READING :

KINDNESS

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye [adapted]

SERMON:

“Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.”

Naomi Shihab Nye’s words have special meaning to the residents along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Many – too many – felt their future dissolve in a moment, dissolve like salt in a great surge of water from the Gulf of Mexico. Driven by hurricane Katrina’s 150-mile an hour winds, the surge took land, homes, and dreams, in many cases leaving nothing.

Although much of the news of Katrina’s path of destruction focused on the city of New Orleans, Ground Zero for Katrina, which made landfall last August 29, was the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a 30-minute drive east on Interstate10 from New Orleans. One town, Waveland, Mississippi, no longer exists. The homes built along the beautiful Gulf shoreline are gone; only cement pilings – some eight or more feet high – remain as evidence that a home once stood here. Nothing remains. What has become of those houses? The siding? The roofs? The porch railings? The refrigerators? The bedroom dressers? The backyard play equipment?

This past May I looked out over the Gulf on a 90-degree day. The placid waters cover the remains of the town that now lies somewhere out there. I was tempted to step into those warm waters, but I am warned by my guide, Julie, that the beaches are off-limits to swimming. Constant monitoring of water quality indicate that, amazingly, the waters do not show dangerous levels of pollution from oil, chemicals, or waste. The danger in the water is the window glass, metal roofs, nails, rebar, all the material that goes into building a home – all the materials, the furniture, the appliances. Along the Gulf Coast beaches are being sifted to remove dangerous objects in a time-consuming process that must happen before the beaches will again be safe for family picnics, boating, swimming and wading.

I moved away from the shore, and walk toward what was once the heart of Waveland. Trees are uprooted or snapped off. What was left of businesses knocked off cinder block foundations by the surge tilt against tree trunks, or rest atop cars in driveways. A brick building is missing a corner, as if it had been hit in a mortar shell.

The streets are empty. Building lots are empty. Silence surrounds me. I become aware of how noise is woven into our lives: a car engine revving as it moves away from a stop light; car radios, the basses tuned to the max; garbage trucks braking to make a pickup; children playing in front of houses; dogs barking. In the town of Waveland, those everyday sounds are missing. Instead, silence.

My guide, Julie, a member of the North Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Lacombe, Louisiana, drives a few miles further east to Bay St. Louis, a picturesque town along the Mississippi Gulf known as an artists’ colony. Bay St. Louis’ Old Town, once home to numerous galleries and bistros that attracted artists, art lovers, musicians, and music lovers, is empty. On August 29, 25 feet of water swept over Bay St. Louis. As the water left, it took buildings, businesses, homes, and dreams with it. Today, according to a recent article in New Orleans’ Times Picayune, the streets of Old Town have been taken over – even during the daytime – by packs of fearless rats. Official believe the rodent population explosion began sometime after Hurricane Katrina stuck last year. According to the town’s animal control officer, “We did have a large population of wild cats and they kind of kept the rats in check, but since the storm we don’t have the cats down there.”

It becomes increasingly clear to me that Katrina’s effects are multifaceted, interrelated, and complex – that the human story is only part of it. “Other life, and the land itself, are in crisis,” wrote my partner, Barbara Gibson, while we were in Louisiana. She continued, “The Big River and the smaller ones. The streams and creeks. The marshes, swamps and bayous. The wetlands. The barrier islands. All of these are changed, some irrevocably. Thousands and thousands of trees destroyed. Vegetation ripped from the earth. What about the animals? Their habitats are gone, in some cases. Their populations decimated. We don’t even know the extent of it. Where do the coastal birds nest now? Where do the tiny frogs live? Do mountain lions still roam the swampy woods? What of the delicate and life-giving interrelationships among all these?”

She adds, “It’s easy to see the ruin and disaster. Its easy to read about the parts of it we can’t see: the government irresponsibility, corruption, the cronyism, the racism.”

And there is plenty of blame to go around: the Army Corps of Engineers; local, state, and federal government; FEMA. As human beings we want to fix blame for the causes, and for the effects.

Despite loss, grief, and anger, the people of the Gulf Coast are not ready to call it quits. Waveland, the town that was completely washed away, now has a city hall and city offices, even if it does not have a city. Planning commission, social services, and other government offices are in five FEMA-type trailers near Interstate 10. As one resident of Waveland says, “Don’t write us off!”

“Don’t write us off!” I heard this from other residents of the Gulf Coast, including members of the North Shore Unitarian Universalist congregation, where I served as guest minister for two weeks at the end of May. I returned home June 1, and am still processing my experiences with and the stories of people in that congregation and community – nine months after hurricane Katrina. Nine months after hurricane Katrina.

