Psychologists who study forgiveness find that, generally speaking, people who forgive lead happier and healthier lives than those who don’t. The Amish people we interviewed agreed, citing their own experience of forgiving others. Some said they were “controlled” by their offender until they were able to forgive; others said the “acid or hate” destroys the unforgiving person until the hate is released. Coming from members of a religious community that emphasizes self-denial, these comments show that the Amish are nonetheless interested in self-care and personal happiness. Forgiveness may be self-renouncing in some respects, but it is not self-loathing. The Amish we interviewed confirmed what psychologists tell us: forgiveness heals the person who offers it, freeing that person to move on in life with a greater sense of vitality and wholeness.

Still, if the Amish provide evidence that forgiveness heals the forgiver, they provide even more evidence that forgiveness benefits the offender. Forgiveness does not deny that a wrong has taken place, but it does give up the right to hurt the wrongdoer in return. Even though Charles Roberts [the shooter at the Nickel Mines schoolhouse] was dead, opportunities to exact vengeance upon his family did not die with his suicide. Rather than pursuing revenge, however, the Amish showed empathy for his kin, even by attending his burial. In other words, the Amish of Nickel Mines chose not to vilify the killer but to treat him and his family as members of the human community. Amish forgiveness was thus a gift to Charles Roberts, to his family, and even to the world, for it served as the first step toward mending a social fabric that was rent by the schoolhouse shooting. These acts of grace astounded many people who watched from afar.

Living in a world in which religion seems to nourish vengeance more often than curb it, the Amish response was a welcome contrast to a barrage of suicide bombings and religiously fueled rage. What is less clear is whether the rest of us saw the Amish response as something to emulate, or as just a noble but impossible ideal.

Perhaps the answer to that question lies somewhere in the middle. Perhaps we were awed and truly impressed that the Amish sought to counter evil with a loving and healing response. At the same time, we may know that had our children been the ones gunned down in the West Nickel Mines School, our response would have been rooted in rage rather than grace. It’s an honest perspective, but also a problematic one, because it assumes that revenge is the natural response and forgiveness is reserved for folks like the Amish who spend their lives stifling natural inclinations.

We often assume that humans have innate needs in the face of violence and injustice. For instance, some who said that the Amish forgave Roberts “too quickly” assumed that Amish people had denied a basic human need to get even. But perhaps our real human need is to find ways to move beyond tragedy with a sense of healing and hope.

What we learn from the Amish, both at Nickel Mines and more generally, is that how we choose to move on from tragic injustice is culturally formed. For the Amish, who bring their own religious resources to bear on injustice, the preferred way to live on with meaning and hope is to offer forgiveness — and offer it quickly. That offer, including the willingness to forgo vengeance, does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong. It does, however, constitute a first step toward a future that is more hopeful, and potentially less violent, than it would otherwise be.

How might the rest of us move in that direction? Most of us have been formed by a culture that nourishes revenge and mocks grace. Hockey fans complain that they haven’t gotten their money’s worth if the players only skate and score without a fight. Bloody video games are everywhere, and the ones that seemed outrageously violent ten years ago are tame by today’s standards. Blockbuster movie plots revolve around heroes who avenge wrong with merciless killing. And it’s not just the entertainment world that acculturates us into a graceless existence. Traffic accidents galvanize hoards of lawyers who encourage victims to get their “due.” In fact, getting our due might be the most widely shared value in our hyperconsumerist culture. “The person who volunteers time, who helps a stranger, who agrees to work for a modest wage out of commitment to the public good…begins to feel like a sucker,” writes Robert Kuttner in EVERYTHING FOR SALE. In a culture that places such a premium on buying and selling, as opposed to giving and receiving, forgiveness runs against the grain.

Running against that grain, finding alternative ways to imagine our world, ways that in turn will facilitate forgiveness, takes more than individual willpower. We are not only the products of our culture, we are also producers of our culture. We need to construct cultures that value and nurture forgiveness. In their own way, the Amish have constructed such an environment. The challenge for the rest of us is to use our resources creatively to shape cultures that discourage revenge as a first response. How might we work more imaginatively to create communities in which enemies are treated as members of the human family and not demonized? How might these communities foster visions that enable their members to see offenders, as well as victims, as persons with authentic needs? There are no simple answers to these questions, though any answer surely will involve the habits we decide to value, the images we choose to celebrate, and the stories we remember.

