Weathering the Storm

Sermon - Sunday Sept. 4, 2005

By Julie Lake

Before I begin, there is something I must tell you first. It is something that I’ve told thousands of children all across the state.

And it is this: I have never been in a hurricane.

And all these children sitting cross-legged on library floors in big cities and small towns have found this a little strange, because I have spent the last six years of my life writing a children’s book about the Great Galveston Hurricane, which hit Texas in the year 1900. It took the lives of more than 6,000 men, women and children.

When I’ve talked about my book, these children in rich schools and poor schools have asked me many questions, including: "Are you rich now?" and, "Do you know J.K. Rowling?" (No, and no)

But I know at some point, one of them will raise their hand and ask one particular question: "Ms. Lake, why did you write about this hurricane?"

And so I tell them. I describe how one day I was doing research at a special library on the UT Campus, where they house very old photographs and letters. I remember that it was really sunny outside. I was poring through a box of insurance artifacts from 1900, wearing white cotton gloves on my hands to protect the crumbling brochures, and accounting ledgers and faded sepia portraits.

And then I came to this image that I knew would be there in that box, and yet I was not prepared for it.

It was a black and white postcard, showing a photograph of storm wreckage that stretched on and on and on. In the distance, poking out of the rubble, there was a dollhouse-like stone building, with turrets and peaked roofs, which Galveston children at the turn of the century had called “Gresham’s Castle” and that we now know as the Bishop’s Palace.

Then my eye was drawn to a point in the middle of the picture, to the single sign of life in this unbearable landscape—a child, a little boy in bare feet, who stared towards the camera. I looked at that child and all my objective notions of this long ago disaster were shattered—the hurricane became real.

When we talk about disasters, we tend to want to reduce them to numbers. I think it’s our way of wrapping up unspeakable human suffering and tucking it away in a box. We scan the newspapers daily to see how many people are waiting to be evacuated. How many people are dead. How many homes were lost. How long and how much it will cost to rebuild. But behind each of those numbers is a face and we must never let ourselves forget that.

As a writer, I have thought a lot about natural disasters and the obsession we have with them. Part of us finds it exciting to read about the fury of tornadoes and earthquakes and hurricanes. We are drawn to their wildness and darkness—just as long as we, and those we love, and our homes, and all that we care about, are safe. As long as we are in control.

This need to be in control is a very primal drive, and as fundamental as our need for food and shelter and love.

When things are scary, or difficult or overwhelming or even just boring, we want to be in control. You could fill the Astrodome many times over with all the pacifiers and blankies that little children use to make themselves feel like they have even the tiniest fragment of predictability and control over their lives.

As we grow up, we get pretty good at convincing ourselves that we are in control and that life is predictable. We tell ourselves that if we brush and floss everyday that we won’t get cavities.

That if we pay our health insurance premiums we won’t ever be wiped out by medical bills.

That if we talk to our kids about sex, drugs and rock and roll that somehow they’ll avoid making the mistakes we made growing up, like dating totally unsuitable boys or buying that Abba Greatest Hits album.

But then something happens that tears apart that illusion of control and that precious, but ultimately false notion that the world is a predictable place. Something that’s too big to ignore. Something like a Category 4 hurricane ripping open the gut of our neighbors to the east.

It is the images that get to us.

They yank our ugliest and scariest monsters out of the closet. Fears of being trapped, fears of drowning, and the unthinkable horror of seeing someone you love die—not in soft bed surrounded by family, but in a building being ripped to shreds by a storm that has no mercy.

We gather around the television and huddle over our newspapers in an unbelieving trance.

It is our worst nightmare come to life and these people are living it.

A few nights ago while watching the news, I listened to a man, who choked up as he described losing hold of his wife and how she told him it was okay to let her go, that he couldn’t continue to support her in the rising water, that she wanted him to save their children and grandchildren instead.

The reporter, whose voice was wavering with emotion, forced herself to ask one more question:

Where is your wife now?

And the man said: She’s gone. She’s gone.

I turned the TV off at that point. I put on my pajamas, and took my vitamin and my calcium pill, and brushed my teeth. And then I got into my nice warm bed with clean sheets and tried to tell myself that what happened in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama couldn’t possibly happen to me and my family here.

But heartbreaking catastrophes do happen in Austin and in Kansas and in little brick homes all over the world, in many different kinds of ways.

When I was eleven years old, about a week after Christmas, a different type of storm engulfed my family. And like most victims of disaster, we were totally unprepared.

I remember there was nothing good on TV that afternoon—a common occurrence in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. The handful of toys I’d gotten at Christmas had begun to lose their appeal. I was reading a Beanie Malone book from the library. Dad had gone out to help my grandparents at their farm outside of Dallas. My mother was cooking something economical for dinner, no doubt involving hamburger meat and a can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup.

