Thoughts on the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina - by Karen Thomas
This response was by Karen Thomas, a friend and member of Centerpoint Church, the church I attend in Tallahassee, FL. I found it moving.
Erik
==========================
Thoughts on the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina - by Karen Thomas
Dear friends, I've been doing a lot of thinking and praying about the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and although I generally avoid mass emails, this is the most effective way to share my thoughts with you. I welcome any comments, and look forward to hearing from you. It's kind of long, so I've attached a file that's easy to print out if you wish.
August 31, 2005
Thoughts on the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina
Why I love New Orleans
I grew up on the Gulf Coast in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, but New Orleans is the place I chose to live once I left home. I attended Tulane University there, and in New Orleans most of the central passions of my life were ignited: my engagement and early years of marriage to Chuck (our engagement party was a crawfish boil in Audubon Park, where we gave all the leftovers to street guys afterward); my love for teaching and academics and Southern history and literature under inspiring scholars with whom I remain in contact over fifteen years later; my conversion to a true and whole Christian gospel that broadened my individual walk with God to include and integrate His passion for prophetic social justice and racial reconciliation; my delight in the live music and food and festivals and culture of this richly diverse city, through nearly every neighborhood of which I ran, bicycled, drove, or rode buses and streetcars and Mardi Gras floats (like the thousands of residents who couldn’t evacuate, I didn’t own a car for most of the six years I lived there). Nearly every room of my home contains reminders of New Orleans: in my kitchen, authentic Blue Runner Creole red beans and gumbo file from our last visit in February to take our seven-year-old daughter Phoebe to see Mardi Gras for the first time; on my walls, black-and-white photos of Jackson Square and the gorgeous, gothic live oaks out in the bayous and the kids in the Desire neighborhood where I worked three summers and a weeping angel statue from one of the distinctive cemeteries—even my bathroom has a poster from the New Orleans Museum of Art, whose treasures are probably under several feet of water right now.
Natural disaster and God’s sovereignty
Some of the news reports have termed Hurricane Katrina "a disaster of biblical proportions." Insurance policies label natural disasters "acts of God." The Great Flood in Genesis comes to mind when I see the footage of utterly inundated neighborhoods where only the very ridges of the roofs break the surface of waters as much as twenty feet deep. But natural disaster is actually a theme that runs throughout the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. The Hebrew word for destruction carries the meaning of "the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the LORD, often by totally destroying them." So in the Old Testament, sacrifice, submission, and destruction are sometimes one and the same (e.g., Leviticus 27:28-30). But why would God use nature to destroy? He is mightier than the waves of the sea (Psalm 89:9) and when Jesus calmed the storm, witnesses marveled that "even the wind and waves obey him!" (Matthew 8:27) The answer lies in Romans 8:20-21, which points to God’s longterm purposes in allowing suffering and destruction: "For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." John Piper puts it best in his book, "Desiring God": "When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. ‘I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the LORD God’ (Ezekiel 18:32). But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in relation to all the connections and effects that form a pattern or mosaic stretching into eternity. This mosaic in all its parts—good and evil—brings him delight" (p. 40).
Hurricane Katrina and social justice
Given everything I know about New Orleans and what God has been doing in my life to incite me to care about urban ministry and racial harmony, my first response is to realize that the areas destroyed by Katrina are among the poorest in the United States. The disaster has affected people of all races and classes, but the inescapable fact is that poor African Americans have been disproportionately hit by this tragedy. According to the U.S. census, Mississippi ranks first in the number of residents living below the poverty line, at 18.6 percent, Alabama ranks third ( 16.9 percent), and Louisiana ranks fourth (16.7 percent). The national average in 2004 was 12.7 percent, up 1.1 million to 37 million people now living at or below poverty levels in our country. These states also have the nation’s highest percentage black populations, with Mississippi first (36.4 percent), Louisiana second (32.5 percent), and Alabama sixth (26.0 percent). New Orleans’ population is 67.3 percent black. The connection between poverty, race, and the effects of Katrina is perhaps most powerfully demonstrated by New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, one of the city’s poorest inner city neighborhoods, where a breach of the levee along the Industrial Canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain with the Mississippi River poured as much as twenty feet of water into the streets. These people were least likely to own cars and be able to evacuate, and they are the ones you see trapped on their rooftops in many of the TV reports. This is also the neighborhood where the urban ministry I used to work for, Desire Street Ministries, is (was?) located, because my friends Mo and Ellen Leverett chose to live incarnationally in the nation’s poorest inner city neighborhood that was not already served by a ministry. Though all of New Orleans is vulnerable to periodic flooding, its lowest-lying areas generally correspond to its poorest. Basement apartments and real estate in flood-prone neighborhoods are cheaper, and thus tend to attract low-income tenants. Hurricanes hit hardest at both extremes of the income spectrum: property damage is worst among the luxury homes along beachfront and other waterfront property (such as the yacht club section along Lake Pontchartrain), but mortality and human losses are worst among those who do not have the means to evacuate and whose often substandard housing is in the lowest lying areas and least able to withstand high winds and heavy rain, such as mobile home trailers.
