“Postcards from the Lower Ninth”

A sermon by

The Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday 6 April 2008

I want to share with you today some reflections from my recent trip, a trip that about 40 of us from this church took to New Orleans two weeks ago.  Really what I want to offer are some impressions and reflections on those impressions.  We have talked before about Katrina and New Orleans and looked at the racial, economic, political analysis.  This is really more a personal reflection on my experience there.  While I was in New Orleans, one snippet of poetry came back to me over and over again.  I want to offer it to you as our reading this morning.  The words are from Adrienne Rich:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save.

So much has been destroyed.

I must cast my lot with those who, age after age,

   perversely, with no extraordinary power,

Reconstitute the world.

When our plane touched down in New Orleans the day after Easter our van was late to pick us up.  The driver called to say he was caught in rush-hour traffic and would be there in 20 minutes.  None of us waiting around the baggage carousel that day realized the significance of this small inconvenience, but significant it was because for the last two and a half years, of course, there haven’t been enough people in New Orleans to cause a traffic jam and, as hard as it might be for those of us who struggle with beltway gridlock to imagine, folks in New Orleans are just giddy about the return of rush hour traffic.  For them, it’s another sign that life in New Orleans is returning to some semblance of normal.

And that certainly was my first impression of New Orleans last week.  As we drove from the airport to the place where we would live and work, we drove through a city that, in many ways, seemed normal.  Now things didn’t look great, mind you, but parts of New Orleans could pass for any other poverty-stricken American city, could pass for parts of our own city.  Only if you looked closely did you see signs of the former destruction:  buildings that still bore the feint sign, the feint stain of the flood’s high water mark, a thin line of grime about eight feel above street level.  And every once in awhile, a home was still boarded up from Katrina, a home whose plywood doors still bore the notorious “X” spray painted by emergency crews, indicating that they had searched the building.  Underneath the X, a numeral was painted, indicating the number of bodies found in the building.  In the wake of Katrina, rescue workers recovered more than eighteen hundred bodies in homes across the state.

But the water line and the boarded up houses seemed to refer more to New Orleans past than its present and All Souls folks who’d been there last year remarked on the progress they noticed when, on our quick drive through the French Quarter that afternoon, we heard brassy jazz wafting through the air and saw twenty-somethings spilling out of bars with plastic cups full of Abida beer and rum punch, it only reinforced our impression that all was as it should be in the “Big Easy.”

This impression of normalcy was shattered the next day when, for the first time, we visited the Lower Ninth Ward.  The Lower Nine was, for generations, one of the most stable African American communities in the country.  Though poor, it had an extremely high home-ownership rate of around sixty percent.  Many of the homes had been in the same family for generations, so folks didn’t have a mortgage, much less a deed certifying their ownership of the property.  Before Katrina the Lower Nine was a lively, bustling community whose small houses were packed so close together that if you stood on your front porch and reached out your hand, you could touch your neighbor’s hand on her front porch.  It wasn’t a perfect neighborhood, but it was a neighborhood in the true sense of the word, a close-knit community.  It’s also a neighborhood that lies as much as seven feet below sea level, kept dry by an intricate system of levies and pumps, kept dry that is until the day the levies broke.

Now, to get from the rest of the city into the Lower Nine, one has to take a bridge over the industrial canal.  I was riding one day in a noisy, fifteen-passenger van filled with All Souls teenagers who were somehow simultaneously talking to one another and texting their friends back home.  It was a raucous van ride, needless to say, but as our van crested the bridge and the Lower Ninth came into sight for the first time a silence fell over our car.  Immediately a wave of grief washed over us, not so much for what we saw as for what we didn’t see.  Nearly three years after Katrina, vast swaths of the Lower Nine are still completely vacant and abandoned.  From the bridge, this formerly bustling neighborhood looked like the swamp it was, long ago.  Instead of houses, thick vegetation.  Instead of children and families, egrets and swamp birds took off and landed, wildflowers grew over crumbling house foundations, rodents scurried through the grass.  It is like a scene from some apocalyptic science fiction movie.

When we stopped our van and got out, the silence was deafening.  All we could hear was the wind.  Before us stood a crushed one-room church house, virtually untouched since the storm.  Inside, enough remained in tact in the building to recognize it as a church.  Though badly damaged, the pulpit still stood, front and center.  Behind it, the choir loft sagged badly.  The baby grand piano had been smashed into a corner like a heap of kindling.  Though covered in litter and mud, you could see that the pew cushions were made from the exact same burgundy fabric that our pew cushions are made from.  There was enough there to be able to imagine that congregation gathered on the Sunday before Katrina, worshipping in their neighborhood church, just as we worship here today, hymns spilling out through the open windows, a potluck awaiting them on the lawn outside.  We wondered where they all were now.  Leaving the Lower Nine that day, our grief was physical, like a knot in the stomach. 

