Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (4 page)

As we peered across the road at the West Nickel Mines School, journalists gathered around us in search of information. Their questions were sensible and to the point: What do the Amish think about . . . ? How do the Amish react to . . . ? What do the Amish teach in their schools?

As straightforward as their questions were, the reporters often began with the wrong assumption: that all Amish people in North America are shaped by the same cultural cookie cutter. In fact, there are many different subgroups of Amish, each with their own unique practices. For example, some, such as the Lancaster Amish, drive gray-topped carriages, but others drive carriages with black, yellow, or white tops. Occupations, dress patterns, wedding and funeral practices, and accepted technology vary across the many Amish subgroups. In a few subgroups, business owners are permitted to own cell phones; most Amish homes have indoor toilets but some do not; certain groups permit the use of in-line roller skates but others do not; and so on. With sixteen hundred church districts across the country, with religious authority anchored in local districts, and without an Amish “pope,” there are many different ways of being Amish in North America.

We tried to respond to the reporters with specifics about the Amish in the Nickel Mines area, but even here there are different personalities and practices. The diversity found in other ethnic and religious groups is also rife among the Amish. How could we squeeze all of this cultural complexity into short sound bites for the evening news?

Part of the reason we were in such demand the day of the shooting was the Amish aversion to publicity. No lawyers or family spokespersons represented the grieving Amish parents or provided statements to the media. With a few exceptions, the Amish did not want to talk with the media or appear on camera. This reticence came not from the sudden shock of the shooting but from a deep aversion to publicity that is grounded in their religious beliefs and cultural traditions.

Taking their cues from the Bible, the Amish have long declined the media spotlight, preferring to live quietly and privately. They take seriously Jesus’ words, “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them . . . do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do . . . let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth. . . . And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray . . . in the corners of the streets, that they may be
seen of men
” (emphasis added). These verses from Chapter Six of Matthew’s Gospel appear right before the Lord’s Prayer, the model prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. The instruction is clear: do not practice your religion in public to show off your piety. Practice your faith privately, and your Father in heaven will reward you.

The Amish also refrain from publicity because, as a collective society, they believe that the community should come first, not the individual. Having one’s name in a newspaper story manifests pride by calling attention to one’s opinions; therefore, some Amish people will talk to the press but only if they can remain anonymous. Faith must at times be practiced in public but should not, in the Amish view, be showcased. “We believe in letting our light shine,” said one Amish father, “but not shining it in the eyes of other people.”

Posing for photographs is also discouraged. The Amish cite the second of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing” (Exodus 20:4), as a reason for not posing for photographs. To pose for a picture is considered an act of pride that places the individual on a pedestal. Such self-promotion not only calls excessive attention to the individual, but it also borders on self-worship.

So the reporters covering the West Nickel Mines School shooting faced a quandary. How could they cover a people who didn’t want to be covered, let alone at a time of deep grief and shock? The shooting was relatively easy to cover: police reports and public records were readily available within a day of the tragedy. Reporting about the Amish community was a different matter altogether.

As we retraced our steps on Mine Road to prepare for an interview, we yielded to an Amish farmer approaching with a bench wagon pulled by two mules. Sitting on an elevated seat at the front of the enclosed wagon, he looked like a stagecoach driver. As we waited for the mule-drawn wagon to pass a string of mobile TV studios beaming their news around the world, it felt for a moment as if we were in a time warp.

The large gray wagon held benches, songbooks, and eating utensils. Because the Amish have no church buildings, enclosed wagons transport supplies from home to home as families take turns hosting the biweekly church service. The three-hour Sunday morning service, called
Gmay
(a dialect shortcut for the word
church
), is followed by a fellowship meal and may be attended by as many as two hundred people. The church service is held in large first-floor rooms or the basement of a home, in the upper level of a barn, or in a shop.

The wagons also bring benches to the homes of grieving families after a death. Hundreds of friends and family members come to the home for viewing and visitation after a body returns from an English mortuary. The visitation period typically stretches over several days and evenings before the funeral. Sixteen hours after the school shooting, the bench wagons were converging on the homes of families who would soon bury their children. The benches carried by the wagons would be used for seating in the barns where the funerals were slated for Thursday and Friday.

