On the night of June 17, 2015, Reverend Sharon Risher was busy at work, serving as a chaplain in a Dallas hospital, when her nephew called with worrying news. There had been an incident at Mother Emanuel Church in the reverend’s hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, but there were no immediate details. Soon after, she saw the unthinkable on TV: A gunman had entered an evening prayer meeting at the church, killing nine people—among them, her beloved mother, Ethel Lance, and two cousins, Tywanza Sanders and Susie Jackson.
In the wake of the news, reeling from sadness, grief, and anger, the reverend—who had attended the church with her mother as a child—left her job, went to live with her daughter in North Carolina, and tried to find a path forward. Over the years, she has become a leading advocate for gun safety, sharing her story in sermons across the country as well as in a memoir, For Such a Time as This, and a documentary, Quiet No More. Along the way, she faced a deeply personal struggle: Could she ever forgive the man who killed her loved ones? As a reverend, she felt she should be among the first to forgive, but she was not. “You can’t force it,” she says. “There’s no time limit to come to forgive.”
On the eve of the seventh anniversary of the massacre at Mother Emanuel last June, another shooter entered another church, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, and killed three people during a potluck dinner. Reverend Risher talked with Oprah Daily about how she handles the onslaught of news of mass shootings, the recent changes to gun laws in America—and her quest to forgive the white supremacist, Dylann Roof, who killed her mother and cousins while they were in prayer.
You’ve traveled to Charleston to honor your mother and cousins on the anniversary of the tragedy every year, except for the past two years due to the pandemic. How did it feel to return to the church this year for the seventh anniversary?
I was like, Okay, I got this, but I got over there and I just had a meltdown. People were coming by and putting flowers on the gate in front of the church, so it just made it feel almost like that first time I visited the church. The same heaviness was there. This white lady and her husband were walking by; she saw me crying and she came over there, and she just hugged me, and we cried together. She cried with me. I didn’t think I would have a meltdown the way I did because I knew it was gonna be a full day of things to do. I thought I had my emotions and everything in check.
By the time the press conference came and everything else I had to do, there was no meltdown—more tears, but no meltdown. I told myself, in the Bible it says seven years marks a time of completion, a time of release. So for me now, I’m thinking, I’m not gonna be able to stop the tears, but I don’t have to have the heavy, heavy sadness anymore. I can just know that it is. It has happened. This is something I’m gonna deal with for the rest of my life, but it doesn’t have to bring me down into a tailspin.
You’ve become a powerful voice for gun violence prevention, speaking around the country and working with the organization Everytown for Gun Safety. But it must trigger your feelings of trauma to discuss this topic—and to hear about it constantly in the news. When the news broke about the recent church shooting in Alabama, you were in Charleston for the anniversary at Mother Emanuel. Before that, there were the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York. How do you take care of yourself when you hear this kind of horrific news?
I was aware of the shooting in Alabama, but I didn’t turn on the news to try to find out any more; I just said a prayer and thought, Those poor people. I didn’t start digging and start tweeting—I just thought, I can’t, I can’t. When you hear news like this, your body, your mind, everything, it’s just in a chaotic state. You find yourself going through the same kind of emotions and feelings like when you heard about your situation the first time. You have to make sure that you’re sitting down and you’re somewhere safe so you can take care of yourself. The shooting in Buffalo really, really got to me because, of course, they were Black people, vulnerable Black people in a place where you would never think something like that would happen, and it did. Just like Emanuel, we now know these things will continue to happen.
I even get anxious when I see “breaking news.” That happened to me with Uvalde. I had just gotten off a Zoom call and I saw “breaking news” and I thought, What now? When I saw the news, I yelled out loud, “What the hell, what the hell!” I turned off the TV and started praying. I tried to stay off Facebook and Twitter because it’s just too much. This is how I take care of myself: I cut off the news, stay off social media, and I take something to help me go to sleep. Because if I’m sleeping, there is no TV on, I’m not messing with my phone, I’m not looking at Facebook, and I’m not looking on Twitter. For about a day or two, I’m not eating much of anything, because the stress takes a physical toll on my body and I don’t want my stomach to get all crazy. Maybe around the third day, I get back to it.
