Like you, I woke up to the news on Sunday about the massacre in Orlando. I was on a retreat in Florida and had limited access to news, but I immediately started thinking about what we as a congregation would do to respond to this horrific tragedy. I texted Dave and Becky to see what they thought about having some kind of vigil at Redeemer, and inviting others to participate—I was clear that it needed to be both Interfaith, and that it couldn’t ignore the fact that almost everyone killed was gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

That text set in motion what eventually became the community Vigil that Redeemer hosted on Wednesday. It was an amazing event that showed the best of our hospitality and our teamwork—from Amy Endres editing the text of Anderson Cooper’s moving tribute to the victims so that when the names were read at the Morristown Green we could include a little bit of each person’s story, to Dave Jones getting the whole thing off the ground while I was still in Florida, and paying attention to every last detail once I got back, to Colleen saying “Yes!” when I came up with a crazy idea while on the plane home on Monday of putting up a series of colored flags to make a rainbow on our sidewalk, to Yolanda Baker, when the Clergy Council-designated speaker was unable to speak, on Wednesday morning agreeing to speak, in Spanish and English, and then making everyone cry with her so-lovingly-beautiful mother’s words, to Barbara Cronenberger, Jody Caldwell, Joan Slepian, Peg Crilly, Marie Endres, Ajorie Henry, Erin Dunn and Jim Gartner, serving as ushers, to Sandra, setting up the photos in the church, to Maurice making sure no one took the bishop’s parking place, and generally making sure everything went smoothly, to all the members of Redeemer who came out and supported the event. As the photos show, it was an overflow crowd, and if you watch the video on MorristownGreen.com, you’ll know what I mean when I say the bishop kicked butt.

But here’s when it got me. I was on over-drive before my plane hit the ground in Newark on Monday. Dave and I had been furiously texting from the moment I got out of my retreat, and we were trying to cover every detail of putting together a large-scale service—having no idea how many people would show up.

The “over-drive” continued through the emergency Clergy Council meeting Tuesday morning, the actual planning of the service with my Interfaith colleagues, and on through the day. Lying in bed Tuesday night, scrolling through Facebook, an image struck me. It was of a friend’s church in Michigan. He had put photos of the 49 victims of the massacre on the steps leading to his high altar, and they almost looked like icons. At midnight, I sent him a short email, asking about the source of the pictures. At 8:30 Wednesday morning, a link to a 40MB file on iCloud arrived. I downloaded the file, and opened it up. Seeing the images up close was hard, but what came next was oddly harder.

Where do you save a file of 49 photos of beautiful people, gunned down in the prime of their life, having a great time in a gay sanctuary? 49 photos of people never imagining that THIS photo would be used to convey something about who they were to the world after their death…49 photos of varying quality…some selfies…some studio portraits…all beautiful human beings. I scrolled through the directory structure of my hard drive. And then I lost it. Finally, after 3 days I couldn’t hold it all in any longer. I had nowhere on my computer to store this. No folder. No category. It didn’t fit in “Correspondence” “Facilities,” “Press Releases,” “Sermons.” So I cried. It was the photographs that finally got me.

We will have the photographs up on Sunday, as we did for the Vigil, so that you may see the beautiful humanity that lies therein. There is no file folder on a hard drive that can contain this beauty, this vitality, or our profound sadness, sense of loss and anger.

–Cynthia Black