“May they be like grass on the roof,
which withers before it can grow;
with it the reaper cannot fill his hands,
nor the one who gathers fill his arms.”
I’m not sure what kind of
measurement tools I use to read the depth and strength of stories, to choose
one as being better or worse than another. Such criteria are themselves issues
of the heart, which is why, I suppose, I don’t understand them. There is, after
all, no accounting for taste.
A decade ago now, one story in
two installments shook this country. The first was the story of a man who lost
control of his life and his will, then entered a schoolhouse in Pennsylvania
with the sole intent of injuring young girls and did just that, killing five,
execution style. Five others, also shot, suffered significant wounds.
Not long after, the community
who lost all those young women razed the school, just tore it down. They were
Amish, a peculiar people given by religious creed to work their farms by hand
and horses, as if time had stopped somewhere mid-19th century. None
of them would think of owning a bulldozer, so they needed to hire someone who
had one to do the demolition because it required work the community decided
they wouldn’t do with their own hands. In just a few pre-dawn hours, the place
was razed, the rubble buried.
Five children were murdered, and
their madman killer was himself dead by his own hand, right there in the
school. That’s one story.
School shootings happen far too
frequently, so perhaps the story is not particularly unusual—people even use a
word, “Columbine,” the way we use “Watergate” for every political scandal. But the nation was, once again, shocked and
horrified by another school shooting, this one, amazingly, in Amish country. It
was a big story for a week or so, maybe ten days.
The other story was bigger, and
that story also took place in rural Pennsylvania, in the same place, in the
same week. Members of that violated Amish community began visiting the wife of
the murderer, bringing her into their love.
With a commitment to social
justice, their own history of persecution, a unyielding belief in God’s
providence and his rule and in the life hereafter, the Amish, so sinned against
by this madman, showed nothing but love for the murderer’s family. They
couldn’t forget what had happened—that’s undoubtedly why the schoolhouse was razed;
but they forgave, amazingly.
Two stories came out of a
Pennsylvania hamlet few had ever heard of, a place called Quarryville. One was about madness and murder—five children
dead, five more badly hurt. Those things happen so often it seemed that, as
short a time as a year later, the whole incident seemed ordinary.
What wasn’t ordinary—what was
divine—was that community’s acceptance, their desire to forgive.
The psalmist had a similar
phenomenon in mind here in 129—may evil quickly pass away, he asks; may it
wither before it can grow. May the
darkness be short-lived. May the murder
of those children be razed like the schoolhouse.
The great story from
Quarryville, Pennsylvania, the story with legs, was the one that’ll grow, the
one whose harvest seems limitless. That story is about acceptance and
forgiveness.
There’s nothing derivative
there. It’s fresh as daisy and new every morning, shocking, always, to our
humanness. It’s the story of grace.
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