I would hate for anybody to have to go through all this, but I wonder, if the senators and everyone who has to vote on commonsense gun laws, if they ever had to go through the physical, mental, and spiritual craziness of having a family member involved in a mass shooting, I wonder if they would still vote the same way. I don’t think they could.
You spoke directly to Dylann Roof when you gave your victim impact statement in court. How did it feel to confront him?
There were so many emotions that day in court. He wouldn’t look at anyone. Different family members got up and were screaming and hollering at him, crying. By the time I got up there, I knew he wasn’t paying attention, but I knew he could hear. So he didn’t look at anybody, but he heard every word that came out of everybody’s mouth. When I spoke to him, I felt like, You might not look at me, but you’re hearing what I have to say because you have no choice. That gave me some solace, knowing that he heard me—he might not look in my face, but he heard what I had to say. I said something like, “I hope that every night, those nine angels will come to you in your cell and have Bible study with you. And before your miserable life is over, you’ll call on the name of Jesus and ask for mercy.”
As a reverend, you felt it was important to try to forgive him, but it was a difficult struggle. Can you describe that personal journey?
The forgiveness journey started 48 hours after the tragedy—during the arraignment hearing for Dylann Roof in South Carolina. I was still in Dallas and hadn’t gotten into Charleston yet. Most of the families were there at the arraignment, and I heard my sister’s voice on TV, along with other families, saying, “I forgive you.” All I could do was scream. My brain was in a fugue state. To hear somebody talking about forgiveness, when I’m in this anger-rage state of mind, trying to figure out what was happening, my brain is like, Forgive? We haven’t even figured out what happened! At the beginning, I was in a rage, angry at everybody.
Days passed; a lot of times I didn’t think about forgiveness, but then I started speaking and traveling and I had a lot of time to really, really think about him. Me and Jesus, we were having lots of conversations. A lot of the conversations were me yelling at God, trying to figure this out. It seemed like the more I yelled, the more God was touching my heart, saying to look at this as a whole. He said, you have to look at Dylann Roof as a person; the same way I’ve loved you, the same way I’ve forgiven your sins when you’ve asked me, you can forgive him as a person and let go of all the heaviness. You don’t have to carry that burden.
I fluctuated, not because I ever lost my faith, but to really use the resources my faith had given me. I did not use them. As time went on, I started to use my faith as a tool to help me with the anger. The prayers and the conversations between me and God were not so much yelling but trying to understand, asking God to help me understand, help me.
I found myself feeling sorry for Dylann Roof. Only because of my faith. That compassion and empathy gave me an understanding to say, I have to look at him as a person. So by the time I was in Martinsville, Virginia—this is, like, two years in—when I was invited to speak at a World Communion Sunday event, I was preaching and I just got kind of warm, and then the next thing you know I’m saying, “I forgive you, Dylann Roof.” And then my brain is scrambling because I’m like, Wait a minute, this isn’t what I’m supposed to be saying! I’m trying to get my papers together, trying to figure out where I’m at—I done forgot what I’m talking about! So then I said, “Let me tell you what these words mean.” And I told the people there in the congregation that Sunday what I was doing and why I said what I said. Then I had a meltdown and sat down.
You didn’t expect to be saying those words that day…
No, I didn’t. I had kind of made peace with myself with that situation. I had started to look at him not just as a monster, because that’s how I used to see him, but as a person. And when I started to see him as a person—not that I forgave what he did, because I’ll never forgive that—I was able to start to move forward and start to come out of that heavy grief. I didn’t have to carry that heavy burden of grief that had weighed me down. That’s what forgiving him meant for me. It gave me the opportunity to start to feel human again.
