Five years later, Amish grace still flowing from Nickel Mines
Oct 11, 2011
from Sheldon C. Good's article in Mennonite Weekly Review:
Just hours after Charles Carl Roberts IV shot and killed five Amish girls and injured five others on Oct. 2, 2006, in a Nickel Mines schoolhouse, the Amish responded in a way that amazed the world — with forgiveness.
For the Amish, forgiveness is not only a dutiful response to tragedy, it is a way of life — a long, emotional journey. Though the gaze of outsiders has moved on, Amish grace continues to flow in seemingly unimaginable yet strikingly ordinary ways throughout Lancaster County.
The fifth anniversary of the Oct. 2 tragedy provided the backdrop for a Sept. 22 conference, “The Power of Forgiveness: Lessons from Nickel Mines.”
About 250 participants, including dozens of Amish, explored the moral dilemmas that arise from violence and the potential power of forgiveness.
Sociologist Donald B. Kraybill of Elizabethtown College, where the event was held, shared seven distinctives of the Nickel Mines tragedy. First, he noted speed.
“I probably wouldn’t be standing here talking about this if the forgiveness had happened three or four months after the event,” he said. “It happened spontaneously. There wasn’t a meeting.”
The night of the shooting, Amish representatives met with Roberts family members to extend forgiveness. The Amish responded so fast, in fact, that critics called it too quick, too mechanical. One Amish man told Kraybill, “This is just standard Christian forgiveness; it’s what Christians do every day.”
“Forgiveness is maybe what Christians should do every day,” Kraybill said, “but it’s not what Christians do do every day.”
Kraybill called the Amish response a “moral barn raising.”
“At a deeper level, it was more about compassion, grace and empathy than forgiveness,” he said.
