Five Children Dead in Paradise

I’ve been sitting here all morning trying to get to work and I can’t. I keep thinking about that little white schoolhouse outside of Paradise, Pennsylvania, a few hours drive from where I grew up, where eleven little girls were shot yesterday and where five are now dead. I get teary every time I try to write about it. There have been a lot of school shootings recently and they are all horrible but this one is tearing me apart — maybe because it is so close to my home but more probably because of the victims, little Amish girls whose families and communities have lived for over a century apart from the rest of the world.

The Amish believe in the Biblical dictate “go ye out from among them and keep ye separate”. They believe that is the only way to lead humble, godly lives in a world that is sinking deeper and deeper into depravity all the time. But even leading their plain lives, the Amish have always known that violence and evil is right there beside them. They chose to believe that their humility and their faith will ultimately serve them and, in a spiritual sense, I am sure it does. But that just makes yesterday’s horrors all the more horrible.

Nothing could have prevented it. That’s the sad truth. I don’t even want to think about what might have happened in the life of Charles Roberts, the executioner of those little girls. People are calling him a monster and, clearly, there was a monster inside o him. But he was a husband and father of many years. I can’t get those two ideas to co-exist in my mind. He had three children that he had just taken to school before he went to another school and started shooting little girls. How can a normal mind wrap around that?

I think about his children and what he has done to them. They have lost their father by his own hand which is terrible enough but they will have to live the rest of their lives with the stigma of being the children of a man who one day murdered five children and shot six more. How will they ever get over that? Didn’t he think of that before he did what he did? No. He couldn’t have.

There is a scene in the movie “Witness”, a movie set in Pennsylvania’s Amish country, in which Harrison Ford, a wounded cop hiding out in an Amish home, sees a bunch of teenage boys humiliating a young Amish man because he is a pacifist and will not fight back. Ford, dressed in Amish clothes, is anything but a pacifist and he steps in and leaves the bullies bloody and beaten. The Amish boy who he defends grinningly tells his friends, “that’s my cousin, that’s my cousin.” Even pacifists have their limits. That schoolhouse in Paradise could have used a movie hero yesterday.

The Amish take pride in caring for one another (though ”pride” is not the word they would use.) They take it as their responsibility to care for one another. Here in Gloucester there is a big controversy going on because a woman died in a fire yesterday because firetrucks did not get to her in time. Budget cuts necessitated the closing of the nearest firestation and by the time the fire department arrived she was dead. In Amish country that would not have happened. Her neighbors would have been there pour buckets of water on her house and pulling her from the fire. The Amish don’t wait for the firetrucks to come to help.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. There is so much sadness here. Five dead children, six more who may not make it, three children who will grow up without a father and, worse, in the shadow of a father who was a murderer. A dead woman in Gloucester. So much anger and outrage. There is something so wrong in all of this. We need to take better care of one another but even when we do we are only a heartbeat away from evil. I have more questions than answers and very little hope of understanding what is going on.

Say a prayer and thanks for reading.