Amish Community Forgives

CNN is reporting on some recent comments by members of the Amish community. 

A grieving grandfather told young relatives not to hate the gunman who killed five girls in an Amish schoolhouse massacre, a pastor said on Wednesday.

“As we were standing next to the body of this 13-year-old girl, the grandfather was tutoring the young boys, he was making a point, just saying to the family, ‘We must not think evil of this man,’ ” the Rev. Robert Schenck told CNN.

“It was one of the most touching things I have seen in 25 years of Christian ministry.”

The girl was one of 10 shot by Charles Carl Roberts IV after he invaded their one-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania on Monday.
. . .
Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, said local people were trying to follow Jesus’ teachings in dealing with the “terrible hurt.”

“I don’t think there’s anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts,” he told CNN.

Sam Stoltzfus, 63, an Amish woodworker who lives a few miles away from the shooting scene, told The Associated Press that the victims’ families will be sustained by their faith.

“We think it was God’s plan, and we’re going to have to pick up the pieces and keep going,” he told AP. “A funeral to us is a much more important thing than the day of birth because we believe in the hereafter. The children are better off than their survivors.”

When members of the community die, they are buried in wooden coffins; women in all white and men in all black, according to AP.

Bodies are embalmed, but undertakers do not apply makeup. Funerals are held in the victim’s home, and the dead are delivered to the cemetery in a horse-drawn carriage. A hymn is read, but there is no singing, AP reported.

Religion News Service has more on this.

In an attack some are calling “the Amish 9/11,” an armed man burst into an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County on Monday morning and shot 10 young students before killing himself. As of Tuesday, five students were dead, three lay critically wounded and two in serious condition at area hospitals. The gunman, identified as Charles Carl Roberts IV, shot and killed himself at the scene.

“That’s exactly what this is — the Amish 9/11,” said Sam S., an Amish carpenter from Gordonville, a town about five miles from Nickel Mines. “We’ve never experienced anything like this before here.” Sam and Mary asked that their full names not be printed because they didn’t want to stand out from other members of their community.

Among the Amish, who honor a humble lifestyle modeled on the Gospels, such provocative statements are rare. But as Lancaster County’s estimated 25,000 Amish try to make sense of the shooting, many say it carries echoes of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
. . .
As Mary and Ben explained the day’s violence to their sons, they emphasized the importance of forgiveness and trusting in God.

“I just feel bad for the gunman,” said Mary’s husband, Ben, 41. “He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he’s standing before a just God.”

While outsiders might be surprised at the forgiveness immediately extended to Roberts, Donald Kraybill, an authority on Amish culture, said that reaction is typical.

“That theme of forgiveness really comes from the example of Jesus, who carried that spirit even to the cross,” said Kraybill, a professor of Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College.

In Gospel lessons, hymns and prayer books written in German dialect, those teachings are passed down through generations in Amish settlements.

“I think the Amish are much better prepared to cope with something like this than most Americans,” Kraybill said. “They see things as having a higher purpose, there’s a higher good, so they are more able to absorb and accept things in a spirit of humility.”
. . .
Settling her hands on her lap, Mary said: “Sometimes we don’t understand. I understand that the Lord does let this happen, but I do not know why.”

“Really the only way to answer this is to toss it in the Lord’s lap and say, ‘You take care of it, I can’t,’ ” Ben said after turning to the boy.

“But you may ask him to please carry us through,” Mary said.

As the boys began to yawn, Ben pulled a black prayer book from the shelf.

He pointed to a prayer often read at Amish funerals and provided an English translation.

“Glory Father, we thank Thee for all the blessings which Thou has bestowed upon the departed one, especially now that Thou has redeemed him from this wicked world and brought his sorrows to an end, and as we trust, has taken his soul home to Thee.”

(Posted by Trask)

Amish Victims Mourned in Funeral

The New York Times is reporting on a recent tragedy in the Amish community.

Four days after a grisly attack on an Amish schoolhouse, funerals were being held for four of the five girls shot by a gunman who wrote of being driven over the edge by fantasies of sexually assaulting young girls.

