Posted: 4/27/07
Documentary on the power
of forgiveness cites Amish example
By Mary Warner
Religion News Service
ARRISBURG, Pa. (RNS)— Filmmaker Martin Doblmeier, who set out to explore the nature of forgiveness, was almost finished when the news broke about the Amish school shooting in West Nickel Mines, Pa., last October.
He went to Lancaster County to film a segment on what happened after a gunman invaded the school and killed five girls and then himself. He found an Amish delegation that went to the gunman’s widow to show support and forgiveness.
| An Amish family arrives to pay respects at the White Oak farm of Chris and Rachel Miller, who lost two daughters when a gunman killed five girls at an Amish school. The Amish community also reached out in compassion to the family of the gunman. (RNS/Robert Sciarrino/The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.) |
“We were convinced we could not make the film without the Amish,” Doblmeier said.
Their example is one of the segments featured in The Power of Forgiveness, to be aired next fall on PBS. The director—who made an acclaimed 2006 documentary on German pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer—said his latest topic engages all faith groups and the wider culture.
“People feel as though we’ve become an angry culture,” he said. “We are a nation at war. We are a litigious society. You can feel it in the movies we make, in the news at night.”
The documentary presents religious teachers with spiritual arguments for forgiveness and psychologists with utilitarian ones—about the beneficial effect on blood pressure, for example.
Research on forgiveness has exploded in recent years amid generous funding ear-marked for the topic. The Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute have been eager to fund forgiveness studies, noted Donald Kraybill, who studies the Amish and appears in the documentary.
“I think what was so shocking to people was that the Amish forgave so quickly,” said Kraybill, a sociologist at Elizabethtown College. “Most psychologists would say forgiveness is a journey, but here were these people six hours after the shooting, walking over to say, ‘We forgive.’”
The collective nature of Amish forgiveness also was intriguing, Doblmeier said. With the strong support of the community, bereft parents “didn’t have to act out of anger,” he said.
Doblmeier hopes to study collective forgiveness more thoroughly before his documentary is completed—perhaps by visiting South Africa and its struggle to overcome the legacy of apartheid.
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