ITS PLACE KNOWS IT NO MORE

And finally tonight, one more on the topic of Katrina and Psalm 103. Especially poignant I think. From the Rev. Raymond de Souza. Please read the whole article, as it touches on so many things that are important and vital for us to consider in the wake of what we have witnessed this past 10 days.

Of Katrina it has been said that her destruction was of biblical proportions. Since the devastation hit a week ago, it is a biblical verse that has seemed to put some proportion around what happened on the Gulf Coast — perhaps it was used at this past Sunday's services. Psalm 103: As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.

The psalms are the prayer book of the Jewish people, giving poetic expression to the various conquests and calamities that have marked their chosen-ness in history. And it is that line about the sheer fragility of man and all his works that so suits this past week — for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.

Indeed, the wind passed over New Orleans, and Biloxi, and Gulfport, and its place knows it no more. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour put it pithily on the first morning after: "[The buildings] are not severely damaged; they're simply not there."

How fragile and transitory it all is. The wind blows and the place no longer even remembers what was there. It is simply, utterly, totally, gone.

De Souza then goes on to point out that while the monuments we build to ourselves and to our greatness are not supposed to be the things that endure. They are not the important items that we are to leave to subsequent generations that come after us. I have learned the same principle in my research of my family history. I've reflected upon it many a sunny, windswept day while standing in yet another prairie cemetery overlooking the simple markers of the lives that came before me.

The desire to leave a mark — if only a tombstone — is natural enough, so that the place remembers those who passed there. Over centuries, the place knows no more those who passed by, and thoughtful souls have always regarded the long march of time as the ultimate undoing of all human ambition.

The wind that blows over centuries is barely perceptible. The wind of the hurricane does its devastating work overnight, and in the morning the reality pondered by philosophers becomes the wreckage of the lives of the ordinary man in the street. Except there is no longer any street. The place knows it no more.

The most important things man builds are not buildings, or boats, or even houses and causeways and levees. There is another labour, in which the architects are the theologians and scholars, the seekers and dreamers, the poets and composers, and the builders are the parents and teachers and coaches and clergy. It is the work of the heart, the education of souls, the construction of character. [emphasis mine]

It is that labour which is supposed to endure. When the winds blow, the house built on the solid rock of virtue is not swept away like the house built on the shifting sands of selfishness.

Yet that labour too took a beating in the days after Katrina. The stories of looting, beatings and gunplay were literally demoralizing, even as the physical destruction was devastating. Were the hurricane winds sufficient to blow away basic decency and civility? Were the simple tenets of morality among the things that the place knows no more?

That buildings are fragile in the face of the storm is not a surprise. But is our civilization so fragile as to put women at risk of being raped amid the fetid squalor of the shelters? What lurks in the heart of a man who would rape a hungry, desperate woman in her hour of need? Does our culture produce men of such little virtue that the winds of destruction flatten also the most basic rules of morality? Perhaps, in the tumult and turmoil, one might understand, if not excuse, the looters who took the televisions and furniture. But the rapists? In due course, perhaps New Orleans will be rebuilt. But what kind of rebuilding project can restore the heart of a man who took the hurricane as an opportunity to let loose depravity and violence?

Over the weekend the too-fragile levees that protect New Orleans were already being repaired. Years from now, we shall likely forget how fragile indeed are the things that man builds. But we shall be haunted for some time by the other news from the whirlwind, that more fragile still was our culture, our civilization, our common humanity.

We are not meant to be simply the stones we leave behind in some windswept field. We are more than that...more than the base depravity that we witnessed in New Orleans last week. We cannot forget that. For if we do, we are doomed to be nothing more than a weathered marble rock...forgotten under the skies.