My time at North Shore was supported by you here at OUUC, both financially and emotionally. My partner, Barbara, traveled with me, and together whe shared heartbreaking, awesome, and inspiring experiences with people whose lives have been changed forever. Interwoven in their stories is a new awareness of the meaning of kindness – kindness to each other, kindness from others, including UU’s in partner churches in other parts of the country.

As many of you know from reports from Ginny Taylor, who heads the partner church committee here, and Art Vaeni, who served as North Shore’s guest minister for three weeks in April, North Shore UU Congregation in Lacombe, Louisiana, is about 30 minutes east of New Orleans. Lacombe is one of several small towns located on I-12, which runs east and west along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. These little towns, including Slidell, Covington, and Mandeville, have their own history, but, since the causeway across the lake was built in 1969, are now homes for many people who commute daily to New Orleans. The causeway, by the way, is the longest bridge in the United States that is completely over water – 23 miles long. Traffic moves in and out of New Orleans daily on this bridge.

As we here in the Pacific Northwest sat fixated on our television screens at the end of August and into September, we saw image after image of New Orleans and its destruction before us: the Ninth Ward, built below sea level and completely destroyed as the levee holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain failed; people in the eighth and ninth wards on rooftops, waving their arms to attract the attention of rescue helicopters.

From news coverage of the storm, we know more about what happened in New Orleans than in other areas of the Gulf Coast – like those Mississippi towns of Waveland and Bay St. Louis, or Louisiana’s North Shore. The area right around the North Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation In Lacombe, Louisiana, did not suffer the wholesale destruction I saw elsewhere, but Katrina’s effects were everywhere. The roof of the church was damaged by falling trees, but a crew of UUs from New England came down last fall and helped with repairs. Many large pecan trees on the property came down; the Feng Shui garden in front of the church, once a shade garden, is now more of a sun garden. Some members’ homes were completely destroyed, some had minor damage, and others were not touched at all.

As Barbara and I drove around Lacombe’s St. Tammany parish, we were stunned by the amount of debris – house parts, carpeting, furniture, appliance, abandoned cars – still piled along the roads nine months after Katrina. At first the sight of boats sitting in freeway medians far from water was startling; after a few days they had become commonplace. Blue roofs are still everywhere—the plastic tarps furnished by FEMA to protect whatever is left inside houses. FEMA trailers are everywhere too. They sit in front of uninhabitable houses, connected to existing power and sewer lines. Many people living in the trailers have made them homelike; patio furniture, potted plants, and barbeques form outdoor living areas around the trailers. Some people live in the trailers while they gut the interiors of their houses and rebuild; others live there while they wait – for government loans or assistance, for insurance, for contractors to begin work.

Remember, it has been nine months since Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast. Yes, FEMA, the Red Cross, insurance companies, and governments have been rightly criticized for their failures, but clean up and rebuilding are happening.

Each morning I went to Gators, the gas station and convenience store near the North Shore church, to buy my morning paper. I saw trucks from all over the country: Florida, Illinois, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, California. Signs in the windows of trucks with winches and chain saws in the back indicated their availability: house gutting, stump removal, roofs repaired.

I was stunned by the enormity of the destruction. In New Orleans alone, it is estimated that 100,000 to 120,000 homes will need to be demolished. Where will the 2X4s, bricks, cinderblock, roofing, go? Katrina and Rita have left 100 million cubic yards of debris in four states. Can you imagine 100 million cubic yards? 100 million cubic yards will fill the Superdome 22 times over.

Where is this debris – the demolished homes, the abandoned cars, the uprooted trees – to go? This is not something you can take to your local garbage transfer station.

A few days after we arrived we were taken on a tour of New Orleans by a woman who had lived in the area for several years. We drove into the city on Interstate 10, a raised highway that goes through east New Orleans. On either side of the freeway are empty apartment buildings, deserted strip malls, a larger shopping mall, a Six Flags amusement park. Only after we had been traveling for several minutes past what I came to call the Dead Zone, did I really get it: nothing – nothing – moved in these areas. No cars, no trucks, no people. What had happened to all of the people who lived in the apartment complexes? Who owned or worked in the shops? Who operated the rides? No one seemed to know.

New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, of which we have read so much and seen so much on television, remains a scene of complete devastation. Piles of broken lumber and furniture were once homes; houses still upright are tilted at crazy angles, broken in half by winds, covered with a brown film, known as the Katrina Patina, left by the receding water. Abandoned cars sit where they have been parked since August 29, 2005. In many parts of the Ninth Ward there is no electricity, no street lights.

There is one vibrant sign of life in the Ninth Ward. Common Ground, a faith-based group of volunteers, has established a community center amidst the rubble. People can come there, have a cup of tea and some lunch at a table in a covered area, and talk. A bouquet of flowers sits on the table. Young volunteers from all over the United States go out from this center to clear debris from streets and home sites in the Ninth Ward, to bring some sense of order to the chaos in which they find themselves.

