Faith in the Face of Disaster: UU Response to Hurricane Katrina
Report from the Gulf
The Reverend Kenneth W. Collier
Presented to the Unitarian
Society of Santa Barbara
September 18, 2005
©2005 by Kenneth W. Collier
Santa Barbara, California
Foreword
I have tried and tried to make this report say what I want it to say, but I cannot. My time in Louisiana has changed me, and I am only beginning to understand the change. Men who have been in combat often cannot talk about it except to other men who have also been in combat. I have a new understanding of that. But here is my attempt to speak my truth.
I
On Monday I received the call from my colleague, the Rev. Danita Noland of Northwoods Unitarian Universalist Church near Houston, that I was needed in Lacombe, Louisiana, which is due north of New Orleans on Lake Pontchartrain. Tuesday morning I was on a plane to Houston where I rented a car and on Wednesday I drove to Lacombe. The trip normally takes about 6 hours, but outside Baton Rouge I caught up to a 30 mile traffic jam, and it took me 10½ hours. This was the result of Baton Rouge 's population doubling in about 3 days. It was my introduction.
Television news is accurate as far as it goes given the limitations of the medium, but you can't show what it is like to drive for miles seeing torn and twisted trees up to 3 and 4 feet in diameter, and mile after mile of downed telephone poles and power lines, and house after house crushed by falling trees or swept away, in whole or in part, by flood water. I know that some of the men here this morning have been in combat and others of you were in the London Blitz. If you are one of those, you have seen worse than I saw, but that is the kind of destruction I'm talking about.
This storm was a great equalizer. I understand that this equalization will not last for long, but when I was in Lacombe, the whole concept of socio-economic class no longer made sense. Few had much of anything, and those who did were sharing what they had. There was no access to cash, for example, because ATMs and bank computers had no electricity—and a lot of bank computers were under water and are permanently destroyed. Mail did not flow either, because all the mail went through New Orleans, and at that point there was no New Orleans. And so it went.
My first job was to relieve my colleague in Lacombe, the Rev. David Ord. David decided to ride the storm out since Lacombe was not in the mandatory evacuation area. He thought that he would be needed right there on the ground, and as it turned out he was right. He began seeking out his congregants, checking their homes and businesses, caring for their animals and so on as soon as he was able to get out himself—which was not immediate since the roads near his house and church were clogged with downed trees and power lines. David began working as soon as he could, and he worked heroically. When I arrived, he was so exhausted and drained that he didn't even know how depleted he was.
My initial work was to be his minister. It began by listening to him as he told me his story and expressed his grief and anger and sorrow for these people and this land, and his frustration that it was so hard to get people on the outside to understand the magnitude and nature of the need. Months before the storm David had arranged to do a wedding last weekend in New York City, and he needed desperately to get away from Lacombe, so Friday he flew to New York. I stayed behind and cleaned his house and the church.
I was there to receive calls from scattered parishioners checking in, some as far away as Florida, and I took responsibility for the Sunday service. I was also the local communication link to the UUA, and since both Bill Sinkford and Anne Heller, the Interim Southwest District Executive are personal friends.
Normal Sunday attendance at the North Shore Unitarian Universalist Society is about 60 to 65 people. We had 32 last Sunday. I split them into three groups and told them to share their stories, telling them to tell each other what had happened to them and to speak from their hearts. Small Group Ministry is what began the healing for these people. Story after story was told of loss and even the occasional no loss. Tears flowed. A common theme was survivor's guilt. I can't tell you how many times I heard someone say words to the effect of, “I have lost something, but so many more have lost so much more than I. Why was I spared and they weren't?”
When I left, we knew of three homes that were either destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, about 5% of the congregation. There may be more, though, since the nearby town of Slidell was the hardest hit of the towns NSUU serves and major sections were still not accessible. NSUU suffered the only Unitarian Universalist storm-related death that I know of. An older man fell and hit his head, suffering internal bleeding. For whatever reason (and I am not sure what that reason is), he was not able to receive appropriate medical attention, and died the next day.
There are myriads of stories, but I will tell only one of them. A single mom in the congregation has an 18-year-old son who was about to enter Tulane. He was in a bicycle accident just before the hurricane and was in the hospital with a collapsed lung. As the storm approached, his mother insisted on staying with him. The two of them rode out the storm in the hospital and were stranded there. It took several days for them to be able to get out, but when they could, they joined a convoy that drove away with an armed National Guard escort.
The young man is now healthy, but he lost everything he owned because his apartment was completely under water. About 10 days after the storm, his roommate turned up in Austin, Texas. And his mother has lost her primary source of income, which is teaching as adjunct faculty at Tulane. No one knows when the university might be able to reopen.
Monday morning I got back into my car and drove to Houston. As I left the devastated area, something completely unexpected happened. Going in I assumed that I would be shocked by the destruction, and I was not disappointed. But I thought that the return would be straightforward. It wasn't. It was jarring to see healthy forests again and businesses running and people simply going about their lives without dazed eyes and grief-stricken faces. I almost had to pull the car over and weep. When I called Anne from Houston Monday evening, I sobbed. Tuesday I flew home. I am still dreaming of what I saw and experienced. It will take a while.
II
When disaster strikes, people outside the disaster area want to know what to do. It's a feeling of helplessness, and we action-oriented types are certainly not comfortable with feeling helpless. We want to get in there and fix what's wrong. Rebuild people's lives. Don't just sit there talking, do something! In fact, that's one reason why I volunteered to go. I've known Anne Heller since we were in Starr King Seminary together 30 years ago. I was one of the first to call, and I believe that I was the first Unitarian Universalist minister from outside the Southwest District to be there, though I'm not certain of that.
