Campus ministers look to begin anew

Denise Sanders, campus minister at Newman Catholic Student Center, enjoys a pancake breakfast after celebrating morning Mass at the student center Sunday. At the breakfast, Sanders shared a table with new and returning students who are active at the Newman Center. EMILY OLSON | emolson@daily-chronicle.com

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Diane Dardón admits she’s under-prepared, but she is also ready. The Lutheran campus minister at Northern Illinois University wasn’t sure how much to plan for back-to-school events, welcoming old and new students to a campus that became a place of sadness and pain last semester.

Then, she had lunch this summer with Virginia Tech’s Lutheran minister, Bill King, who was a central figure following the April 2007 shooting on the Virginia campus.

He confirmed what she had been feeling all along: Just let it be.

So rather than booking guest speakers and programs focused on the Feb. 14 shooting and its aftermath, Dardón is letting the new semester fall into place as it will.

“My way of bringing in a new community and welcoming back a community is to simply say, ‘Let’s be together. Let’s work together, let’s play together and let’s be a community,’” she said. “There’s a lot of preparation that goes into looking like you’re not prepared.”

Even though no one was prepared for the events of Feb. 14, when a former NIU student opened fire in a classroom in Cole Hall, killing five students and injuring at least 16 others before turning the gun on himself, campus ministers were among those who had to quickly make themselves ready for anything and anyone who walked through their doors.

The response was immediate and natural, said Denise Sanders, campus minister at the Newman Catholic Student Center.

“When things went on lockdown, we’d stand at the door and let (students) in if we knew who they were,” Sanders said. “The students were like, ‘We needed to pray.’”

As the day unfolded and pieces fell in place, students flocked to churches to “make sense of the senseless,” Dardón said.

Campus ministers worked triple-time, helping thousands of individuals work through their own grieving process. Dardón got a combined 20 hours of sleep the first week following the shooting, she said.

It was a roller coaster ride of emotions. Sanders described an initial sense of numbness, then of “clinging” to one another and to God.

Many religious organizations, including Newman Center and Lutheran Campus Ministry, held prayer services and kept their buildings open 24 hours a day for students to find safety, comfort and a hearty meal.

“The school did a great job with having tons of professionals come in, so we were able to do more faith-based, relational sort of ministry — just meeting people where they’re at and with their faith and their struggle of, you know, where was God,” Sanders said.

That question — where was God — was hard to answer.

“Any time that we feel lost and our world is turned upside down, it gives us a moment to think: What if that had been me? Where would I land in the grand scheme of things? So, yeah, a lot of faith testing, a lot of soul searching,” Dardón said. “I also firmly believe that God has wept every tear with us and God has been at every one of our sides.”

The campus ministers had their own caretakers: Family, church leaders and the whole community. Sanders’ relief was found in going home to her golden retriever for a game of fetch.

And the caretaking and caregiving is far from over. Both Sanders and Dardón said that they’re ready for the new semester, but know it won’t always be easy.

Dardón acknowledges that everyone will “bump into this” at different times this semester — and for a lifetime.

“The first couple weeks it’s going to be real exciting, but I know there’s going to be those waves of ‘OK, what is normal again?’” Sanders said. “So I just try to be prepared for wherever students are going to be, and then meet them where they’re at.”