We are heartsick over the deaths of Greg McKendry and Linda Kraegar and chaos caused by the shooting in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Knoxville, in Knoxville, TN during their worship service on July 27, 2008.

In response, on the afternoon of Saturday, August 2, we gathered, Members, Friends and guests from our Riverside community, in a special service of Remembrance. We came in solidarity with the UU community in Knoxville. We shared with one another our own pain and fears. Despite the senseless hate and violence at the core of this event, we gathered to dwell in the inspiring and the meaningful.

I was deeply moved our intergenerational gathering. So many came in spite of the named fear that this “could happen anywhere, even here in Riverside,” and offered up their sorrow and their inspirations so completely to one another – in some cases to a complete stranger. Our courage did not end there, instead motivated by the example of our fellow Unitarian Universalists in Knoxville and all over the continent, we went beyond fear and into hope and healing.

We worked through many questions as individuals and as a community affected by great loss. We chose not to follow the course of our fear, anger and, yes, in some hearts hate for the shooter, Jim David Adkisson. Instead, we admired the courage expressed in Knoxville to risk their lives to protect their children, to show restraint when they had the shooter confined for several minutes before the police arrived, and to show a resolve in our Unitarian Universalist values and publically request that the death penalty not be considered for this man.

There were many questions we did not have answers for as individuals and as a community of faith, but together accepted that this was just the beginning of a larger process for us all. We will in the coming weeks and months and years seek answers together, in the fashion that Rainer Maria Rilke names in her “Letter to A Young Poet, Letter Four (July 16, 1903):

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. 

I remain grateful for the wisdom of Lorriane Hedtke, who shared in planning and leading our Service of Remembrance and the support of my friend, the Rev. Sara Gibb Milspaugh, for her work in crafting a workshop in response to crisis from which much of our service was drawn.

In Community,

Matthew