As the Katrina Anniversary approaches, emotions are running high in the church I serve and in the greater New Orleans area. What happened to us would be unreal if it weren't that we have to look at the evidence of it every single day. There are still neighborhoods even Uptown -- not just Lakeview, Gentilly, and the Lower 9 -- with ruined boarded-up houses, streets with no street signs, blue FEMA tarp everywhere, and Grand Canyon potholes in the streets (even major arteries). You can always tell experienced native drivers, because they're the ones automatically making wide swerves around the known road hazards, while the newbies plow straight ahead, dropping off "cliffs" and falling into big gaps in the road. Things that ought to be fixed RIGHT AWAY are left to rack and ruin -- like the smashed wooden utility pole looming dangerously over the corner at Felicity and Simon Bolivar, apparently held up by nothing except the electric wires.
Amazingly, proving the old saying that you can get used to anything, we begin to be inured to these sights and experiences.
I was asked by the Mayor's Office to participate in the city's interfaith Katrina Memorial in Jackson Square on Friday evening. My disgust with the poor performance of the incumbent Mayor and U.S. president over Katrina made me think twice about accepting. (I wasn't sure I wanted to share a platform with the Mayor.) In the end, I decided it was more important for me to be there than to make some kind of flimsy, ineffective protest by staying away. It's been a REAL challenge, trying to compose something that doesn't indict, even if only by implication, the Mayor and the president and the Corps of Engineers and the insurance companies and .... (Well, you get the idea.) I'm sure I'll have all these feelings under control (mostly) by the time the event rolls around at the end of this week.
My church will hold its 3rd annual Katrina Dinner on Saturday night, along with the ritual based loosely on the Passover seder that was developed by Justin Lundgren, a New Orleanian, soon after the Storm . We eat our favorite New Orleans foods (pralines for sweetness, dill pickles for bitterness), the youngest children present ask ritual questions, and we always keep an empty chair for all those New Orleanians who have not been able, or have not been allowed to, come home.
The rebuilding and recovery of our poor building goes very, very slowly. (If it went any more slowly, it wouldn't even be happening.) I'm still preaching from a flimsy and rusty music stand, trying to be a good sport about it. The floor in the Sanctuary is still scarred and pitted bare concrete, the water line is still visible above the new paneled wainscoting, and the ceiling shows missing and drooping acoustic tiles (which weren't attractive even before Katrina). The chapel has no electricity, but at least now has a new bamboo floor. The RE wing, with the exception of the new admin and minister's offices, has no floor, except for painted (pitted) concrete. The area where the kitchen and old board room used to be has at least been cleared and gutted, and is ready for the construction of the planned commercial kitchen that will be shared with a local AIDS agency. We hope to begin construction this fall, as soon as engineering plans and permits are taken care of.
So much of church life seems on hold -- we can't easily hold regular potlucks or dinners or social gatherings without a kitchen, and the unfinished, even ugly, appearance of the Sanctuary requires a suspension of feelings and awareness for a good worship atmosphere. Sometimes it all seems overwhelming.
And yet...
And yet there are many hopeful, happy signs. The people who live here, who've always lived here or who've moved here since It happened, are determined and committed, and absolutely united in their/our love for the city. As Ned Sublette wrote in the coda to his new book, "The World That Made New Orleans": "They refused to cooperate in their own erasure." He was writing about Mardi Gras Indians, but it now stands as a fitting declaration for all of us New Orleanians.
We refuse to cooperate in our own erasure, our own Disneyfication, our own irrelevance. We stand together, united in our affection for our culture, our music, our food, our way of life, our beloved, still beautiful city. We will not be erased or removed.
We are New Orleans. We go on.
No comments:
Post a Comment