Staff, faculty and students shared thoughts in a Friday program hosted by the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Diversity Education that concluded with handwritten notes of support to a South Carolina church where nine people were killed days earlier because of their race.
Members of the Elon University community gathered in prayer Friday to express grief following the South Carolina murders of nine people attending a Bible study two nights earlier in the oldest African-American church in the South.
Led by staff from the university’s Center for Race, Ethnicity and Diversity Education, the “Pray for Charleston” program welcomed more than three dozen people to Moseley Center for meditation and reflection.
The gathering featured a prayer from Chaplain Jan Fuller, who lamented the “racism undisguised” that led a gunman to open fire in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Fuller said that such acts of violence often leave people without words to describe their pain.
Yet as explained in Paul’s letter to the Romans, she said, the Holy Spirit interprets “the groaning of our hearts” and knows what to make of pain. “We might not have the words, but we have the tears, we have sighs, we have groaning, we have breaking hearts,” Fuller said. “Coming (to God) with our wordless grief is enough.”
Many people at the gathering expressed sadness at a racial divide in America where many whites may not fully understand pain felt by African-Americans following the June 17, 2015, shooting in Charleston. Churches have always been a place of refuge and comfort for generations of black Americans who confront racism, inequality and injustice every day, they said.
A white gunman who enters the oldest African-American church in the South to kill nine people because of their race, including the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, raises a very real question: Am I safe anywhere?
“Violence has been prevalent in our society,” Jamie Butler, assistant director of the CREDE, said in opening the program. “We thought this would be a good opportunity to get together.”
Along with the gathering, Fuller has made available the Sacred Space as a place of prayer, meditation, candle lighting and silence all day Friday. Chaplains will be available to talk or pray through the day and will be on hand at the gathering in the CREDE.
Anyone who wishes to write a note of encouragement, sorrow or solidarity to the congregation of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston will find note cards, paper, pens and envelopes available in the CREDE in Moseley Center and in the Sacred Space of the Numen Lumen Pavilion.
Write a note and either put it in the basket or leave it in the writing area. If you wish to send one of your own, bring it by one of those spaces. CREDE and the Truitt Center for Religious and Spiritual Life will take care of the address and postage. Staff plan to mail the cards together from the community of Elon on Thursday, June 25.
Staff will receive notes until Wednesday at 5 p.m.