Moving On

I read yesterday that early in the morning heavy equipment rolled in and razed the little white one room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania where ten Amish girls were shot by a madman last week. It was a decision on the part of the community that the building should be torn down and, within hours, it was razed and the remains carried away and now the community will not have that daily reminder of the horror that happened there.

I have spent so much time thinking about this entire situation because it is one of those instances where there is no resolution and there never will be. A man whom no one suspected of being capable of such a deed went into a schoolroom filled with the very most innocent of victims and assassinated five and left five more in critical condition then killed himself. He left a few notes that don’t provide much information — bitterness over a lost child, memories of abusing other children who, as adults, don’t know what he was talking about. This is the sort of situation where no one knows what the hell happened. No one could have stopped it and no one can stop it from happening again. It is a complete mystery.

And the Amish, in their stoic, practical, quiet Christianity have behaved so admirably in every sense that it humbles us all. They have extended forgiveness to the killer. I read that at his funeral half of the attendees were Amish people in traditional dress. They went to pray for the soul of the man who murdered five of their own and to offer comfort and support to his wife and children. What a display of Christian goodness!

I read about a group of knitters and spinners who have undertaken a project to spin the yarn and knit it into shawls for the mothers, sisters, and grandmothers of the lost girls and also for the wife of the killer. It is part of the Shawl Ministry which I think is such a warm and tender movement. I wrote about this beautiful gesture in another forum and was barraged with comments mocking the idea that someone would spin and knit for Amish women. Carrying coals to Newcastle one woman called it. I was thunderstruck.

It turned into quite an unpleasant little cyber-war and I finally had to back out. That level of mean-spiritedness is not something I can fathom nor choose to have in my life. But I have been thinking about it and thinking about how the Amish whose community was violated could quietly and in Christian goodness forgive and move on while others who have no connection to the situation would mock and deride women offering a beautiful gesture of comfort. An opportunity to publically advertise their charity, one person said. An unneeded gesture another said. How can people be so black-hearted? Yet, the Amish would counsel forgiveness here too. People often cannot help their unlovingness. We cannot look into the heart of another and know what is there, they remind us.

So the schoolhouse is gone and the fields will be plowed and corn will grow and the living will heal and move on. Some of us will never forget what happened in Pennsylvania and it will live in us as a reminder that we cannot know what is going on inside another. We must trust that to a power greater than ourselves and, for our own sanity, we must forgive and release attachment. Hopefully as a better person for having let go. Evil can beget evil. Forgiveness is the antidote to that. Someday people driving down that road through rows of corn will say how pretty that place is and someone else will say that something horrible once happened around there somewhere but they forget what. And life goes on.

Thanks for reading.