There have been so many public, painful, hurtful events in recent months – the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech, The West Nickel’s Mines School shootings last October, the brutal storms that have ripped rural Kansas over and over again, the Atlantic storm that made whole neighborhoods uninhabitable especially on the Maine coast, or today’s frantic search for three missing soldiers, kidnapped in Iraq. There are those like Pat Robertson who have wonderful, simple, clear and wrong answers to all the trials and tragedies. It’s easy to be cynical, or resigned, but those are among the least helpful responses.

The faces of the Amish parents and friends in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, remain imprinted on my mind. The media have them pegged as simple rural types, a kind of holdover from another time when life was gentler and peaceful. The press relay the images of their stoic faces and plain lifestyle. But the Amish have never had an easy life. They fled here from bitter civil and religious persecution in Reformation Europe centuries back and they were often not welcome here. They seemed strange, remote, suspect, distant even from the ways of other early settlers. Their faith seemed a fierce and demanding burden to outsiders looking in, and completely out of step with the fast go getting world that surrounded them.

The Amish are pictured as simple rubes who don’t know anything better than forgiving their enemies. But their beliefs have been tempered in the “blood and ashes of a thousand martyrs.” Out of the fiery storm they forged a faith of uncompromising and forgiving love, and a deep religious aversion to all forms of violence. It is no easy thing to cross the street, into the stranger’s world, to ask of the widow of the man who slaughtered their daughters what she might need that they could help provide, but they did it. It is no easy thing to greet and embrace the parents of that troubled and misguided young man and struggle for common ground, but they did that too. Some religionists portray these people and their theology as simple. It has never been so in their “way of living and forgiving.” How do we do in our violent and vengeful world – at walking together in peace, at reaching out over the chasms of our pride and anger for a forgiving way forward? No, there’s nothing simple about the ways of the Amish, but much we can and must learn to make peace among ourselves and all people, and peace with the earth and all the other “nations” of life that accompany us. That’s our task too.

Join the UU Service Committee in one of their “Just Works” Service projects, or their revisit to Civil Rights sites in the South. Check in on our UU Camp and Conference Centers. And whatever you do – have a great, healthy, healing, joyful summer!

Blessings,
Rev. Dave Johnson