The bench wagon illustrated a point we repeated over and over again to reporters who asked, “Are the Amish prepared to deal with a tragedy like this?” Our answer was a paradox, perhaps a little unexpected. Of course, the Amish were not prepared, we said—except, of course, they were.

In one sense, no community is ever prepared for such a calamity. There have been few murders in Amish history, and never before had there been a school massacre. Certainly adults and children had died in tragic accidents, but there were no parallels to the Nickel Mines shooting. Amish schools, with no history of violence, are not designed with such incidents in mind. There are no metal detectors at the doors, no daily body searches for concealed weapons, no police officers patrolling the hallways, no policies for emergencies, and no drills to prepare for hostage situations. The children who attend a one-room Amish school come from ten or so nearby families. Doors are unlocked and sometimes stand open when school is in session. Amish schools offer children a deep sense of security: their peers are neighbors and their teachers are frequent visitors to their homes. Some of the younger children would likely not recognize a pistol if they saw one. Almost without exception, young Amish children have not seen violent movies, video games, or television; they can hardly imagine violence, apart from a fistfight. So were the Amish prepared for the outburst of violence that hit them that Monday in October? Of course not.

At the same time, the Amish are better prepared than most Americans to deal with a tragedy like this. The Amish are a close-knit community woven together by strong ties of family, faith, and culture. Members in distress can tap this rich reservoir of communal care during horrific events. The typical Amish person has seventy-five or more first cousins, many living nearby. Members of a thirty-family church district typically live within a mile or so of each other’s homes. When tragedy strikes—fire, flood, illness, or death—dozens of people surround the distressed family with care. They take over their chores, bring them food, set up benches for visitation, and offer quiet words of comfort. The Amish call this thick web of support
mutual aid.
They literally follow the New Testament commandment to “bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). So while no one is ever ready to deal with a tragedy like this, historic practices had prepared the Amish well.

As the bench wagon came closer, we were surprised that the mules were not spooked by the TV crews and their noisy generators. What did frighten them, however, was a yellow plastic strip, two inches high and six inches wide, stretching across the road. The plastic cover protected electric cords running from an English residence to some of the media trucks. The mules stopped and refused to cross the yellow strip. After trying to persuade them from his seat on the wagon, the driver finally got off, walked in front of them, and tugged on their bridles. They still refused. After several more minutes of their owner’s persuasion and gentle tugs, the animals gingerly stepped across the yellow line. Despite the sudden appearance of electric cords and satellite dishes, the viewings in the grieving community at Nickel Mines would proceed on schedule.

Word of trouble in a school had begun spreading at 10:30 A.M. on Monday, October 2, 2006. A distraught, sobbing teacher ran to a nearby Amish farmhouse with an alarming report: a man with a gun was in the school. The farmer called 911 from his telephone shanty to say that children had been taken hostage in a school. The news traveled quickly via word of mouth. “The Amish grapevine is faster than the Internet,” said one Amish man, who has never sent an e-mail. Some neighbors began gathering at the farmhouse; others went to the school to see if they could help. By 11:26 A.M. local television stations were reporting a multiple shooting in an Amish school. Word of the horror soon appeared on Fox News and CNN.

Amish people ran to their phone shanties to pass the word. “Something bad happened at the West Nickel Mines School. Children were shot. A neighbor man went crazy. Helicopters are taking them to hospitals.” Voice-mail messages were left on Amish phones in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and many of the other 370 Amish communities in twenty-seven states and the Canadian province of Ontario. An Amish contractor in Indiana received a call about the shooting on his cell phone from his financial advisor in Chicago. A Pakistani customer in New York called his Amish harness supplier in Lancaster to report the shooting. The news—of a shooting, of dying children, of very bad things south of Paradise—spread fast in Amish communities in North America despite the absence of phones inside their homes.

The horror of school shootings at places like Columbine had reached Lancaster County. For many Americans living in fear of guns, violence, and terror it had been comforting to imagine a safe place somewhere—a place where children could giggle and learn their ABCs without worrying about guns, knives, and bullies. If something like this could happen in a small Amish school nestled in a peaceful rural community, it could happen anywhere. In many respects, the last safe place in America’s collective imagination had suddenly disappeared.

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