How to respond?
"For such a time as this" I am now trying to tear myself away from the internet and TV coverage of Hurricane Katrina to consider how God wants me to actually respond. First, Hurricane Katrina presents a teachable moment. People around the country are eager to understand and process this event, as they were after September 11 (whose fourth anniversary is almost upon us). In my opinion, Katrina represents a worse domestic disaster in many respects than Sept. 11, in terms of the geographic scope of destruction and the longterm challenges of restoring a basic level of sanitation, health, education, infrastructure, and other public services (this does not, of course, include the tremendous cost and human loss of the Iraq War as an indirect consequence of September 11). After addressing the most urgent needs of rescuing those that remain trapped, providing food and shelter for the tens of thousands of refugees, repairing the levees and stemming further flooding, returning civil order, and securing basic public health and sanitation, the process of planning the rebuilding of the devastated areas will begin. This represents the most daunting and important public policy challenge since Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War. The promise of real and lasting justice and prosperity for the nation’s poorest citizens shines as brightly in the former slave-trading capital of North America as it did after the similarly catastrophic Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 (read John Barry’s excellent "Rising Tide") and exactly 140 years ago, when black freedmen, having endured the adversity of slavery and war, surged into New Orleans full of hope and ready to claim the rights and responsibilities of equal citizenship (John Blassingame’s "Black New Orleans" is an amazing account of how remarkably successful they were in the 1860s and 70s, before white supremacists used violent means to write segregation and disfranchisement into law at the end of the nineteenth century). So one thing I would like to do is reach out to the 70,000 college students I live among in Tallahassee and help organize "teach-ins" similar to those that followed September 11.
But the most important thing I want to do is to encourage my friends, my church, my denomination, and everyone within my network of influence to prayerfully consider how they can help the victims of one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, whether by giving money, volunteering for a relief team, donating blood, or even housing those forced to evacuate who may have nothing to return to. I think of two passages of Scripture: Isaiah 42:1-2, "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you." This is my prayer for those who still wait to be rescued, for all the relief and rescue workers, and for all those who evacuated: that they would know God’s protection and presence and love for them in a powerfully new way. And for those of us who, through no righteousness of our own, have been spared and remain in a position to help, I pray that we will heed the example of Queen Esther, whose cousin Mordecai warned her when her husband threatened to exterminate her people, "For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?" (Esther 4:14)
Perplexed but not in despair,
Karen
Karen Kruse Thomas, Ph.D.
Research Affiliate Claude Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy
Florida State University
karenkthomas@hotmail.com
Erik
==========================
Thoughts on the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina - by Karen Thomas
Dear friends, I've been doing a lot of thinking and praying about the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and although I generally avoid mass emails, this is the most effective way to share my thoughts with you. I welcome any comments, and look forward to hearing from you. It's kind of long, so I've attached a file that's easy to print out if you wish.
August 31, 2005
Thoughts on the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina
Why I love New Orleans
I grew up on the Gulf Coast in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, but New Orleans is the place I chose to live once I left home. I attended Tulane University there, and in New Orleans most of the central passions of my life were ignited: my engagement and early years of marriage to Chuck (our engagement party was a crawfish boil in Audubon Park, where we gave all the leftovers to street guys afterward); my love for teaching and academics and Southern history and literature under inspiring scholars with whom I remain in contact over fifteen years later; my conversion to a true and whole Christian gospel that broadened my individual walk with God to include and integrate His passion for prophetic social justice and racial reconciliation; my delight in the live music and food and festivals and culture of this richly diverse city, through nearly every neighborhood of which I ran, bicycled, drove, or rode buses and streetcars and Mardi Gras floats (like the thousands of residents who couldn’t evacuate, I didn’t own a car for most of the six years I lived there). Nearly every room of my home contains reminders of New Orleans: in my kitchen, authentic Blue Runner Creole red beans and gumbo file from our last visit in February to take our seven-year-old daughter Phoebe to see Mardi Gras for the first time; on my walls, black-and-white photos of Jackson Square and the gorgeous, gothic live oaks out in the bayous and the kids in the Desire neighborhood where I worked three summers and a weeping angel statue from one of the distinctive cemeteries—even my bathroom has a poster from the New Orleans Museum of Art, whose treasures are probably under several feet of water right now.
Natural disaster and God’s sovereignty
Some of the news reports have termed Hurricane Katrina "a disaster of biblical proportions." Insurance policies label natural disasters "acts of God." The Great Flood in Genesis comes to mind when I see the footage of utterly inundated neighborhoods where only the very ridges of the roofs break the surface of waters as much as twenty feet deep. But natural disaster is actually a theme that runs throughout the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. The Hebrew word for destruction carries the meaning of "the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the LORD, often by totally destroying them." So in the Old Testament, sacrifice, submission, and destruction are sometimes one and the same (e.g., Leviticus 27:28-30). But why would God use nature to destroy? He is mightier than the waves of the sea (Psalm 89:9) and when Jesus calmed the storm, witnesses marveled that "even the wind and waves obey him!" (Matthew 8:27) The answer lies in Romans 8:20-21, which points to God’s longterm purposes in allowing suffering and destruction: "For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." John Piper puts it best in his book, "Desiring God": "When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. ‘I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the LORD God’ (Ezekiel 18:32). But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in relation to all the connections and effects that form a pattern or mosaic stretching into eternity. This mosaic in all its parts—good and evil—brings him delight" (p. 40).
