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Amish Woman with Child - Nickel Mines

The Amish way of unconditional forgiveness out of obedience to God is awesome, amazing, of true mystery, of true and radial otherness, it has heroism and beauty to it, but in the end it may be dangerous. — Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete

On a cloudless morning in October 2006, a group of Amish children were gathered in their small one-room schoolhouse at West Nickel Mines, a peaceful village nestled in the lush rolling green hills of Pennsylvania. Amish schoolhouses are considered a safe haven for children, but on this particular day a man entered with an arsenal of guns and ammunition, two-by-sixes and two-by-fours embedded with metal bolts, containers of K-Y jelly, plastic cuffs, and a raging anger against God. He proceeded to shatter the serenity of this small community. That man was thirty-two-year old Charles Roberts, a local milk truck driver who, although not a part of the Amish community, occasionally made deliveries to Amish homes. He was married with three children. In a picture later released by the police, Roberts, dark haired and intense, smiles into the camera while surrounded by his family, all dressed in their Sunday best. Nine years earlier his first-born daughter had died minutes after birth. Roberts continued to brood over this loss, wanting to get his revenge against God.

Before barricading the doors, Roberts released the fifteen boys and few women who were in the schoolhouse. Two of them, a mother and her young son, ran to a nearby farmhouse where they called for help. Roberts told the remaining eleven girls to line up in front of the blackboard. It would appear from the items he brought with him that he intended to rape each of the girls, ages six to thirteen, before shooting them. Deputy Coroner Janice Ballenger believes he either ran out of time or changed his mind. “If there’s any salvation at all, it is the fact that he did not carry out what he had planned,” she says.

As police officers were nearing, Roberts was binding the girl’s arms and legs with plastic ties. He warned the troopers to back off. They were planning to storm the building, but then the shooting began. According to one of the survivors, he told the girls to get down on the floor. One of the children suggested to the others that they say a prayer. Apparently Roberts said, ‘I don’t believe in prayer, but why don’t you pray that I don’t do what I’m about to do,’ and the girl replied, ‘if you are going to shoot us, then shoot me first.’ Which is what he did. He then shot the other girls, killing five and critically wounding six, before he shot and killed himself.

Pennsylvania police believe that Roberts did not have any ill will towards the Amish people, simply that the schoolhouse provided easy access to young girls. Before the murders, he phoned his wife to confess that when he was about eleven he had molested two young girls, although neither ever acknowledged the abuse. In a suicide note, Roberts wrote that he had again started fantasizing about molesting girls. State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller reported that Roberts spoke with his wife before the killing, telling her that he was compelled to seek revenge for something that happened twenty years ago. This, compounded with the death of his infant daughter, appears to have mentally pushed him over the edge. A survivor said that Roberts told the children, “I’m angry at God and I need to punish some Christian girls to get even with him. I’m going to make you pay for my daughter.”

“We knew the shooter was dead inside,” says Ballenger, one of the first responders on the scene. ”We entered the schoolhouse and the room was indescribable.” A woman in her late thirties with a brisk, no-nonsense manner, she thought she had seen everything in her work, but she was not prepared for this. Her voice breaks as she describes the scene. “There was not one desk or chair in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with blood or glass. I saw one dead girl lying on the right side and the perpetrator lying on the left. Both were engulfed in pools of their own blood. There were bullet holes everywhere. Blood everywhere. It wasn’t just single shots to the head, later we discovered twenty bullet holes in just one child. But at that moment, while waiting for the medics, I tried to concentrate on anything but the bodies; I tried to find one square of linoleum that was not touched by blood. I saw a vase of fresh flowers on the teacher’s desk and I kept my eyes on those flowers. Outside in the schoolyard it looked like somebody had taken several ambulances, turned them upside down, and then shook and dumped out all the medical supplies. For as many people that were there it was eerily quiet, other than the hum of the hovering helicopters waiting to take the wounded children to the hospital, and the sound of quiet sobbing coming from the Amish men, women, and children standing in groups together along the side of the road.”

