Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

After the Flood

Reverend Darcey Laine
May 7, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

I confess to you that if the coffee shop doesn’t have my Carrot Ginger muffin on Tuesday mornings, I come to work a little grumpy. I hardly give a thought to the faucets I count on for fresh water, the light switches that always give me light, or the home that keeps me safe and dry. The part of my mind that dwells in these predictable daily and weekly cycles boggles at the prospect of living in the aftermath of a hurricane like Katrina. The normal daily flow of our habits and patterns allow us to feel a sense of mastery and control of our lives. We know the best roads to take to work, the kind of after school snack our kids like that’s healthy and not too messy. If we have a regular income, we know what bills to expect and how we will pay them. But after the flood — after a disaster like Katrina, all of those habits we count on to make our days flow are washed away. Now eight months past, this disaster has left a huge mark on this country, on the land, on the people, on our government, and on our psyches, our ability to make meaning or have faith.

One of the things that had worried me most, after all the stranded were rescued off of roof tops, was the sense that the fates of these cities an towns would be decided by some multi-national corporation. When I heard that PIA would be sending our own organizer Krystal Caves down to help with grass roots organizing the month after the hurricane, my eyes filled with tears. I was so grateful that someone would be there to make sure that local people had a voice in the decisions that would be effecting their lives. So when I was asked by Peninsula Interfaith Action to be part of a religious witness to New Orleans I was grateful and honored. I felt like being there on that soil would help me make sense of this disaster. And I longed, as I think we all did, to be able to do something to help.

Four of us represented the Peninsula on this journey, and as we disembarked from our airplane and headed for baggage claim, we passed a huge sign that reminded us and residents returning home about the hazards still to be faced, about toxins and gas masks. It was my first visit to New Orleans, so as we drove into the French Quarter, I wondered if I would be able to spot the damage the storm had done. Our hotel was up and running, and fully booked. We were warned that this section of the city is known as “the Isle of Denial;” because of it’s higher elevation, it had seen much less damage than other parts of the city, and there was a sense of business as almost-usual.

Our PIA delegation walked to the Our Lady of Guadalupe church where we met with PICO clergy and organizers from around the country. We shared a meal together, then my colleagues serving congregations in Louisiana began to tell their stories. One colleague who serves two congregations lost both his home and one of his church buildings. He now lives out of his office. Another colleague lives in a trailer driven all the way to New Orleans by a couple from Minneapolis. A young man stood up and admitted he was the youngest minister in his denomination. He had arrived fresh out of seminary to serve his New Orleans church on August 1. Katrina hit landfall on August 29.

“Thank you for coming”, the pastors said one after another. “We are tired. We are running out of hope. We need you. And we need you to take our message back to your congregations, to the press, to your Senators.”

The next morning after a short prayer, our three tour busses rode away from the habitable part of the city with a police escort winding through Lakewood, a middle class neighborhood which was mostly deserted. Every mile or two we would see a team gutting a home to its studs, with masks over their mouths, blue and white protective gear covering their whole bodies, but I was surprised at how few and far between these crews were, since I had heard on the news that rebuilding was under way.

The streets have been cleared now, and in many places the piles of rubble are no longer where the flood left them, but where families or volunteers have carried them to the curb for eventual removal by the garbage company. We were told “if you see someone working on a house, that’s the family that lives there or Acorn or Habitat.” Not one federal dollar has been spent to rebuilt a home. All that money appropriated by our federal government has been spent on relief.

Most houses still were mostly as they had been left on August 29. Jungle Gyms, toys, furniture, books, pictures on the walls. All consumed by mold and mildew. Everyone wonders what will happen when the wet heat comes in June. Everyone worries about disease. So those who could afford to do so, or could get some help, were gutting their houses. At least then you could think and plan in this empty torn-up space. Now you could get in the front door and walk around.

We walked first through Pastor Joe’s gutted house, stripped to the studs, and through the back yard where the wooden pieces of train track, and little wooden train cars just like my son’s, lay abandoned and swollen with water. Next door was a house still littered with mud-caked chairs and books. The smell, the feeling of the air inside was so markedly different than the smell in the gutted house. Some alarm in my brain went off, “It isn’t healthy to be in here. It isn’t good to breath this air.”

Back on the bus, the Senator’s Aide pointed out a FEMA trailer. The first one we had seen. 7,000 had been given out. 150,000 family homes were destroyed. The pastor in front of me said he had received a call from FEMA telling him he qualified for a trailer, and would he like one? That was in December and he hadn’t heard from them since. The Senator’s Aide said their office was flooded with calls about FEMA, questions and frustration. The right hand didn’t seem to know what the left hand was doing.

As we drove we saw reminders that the flood was not a disaster just for the human community. Trees lay upended with their root balls exposed. Plants which had stood below the water suffocated under a coating of dried sludge. My neighbors on the bus turned to share my excitement as I observed hopefully: “Look, someone planted flowers.”

Every house in every neighborhood we toured had been marked with spray-paint indicating which agency had inspected it and what they found. Several animal rescue agencies had been patrolling the area. Walls read in orange spray paint “SPCA 1 dead dog” or “9/28 dog under porch” It was such a joy to finally see a sign that said “1 dog rescued 10/1”

As we drove through Gentilly and approached the 9th ward, our guide explained to us the way the water flooded those homes closest to the levees with a crashing wave as the levees were breached. She warned us that though we would see water marks at 6 feet to realize that this was where the water had settled for those long weeks, a much lower line than when the ward was first flooded.