Hurricane Katrina and social justice
Given everything I know about New Orleans and what God has been doing in my life to incite me to care about urban ministry and racial harmony, my first response is to realize that the areas destroyed by Katrina are among the poorest in the United States. The disaster has affected people of all races and classes, but the inescapable fact is that poor African Americans have been disproportionately hit by this tragedy. According to the U.S. census, Mississippi ranks first in the number of residents living below the poverty line, at 18.6 percent, Alabama ranks third ( 16.9 percent), and Louisiana ranks fourth (16.7 percent). The national average in 2004 was 12.7 percent, up 1.1 million to 37 million people now living at or below poverty levels in our country. These states also have the nation’s highest percentage black populations, with Mississippi first (36.4 percent), Louisiana second (32.5 percent), and Alabama sixth (26.0 percent). New Orleans’ population is 67.3 percent black. The connection between poverty, race, and the effects of Katrina is perhaps most powerfully demonstrated by New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, one of the city’s poorest inner city neighborhoods, where a breach of the levee along the Industrial Canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain with the Mississippi River poured as much as twenty feet of water into the streets. These people were least likely to own cars and be able to evacuate, and they are the ones you see trapped on their rooftops in many of the TV reports. This is also the neighborhood where the urban ministry I used to work for, Desire Street Ministries, is (was?) located, because my friends Mo and Ellen Leverett chose to live incarnationally in the nation’s poorest inner city neighborhood that was not already served by a ministry. Though all of New Orleans is vulnerable to periodic flooding, its lowest-lying areas generally correspond to its poorest. Basement apartments and real estate in flood-prone neighborhoods are cheaper, and thus tend to attract low-income tenants. Hurricanes hit hardest at both extremes of the income spectrum: property damage is worst among the luxury homes along beachfront and other waterfront property (such as the yacht club section along Lake Pontchartrain), but mortality and human losses are worst among those who do not have the means to evacuate and whose often substandard housing is in the lowest lying areas and least able to withstand high winds and heavy rain, such as mobile home trailers.
How to respond?
"For such a time as this" I am now trying to tear myself away from the internet and TV coverage of Hurricane Katrina to consider how God wants me to actually respond. First, Hurricane Katrina presents a teachable moment. People around the country are eager to understand and process this event, as they were after September 11 (whose fourth anniversary is almost upon us). In my opinion, Katrina represents a worse domestic disaster in many respects than Sept. 11, in terms of the geographic scope of destruction and the longterm challenges of restoring a basic level of sanitation, health, education, infrastructure, and other public services (this does not, of course, include the tremendous cost and human loss of the Iraq War as an indirect consequence of September 11). After addressing the most urgent needs of rescuing those that remain trapped, providing food and shelter for the tens of thousands of refugees, repairing the levees and stemming further flooding, returning civil order, and securing basic public health and sanitation, the process of planning the rebuilding of the devastated areas will begin. This represents the most daunting and important public policy challenge since Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War. The promise of real and lasting justice and prosperity for the nation’s poorest citizens shines as brightly in the former slave-trading capital of North America as it did after the similarly catastrophic Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 (read John Barry’s excellent "Rising Tide") and exactly 140 years ago, when black freedmen, having endured the adversity of slavery and war, surged into New Orleans full of hope and ready to claim the rights and responsibilities of equal citizenship (John Blassingame’s "Black New Orleans" is an amazing account of how remarkably successful they were in the 1860s and 70s, before white supremacists used violent means to write segregation and disfranchisement into law at the end of the nineteenth century). So one thing I would like to do is reach out to the 70,000 college students I live among in Tallahassee and help organize "teach-ins" similar to those that followed September 11.
But the most important thing I want to do is to encourage my friends, my church, my denomination, and everyone within my network of influence to prayerfully consider how they can help the victims of one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, whether by giving money, volunteering for a relief team, donating blood, or even housing those forced to evacuate who may have nothing to return to. I think of two passages of Scripture: Isaiah 42:1-2, "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you." This is my prayer for those who still wait to be rescued, for all the relief and rescue workers, and for all those who evacuated: that they would know God’s protection and presence and love for them in a powerfully new way. And for those of us who, through no righteousness of our own, have been spared and remain in a position to help, I pray that we will heed the example of Queen Esther, whose cousin Mordecai warned her when her husband threatened to exterminate her people, "For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?" (Esther 4:14)
Perplexed but not in despair,
Karen
Karen Kruse Thomas, Ph.D.
Research Affiliate Claude Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy
Florida State University
karenkthomas@hotmail.com
posted by TravelingMan! at 12:16 PM
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