Of Storms and Life

Hurricanes are like getting rear-ended while waiting for a stoplight to change.  Nothing you could have done caused the minor or major damage done to your property and/or to yourself and others with you.  You just were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  (This analogy does not hold for personal injury if ordered to evacuate by experts and civil authorities.)  

For those, like me, who have survived many hurricanes in our dangerously located state, you know what I mean.  If it missed you, after thanking God, you pray for those who suffered the hit.  If you were in its path, after thinking why me, why us, you thank God you are alive, pray for the less fortunate and deal with the damage while waiting to get electrical power.  Such was the case once again with Hurricane Ida.

My first hurricane was when I was about 6 years old.  Our two-bedroom house was next to the Mississippi River levee in Plaquemine.  From my bedroom window I could see the tops of trees behind the levee on the land between the levee and the river.  As the winds grew stronger those trees began to sway as if they were dancing.  Once in a while one would be uprooted and disappear.  My mother sat in the room with me and my two sisters.  She tried to distract us with stories of storms she had survived but we were still afraid.

There were many hurricanes after that.  One that I remember that missed us was named Hurricane Camille.  In 1969 it made landfall just east of the Pearl River in Mississippi between Waveland and Biloxi.  I remember how still and heavy the air was that afternoon as we sat around our neighbors’ swimming pool.  The hurricane hit that night, and a couple of weeks later I drove along the coastal highway to see the damage.  

There was almost nothing to see.  The storm had been compact but dreadfully powerful.  All that was left behind were the front stone steps that had once led into large, beautiful homes.  It was eerie and sorrowful to see.  Some of those lots still remain empty. More than structures were lost. Many died and lives were changed forever.  

Another really big one that hit us was Hurricane Betsy.  It was in 1965 during my second year as an ordained priest assigned to St. Joseph Cathedral in downtown Baton Rouge.  We had a priest-rich diocese in the 1960s.  Four of us were assigned to the cathedral, although each had other duties.  We were Msgr. Donald Borders, cathedral pastor and director of many diocesan programs; Chancellor Msgr. Stanley Ott; Vocations Director Father Leo Guillot and myself, assistant pastor and teacher at Cathedral Prep School.  

As Betsy approached on Saturday afternoon, I had one final duty, to officiate at the marriage of a high school classmate in the cathedral.  The couple wanted to go through with their wedding even though none of their family and friends could attend because the I-10 bridge spanning the Mississippi River was closed. Their best man and maid of honor were also stranded on the west bank of the river in Plaquemine.  So Msgr. Borders served as best man and our housekeeper was maid of honor.  

The storm was near, and we had already lost electricity.  The altar candles did more than honorific duty.  After a very quick wedding, with the bride and groom hastening to shelter in the city, we priests hunkered down next door in the living room of the old wooden-frame rectory that faced Main Street next to the cathedral.  The rectory shook but held through the hurricane.  It was not until the next morning we realized the large steeple of the cathedral had been blown about a third of the way off its base toward us. St. Joseph Cathedral dates back to before the Civil War but it received an identical replacement of its steeple in 1965, thanks to Hurricane Betsy.

  I missed Hurricane Katrina in 2005 almost entirely.  I was on a riverboat on the Danube River in Europe when it hit New Orleans. We were able to follow the storm on the ship’s TV.  When I flew back to New York the custom agent who looked at my passport and flight papers told me that commercial flights were not yet allowed to land at Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport.  But by time I arrived in Atlanta, flights to Baton Rouge had just reopened.  When I returned to Christ the King Church and Catholic Center on the LSU campus where I was chaplain, the staff told me our work was now at  a sort of field hospital/refugee center in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.  

Much later I drove across a reopened 17th Street canal bridge leading into New Orleans and saw the devastation in the Lakeview area of the city, down Elysian Fields Avenue and then through the Bywater into the Ninth Ward.  What really was hard was to see the codes scrawled on wrecked homes indicating bodies inside or destined to be destroyed.   

And only three years later, Baton Rouge was hit by Hurricane Gustav.  Not much loss of life but to get out of the LSU campus and around the lakes you had to climb over fallen trees everywhere.  Hurricanes really are, in more than the words of insurance policies, “An act of God.”  Theologians will tell you that God only allows nature to take its course.  He doesn’t will the death of his creatures.  Yes, but when it is us and our loved ones who suffer in these storms, who doesn’t say, “Why us, Lord, why us?”

We believe as Christians in a God who creates out of love to share his nature, which is love with his creatures.  God’s creation didn’t happen just once and for all.  It is constantly evolving in our universe, and God is always sustaining its existence and evolution.  That is why God is everywhere.  

Today, weathermen and weatherwomen show us on TV the physical reasons why hurricanes go west from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean and then once in the Gulf of Mexico, north, northeast or northwest. Areas of high pressure or low pressure push them in one direction or another.  Our world and our universe are beautiful and, as God proclaimed in Genesis, “good.”  But in their evolution there is both power and danger.  Birth and death are constant – in volcanoes and earthquakes, floods and tsunamis, tornadoes and lightening.  And in plants and animals there is disease and violence.  As God tells Job, it is more than we can understand. 

Yet we humans, who the Book of Genesis says were created in the image and likeness of God, introduced sin and ugliness and upset the balance that God intended.  

God, however, is all-powerful and merciful, constantly bringing good out of evil. He allows suffering and disasters to call us back to him.  He even invites us to be part of our own healing, asking us through the prophet Micah to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with him. And while the poor suffer disproportionately in natural disasters, in St. Luke’s Beatitudes Jesus promises them the kingdom of God and a great reward in heaven. God is the great equalizer.

In the week after Ida came through, I helped a friend clean up her camp in the Atchafalaya Basin.  As I was driving back to Baton Rouge, I was caught in a caravan of power company trucks, huge trucks with cranes, 18-wheelers puling flat-beds loaded with transformers, vans with a small army of linemen in their work clothes and helmets.  The license plates all read Texas.  “Oh my gosh!,” I thought.  “God is helping us, and he’s wearing cowboy boots.”

Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnny [email protected].