Reflections,
Pastor Marilyn Lerch,
Good Shepherd Church of the Brethren,
Blacksburg, VA,
campus minister at Virginia Tech.

My heart is grateful for the prayers and encouragement that have been poured into my life this week. As the pastor of Good Shepherd Church of the Brethren in Blacksburg VA, a campus pastor for Virginia Tech, and a graduate of the university myself, I have been filled with deep emotion.  Many of you have asked if there are specific things that you and your congregations might pray for tomorrow in worship.  Below I have written some reflections hoping that there is something to help add focus to the prayers of many and to the healing that so many are seeking in this tragedy.  If you want more information, please visit our church web site at www.goodshepherdblacksburg.org

 

Some thoughts:

 

We in Blacksburg awoke Monday morning with fierce winds blowing snow across our community, an unusual weather condition for these mountains in mid April.  Little did we know where the winds would blow us that day.  This is a small, rural town in the Appalachian Mountains of southwest Virginia where, because Virginia Tech is the land grant university of our state, the campus stretches out to farmland in many directions in order to provide a variety of agricultural students and researchers settings in which to practice their skills.

 

By the end of the day Monday, we found ourselves in the midst of fear and sorrow, surrounded by media coverage, preparing to find ways to comfort one another and trying to understand what had happened.  As the events of the week unfolded, we realized that the places we hold dear had been the scene of violent acts and were also home to one whose mind evidently was very disturbed.  Even on this sixth day following the tragedy, we are still very much in shock.  Many who have had no association with this university have been affected through their watching of such graphic media coverage.  In your prayers, please remember all whose hearts and minds have been touched by a tragic event either close to home or whose impact as entered their life from afar.  On Sunday, our Blacksburg congregation will light 33 candles for those who lost their lives as well as to remember so many who live in a different world than they did a week ago.

 

Due to the locations of the shootings ? a dorm (where I lived the first year it was open when I was a student) and a classroom, many students have had their personal and academic lives violated. Tech?s graduation is only three weeks away.  Among the victims were a number of students preparing to graduate who already had jobs waiting for them. The university has done an outstanding job in responding to the pain, allowing students options for how they finish out their year.  In your prayers, please remember students and families who are walking through uncharted territory in their grief. Hold in your prayers faculty and staff grieving the loss of colleagues.

 

Through the curiosity of the news media and the American public, much second guessing is going on about how the university officials and response teams handled the crisis.  In your prayers, please remember those who found themselves unexpectedly in difficult leadership positions this week: university officials, local and state law enforcement officers, hospital personnel, rescue squad workers.

 

We Brethren rarely wear clergy collars.  I have worn mine more this week than in my entire life because on campus it identifies me as someone who is open to listening. Those of us who minister here have tried to make ourselves visible and available.  Personally, I have spent hours at the campus chapel where a constant stream of students, faculty and staff, alumni, media and others who have been drawn here have come for quiet prayer.  To watch and to talk with these sorrowful souls is both a humbling and a tearful experience.  As is often the case in nationally publicized tragedies, a number of groups with their own agenda have visited the campus who appear not to be sensitive to the vulnerability of many in grief here.  We have also been blessed with an outpouring of generous helpful acts.  In your prayers, please remember those who seek to minister to those who mourn. 

 

I once heard a South American folk saying: ?They can cut down the flowers, but they can?t keep the spring from coming.?  In the midst of tragedy, moments of life-giving hope emerge.  Two of our professors who lost their lives on Monday are being remembered for particularly selfless acts.  One, Liviu Librescu, a 76 year old Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics and a Holocaust survivor, blocked the classroom door with his body so that some students could escape with their lives by jumping from the second story windows. Kevin Granata, 46, a professor in the same department who researched movement dynamics in cerebral palsy, and who had been in the military, rushed from his office upstairs into the danger zone at the sound of the shots, to try to stop the violence.  In your prayers, please remember those acts of love and courage, so poignant in these weeks following Easter, which give us hope and challenge.

 

On Wednesday, from my vantage point high above Lane Stadium at the campus convocation, my eyes scanned the thousands of students sitting on the football field watching the event through the screen on the end zone monitor.  In my mind, I compared the number of young lives before me with the growing numbers of those Americans killed in Iraq. I wonder what the crowd would look like if it were the size of the Americans who have lost their lives in that conflict, plus the much larger number of Iraqis who have been killed.  Questions about the violence in our society have emerged, as have questions about how we approach mental illness in the country. In your prayers, remember America and those leaders who are in positions to set the course for our country, as this tragedy vividly sets before us who we have become as a people.

 

And finally, please remember our congregation here.  Small as it is, even we have been touched directly by the tragedy.  A college student who has worshipped with us since coming to Virginia Tech is on the college rescue squad.  One of our youth is close friends with the son of a professor who was killed.  Two of our members are the parents of a student who has returned to Tech after some years to complete her degree and is planning to graduate in May.  She had a class scheduled for Tuesday in one of the rooms where the killing occurred.  Had that class been held Monday, her three young daughters might have lost their mother.  We have a long time member of the English faculty as a member of the congregation, the department being questioned about why the troubled gunman was allowed to continue as a student in the university community. There is a family from South Korea who is worshipping with us during the father?s research time at Tech.  They wonder whether they will be seen as somehow connected to the student who did the killing since he was born in South Korea. 

 

Below are some of the words from Tech professor and poet Nikki Giovanni?s ?benediction? offered at Wednesday?s convocation:

            We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while.  We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

            We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

 

May the tears of a loving God, who weeps over all human tragedy as we weep over this Virginia Tech tragedy, give us comfort.  May the selfless act of love of Jesus Christ in going to the cross give us courage.  And may we all find, in our faith, some measure of peace  - not too soon, not too easily, but eventually.

 

Marilyn Lerch

Pastor of Good Shepherd Church of the Brethren, Blacksburg, VA

April 21, 2007