Despite this horrific event that changed so many lives, the Amish people did not judge or condemn. Instead, they immediately announced that they had forgiven the murderer. Forgiveness is a central theme of Amish beliefs and they genuinely try to live by this verse from the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our transgressions as we forgive those who transgressed against us.” They are convinced that, “If you forgive, you will be forgiven; if you don’t forgive, you won’t be forgiven.” That afternoon the father of one of the girl’s who had been killed was heard to say, “He (Roberts) had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he’s standing before a just God.”

Hours after the killings, Amish members went to see Roberts’ widow, Marie, and her family, including her parents and parents-in-law, to express their condolences and offer forgiveness. Among those who took food to the family was Gertrude Huntington, a midwife and specialist on Amish culture, who had helped birth several of the murdered girls. “They (the Amish) know the children are innocent and are going to heaven and that they will join the girls in death. The hurt is very great, but they don’t balance the hurt with hate.”

Local pastor Rev. Robert Schenck told CNN how he witnessed the grandfather of one of the murdered girls teaching younger relatives not to hate Roberts for killing his granddaughter: “We were standing next to the body of this 13-year-old girl as the grandfather was tutoring the young boys. He was saying to the children, ‘We must not think evil of this man.’ It was one of the most touching things I have seen in twenty-five years of Christian ministry.”

On the television evening news, anchors Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, Brian Williams and others voiced their awe and respect for the Amish as the children were buried: “Dozens of horse-drawn buggies carried mourners to a simple hilltop ceremony, as four of the five children who were killed are laid to rest” … “Ironically the procession passed by the home of Charles Roberts, the truck driver who killed them and wounded six others” … “It was a lesson in dignity, forgiveness, incredible strength, and towering faith” … “Most of us feel anger and rage toward the shooter” … “An unimaginable crime, followed by an inconceivable response” … “The Amish are not calling for revenge, instead, they’re preaching something very different: forgiveness.”

The Amish mercy moved the nation. Within a week of the killing thousands of media stories were reporting on their ability to forgive, despite such awful carnage. The story traveled around the world—to Germany, Japan, England, France; it had enormous traction. “Instead of being one of those ‘two-night’ media circuses that we have on a regular basis, this story lasted for months,” says Bill McClay, a long-time observer of the Amish. “It had national and international impact. People were fascinated, obsessed. But why? Perhaps because it brought to the fore our confusion about forgiveness in our culture, something we esteem greatly as being in almost every way a good thing. Here forgiveness was seen in its most selfless and sacrificial form, it seemed almost inhuman in its purity, and this deeply challenged our understanding of it.”

Money poured in from all over the world to help the families. The Amish created the Nickel Mines Accountability Committee, which gave a portion of the funds to the Roberts family to ensure that they were looked after.

Roberts was buried a few days after the killing in a small cemetery a mile from the schoolhouse. Half of those who attended were Amish, including some who had just buried their daughters. Afterwards, they hugged Roberts’ widow and parents. Marie Roberts later sent a letter to her Amish neighbors to thank them for their kindness. In it she wrote, “Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you’ve given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you.”

As immediate as the forgiveness was, however, to forgive is not the same as to forget, and such actions did not soften the loss or mend hearts any faster. The community still had to deal with their grief and to find healing. “I’ve seen people stifle grief by trying to put it away and pretend it didn’t happen, only to have to deal with it later,” says Anne Beiler, who grew up in the Amish community. “I checked in with some of the women because we were concerned that the mothers might just sweep their feelings under the rug and act like it never happened. But they have a strong network of support where they are able to talk together about how they feel. One of them was having a bad day and exclaimed, ‘I just want to pull him out of the grave and I want to shoot him again and again!’ They’re very real, very much in touch with how they feel, they talk about their anger and their frustrations and how they miss their children.”

