It was his experience after the Kirkwood City Council shooting nearly three years ago that took the Rev. David Holyan to Tucson, Ariz., last week.

Holyan, 46, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Kirkwood, has become an accidental expert in what the Presbyterian Church (USA) calls "human-caused disaster" response. More precisely, he is a member of the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance's National Response Team for human-caused disaster.

His expertise comes from the victim side. First Presbyterian became a spiritual hub for the community in the wake of a shooting rampage on Feb. 7, 2008, at a Kirkwood City Council meeting that claimed the lives of six people and the gunman.

In the hours after the shooting, Holyan was at St. John's Mercy Medical Center with a member of his staff, director of lay ministries Cathy Yost, when she got the call that her husband, Ken, the city's public works director, had been killed. (Kirkwood Mayor Mike Swoboda, who was shot and died of complications seven months later, was a member of First Presbyterian.)

"My instinct is to step into the hard places and be calm, but nothing prepares you for this," Holyan said. "You can't prepare for human-cause disaster. It rattles you to the core of your being."

Near midnight, after seeing Cathy Yost home and returning to church to talk to the staff, Holyan walked to Kirkwood Station Plaza "to feel what was going on and see it for myself."

There was a fair amount of activity inside the yellow tape — the medical examiner, police wielding guns to protect the perimeter. On the outside, there was relative calm. Small groups huddled together, crying.

"It made it all real," Holyan said. "It was more than just our staff. The whole community was affected by it."

As he took in the scene, his cell phone rang. It was the Rev. Paul Reiter, leader of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in the St. Louis area.

"He asked what I needed, and I said I didn't know what I needed," Holyan said. "He told me the PDA would show up soon. I said OK, and hung up the phone. I had no idea how that would help."

That was Thursday night. By Friday afternoon, a team from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance had flown in to help Holyan help his flock. That Sunday, as that flock looked to him for context and meaning, Holyan had to give a sermon that would attempt to make sense of the senseless. The next day, he preached at Ken Yost's funeral service.

A Thursday, a Sunday, a Monday. They were three of the hardest days in Holyan's career, and they prepared him to respond to human-caused disaster.

Later, Holyan and another Presbyterian pastor from the Chicago suburbs — whose office coordinator was killed in a double-murder suicide in 2009 — were asked to join Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, to provide perspective from the point of view of those who had experienced horror firsthand.

When eight people were killed in a massive gas pipeline explosion in California in September, Holyan was part of the team called in to help.

"It's very redemptive for me," Holyan said. "The horror of what happened in Kirkwood was transformed to become wisdom for others going through a similar situation."

Holyan flew to Tucson last Tuesday morning, three days after the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others, 'showing up in the midst of mass confusion, bewilderment and shock," he said.

One of the pastoral goals of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is the 'stabilization of the ministry, not individuals," Holyan said. Ultimately, the wider community is served by concentrating on religious leaders' mental and physical health.

"You need those who are being pastoral to also be healthy," he said. "They're going to be the last ones aware of how affected they are. A pastor's immediate instinct is to care for others first, then the bigger system, then, finally, themselves, when they figure out — 'wait a second, I have no energy left.'"

Holyan and his team were invited to a meeting of the Pima County Interfaith Council, convened by the local Roman Catholic and Methodist bishops. They encouraged local religious leaders to allow people 'space" before pushing toward healing.

A representative from the Department of Homeland Security's faith-based office was at the meeting, which led to invitations to provide spiritual care to the larger community, Holyan said.

The pastor and his team were asked to attend the funeral of 9-year-old victim Christina Greene in case people broke down. They were also involved with the care at Northminster Presbyterian Church where the oldest victim, Phyllis Schneck, 79, worshipped.

Holyan returned to St. Louis Wednesday but will go back to Tucson in March and again in May to make sure religious leaders are healthy.

"People want you to make sense out of the senseless and help them figure out how God could still be a part of that, or at least present in it," he said. "That's a lot of work."

Holyan was a premed student in college in Seattle, and one night, when he was volunteering in the emergency room at a hospital, a call came in that a 9-year-old boy had been hurt in a fall from the top bunk of his bed. The boy had a laceration across his face, and a young resident warned Holyan about the amount of blood to expect. He told Holyan to grab six bottles of saline.

"Six?" Holyan asked.

"It's more dangerous to close up the wound too quickly," the resident told him. "We need to clean it out."

Holyan told that story as part of his sermon the Sunday after the Kirkwood shootings.

"It seems to me before we heal, we need to find that deeper truth and to be real with one another," he said that day. Now that he has more experience than he ever wanted responding to human-caused disaster, Holyan has honed in on his favorite passage from Scripture. It's a familiar one, from Psalm 23. He calls it "the cry of my heart":

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," it reads. "For thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."

In the aftermath of human-caused disasters like those in Kirkwood or Tucson, "We're in that shadowy place we don't know," Holyan said. "And at the end of the day, the invitation is to be unafraid."