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“Instead of being one of those ‘two-night’ media circuses that we have on a regular basis, this story lasted for months,” says Bill McClay, a long-time observer of the Amish. “It had national and international impact. People were fascinated, obsessed. But why? Perhaps because it brought to the fore our confusion about forgiveness in our culture, something we esteem greatly as being in almost every way a good thing. Here forgiveness was seen in its most selfless and sacrificial form, it seemed almost inhuman in its purity, and this deeply challenged our understanding of it.”
Money poured in from all over the world to help the families. The Amish created the Nickel Mines Accountability Committee, which gave a portion of the funds to the Roberts family to ensure that they were looked after.
Roberts was buried a few days after the killing in a small cemetery a mile from the schoolhouse. Half of those who attended were Amish, including some who had just buried their daughters. Afterwards, they hugged Roberts’ widow and parents. Marie Roberts later sent a letter to her Amish neighbors to thank them for their kindness. In it she wrote, “Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you’ve given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you.”
As immediate as the forgiveness was, however, to forgive is not the same as to forget, and such actions did not soften the loss or mend hearts any faster. The community still had to deal with their grief and to find healing. “I’ve seen people stifle grief by trying to put it away and pretend it didn’t happen, only to have to deal with it later,” says Anne Beiler, who grew up in the Amish community. “I checked in with some of the women because we were concerned that the mothers might just sweep their feelings under the rug and act like it never happened. But they have a strong network of support where they are able to talk together about how they feel. One of them was having a bad day and exclaimed, ‘I just want to pull him out of the grave and I want to shoot him again and again!’ They’re very real, very much in touch with how they feel, they talk about their anger and their frustrations and how they miss their children.”
Family counselor Jonas Beiler agrees, “I’m glad when people express their need for revenge, as this is a necessary piece of the puzzle. God doesn’t want us to act it out and get ourselves into deeper trouble, but there are times when that thought of revenge gives us a little wind in our sails to help us get through the pain.”
Some members of the Amish community sought help from therapists. “I got a phone call asking if we could get in touch with Mr. Roberts’ widow in order to help the families with their forgiveness,” says Brad Aldrich, a local grief counselor. A shy man in his early thirties who speaks softly, he is protective of his neighbors and unwilling to invade their privacy. “We met in a fire hall about two weeks after the incident. All ten of the families were represented, and each was allowed to say what they wanted to Mrs. Roberts and her family. Frankly, we didn’t know what to expect and I was on edge before the meeting began. Then one of the Amish fathers, who had lost his daughter just fourteen days earlier, stood up and said with total sincerity and tears in his eyes, ‘I have not had the fortune of knowing you before today, but I would like this to start a friendship between our families. You’re welcome in my house any day that you want.’”
The first responders also set up a meeting with the families and the state police. “I’m not sure how many attended, but it included all ten families who were involved, and then all the policemen who were part of that day, and the ambulance drivers and helicopter pilots, as many as could get in the hall.” Among those who attended was Jonas Beiler, who was raised in a traditional Old Order Amish family but left because of his love of motorcycles and the openness of the sixties. He still retains his closeness to the community. “They shared with each other what they saw, heard, and experienced that day. All of them said that it was one of the most powerful meetings they had ever attended. If it had been in an atmosphere of anger or unforgiveness then some lawyer would have been saying you couldn’t talk to this or that person. But there was nothing like that going on. No litigation, no lawsuits, and nobody blaming anyone for not doing their job. I also heard that Charles Roberts’ mother went several times to hold the child that’s still in a vegetative state. She just cradled this little girl in her arms and said how healing it was for her to be able to do that.”
William McClay puts the Amish concept of forgiveness into this context: “It is completely dependent on their cosmological view of the world. The Amish at Nickel Mines immediately saw the massacre in terms of ‘if we don’t forgive, we don’t get into heaven.’ Forgiveness is moral protection for the afterlife and if they don’t forgive others then their own sins aren’t protected. Moreover, the Amish live with the expectation that the world doesn’t make sense. In a sharp contrast, people responded to the shootings in Virginia Tech by asking: How can we change the gun laws, improve counseling in the university, or set up an alert system? There is nothing like this in the discourse of the Amish community. Their response was: These things happen, this is how the world is, and all that is required is to be faithful and to do the things we are instructed to do. I don’t think they could have forgiven this massacre without such a metaphysical belief system. It is the warp and woof of their reality, it is as real to them as gravity is to us.”
For Roman Catholic priest Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, such forgiveness was astonishing. “The Amish way of unconditional forgiveness out of obedience to God is awesome, amazing, of a true mystery, of true and radical otherness. When the reality that one is trying to live by—God, Christ, the big lizard, whatever you call it—when it intersects with ordinary life it is an astounding thing. Something of another world enters this world. It is a sign of total grace in Christian terms. Such radical unconditional forgiveness is like this.”
Many responded that the Amish forgiveness was extraordinary and potentially transformative. “When the Amish community forgave the murderer they did it in a considered way,” says Susan Collin Marks, senior vice president of Search for Common Ground. ”It cut 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