Family counselor Jonas Beiler agrees, “I’m glad when people express their need for revenge, as this is a necessary piece of the puzzle. God doesn’t want us to act it out and get ourselves into deeper trouble, but there are times when that thought of revenge gives us a little wind in our sails to help us get through the pain.”

Some members of the Amish community sought help from therapists. “I got a phone call asking if we could get in touch with Mr. Roberts’ widow in order to help the families with their forgiveness,” says Brad Aldrich, a local grief counselor. A shy man in his early thirties who speaks softly, he is protective of his neighbors and unwilling to invade their privacy. “We met in a fire hall about two weeks after the incident. All ten of the families were represented, and each was allowed to say what they wanted to Mrs. Roberts and her family. Frankly, we didn’t know what to expect and I was on edge before the meeting began. Then one of the Amish fathers, who had lost his daughter just fourteen days earlier, stood up and said with total sincerity and tears in his eyes, ‘I have not had the fortune of knowing you before today, but I would like this to start a friendship between our families. You’re welcome in my house any day that you want.’”

The first responders also set up a meeting with the families and the state police. “I’m not sure how many attended, but it included all ten families who were involved, and then all the policemen who were part of that day, and the ambulance drivers and helicopter pilots, as many as could get in the hall.” Among those who attended was Jonas Beiler, who was raised in a traditional Old Order Amish family but left because of his love of motorcycles and the openness of the sixties. He still retains his closeness to the community. “They shared with each other what they saw, heard, and experienced that day. All of them said that it was one of the most powerful meetings they had ever attended. If it had been in an atmosphere of anger or unforgiveness then some lawyer would have been saying you couldn’t talk to this or that person. But there was nothing like that going on. No litigation, no lawsuits, and nobody blaming anyone for not doing their job. I also heard that Charles Roberts’ mother went several times to hold the child that’s still in a vegetative state. She just cradled this little girl in her arms and said how healing it was for her to be able to do that.”

William McClay puts the Amish concept of forgiveness into this context: “It is completely dependent on their cosmological view of the world. The Amish at Nickel Mines immediately saw the massacre in terms of ‘if we don’t forgive, we don’t get into heaven.’ Forgiveness is moral protection for the afterlife and if they don’t forgive others then their own sins aren’t protected. Moreover, the Amish live with the expectation that the world doesn’t make sense. In a sharp contrast, people responded to the shootings in Virginia Tech by asking: How can we change the gun laws, improve counseling in the university, or set up an alert system? There is nothing like this in the discourse of the Amish community. Their response was: These things happen, this is how the world is, and all that is required is to be faithful and to do the things we are instructed to do. I don’t think they could have forgiven this massacre without such a metaphysical belief system. It is the warp and woof of their reality, it is as real to them as gravity is to us.”

For Roman Catholic priest Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, such forgiveness was astonishing. “The Amish way of unconditional forgiveness out of obedience to God is awesome, amazing, of a true mystery, of true and radical otherness. When the reality that one is trying to live by—God, Christ, the big lizard, whatever you call it—when it intersects with ordinary life it is an astounding thing. Something of another world enters this world. It is a sign of total grace in Christian terms. Such radical unconditional forgiveness is like this.”

Many responded that the Amish forgiveness was extraordinary and potentially transformative. “When the Amish community forgave the murderer they did it in a considered way,” says Susan Collin Marks, senior vice president of Search for Common Ground. ”It cut through all the talk about when and how you forgive, it made everything else in our daily lives appear small in comparison. The story spread everywhere because it was so extraordinary. These people found in their hearts the ability to forgive in a way that most of us couldn’t even imagine. They did something so counter-intuitive, so out of the ordinary, that it struck people with astonishment: If they can forgive the murder of their children, then what can we forgive in our own lives? It offered us all the possibility to create a more forgiving and loving world.”

