many lives around the world has helped the healing process for me because we know the girls didn’t die in vain. It might have been a lot harder to accept all of this if the forgiveness story hadn’t happened.”

A Wagon Without Wheels

Despite searching for answers to the problem of evil, every Amish person with whom we spoke deferred in the end to divine mystery. With typical Amish humility, they all recognized that they did not know why this event had happened or, with certainty, what good might come from it. “Every religion has mystery,” said an Amish craftsman. “I like to say a religion without mystery is like a wagon without wheels.”

Indeed, although the Amish wrestle with questions of providence, they are not inclined toward endless speculation and do not expect to find answers to the theological questions they have. Not only do they wish to avoid the spiritual perils that sometimes come with theological speculation, but their willingness to give up questioning—another form of uffgevva, of giving up—also, in fact, fits their notion of God’s providence. “We must stop asking questions,” said one Amish person. “We will never have all the answers.” Some Amish ministers made the point even more emphatically: “We should not put a question mark where God puts a period.”

A mother of school-age girls told us that the minister who gave the main sermon at one of the funerals compared the Amish community to Job, who early on in his suffering demanded an explanation from God. The minister acknowledged that it is only human to want explanations for suffering, but he urged his listeners to “stop asking questions,” for “we will never have all the answers for why it happened.” A man writing later in Die Botschaft echoed the minister’s counsel: “Some things in life we may never understand [so] let’s leave it all where it belongs, to a Higher hand.” He concluded his correspondence with these thoughts: “Death is in the Lord’s hands. The shooting was in the Lord’s hands. There’s a higher power and we simply need to bow down to it.”

We Don’t Pray for Rain

It was not surprising that Amish attempts to find purpose in tragedy or to decipher why God might stop, permit, or endorse evil ended at the door of mystery. Not only did Job of old end up at that same door, but so do the learned theologians of today. What was different about the Amish response was not that they were willing to place their confidence in a higher power to manage the mysteries of the universe, but that they were willing to “ bow down to it” so quickly. Like the swift forgiveness itself, they were quick to say, “Thy will be done.” These words in the Lord’s Prayer flash across Amish minds frequently, especially when they face situations in which they are vulnerable. A seventy-year-old grandmother said that the phrase “is on my mind all the time. If I go on the road in the carriage I say it subconsciously all the time.”

Uffgevva, in the words of one bishop, means “submitting to God’s perfect will.” It means not fighting or striving against God. One bishop paraphrased a few lines from one of his favorite German hymns to explain submission to God’s will: “God, you let it be so.Who are we to strive against you? Even if the tears fall, let it be so.” Another Amish elder emphasized the importance of submitting to God’s will quickly: “ The quicker you give up, the better things go. In our way of life it takes a lot of giving up.”

Despite their simple trust in God’s will, the Amish are not mired in fatalism. For example, Amish women who own craft shops make strategic decisions every day. They plan, organize, and seek new markets for their products. Nevertheless, in the religious realm of life they exercise patience, and are willing to live without demanding answers from God. In a letter to one of us, an Old Order woman described Gelassenheit this way: “It’s a yieldedness to whatever God sends. Especially an untimely death of a loved one or a long-term sickness, but also the weather—drought, floods, extreme heat or cold, crop failure, missing the market, disease in animals, hail, fire [and so forth].” She concluded, “We don’t pray for rain. We wait for rain, and when it comes, we thank God for it.”

Salvation and Final Judgment

The Anabaptist emphasis on nonretaliation, love for the enemy, and defenselessness places the responsibility for punishment squarely on God rather than on humans. The sixteenth-century martyrs could die unjustly—and without attempts by others to avenge their deaths—precisely because they believed that ultimate justice lay on God’s desk. This long-term view of justice is in part what frees the Amish to forgive on earth. The Amish cite a passage in the New Testament book of Romans in which the Apostle Paul writes that we should not avenge ourselves but leave vengeance in God’s hands. In fact, Paul takes it one step further: we are to feed our enemies if they are hungry and give them something to drink if they are thirsty. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good,” he writes (Romans 12:17-21).

Amish humility and their willingness to turn justice over to God sharply diverges from some hungry calls for revenge by outsiders. One English observer said he wanted Roberts’s ashes tossed into a dumpster. Never once in our conversations with Amish people did we hear calls for vengeance—not even God’s vengeance—against Charles Roberts. This stands in stark contrast to a parent’s response to a college dormitory fire in New Jersey in which three students died. Speaking at the sentencing for the young men who set the fire, the parent of one of victims warned the arsonists, “You will face a higher court one day, and when that day comes, the sentence of that court will be that you both rot in hell together.”

Even if some Amish people privately thought that the deceased gunman was condemned to eternal punishment, we never heard expressions of satisfaction or vindication about it. The people we spoke with expressed typical Amish humility on this point. “I am overcome with sadness that Roberts’s life ended without the opportunity for repentance,” said the mother of one of the slain girls. “I can’t say anything about Roberts in eternity,” said an Amish craftsman. “Only God knows. I wish him [Roberts] the same as I wish for myself.” When a Canadian Amish minister was asked by an English acquaintance shortly after the shooting, “Don’t you think the killer is burning in hell?” the minister was similarly noncommittal. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Only God can judge. All I can tell you is that I would not want to stand before God having done what that man did. But how God has judged him, I can’t say.”

