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After Katrina
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| 9/15/2005 |
My mother lived with cancer for 24 years. As a priest, I know that many who suffer from a chronic and debilitating disease ask me, “Why has God done this to me?” Or, “I am a good person, and I suffer, and the bad person prospers.” Sometimes, “I have done eve-rything right, why doesn’t God help me.” In her last years, my Mom would not do this, she never questioned if God had judged her or wondered why God did not deliver her and heal her. Rather, she would say, “Tim, I believe God is in my cancer.” At first, this seemed quite outrageous to me, even sacrilegious. But she believed that cancer was just a part of life, a part of the created order and not a supernatural punishment. She fought the cancer with every ounce of her being and God fought with her every step of the way, but when it became inevitable that cancer would overwhelm her body, she prayed that God be in the cancer, too, as God was with Jesus in the agony of the cross. She did not want God removed from the suffering and the pain. She wanted God in it.
I have remembered this theological lesson this week as I have tried to make some theo-logical sense of Hurricane Katrina and its devastation along the gulf coast, its destruc-tion of biblical proportion in New Orleans. There is often in preachers and believers alike the tendency to understand the evil of natural disaster as judgment and punish-ment. Preachers who peddle a Gospel of Fear will once again, as they did on 9/11 and in the Tsunami, preach that the hurricane is God’s wrath against sins of a people. But that is hogwash.
God has crafted the vast expanse of space, and placed the suns and stars in their courses, including this planet, earth, our fragile, beautiful home. Made for us, we have had millions of years as a collected race to learn its beauties, its powers, its dangers. Still, the earth can hold us all, and provide for us all out of God’s abundance, and, still, the earth can be a dangerous place.
I have never wondered if people should live in New Orleans, but I have certainly won-dered if so many people should live in my hometown of Los Angeles. It is a desert that robs every ounce of water it can from the lifeblood of the earth’s nearby rivers to support itself. People build houses in fire-prone canyons, and on earthquake-vulnerable hills. With every warning, they simply build in impossible places again. Modern New Orleans has received its last warning. But people live where they want to. They trusted in levee’s to tame nature. Separate from whether our government maintained those lev-ees, all of us need to remember that God always speaks to the arrogance of the human in his belief that he can save himself and tame nature. With all of our knowledge, we are all vulnerable. We cannot save ourselves through knowledge and technology for our fallen-ness and frailness leave us weak.
Still, I believe God is in that hurricane.
Again, we have learned, even with for our human folly of believing we are safe in the sheer force of nature, that the poor and most vulnerable among us are at the greatest risk from a society that turns a blind eye to the poors’ plight. In the same day the pa-pers reported the devastation of New Orleans, they reported the government’s new data from a recent Census survey. Poverty grows. Wages for the poor do not. Wages for the poor are stagnant as their costs rise. Poverty grows worse in the urban America, and those with resources flee, as we saw in New Orleans.
Anyway, we have been reminded by God the power of the hurricane. Does God want the poor of New Orleans to suffer? Is it judgment on them? Of course not. When we accept that God is in the hurricane, we realize our human solidarity with each other should protect us all.
Paul writes in the lesson from Romans: “ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
I think that if we radically lived in that ethic before the hurricane hit, rather than just after, life would be different today for an entire population devastated by Katrina.
One last thought. I said earlier that my mother believed that God was in her cancer when she was dying. Was God in Katrina? I think it is reasonable to say back to me, “Preacher, if God is in cancer, why doesn’t God stop it. If God is in Katrina, and God loves the poor, why wouldn’t God steer the hurricane out to sea?”
Reasonable questions, for which I have no answer. All I know is that my mother’s last words, before climbing into bed before dying, were, “I have a wonderful life. God finally makes sense to me. I love God, and I know God loves me. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”
I don’t think she ever could’ve said those things unless God was in the cancer.
We are not done with hurricanes, be it the Category 5 hurricane that can lay waste to a city, or the hurricane that may blow through your life in the blink of an eye. Just remember, God is in the hurricane, just as God is in the agony of Jesus on the cross.
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