“The earthquake can shake the mountains and block rivers, but it will never diminish our determination to unite and help each other in the face of such catastrophes.” So said Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao when he traveled to the epicenter of the worst earthquake to strike China in 30 years.
According to the Shanghai Daily, their leader’s emotional state seemed to calm and reassure the people of Beichuan.
"Your pain is our pain,” he said to a cluster of villagers, some with blood on their heads, others wiping away tears.
There has been so much blood and tears of late: the cyclone in Myanmar. The terrifying earthquake in Sichuan Province, China…The toll on all humanity is devastating. Tens of thousands dead. Millions—MILLIONS—homeless. Their pain is our pain.
It is mind-boggling and heart-breaking to confront the destruction to the people, the land, the buildings and systems. And to wonder: how are these countries are going to cope in the aftermath of such unfathomable losses…?
Trying to imagine the magnitude of these catastrophes is especially painful in light of having just returned from our recent service trip to New Orleans where, two and a half years since Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on that unique American city, there is still so much pain and so much recovery work remains to be done.
I don’t think I have to say much about how bad things are there…Yes, there is progress in some parts of that romantic and mysterious city. But have you noticed, we don’t hear much about New Orleans in our national media outlets anymore…As a culture, we continue to suffer a peculiar collective affliction of catastrophe amnesia. There is, sadly, never a lack of catastrophe to report on—it seems there is always a new one to wrench our hearts. But we have a serious attention span deficit. And I believe that is a problem, if there is to be any hope of full recovery.
Folks from our church who went on the recent service trip are not going to forget anytime soon some of the things they saw and heard and did just a few weeks ago.
It is amazing to me how our church responded to the invitation to pack up and head down to the Gulf Coast to spend time on the ongoing relief effort to rebuild New Orleans. Many of you expressed to me a wish that you could have gone on this spur of the moment trip. I promise you: another trip is being planned and I hope it will work out for your schedules in the fall.
Others of you came forward with financial and moral support for this mission.
And a bold handful said, “Sign me up!”
You can read excerpts from our team’s reports in the current newsletter. They are part of the text I draw on today. Our friends were living examples of courage and good-humored flexibility. They embodied the power that living in the moment has to transform frustration and even chaos. You can be proud they represented you and proud that First Church in Boston stands as a partner in hope for the people of New Orleans—in a visceral, immediate, and on-going way. That hope means so much!
Edward Everett Hale—the inspiration for the formation of Lend-A-Hand clubs in the 19th century-- is quoted in our hymnal. A statue to his legacy stands in the Public Garden, across the bridge, near the crossing to the Common. He said: “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
I took these words to heart on our trip to New Orleans. They bolstered me because (it turns out) I’m not that handy on a construction site….
The first day, I was assigned to a team that was working on the much needed industrial kitchen at our sister church, the First Church in New Orleans, in the Broadmoor area--where buildings took on 4-5 feet of standing water. When completed, the kitchen will house a tenant, the non-profit group NO AIDS, which will deliver hot meals to homebound AIDS and cancer patients. The room-sized spaces where the walk in refrigerator and freezer will go were already gutted and framed, and needed drywall installed on the walls and ceiling.
I was not the good sport that Ann Casey was. Ann confesses that she’s never held a tool in her hands before, but there she was: working her way up from a hammer and pry bar, to using a power nail gun while standing on scaffolding! I couldn’t even be in the same room with that nail gun. One, I couldn’t bear the incredibly loud bang it makes every time you squeeze the trigger to unload a nail deep into a hard surface. Two, I was a little nervous being around someone new to a nail gun—for fear she might squeeze the trigger at an inopportune time and I would end up like a character in a Schwarzenegger movie! Sorry I doubted you, Ann….
I also knew I wouldn’t be very successful doing what Noe and John, Abby and Jean did, holding heavy pieces of drywall overhead while someone with, say a power drill, fastened it in place.
I thought perhaps I could lay new flooring for the upstairs storage spaces. But after I got up the nerve to climb the ladder to the “second floor,” I discovered that was a very loose description. Where I had expected sub-flooring already in place, there were only rafters. That means narrow boards—interspersed with wide open spaces, high above the first floor. It meant being steady enough to stand out on the narrow boards while not falling through the wide spaces…I don’t do rafters; I get vertigo.
So I slithered back down the ladder, taking my fantasy of being a good example with me. For a while I practiced patience by removing bent nails from boards that could be reused (Ann and Noe were much more patient). Then I set to sweeping up our work site and organizing the very confusing tool bench.
I finally found a perfect placement for my skill level. Suzy Nacco, one of the organizers from ASC, arrived in NOLA with her three-month old daughter, Giuliana. Now, Suzy, and architect, has real construction skills. We figured out that if I could take care of Giuliana, Suzy could probably dry-wall a room in the time it would take me to change a diaper.
Giuliana was my passport to the Lower Ninth Ward—the area where some of the greatest damage was done by the flood waters after the levees broke.
Driving around the Lower 9th, one still sees marked evidence of the desperately frustrating, painfully slow pace of recovery. On any block, there might be one house out of 5 or 10 that shows any signs of restoration. Inside that one house, volunteers like Lew Lloyd were doing the things they could, like the tedious, exacting work of piecing together drywall to fit the irregular nooks and crannies of two small closets. Many on our joint team were working on houses in the lower 9th. While Suzy joined Lew and Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie and other volunteers from Arlington Street Church in a house on St. Maurice Street, Giuliana and I went for a walk.