The busses stopped in front of our colleague’s church. The social hall had been gutted to the studs, but in the worship hall flood lines were clearly marked in dark mold or mildew above the height of my head. Strips of insulation and sheetrock hung from the ceiling like liturgical banners, the altar vaguely recognizable from its shape and position in front of a painting of the last supper. A plaque by the front door read “Destroyed by flood rebuilt 1965. Destroyed by Fire rebuilt 1976. New edifice dedicated 1995.” On the steps of that church we held a press conference in which local pastors and colleagues from around the country testified to what they had seen, and challenged our leaders to begin rebuilding.

We returned to the French quarter where we talked and prayed and strategized. Over the past six months, PICO-LIFT had been conducting a listening campaign in their congregations all over Louisiana. They had determined that the people wanted three things on a federal level (the level where you and I have the power to help):

1. Because federal levees broke, they want federal money to rebuild.
2. They want all new housing to include low income housing, and they want HUD to reopen federally subsidized housing, which remains boarded up and vacant since the evacuation.
3. They want a portion of tax revenue from Oil Drilling to go to restoring the coast land that the drilling has helped erode.

Most urgently they want us to reach out to our senators to get that 4.2 billion appropriation bill passed that has stalled for two months between the house and Senate. So we all made promises about how we would do that. I promised to ask you to call our senators, and I promised to ask the UUSC to issue an action alert about this stalled legislation.

And then we worshipped together. We prayed for help, we prayed our gratitude for each other and for life itself, and we prayed our faith. And faith was palpable in the room. Faith, after everything these folks had been through, faith after everything we had seen. Faith that God was good, Faith that there was a way through this.

It stunned me a little bit. Here I had been so grumpy and grumbly about my own dry, stable, mildew free life. And these pastors who spoke of “the long season of our despair” were talking about faith, were giving me an example of faith. I’m not saying that these folks never got down, or angry — they were angry alright. If you go outside after the service and look at that Documentary on the TV we’ve got set up out there you’ll hear their anger, anger at the fact that only 7000 FEMA trailers were given out. Anger that the politicians are still dibbling and dabbling while the houses rot. This was a faith that understood loss, that knew destruction, that stood next to anger and sorrow. And perhaps sometimes it was a wished-for faith, because it was so desperately needed. But as the Gospel of Matthew reminds us, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move." (Matthew 17:20, NIV).

That night we found a restaurant with traditional Cajun cuisine, and live music, local couples dancing in pairs. My more extroverted companions soon learned the large party of teens that got up to line- dance was a high school service group who had traveled from Alaska to help. Getting bolder, my companions soon identified every party in the restaurant (aside from the musicians and dancers who lived nearby) were school or community groups who had come to gut houses, or help out in some way. What gratitude I felt to witness the outpouring of generosity — these folks who had given their spring break to help others half a country away. And after a day like that, everyone wanted to dance.

The next morning we represented the clergy of this country at a PICO action, much like the one PIA will be hosting on May 16. This action followed a series of Neighborhood meetings, “Days of Declaration” — in which the residents responded to the Bring New Orleans Back Commission’s mandate that they prove viability. “We are viable, we are coming back. The residents proclaimed”

We heard testimony of residents who had lost their homes, and we challenged the national and local officials who were present, including Senator Landrieu, to commit to certain concrete actions. As we left our colleagues behind and headed for home I began to realize the size of the mountain that had to be moved.

So where is my UU faith? Where is the faith that allows me to get up in the morning having glimpsed, as we all have, some tiny bit of the pain and despair present in this world?

For me it lives in our primal unity, the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Katrina really showed us how deeply we are interconnected.

1. Just to think on the level of weather systems — think of the Doppler weather radar map — during that last spring storm I watched the pixilated swirl come from way out in the pacific and run along the whole west coast. On this layer of our planet where systemic motion is bigger than states, bigger than countries, sometimes bigger than continents.
2. And think what happened when the oil distribution system in the gulf was shut down; gas prices went up all across the country. We are tied together on the level of commerce and distribution of basic survival stuff like food and water and gas.
3. Think about the federal laws and politics that contributed to this disaster. Now federal, that’s the political system that we in this room share with all the folks in the country, including those folks in Louisiana. OUR levees were under funded and broke. OUR FEMA was not prepared.
4. Or think about the communities that took in refugees from the Gulf States. Houses filled with friends and relations, church floors covered with cots. Schools filled to capacity to welcome the children of the Gulf Coast.

It took something this big to show me how I am connected to people across the country. When we were there, the pastors called us brother and sister, and I really felt the connection that my theology tells me is real. I felt that we are part of a really big family.

And this brings me to the second place I get my faith — which is love. The real and deep connection between living beings that can be cultivated and brought to the center of our lives. The love I see when a new baby is born into this congregation, or a member is seriously ill, and we are there with a hot meal and our caring presence. The love shown so concretely by high school, college and church groups from around the country who flew out to help gut houses on the Gulf Coast.

When we hold in our hearts the people in New Orleans who have no place to live, we feel that their self-interest is our self-interest, because we know that we are one family, one body.

This is where I draw my faith, though it is often small as a mustard seed, from the one-ness of our nature, of our physical reality, and from the experience that on some level love is always present in this world, and that if we look for, give thanks for, and hold fast to that love, together we will move this mountain.