Hours after Charles Carl Roberts IV shot 10 female students inside West Nickel Mines Amish School on Oct. 2, members of the Amish community visited the gunman's family.

In the days following the massacre, which left five girls dead and five seriously wounded, the Amish buried their own and also attended the funeral of Roberts, who took his own life after shooting the girls.

The Amish community prayed — not only for the victims and their families but for the Roberts family, which included his widow, Marie, and the couple's three children.

And in an act of faith that inspired  and mystified many, they forgave.

In a book titled, "Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy," authors Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt and David L. Weaver-Zercher examine the Amish understanding of forgiveness and explore how and why they reacted with grace and dignity to the killings.

The writers discussed the book and signed copies Sunday at Lancaster County Mennonite Historical Society.

Kraybill, a nationally known expert and author on Amish culture, said the swiftness with which the Amish extended forgiveness attracted an onslaught of media interest that sometimes rivaled that of the tragedy itself.

"I talked to an Amish carpenter after the shootings, and he didn't understand why it was such a big deal," Kraybill, an Elizabethtown College sociology professor, told a group of about 75 Sunday. "But people just didn't understand. They couldn't grasp the fact that the Amish were reaching out to the family of the man who killed their children."

Kraybill said there are several features to the Amish way of forgiveness.

For instance, the Amish follow the Lord's Prayer, which says literally that if you don't forgive, you will not be forgiven, he said. They also believe in expressing forgiveness, not in words, but in actions — attending Charles Roberts' funeral, taking food to the family and making donations to a fund for the Roberts family.

To the Amish, Nolt said, forgiveness is a decision, not necessarily an emotion.

"Forgiveness is a good thing, but it's also a complicated thing," Nolt, a history professor at Goshen College in Indiana, said. "The Amish knew they forgave immediately, and they acted on it immediately, even though they really didn't feel it emotionally at that point. That aspect of it would be a process, and they knew that. They accepted that."

In preparing to write the book, the three authors approached Herman Bontrager, a member of the Nickel Mines Accountability Committee, to gauge the Amish response, said Weaver-Zercher, a religious studies professor at Messiah College.

"We were going to write it either way," he said, "but we certainly would have preferred the Amish community approve. What resulted was, we got calls from some of the victims' families saying they wanted to talk to us. If we were going to do this, they wanted to be a part of it. They wanted it portrayed accurately."

Kraybill said six members of the Amish community read a draft of the manuscript and the biggest concern they had was the title, which could not be changed at that point.

"They felt it should say 'God's Grace,' " Kraybill said. "They didn't want to appear that they were being put on a pedestal."

"Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy" was published this month by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, and costs $24.95.

E-mail: jtodd@lnpnews.com