Learning to forgive

The man who killed or wounded 10 Amish girls earlier this week has become the devil incarnate for some observers but an object of forgiveness for those he hurt the most deeply.

How does that happen?

It's a question many Americans have asked themselves, as images of horse-drawn buggies and their sad-but-peaceful-looking occupants rolled across our TV screens while reporters and commentators struggled to understand the dichotomy of such senseless violence — without the predictable rage.

After nearly a week of what one Amish bishop called "our 9/11," an author who knows the community told The Associated Press: "They know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent ... and they know that they will join them in death," said Gertrude Huntington, a Michigan researcher who has written a book about children in Amish society.

"The hurt is very great," Huntington said. "But they don't balance the hurt with hate."

Does that response come simply from self-control or community expectation, or is it something deeper in their religious mandate that extends mercy without justice before the deep grieving process has even begun?

Fred Luskin, director and co-founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, said in studying forgiveness over time, "I think there has to be some processing of the grief response before one can come to a genuine experience of forgiveness. On some level what you are forgiving is your own outrage," which those who have been through such trauma know can often come much later, after the initial shock has worn off.

But that said, "parts of what they are doing are so laudatory and separate from even forgiveness, which is that they are not punishing this person's family," he told the Deseret Morning News. In reaching out to killer Charles Roberts' family and even inviting them to the victims' funerals, the Amish are more in keeping with "what Jesus would do" than most.

Yet he wonders about "the inner quality of that forgiveness. I don't know how you can do that without feeling some of the pain and struggling with your own loss and woundedness," though he said that processing such feelings "doesn't have to take as long as most people do.