On the other hand, being there, pitching in and doing your part is also frustrating, because you quickly realize that, in a sense, you really are helpless. The need is so enormous that you can't fix it; only a community acting together can begin to fix it. And the fixing will take years, not weeks or months.
But here is one thing for us to consider. I understand that our Mayor, Marty Blum, is exploring the possibility of the city of Santa Barbara adopting the city of Jackson, Mississippi. Part of this would involve local churches adopting their counterpart in Jackson. We have a small congregation in Jackson that we could adopt. In fact, whether or not Marty's plan comes to fruition, the UUA is organizing this kind of effort. Already the Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, congregation has adopted North Shore, where I was working. We could plug into that effort. It would involve a commitment to a serious effort to meet their needs for material help once that need is ascertained. We could do that, and I have already begun the conversation with the Rev. Jacqueline Luck, the minister in both Jackson and Ellisville. She emailed me this morning:
Ken, thank you for your kindness. With the closing of shelters I find I am waiting to see what the next phase of this will be. Adopting Jackson would certainly give us access to the bigger picture here. We are so small (about 55), and were lay led until last September when I started here, UUCJ doesn't have much clout in the Bible Belt, but it has a big heart and open arms. Our Home is even smaller but with a larger building. At this moment Laurel / Ellisville and Hattiesburg look like some giant was playing pick up sticks with the trees....its amazing. And many still do not have power or phone. I think it would be grand to enter into conversation about this. I am out of ideas at the moment, but think time and love will guide us. Jacqueline
Our congregation is so much larger than our churches in Mississippi, though, that there is no reason why we should stop with them. Barbara Sachs, our Social Justice Coordinator is already in contact with St. Paul 's AME church to help with their effort in Jackson. I will be at a Unitarian Universalist minister's retreat this week and cannot attend the meeting about this in Mayor Blum's office, but Barbara will be there, and when I return she and I will set up a conversation here. Keep your eyes and ears open.
For the rest of my time, though, I want to address the longer term work, because I think that far too many people think that it involves only the physical and economic rebuilding of the area, which is a large task indeed. I am afraid that it would far too easy to rebuild, say, New Orleans just as it was before the storm. And that would be to miss the deeper rebuilding, the rebuilding of this nation.
Let's go back a moment to the story of that single mom and her son being escorted out of New Orleans in convoy of armed National Guard troops. It really was that dangerous in parts of the city that they had to travel through. But before we throw our hands up in anger at “those lawless looters,” let us ask ourselves why it happened
The danger came from people who were desperate and angry. Some were desperate because they really are addicted to some substance and could not get it; some were desperate because they could not get help—food, water, clothing, even diapers for their babies; some were desperate because they could not find loved ones, children having been separated from parents, the elderly from their adult children and caretakers. Some were angry because there as no competent plan to care for those who were not able to leave the city; some were angry because the whole situation felt like the final insult in a lifetime of being ignored, insulted, and deprived by a racist and classist political and economic system. The reality is that poverty often floats on a sea of anger, desperation, and despair, and when social controls are removed, for whatever reason, that anger, despair, and desperation become free to explode.
When you begin to understand why people were feeling such enormous frustration, anger, desperation, helplessness, and fear, then you may begin to be ask some really crucial questions. What does it say about us as a people that we cannot see the misery within our own nation unless it becomes as unmistakable is it did in New Orleans? What is America going to do about it? How is America going to rebuild not only the city of New Orleans, but also the idea of America, the soul of America? And what is the responsibility of people as far away as Santa Barbara?
These are questions that every American needs to begin to ask. They are certainly questions that I continue to contemplate, because, to be completely honest, I do not know the answers. They are fraught with complexity at every level, and present us with nothing less than the necessity of reconstructing the way Americans think and feel about each other.
There is one thing that I do know, though. Unitarian Universalism has a lot to say about these questions. We are based, not on right belief or even right practice, but on a profound trust in the sacredness of life. This is the source of our message of compassion and love, and our impetus to social action and social justice. This is the essence of our healing message: that every person, no matter what the circumstances of his or her life, has a core of sacred worth and dignity.
To treat people as if their lives are unimportant, irrelevant, and invisible is a sin, whether it be perpetrated by an individual, a bureaucracy, or a government. To fail to make plans to care for people in an emergency, is a sin. And to rebuild a city like New Orleans so that it can simply go back to what was normal before the storm is a sin. We cannot permit that to happen. The voice of Unitarian Universalism must be heard. Why? Because not only do we carry this message, but also because so many of us are powerful people whose voices will be listened to.
We can and should make what contributions we can to the immediate need. Of course—and we continue to be generous in that effort. But beyond that, we also must make our contributions to the rebuilding of the nation. This is something that we cannot think of in terms of “those people Back East.” We have to begin it here in Santa Barbara. So let me leave you with this question to contemplate: What is Santa Barbara going to do about it? How are we going to open our eyes to our invisible? And how is our voice going to contribute to that conversation?
PRAYER FOR THE LOST
When I close my eyes, what I see are trees:
Twisted, broken like a child's toy,
Turn from the ground, tangled and matted
Like wheat after a thunderstorm.
Say a prayer. Say a prayer
For all that has been lost, destroyed, lost.
Some prayers flow across the mind
Like mountain streams dancing down hill;
And others are like deep underground rivers
That flow in steady and profound silence.
When I open the lips of my heart to speak,
All I find are the words of silence.
Faith in the Face of Disaster: UU Response to Hurricane Katrina
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