I haven’t been a Catholic for several years now, but there are some aspects of the religion of your upbringing (hell, of your first 40 years) that get under your skin. It’s become almost a truism or something of an accepted social joke that if you were raised Catholic, one of those is guilt. Well, guilt isn’t exactly the world’s healthiest emotion, and I’m not here today to advocate it, but there is a related thought process, the examination of conscience that has a lot to recommend for it. This thought occurred to me today upon seeing a story over at Grist, the folks who daily bring us the details of our ecocide with a dose of snark to keep us from going mad.
The story is Laid to Waste: Portraits of loss in the wake of Katrina by Chris Jordan, a Seattle photojournalist, and here is a bit of the text to give you a flavor of it; there’s also a worthwhile slide show as well:
He was the only other person I had seen for several hours; the otherwise empty streets were as still and silent as those of a ghost town. I felt I ought to acknowledge him before returning under my dark cloth, so I left my camera and crossed the street. As I approached I saw he was elderly, a tall slender black man with a pointed chin and lean, skeleton-like arms and hands.
I asked if this was his neighborhood. He told me his great-grandfather had built this house in the 1890s; his grandfather was born and died in this house, his father was born and died in this house, “and 76 years ago I was born in this house.” He pointed behind him to where the front door should have been. The entire house and everything in it was gone, swept away and smashed together with uprooted trees and cars and the remains of other houses in a huge splintered pile of rubble a quarter mile away. There was nothing left but the heavy cement steps, and some cinder blocks and grimy debris.
“They’re paying for me to stay in a motel room in Kansas City,” he told me. “It stinks of smoke and I don’t know anyone. I lost my wife a couple of years ago.” He pointed down the block to a small white building that was pushed off its foundation into the middle of the street. It was still standing, but twisted sideways with its back torn open. “That’s my church. The people are all gone. There used to be people…” His voice stopped as he gestured at the ruined landscape.
After a pause I asked him what he was going to do. “Same thing I’ve always done,” he said. “Sit on my front steps. I don’t belong anywhere else. I’m not going to rot away in some motel. This is where I am from, and this is what I do — I sit on my front steps — so here I am sitting on my front steps.”
Now if that was all there was, it would be enough to be heart-wrenching; but shifting gears, he grabbed me in a headlock from a different angle with the next paragraph:
Almost 300,000 Americans lost everything they owned to Katrina. There is evidence to suggest that this disaster may not have been an entirely natural event like an earthquake or tsunami. The hurricane’s severity can be linked to global warming, which is at least partially a human-caused phenomenon. Our individual consumer practices affect the environment in increments that cannot be measured, yet our Gulf Coast residents experienced Katrina directly and catastrophically. The question is whether we are all accountable to some degree. [emphasis mine]
Let me repeat that thought for you:
The question is whether we are all accountable to some degree.
This immediately brought back a flood of memories and emotions on this Ash Wednesday around examination of conscience, and the concept in Catholicism (and other faiths as well, I suppose) call “social sin”:
“…cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins. It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate, or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear, or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world, and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required; producing specious reasons of a higher order…” – Pope John Paul II
Now some would say it’s ironic for the Catholic Church to be speaking of such matters, after all, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3) But I’m not here to speak of those matters today.
I’m here to raise the question again:
The question is whether we are all accountable to some degree.
- For the poverty and illness and hopelessness of our brothers and sisters not only in New Orleans, but all across America – and around the world.
- For each avaricious choice that incrementally contributes its bit to environmental damage, to climate change, and thus to the storm’s fury.
- For each missed opportunity to oppose the policies being foisted upon this nation and this planet by the powerful but blind and deaf and dumb (stupid dumb, not mute dumb).
Yes, I know I’m preaching to the choir, or at least to the converted, and I’m certainly no saint in regards to these issues myself – I’m sitting here at the keyboard with tears in my eyes as my own actions and inactions parade before my mind’s eye.
So why am I saying this? Maybe to reach out to you all; there’s been a bit of a hurricane in the pond of late as well. None of us are perfect, and I don’t want to revisit all of those recent discussions that have left some frogs feeling homeless, or battered, or grieving. My own fault was avoiding the whole discussion as if it was an angry twelve-foot rattlesnake – as if I had no stake in seeing friends having at each other in their pain. But we have important work to be about, and so I reach out to all of you:
The tasks that face us seem daunting, the setbacks depressing, the tragedies – as with Katrina – almost too heart-rending to bear. But what choice do we have? This is the hand we’ve been dealt, and we must play it as best we’re able.
Now those who’ve been kind enough to read my ramblings know that I don’t put much stock anymore in the concept of sin, of good versus evil, preferring to discuss things in terms of wise versus foolish acts, and so perhaps it’s the height of irony for me to be here on Ash Wednesday carrying on about what 99% of you would describe as sin, but like I said, some things stick with you, and for me among them are the usefulness of a good examination of conscience now and then. So as to keep myself from being among “those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world” or “those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required; producing specious reasons of a higher order” as much as humanly possible.
So keep me honest, and I’ll try and do the same for you. But let’s be kind to one another, works in progress that we are. There’s more than enough madness in the world already to be fought, and we need to keep each other hopeful and strong to face the challenges ahead of us. There are enough things in the world we are all accountable for to some degree, and it’s going to take all hands and hearts of good will to re-weave the tattered fabric of our communities, our nation, our ecosystem, and our common humanity.
(((hugs for all))) Now back to work, LOL.
[cue exit antiphon]
Whose garden [city, republic, blog, biosphere, fill-in-the-blank] was this?
Whose garden was this?
It must have been lovely.
Did it have flowers?
I’ve seen pictures of flowers, and I’d love to have smelled one.
Whose river was this?
You say it ran freely.
Blue was it’s color.
I’ve seen blue in some pictures, and I’d love to have been there.
Tell me again I need to know.
The forest had trees, the meadows were green.
The oceans were blue and birds really flew.
Can you swear that it’s true?
Whose gray sky was this?
Or was it a blue one?
You say there were breezes.
I’ve heard records of breezes and I’d love to have felt one.
Tell me again I need to know.
The forest had trees, the meadows were green.
The oceans were blue and birds really flew.
Can you swear that it’s true?
Whose garden was this?
It must have been lovely.
Did it have flowers?
I’ve seen pictures of flowers, and I’d love to have smelled one…