I would not have been able to do that if it was not for my faith. Being clergy, too, I felt like I needed to have a higher standard for myself. My understanding of being clergy is that the life you lead is what helps people say, “Maybe I should listen because I’ve seen her in action, I’ve seen her empathy, I’ve seen her compassion.” So when I talk to you about my faith, it’s not gonna be something phony, because you have seen me. I just felt like I had to hold myself to a higher standard because God had called me as one of his own—not that I’m putting myself above people, but I have a higher standard for myself. And in spreading the gospel, your life is that gospel that you teach and you give.
I’ve met so many people who have struggled. A friend who lost her only son to gun violence told me recently, “Girl, I still haven’t gotten to the forgiveness. Sharon, I just can’t seem to get there.” There are plenty of people I have met that have had these kinds of things happen to them and they have not found it in themselves to forgive. And what I always tell anyone when they say that to me, I always say: “In your own time.” If that’s what you want, it’ll come in your own time. You’ll get there. Everybody is different. You have to do what feels right for you.
Dylann Roof was sentenced to death, and the experience made you begin to really think about the death penalty. Now you work with Death Penalty Action, an advocacy group to abolish the death penalty. How did you get there?
The death penalty came up really quick when they started talking about what they were gonna go for in court with Dylann Roof. That got me thinking about the death penalty; I never really paid attention to the death penalty, because it never really had anything to do with me. I would hear things on the news about someone who killed children, molested, really horrific-type things, and my brain said, Yeah, they need to die. But after being involved with a situation as personal as it was with me, I really started to read about the death penalty. I started to read how Black and brown people are more disproportionately executed than white people, how usually if a person has had a lawyer, a paid lawyer, then it’s more than likely they won’t get the death penalty. Poor people always seem to be the ones to get the death penalty because they have no one that’s hired to speak for them. I started to realize, well, when it comes to the death penalty, I could not pick and choose. So here we are with Dylann Roof. My faith again says, Sharon, you can’t pick and choose. He could be redeemed one day, but he can’t be redeemed if he dead!
Congress recently passed a bipartisan bill aimed at stopping dangerous people from accessing firearms. Among other things, the legislation enhances background checks for potential gun buyers under the age of 21, requires that officials have time to examine juvenile records, and provides funding for states to implement “red flag” laws that allow officials to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed in court to be dangerous. Critics have said it doesn’t go far enough. How do you feel about it?
I believe that this bipartisan bill does not address the whole list of commonsense gun laws; it doesn’t do justice to the real laws that we need. I believe that they’re trying to give us a little something to show that they have a heart, but the real thing they need to be trying to legislate is banning all military-style weapons, and everybody regardless of who they are has to go through a background check—a person can’t buy any kind of weapon until they have passed a background check and have at least reached the age of 21. There is some good in what they’re doing, but it’s still not enough.
In other recent news, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law that placed strict limits on carrying guns outside the home, and the decision is expected to spark lawsuits seeking to loosen other state and federal restrictions. Your thoughts?
All it does is ramp up everything we’ve been worried about all along—more people having guns, more mass shootings, more accidental shootings, guns in the hands of people who aren’t qualified to carry a weapon.
How do you maintain a balance with your advocacy and personal life?
I had to find boundaries. Otherwise, you eat, sleep this stuff. It gets into your brain that it’s all you can do. The other parts of your life get shoved aside. I’ve realized that my self-care and self-worth is most important. I can tell that my spirit is getting stronger and I’m better able to take care of myself. I am who I am. I don’t have to prove to anybody anything anymore. I have set boundaries, and I’m taking care of me. Every day I get stronger, and the telling of the story isn’t as sad. My wish is that telling my story will be able to help someone now or in the future. We know gun violence is not going anywhere. We will continue to have stories. But if my story can help—as we say in gun violence prevention—if we can prevent the death of one person, then the work we’ve done is not in vain.
