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into some sort of pop culture trick, it shouldn’t be blurred.”
Law professor Thane Rosenbaum agrees. “We live in a much more compressed, globalized world where everything is instantaneously known, which means we have an absence of private life, there is nowhere to hide, our shame is much more evident. Sadly, there is a kind of public enjoyment and even voyeurism in this new ritual of forgiveness.”
For Wilfred McClay, a cultural critic, this new therapeutic forgiveness is a troubling sign of the age we live in. He yearns for the time, “when forgiveness once again is concerned with the soul of the transgressor and the well-being of society, and not merely with the forgiver’s good health or psychological revenge.”
And so the questions persist: What is forgiveness? Why forgive? What are the roots of forgiveness? In the end, forgiveness knows no boundaries of time or place, and its origins appear to be embedded in our own psyches. Perhaps, at the deepest level, forgiveness is the memory of lost possibilities, the enormous presence of absence, an ache for what could have been but is no more.
FORGIVENESS IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR
AMISH GRACE: AS WE FORGIVE OUR DEBTORS
Amish Woman with Child - Nickel Mines
The Amish way of unconditional forgiveness out of obedience to God is awesome, amazing, of true mystery, of true and radial otherness, it has heroism and beauty to it, but in the end it may be dangerous. — Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete
On a cloudless morning in October 2006, a group of Amish children were gathered in their small one-room schoolhouse at West Nickel Mines, a peaceful village nestled in the lush rolling green hills of Pennsylvania. Amish schoolhouses are considered a safe haven for children, but on this particular day a man entered with an arsenal of guns and ammunition, two-by-sixes and two-by-fours embedded with metal bolts, containers of K-Y jelly, plastic cuffs, and a raging anger against God. He proceeded to shatter the serenity of this small community. That man was thirty-two-year old Charles Roberts, a local milk truck driver who, although not a part of the Amish community, occasionally made deliveries to Amish homes. He was married with three children. In a picture later released by the police, Roberts, dark haired and intense, smiles into the camera while surrounded by his family, all dressed in their Sunday best. Nine years earlier his first-born daughter had died minutes after birth. Roberts continued to brood over this loss, wanting to get his revenge against God.
Before barricading the doors, Roberts released the fifteen boys and few women who were in the schoolhouse. Two of them, a mother and her young son, ran to a nearby farmhouse where they called for help. Roberts told the remaining eleven girls to line up in front of the blackboard. It would appear from the items he brought with him that he intended to rape each of the girls, ages six to thirteen, before shooting them. Deputy Coroner Janice Ballenger believes he either ran out of time or changed his mind. “If there’s any salvation at all, it is the fact that he did not carry out what he had planned,” she says.
As police officers were nearing, Roberts was binding the girl’s arms and legs with plastic ties. He warned the troopers to back off. They were planning to storm the building, but then the shooting began. According to one of the survivors, he told the girls to get down on the floor. One of the children suggested to the others that they say a prayer. Apparently Roberts said, ‘I don’t believe in prayer, but why don’t you pray that I don’t do what I’m about to do,’ and the girl replied, ‘if you are going to shoot us, then shoot me first.’ Which is what he did. He then shot the other girls, killing five and critically wounding six, before he shot and killed himself.
Pennsylvania police believe that Roberts did not have any ill will towards the Amish people, simply that the schoolhouse provided easy access to young girls. Before the murders, he phoned his wife to confess that when he was about eleven he had molested two young girls, although neither ever acknowledged the abuse. In a suicide note, Roberts wrote that he had again started fantasizing about molesting girls. State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller reported that Roberts spoke with his wife before the killing, telling her that he was compelled to seek revenge for something that happened twenty years ago. This, compounded with the death of his infant daughter, appears to have mentally pushed him over the edge. A survivor said that Roberts told the children, “I’m angry at God and I need to punish some Christian girls to get even with him. I’m going to make you pay for my daughter.”
“We knew the shooter was dead inside,” says Ballenger, one of the first responders on the scene. ”We entered the schoolhouse and the room was indescribable.” A woman in her late thirties with a brisk, no-nonsense manner, she thought she had seen everything in her work, but she was not prepared for this. Her voice breaks as she describes the scene. “There was not one desk or chair in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with blood or glass. I saw one dead girl lying on the right side and the perpetrator lying on the left. Both were engulfed in pools of their own blood. There were bullet holes everywhere. Blood everywhere. It wasn’t just single shots to the head, later we discovered twenty bullet holes in just one child. But at that moment, while waiting for the medics, I tried to concentrate on anything but the bodies; I tried to find one square of linoleum that was not touched by blood. I saw a vase of fresh flowers on the teacher’s desk and I kept my eyes on those flowers. Outside in the schoolyard it looked like somebody had taken several ambulances, turned them upside down, and then shook and dumped out all the medical supplies. For as many people that were there it was eerily quiet, other than the hum of the hovering helicopters waiting to take the wounded children to the hospital, and the sound of quiet sobbing coming from the Amish men, women, and children standing in groups together along the side of the road.”
Despite this horrific event that changed so many lives, the Amish people did not judge or condemn. Instead, they immediately announced that they had forgiven the murderer. Forgiveness is a central theme of Amish beliefs and they genuinely try to live by this verse from the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our transgressions as we forgive those who transgressed against us.” They are convinced that, “If you forgive, you will be forgiven; if you don’t forgive, you won’t be forgiven.” That afternoon the father of one of the girl’s who had been killed was heard to say, “He (Roberts) had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he’s standing before a just God.”
Hours after the killings, Amish members went to see Roberts’ widow, Marie, and her family, including her parents and parents-in-law, to express their condolences and offer forgiveness. Among those who took food to the family was Gertrude Huntington, a midwife and specialist on Amish culture, who had helped birth several of the murdered girls. “They (the Amish) know the children are innocent and are going to heaven and that they will join the girls in death. The hurt is very great, but they don’t balance the hurt with hate.”
Local pastor Rev. Robert Schenck told CNN how he witnessed the grandfather of one of the murdered girls teaching younger relatives not to hate Roberts for killing his granddaughter: “We were standing next to the body of this 13-year-old girl as the grandfather was tutoring the young boys. He was saying to the children, ‘We must not think evil of this man.’ It was one of the most touching things I have seen in twenty-five years of Christian ministry.”
On the television evening news, anchors Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, Brian Williams and others voiced their awe and respect for the Amish as the children were buried: “Dozens of horse-drawn buggies carried mourners to a simple hilltop ceremony, as four of the five children who were killed are laid to rest” … “Ironically the procession passed by the home of Charles Roberts, the truck driver who killed them and wounded six others” … “It was a lesson in dignity, forgiveness, incredible strength, and towering faith” … “Most of us feel anger and rage toward the shooter” … “An unimaginable crime, followed by an inconceivable response” … “The Amish are not calling for revenge, instead, they’re preaching something very different: forgiveness.”
The Amish mercy moved the nation. Within a week of the killing thousands of media stories were reporting