Interestingly, the Amish apply the same humility to their own eternal destiny that they applied to Roberts’s eternal fate. They are loathe to speculate on both salvation and damnation, and unwilling to insist either that they are saved or that Charles Roberts went to hell. Amish people speak of having a “living hope” of salvation. Unlike many evangelical Christians who openly pronounce assurance of salvation, the Amish resist declaring that they are saved. Such proclamations of human certainty are, in the Amish mind, an offense to God, for only God knows the mysteries of salvation. Our task, they would say, is to follow faithfully the way of Jesus in daily life and not to presume to know the mind of God. Nevertheless, they have hope and confidence that God will be a just and merciful judge.

This understanding of salvation reflects the Amish focus on practice rather than doctrine, on acting rather than speaking. One young Amish father made a direct connection between forgiveness and the Amish view of salvation, pointing to Jesus’ words that God will forgive us by the same measure we forgive others. “That means that if in the future you don’t forgive, you will lose your salvation. You can’t say ‘once saved, always saved.’” An Amish deacon also linked forgiveness and salvation together. The two, in his words, “are one and the same; they’re pretty close together. Every sin can be forgiven, but to be saved, you need to forgive. To enter into a holy place [Heaven] your sins must be forgiven, but if you don’t forgive, your sins can’t be forgiven. . . . If we do not forgive, there will be dire consequences.”

This view of salvation elevates the importance of forgiveness in the Amish faith, making forgiveness essential for eternal salvation. Some Christians may find such understandings of eternity disturbing. While many would agree that God is the final judge, Amish humility about eternal security and their fusion of behavior and salvation counter the ideas of many Christians. Indeed, these convictions about salvation represent the most striking application of Gelassenheit: the willingness to yield certainty about eternal outcomes to the providence of God.

Earthly Justice

Beyond the questions of long-term justice and divine providence lies the issue of earthly justice here and now. For the Amish, forgiveness does not mean condoning bad behavior or erasing its consequences. “If Roberts had lived, we would have forgiven him, but there would have been consequences,” explained a minister. Yet the Amish do not believe that worldly justice rests in the hands of the church.

As mentioned in Chapter Eleven, the Amish subscribe to a two-kingdom theology, shaped by their history of religious persecution in Europe. The churchly kingdom of God operates with a pacifist ethic that avoids force to achieve results. The ethics that Jesus taught—love for enemy, nonretaliation, and forgiveness—guide this spiritual kingdom.

In contrast, the worldly kingdoms—the governments of this world—rely on force, or at least the threat of force, to achieve their goals. The Amish accept the state’s authority to use force, and the Dordrecht Confession of Faith instructs obedience to the state as long as its demands do not conflict with God’s. For example, the Amish flatly refuse to participate in the armed forces, press charges in court, or sue those who wrong them. They do pay all taxes except Social Security, which they consider a form of insurance that undermines the church’s responsibility to care for the needs of its members.

Nonetheless, because they believe that the state is ordained by God to maintain order in the larger world, they expect that the state will organize a police force, imprison lawbreakers, and conduct war. “We fully expect a killer to go to jail,” said an Amish elder. “We’re not naïve. We would never want a killer turned loose,” added a deacon. “It’s the government’s job to punish evildoers.” As the tragedy unfolded in Nickel Mines, the Amish readily accepted the intervention of the state police and thanked them profusely for their help. They saw the events of that October morning as an intrusion of worldly violence into their community, and they expected worldly authority to counteract it.

The boundaries between church and world are not always that tidy, of course, and the Amish have occasionally faced perplexing questions of justice when worldly and churchly authorities overlap. In 1994, for example, a Pennsylvania jury found a twenty-eight-year-old Amish man, Ed Gingerich, guilty of involuntary manslaughter but mentally ill after he brutally killed his wife in front of two of the couple’s young children. Testimony revealed that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had occasionally been hospitalized in the past, but that his family and church neighbors had helped him substitute homeopathic alternatives for his prescribed medication.

The case exposed conflicting views of justice, responsibility, and punishment. Jurors later said they blamed the church for creating conditions that made the murder likely, while a criminal justice professor charged that prosecutors had not done enough to secure a first-degree murder conviction. Meanwhile, the Amish bishop, who was also an uncle of the victim, was quoted as saying that he was dismayed that the court handed down only a five-year sentence: “We thought he would be put away for a long time, maybe ten or fifteen years.” Indeed, when Gingerich was released from prison, having paid his debt in the eyes of secular society, his church in northwestern Pennsylvania would not allow him to return, continuing to shun him and separate him from his children and most other relatives. Gingerich instead found a home in two midwestern Amish settlements whose members considered his punishment sufficient and supported his return to psychological care. Gingerich’s case demonstrates the sometimes complicated and overlapping boundaries of the worldly and churchly kingdoms in Amish life.

This World Is Not Our Home

The Amish belief in miracles is part of their understanding of God’s providence, and it is woven into their affirmation that God is closely and directly involved in the world. Many Amish people spoke of miracles in the wake of the shooting. Some believed angels were hovering above the roof of the school that day. As we noted earlier, the girl who escaped the building before the shooting said she heard a voice tell her to run—a voice that many ascribe to an angel. In addition, Amish people often described the healing of the injured girls as miraculous. The poem written by a sister of one of the boys in the Nickel Mines school included these lines:

Some days we think we can’t go on
When so many of our friends are gone.
But we just hold on to the good things,
We’re surrounded by miracles.

Certainly, as we have seen, the Amish conviction that God intervenes in miraculous ways does not mean the Amish have solved age-old questions about God’s providence. It doesn’t mean they never wrestle with questions of how a loving God is involved not only in “the good things” mentioned in the poem but also in the terrifying and tragic things in life. Nor does it mean they skirt questions of justice.

But accepting miracles, like accepting mystery, goes hand-in-hand with Amish humility, submission, and patience with life. This combination of values provides them with an enormous capacity to absorb adversity, forgo revenge, and carry on—gracefully.