Most Presbyterians were nowhere near Blacksburg, Va., on April 16, that darkest of days at Virginia Tech.
Others were right in the epicenter, and they will never forget — like Alexander Evans, the pastor of Blacksburg Church, who was in his car driving to Montreat when he got a phone call telling him to turn around, come back, there was trouble. Evans, a police chaplain, spent that Monday in the emergency rooms of hospitals and then going to campus to stand with police officers who came out of Norris Hall, their faces reflecting the horror of what they had seen.
Later, Evans was asked to help notify the families of those who were killed.
Time after time, he went into a room with the brothers and sisters and parents of students, closed the door and told them what no family can ever prepare themselves to hear.
“It was the worst scene you could imagine,” said Evans, who has college-aged children of his own.
“This is just pure shock. … They’re just crying, it’s hardly a conversation. It’s just pure stunned grief.” Eventually there might be a question, such as: “‘Did she suffer long?’ And I have no answer, nobody has answers for this.”
Because this is a small town, many of those who live in Blacksburg have connections with the university — they work there, or their friends and relatives do, or their children go to school with children who may have lost parents in the shootings. “The waves are all through the community,” said Linda Dickerson, pastor of Northside Church in Blacksburg.
Most Presbyterians were not in Blacksburg that day. But the folks from local congregations were — crying, praying, listening, providing space for worship and funerals, offering lamentation and hope and hot food.
“That’s what churches do,” said Dickerson. “When somebody is grieving, that’s what we do. We bring food. We’re there. Maybe we’re not really doing anything, but we’re there. We have worship on Sunday, we pray for each other. We proclaim Scripture. We sing. Maybe we can barely sing, because our hearts are broken too — and boy, they are.”
Recently, Northside confirmed a group of young people, and as Dickerson prepared for that confirmation she thought of what she would say.
“We can’t insure that nobody with a gun is ever going to invade their lives or that car wrecks won’t happen or cancer won’t happen,” Dickerson said. “Things will happen. But what we can do is keep being a family of faith to them,” even in the hardest times. “And keep teaching them that Jesus is with them and God loves them. And we love them.”
The church is needed
The church was there for Virginia Tech in the aftermath of the violence. And in the weeks and months to come, the church will still be needed.
Virginia Tech students, and those from other colleges, will spread out into the world over the summer, hauling with them grief and perhaps depression or guilt, flipping over in their minds and hearts questions about why this happened and what it means.
“They take the trauma home with them,” said John Robinson, national associate for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance.
“Events like these trigger the memory of other traumatic events.”
Pastors caution that congregations across the country should keep an eye out for the hurting and the vulnerable, of all ages, and should communicate that they care and are willing to listen. They could pray specifically, for example, for people working in law enforcement, in emergency medicine, or on rescue squads; for children and their parents; for firefighters and chaplains; for teachers and those who work in schools.
What else can Presbyterians do to help?
Some want the church to consider with care and passion the public policy implications of the shootings at Virginia Tech — issues such as gun control, mental health treatment, and the pervasiveness of violence in American culture.
Continue to pray, send cards or messages of condolence to folks in Blacksburg. Support the denomination’s work in disaster relief financially, Robinson said. Reach out to those who seem isolated or lonely.
Work for peace.
Dickerson has found herself thinking about all those killed or hurt every day in tragedies around the world — how the headlines reflect deaths and injuries from far-away wars and bombings, earthquakes and fires and floods, perhaps even shootings across town.
Until it hits home, she said, “we let ourselves be immune to it too often.”
Catherine Snyder, a campus minister at Virginia Tech, spent the intense week after the shootings talking with students, faculty, administrators, and staff members, and visiting some of those affected in the hospitals. She is thankful for the expressions of support from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
“It’s a blessing to be part of a connectional church,” she said.
And she said to those who want to help: “I would ask for the love and prayers of everyone in the PC(USA). We are going to need the care and acts of kindness for a long time.”
Jumping In
The shootings at Virginia Tech came so quickly, so forcefully, and so chaotically that the Blacksburg congregations and the campus ministry had to respond on the fly — acting from the heart and from faith. As Dickerson put it, “There is no class in seminary for this.”
People did jump in — organizing prayer services, bringing food to students, offering their homes for students who wanted to get off campus or for concerned parents rushing to town.
