An Amish Grandfather's Lesson of Forgiveness

by L. Gregory Jones

Shock, dismay, horror--words that only barely begin to convey our reactions to the killings of five Amish girls in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse this week. How could such a thing happen? We reel at this stark clash of cultures and images: the eruption of modern America's violence with the non-violent Amish; adult bitterness and youthful innocence.

There is also another story here that we risk missing amid the chaos of the moment--a tale of two lives, lived over time, with very different implications and lessons for all of us.

The grandfather of one of the slain Amish girls was standing next to his 13-year-old granddaughter's body, preparing her for burial. Less than 48 hours after the killings, he told a group of young boys: "We must not think evil of this man." He went on to urge them to forgive the killer, who had taken his own life as well.

Such words sound bizarre to many of us.How could a grieving grandfather think such thoughts, much less say them, so soon after the killing? Who among us, we wonder, is not thinking evil of this man?

What we miss is how this grandfather's life has been formed by non-violence, by patterns of prayer and worship and peaceful resolution of differences with others.

His words come naturally to him because they are the reflection of how he has lived over the course of a lifetime. They startle many of us who live in the midst of violence, who tend to harbor desires for vengeance, even if we do not act them out violently.

The grandfather would be the first to admit that it is not "natural" for human beings to embody a commitment to forgiveness, to living non-violently, to learning not to think evil of others. That must be learned over time, with the assistance of a wider community of people who share those commitments.

He would say it is learned by following Jesus.

The noted preacher William Sloane Coffin interpreted the verses Romans 8:14-21 by saying, "If you love good you have to hate evil; otherwise you are sentimental. But if you hate evil more than you love good, you simply become a damn good hater, and of such people the world has enough."

This grandfather is no hater. As a result of the habits of a lifetime, he is speaking and acting as those who know him would expect him to act: as a peaceful man who embodies the art of living as a forgiven and forgiving person. He undoubtedly hates the evil that was done to his granddaughter, but he also knows the corrosive effect of harboring that hatred and letting it define his life and our world.

By contrast, the killer learned to hate extremely well.

He evidently harbored bitterness for more than two decades, and there were no practices of forgiveness and repentance that would have enabled him to discover a way of letting past brokenness remain in the past.

Instead, bitterness seeped into his soul, and his grudge burdened him until it finally exploded in an outrageous series of actions whose effects go even beyond the horror of the young girls' deaths: the scarring of a community and its fragile peaceable life; the despair that many of us feel, wanting some constructive outlet for our own outrage and grief; the fear that we cannot stop the cycles of violence and the imitative destructiveness we have seen in recent school shootings.

Our task is to hope even against hope for communities and practices of forgiveness and repentance that can cultivate a future not bound by the destructiveness of the past.

We need not live like the Amish to learn a powerful lesson from the grandfather's life and witness.

But it will take us becoming focused on a renunciation of the violence and vengeance that haunts our own lives and imaginations, and learning to live in relationships and communities that are marked by the regular, difficult, costly yet life-giving patterns and practices of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Iris Murdoch once wrote that "a saint is someone who absorbs evil without passing it on." If a close relative can do so even in the wake of senseless killing, we ought to be able to find ways to cultivate such saintly practices in our own lives. Whatever it takes to do so.