Faith in the Face of Disaster: UU Response to Hurricane Katrina

For All the Saints

Commentary by the Rev. Susanne Nazian
UU congregation of Venice, FL
Published in the Venice Gondolier,
Venice, Florida, September 23, 2005

Four days living on the interstate – four days without food and water – four days for the elderly, the sick, the newborn babies – four days with their homes flooded, their possessions and livelihoods gone, separated from their loved ones, sweltering in the heat beside their dead. The blues replaced by keening, the low, mournful sound of hope's death.

Four days – days after the fury of wind and rain had gone to be replaced with the greater fury of the unleashed lake and broken levee. Four days in which dreams of recovery were dashed, and despair took hold. And the low, mournful sound of the saxophone punctuated with the staccato fire of weapons.

Four days – after the National Guard came in – after rapes and murders and helpless neglect – after looting and theft and the worst in humanity engaged – four days and the sound of the convoys – hot meals and cold water and ice and finally evacuations of the poorest of the poor.

This is not it, not our New Orleans, not everyone's dream of the New South. It's not this, not this pitiful shell of a city burning for lack of water pressure while most of it is under water. It's not this – a city where anarchy takes over – a city of anger and poverty and fear. New Orleans is the home of jazz, of the blues – Bonnie Raitt and Louis Armstrong and the Preservation Hall Band. It's jambalaya and crawfish and Creole and Mardi Gras and five-star hotels. It's all about knowing when to have fun; the Big Easy, they call it.

They built this city here a long time ago. They built it by pumping the water out of the bowl, by building levees to hold back the exotically named Lake Ponchartrain. They built a city on the Gulf of Mexico, below the level of the mighty sea, and they dared Mother Nature to interfere.

They built a city and like most of us, they ignored the anger that rose out of poverty and racism, ignored the poor among them and their despair. And when nature left her calling card, when the impermanence of humanity's know-how and creative genius showed itself in the breaking of a levee, that city became a nightmare.

The pictures are graphic. Homes marked with the number of dead inside. The old and the disabled and the very, very young on roofs waiting above the water that has taken their homes, waiting to be rescued, waiting for food and for water and for medications. Bodies left to stink and rot on the street; the stench of urine and feces in the shelters, the looting and the violence. This looks like a war zone, like a Third World nation. The city of fantasy is no longer.

There's more, more death, more destruction in two more states. Gulfport, Miss., virtually gone, Biloxi, Jackson, and Bay St. Louis heavily damaged, small cities like Bayou le Batre, Louisiana are distant memories, Mobile is severely damaged. They, too, have no food, no water, and no homes. People there struggle for survival, and yet, it's the city of legends that commands most of the attention. After Florida, people understand hurricanes; understand their power to devastate a landscape. People understand floods too, but somehow they don't understand both together in the midst of a city. They don't understand the poverty and racism that give rise to anger, or the anger that gives rise to theft, to burning, to shooting. They don't understand the fragile peace, the simmering rage or the kind of events that conspire to tip it over.

Four days – four days of seeing the people high up on an interstate highway, high above the city of everyone's fantasy. Four days – the time it took to mobilize – to send in the saints to save them. Some say they came too late. The bodies covered in blankets by the side of the road, the sick, the injured testify to the truth. Could it have been better if... if things had been different? But they weren't different. We had what we had, for good or ill. This has happened, and it now becomes the nation's responsibility to see that it does not happen again.

New Orleans this summer of 2005 will not quickly be restored nor forgotten. We must remember the dreadful, but it is also incumbent upon us to remember the moments of hope. Parents reunited with their newborn in Fort Worth, Texas. Lifesaving insulin brought to the diabetic man. A man in a hospital gown being pulled onto a boat and returned to the hospital caught two days later on camera being evacuated to a Houston hospital. A rescue helicopter that airlifted the elderly, the infants, and the disabled from the roofs of their homes; a convoy of amphibious vehicles filmed bringing food and supplies to the desperate refugees. Cruise ships housing victims. Houston and Dallas and Fort Worth opening the doors of their already crowded schools to the children of New Orleans. These were the moments of life-giving, life-affirming hope.

What finally sustains us all is that there are literally millions of the world's citizens who care. The saints are among us.

We affirm once again in these difficult days the fragility and preciousness of life, and the impermanence of all humanity's constructs. We affirm in these difficult days the permanence of love, the necessity of forgiveness and the blessing of hope. Let our prayer be that in the rebuilding of the city those three will support its foundations, and that in our lives and in our loving we will always reach out and touch one another's hand.

From the service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Venice Sunday, Sept. 4, by the Rev. Susanne Nazian. Rev. Nazian can be reached at uucov@aol.com.

By Rev. Susanne Nazian

Religion Columnist

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