There is a horse-and-buggy, and strange folks with black cloth and black hats, and some with beards, and a child running with flowers toward a deep blue dream. From some cold grey pasture (it was green this morning), with dirt on his boots and mud-caked cheeks, a man steps forward and, taking off his hat, bows before a weeping mother and father. He stands erect, though a little bent, and looks into their eyes, eyes filled with flowers and children and blue and dirt and the teary flash of a gun. He says, “We will forgive your son.”
A dog passes by, sniffing for a little girl whose last words of the schoolday were, “Please, shoot me first.” Mothers and fathers -- and several small girls -- collapse at such lessons.
But these strange images all look the same to us: black-and-white on a horse-and-buggy, a triangle flashing warnings. We barely slow down, unless we have friends visiting from faraway. That movie with Harrison Ford was as real as this: we are witnesses to the futility of innocence. And we drive home, thinking we got the picture.
The full moon falls from the sky with nary a word. But the internet and TV are all a-chatter. The world would do well to drape itself in black for a while, seeing in the dark fabric the brilliant tearing flash of forgiveness that cuts its way through an Amish field not far from Paradise. Forgiveness bearing glad tidings, once twitching with doubt on the tip of a trigger. The big, sad bang which started it all.
"Pray for me," he said†. We pray, irrespective of the time, or whether it's too late. And now Amish families gather coins and cans, raising funds, not for the victims, but for the murderer's own family, left shattered beyond imagination. The rest of us are just confounded by such grace.
Peace everywhere, if for just one minute.
[†"He asked the children to pray for him, and that's kind of interesting because he said he hated God," Rhoads said. "He must have recognized the faith in them, God in them." -- ABC News]
©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
amish, murder, forgiveness, grace
3 comments:
Esther,
You're welcome, and thank you.
Peace.
Gnade
Thank you for this. It's beautiful.
I was struck by the same things, BG. But you have said it much more eloquently than I could have.
The school house is gone now. The 'English' came to help with their big machines and tore it down, took it away, in not such a very long time. That land will be seeded, and left to stand empty. But it will never be forgotten what has transpired there.
The forgiveness was a choice, the feelings to be worked out yet. More need to learn that lesson from the Amish.
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