LOS ANGELES — Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church sits on a rise overlooking the ocean. The church caught fire and burned down on the first night of the Palisades Fire, which began the morning of January 7.
"It was absolutely surreal to see flames coming off the top of those crosses," said the Rev. Grace Park, who has served as one of the church's pastors for nearly two decades.
On a recent afternoon, she walked through the rubble of her congregation's campus.
"If you come up these stairs here," she said, "this is where the back entrance of the church used to be."
Palisades Presbyterian now lies in ruins. The congregation has been meeting a few miles away at a Presbyterian church in Culver City since the fire. Church leaders say they hope to rebuild someday, but it's too early to talk about when that might be.
Many Christians mark the beginning of Lent by marking their foreheads with the sign of a cross in ash. For those whose homes and churches burned in the Los Angeles area fires in January, this year's Ash Wednesday is especially poignant.
"I am constantly reminding folks in church, reminding myself as well that the church is not a building, but it is her people," said Park. But she admits that such reassurances can feel like cold comfort.
"The reality is that this is our home," she said. "We do live here. And we are surrounded by the things in our lives that mean something to us. The photos mean something to us. That special coffee cup that you used every morning, it meant something to you. We need to take the moment to grieve them."
A hard few months
About 50 families from Palisades Presbyterian lost their homes in the fire, along with their church. Many others have been displaced, scattered throughout Los Angeles County and elsewhere in California, from San Diego to Sacramento.
Park and other clergy and staff spend their days talking with members on the phone, on Zoom and in person to make sure they have what they need.
Among those grieving is 91-year-old member Sylvia Boyd, a retired executive at Tupperware who lived near not far from the church. She was at home the afternoon the Palisades Fire began.
"My neighbor pulled up and ran to the door and said, 'Quick, grab your dog in your purse and let's go.' " said Boyd. "I never saw my house again."
Boyd has been a member of Palisades Presbyterian for some 30 years.
"I just know at my church we always worked and prayed and did everything we could to help everybody who needed help," she said.
Boyd is now living with her daughter, near Sacramento. It's been a hard few months. Her husband died right before Christmas and her church burned down just before his memorial service.
"I do hope that there is something on the horizon that will come, and I know it will," she said. "And if you're lucky, like me, you've got a family that will take you in along with your dog."
Congregations strive to stay together
On the other side of LA County, the Rev. Carri Patterson Grindon has moved her congregation into a temporary home. She's the long-time rector at St. Mark's Episcopal Church of Altadena, which burned down on the first night of the Eaton Fire on January 7.
"This is the former rectory of St. Barnabas Church in Eagle Rock," she said on a recent morning, showing off a sparsely furnished room. "It's sort of a multi-purpose space."
St. Barnabas offered the space to St. Mark's for as long as they need it. The Altadena congregation worships in the sanctuary on Sundays and uses the former rectory for meetings, which have included time to share stories of loss, guidance in filling out FEMA forms and complimentary acupuncture sessions to help relieve stress.
For Grindon and many at her congregation, these have been enormously stressful weeks.
"Receiving both the good news that our house was still standing and then this unimaginable news that the church was gone. I don't even know," she said. "It was unbelievable to try to hold all that."
Grindon describes her congregation as diverse and multigenerational, especially for an Episcopal church. It reflects the wide range of race and ethnic mixes of Altadena in particular and Los Angeles County in general.
She says losing the space where so many different people have come together to worship over the years — a space that held holy moments from baptisms to funerals to weddings — has been traumatic. "Seeing it all gone," she said, "was just excruciating, honestly."
Observing Lent amid tangible loss
In the late 1990s, Betty Butler began attending St. Mark's. The retired librarian has been an active member ever since, serving on committees and leading study groups. She's a lifelong Episcopalian who speaks with some perspective on the loss of her church's building.
"We move forward after seeing lives in ashes," she said. "The ashes will scatter. They'll return to the earth. There will be things that are painful and we'll get through them. But we have our faith and we have a promise."
A promise of hope in the midst of despair, Butler said, and a responsibility to help each other. Her home was spared in the fires, but five of her nieces and nephews were temporarily displaced. For a while, all of them were living with her in her two-bedroom condo.
The losses and sorrow have Butler thinking about Lent a bit differently this year. "Faith calls you to not give up," she said, "but to give to."
There is so much need in her community, her Lenten practice will be to offer help to whoever needs it.
Another longtime member is 18-year-old Maggie Arnzen-Samoa. She began attending St. Mark's in first grade, when she and her two fathers joined the congregation.
"When I first heard that the church was burnt down, it was through my dad. And that was the first time I saw him cry in the whole ordeal," she said. "The church wasn't just a place where I felt safe, but my family felt safe."
Safe is something Arnzen-Samoa, a first-year student at Pasadena Community College, longs to feel again. It's something she's making her spiritual practice this Lent.
"There's been a lot of trauma, and I think it's good to give up something more emotional that I've been feeling — anger or resentment," she said. "I think those are things that I'd love to let go and move forward."
The path forward isn't clear, but her pastor, Carri Patterson Grindon, says her congregation is committed to walking it together.
"It's been really incredible to see people come together in the midst of their grief and their loss," she said, "without skipping over any of that and holding each other up and remaining one in the midst of really unimaginable loss."
For Christians, Lent is not the journey's end
Facing so much profound loss makes this Lent different, says the Rev. Grace Park of Palisades Presbyterian.
"The symbol of Lent is ashes, and we are definitively surrounded by ashes," she said. "The imagery of ashes is destruction and loss and grief."
It's a season, Park says, that reminds humans of their fragility and God's solidarity with them. "God loves us. God weeps with us. And God walks with us through the ashes."
Through loss and grief, not around it.
At the ruins of Palisades Presbyterian Church, Park stood on dusty ground and pointed to a spot in the rubble. A few days after the fire, she and some others hiked to the site.
"And right in there, inside of those ashes," she recalled, "is where we pulled out the chancel cross."
The cross at the front of the church had been badly burned but not destroyed. In the midst of despair, it was a sign of hope on the path to Easter.
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