Presbyterian pastors were thrust into different leadership roles — asked for interviews by the throngs of reporters; preparing for funerals and memorial services; helping to provide interfaith support for a diverse international community. Blacksburg Church, for example, opened its doors for the funeral of a professor who wasn’t a member of the church and for a memorial service for another professor, a Hindu.
Evans appeared live on CNN and in the pages of The New York Times.
He was surprised to find himself as “one of the guys with the earplug in talking to the anchor. I guess I could have refused all that, but I wanted to give a faithful, Reformed, compassionate presence and voice to our faith,” Evans said. “We trust God. We’re not blaming God. We live in a messed-up world, and our calling out of this is to work on a better world where guns and violence don’t have so much to say, but God’s shalom may emerge.”
Susan W. Verbrugge, Blacksburg church associate pastor, put it this way in a sermon: “For I know that God’s heart was the first to break on Monday — to break and to break and to break. … God was there. And God is here.”
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance
In times of crisis, the national church tries to provide a support network for those pastoral caregivers on the front lines.
Three representatives of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, trained in critical care response, arrived the first night, primarily to provide spiritual support to local clergy and church leaders who were on the front lines of the community response. A Presbyterian Disaster Assistance team also worked with the clergy in Colorado after the Columbine High School shootings, both immediately after the incident and returning months later for stress debriefings for pastoral leaders.
“Our purpose is always initially to give care to the caregiver,” said Robert “Bobb” Barnes, a minister and former police chaplain from New Mexico who’s been involved in disaster response for more than 30 years, and who came along with Jim Kirk and Anne Van Allen.
The Presbyterian Disaster Assistance team tries to provide “an unanxious presence” to local pastors and church leaders, by letting local Presbyterians know the national church has resources to back them up, Barnes said. “It’s an incarnational presence,” he said, “We listen more than we talk. … I’m honored to be able to represent to people at the crisis scene all those Presbyterians around the country, around the world, who would like to be there helping, and cannot.”
PDA’s emphasis is “to provide support for the people who are on the front lines,” Robinson said. “We’re very clear about all disasters are local. But the local community can be so devastated by an event, or it can be an event for which they don’t have the preparation or resources, and need some assistance from those who’ve been through it before, who have some training in trauma.”
In Blacksburg, Barnes also worked with the Red Cross Spiritual Care team, helping coordinate the flood of clergy and others from religious groups who showed up, unsolicited, to help — or sometimes to proselytize.
Evans — while consumed that week with the immediate needs before him — said he was grateful for the presence of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance.
“It was a powerful expression of our connectional church,” he said. “In the midst of our deepest pain and grief, the church is present with individuals, saying, ‘We’re here, representing the whole denomination. What can we do? How can we be helpful?’ … There’s no training for any of this. It calls out from the deepest places in our hearts, the most compassion we can offer, the best pastoral care we can give.”
Participating in rituals and ongoing ministries helped.
In the congregations, “people are still getting sick and people are still shut-ins and new babies still get born,” so the regular ministries needed to continue as well, Dickerson said. When she went to visit church members in an assisted care facility, she found Presbyterians in their 80s and 90s who’d been watching the news and praying for those affected.
Many of those older folks have had their own brushes with tragedy — through the decades, “they’ve been through the great ordeals,” Dickerson said. “They know that … there still is life and hope in the trouble. I think that really is powerful — they can be such a rock for us.”
She also met with children from her church and with their parents to talk about their concerns. One girl, whose birthday falls on April 16, the day of the shootings, asked if she’d be able to celebrate her birthday anymore.
A six-year-old child wanted to know if it was OK “to be glad that some people didn’t die?” Or, do we just have to be sad?”
In a situation like Virginia Tech — one involving the intentional infliction of destruction — the questions people ask are different than with a natural disaster, Barnes said.
“The whole nature of evil — we heard about that over and over again. The whole difficulty in forgiveness. … When a tornado happens, that’s nobody’s fault.”
Evans said he preached that first Sunday that “evil is real, and we know it — fresh, this week. God’s love and presence is with us even still, our present help in time of trouble. The third thing was we’re called to be about love and peace. That’s our ongoing task, so let’s keep at it. We’ve got work to do, a lot of it.”
(Editor’s note: Read Alexander Evan’s sermon from April 22 in the May 14 issue of Outlook.) His, and other sermons after the Virginia Tech tragedy).
