Love Notes

by Bill Love

When I was in California, I was very conscious of earthquakes, both fascinated and fearful. A part of me wanted to experience one, a minor one to be sure; a part of me, fearful of their awesome capacity for destruction and not wanting to be caught at the mercy of such power. Californians tended to be blasé. They had experienced so many of varying degrees. They accepted the smaller tremors and found some rationalization for the potential of the Big One. The natural phenomenon that raised in them the same kind of dread I had of earthquakes was hurricanes. I couldn’t understand how they could accept earthquakes; they couldn’t understand how Southerners could live with the reality of hurricanes.

When I was in Michigan, a hurricane was threatening the east coast with a prediction that it would make landfall at Myrtle Beach. The church secretary told me that late in the afternoon. I told her that it wouldn’t, that it would turn north and east. She said, But the Weather Channel said…. I said, I don’t care what the Weather Channel said; it’s going to turn north and east. During the night, it did. The next day, she asked how I knew that. I said, I’ve been watching hurricanes all my life.

And I have watched reports of the damage they do and have done over the years. From hearing of Camille to the lesser catastrophic storms, I had an idea of what Katrina could be capable of but was unprepared to witness from a distance what it did and can only begin to imagine what it was like to witness it up close.

I suppose we don’t get to choose the size of the storms in our lives.

I have heard a few ruminations about Katrina. One was from a person who said he didn’t feel sorry for those in New Orleans because they had warning and didn’t evacuate. I suppose this person or I, if we had warning, could have gotten into our cars and driven out of the city and stayed with family or friends or pulled out our credit cards for a motel. There are, however, those who don’t have that luxury. They may not have cars and depend on public transportation. (I remember taking the MetroLink in St. Louis into the city to go to a Cardinals game. The Elder with whom I was going said it was unfortunate that it went through the less desirable neighborhoods. I said they were the ones who needed public transportation, that in some cases the availability of public transportation was the difference that enabled them to hold a job, that the interstates were built for us suburbanites to drive our cars to our jobs. Public transportation is, among other things, a social justice issue.) They may not have the financial means to evacuate as comfortably as the rest of us. And when it’s known how devastating the storm will be, it’s too late.

Another is the idea that God sent Katrina to punish New Orleans for being a sinful city. That notion is so moronic I don’t know where to begin. The Bible I read says that God makes the sun shine on the good and the evil and makes the rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. Katrina cut so wide a swath that surely some righteous suffered as well. I am wary of any who presume to speak for God as if there’s a one-to-one correspondence between God’s will and their own.

I can imagine those caught by Katrina felt some version of Psalm 22: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? I believe Jesus knows that feeling as well. I don’t believe our feeling God-forsaken speaks to God’s presence as much as to our despair. And I trust that God in Christ understands that. The words of William Sloane Coffin when his son died come back to me: My consolation lies in knowing that, when he disappeared beneath the waters of Boston harbor, God’s was the first of all hearts to break. God was there, was that close, when Katrina came through and is that close now.

The Bible I read also says that nothing in all creation, including Katrina, shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.