Certainly, the Amish beliefs lie outside of most people’s everyday experiences. To live and believe as they do demands a deep commitment and, as Rabbi Irwin Kula stresses, “practice.” For Rabbi Kula, a religious leader known for his provoking questions, the Amish are the “great spiritual athletes of our time. They don’t just wait until the tragedy arrives that will require their forgiveness skills, but they practice it daily, wrestling with everyday petty grievances and the forgiveness that follows. It is a thickly layered approach, for imagine the intense internal discipline it took to hold that stand at Nickel Mines. Does it come at significant psychic cost? As an outsider it seems so, but only they know for sure.”
David Weaver-Zercher, chair of Biblical and Religious Studies at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, believes that “surrender” is the defining word. “If you choose to become Amish you agree to give up a lot; individual desires and even individual feelings are frequently sacrificed to the community. You give up a car, you give up your right to wear what you want, you give up any possibility of higher education. And in the same way, forgiveness is also about giving up. It’s about giving up one’s right to revenge, and eventually giving up the anger that one naturally feels.” He pauses. “However, I think this can be a danger in Amish life, or in any community that values forgiveness as highly as the Amish do, where people are compelled and coerced to feel something that they just don’t know how to fully experience.”
Ray Gingerich, a theology professor at Eastern Mennonite College, agrees. He has a personal insight into the world of the Amish as he grew up within their community before leaving to become a university professor. It took years for his Amish family to accept his decision to leave, and traces of the world Gingerich left behind still remain, such as his beard and a fierce concentration on moral issues. “Despite the fact that I’ve left the Amish and have many reservations about things in the Amish culture, my initial reaction to the horror that happened at Nickel Mines was one of great admiration that they were able to say ‘I forgive.’ It was particularly extraordinary to see this happen right at the time when the U.S. as a whole was at war and making threats about getting even with the people who flew into the Twin Towers. I looked at how we, as a country, responded to 9/11 and the anger that was felt by so many people; it seemed that we were just making more and more enemies. And then we contrast this with the Amish. Their illustration of forgiveness came without any negotiation, without even a lot of thought. It is as though there is something in the Amish character and community that has the power to just transcend, to rise above the death of their children, to rise above this immense tragedy and simply say, ‘we forgive.’ Instead of an eye for an eye, they gave good for evil, they absorbed the evil and offered forgiveness. And that has a religious or spiritual or even transcendent quality to it. Forgiveness in its deepest form is taking what society usually thinks of as weakness and passivity and saying no, this is the real power that transforms. They take the pain and suffering and transform it into something very positive. The negativity of woundedness and murder is actually taken up and reprocessed so that a positive component comes out of it.
“But I have to come back to the flipside of this.” While deeply admiring the Amish ability to transcend horror, Gingerich also questions the personal authenticity of this versus obedience to religious doctrine. “Every time I hear the Amish saying, ‘Forgive those who sinned against you for if you do not forgive them neither will your Father in heaven forgive you,’ I feel impelled to ask, is this really life-giving if I do it just so I can find salvation? Maybe it is. I don’t want to be too hard but it feels legalistic. It feels as though it is not coming from the depths but rather from the demands of religion.”
Monsignor Albacete echoes this uncertainty about whether the Amish commitment to unconditional forgiveness comes from a genuine experience or from an unquestioned religious belief that could, in the long run, be damaging. “Forgiveness does not come immediately after the offense. It actually comes before, because it is based on a blind obedience, in this case to the words of Our Father, to the prayer of Jesus that makes your own experience of forgiveness dependent on how you forgive others. So already you are disposed to forgive. If nothing too bad is happening then such an attitude can be very inducing of peace, whatever it is you will just be able to forgive. But when something really awful happens—like when someone kills your child—then what? And when the Amish say that they have forgiven this man and express it in the best possible way by caring for his wife, it’s not that I don’t believe them. It’s that I want to say: At what price? What happens to your feelings of anger?” Albacete struggles to comprehend. “What happens to your feelings of great loss? To your desire to reverse time? To regret … if only? What happens to the horror at the absence of someone you love? Your relationship with that person was a part of your life and now that part of you has been taken away. You are less. Can this radical obedience fulfill these needs? I don’t think so. You can only deal with them by suppressing them in some way, and I think this is actually violence done to yourself.”
Professor McClay’s doubts are intensified by his experience as a parent. “I couldn’t help but be moved by the moral grandeur of their willingness to forgiven the gunman who was dead and to reach out with love and compassion to his family with no desire for vengeance or punitive damages. But, at the same time, as a parent, I was appalled. There is a kind of ferocity that rises up when someone does something to children, an intensity with the parental bond that, were it to happen to me, I wonder whether I could even let the matter take its course through the courts of law. I can’t imagine letting go of those feelings, and I’m not sure that I would respect someone I knew who yielded their anger so completely. To renounce those feelings, to simply have that be a floor on which the elevator never stops on the way to the high ground of forgiveness, seems to me almost inhuman.”
Far away in South Africa, a country that had gone through brutal years of apartheid, the event transfixed some of its citizens. Pumla Goboda-Madikizela, an eminent psychologist and one of the architects of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, raised similar questions: “I worry that at a deep psychological level something has not been addressed. I am not judging the act of forgiveness as being improper or immoral, of course not. The TRC was created with the hope that reconciliation is possible even after horrific, seemingly unforgivable acts. But I am reflecting on this with my psychological mind. There is a great deal of pain that these parents are living with, but such pain appears silenced even before it has been felt. An important part of the journey towards forgiveness requires being in touch with that pain. Also—and I am speaking now as a believer—when the forgiveness is so quick, it almost borders on assuming the power of God, casting ourselves in God’s image so that we do not allow the weakness of being human to overwhelm us. Instead, what we really need is the grace from God to empower us so that we can rise up from our pain and then reach out with forgiveness.”
What is it that makes this “violence done to oneself” bearable or, as Ray Gingerich describes it, “this forgiving without really having allowed ourselves