In the face of tragedy, a pastor finds words — and a community listens

By Madeline Holcombe, CNN

(CNN) — There was a rare and brief moment of stillness on Saturday –– after the last child waiting in the church was reunited with his parents –– when Rev. Jasiel Hernandez Garcia could sit with his staff and ask them: What do we say to the congregation?

The leadership at First Presbyterian Church in Kerrville, Texas had originally planned to talk about celebrating independence and the importance of rest at their Sunday services on July 6. Then the flooding began.

Starting Friday, the church staff spent 18 hours working on relief efforts. The building, just a few blocks from the Guadalupe River, served as a reunification center in the morning and as a shelter later in the day on Saturday. Then everyone learned that one of their own congregants had died in the flood. They scrapped all the readings, music, and the sermon.

Instead, they put together a Sunday service that incorporated church members who volunteered to perform music they felt would be of comfort to their community. Garcia rewrote his whole sermon, focusing on the call to do what is right no matter what and to respond with hope and action.

“The amount of grief was something I had never experienced before,” said Garcia, the church’s senior pastor.

With at least 150 people missing and 120 people dead, including at least 27 children and counselors at a summer camp, from the flooding in Central Texas, people in Kerr County and across the country have been feeling sadness, anger and grief from the losses.

Many people are turning to Garcia and other religious leaders to ask for guidance in the face of the devastation. What can they do with these feelings?

Feeling the pain across the country

When tragedy strikes, the messiness of pain, anger, sadness and fear of those experiencing loss don’t need to be cleaned up quickly, said Rev. Shannon Johnson Kershner, senior pastor at Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

“God is not scared of all of those feelings,” Kershner said. “I think anger is faithful. Doubt is faithful. All of that is faithful because it means that you actually care.”

For the people not directly affected by the flood but struggling themselves, that is natural and human, too, said the Very Rev. Sarah Hurlbert, dean of the Cathedral of All Souls, an Episcopal church in Asheville, North Carolina. The cathedral was inundated and extensively damaged by floodwaters from Hurricane Helene last September.

Maybe the news reports and images trigger your feelings around a horrible experience at a camp, a personal loss of a child, or even just a loss of feeling safe and in control of the world, said Hurlbert. “Sending your kids to a camp, what you expect is that they’re going to have a great time and … come back with some bumps and bruises, but they had a good time doing it,” Hurlbert said. “It’s part of how we get disabused as human beings of the notion of control.”

Bad things happen every day to people around the world, and you can’t always stop and fully feel the pain because you have to keep going, said Rev. Janet Maykus, transitional pastor of the United Christian Church in Austin, Texas. But sometimes, she noted, an event hits a little closer to home.

There is no ‘right’ thing to say

After witnessing Helene’s destruction, Hurlbert has a sense of how words can fail to provide the comfort needed in the aftermath of tragedy.

Last year, her congregation gathered in a church that was not theirs for the first time since the storm. As the people filed in and laid eyes on their community members –– many of whom they could not contact to make sure they were safe –– they just clung to one another, Hurlbert said.

“I don’t even think I had a sermon that day,” she said. “We just hugged and held each other and cried. And really and truly, that was the sermon.”

It is human and natural to not want to say the wrong thing, Kershner said. Or you may so badly want the person you are with to not feel pain that you say anything you can to fix it for them. Often, that can drive you away from the people who are suffering.

“There’s no right thing to say, but to move towards those places of hurt, rather than away from them, I think that’s what we’re called as people to do,” she said.

If you can’t take the pain away from someone experiencing loss, your presence can still be of some benefit, said Don Burda, president of the Jewish Community of the Hill Country in Kerrville, who lost his wife and two daughters to a drunk driver years ago.

Burda isn’t a rabbi, and his community has a congregation so tiny that he considers it a full house if 10 people show up. He is planning Shabbat services this Friday, where they will say the Mourner’s Kaddish, as they do every week for lost loved ones, and he will share pictures of those who have died in the floods.

“Each of us reacts to tragedy differently,” Burda said via email. “Some will be silent, some will scream to the heavens, some will try to find someone to blame. None of these things will bring their loved one back and no amount of good wishes and kind words will make a dent in what they’re feeling, nor do anything to fill that huge chasm in their soul caused by their loved ones being ripped from them.”

“The kind words do one important thing: They let those who are left behind know that they are not alone. And that –– knowing they’re not alone –– is perhaps the greatest gift we can give to those who mourn,” he said.

Sitting in the pain

Members of Garcia’s congregation have begun to reach out for support for the loss or continued uncertainty about their loved ones. But so far, he has found that they are not looking for answers as to why it happened or what to do with their grief.

Most of them just want to talk, to connect and to find someone who will listen, he said.

“They haven’t really sat with their emotions. They’re not really ready to really wrestle with the complexity of all that we experienced last weekend,” he said.

An important place to start is to assure each other that feelings that come out of tragedy are OK, said Dr. Shelly Rambo, professor of theology at Boston University. What many people need in the aftermath is someone to sit beside them and hear their pain without being afraid of it or trying to tie it up and send it away, Rambo said.

It isn’t always natural for people to know how to stay in those difficult moments and allow others to grieve, she said. It takes intention to learn how to say, “I am so sorry,” and then just sit there and say nothing else, Rambo added. You might hold the person if they want it, but you don’t always have to.

The important thing is that you are communicating to the person, “I am here. I will be here for the long haul of this grieving. You have a safe place to put these feelings down,” she said.

Community in the midst of grief

With the assurance of God’s presence, or a call to the community to gather, or the promise of a listening ear, many religious leaders stressed the importance of those hurting not feeling alone.

“When we are just on our own, it can feel very daunting, very hopeless, very overwhelming,” Garcia said. “But when we mourn and grieve together with other people that we can trust … then that allows for a kind of transformation in the community, a sense of love that is tangible.”

In the 18 years Maykus worked as a hospital and hospice chaplain, she found that losing a loved one often upended a person’s entire reality.

She thinks of lives as a great web of all the communities you exist in and the people you love. When you lose someone, a critical chord is snapped and everything is unsteady for a time, she said. The web will never be the same again, but as you mourn and move forward, you will weave a new version, Maykus said.

Having people by your side and supporting you in your grief helps hold the web in place while you work to rebuild your reality, she said.

“Your existence is now completely different, and everyone is walking around you like everything’s the same and it’s not,” Maykus said. “Just knowing there’s someone there, it’s kind of a grounding thing.”

It is important to allow others to support you when you are struggling and to show up when others suffer loss –– however you can do that, Maykus said.

“Some of us are really good at sitting in silence with someone, some of us are really good at listening, some of us have great things to say, and some of us don’t have any of those things,” she said.

Can you bring food? Mow the lawn? Clean the refrigerator? These things may not feel as important as the conversations, but they are, Maykus said. The presence and help in keeping life going sends a profound message, she said.

“It’s saying to that person, ‘You are a person. You are alive. You are here. We care about you,’” she said.

The truth is that religious leaders are dealing with the grief and pain, too. Coming together as a community gives Kershner a place to hold her faith and hope when she is having trouble, just as she holds it for the people in the pews when they are suffering, she said.

“Sometimes we have to borrow faith from each other,” Kershner said. “We don’t go through any of this by ourselves.”

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