THE LITURGY OF A HURRICANE byRolandWise

Good friend Tommy Dillon is the father of the flock at Saint Augustine’s Episcopal Church just outside Baton Rouge. By the time I arrived in Louisiana, it was about a week after hurricane Katrina had made landfall, making business as usual in the small church a thing of the past. The liturgy of human needs in this devastated region had naturally beckoned the church and it good folks to displace any sense of normalcy, and become a hub of relief effort. And this not only happened here, it was happening in Athens, Georgia at Emmanuel Episcopal Church as well. A group of parishioners from there, led by the Very Reverend Mandy Brady, loaded up their vans with supplies and made the day and half trip from Georgia, arriving at Saint Augustine’s to help meet the various needs growing with every days passing.

I first met up with the group of saints at one of the relief shelters in town where they were busy sorting out supplies into various categories, a system that eventually bagged up orders, labeling them, so that the folks who had called in prior could drop by and pick up things with some sense of arrangement. I thought to myself it was very important (as well as efficient) to have these packages waiting for folks, and I imagined that it gave them dignity they might not have received otherwise, to walk up to god’s house and have something waiting there with their name on it. With no physical address, it was unimaginable to me what must be going on in the hearts and minds of these folks as they arrived in need trying to secure the very basic resources for their families. This notion of having a gift or package waiting also played out with the children that day who were there browsing through the pile of toys donated. While passing out toys to them, I felt like Santa Claus, and then one of the little girls brought me a bag of bows she had found over in the Christmas stuff. She handed me a bow wanting me to stick one on her present making it like Christmas, she informed. All of the kids then lined up for a bow on their gift, and we all had fun pretending for a moment.

On our last night together, before the folks of Emmanuel Episcopal Church left to go back to Georgia, was spent in communion, while sharing stories about the vastness of human liturgy that had transpired on all fronts. While eating a potluck supper following the Wednesday night mass, Father Tommy posed the question that we all had been throwing around since Katrina made landfall.

Where is God in all this mess?

After hearing each story, and how every single person there had brought such a lovely unique brand of individual wholeness to the table while meeting the many needs that had to be met one by one, it seemed the answer to this age old question was much clearer and closer to our hearts than perhaps any of us realized.

My experience tells me this sort of innate humbleness we have in relation to the unknown while going about doing good deeds, is built in for good reason; and that it helps us to avoid premature recognition of our own godliness, so as to continue the efforts of relief in ways small and large, culminating into a mass of good will unlike anything we could have every imagined or forecasted or thought we might be able to create and withstand.

This sense of alpha beckons tomorrow’s omega, and the timeshare we (as humans) invested in was like putting a bow on the relief efforts so that each of us could go our separate ways becoming evermore changed and present while moving back into our routine lives.

And the grandest surprise of all is the ending, and how God hides from us with great purpose, like the ending of a great novel makes us wait and wait for relief until the very last word.

It's how the grand devastation of knowing the unknown displaces us for a moment to what lay ahead, and this means that the electrifying service of loving one another efficiently and effectively can go on uninterrupted while shedding much needed light onto situation after situation, inviting us to look into the mess of it all and gather ourselves up into the wholeness that is our birthright. We do all this to others as we would have them do unto ourselves, with hope and love, while the liturgy of one meeting of need ends, and the musical service of another begins.

Copyright 2005 Roland Wise