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Dirty was the daybreak, Sudden was the change

The title of this blog post comes from a song by Elton John (music) and Bernie Taupin (lyrics) called “Where to now St. Peter”. It is on the Tumbleweed Connection album recorded in 1970 and released the same year as Elton’s self titled album which included the hit, “Your Song”. Tumbleweed Connection is a very unique album in the EJ collection, with a mix of bluesy and country themed tracks, and this song has always haunted me. The words of the title are sung halfway through the 2nd verse and describes, I think, the change in the character’s life as he faces eternity and asks St. Peter, “where to now? Show me the road I am on”.

This song, and especially those words, “Dirty was the daybreak, sudden was the change”, always pops into my mind when thinking about our Katrina experience (by the way for a really detailed look at our experience on the ground, my wife, Jennifer Forrester Knight, offers on her Facebook page some excellent descriptions of what we went through, we being the people of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.

I am not the first person by any means to quote the saying, “the body knows”. It is like muscle memory, a smell, a sound, a song, a picture, bring it all crashing back. Every time a storm brews in the Gulf it happens. On anniversaries, it happens. When even reminiscing about some of the wonderful people who we met along the way, especially the volunteers from all over the world, seeing their hard work and smiling faces can still trigger that deep, ugly feeling in my gut.

Dirty was the daybreak. Although it was near dusk when the storm finished her job on the coast of Mississippi, the sky was weird. Clouds and gusts of wind still played around the rubble as we scrambled to chainsaw our way out of the driveway of the home we had stayed in, about 5 miles north of our own which was one mile from the beach. I had arthroscopic knee surgery for a meniscus tear just a few days before the storm, so climbing over debris became my physical therapy. For many days in late August and September we had no rain (until Hurricane Rita sent some our way), it was like Katrina had absorbed all the moisture in the universe and dumped it on us and many others to our north, west, and east. We were left with bright sunshine and brutally hot and humid days, with no air conditioning or fans of course. Those day breaks didn’t look dirty, until the light of the new day shone on destruction and devastation as far as you could imagine.

Yep, Sudden was the change.

There are no words to truly describe those early day breaks, other than, perhaps, dirty and sudden. So I will close with a great thanks be to God for all those who helped, who came, who sent money and goods, and who prayed. Twenty years seems like a 100 and like 2 at different times. We as a nation have learned a lot about how to respond to disasters like Katrina, I hope we continue to support each other in the better ways we have learned since then. For Katrina there is no doubt faith communities saved us, but they cannot sustain that level of help forever. Jennifer and I were very blessed to meet so many wonderful people, many good friends to this day. Every hand that reached out in any way, was a blessing. My prayers are with all the people of the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts on this terrible anniversary day. May your day breaks be clean and changes bring blessing.

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Katrina at 20

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I have written a lot on this blog regarding Hurricane Katrina and especially the PTSD which still impacts Jennifer and me whenever storms pop up. This August 29th marks 20 years since the storm hit the coast of Mississippi. I am not aware of a lot of activities on the coast to commemorate the anniversary, nor been invited to participate in any. So I am not sure how we will pass the day, we’ve been pretty good at reflecting on our experiences over the years.

I did want to share a story, the memory of which was triggered by an article in the Mississippi Episcopalian, the diocesan newspaper. It was authored by my friend and former parishioner, Doug MacCullagh, who is currently the Senior Warden and historian at St. Patrick’s in Long Beach, Mississippi, the church I served for 8 years.

I arrived at St. Patrick’s as a brand new Rector in March of 2004. 18 months later the storm changed our lives forever, destroyed our church and most of the area we lived in (Pass Christian and Long Beach) and greatly influenced the rest of my life as a clergy person. In the article Doug described the importance of a statue of the mother of Jesus, Mary. Please read his article HERE before continuing, as the context is important to my story.

Katrina made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday morning, August 29th. I (foolishly) had my regular two church services the morning of the 28th, for any folks who had not yet evacuated. We had a decent crowd at the 8am service, then most of those people hit the road. The 10:30 service only had a handful, and after it ended Jennifer and I began to panic a bit and thought about leaving the area, but by then all the highways out were packed with cars, with no way to get to a safe area before the storm arrived. I won’t ever forget a CBS radio news reporter interviewing me between services. As we walked around the property where St. Patrick’s was, he asked what I was most worried about regarding our building. I told him we had made plans to get our most valuable items out of the building and divided them up into large totes, each able to allow church with Eucharist (communion) to take place from the content, but I was concerned about branches from the many Live Oak trees on our property damaging our roof. Can you tell I was naive? As Doug points out in his article, one of the totes contained the marble statue of Mary, the only item recovered after Hurricane Camille in 1969 had destroyed an earlier version of St. Patrick’s (also on the coastline but in a different area on the beach road than the church I served).

The importance of this statue to the people of St. Patrick’s cannot be understated and Doug’s article speaks to this. After the storm passed we were all in shock, the church gone,

28% of my parishioners lost their homes completely, 100% had damage. In Pass Christian, where we lived there were about 9000 housing units pre-Katrina, after the storm 500 of them were habitable. The devastation was enormous.

