Editor’s note: Although written about a wildfire that ravaged Malibu, Calif., in 1993 — a fire not nearly as devastating as the Los Angeles-area fires of 2025 — this piece offers important reflections on what it means to be both human and Christian in the face of such devastating realities.
The winter of 1993–1994 was a very long, emotional season for those of us who called Southern California home. In November, ferocious fires turned our immediate world in Malibu upside down. The scorched earth looked like a barren moonscape.
And then, just about the time we were beginning to rejoice over a few sprigs of green grass poking their slender blades up through the soot-impregnated soil, the ground itself took on a life of its own. In the early morning hours of Jan. 17, the earth began to quake, buildings swayed and cracked, highways buckled, fires erupted. Once again, chaos ruled the day.
Jan Hughes
And then in February, the earth began to move again, this time because of torrential rains that had saturated the soil. Houses literally hydroplaned down the hillsides.
Many people lost family, friends, homes and jobs in those triple disasters. Others of us emerged virtually unscathed. But we all lost our naiveté. We were forced to face our own finitude as well as the impermanence and frailty of the seemingly solid structures that surrounded us. We now knew we could be touched.
On the day the fire engulfed our community, I was caught in gridlock on Pacific Coast Highway, one of thousands trying to make their way home. For more than an hour I sat, waiting, waiting to move toward home, toward reunion with my family. As I sat, I pulled out a dog-eared voting pamphlet I had used earlier in the day, and on it I began to jot down a list of items we needed to pack in our car prior to fleeing for safety. I mentally sorted through the most precious items in our home: photographs, quilts, the Amana rocker I had used to rock my son Andy, my mother’s little wooden sewing cabinet, Richard’s grandmother’s silver egg, the contents of the cedar chest, the books Richard had written, and the list goes on. I have kept this list, and even today the items still seem to make sense. I would not delete anything, but I would add a few, for everything on the list has a story that surrounds it.
As the minutes turned into hours, it became clear I would be unable to reach my home. All access to Malibu was closed. Suddenly everything moved into sharp perspective, and I realized nothing on that list made any real difference to me when placed against the reality of the giant inferno that separated me from both Richard and Andy. My list was now quite short: Richard and Andy, Lord, please.
During that winter, most of us spent some time reflecting on the meaning of fire, quake and mud, trash and treasures, life and death. Both the rich and the poor who found their homes burned to the ground or crushed by the relentless moving of the earth were left with essentially the same thing — memories.
As I thought about my own treasures, I realized the things I cherish most are items neither a burglar nor an insurance adjuster would even notice: items made by the hands of someone I love, or little bits and pieces of things handed down from one generation to the next. Those things are really not replaceable, for they are connected to my story. The items I value most are those that serve as triggers of memory, and they remind me of childhood, of friends, of courtship, of my wedding day, of the birth of my son, of graduations or a baptism.
“This was my mother’s rolling pin, and when I hold it, I feel connected to her.”
Almost a week went by after the fire before I realized I had not even thought to have Richard rescue one of my most treasured items. A rolling pin. Yes, a rolling pin. A rather ordinary wooden rolling pin. It should have been near the top of my list, right after photos and quilts. This rolling pin has rolled out thousands of flaky pie crusts to cover bubbling cherry cobblers. This was my mother’s rolling pin, and when I hold it, I feel connected to her. I look down and see not my own hands but her hands. I hear the laughing voices that filled our hospitable table through all the years of my childhood. I celebrate my mother when I bake pies.
In March of that same year, my world was turned upside down again, for my father, age 85, became critically ill and was hospitalized in Nashville. Suddenly finitude stared our entire family straight in the eyes once again, but even after the physical challenges were behind Daddy, his essence seemed somewhat altered. He had not suffered a stroke, his asthma was now under control, but something was not quite right. Was it simply the medication? Memory seemed diminished, and tomorrow loomed as a vast unknown. As the weeks and months passed by, most of our fears were alleviated, and our fear of Alzheimer’s disease proved to be unfounded.
But I was now confronted by a new reality. I could not even count on memories. Those treasures that fill my house, those triggers of memory, are of absolutely no avail when memory itself fails. Madeleine L’Engle asks in The Irrational Season:
So what can I put my trust in that I can really know, here and now? I used to think that when all else failed I would have my memories. Saint Exupéry said that in our old age we will sit under the sheltering branches of the tree of our memories. But I saw Grandfather’s memory being taken away from him, and then my mother’s and that was the worst of all.
In a column for the Los Angeles Times titled “Where Time is Forgotten,” Al Martinez once wrote:
If God gave us memory so we would have roses in winter, I have been to a place where there are no roses. It’s a home for Alzheimer patients in San Gabriel. … There, in a tree-shaded setting whose beauty is all but lost on its occupants, abide victims of a disease that eats at one’s very soul. It erodes memory first and then time itself, trapping those who suffer its worst effects in a place where there is no light and there are no doors.
“To count on the permanence of our memory is to be trapped in the inevitable struggle against finitude.”
To count on the permanence of our memory is to be trapped in the inevitable struggle against finitude. Actually, the one thing we can count on is death. But because God is our Father, we can count on death and then life forever, through all eternity, as his children. As the years begin to register more and more little tally marks in my own columns, I am beginning to learn to see the death of his saints as a great victory indeed. The idea of a world without sickness and pain, without disappointment and alienation, without loss and diminishing abilities, of reunion without separation, a place which weary pilgrims will recognize as home — this really does sound like victory to me.
On Sundays, as we meet together for worship, we share the Communion feast. Two very humble elements — bread and wine — are employed week after week, year after year, century after century. These simple elements serve to wake up our memories — to remind us of who we are and whose we are.
They also remind us of the body that surrounds us, participating in that same memory with us, and living the life of faith with us. They serve as triggers of memory to point toward the story of our redemption. Such simple elements that, when taken together with fellow believers, point toward and remind us of our common story. The bread we eat is more than bread. The wine we drink is more than wine. This is our common memory. Our story.
Romans 8:38-39 says: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Janice Hughes is a writer of stories and spiritual memoirs. For 15 years, she and her husband, Richard, taught a first-year honors seminar, “Learning to Tell our Stories,” first at Messiah University and later at Lipscomb University.
This article originally appeared in Teleios: A Journal of Holistic Christian Spirituality, Issue 4.2, Summer 2024 as published by The Crossroad Publishing Co. and is used here with permission.
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