With two kids and two dogs and woefully few belongings, my wife Kathy and I slipped out of New Orleans at two in the morning two nights before Katrina hit. Cell phone voice circuits overloaded early that day, and so during bathroom breaks we were rapidly text-messaging friends, relatives, and church members to make sure everyone was safe. It was a bizarre trip, leaving behind a city that even then seemed doomed, praying for those who were staying, worried for those who were leaving, and almost completely stripped of belongings.
Tom Petty was wrong: sometimes you do have to live like a refugee. But that wasn’t as hard as leaving behind my home. New Orleans is a strange city among American cities, a slow-moving Creole European place where racial and class conflict tended to produce defiant art, a quietly triumphant culture neither “high” nor “low.” There was no place like that; I don’t know if that city will come back.
My sister and her husband took us in to their home for two crowded months. Cable and Internet news kept us more anxious than informed. The University of New Orleans, where I teach, cobbled together a semester from the ruins, taught entirely on-line, so I was at least able to teach to keep away the clawing boredom that marked most of the refugees. Sometimes I went to the Red Cross shelters as a chaplain, and listened to my fellow refugees who were still in shock. They were idle, unsure, and grasping for light.
As talk in the New Orleanian ex-patriot community in Shreveport slowly turned from “return” to settling elsewhere, Kathy and I felt quite sure that we were called back into the city. So in October, we loaded our family up and came home.
You know about the devastation. But the Kingdom of God was more visible in New Orleans than I’ve ever known it to be. Racial and class divisions were evaporating as pastors met to pray with and for one another. Almost everywhere churches were in the front lines of helping to cope with human suffering.
Murder in the city evaporated in the weeks after the storm, and my priest and I decided that now was the time to attack the death-grip of drugs and drug-related violence in a nearby neighborhood. Our own church, Lamb of God CEC, partnered with Trinity Christian Community, Carrollton United Methodist, and a score of volunteers from California and Washington to provide a Thanksgiving Day meal, with Eucharist for the baptized, on a corner known for its drug traffic and violence. We set up on a vacant lot across from a small ugly brick bar. (The owner is now a friend: he tosses me a two-liter bottle and says he’s my Coke dealer.)
We had 100 meals prepared, but nearly 200 people were served. (Insert your own amazement and / or praises here.) Several of us stationed at the Eucharistic altar spent hours in prayer and conversation with the poorest of New Orleans’ poor, many of whom were anxious to spend time in confession even before they ate.
Since that day God has opened doors for us, including opportunities to spend time ministering to crack users and their families, prostitutes, and other victims of poverty in the Pigeontown area of New Orleans.
Someone asked me once, Did God cause the storm, or allow it? I don’t know the answer to that: all I’m certain of is that God was in the storm, continuing to call his prone-to-wander children through the good news of Jesus Christ.
And I think that even those here who hate the very thought of religion know it. Just before Christmas, at a packed performance of The Messiah in a cavernous Catholic church, Handel’s music perfectly presented to us the electrifying words, “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever. Hallelujah!” With people of every faith and no faith standing, you could see the shiver running through that sacred place:
After devastation, there is life that might well be judged miraculous.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 8:22AM | by 
