by Jonas Beiler
When the media converged on our community on that tragic October day, I guess I was an ideal person for the media to talk to: someone who grew up in the Amish community, now a family counselor familiar with the effects of grief and tragedy on people’s lives. So I served as a contact for the media, doing countless interviews and sitting on various panels, almost all of which discussed the Amish response of forgiveness. It immediately became the theme for the media and the millions of people who watched in their homes or listened in their cars—this unbelievable ability to forgive the murderer of innocent children. But tragedy can change a community, and I wondered how the acts of one man would change ours.
Like many individuals, I had already experienced my share of personal turmoil over things I could not control. I knew that when these overwhelming experiences of hurt and loss occur, the very core of your being is altered. In fact, experiencing such tragedies in my life and being counseled through them led me to pursue becoming a counselor myself. Eventually I went back to school to do just that, and I studied quite a bit on my own as well. In May 1992, my wife and I opened the Family Information Center (later it became the Family Resource and Counseling Center), just up the road from Nickel Mines, a place where people from our community come to find healing from a variety of ailments, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual.
As a trained counselor I spend a lot of time listening to people pour out the pain of their lives, and can see with my own eyes how it has affected them. Nearly every time I speak with a couple whose marriage has been torn, or visit with a family who has lost a child, I am reminded that there are some hurts in life that never completely disappear.
But now, after the shooting, I understand even better how tragedies can affect individuals and communities. I think about people in places like Columbine, or the areas in the South affected by Hurricane Katrina, and I can relate to the trauma they faced and continue to live with. Our community felt shattered after the shootings in that small schoolhouse. Sometimes, as I drove those backcountry roads or stopped to talk to Amish men, I could hardly bear to think about the pain those girls’ parents felt, or the innocence that our community had lost. But tragedies can also bring communities closer together if forgiveness is allowed to take hold, and if any good can come out of our loss, it is this unique practice of forgiveness that characterizes the Amish response to evil and injustice.
Word of the Amish community’s decision to forgive the shooter and his family spread around the world through the media in a matter of days (ironically, from a culture with little or no access to the media). This in itself seems like a miracle to me—if you or I wanted to market a product or a concept to the entire world, we could spend millions of dollars and take years and probably still not accomplish it. Yet the Amish, who do not own phones or computers, captured the world’s attention with a simple, seemingly preposterous act.
While the public was fascinated with the Amish take on forgiveness, they didn’t quite know what to do with it. Some people refused to believe that anyone could offer genuine forgiveness to their children’s killer. They suspected the Amish were either lying or deluding themselves. Others believed the forgiveness was genuine but thought the stoic Amish must be robotic, lacking the normal emotions experienced by you and me, to offer up such a graceful sentiment.
Neither is the case. Both misunderstandings find their origins in mainstream culture’s false perception of what forgiveness truly is, and the state of mind of someone offering such unusual forgiveness. The Amish are neither liars nor zombies. They are just like you and me, and offer a sincere forgiveness with no strings attached and no dependence on any reciprocal feelings or actions. But they also hurt as deeply as the rest of us over the loss of a child or a loved one. True forgiveness is never easy, and the Amish struggle with the same emotions of anger and retribution that we all do. But they choose to forgive in spite of those feelings.
ABOUT A year after the shooting, I heard a story about one of the young girls who had been in the schoolhouse when the shooter entered. She was a survivor. She, along with her family and her community, had forgiven the man who killed those girls. But forgiveness does not mean that all the hurt or anger or feelings associated with the event vanish. Forgiveness, in the context of life’s major disappointments and hurts, never conforms to the old Sunday-school saying, “Forgive and forget.” In reality, it’s next to impossible to forget an event like the shooting at her schoolhouse.
This young survivor was working in the local farmer’s market when she noticed a man standing quietly off to the side of her counter. As she tried to concentrate on her work she found herself growing more and more agitated over the man’s presence. He seemed to be watching all the girls behind the counter very closely, occasionally starting forward as if he were going to approach, then stopping and standing still again, always watching and fidgeting with the bag he carried with him. There was something eerie about him. Was it the way he stood, or how intently he seemed to stare at them?
All around him the farmer’s market bustled with activity. The Amish were often the center of attention for first-time visitors to the market, so the Amish girl was somewhat used to being stared at, but something about this particular man made her want to hurry up and finish helping the customer she was with and then disappear into the back of the store. The difference between a curious stare and the way this stranger looked at her seemed obvious and stirred something inside her from the past.
Meanwhile, other customers walked between the long rows of stands, eyeing the goods, making their cash purchases. The vendors took the money from each sale and crammed it into old-fashioned cash registers or old money boxes. The floor was bare cement smoothed by years of wandering customers. The exposed ceiling showed iron crossbeams, pipes, and electrical wires. The whole place smelled of produce, fried food, and old books.