Such immediate and inclusive forgiveness, however, was also met with skepticism, leading some to question not only its authenticity but even its appropriateness. “You cannot imagine the horror, it’s every horror that every parent, husband, lover, even every friend has,” says Monsignor Albacete. ”But the Amish forgiveness is not just words. They go at once to search out the man’s wife and embrace her, to accompany her in this moment of loss and shock for her, because she didn’t know. They don’t sue her because she should have known. They embrace her. They become friends. And yet,” he pauses, “in the end, to me, this could be dangerous. It is detached from the human context, the victim seems beside the point. Forgiveness doesn’t occur because of a change in relationships with the victim but because they are obeying the will of a transcendent power. It is noble, it is awesome, but it scares me more than it encourages me for it is not mediated by the human experience. Forgiveness, if achieved, has to be real. It has to deal with not simply obeying a transcendent power but also with what was done. The Amish have their relationship with God but it isn’t one that I would want to have—one of blind obedience.”

After writing a Boston Globe article about the Nickel Mines shooting entitled “Undeserved Forgiveness,” conservative commentator Jeff Jacoby was flooded with emails and letters from Christians, some of them very angry. ”They wrote to say that I should understand that this is what a Christian is expected to do, that God is love and that we must love everyone. And I would write back to some of them and say, ‘Are you trying to tell me that God loves Charles Roberts, the murderer in this case, as much as he loves the girl that he fired twenty bullets into? Do you really want me to believe that the God that you worship and the God who you say is love has equal love for both people?’ And in many cases they would write back and say, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.’”

While quick to show his respect for the Amish commitment to their beliefs and values, and sympathetic to what he describes as “a horrible, pre-mediated, and bloody atrocity,” Jacoby still is not convinced. An intense scholarly man in his thirties, he proceeds carefully. It is clear this is an important subject to him. “I admire the fact that they were trying as best they could to live up to their Christian ideals, even amidst such heartbreak. They take literally the admonitions in the New Testament to return good for evil, to pray for their enemies, and to turn the other cheek. At one level I admire that, but at a different level it really chilled me. I believe in God, but I don’t believe in a God who can’t distinguish between a murderer and the murder victim, between Hitler and the children dying in a gas chamber. God is with the victims. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where nobody got angry when children were murdered. I don’t think that makes the world a better place, and I’m very troubled by this idea that you just instantly forgive even the most horrific and evil act. How many of us would really want to live in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered? In which even the most horrific acts of cruelty were always and instantly forgiven? I believe that hatred is not always wrong, and forgiveness is not always deserved. And I firmly believe that there are times when you’re not supposed to forgive, when you are supposed to retain your anger, which, on occasion, has been a great engine of progress in civilization.’”

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 time to work through the pain?” For Ray, it is the value of community in Amish life. “The Amish can do it because they don’t have to be alone when the tough days come and the company doesn’t drop by anymore, or when friends don’t tap on your door and say, ‘how are you doing today?’ The Amish would say they have their God. From my perspective, they have each other. They have the support of their family and their friends, and they always have the community around them.” Ray concludes with a touch of sadness, perhaps even longing for the world he has left behind, “But what about people who don’t have that kind of community? Where do those people go? Where do they find refuge? Where is forgiveness rooted among those who don’t hold to a personal God?”

Each religion has its own insights and beliefs, many of which are radically different to the unqualified mercy extended by the Amish. “As I understand it, the Jewish response, for instance, isn’t so quick to forgive, and it isn’t so quick to spread love around.” Jeff Jacoby believes that Judaism teaches there are times when it is appropriate to hang on to anger, and that forgiveness has to be earned. “There’s no forgiveness unless it’s preceded by repentance. And repentance isn’t simply saying ‘if I offended anyone I am sorry,’ as politicians do so often when they are caught. It means you acknowledge that you did something wrong, you’re precise about what it was you did, you resolve never to do that wrongful deed again, you make restitution to the extent that you’re able to, and you direct your apology, again as best you’re able, to the one whom you wronged. And for that reason I think that murder, by definition, is unforgivable, whether it’s in Nickel Mines or in any other case where people’s first reaction is to say, ‘we forgive.’ You have no right to forgive. You weren’t the one who was murdered, and the one who was murdered is no longer here. So nobody has that right.”

