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Friends United Meeting |
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April 2000
I SAW HEAVEN ANSWER HELL
By Peggy Senger Parsons
"In this place that you called a wasteland, there shall be heard again the voice of joy and the voice of gladness."
Jeremiah 33:10
There is a fabric of peace that is woven below all creation. Yet at times, rents are made in the fabric of peace so wide it seems likely the tear will always remain. I was once near one of these catastrophes in Scotts Mills, Oregon, in September of 1995.
On the eastern edge of the green Willamette Valley, in the lower foothills of the Cascade Mountains, Scotts Mills was settled by Quakers, built by loggers and farmers, and temporarily besieged by flower children. Scotts Mills has all it needs-a store, a post office and a church. This town of 400 souls endures-proud, parochial, somewhat impoverished, threatened only by the gentrification of urban refugees. On my first day as interim pastor of that little Friends church, violence erupted into the life of the community.
The church was at a waning moment in the traditional wax and wane cycle of rural churches and had about 25 believers. What impressed me on my first visit was its continuity. Built in 1894, the church stood pretty much as it had been built. However, the human continuity was even more impressive. There I met Edith Kellogg Magee, 95 years old. She had attended this church nearly every Sunday for 77 years. She introduced me to her daughter-in-law, Margaret, a quiet woman who had returned with her husband to his hometown to retire, only to lose him to cancer. I also met Margaret's daughter, Laura, who had come to live with her mother and find healing from a disturbed marriage. I met the sunshine of the clan-three tiny blondes named Sarah, Rachel, and April Hope. Sarah was five and had new crayons, ready to go to kindergarten and ready to tell anyone about it. Rachel, three, was too busy enjoying stained glass-filtered sunlight to be bothered with guests. April was six months old and had the grace to be held by a stranger and the willingness to smile at an unknown face. Four generations of women, giving breath and voice to the history of a place. Then Hell found its way into the community in the only way it has available to it-through human permission. A man who could not stand the loss of control over his family; a man who would not acknowledge that sin had lurked at his door and entered it in fullness, a selfish, cowardly man came to Scotts Mills and shotgunned to death his wife Laura and their three beautiful daughters.
Most of the town heard the gunshots. Several neighbors witnessed the horror occurring in Margaret's front yard. People locked themselves in the post office and the store in terror. Law enforcement, thirty minutes away, was thirty minutes too late. Relatives and friends were first on the scene. The media locust arrived soon after, with helicopters, satellite dishes and a voracious appetite for evocative sound bites from the shell-shocked. The church family was devastated, the town was shaken to its core, and it seemed for a time as if peace had been forever banished by terror.
The media focused on the crime and the criminal and overstayed their tenuous welcome. Their story withered in a week. They were long gone when the truly unusual things started to happen, when Heaven answered Hell.
Living threads began to re-weave the fabric of peace, becoming visible even in the dark, beginning days. The first thread of heaven we saw was honesty. Two days after the murders, the community gathered in the church to pray together, to attempt to console each other, but also to nail to the door of Heaven those ancient, unanswerable questions that all begin with "Why?" The general restraint in not applying shallow, easy answers was remarkable. The honest laying out of human pain and outrage, without the need to cover it over swiftly, was the weaver's loom of a miracle.
The next thread appeared a few days later at what should have been one of the darkest moments. At the memorial service for Laura and her daughters, her brother stood in the face of unbearable pain and shouted, "We will not let this steal our hope!" Audacious, militant, defiant hope laid down the warp, the undergirding, of the fabric of peace.
The weft, the filler, of the fabric came in a multitude of colors and textures. One shining thread was a small victory that community made possible. While the newshounds sniffed out and stalked down every quote, the entire community managed to 'forget' to mention Edith, the eminently quotable 95 year-old matriarch of the clan. And they smiled at each other with a knowing pride, having protected at least one of their precious women.
Determined courage put the footwork to defiant hope. The church met that Sunday, and all the Sundays to follow, though the twenty-five had been robbed of four. They met when the twenty-one became twenty because Margaret was taken away to be cared for by her family. And even when the twenty became nineteen, when in October, Edith was diagnosed with cancer and left the home of her bride-days, her motherhood and her widowhood to be cared for in another town. Still they came together and passed back and forth the shuttle of prayer, believing that this was not Heaven's ending for this place.
The hole started to fill the following spring, when the people, having wiped their tears and risen slowly from their knees, began to look about. They saw a land full of small places unprepared for and open to the attack of violence.
Out of deep knowledge and compassion they turned outward and commissioned and supported a visiting ministry about family violence to inform and prepare their sister churches. The vision continued to widen and the local congregation, now of 50 souls, organized and opened a women's shelter. They named it Laura's House of Peace.
It was soon after this that I noticed life starting to return, first in music and then in laughter. I noticed it in a wedding, a Christmas, in children's voices speaking in meeting again. Pews were filling with people, some for whom the nightmare was a story and not a memory. Edith passed away but Margaret returned to Scott's Mills, reclaiming, redeeming what was her very own.
I knew the fabric was truly healing when Easter 1997 dawned; warm, sunny and beautiful. The church was full of flowers, tulips, daffodils and primroses among the lilies. A hundred people, and I believe, all the saints and angels crammed into that little room to celebrate a resurrection that was to them a familiar mystery.
Violence had its day in Scotts Mills, but (Praise God!) the things that make for peace -honesty, hope, community, determination, and compassion - rose up through the ashes and persist to this day. This is the message of redemption for our world. The strength and power of militant yet quiet healing is available to us all. Armed with it we can ease the burden of a wounded world.
Peggy Senger Parsons is a recorded Friends minister and served at Scotts Mills Friends from September 1995 to June 1997. She is also a licensed professional counselor and a certified spiritual director. She is available for speaking engagements, including events on family violence education. She lives in Salem, Oregon, with her husband, daughter and father. Her website is: [http://ourworld.cs.com/peggyparsons].
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