"Shoot me first," 13-year-old Marian Fisher told Charles Carl Roberts IV as he stood over 10 Amish girls last Oct. 2 in the little wooden schoolhouse in Bart Township.

Roberts straight away shot Marian and four other students to death at the West Nickel Mines School on White Oak Road. He wounded the rest and then committed suicide.

Within hours, numerous Old Order Amish from the Georgetown area publicly forgave Roberts. They also reached out socially and financially to Roberts' widow, Marie, and have continued to do so in the months since the crime.

Their olive branch quickly eclipsed the story of the massacre and is now the subject of a book by Plain Sect scholars Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt and David L. Weaver-Zercher.

Published this month by Jossey-Bass, "Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy" is both lyrical and empirical in its analysis.

Praise was the common worldwide reaction to Amish forgiveness. Still, as the authors recount, the gesture was all but unfathomable to a modern culture fueled by pride, militarism and vengeance.

And it begged questions.

How could a people who ostracize their own wayward church members spontaneously forgive outsiders? Was there a lesson to be learned? Or were the Amish diminishing themselves by glossing over a heinous act?

"The debate continues," said Weaver-Zercher, who joined Kraybill in an interview recently at Elizabethtown College's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.

But the book nimbly negotiates the complex psychological terrain of forgiveness. And it illustrates clearly the logic that undergirds Amish practices.

Old Order members absorb from the cradle up a sense of humility and submission, according to "Amish Grace." Their brand of Christianity emphasizes martyrdom and service to the community and holds that they must complete the divine circle of forgiveness.

Their gentle response to unprecedented carnage was thus sincere and instinctive, said Kraybill, an Elizabethtown College sociology professor and nationally known expert on the Amish.

But the circumstances of Nickel Mines provide no template for forgiveness, the scholars said. And, while the world marveled at their example, the Amish struggled behind the scenes with stress.

"They have a profound sense of God's providence," Kraybill said. "I do think it makes the task of forgiveness easier."

Horror of the thing
The violence unleashed by Roberts, a family man and milk-truck driver, pierced the heart of "the last safe place" on a cloudless fall day almost a year ago.

"Doors are unlocked and sometimes stand open" at the 190 rural Amish schools scattered around the county, "Amish Grace" points out. "Some of the younger children would likely not recognize a pistol if they saw one."

What one Amish man called "our 9/11" prompted a flurry of media calls to Kraybill and to Weaver-Zercher, chair of the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies at Messiah College, and Nolt, a history professor at Goshen College in Indiana.

The bad tidings evoked an image of the one-room school for Nolt. The professor lived previously in Willow Street and often commuted with his wife to Atglen via White Oak Road.

Phoning in last week from Indiana, Nolt recalled immediately switching on the TV news that day.

Kraybill said that the Internet helped ensure that "This event received more publicity than any other event in Amish history."

The killings also launched a national dialogue on forgiveness and might even have tempered the reaction to the slayings last spring at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Kraybill said.

More than 2,400 stories about forgiveness appeared in the first week alone after the Nickel Mines shootings, Kraybill said.

An agent pressed him to write a book "on the horror of the thing," Kraybill recalled. However, he said, "We were interested in the forgiveness story ... hoping it would keep the conversation going."

He and his colleagues researched and wrote the book over several months beginning in November 2006; they plan to donate the proceeds to the Mennonite Central Committee.

The $24.95 book, which was checked by half a dozen Amish readers before its release, comes highly recommended by veteran social justice journalist Bill Moyers and other scholarly prepublication reviewers.

Kraybill, Nolt and Weaver-Zercher will give talks and sign books at several events this week in Lancaster.

The men have collaborated on works about the Plain Sects before.

But they said they learned much while speaking about Nickel Mines to more than three dozen Amish, including the families of the victims.

"This really sparked a lot of questions about what do the Amish believe," Nolt said, "what do I believe."

