›› Throughout the day, a procession of grieving families flowed into the Gateway High School gym. A few hours earlier, a gunman had opened fire on an Aurora theater a short drive north of the school, killing 12 people. The scope of the crime was so massive, police used the gym as a makeshift meeting place for the families and investigators trying to tackle the immeasurable horror of the hot, windy summer day.
By that afternoon, dozens of grieving survivors had assembled in the gym, their eyes red, shoulders slumped from a day of trying to wrap their minds around the carnage.
For many, the grief had turned to anger. While police and the families largely knew their worst fears would come true — that their missing loved ones had been killed in the theater — investigators wouldn’t release the details the families wanted. Some lashed out at the investigators, demanding answers that the cops didn’t give.
At 4 p.m., the police chief turned to Dennis Gorton, a longtime chaplain with the police department. He asked him to pray.
Gorton, decked out in the blue police chaplain uniform he often finds himself wearing in the worst of times, stepped in front of the assembled families and asked them to pray with him. Earlier that day, he had asked dozens of friends and fellow preachers to pray for Aurora that afternoon, and he told the families that as they prayed, people around the country were praying with them.
The crowded gym went silent, and Gorton prayed.
It’s one of the most important prayers Gorton has delivered in his 40 years of ministering. But with the emotion of that day, he doesn’t remember a word of it.
“I have no clue,” he said. “But we were able to move forward, and that’s what chaplains do in those kinds of situations. We remind people that all of the stuff that is so totally out of our control, God is still there in the midst of it.”
Finding God in the midst of heartbreak is a constant for police chaplains. Their work revolves around the most trying times for police, and those times make even the most faithful question their beliefs.
Last summer, in the aftermath of the theater shooting, Gorton said questions like “God who?” were common among the officers he visited. Gorton himself asked those questions as he struggled with why someone would unleash such horror.
“The ‘why’ question is an unanswerable question except for the fact that within all of us is the ability to be evil,” he said.