Closing in on forgiveness

The tragedy of silent pride

Patricia Paddey
Ontario Correspondent
ontario@christianweek.org

Forgiveness was not on the mind of 32-year-old Charles Roberts when he entered a one-room schoolhouse filled with Amish children in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania on October 2. Releasing the boys and the teachers, he bound the 10 girls who remained, then shot them all before taking his own life. Five of the girls died. The other five remain under medical care.

But forgiveness was the dominant theme that emerged from the evil Roberts had wrought. For the Amish community were quick to express forgiveness to the killer's family—in both word and deed—and their actions caught the attention of the world's media.

Working with a crew from the television program "Listen Up", (www.listenuptv.com), I travelled to Pennsylvania in the days following the shootings to help bring the story back to Canadian television viewers.

We were soon to learn the terrible irony that it seemed to have been a lack of forgiveness in Roberts' own life that led to the unspeakable crime.

Roberts' suicide note and final words to his wife indicated he had sexually abused two female relatives as a 12-year-old boy. Years later, when Roberts and his wife had their first child—a baby girl named Elise—and the baby died, Roberts may have believed her death was God's revenge for his sins.

"It appears [Roberts] was upset with God for taking his child," Miller told us. "It was as if he picked this school because he would have victims, young girls, that he may have intended to assault before executing them. And the fact that they were these innocent Amish children of God; his revenge against God would be taken with the lives of these children."

"He acted on something that apparently he tried to repress from the time he did it, until near the end."

A counsellor working with some of the families involved in the tragedy, Jonas Beiler, believes people don't start to heal from life's wounds until they start to talk. "I call that redemption," says Beiler. "There are those redemptive moments that happen in the process of telling your story that don't happen when you're just quiet about it."

Charles Roberts, says Beiler, "had some deep pain that he was not able to talk about." Perhaps if he had been able to confide in someone about the guilt and shame associated with acts he'd committed as a boy, he wouldn't now be lying in a grave next to his infant daughter Elise.

I thought of Roberts weeks later as I read news accounts of another terrible tragedy, this one involving Ted Haggard, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals in the U.S.

In a letter read to the congregation at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, after he was removed from leadership there, Haggard confessed to sexual immorality, lying and deceit. "There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life," Haggard wrote.

"Because of pride, I began deceiving those I love the most because I didn't want to hurt or disappoint them…When I stopped communicating about my problems, the darkness increased and finally dominated me. As a result, I did things that were contrary to everything I believe."

Jonas Beiler says he's come to realize death is not life's greatest tragedy. The real tragedy, he believes, "is what dies inside us while we live."

The tragedy deepens when we consider what dies inside the lives of those we touch, all because we were too proud to confess our weaknesses and sins, and to seek help, healing and forgiveness.

—With files from Listen Up TV