In fact, forgiveness is less a matter of forgive and forget than of forgive and remember — remembering in ways that bring healing. When we remember we take the broken pieces of our lives — lives that have been dismembered by tragedy and injustice — and re-member them into something whole. Forgetting an atrocious offense, personally or corporately, may not be possible, but all of us can and do make decisions about how we remember what we cannot forget.

For the Amish, gracious remembering involves habits nurtured by memories of Jesus forgiving his tormenters while hanging on a cross. … When thirteen-year-old Marian said “shoot me first” in the schoolhouse, and when adults in her community walked over to the killer’s family with words of grace a few hour’s after her death, they were acting on those habits. And just as surely their actions at Nickel Mines will be recounted around Amish dinner tables for generations to come, creating and renewing memories about the power of faith to respond in the face of injustice — even violence — with grace.

In a world where faith often justifies and magnifies revenge, and in a nation where some Christians use scripture to fuel retaliation, the Amish response was indeed a surprise. Regardless of the details of the Nickel Mines story, one message rings clear: religion was used not to justify rage and revenge but to inspire goodness, forgiveness, and grace. And that is the big lesson for the rest of us regardless of our faith or nationality.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Tuesday, October 2, is the first anniversary of the atrocity in an Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where a gunman murdered five girls and severely wounded five others before killing himself. And then another shock for many: The Amish community forgave the killer and reached out compassionately to his widow.

There’s a new book coming out next week called AMISH GRACE: HOW FORGIVENESS TRANSCENDED TRAGEDY. One of the authors is Steven Nolt, a history professor at Goshen College in Indiana and an expert on Amish life.

Professor Nolt, welcome. How could the Amish forgive something as atrocious as those murders?

Dr. STEVEN NOLT (Co-Author, AMISH GRACE and Professor of History, Goshen College, Indiana): Forgiveness is central to Amish theology. The Amish believe, in a real sense, that God’s forgiving them is in some ways dependent upon their extending forgiveness to other people. For them this is also about following Jesus, about doing what Jesus said, what Christ taught in the Lord’s Prayer, which is a central text for the Amish: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

ABERNETHY: But why are the Amish seemingly so much better able to do this kind of thing than other Christians?

Dr. NOLT: In a lot of ways, this is built into their cultural DNA. They have a 300-, 400-year history of responding to wrong in this way. They have examples, and they also do it as a community. They don’t view forgiveness as the responsibility of the specific individuals who have been wronged. It’s something that’s shared by the entire community.

ABERNETHY: You’ve written that the Amish think that the act of forgiving wipes away feelings of revenge and hate. But might not that kind of thing repress something that’s important to get out and therefore not be very healthy?

Dr. NOLT: Yeah, when the Amish talk about forgiveness they talk about it in a couple of ways. What we heard right after the Nickel Mines shooting was a decision to forgive, wanting to say publicly we are committed to forgiving. We’re committed to reaching out compassionately to the family. The Amish are quite aware that forgiveness is — the emotional side of forgiveness is a process. It’s a difficult process. It’s something that certainly wasn’t over in five or 10 days after the shooting. It’s something that’s still going on now. So I don’t think their forgiveness in early October meant that they felt that forgiveness was complete.

ABERNETHY: In some cases, confession and contrition are considered necessary before there can be forgiveness. Now, obviously, that couldn’t happen here because the shooter was dead. But, in general, do the Amish believe that?

Dr. NOLT: No, they don’t. They make a distinction between forgiveness and pardon and reconciliation, and it’s possible that for pardon or for reconciliation to take place you need to have a two-way relationship. But forgiveness they see as something that they extend regardless of the stance of the offender.

ABERNETHY: Are there any signs that what the Amish did a year ago, this extraordinary act of forgiveness, is having effects in the wider world?

Dr. NOLT: Well, I just think the interest in the wider world in this story, in taking forgiveness seriously — not necessarily imitating what the Amish did exactly but in thinking about forgiveness as a complex and difficult but important process and trying to apply that to our own lives, our own context — has really been a heartening development.

ABERNETHY: Steven Nolt of Goshen College, many thanks. His book, with his two co-authors, is AMISH GRACE.