‘It’s painful and healing at the same time’
Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church pastors show a PDA delegation the site where a beloved church once stood
PACIFIC PALISADES, California — The Rev. Matt Hardin and the Rev. Dr. Grace Park, who serve Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, the only PC(USA) church destroyed by the January wildfires, led members of the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance solidarity visit during a sacred time Sunday to mourn their beautiful church, a complete loss in the Palisades fire.
“We’re still in the wilderness,” Hardin said, standing alongside the charred remains. “Every time I come here, I realize how long it’s going to take.”
“It’s like visiting a gravesite,” Park said. “It’s painful and healing at the same time.”
Fifty-five church families lost their homes in the blaze. Church leaders are undecided as of now whether to rebuild after adding a new roof and carpeting and, most recently, custom sliding doors just before the fire. The fire also claimed the church’s preschool, which ministered to 65 children. The preschool “was a big part of who we are,” Hardin said. It’s been shuttered.
The church currently conducts worship services each Sunday afternoon at Culver City Presbyterian Church. On Sunday, PDA’s director, the Rev. Edwin González-Castillo, offered a sermon during worship based on Luke 4:1-13. The setting — Jesus and the devil in the wilderness — is “all the more relevant to those of us who have experienced the struggles of a disaster — to be able to find similarities between what the wilderness represents and the experience of living through, or surviving, a traumatic event,” González-Castillo said.
He recounted the biblical accounts of others who experienced the wilderness, including Abraham, Moses and Elijah. González-Castillo called the wilderness “a place of isolation, vulnerability and struggle, but it can be a place to find spiritual depth, renewal and transformation.”
Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church musicians and singers joined during worship to lead a wide array of beautiful music, from a piano and organ duet of Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” to “Ten Thousand Reasons.”
A touching site
While driving visitors to the church site, Hardin pointed out other nearby losses. A popular site, Will Rogers State Park, had been overseen by a church member. The church’s former manse, adjacent to the church building, is still standing but is being remediated to make it once again habitable. It had been rented out, and the church is experiencing that revenue loss as well as no longer receiving tuition from the preschool. But Presbyterians and others have been generous with their gifts, Hardin pointed out.
“We’ve been blessed with donations from all over,” he said.
Park showed visitors around what remains of the church, which isn’t much. Pots of geraniums survived the blaze, but the pipe organ did not, along with the decades of music with which the choir has blessed worship. Among the surviving church finery is a charred cross that Park and others pulled from the site. Each Sunday, church members display the cross during worship at Culver City Presbyterian Church.
On Jan. 7, the day of the fire, Hardin first helped preschoolers to unite with their parents, then was later able to join his own family. His last acts at the church included sending a note to session members and then locking the door.
“He called me and said, ‘Grace, the flames are so close,’” Park said. “I could hear the shock in his voice.”
As people were evacuating the Palisades through the only two routes in and out, a church member was directing traffic near the church. That member moved Hardin’s car a couple of blocks, which saved it from the fire’s destructive path.
“I was calling folks saying, ‘You really need to leave!’” Park said. Married just last September, Park’s daughter was a participant in the last to take place in the church’s sanctuary.
The two pastors talked with the PDA delegation for a time at the church site, and then everyone circled up while González-Castillo said a word of prayer.
“Dear God, we’re standing on sacred ground — not only because of events, but because we believe you’re still in this place,” González-Castillo told the Almighty. “In the midst of pain, sorrow and anger, we pray for your Spirit to move around the community, those near and far. We ask for your Spirit to embrace them with hope, with the expectation you’re still in control.”
“Provide them with spaces of security,” he prayed, “that they may feel the embrace of a church that’s visible and invisible.”
Financial support for relief efforts through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance can be designated to DR000165, which supports the church’s response to wildfires in the U.S. Gifts can be made here.
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