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.