The Amish are Not Ours (continued)

One of the hymns in the Ausbund, the sixteenth-century songbook that the Amish still use, describes Jesus’ followers like this:

Renouncing all, they choose the cross

and claiming it, count all as loss,

even husband, child and wife.

Forsaking gain, forgetting pain,

they enter into life.

This hymn, written in the 1560s, recalls the persecution endured by the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, the Amish’s theological forebears. And while the Amish in Nickel Mines are unlikely to think of their daughters as martyrs (in the classic sense of dying for their faith), they nonetheless find comfort in knowing that the deceased have now “entered into life.”

The Lancaster County Amish community grieves, and will continue to do so. But as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, and as the Amish no doubt reminded one another as they buried their daughters’ precious bodies, the Amish do not grieve “as others which have no hope.” One cannot understand Amish life apart from recognizing that they are a people of hope, a people of faith, and a people of love—a love that, irrational as it may seem, extends even to Charles Roberts.

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