We passed a camouflaged humvee and armed MPs who patrol the area. We surveyed the blocks of boarded up houses spray-painted with symbols from the early rescue teams. And we greeted the occasional neighbor sitting out in front of their houses on that sunny day….
I should tell you that baby Giuliana is of African American descent. I felt she helped me cross a racial divide that might have been difficult for both parties otherwise. (What is it they say? “And a little child shall lead them….” Isaiah 11:6.) With Giuliana as a beautiful ice-breaker, I was able to make a couple of pastoral visits in the Lower 9th. We heard stories of deep loss, illness, and struggle. We also heard of hope and gratitude from these few who were so happy to be home again…
A story that came out of the Lower 9th that really touched me, I heard second hand, from John Thompson who, with Jean Krasnow and her daughter Abby, were putting in a sheetrock ceiling in a double shot gun-styled house on St. Claude Street. I hope I have this right, John. They were taking a break from their hot labors, sitting out on the front stoop, when a neighbor came by. After some preliminaries, John said that he was there with his church doing some work on the house behind him. First Church in Boston, Unitarian Universalist.
“Oh, you’re a UU!” said the neighbor. “I never heard of UUs before the storm, but you are the only ones who keep coming down to help us here in the Lower 9th.”
Of course, I know that’s not entirely true. I’m pretty sure Brad Pitt isn’t a UU (or maybe he is?), and he’s down there helping out with his project “Make It Right,” as are many people of faith working through Lower 9.org and other organizations. But it certainly was uplifting to learn that this man had such a strong and positive association with Unitarian Universalism and service to New Orleans….
After a day of work on the building efforts, we would get cleaned up and go out for some food and fun: two important ingredients for maintaining equilibrium. It is a fine balance between doing what we need to do to take care of ourselves so that we are strong enough to do the work of justice---and doing the work of justice enough that we have that “good tired” feeling at the end of the day. (Right, Noe?)
When we went out, Lew and I would pop on our Boston Red Sox hats. Folks greeted us with exclamations of “Go Sox!” and ask if we were, in fact, from Boston. “Here for the Jazz Festival?” they’d ask. “Well, actually, we’re here with a group from our Boston church doing some rebuilding,” we’d reply.
And it happened every time: A sparkle of tears would well up in their eyes as they said, invariably: “Thank you for helping. Thank you for not forgetting us.”
There is such power in this for all of us! Please let it in to your awareness.
When we remember, when we show up, when we bear witness—it makes a difference in the lives of others. I know it made a difference in ours.
There remains an awful lot of opportunity to make a difference. It’s going to still take a tremendous effort to rebuild New Orleans.
Tremendous: to tremor, to shake. That is how my whole body felt when I thought about the prospect of rebuilding Myanmar and Sichuan Province…
Then I had a flash of an image of this church 40 years ago, after it went up in flame and all that was left was rubble. The church was referred to in some headlines as “The Coventry Church”—a reference to a cathedral destroyed north of London during the Blitz of WWII. (The Blitz began with 57 days of bombing by Germany and lasted for seven months. Reportedly 43,000 civilians were killed and a million homes destroyed.) Large swaths of that great city were flattened. It took years and years and years to rebuild. My husband reports going 20 years after D-Day to areas of the city where whole blocks were still just wooden fences—shielding areas yet to be cleared and rebuilt. Today, 50 years later, there is memory, but little physical evidence of that great destruction. London, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Overwhelming, man-made, war-borne catastrophe. And the cities were rebuilt…
Of course, in each of these cities, there was political will and there was a policy and a strategy, and there was money and there was commitment. It’s unclear that these are all in place regarding parts of New Orleans—especially when it comes to the poor, black, residential areas of the Lower 9th.
Nature cried. In the wrath of waves, flowers, withered, fell into the sea….
We are members of your family. Our heart is with you You are always in our mind.
Standing as one, bonded in friendship, we can overcome.
Let’s rebuild… Hand in hand. Shoulder to Shoulder. We are one.
There are three UU congregations in the greater New Orleans area that have bonded together to support the rebuilding of their sanctuaries and to cooperate on developing programs and doing outreach. The UUs are the ones, said one neighbor, who keep coming to help the Lower 9th. They need partners from healthy, stable, functioning congregations to help their congregations get back on their faithful footing. They still need to rebuild.
I hope that we can make a commitment to supporting our partners in liberal faith in the American South with our hard work and with our treasure. They are in this for the long haul. I hope we will be, too. I hope we will think about how to extend our covenant to include our wider human family. How we will walk with them in all their ways: in all their trials and struggles and hope. How will we say and mean:
Your pain is our pain. Our heart is with you. You are always in our mind.
Let us rebuild. Hand in hand. Shoulder to shoulder. We are one.
It is a fine balance between doing what we need to do to take care of ourselves so that we are strong enough to do the work of justice---and doing the work of justice enough so that we have that “good tired” feeling in the end. We cannot do everything. But let us not refuse to do the something that we can. AMEN
