In response to a social media post in which I updated friends and family on our condition immediately after Hurricane Helene, a well-meaning cousin wrote, “God was really truly with you all to keep you safe amidst all this chaos and destruction.”
Any other time, I might have thanked her for this sentiment. But in the moment when I read it, just after witnessing an apocalyptic level of destruction, neighbors clinging unsuccessfully to trees as the Swannanoa River continued to rage beneath them, houses sliding down the mountains or into the river, this comment angered me.
I cannot believe in a God who would thump some people into the river to their deaths while sparing me and my family. Was God with me but not them? Was God with them but not me?
Paula Garrett
In the wee hours of the morning, as I listened to helicopters overhead, no doubt carrying search-and-rescuers to more and more mud piles to dig through for signs of life, I obsessed about the implied theology.
As sirens blared from ambulances weaving their way through the washed-out roads, overturned homes and businesses, and the river still taking everything nearby into its vast destruction, I just could not get comfortable with the idea that God somehow spared me and not our neighbors.
What kind of God allows hurricanes, floods, devastation?
I’m enough of a progressive to know climate change is contributing to more and more dramatic weather events. Yet many of God’s people are not concerned about the way we tend to God’s creation.
I’m also enough of a progressive to know my safety was tied, at least in part, to my economic status. Our home is a few blocks up from the river. Land that distance from the river is more expensive. Land just beside the Swannanoa River is often reserved for trailer parks and make-shift housing.
Yet many of God’s people are not concerned about creating an economy in which everyone can thrive, in which everyone can claim a piece of land far enough from the river that they have a hope of surviving such a storm.
“God did not choose to be with me and not with others during the worst of the storm.”
Hurricane Helene has brought out the absolute best in the people of Western North Carolina. In our neighborhood, people have pooled together food, water and other resources to make the best of this while we wait, likely another week, for electricity. We will wait far longer than that for our clean water system to be restored. But our neighbors have cut down trees for each other, voluntarily swept and brushed driveways that were covered in debris, kept an eye out on homes for folks who have evacuated.
Hurricane Helene has, likewise, brought out the absolute worst in some people of Western North Carolina. Some homes have been robbed, stores have been looted, guns have been waved or, worse, used.
I am still sorting out the theological implications of all I have seen and felt. There are so many things we still do not know, bodies we have not found, impacts we cannot begin to anticipate.
There is one thing I do know about the God I can believe in. God did not choose to be with me and not with others during the worst of the storm. God did not give me enough prosperity to live safely while denying it to others.
God’s people frustrate me a good bit, but never more than when our self-centeredness allows us to make of God something that God isn’t.
As my home continues to heal, I pray we all feel God with us and we find the courage to be the gospel to one another. For now, that is the best theology I can do.
Paula Garrett serves as professor of English at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C., is a master of divinity student at Perkins School of Theology and serves as director of communications at Neighborhood Economics.