For many people outside Lancaster County, farmer’s markets are the only place they interact with the Amish and their conservative dress—the men wearing hats, mostly black clothing with single-colored shirts, and long beards; the women with their head coverings and long hair pulled into tight buns. Amish from Pennsylvania often travel to New York City, Philadelphia, or Baltimore to sell their wares: fresh fruits and vegetables, homemade pies and cookies, quilts and handmade furniture. For some of the Amish, that is their main interaction with people outside their community as well. The Amish are hardworking, provide quality products, are almost always outgoing in that environment, and give friendly customer service.
But this particular girl, only months removed from the shooting that took place in the Nickel Mines school, got more and more nervous—she felt her breathing becoming shallow and faster, so much so that her chest rose and fell visibly. She looked around, but no one else seemed to notice the man or her reaction to his presence. Her gaze darted from here to there, first looking at him, wanting to keep an eye on him, then quickly looking away if he looked in her direction. She tried to help the customer in front of the counter, but concentrating was difficult.
Then she saw him approach. He strode forward, fishing around for something in his bag, then stuck his hand down deep and drew an object out with one fast pull.
The girl cried out and fled to the back of the stand, shaking.
The man pulled the object out of his bag and placed it on the counter. It was a Bible, a gift to the workers at the farmer’s market stand. He disappeared among the hundreds of browsing shoppers. The gentleman had no idea the scare he had just given the girl. No one outside the stand had noticed that something intense had happened. Everything continued on as normal—the shoppers wandered and the vendors shouted out their sales to the lingering crowds.
But in the back, the traumatized girl wept.
Not too long before, her schoolhouse had been hemmed in by police cruisers and emergency vehicles while the sound of a handful of helicopters sliced through the sky, and the thunderous crack of rapid gunshots had echoed back at her from the rolling hills.
Forgiveness is never easy.
DURING THOSE solemn winter months following the tragedy in our community, my wife, Anne, was running errands in the countryside close to the place where the shootings had taken place. That particular area of southern Lancaster County, about sixty miles east of Philadelphia, was an alternating blanket of farms and forest. The trees stood bare. The fields in November and December and January were rock hard and flat. Where spring and summer bring deep green, and autumn blazes with color, winter often feels quiet and stark.
Anne also grew up Amish, and we both understood the questions rising within that community in the wake of the killings: Should their schools have more secure steel doors with dead bolts to keep intruders out? Should they install telephones in the one-room schoolhouses in case of emergency, a serious break from their traditional decision to shun most modern conveniences? Should the gates that guard the entrance to most of their schools’ stone driveways be kept closed and locked to prevent strangers from driving onto the premises?
Anne came to a stop sign at a T in the road. She could only turn right or left. The roads rolled with the gently sloping landscape and curved along the small streams. A handful of scattered homes broke up the farmland that seemed to go on almost indefinitely. But as she paused at that intersection preparing to turn, she noticed something: directly in front of her was a one-room Amish schoolhouse, not the one where the shooting took place, but one of the many within a ten-mile radius.
Most of those schools look the same: a narrow stone or dirt lane leading from the road up to a painted cement-block building with a shingled roof and a small, covered porch; a school bell perched on the roof’s peak; separate outhouses for the girls and the boys. In some of the schools’ large yards you can see the outline of a base path where the children play softball. Some even have a backstop. The school grounds often take up an acre or so of land in the middle of a farmer’s field, usually donated by one of the students’ parents, surrounded by a three- or four-rail horse fence.
Yet there was something about this simple school that made my wife stop her car and park there for a minute. Part of it had to do with her thoughts of the children at the Nickel Mines school and all they had been through. She was also affected by visions of the parents who had lost children and their long road ahead, knowing as she does how heart wrenching it is to lose a child. But on that particular day, in the wake of all the questions brought up within the Amish community about how they would deal with this disaster, there was one thing that immediately stood out.
The front gate was wide open.
We have all seen what happens in a community when people allow unforgiveness to rule their hearts. Lawsuits abound, separating the perpetrators and their families from those who were wronged, and in this separation the healing process is slowed dramatically. When forgiveness is withheld, walls are built within a community and division occurs, leading to isolation and further misunderstanding. Anger and bitterness take hold.
The parents of those girls who were killed, along with their family members and neighbors, decided not to allow the shooting to separate them further from their neighbors. There were no lawsuits filed by the victims’ families against the shooter’s estate or the emergency services or the government, as is so often the case. They would not permit anger or fear to drive them into installing telephones or other modern conveniences that their way of life had survived so long without. They would trust God to protect them, leaving open the gates to their hearts and their communities, and move forward with forgiveness.
Given what happened, could that really be possible?
Amish buggy at dusk
CHAPTER TWO
Nickel Mines, Asleep
MIDNIGHT. OCTOBER 2, 2006. I was home sleeping, but having spent my lifetime in Lancaster and having driven those roads late at night, I know how bright the stars can be, how dark the shadows. Knowing the intersection of Mine Road and White Oak Road, I imagine it was quiet as usual. The unassuming convergence of these two roads—Mine Road running north and south, White Oak crossing it from east to west—forms the small town of Nickel Mines. The occasional milk truck making nightly rounds has little traffic to contend with, save for a raccoon or deer darting across the road. A large number of the households surrounding that small intersection are Amish, their farms and businesses tucked away in the hills and rolling valleys. But there are also many non-Amish (or English, as the Amish refer to us) who live in Nickel Mines. Still, with so many Amish in the area, night seems to come earlier, since fewer houses have electricity to power a television, or lights in every room.