"The Amish themselves were surprised that we were surprised" by their graciousness, Weaver-Zercher noted.

Many sources cited the Lord's Prayer and Matthew 18:21-22, in which "seventy times seven," as the basis for their understanding of forgiveness.

The Amish practice of forgiveness springs from Uffgevva, an ethic of giving up self and acquiescing to God's will.

According to "Amish Grace," children are trained to defer to others and to mute their anger through the "cultural osmosis" of parental example and stories about the church's some 2,500 martyrs.

"The stories cultures tell about themselves play a part in what they become," Weaver-Zercher pointed out.

Still, any society has a hard time defining forgiveness, which, in this case, opened the door to reconciliation with the Roberts family. Many people confuse forgiving, which is unconditional, with pardoning a remorseful offender.

And so Kraybill and Nolt traveled to Kalamazoo, Mich., to meet with Wayne Ramsey, Fetzer Institute go-to expert on forgiveness philosophy.

Refusing to hold a grudge is the baseline meaning of forgiveness, they learned, but not everyone considers that a virtue.

Forgiving can be a form of self-loathing, according to some psychologists; "Amish Grace" cites complaints by Boston Globe writer Jeff Jacoby and other media critics that the Amish reaction to the slaughter was overly fatalistic and restrained.

Some Amish contacts admitted that they were angry after the shootings, the book relates, but they did not typically direct rage toward, or condemn, Roberts.

"Extending forgiveness too quickly can be hurtful to the victim," Weaver-Zercher acknowledged. Yet, letting go of anger yields mental and physical benefits.

"It's a way to move on," Weaver-Zercher said, "to accept the evil in life."

Amish tears
Not that church members were letting Roberts off the hook. Had he lived, the authors point out, the Amish would have expected him to go to jail.

According to "Amish Grace," the researchers found plenty of tears but no evidence that young or old were pressured to forgive before they were ready.

Amish families grieve just as intensely as outsiders, the book says, and they also wonder about a world "where little girls are shot in the head.

"Every Amish person with whom we spoke deferred in the end to divine mystery," the trio wrote.

The community has yet to complete its emotional "journey," according to "Amish Grace," which details Amish coping tools such as special dress, poems, circle letters and bereavement groups.

Some members of the community sought counseling to help them deal with the trauma, according to the book.

"Amish Grace" also examines the seeming inconsistency between forgiveness and shunning.

Amish people believe in justice and punishment but reserve the authority to discipline their own wayward church members, the authors write:

Shunning "logically follows from the Amish view of spiritual care" that encourages offenders to return to the fold. This social sanction is not absolute, despite popular conception.

Practical concerns determined as well that the Nickel Mines school be dismantled last year.

Workmen razed the building not as a purification rite, says "Amish Grace," but to help youngsters get past the tragedy.

Kraybill and his colleagues reflect on the significance of the Nickel Mines episode in "Amish Grace and the Rest of Us," a 13th and final chapter they deemed necessary only after getting their project under way.

The book points out, and many pundits missed, that forgiving Roberts was fairly uncomplicated because he was dead and posed no more threat.

On the other hand, the authors concluded, "the Amish response was a welcome contrast to a barrage of suicide bombings and religiously fueled rage."

Less clear is its impact on the larger world.

What if the United States had responded to Sept. 11 in this way? asked Nolt, echoing a rhetorical question raised after the shootings.

"What would have happened if George Bush had been Amish?" The question is simplistic, Nolt asserted. "If George Bush had been Amish, he wouldn't have been president."

Forgiveness offers no easy formula, Weaver-Zercher said. "Amish Grace" does not exhort readers to walk in Amish footsteps.

But it does provide a vantage point from which to view modern culture and to ponder changing it for the better.

"The question is how to get there," Weaver-Zercher said. "We outside the Amish culture are probably going to get there in a different way."

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Jon Rutter is a staff writer for the Sunday News. His e-mail address is jrutter@lnpnews.com.
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