| New Orleans lives to fight another day, but it was a mighty scare. Hurricane Gustav gave the city only a glancing blow, and the levees that protect it from the water did their job. This was not to be another Hurricane Katrina.
But, of course, no one doubts that there will be a next time. At this time of year, potential hurricanes spring up in the southern Atlantic nearly every day. No wonder so many people have chosen to live elsewhere. Since Katrina, somewhere between one half and one third of the population have relocated.
Katrina made landfall on 29 August 2005. The winds and the surging waters wiped away vast swaths of the city. In the historic lower ninth ward, and further up into St Bernard parish, the poorer part of town where the land was lower and the buildings were less well built, the storm made the place look as if it had been hit by a nuclear bomb. Houses became splinters, roads buckled in two, and gas stations were tossed aside as if they were made from Lego.
I saw some of the clean-up operation. Volunteers came from all over the world. My abiding memory will be the dirty work of restoration, and the remarkable group of bishops from the Episcopal Church who had personally set about mucking out some abandoned houses.
What was especially noteworthy was that they were bishops of different traditions, bishops who might otherwise have been arguing with each other, but instead were rolling up their sleeves and showing what good news looks like on the ground.
Living in a city where the next emergency might be only a few days away has shaped much of the place’s character. For some, it produces a live-for-today attitude. New Orleans is a crucible of exciting hedonism: jazz and sex and Mardi Gras. But, unlikely a combination as it might seem, it also has a feel of remarkable spiritual maturity.
This is city where most people have been asked a number of times to pack up all that is valuable in a matter of hours, and get out of town. The Bishop of Louisiana, the Rt Revd Charles Jenkins, got a call to evacuate at 4 a.m. last Sunday, and he and his wife were on the road by 8.30 a.m. Such an experience does seem to orientate many to what matters most. Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where rust and moth and hurricanes can destroy.
Bishop Jenkins told me that Katrina had changed him for ever, describing it in terms of a baptism by dirty water. Like baptism, Katrina was all about death and resurrection. Crucially, this resurrection is not antique doctrine: it is something that you get on with and join in.
The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney, in south London. |
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