But I felt within me we needed to try to gather together, to worship and pray and sing and cry – cry a lot! So we never missed a Sunday gathering. The Sunday immediately after the storm found us at Grace Lutheran Church in Long Beach, who graciously hosted both us and St. Thomas Catholic church. We used the parish hall for our service, I think we met early afternoon. The Sun Herald newspaper was miraculously publishing every day, printing the paper off site and delivering free copies all over the coast. We got word to them and WLOX, the local TV station, we would have church on Sunday with the information as to where and when. None of us had working phones, and Grace Lutheran, like the rest of the area, did not have power, but somehow the word got out and a small group of St. Patrick’s folks made their way to the Lutheran church. The reunions upon seeing one another were uplifting and heart breaking as people shared their stories.

Kitty MacCullagh, Doug’s wife who very sadly died this past year, was our long time Altar Guild director and she had the tote with the Mary statue in it. Upon finding this out I got word to Kitty to bring Mary to our church service that Sunday. We sang a hymn and I reached into the tote and pulled out the Mary statue, wrapped in a protective cloth, and placed her on the make shift altar in that Parish Hall. The entire room stilled, people gasped as they realized this long time symbol of hope and recovery was still with us. As I placed Mary on the altar, tears began to fall from all of our eyes. It was a holy moment of faith and grace and thanksgiving.

Fast forward to September of 2007. The Episcopal House of Bishops met in New Orleans. Included in their gathering were opportunities not only to tour devastated areas in NOLA and Mississippi, but also to participate in recovery efforts in both places. St. Patrick’s met on Sundays and Wednesdays at our disaster recovery and relief center, Camp Coast Care (CCC), on the grounds of Coast Episcopal School in Long Beach, where my wife, Jennifer, had run a free medical clinic for five months post storm, serving over 22,000 patients with medical and mental health care. My office was in a trailer at CCC until we finished our new church building in 2009. Quite a few Bishops came and stayed at CCC and were sent out with work crews to help muck out houses, hang sheet rock, paint, etc. It was hot and humid and they worked hard. Then Presiding Bishop, the Most Reverend Kathryn Jefferts Schori, was one of the bishops at CCC and we discovered she could hang sheet rock like a champ! They joined us for worship and I preached about the Mary statue, which I had on display for them to see. The PB was preaching later that Sunday at a special service at the Cathedral in New Orleans, and she asked if she could borrow Mary and use the story in her sermon. So our beloved statue and symbol of hope was shared with the good people of the Diocese of Louisiana that day, and to this day she is still around, watching over the flock of St. Patrick’s in their new location, truly a messenger of resilience and faith for so many.

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THE SAME…BUT NOT THE SAME

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I heard from an old friend this week, Zara Renander. I met Zara after Hurricane Katrina turned our lives upside down on the coast of Mississippi. Zara, along with the Reverend Kerry Holder-Joffrion, are experts in teaching the use of labyrinths for meditation, prayer, mental health, support and a myriad of other wonderful things. A year or so after the storm, we invited Zara and Kerry to do a weekend workshop at Coast Episcopal School and St. Patrick’s (we were meeting in the gym at Coast Episcopal then). We built a simple labyrinth with the help of the school kids on the grounds of the school, and setup another temporary one in the gym where St. Patrick’s held worship services. We invited mental health workers and school teachers from all over the coast of Mississippi and they came in large numbers to see if using a labyrinth could help with their clients and students. It was a huge success. So much so that when we built (finally) the new St. Patrick’s, we included an outdoor labyrinth on the grounds.

Zara and Kerry are amazing spiritual guides that helped me tremendously during this challenging time. This week Zara was wanting to write on her blog about the current crisis and reached out to me to see if she could use a letter I wrote at the 10th anniversary of Katrina. I was flattered and of course said yes. Here is her entire post: http://turningpointgroup.org/talking-feather-time-in-the-nick-of-time/

The part she quoted from me is this:

This is an excerpt from David’s letter and reflections on that disastrous time:

“Do I talk about the woman who almost died in her home, water to her neck, neither she nor her daughter could swim, how a neighbor rescued them out of a window and lashed them inside a boat tied to a tree, where they watched it all play out, tornadoes and wind and water and prayed the tree held, watched her home and car wash away, knowing her story was just one story of so many JUST LIKE THAT. Do I talk about the friend in Hattiesburg who is a Chevy dealer who loaned me a pickup truck that I would fill up with supplies and drive around to all the tent “villages”, especially in the Bay, and hand out what I had and money if I had it too, and then go back for more supplies and do it all over again. What a gift that truck proved to be, just in the nick of time. So much came to us just in the nick of time, over and over again God provided, in the triple digit heat and the dust and the great despair, God kept showing up, looking different every time, but present and there always. Always.”

This crisis is the same and very different. None of us know how this pandemic crisis will end. There will be pain and suffering and deep sadness. There will be miracle workers and angels we are unaware of. There will be suffering and pain and there will be glimmers of hope. As I preached last week, hope does not disappoint! Those are St. Paul’s words, not mine. May we never lose hope, for hope, the only hope that matters, is hope in God who loves us and is with us, at the nick of time and over time. This will be so hard. We have a while to go. But our sacred story speaks of a God who shows up, loves us when we are unlovable, and truly wants us to put our hope, our trust, our faith in Him. In the nick of time. And all the time.

My prayers are with you all. This blog will be much more active for a while, some of the posts will be video based. I welcome you sharing with anyone you think may like to read/hear my thoughts, reactions, and prayers. God bless! In the nick of time. And all the time.

Fr. David+