Now sometimes solace comes from surprising places.  The next day we took some of the youngest kids on our trip to visit the bayou.  The natural world around New Orleans is hauntingly wild and beautiful.  We walked through the swamp past live oaks draped with Spanish moss.  We walked on elevated planks above the delicate swamp ecosystem, past alligators basking on logs and, yes, cottonmouths, slithering through the mud.  In some directions, the bayou stretched as far as the eye could see, reminding me of pictures I’d seen of the vast plains of Africa.  As the sun set over the bayou, as the herons glided over the water, I felt ministered to by the earth.  I was reminded of one of my favorite poems from Wendell Berry, which I shared with our group that night:

When despair grows in me and I wake in the night

            at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water

            and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with

            forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water.

For a time, I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

The peace that comes from wild things would prove to be fleeting last week.  On Thursday night, after another day of demolishing garages and hanging drywall and scraping paint, we celebrated by taking the kids bowling.  Taking the kids bowling!  We took ourselves bowling that night at a place called “Rock and Bowl,” which featured slightly decrepit bowling lanes, but a very fresh zydeco band.  This was really the first night that we were able to let loose and to celebrate as a whole group, children and adults alike.  At about ten o-clock that night, we received a phone call from the place in which we were working and living.  While we were away, two young men had attempted to break into that site and to steal a car.  Two of the AmeriCorps volunteers we had worked with all week gave chase for several blocks.  Then one of the burglars turned and fired on the AmeriCorps volunteers, shooting Mark Smith in the stomach and the arm.  Mark had given us our orientation that Monday and had taught a team of our teens and adults how to hang drywall.  We learned that Mark was in the intensive care unit, fighting for his life.

First we told the adults, and then we rounded up the kids and took them down to the parking lot of the bowling alley where we told them the news.  As an update, and gratefully, we now know that Mark will be all right.  His liver had been perforated, but it has been repaired and doctors are still waiting to reconstruct his shattered arm because his health care benefits have run out.

As we spent hours working through the trauma of that night, we talked about a lot of things, parents, adults and children.  We talked about how precious life is and how we needed to treat one another gently and with love.  We wrestled with whether or not to spend the night at the site where the burglary had occurred or whether to go someplace else.  And as we did, many of us thought about our own city, thought about Washington, D.C. and how such a thing could easily have taken place right here in our own neighborhood, certainly in the neighborhood around our church.  We reflected on how so many of the problems that continue to destroy the fabric of life in New Orleans are present here in D.C. and in so many cities across the country.  The urge to flee the site that night mirrored, I think, a thought that many of us have had at one time or another in our lives, at least those of us who can afford the luxury of this thought:  The thought that maybe I should just leave the city; maybe I should go to someplace safer, someplace better, someplace where I can leave all these problems behind.

The Greek poet Contstantine Cavafy, wrote a poem addressed to those of us who have had these thoughts.  It’s called, “The City.”

You said, “I will go to another country; I will go to another shore

            And find another city, a better one than this.”

But you will find no new lands; you will find no new shores.

The city will follow you.

You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhood,

            Turn gray in these same houses.

Always you will arrive in this city; do not hope for any other.

There is no ship for you; there is no road.

As you have destroyed life here in this small corner,

You have ruined it in the entire world.

We decided to stay put that night.  I wasn’t sure how the rest of the trip would go, frankly.  But the next day, the sun rose bright and warm and we had the pleasure of working in the New Orleans City Park, one of the largest city parks in the country.  We were put to work hauling mulch from a pile in the back and spreading it beneath azalea beds in full bloom, far from the neighborhood in which the shooting had occurred.  We placed mulch around the fountains and pools of a little place in the park called “Storyland.”  It’s a little kiddy park, filled with statues from fairy tales like The Three Little Pigs and Humpty Dumpty.  If the price were right, in fact, a photo might even be procured of your senior minister posing with Little Bo Peep.  [Laughter]

After hours of work in the beautiful park in the blazing heat, the children all took off their shoes and their socks and jumped into the pools and the fountains and the girls had competitions about how far they could throw the water when they dunked their hair down and tossed it back up in the sunlight.  During our closing worship service on Friday afternoon, several of us talked about how hard it was to experience both the joy of that morning in the park at the same time as we were still grieving the trauma of the night before.  Did we have the right, many asked, to feel joy while Mark’s life hung in the balance in a nearby ICU.

E.B. White wrote, “I wake up each day torn between the desire to save the world and the desire to savor the world.  It makes it hard to plan the day,” he said.  But I think he offers us a false choice.  I don’t think there is any way we can live in this world unless we can both save it and savor it at the same time, unless we can experience simultaneously both the world’s pain and its beauty.  To refer back to my sermon from two weeks ago, that’s how we will be Easter people in a Good Friday world.

Two weeks out, as I look back on our trip to New Orleans, I once again come back to our own city and to the words from Adrienne Rich.  “My heart is moved by all I cannot save.  So much has been destroyed.  I must cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”  Friends, I think that ultimately this is what the church is for.  A place where those who, against unimaginable odds, seek to heal our broken world.  I, for one, am glad that fate has cast our lots together in this place, at this time, in this city.  May our presence here help redeem it.       Amen