The Rev. Daniel Greenleaf sits Thursday next to portraits of people killed in the Oct. 25, 2023, mass shooting. Holy Family Church was planned to be open for prayer all day. Andree Kehn/Sun Magazine

LEWISTON — How do you confront evil and come out the other side surrounded by good?

That’s the question Pastor Daniel Greenleaf has been grappling with since the night of the mass shooting in Lewiston last year. The answer is not easy and nuanced.

“The challenge in this dark time is to find the light, the hope, the meaning in everything,” he said, “and to believe that this is not the end of the story.”

According to Greenleaf, life in Lewiston will never be the same again after October 25, 2023.

“There definitely seems to be a before and after,” he said.

The pastor of Prince of Peace Parish said he focused on the light that reveals itself in dark times to save himself and his congregation.

“It was amazing to see so much good coming through all of this,” he said. “The people who showed up, the acts of kindness, the money and the prayers; people ask ‘how can I help’, ‘what can I do’. “To me, that makes me love Lewiston even more because I’ve seen so much good in the people.”

Greenleaf said that sometimes that’s when the goodness in people shines brightest when darkness and evil show their face.

“Sometimes you can only see the good when the bad comes,” he said. “Otherwise, you might just take it for granted and forget it’s even there.”

Over the past year, Greenleaf has thought a lot about how to talk to people about making sense of this kind of tragedy and how to advise them to overcome their fears about such a traumatic experience.

“When they come to see me, they’re not just struggling with their faith, they’re trying to figure it out,” he said. “How should I understand this? How could God allow this to happen? This is some of the issues I struggle with. The feeling of how can someone heal and move on?

He said people need to see the situation “in the light.”

“As difficult and painful as it is for all of us, it has changed our lives forever, but we cannot let it end in this pain,” he said. “There must be something more, something that will lead us to hope and well-being.”

DEALING WITH FEAR

Greenleaf said fear among congregation members and the broader community is one of the biggest challenges.

“What we have to overcome is fear,” he said. “Will this happen again? What would happen if ‘this’ happened?”

The church went through a period of making sure everyone was inside during services and events and locking the doors so no one could get in without being checked.

“We realized that was not the way to deal with this,” he said. “We can’t live this way. “But it’s still in the back of our minds, especially as we come together in a large group.”

This became a focal point, and he often had to address it with the congregation and reassure people that everything would be okay.

“And that’s just a product of what I see as post-traumatic stress,” he said. “As someone who lived through those three days (when the shooter was released) when everyone was in isolation; “I don’t know where he is or what’s going on.”

This fear played out in real time, even for him last year.

He said there was an event at the Holy Family Church on Sabattus Street on Saturday and he saw a man he did not know enter the church. The man sat in the back row for a while. Then he got up and left, went to his car, opened his trunk, then took out something and walked towards the church.

As he watched from the vicarage window, he panicked. The man was acting strange.

“I saw this while looking out the window and ran. ‘What does he bring to the church?’ I thought.

He said they locked the doors and called the police. The police came and the man left. It turned out to be nothing.

Greenleaf said he has no idea what happened or might have happened, but he knows where the brain went. He said the man appeared to be mentally ill.

“This is a hard thing to accept,” he said. “How could we not want someone in church? Even if he is mentally ill, why can’t he come to church? This could be a place where he can find lots of peace and happiness. But there is another element that emerged because of our experiences (during filming).”

‘IT TAKES ME BACK’

At the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul downtown, during and after mass on cold days, some homeless people will come in and sit in the back.

Last year a lady walked down the middle of the aisle and began confronting Greenleaf in the middle of the service. Another man sat in the front row, then raised his hand during the service and asked to speak to her right then and there.

“If you want to come in and get warm, that’s what Christ wants us to do,” he said. “But if you’re going to come and cause trouble, we can’t let that happen.”

“That balance is what you have to deal with,” he added. “We want to feel welcome and it doesn’t cost us anything to let someone come in and warm up or even fall asleep in the back row, and that’s fine. Be warm. But everything we experience will be filtered from that October evening.”

As emergency vehicles with sirens blaring pass the rectory, it reminds him of the night of the shooting.

“This takes me back,” he said. “This is a human reaction after going through what we went through.”

Recent violence in the city has intensified some of the ongoing fears, especially in the neighborhoods around the basilica.

“We even moved morning mass to Holy Family because people were afraid to go downtown,” Greenleaf said.

“They made the connection between violence and downtown, and some of the problems downtown are mental illness and drug use,” he said. “People are disturbed”

Robert Card, the October 25 attacker, was known to authorities to be struggling with mental illness. This reality has further increased the uncertainty of people in the city who are also struggling, and access to help can often be limited.

“Good people were trying to help (Card), but there was a broken system that wouldn’t allow him to get help,” Greenleaf said.

As a person of faith, Greenleaf said you have to put things like this in context.

“What Card did was evil, but his own illness made him very susceptible to giving in to evil,” he said. “The men who carry out these attacks are suffering for many reasons, and this is not justifiable, but it does reveal another piece of the puzzle. There will never be answers, but we need to discover them because you see the depth of what these issues really are. “You are dealing with endless questions, multi-layered meanings.”

Although the basilica no longer hosts evening masses, the church hosts events such as parties, family gatherings, games, meetings, and more.

“The Basilica is a great place for some events, but we think people are more scared now,” he said. “They caught a man opening car doors (during an event) and stealing items from unlocked vehicles.”

Greenleaf says he’s looking forward to seeing the city come together to address crime and drug use in the area.

“Sooner or later we have to address what’s going on there,” he said. “The municipality can’t seem to handle this.”

PILGRIMAGE TO FIND THE LIGHT

Even halfway around the world, Greenleaf said he found deeper meaning in the Lewiston shooting.

On his latest trip to the country of Poland, where he just returned this week, the people he met there knew what had happened there last year.

“Even in Poland they knew about Lewiston, so you identify with that event,” he said.

While there, Greenleaf visited the World War II Auschwitz concentration camp and spent time in Warsaw.

“We went to the museum of a priest who helped hide some of the people and was eventually killed in the war. “We found out that there was another man in the camps who took the place of others and eventually died,” he recalled. “Even in the midst of all this horror, you see good things happening. Against such overwhelming evil; There are people of such deep faith everywhere you go.”

When asked how he finds light in the darkness, Greenleaf said there are two quotes that help him.

“It’s never so dark that you can’t see the light. There will never be enough light to see the darkness.” The other: “Evil continues to exist because good people do nothing.”

“I believe in goodness. “We need to be on the side of good and light,” he said. “I think this has come out in my own experience of dealing with someone with cancer. “I saw so many good things.”

There are no quick answers to the bigger questions of faith, good and evil.

“How can there be so much good when there is so much evil in the world? You’re talking about questions that are huge throughout human existence.”

“I don’t know why evil exists, but I know what evil exists,” he said. “It breaks some people, but it brings out the best in others.”

“For me, this experience helped me love the people of Lewiston even more, especially those in my own community.”

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