This time, maybe this time, we'll turn.
I am tired of the finger pointing already. I am tired of the blaming, the hunt for persons whose heads, rolling down the aisles of government, might cause us to forget the pain we feel in the aftermath of Katrina. It is because we can't get past questions like the reporter's, "So, do you think FEMA dropped the ball?" that we cannot look to our own complicity in the suffering of the people of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. And because we are complicitous, no other course but the one of real repentance will lead out of this tragedy toward anything newer, or brigher.
We are complicitous. We elected people because they promised to keep our taxes low. They kept our taxes low at the expense of the levees. We elected people who promised to keep America safe, forgetting that the greatest single threat to American life in the history of the country would come from the heavens, not from Al Qua'eda. We spent billions in the Middle East when 250 million could have saved New Orleans.
But it goes well beyond this, our complicity. We are complicitous because we are not surrendered to God and to one another. We are complicitous because the very things we complain about in "them" are just as present in "us" and we won't acknowledge it. If blame were of the Gospel (which it most assuredly is not) then we would all have our share, if not because of what we have done, then surely because of the things we could have done and did not.
And we have a chance, looking in the poisoned mirror of the waters covering the city, to see ourselves truly for a change, to see where our choices are leading us. In that moment of seeing, if we'll open our eyes, is the moment of opportunity. We have the chance to turn, to repent as a nation.
It is time to set aside words like "greed" or "incompetence" or "racist" and simply admit that we are all joined together in the creation of this masterpiece of death and humiliation. What the president did not do, I did not do. What the FEMA director did, I did.
So, now what?
I hunger for the moment when we say, as a people, "We would have had it turn out otherwise, we will do what we are able, truly what we are able, not what we are willing to do, to see to it that no one else suffers as these people have suffered, to see too it that we do not suffer again. (For, if we are all so joined as to be co-creators of this Second Deluge, then we are also joined equally to those who have died, and who have lost.) We can turn, and seek a whole new way of being in the world, a way patterned after that of Jesus, who stills storm and wave, but does not destroy them, who casts out demons, but grants them a place to go, who heals with a touch, not a knife.
It would mean turning our country's set of signposts upside down, inside out. At first, I fear that I'd feel like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, arms akimbo, indicating so many different directions that the one I want is obscured. But the way of Jesus is the way of Life. In His footsteps are security and direction and purpose unlike any I have yet known. Any we have yet known.
Katrina has spun us around like a child searching for the donkey with his tail. She has taken us, for a moment, off the road to death which held us spellbound. If we listen carefully, we can hear Jesus beckon us in a new direction. O God, I hope we listen.
Jeff
Thanks for being on point and on trgeat!
Posted by: Roger | April 03, 2012 at 09:35 PM