NEW ORLEANS (ABP) — Five years after the hurricane that killed thousands and nearly killed a great American city in the process, one church in New Orleans decided to remember its community’s mourning — but then move on to the dancing.
Members of St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church gathered in morning worship Aug. 29 to mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Mississippi Gulf Coast — followed shortly by levee breaches that flooded most of the city. The service was modeled after the passage in Joshua 4 in which the ancient Israelites memorialized their past trials by placing 12 stones on the banks of the Jordan River. Worshipers heard 12 stories of the St. Charles and New Orleans communities’ trials and triumphs after the storm that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Famous New Orleans jazz singer Charmaine Neville (left) sings to Mona Bond, one of the members whose Katrina story was told during St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church’s Aug. 29 worship service commemorating the fifth anniversary of the storm. (PHOTO/Matt Anderson)
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It included both blues and gospel music sung by Charmaine Neville – a member of one of New Orleans’ most famous musical families.
“I use that as a kind of a rubric for saying, what are some of the key stories that we need to be telling as a congregation . . . how we survived and what helped us cope and point things toward the future?” said Lou Irwin, the church member who designed the service. He has used the 12-stones format in his work as a pastoral counselor working with people who have experienced significant grief.
One story he lifted from a PBS interview with John Besh, one of the most highly acclaimed chefs in a city teeming with world-class cooks. Besh recounted to interviewer Tavis Smiley his experience in the early days after the storm flooded much of the city and federal and state authorities failed to bring relief to the tens of thousands of poor city residents stranded — often without food, water or medical assistance — on rooftops, overpasses and in storm shelters.
Besh, compelled to do anything he could to help, made a big pot of a Louisiana classic — red beans and rice — got in a boat and went to go find hungry people.
“Here he is, this world-famous chef, in a boat dishing out red beans and rice. And one guy he gave it to — wading half-deep in water — told him, ‘Who taught you how to make red beans and rice? My momma could make better red beans and rice than this!’” Irwin recalled. “Besh’s take on that was that two days after the storm he knew that New Orleans was going to be alright, because of the clinging to an authentic culture.”
Another story was of church member Marjorie Ball, who along with her adult daughter accompanied her nursing-home-bound husband as he was evacuated to a town in southwestern Louisiana. Just weeks after that evacuation, he had to be evacuated again due to the approach of Hurricane Rita. This time, the family was sent to the tiny town of Lake Providence, in the far northeastern corner of the state.
By the time they got there, the lone hotel in Lake Providence was fully booked. A local woman who had been helping the evacuees insisted that Ball and her daughter stay with her and her husband.
“And they ended up for over a month staying with this couple and just felt complete love and support,” Irwin said. “That whole community responded to them, and that’s part of things that start as a lament turning to joy and good news.”
Things have started to turn to joy for both the city and St. Charles, said the church’s pastor, Travis Norvell. He was called there from Rhode Island last year. Although attendance and giving dropped precipitously between Katrina’s landfall and its reopening post-storm, Norvell said, they are back to their pre-storm levels.
Lou Irwin (left), the St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church member who designed the church’s Aug. 29 worship service commemorating the fifth anniversary of the storm, during the service with the church’s pastor, Travis Norvell. (PHOTO/Matt Anderson)
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“There’s a general energy; we think we’re going to turn the corner, we’re going to make it,” he said. “We’ve still got a lot of people who have chosen to leave, that are scattered across the country,” Norvell acknowledged, but five years after the storm, “We kind of have an idea now about who’s going to come back and who’s not going to come back.”
Other New Orleans churches haven’t been so fortunate. St. Charles — located near Tulane and Loyola universities in an affluent part of Uptown New Orleans — didn’t flood, and many of its members pre-storm were well-heeled professionals. Nonetheless, Norvell said, the church is surrounded by reminders that recovery in its community is nowhere near complete.
“You can drive anywhere in the city — even here in Uptown, which was largely spared — and you’ll still see abandoned houses and houses with National Guard symbols on the front (indicating) how many they found dead inside,” he said.
The church has been serving as a rallying point for the volunteers working to rebuild New Orleans since shortly after the storm. Its educational building already housed the offices of the local Habitat for Humanity chapter before Katrina; Habitat has expanded its staff and its offices many times over.
Norvell said that while government and charities are now much better at coordinating rebuilding work for those who lost their homes in the storm — rather than the essentially ad-hoc process that existed for a year or more after Katrina — gaps remain. And so do the painful memories.
“They’re still there, very much,” he said. “It doesn’t take much, you know, in a conversation to see that veil of tears start to well up in people. . . . Everybody’s making it through the days and making progress in their lives. But the moment they kind of sit down and try retelling the stories, everything just comes to the fore again.”
Irwin closed the Aug. 29 service by using Jesus’ "Parable of the Great Banquet" from Luke 14, in which the initial invitees decline the host’s invitation to something most New Orleansians know well — a sumptuous feast.
“I tried to localize that and say if the whole Saints team came to your door the week before the Super Bowl, and you said, ‘I’d like to go but I was planning to clean out my closets on Super Bowl Sunday,’ and you declined that offer — that’s a little bit what it would be like if you declined the offer to join God’s great banquet,” Irwin said. “We can decline . . . but we would be insulting God if we do that. But if we accept, we need to be prepared that everyone else is being invited, too.
“As we look at continuing the rebuilding of New Orleans it’s not just someplace in the future, it’s right now, too. And what’s the banquet that needs to be done right now in New Orleans? Who's an outcast and who needs to be invited to the banquet in the Gospel?”
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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.