During the day, Nickel Mines is a peaceful place: silos, trees, and row upon row of corn and tobacco define most of the horizon. The roads are barely wide enough for two cars to pass, and the electrical wires following alongside those narrow roads do not always follow the long driveways back to the farms—Amish farms do not need electricity, and the power lines pass them by. During that time of year, trees are shifting their colors from a late-summer green to shades of yellow and orange and red. Any corn still standing is drying out, the color of a scarecrow. The silos are tall, some already filled with a mixture of hay and corn for the winter months. The sky is large and inviting.
But at night all is quiet and dark: there is no glow of some distant city, and the streetlights can be counted on one hand. A stranger walking those back roads (some of them still lined with eight-foot-tall, unharvested cornstalks) might find the absolute quiet disconcerting. Any hint of a breeze will set those cornstalks to talking, their dried-out husks sliding against each other like a million pieces of brittle sandpaper.
Nickel Mines began its existence as a small mining town in the early 1700s, but it took over one hundred years for the mine to become a success, when in the 1850s a large vein of nickel was discovered. Soon after that, businessman Joseph Wharton, namesake of the renowned Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, combined the discovery of nickel with his own prestigious connections and convinced the government to go ahead with the “Shield” nickel, America’s first five-cent piece that did not contain precious metals. The coin, engraved with a large shield on one side and the number 5 on the other side, was first minted in 1866.
During the height of its success, the nickel mine employed over 150 workers and in total mined 4.5 million pounds of nickel from as many as twelve separate shafts. In some years, Nickel Mines produced nearly 25 percent of the world’s nickel, but by 1890 the mines were stripped, and mining came to an end in 1893. Those fertile, rolling hills quickly turned into farmers’ fields.1
The Amish had begun settling in eastern Pennsylvania as early as 1736,2 but history has little to say about the relationship between the Amish people and the mining village. One would assume they intermingled peaceably—in those days the Amish way of life was less visibly different than it is in the twenty-first century.
Yet in 2006 the intersection forming Nickel Mines remained, surrounded by many Amish, and the population would appear to have barely increased from the heyday of the nickel mines. Horses still pulled plows through the fields, and small Amish boys drove the teams as their fathers hefted the hay bales onto the wagons. The old church, Nickel Mines Mennonite Church, remained from the days of the mines, but most of the buildings at the crossroads had been added much more recently. Where the long farm lanes joined the main roads, small stands advertised baskets of produce or baked goods.
The Nickel Mines auction house was situated at the crossroads. An aging roof covered the stucco exterior, surrounded by a large, mostly unpaved parking lot. There was usually a milk truck in the lot: some local driver who needed a place to park his rig after a long night of work. The auction house was quiet most of the week, except on Thursday evenings, when visitors came from all around in the hopes of finding a deal.
I went to the Nickel Mines Auction many years in search of spare tires or wheels for the automotive business I owned at the time. On that night I remember the building bus
tling and heaving with people, the convincing shouts of auctioneers, and the discreet, pensive nods of bidders. Hopeful people entered the building and passed by those on the way out, their arms full of purchases.
But just after midnight, as the October night drifted toward morning, the auction house would have held only silence; its windows dark, its doors locked, its parking lot empty.
A few hundred yards up White Oak from the auction house is a public swimming pool, home of the Nickel Mines Pool and Swim Club. To me it has always seemed out of place in the middle of all that farmland. In the summer months children swarm inside its chain-link fence like ants in brightly colored costumes, a strange contrast to the quiet, natural surroundings. A white three-rail fence surrounds the stone parking lot. Shouts ring out along with splashes, ice cream melts on children’s faces, and cars pull in and out of the small parking lot on those hot midsummer days. But by October it is locked up and the pool is covered, a quiet slab of concrete surrounded by chain link topped with barbed wire in the middle of a Pennsylvania paradise.
The Nickel Mines Amish schoolhouse was located just across from the swimming pool on White Oak, and was one of many Amish schools within a ten-mile radius. The school, clearly viewed from the road, had side and back windows that offered views of open fields in every direction. With attendance hovering around twenty-six children, the school served Amish families within walking distance. A stone lane, maybe fifty yards long, led through a gated fence onto the acre or so of land and up to the small, block building painted yellow. A few of the windows had yellow “Have a Happy Day” smiley-face stickers on them. The lane stopped directly in front of a covered porch that stretched the entire width of the school. Two outhouses (approximately fifteen yards to the right of the building as you faced the front door) served as restrooms for the children. Flanked by only a few large trees and recently harvested cornfields, the small schoolhouse blended in well with the serene backdrop.