For Jacoby this remains one of the core differences between Judaism and Christianity. It can be a tender spot for Jews who have experienced criticism by Christians, as if their insistence on the necessary steps for justice is lesser than the glory of freely given forgiveness. He muses that perhaps, “this is the great divide between the Jewish view of the world and the Christian view. The terrible event at Nickel Mines actually goes to the heart of the tension between them over these tough knotty issues of forgiveness and evil. Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe in forgiveness, but I question whether we can have a healthy or viable society that is based on this premise. Indeed, I found myself thinking how the Amish can only live this way because a few miles down the road there’s a police department that isn’t staffed by Amish people and they are not going to be so quick to forgive when somebody does something wrong. It is easier to survive like that when you are protected by a larger society that doesn’t live that way.”

There are also Amish members who have left the community and who remarked bitterly on the “unforgiving” treatment that they have received. Some have been shunned by their families and not seen them for years. They wondered why it was easier for the Amish to forgive a stranger who had murdered their children than to forgive their own children who had simply chosen to leave. Interestingly, there were reports that this apparent contradiction was not lost on the Amish. According to Janice Ballenger, “After the massacre some families did, in fact, reach out to their children, trying to repair the breach. It made them reevaluate the depth of the forgiveness they proclaim to have.”

It does appear, however, that the Amish understanding of unconditional forgiveness reflects their ability to forgive the per petrator without having to forgive the act. A s one Amish woman notes, “When I saw the bodies of the little girls at the viewing it just made me real mad, but mad at the evil, not at the shooter.” This attitude seems to immediately embrace the horror or revolt at what has been done, while also seeing the ignorance with which the perpetrator acted. In turn, this generates the capacity to forgive the ignorance.

“I knew that if there wasn’t an Amish person in the Roberts home to extend forgiveness that first day, there would be before the next day was out,” says Jonas Beiler. The Amish choose to handle such situations by immediately offering forgiveness. “Though it’s difficult to comprehend how they can forgive so quickly, it’s because it’s woven deep into their culture. They believe that Charles Roberts didn’t know what he was doing. Even if you bring overwhelming evidence to them showing how this man plotted and planned, it doesn’t matter. They don’t believe that the man knew what he was doing. And to some degree they’re right, for a good and sane man wouldn’t think or act in that way.”

The Amish forgiveness suggests that without it we can become locked in a place of bitterness, emotionally trapped in the story that we have been wronged. Their approach, whether agreed with or not, appears to lead them to a place of inner peace, as some of the parents claim it has. Or it may stifle the healing process prematurely, as some psychologists believe. “But,” as Professor McClay reminds us, “it is important to remember that the Amish understanding of forgiveness is at a far distance from the therapeutic approach dominating our era. It has nothing to do with feeling better in this life. It has nothing to do with asking for a better performance from the person being forgiven. If this occurs, they are wonderful benefits, grace notes. Rather, it’s entirely about making yourself ready for the next life and to present yourself before God in purity, to a degree that makes concerns about justice seem trivial by comparison.”

Late at night on October 12, almost two weeks after the shooting, the Amish community demolished the schoolhouse. By the time the sun rose, all traces of it had been removed. A new schoolhouse was built not far away, but this time closer to their homes.

“There was a group of three or four little Amish boys, maybe eight or nine years old, at the counseling session,” remembers Ballenger. “It was a few days after the Amish had torn down the old schoolhouse. The children were whispering together and what they said, I believe, goes to the heart of the complexities and contradictions of forgiveness. I heard one boy say to the other, ‘They can take down our school, they can take away our school, but they can’t take away the things we remember.’ And the other said, ‘Hush, you’re not supposed to say that. You know that we’re supposed to forgive.’”