Again I ask myself, where are the people who once lived here, worked here?

In other neighborhoods houses were destroyed by polluted water that sat in them for days. Unlike the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where the sudden surge of water quickly receded, sweeping houses, furnishings, and vehicles away, these New Orleans’ neighborhoods flooded, and the low-lying fetid waters could not drain away. Houses have a telltale brown line on them, indicating how high the waters rose. Some are three feet from the ground; others are 15 feet. Large spray-painted X’s on the doors are a code that tell us when the house was checked, by what group, how many dead were found inside. Some carry additional messages: “No reptiles found.” “Dead dog in back room.” “Please feed cat.”

East of the lake, members at the North Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation live with the continuing effects of Katrina. Trees still rest on top of roofs, parts of houses are missing. The nearby town of Slidell has an Old Town section, once home to numerous antique shops, boutiques, and a soda fountain. Today Old Town is abandoned; on the walls of the buildings, eight feet above the sidewalks, someone has painted a water line, adding drawings of a sailboat navigating the waves and fish in the water. Each of those shops represents someone’s dream of having a small business, a dream that may be permanently shattered.

The physical damage is only part of Katrina’s legacy. The deeper ruin is in people’s lives and hearts. Lives have been forever changed. Businesses – and jobs – have vanished. Mental health professionals, needed now more than ever, have few clients. People must use their time and money to rebuild houses. For many, the emotional and spiritual rebuilding will have to wait, despite the cost.

Even those who had little damage to their homes continue to live with Katrina. One couple, in their 80’s, evacuated last August to a cousin’s house in Baton Rouge. There, the storm had taken out electricity, water pumps did not work, toilets did not flush. Temperatures were near 100. This couple later moved to a family farm in Kentucky, where they spent the next three months. They returned home to a house that had only minimal damage, but to a life that had changed dramatically. A good friend had died, another had moved to Kansas. Katrina Patina had spread over their lives. Married for nearly 60 years, this couple feels increasingly isolated and anxious as they face the 2006 hurricane season.

And the North Shore congregation as a whole? Like the elderly couple, everyone has a story about how Katrina has affected their lives. Perhaps the most important gift those of us on the outside can offer is to hear those stories. Their individual stories, and the stories of their congregation. It is at this point we can understand their sense of loss, truly see and feel how many have seen their future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

The congregation feels a profound sense of loss. North Shore is a small congregation, about 85 members before the storm. Since Katrina, about 20% of their members are gone: people lost homes; jobs; some are too elderly or too emotionally wasted to cope with the idea of rebuilding and have moved away. Of the 65 or so members left, probably 2/3 had damage to their homes. Some had homes completely destroyed. Some are still in FEMA trailers, others in rented space. For many, their congregation is, more than ever, a place of solace, fellowship, and support. It is where members have come to know what kindness really is.

Gay, a member of North Shore, was to be married last September 5. Invitations had been sent, musicians and caterer engaged. Gay had moved her furniture and other possessions to her fiance’s house on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, but, in preparation for the next weekend’s wedding, had kept her wedding dress with her. Then Katrina hit; her home was damaged, but not severely. Her fiance’s home, along with all of their possessions, was destroyed.

Plans for the elaborate event were called off, but the wedding itself was only postponed. When the ceremony took place last October at North Shore, it was simple and homegrown. Gay wore her wedding dress, and the congregation’s wonderful musicians provided the music. A potluck, organized only the day before the wedding by church members, became the wedding feast.

Naomi Shihab Nye writes, “What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.”

Many of the people at North Shore have seen what they held in their hands – homes, jobs, relationships, plans – have seen them dissolve. They have seen how desolate the landscape can between the regions of kindness. Fortunately, they have experienced those regions, with each other and with the larger Unitarian Universalist community through their partner churches. The people at North Shore perceive new possibility. They are rebuilding their leadership team, working on long-range strategic plan that includes membership recruitment and community outreach. They recognize what a gift they have in their chalice circles, their small group ministries, that give great emotional support to their members.

And the future? The hardy souls at North Shore know how important their liberal religious voice is in the Gulf States. Even as members struggle to rebuild individual lives, they are committed to rebuilding their Unitarian Universalist church.

At a potluck the night before I left Louisiana, I asked North Shore members what they would like me to say to people in the Pacific Northwest. There was silence, then one member said, “Just don’t forget us.”

Our greatest act of kindness to our sisters and brothers at North Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Lacombe is not to forget them, and to continue to hold them in our hearts and prayers. In doing so let us remember these words of Naomi Shihab Nye:

“Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.”

Amen, and blessed be.