It was a somber close to a New World horror visited on an Old World people. A truck driver who was paid to collect these dairy farmers’ milk took their children instead.

The first of three services began at 9 a.m., for Naomi Rose Ebersol, 7, who was laid in a simple pine coffin at her home.

“We are here facing the unexpected,” said one of the two pastors who spoke at the ceremony, according to a Mennonite pastor who attended the service but asked not to be named. “We know and believe that these girls are in Heaven with the Lord Jesus Christ.” The man said the pastor read from the book of Matthew in the New Testament about the importance of innocence.

As is customary in Amish tradition, guests brought food, not flowers. A hymn was read in 16th-century German, but there was no singing. The girls were laid in simple pine coffins and dressed in homemade white dresses, symbolizing purity. The bodies were embalmed but without makeup. Two sermons were given, both in Pennsylvania Dutch.

“Unless you become like these little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven,” the pastor said during one of the sermons, emphasizing the need to regain the purity and innocence lost by the incident if the faithful hopes to enter heaven, according to the Mennonite pastor.

After the hour-and-a-half ceremony was held in Mr. Ebersol’s woodworking shop, about 300 men with long beards and women in white bonnets mounted their black and grey buggies and clip-clopped in quiet procession to Bart Amish Cemetery. Along the way they passed the home of Charles Carl Roberts IV, the 32-year-old killer.

Burials are scheduled for later today for Marian Fisher, 13, and another service for Mary Liz Miller, 8; and her sister Lena Miller, 7. Another victim, Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, is to be buried Friday.

At times, the tragic irony was overpowering. Stone-faced, Amanda Shelley, the deputy county coroner, told reporters on Wednesday about the blood on the classroom walls. But her composure fell into a torrent of tears when she mentioned the sign posted beneath the classroom chalkboard. It read: “Visitors Brighten People’s Days.”

Amish mourners had been attending viewings at the homes of the victims’ families since Tuesday.

Rita Rhoads, a midwife who delivered two of the girls who were killed, said that during the viewing of the dead, children are encouraged to touch the body.

“It is part of the realization that the person is no longer in the body. It’s part of the reality of life,” said Ms. Rhoads, a Mennonite who has attended many Amish funerals.

In Georgetown, not far from the shooting, no one knew what to say about the man whose inconceivable actions were made only more confusing by the words he left. The gunman who shot 10 girls on Monday and then killed himself as state police were closing in left a suicide note saying that he was tormented by memories of molesting two young relatives 20 years ago.

The police later interviewed the family members they believed the note was referring to, but both women denied ever having been sexually assaulted.

Aside from the media intrusion, closure for this insular community remained elusive as four other girls remained hospitalized — two in critical condition and two in serious condition. On Tuesday, another girl was taken off life support and was taken home to die, officials said.

“This is an awful time because it keeps coming,” said Philip W. Furman, an undertaker in Leola, Pa., who serves the Amish community.

The strain of media presence on this insular community was becoming apparent.

“I’d just as soon not give you any information about our culture to send out to the world,” said Ammon Fisher Jr., who helped his father in making tombstones for the girls. ‘What good does that do?”

Driving on Mine Road in Georgetown, an Amish man in his 20’s driving a mule-drawn hay cutter, stared sternly at reporters as he approached and swerved toward them. “We all wish you would just pack up and leave,” he said.

And yet, when asked about the killings, most people here seemed focused on forgiveness, faith and a determination to move forward.

“You think about them, you cry about them, you pray for them and then you have to let go of things you can’t explain,” said Lizzy Fisher, an Amish grandmother who is close to several great-grandparents of the slain girls.

Asked whether anyone in the community felt angry about the killing, she seemed aghast.

“Oh no, no, definitely not,” she said shaking her head vigorously, standing behind a screen door at her home along Bachman Town Road in Ronk, Pa. “People don’t feel that around here. We just don’t.”

Barbara Beiler, a friend of a pregnant teacher who was released by the gunman and whose name has not been released, said, “Even when the gunman was in the room she felt like there were angels present. These are people with unshakeable faith.”

(Posted by Trask)