In the Current Issue: "All Souls and the Club Q Vigils"

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Rites for Wounded Communities,” guest-edited by David Hogue, explores a wide range of responses in which churches and chaplains have engaged in order to help people affected by disasters and violence come to terms with the after-effects and the on-going trauma. This excerpt by Elizabeth Elliot describes the experiences of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, a congregation in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that responded with pastoral compassion to a shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQIA+ bar not far from the church. –– Melinda Quivik

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The worship team prioritized elements that most provide comfort in times of crisis: prayer, music, and story. To accommodate the many visitors and guests joining the service, many elements were more contextualized. For example, the UUA ritual of lighting the chalice, a key liturgical element for All Souls, was explained. . .

The staff and volunteers demonstrated how, in doing the mundane tasks of the everyday Sunday church service (lighting the chalice, making coffee, setting up chairs, greeting people) in the most extraordinary circumstances. . .  were a spiritual practice. Mary Daly’s claim that “God is not a noun, but a verb” proved a solid starting point for the worship cohorts in framing the spiritual grounding for the orthopraxy of the upcoming public rituals. The volunteers and staff of the church proved their ability to perform their duties with grace, determination, and compassion while being adaptive to a day filled with the unexpected. No one felt unsupported; rather, the “loving practice” of performing the tasks of worship revealed a well-oiled machinery of service.

One of the themes of the work of Widening the Circle of Concern is creating space for voices that have been absent from the pulpit, a commitment to centering the most marginalized. In the All Souls worship service, this was reflected in the choice to have two members of the congregation provide testimonials in place of the traditional sermon. One of the speakers was a long-term church member who was a regular at Club Q and the other was a Trans parishioner. Centering these voices not only empowered those most impacted by the violence of the night before but connected the congregation through the compassionate solidarity of hearing the experiences of their fellow parishioners.

In planning the vigils, the commitment to centering the marginalized was expressed by entrusting the Director of Inside Out Youth Services to take the lead. She, in turn, reached out to more community partners. This resulted in a shared power dynamic that had the most well-known and trusted LGBTQIA + community members front and center during the vigils. The fact that All Souls already had a relationship with these LGBTQIA + community partners proved instrumental. The church was not a mere host, nor a dominating voice, but an interconnected part of the community. Those whose voices were most prioritized were the ones most central to the moment: the owners of Club Q, the other people who were present at the shooting, the families (biological and chosen) of the victims, and the spiritual and organizational leaders embedded within the community. The message of the moment was that the vigil organizers were not there to provide complex theological answers; rather, everyone was there to sit in the questions together. This approach proved effective for this interfaith space.

. . . During the vigils, the names of the deceased were read aloud and loved ones were able to share stories of their lives and of the community’s time together at Club Q.

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Elizabeth Elliot an End-of-Life Doula, attends Iliff School of Theology and is seeking ordination in the Unitarian Universalist Association. https://www.bethelliot.com.

Elizabeth Elliot, “All Souls and the Club Q Vigils,” Liturgy 39, no. 2 (2024): 45–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2024.2330321.