Giving the gift of mercy is a burden — and a liberation
This season of light comes with an extraordinarily heavy burden, one that is our choice to accept or not. Amidst the giftgiving, our most difficult though precious offering remains that of mercy. As in the following disturbing parable, this is no light task.
On Oct. 2, 2006, 32 year-old Charles Roberts IV, a local milk truck driver in the rural community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, entered the one-room Amish schoolhouse and at gunpoint ordered the adults and all boys to leave. He nailed the doors shut, bound up the ten young girls, ages 6 to 13, and made a last call to his wife. Just as police arrived, he shot the girls at close range and shot himself. 5 girls died and the other 5 were critically injured.
Shocked, in utter anguish and shared pain, the small Amish community did not wait long before reaching out to the slayer’s household with mercy, extending their compassion, support, and — forgiveness. Though Roberts’ family was not Amish, over half of the 75 mourners present at his funeral were.
How scandalous this forgiveness! Does it not upend our conventional moral propriety?
Our human commandment demands settling scores, lex talionis (law of retaliation), getting even. The blindfolded Lady Justice with her sword and scales aims to mete out “measure for measure.” We find different versions of restoring balance in ancient cosmology as the Chinese yin of darkness catches up with the
yang of sunlight, in the Hindu Dharmasastra law of karma, in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, even written in Nature’s seasonal script when spring sunshine is payback for winter’s storms.
This ‘scandal’ of forgiveness after this heinous, calculated slaughter of innocents upsets our sense of proportionality and explains why the subsequent barrage of news coverage focused less on the crime than on the Amish act of mercy. As University of Iowa religious studies professor Darcy Metcalfe aptly points out, media paid less attention to Roberts’ access to and hoarding of weapons, the spate of prior school shootings like Columbine, Thurston, San Diego State University, and Platte Canyon, and the sexual assault of young girls that Roberts intended but never carried out. See her compelling analysis at www. mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/9/524/ htm. As Metcalfe asserts, the media obsession mirrored our “cultural fetishization of Amish forgiveness,” a fixation that speaks more about us than the Amish, about our appetite for payback, satisfaction by any means. In a world where there is no safe place, to forgive is simply unsatisfying.
The Nickel Mines tale is no script for a blockbuster film. Not like Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.” Now that was satis
fying. Yet there are deeper forces at play. The clue lies right in front of us, what I hinted at the start — this season of light, one amidst a long, churning darkness. While its message of “Peace on Earth and good will to all” sounds charming on paper and in song, its meaning is utterly daunting in the flesh. Mercy demands that we flex the lesser-used moral muscle of empathy, that we erase the boundaries between matter and spirit, neighbor and stranger, friend and enemy. Offering mercy unshackles us from our human fiat of eye-for-an-eye, the canon of divisiveness.
If we could only heed the pleas for mercy, compassion, and forgiveness from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the Chinese deity Guan Yin, the Hebrew rahamin and Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, the Quran’s Rahim, and the Gospel of Matthew’s Corporal Works of Mercy. This season reminds us of the incarnational truth that we are what we give of ourselves to others. Will we step up to the plate and accept this oppressive yet liberating burden? Only we ourselves can choose to withhold or dispense the saving gift of mercy. In that spirit, let us tip our hats and toast to those among us who see and reach beyond division and what splits us apart, acknowledging that all of life matters. To life.