Hurricane Heart

Week beginning 18 September 2005

Hurricane Katrina left the world, not to say the United States of America, open-mouthed and unable to speak. The devastating effect on the Gulf Coast brought to mind the opening words of Jeremiah's lament over Jerusalem: 'how lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations'.

I was intrigued, however, by a different kind of jeremiad which appeared in a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal. The writer, Tunku Varadarajan, made the following observations: 'Physical strength has suddenly become more important than knowledge, or education. Everything smells.

'For Americans, this is humbling, and aggravating. ... There has been a descent so clear into indecency that one must address it as pressingly as the breakdown of the city's levees. It is as if the moral and civic "levees," too, were overwhelmed by the torrent. Once the waters have receded, New Orleans will face a task that will test our national mettle. A part of that task will be to ask why so many stooped so low as the waters rose so high.'

The almost total annihilation of New Orleans led to a lesson in geography for the rest of us, who had not appreciated that the famous city was lying so low beneath water level, or that its safety depended on the strength of the 'levees', or surrounding damns. Only when the catastrophe occurred did we realise why the wealthy white population lived in big houses on high ground.

Suddenly we realised that it was a disaster waiting to happen. Too late now to ask whether it might have been avoided, the devastation has thrown up more pressing questions, and has exposed more than physical holes in the city's infrastructure. The reality is that deep racial and political tensions were also waiting to burst. How different might the situation have been if New Orleans was in Florida?

But Varadarajan's observation is penetrating and accurate. We may legitimately raise questions of theodicy: how can a sovereign God permit such natural disasters to take place? Where do these events fit in to the overarching purpose of a benevolent God for the world that he has made? For many people, such events are enough to unsettle theism, although it seems to me that they are infinitely worse without it.

But there is another question: why was it that the biggest fear people faced in the aftermath of Katrina was not water infiltration, or environmental pollution, or storm damage, but looting, rape and murder? What is the explanation for a people turning to such lawlessness in the aftermath of the hurricane?

Is there not a deep pathos in the statements of houseowners who refused to leave their homes in spite of the risks involved in staying, simply because they needed to protect their property? More than their fear that they themselves might be endangered by remaining was their fear that their property might be looted if they left.

Is there not something deeply serious in the statements of young British tourists, for whom the greatest fear in the middle of the nightmare was not the shortage of food and clean water, or the immediate urgency for accommodation and transportation, but the possibility that they might be raped?

It beggars belief that, as Varadarajan puts it, the rising flood witnessed a moral decline. The city barriers were powerless to prevent the ocean spilling onto the streets and suburbs of New Orleans; but other barriers of morality and of conscience and of decency also broke down, leaving a city exposed to the sinful inclinations of the human heart just as much as to the consequences of the worst hurricane in living memory.

Perhaps it's easy to pontificate as I type out these words in the relative calm of a new week in Lewis. The Braighe was closed for a while this morning because of rising tides and gale force winds, but we know it will recede, and we will avoid the extremes of Gulf Coast weather. We will still complain about the lack of sun, but we have no need to at all.

We may be far removed from the battered coastline of the United States, but we do well to ponder the lessons in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The physical assault on our environment is one thing, but our commonalities go deep. We all need moral barriers as well as physical ones, barriers to check our behaviour, regulate our conscience and set our standards.

Yet we allow these barriers to collapse so easily. Look at our professional sportsmen who have been in the news recently: worth thousands of pounds in transfer fees and in club revenue, these are men with outstanding consummate skill in controlling footballs and scoring goals, yet so many of them find it difficult to control their tempers on the pitch or their behaviour off it.

The heart of the problem, as I never tire of saying, is the problem of the heart. Jeremiah knew that when he declared that 'the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick'. That's why his lament over Jerusalem ended with the plea, not for a physical, but for a spiritual restoration: 'restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old -- unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us'.

We may analyse issues and circumstances from every conceivable angle, but until we examine ourselves in the light of God's standards, we stand exposed to the same problems which engulfed the great cities of the Southern States -- not problems merely of politics, or of race, or of social deprivation and poverty, but the problem behind all problems -- the problem of man's sinful heart.

For that, as for everything, the Gospel remains the only solution.

iaind@backfreechurch.co.uk