Table of Contents | What really stunned the country about the attack on the small Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania was that the Amish community itself simply refused to hate what had hurt them. "Do not think evil of this man," the Amish grandfather told his children at the mouth of one little girl's grave. "Do not leave this area. Stay in your home here," the Amish delegation told the family of the murderer. "We forgive this man." No, it was not the murders, not the violence, that shocked us; it was the forgiveness that followed it for which we were not prepared. It was the lack of recrimination, the dearth of vindictiveness that left us amazed. Baffled. Confounded. It was the Christianity we all profess but which they practiced that left us stunned. Never had we seen such a thing. Here they were, those whom our Christian ancestors called "heretics," who were modeling Christianity for all the world to see. The whole lot of them. The entire community of them. Thousands of them at one time. The real problem with the whole situation is that down deep we know that we had the chance to do the same. After the fall of the Twin Towers we had the sympathy, the concern, the support of the entire world. You can't help but wonder, when you see something like this, what the world would be like today if, instead of using the fall of the Twin Towers as an excuse to invade a nation, we had simply gone to every Muslim country on earth and said, "Don't be afraid. We won't hurt you. We know that this is coming from only a fringe of society and we ask your help in saving others from this same kind of violence." "Too idealistic," you say. Maybe. But since we didn't try, we'll never know, will we? Instead, we have sparked fear of violence in the rest of the world ourselves. So much so, that they are now making nuclear bombs to save themselves. From whom? From us, of course. For the 3,000 dead in the fall of the Twin Towers at the hands of 19 religious fanatics, we have more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers now killed in military action, more than 20,000 wounded, more than 10,000 permanently disabled. We have thousands of widows and orphans, a constitution at risk, a president that asked for and a Congress that just voted to allow torture and a national infrastructure in jeopardy for want of future funding. And nobody's even sure how many thousand innocent Iraqis are dead now, too. Indeed, we have done exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do. We have proven that we are the oppressors, the exploiters, the demons they now fear we are. And -- read the international press -- few people are saying otherwise around the world. It seems to me that we ourselves are no longer so sure just exactly what kind of people we have now apparently become. Interestingly enough, we do know what kind of people the Amish are -- and, like the early Romans, we, too, are astounded at it. "Christian" they call it. Joan Chittister wrote this in a column in the National Catholic Reporter, October 10, 2006.
|