wfn.org | A loss for words: Pastors face daunting challenge of comforting

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Note #6845 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

victims' friends, families
14-September-2001
01327

A loss for words

Pastors face daunting challenge of comforting victims' friends, families

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE - Three days after two Manhattan skyscrapers were destroyed by
jetliners piloted by terrorists, the Rev. Elliott Hipp was leafing through
his Bible in the study of Central Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue, about
70 blocks from the site where firefighters and construction workers were
picking through the wreckage.

He had been invited - along with a rabbi - to his daughter's school the next
day to speak briefly about the attacks to a group of girls ranging from
kindergarteners to high schoolers.

"I'm sitting here thinking through what I want to say and how to say it,"
Hipp tells a caller. "They've asked us to read Scripture, talk about it
briefly ... do something worshipful. So I'm leafing through the Bible. ...

"But I'm not there yet."

He's not alone in being dumbstruck.

All of his parishioners at Central church are accounted for; no one is
missing. All the parents of the children at his daughter's school have
survived, too. But there is a preschooler in the church's day-care program
whose daddy hasn't made it home yet - and probably won't.

Speaking to thousands of New Yorkers about the horrible tragedy that has
befallen them is one thing. Talking to a kid whose mom or dad is missing -
or whose friends' moms and dads are missing - is quite another. Pastors in
New York and the surrounding presbyteries are groping for the right words,
the ones that will soothe.

Craig Rule, of Tenafly, NJ, is one of those guys. By late Thursday
afternoon, the parents of 11 children in the local school district were
still unaccounted for, in a presbytery - Palisades - where five of 53
congregations have someone missing.

Three families in Tenafly's Presbyterian Church are missing members. One is
a father of two, a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old. One member's brother-in-law
is confirmed dead, leaving a wife to care for three children.

"There will be a lot of emotion on Sunday," Rule says.

He says that's why the children's sermon is going to focus on "what it feels
like to be afraid, and what to do when you are." He says he's leaving that
duty to a therapist who is a member of the congregation and is
professionally capable of fielding any hard questions the kids may have.
Later that day, he adds, there will be seminars for adults on how to talk to
kids about trauma, and how to draw on spiritual resources in a difficult
time.

In the early service, kids older than 9 will stay in the sanctuary as Rule
invites people to speak about what they're feeling after a week's horror.
Younger children will be dismissed to classrooms for age-appropriate
conversations.

The Rev. Mary Thies is deciding how to tackle some of the same questions at
First Presbyterian Church in Stamford, CT, where three people - the husband
of one member (leaving two young children); the brother-in-law of another;
and the nephew of yet another.

"It just fans out from there," says Thies, who joined other city clergy on
the day of the attacks in meeting commuter trains out of New York, to pray
with arriving passengers or just to keep them company for a little while.
"People know people who know people. Everybody here is affected some."

Literally hundreds of people have been walking into and out of churches in
the New York metropolitan area in the past few days. Sanctuaries' doors have
been thrown open, and people have flocked in, looking for consolation,
prayer and special services, or in search of a drink of water or a phone to
use, or a toilet - simple things not always easy to locate in the big city.

"It just looked like a refugee column coming up from lower Manhattan," said
the Rev. J.C. Austin, associate pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian
Church, a 1,000-member congregation on the Upper East Side, many of whose
members work in the financial district.

While the church's three pastors are "cautiously optimistic" that none of
their members is among the dead or missing, other crises have arisen. Some
members managed to get out of the building before it collapsed, but were and
are shaken by the flames they saw or the shaking of the earth. One woman now
finds herself the guardian of three children whose mother's body is buried
in the rubble; she's trying to incorporate those children into her own
family while she struggles with her own grief.

What to say? What are the words of comfort?

"You want to say that 'the light shines in the darkness and the darkness
shall not overcome it,' but still to say that the darkness is real - and so
is the resurrection," says Austin. "It is holding those two things in
tension. But it is hard to make it sound like more than words to the people
going through it. ... You want to help them experience God in the midst of
this. When there are no answers. When there is nothing we can do to make it
better.

"But gathering together for prayer, for reading Scripture, for singing hymns
- that in itself is an act of defiance against the powers of evil."

What to say to the kids? It's the same struggle, only harder.

In Stamford, the Rev. David Van Dyke has been assigned the childrens' sermon
for Sunday. He's going to help the kids memorize the first two lines of the
23rd Psalm:  "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." The children will
learn them, as he says, "by heart."

He says he'll tell them that when he is scared, it helps to repeat
comforting lines of Scripture over and over. And these- despite their
somewhat archaic language - remind him that no matter what the
circumstances, God will provide what we need, "somehow."

He says he'll also tell them that he's available if they have questions or
want to talk.
He'll tell the parents the same thing, he says.
Presumably there will be plenty of questions.

School was closed in New York much of the week, so kids hadn't seen friends
to hear about their families - and the news won't all be good.

At First Presbyterian Church on 12th Street, a column of smoke from the
disaster site filtered up Fifth Avenue and crept inside the building -
irritating eyes, filling throats with a chalky powder. Inside, members were
waiting for news about the church secretary's husband, Peter Wallace, who
was on the 105th floor of the North Tower when it was hit; and a third-grade
Sunday School teacher, Janet Gustufson, a mother of two, who hadn't come
home.

"Really, people are speechless," says pastor Jon Walton, who says he'll make
a clinical psychologist available to talking to the Sunday School kids this
week. "People are realizing today that some people are not coming back, that
they're not going to appear. And we're all (struggling) with that in our own
way and our own time.

"The towers we saw on Monday and Tuesday morning are not there. The people
who were there are not there. And they are not coming back."

For Rule's parishioners, that reality has been sinking in slowly.

Members have been visiting the homes of panicked families, sitting with
grieving people, listening to them. But as one woman told Rule: "It is great
having people here now, but two months from now I'm going to be a single
mother."0
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