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BY GRETCHEN KEISER
Staff Writer
CONYERS--Since the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.,
Elizabeth Antillon has been spending one hour a day in front of the Blessed
Sacrament praying for the protection of children.
Antillon, an associate oblate at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in
Conyers, works at the retreat house. She spends the holy hour in the abbey
church next door.
The deaths of 15 students and a teacher at Columbine broke her heart, as it
did the hearts of so many in this country. Antillon, who is Filipino, chose to
take spiritual action.
“Almost everybody (at the monastery) was crying” at the time of
the April 20 tragedy, Antillon said. “I said, I must do something ... From
now on, I am going to do a holy hour every day in front of the Blessed
Sacrament.”
“I know there are two forces in this world--God’s and the evil
one. I know prayer is power and I have the power ... God’s power is
stronger than his.”
“If I can do many things, why can I not give an hour to Jesus and beg
him for protection for our children. That is what I am doing, I am begging
him.”
Exactly a month later, on May 20, tears flowed again, but they were tears of
gratitude, as Antillon took a phone call from her godchild, Elizabeth Barfield.
Barfield, 16, a sophomore at Heritage High School in Conyers, was sitting
with friends in the commons area around 8 a.m. May 20. She had been released
from her 7 a.m. class a few moments early. She walked down a hallway and
entered the commons area where students sit around four big planters between
classes.
Barfield sat down next to her friend, Dwane Mann. He eagerly showed her a
paperback book his mother had bought the night before. He was a week away from
a trip to Spain and it was a book about European travel.
Suddenly a commotion and noises like firecrackers broke out. Barfield
instinctively pulled the book to her chest. Students started screaming and
running in all directions. At first Barfield was still, then she and her friend
started to run, not even sure what was happening. Her book bag lay on the
ground and she ran, holding the book against her chest, out one of the main
doors of the school.
When she stopped running she was far from the school and the commons area,
where six students lay shot and wounded.
Then Barfield looked at the book and realized something had gone straight
into the book, piercing it to a depth of about the 200th page and leaving a
shiny metallic residue along the tear.
At first, she says, she could not process what she was seeing. Then, “I
had to realize that a bullet had caused this damage. The indentions of the
bullet were impressed all the way through about page 200. What scared me more
was knowing that I had held the book directly over my chest.”
In the midst of shock and other emotions following the shootings, Barfield,
her family and her friends, like Antillon, see God’s protective hand
sheltering her from harm and give thanks for the merciful way she was spared.
Neal Barfield, who received his daughter’s first phone call for help
from a friend’s home where she went for shelter, says she told him
immediately about the book, but “she was hysterical when she called. I
didn’t understand about the book. She was not calm enough to let me
know.”
Before he and his wife could reach Elizabeth, she was able to retrieve her
car at the high school and start for home, meeting them en route.
“I just hugged her. Oh Lord, it was just the best hug of my life,”
said her mother, Cida. “Once I saw the book, it was just awful. We both
started to cry.”
Elizabeth’s grandfather, who is Brazilian, took her inside to the
family’s portrait of the Sacred Heart and said, “He saved you.”
The sophomore goes to Mass at the monastery and meets Antillon there at
other times to study Bible passages and talk with her about faith and problems
of teen life.
In her daily prayer hour, Antillon says she has prayed for Elizabeth by
name, while also praying for her own son who is in college, for the children of
those who work with her at the retreat house, and for all the children of the
world.
She wiped tears from her eyes May 20, struggling with the shock of what had
occurred a few miles from the monastery, but moved that no students had died
and that the teenager for whom she prays daily was extraordinarily protected.
“I told her, now you see how good God is. Continue praying.”
When the book was turned over to a GBI investigator, Mrs. Barfield said the
agent patted her shoulder and said, “Oh, my God.”
“I pray for my children every day,” the mother of three said.
“Since this whole (school) shooting started two years ago, three years
ago, I think every parent is so concerned ... It is so scary for parents. I am
so glad we have the faith we have and the Lord to go to ... I am so grateful to
my mother that she brought me up with faith and I was able to pass it on to my
children ... I was blessed to come from a strong Catholic family.”
The Barfields, who also have two sons, one a senior at Heritage, had
originally hoped to come together at the monastery for prayers of thanksgiving
before turning the book over to police. After Elizabeth was interviewed by
investigators and the book turned in as possible evidence, she wrote an account
of her faith experience beginning with events the night before.
She says that she feels sorrow for her classmate who did the shooting, a boy
she doesn’t remember ever meeting at school.
“I basically feel no bad feelings for him. I feel sympathy for
him,” Barfield said. “I cannot even begin to comprehend what is going
through his mind and I am so grateful I don’t have to think like that. I
feel bad for him. I pray for him.”
Like the metal which pierced her book, her normal high school life has been
invaded by something foreign and destructive. She believes media coverage of
school shootings is partly to blame.
“They are incorporating it into the normalcy of life and they
shouldn’t be,” Barfield said. “They don’t understand. They
are hurting it more.”
“The media doesn’t get it. They don’t get it,” she said.
“It just gives people with the potential to do this the idea that they can
actually do it--they’re legends to everyone.”
She decided not to watch the extensive news coverage or to go to community
sponsored gatherings, but to seek out the monastery’s quiet solace and the
support of her family and close friends.
“My faith is the only thing that is getting me through this,” she
said. “I wasn’t meant to die. He saved me for some reason and I need
to find out what that is. That is a better way.”
She wants to say this through her account of May 20 at Heritage High School.
“Tell them to pray for peace. Tell them to pray for the youth and pray for
world peace.”
On the morning of May 21, Cida Barfield woke up feeling like a small speck
of sand surrounded by an awesome power, thinking “how great is the
protection of the Lord.”
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