THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504300066
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ESTHER DISKIN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 119 lines
Fern Stanley travels to Unitarian Universalist churches around the country, serving as a pinch-hit minister for any congregation that has lost its pastor and needs help.
Stanley spent 1990 to 1992 at the Unitarian Church of Norfolk, where she helped organize a network of city churches to serve as shelters for homeless people.
Since September, the 60-year-old minister has been serving at the First Unitarian Church in Oklahoma City, a red brick building with a single spire, eight blocks from the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
The force of the blast April 19 blew out the church's bolted doors and shattered a window. Two women of the 360-member congregation apparently died in the federal building, though the body of one has not yet been found in the wreckage.
For the Norfolk congregation, personal ties to Stanley brought the national tragedy close to home. They reached out: last Sunday's church collection brought more than $1,000, the largest amount in recent years. That practical help will be sent to the church this week with a bundle of spiritual comfort - letters from the congregation and a banner of art and messages from children in the religious school class.
Nora Sakal, age 7, drew a picture of the federal building with an ambulance out front and a stretcher with a person on it. ``I am sad,'' she wrote. Another girl drew a picture of a frowning woman with the words: ``We are very sorry you lost people you know.''
``There was a bit of shock to realize that we knew people there,'' said Norfolk minister Maj-Britt Johnson. ``There was a connection. . . . it's both far away and it's not.''
Stanley said people in her church and all around Oklahoma City have needed to hear those voices of kinship, to pull them through an eerie sense of isolation. ``At first, we just felt cut off from the world,'' she said in a phone interview. ``It had marked us out in some strange way.''
``The loudest sound I've ever heard,'' is how Stanley describes the noise of the bomb blast that stopped her in her tracks as she came up the church driveway at 9 a.m. last Wednesday, heading for her office.
In a moment, all was chaos. Nuns were running toward children playing in the yard of a day-care center near the church. Up and down 13th Street, storefront windows were smashed. Panicked workers came running out the double doors of the Unitarian Church, which had popped open despite bolts on the doors.
Stanley could see smoke rising in the distance.
She and other workers ran inside the church to check for damage and then turned on the television to find out what had happened. As pictures flashed across the screen, Stanley said she sensed, with a sinking feeling, that it was no accident.
``We kind of knew, without wanting to say it, that it was done by human hands.''
She and others in the church spent the rest of the day on the phone, calling members of the congregation to try to figure out who might have been inside the building.
As she listened to the pain and confusion in the voices of friends and congregants, she decided the church needed to act fast to pull its faith community closer. She scheduled a service for Thursday night, and made plans to create a sign of caring: A wall of the social hall would become a bulletin board for messages from friends and strangers.
By Thursday night's service, it was clear that two members of the congregation were missing, though there was still some possibility that they'd be found alive in the building.
Mary Rentie, a mother of two teen-agers, worked in the federal building as a manager for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Susan Farrell, a 36-year-old attorney for HUD, loved to dance. She drove a car with a bumper sticker that said, ``Practice random acts of kindness.'' Rentie's body has still not been found, Stanley said Thursday night.
By Sunday morning's regular service, letters from sympathetic outsiders had begun pouring into the church. Now, three walls of the meeting hall are covered. Some church members have started to send out news.
In Norfolk on Sunday morning, about 180 people in the church pews listened and wept, as pastor Johnson read a message from a member of the Oklahoma church picked up on the Internet.
The Internet message from Robert Hurst gave details about how the missing women had brought joy to their community. Rentie ``taught church school for many years and was a favorite teacher for many of our children,'' he wrote. ``Mary played Scrabble, and she told outrageous tales with a perfectly straight face.''
Farrell, ``vivacious, fun and full of life,'' went to have lunch with her grandmother every Sunday.
The Norfolk congregation held a silent meditation and dug deep in their pockets. Their money will be used to help pay for necessities and counseling for the families of the women, Stanley said.
In the Norfolk church's religious school class for fourth- and fifth-graders, they talked about what can be done to help people, even if you can't heal them.
A six-foot banner that they are sending to the church shows what they figured out. Maura McAuliffe, age 11, listed things they could do to help improve their mood, such as playing soccer or spending time with friends. There are pictures of a multicolored peace symbol, and a rainbow connecting the states of Virginia and Oklahoma.
``They zeroed in,'' said Sally Daniel, director of children's religious education for the church. ``They felt, we can make a difference even though we can't go, even if we can't hug them.''
Once the banner reaches Oklahoma City, it is likely to go up on the wall quickly. Every day, Stanley said, church members come to open the new letters and arrange them for the wall.
People stop by every day, looking for a little bit of comfort. ``People just read and read and read,'' Stanley said. ``We find ourselves in tears. It's healthy tears, because it comes from knowing we are cared for.'' MEMO: If you'd like to send a letter to the First Unitarian Church in Oklahoma
City, the address is: First Unitarian Church, 600 NW 13th Street,
Oklahoma City, OK 73103. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/Staff
A banner to be sent to Oklahoma this week from the Unitarian Church
of Norfolk is held by, from left, Sally Daniel, Neal Hur, Brian
Daniel, Chris Daniel and the minister, Maj-Britt Johnson.
KEYWORDS: BOMBS EXPLOSIONS FATALITIES TERRORISM
OKLAHOMA CITY RELIEF by CNB