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The Amish Teach Us All
On October 7, 2006, the Los Angeles Times, in speaking about the incomprehensible tragedy in Pennsylvania when a “simple milkman” killed five little girls and wounded five more, quoted from Mennonite author Peter J. Dyck, a man revered in the Amish community:
“Forgiving is a serious business because it is basically for our ownspiritual, emotional and physical benefit. We may or may not establish a new relationship with the person who injured us; that is not the heart of forgiveness. When we forgive, we finally stop hurting ourselves...”
Members of the Amish community echoed these same sentiments with surprising unanimity. Forgiveness (of the killer himself) is a way to stop our own suffering. I was also moved by the public invitation from one of the deceased girl’s parents who offered to accept the (deceased) killer’s wife into the Amish community to live as “one of us.”
I find the apparent similarities in belief between the Amish in Pennsylvania and our own Shin Buddhism remarkable. When I faced loss from the death of lifetime friends, and especially when experiencing life’s senseless catastrophes, I tried to move the focus of my anger (over the loss) to forgiveness. It may be that my conscious efforts to do so miss the mark. Isn’t it supposed to come without self-effort but rather from truly embracing the Nembutsu without seeking the goal, for example, of ending my own suffering? Yes. However, for me, the path is difficult. My best efforts may move me toward the knowledge that from genuine understanding of the Dharma I may begin to see the interconnectedness of all sentient beings. Maybe if I learn to stop consciously trying to make sense of such losses I will begin to move towards embracing the Amida Buddha in all of us and find relief from suffering.
As a young man in 1963, I wrote a poem following the senseless killings of four, young, African-American girls when the Alabama church in which they attended Sunday school was bombed by a white segregationist (injuring many others):
“...For like the clock’s two hands,
which appear as one at
midnight,
So too, are end and beginning
entwined as One in time,
The old has passed; the new begun,
and all of the new
is but the sum of the old,
and together, they make life’s story
never-ending....”
Only when reading Peter Dyck’s comments did I reflect on my poem and understand what the Amish were saying to me. When we forgive, we finally stop our own suffering because we are all connected, we are all one. And if we are all linked together then the heinous acts of one man (or of nations) must truly belong to all of us. Are we not then, by forgiving others, actually forgiving ourselves? Or is it more precise to say we are then beginning to accept ourselves “just as we are?” Jinen.
Namoamidabutsu
© 2008 West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple Online
