As we await the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group about what “to do” in Iraq, I can't help but be struck by the poverty of our imaginations. Just what, if anything, can we do to shore up the new Iraqi government, to help stabilize the Mideast or to prosecute the “war on terror”?
I have a suggestion that I doubt the wise old men and women will make: Let's imitate the Amish of Lancaster County, Pa.
Stop for a moment to compare our national response to 9/11 to the Amish response to the recent school massacre. It has become common to speak of 9/11 as a day when America lost its innocence (although Native Americans and African-Americans might wonder what this innocence consisted of). If that lost innocence means anything, it means that we were shocked to be taught in the most violent of ways that some people hate us enough to kill us. Our reaction was a “realistic” one: “Let's kill them before they can kill any more of us.”
How did the Amish react to their tragedy?
It's easy to relegate the Amish, with their buggies and antiquated hats, to quaint postcards. True, they eschew many of the modern conveniences that most of us take for granted. They refuse to drive cars, to have their picture taken, to wear the latest styles or to own the most recent technological gadgets. They do not have air conditioning or even electric fans — a fact brought home to me when our church in Indiana visited an Amish home, with sweat dripping down our faces, on a 100-degree summer day.
While some of us might admire their tenacity, we no doubt might wonder if this kind of life is really necessary. After all, does having electricity compromise your Christian witness? While not driving a car might be good for the environment, it seems a necessity for most of us. What about education? Not having an education past the eighth grade seems terribly irresponsible. Aren't the Amish seriously limiting the future possibilities for their children? Come to think of it, this train of thought might lead us to conclude that the Amish have got it all wrong. To what does their way of life witness, other than a stubborn refusal to join the modern world?
And yet, the Amish way of life produced a remarkable response to the tragic deaths of their own children, killed in a schoolhouse shooting by one of their own. They offered forgiveness to Marie Roberts, the wife of the murderer. They invited the widow to their own children's funerals. More than 30 Amish attended the killer's funeral. And finally, they requested that all donations be shared with the widow and her children.
Such a response confounded many observers. How could they act so generously toward the perpetrator and his family? Aren't they offering forgiveness too soon, before there is any repentance or accountability? Isn't such forgiveness even dishonoring the dead, jumping to forgive before the children are even buried? They are not following the “normal” stages of grief.
And yet, the Amish are long practiced in the art of not needing to be “normal.” Their extraordinary witness to the practices of forgiveness and peacemaking cannot be separated from the seeming oddness of their way of life. Their willingness to attend the funeral of the man who murdered their children is of a piece with their refusal to wear the latest styles or use the most convenient mode of transportation. They embody what the writer Flannery O'Connor once claimed: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”
But where does this leave us? If the Amish's peculiar way of living is deeply related to their extraordinary way of forgiving, then does this mean that most of us are “locked out” of practicing such profound communal gestures?
But such a question assumes that the Amish are an alien body to the church universal. Rather it is the case that, in baptism, we are members of the same body, the body of Christ. We do not of course live with the Amish, but we are nevertheless related through Christ. Saint Athanasius once compared the coming of Christ to a king who enters a particular town, and in so doing, elevates the spirit of the whole community. God becoming flesh elevates all of humanity. In a similar vein, the holiness of one member or community lifts up the whole.
This does not mean that Christians simply bask in the glow of the Amish witness. As Baptist Christians, we live in a peculiar relation to the nations in which we find ourselves citizens. Perhaps we will find ourselves hated, not as Americans, but as followers of Christ. But then we will also discover that peace that passes understanding.
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— Beth Newman is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]