Several hours later, my grandaddy called to say my Dad was sick. Really sick. That he wouldn’t wake up. Mother assumed Daddy had the flu and loaded the old Pontiac with blankets and a thermos of coffee. My oldest brother, who was home from college, went with her to help.

They came back a couple of hours later and my mom was hysterical. I tried to understand what she was saying, but she wasn’t making any sense. She said my dad was dead. He’d had a heart attack.

It felt like someone had sucked all the air out of our house and people’s voices sounded very strange. Somehow me and my mother and my six brothers and sisters—one of whom was only six weeks old—clung together in that three bedroom house on Sharondale Lane in Dallas and tried to come to grips with what had happened to us and what our future would bring.

I looked at this woman—my mother—who might have weighed all of a hundred pounds, and realized that she might not be strong enough to save me from this storm that had overtaken my family. And I’m ashamed to say that I remember thinking that God had taken the wrong parent.

You see, my father had always been the strong one, the tall one, the funny one, the parent who was whole in every sense of the word. My mother had always been weak. The one who was mentally fragile. The one who’d had a nervous breakdown a few years before—which no one ever talked about.

My mother held her sanity together in the years after my father’s death, and she held it together in a way that reminds me very much of a storm victim clinging to a rooftop.

Looking back, with adult eyes, I realize she was much stronger than I ever gave her credit for. And it makes me realize that, in all of us, there are reserves of strength waiting to be tapped. That we can survive loss. No matter how terrible.

But to do that, we must have help.

As a country, we are often uncomfortable with victims. We want them to get better and get over it as soon as possible. We treat them a little bit like a child who spills his milk—wipe up the table, wipe the floor, give him a fresh glass of milk, and tell him not to do that again.

And all too often, we even try to find ways to blame the victim. We ask the person whose car is stolen if the doors were locked. When a woman is raped, we want to know what she was wearing and why she was jogging by herself on that stretch of road. We wonder if the cancer victim smoked cigarettes. We want to believe it was something the victim did that caused their misfortune, because if that is true, we think we can avoid making that same mistake. And all that bad stuff will not happen to us. We will be safe. We will be in control.

There is an aspect, however, to Hurricane Katrina, that makes the news reports even more disturbing to watch. A nagging suspicion that racism may have played a role in this tragedy.

When I first heard that thousands of people had stayed behind in New Orleans despite the orders to evacuate, I had this vision of foolhardy folks holed up in the French Quarter, whooping it up with tall hurricane drinks. Too stupid to leave. People you would feel sorry for, but who at some level you could almost say deserved whatever happened to them.

But then the images unfolded. The young and the very old. Most of them black. All obviously very poor. People who live in the neighborhoods most of us avoid if we can. People who don’t have cars, who lack the money to pay for a hotel room. People in wheelchairs, sick and confused, who look much like my children’s grandmother, who is dying of brain cancer.

Only my mother-in-law is in a clean, comfortable, air-conditioned nursing home near our house, and these people were on the overpass of a Louisiana highway.

These people had been left behind in every sense of the word—left behind by an economy that is focused on consuming and spending, left behind by a country that lacks the political will to address huge social problems—issues that are complex, but by no means unsolvable. And left behind by an entire city fleeing a merciless storm.

Seeing these people stranded in the wreckage evoked another tragedy that I studied during the writing of my book. The sinking of the Titanic. On that great ship as in New Orleans, evacuation plans were totally inadequate, and a disproportionate number of the victims were the poor and the disenfranchised, who never had a chance for a first-class seat on the lifeboat.

When the scars of Hurricane Katrina finally begin to heal, I hope that we as a country have the stomach to look at this tragedy in a meaningful way. There are huge issues at stake. We have known for decades that New Orleans was at risk and was protected by an inadequate system of levies. We know that countless people live along the coasts of our country in the path of future hurricanes. We allow people and businesses to locate in floodplains, collecting their tax money every year.

What is our responsibility to these people? What are our plans to help them and our other fellow humans who suffer huge losses?

We cannot control the wind and the ocean, and we cannot control the many decisions that other people make. But we do have power over ourselves.

We can be like those Americans more than a century ago who looked at the images of another horrible hurricane. They saw the compelling, unforgettable pictures not on television, but on postcards, distributed by Clara Barton, an early Unitarian who helped establish the American Red Cross, who at age 79 rode down to Galveston on a steam train, wearing stifling long black skirts, to personally oversee the relief effort.

Clara Barton knew that once people saw those postcard images and realized the scope of the tragedy, that they would open up their hearts and their pocketbooks to the victims of that storm.

And she was right. The money poured in. And people came to help.

So let us open our eyes, and our hearts and our wallets to these images and to these people who have suffered so much.

And let us know that each time we reach out a hand to someone in trouble that we are also reaching out to ourselves, and healing our own hearts from the losses we have suffered.