By Lacy Thompson
Darkness. Of all the Hurricane Katrina memories and images, the one that endures in me is darkness.
For weeks after the storm, I had to travel through New Orleans’ devastated Lower 9th Ward. Each night, as I crossed the Industrial Canal, I entered into a world that defined “surreal.”
There were no streetlights, traffic signals, porch lights or neon advertising signs, and rarely another vehicle on the road. To call it a darkness as deep as the soul is barely a clever turn of phrase. It was the type of darkness you feel when returning to a blackened house after a loved one’s funeral, knowing no matter how many lights you turn on, something and someone will be missing.
It was easy to feel isolated, forgotten, lost. Something was missing — and maybe Someone as well.
“Do not hide your face from me,” the Psalmist cries to God. Entering the Lower 9th Ward each night it was easy to think God not only had hidden his face, but turned away completely.
The darkness threatened to take up residence within me. There was no “normal” and serious doubts there ever would be. Many nights, I stood in my black yard and looked across the Mississippi River at the mocking glow of lights and unflooded life elsewhere. I wondered: Is that world real, and can this dark world around me ever be real again?
In the end, the darkness did not win — not where I live and not within myself.
It was by grace, to be sure, for that is where all good and all life and all that is good in life arises. However, it was not a philosophically slippery grace, if such a grace even exists. It was incarnate grace, which may be the only kind of grace that does exist.
It was the grace of friends who refused to allow me to disappear; who called, their voices over the phone a thin string of connection to life beyond my own.
It was the grace of family and of realizing those often tenuous, sometimes tedious, bonds between those who share a bloodline were stronger and more necessary than ever had been supposed.
It was the grace of the neighbor who walked across the tree-strewn lot and spoke not a word but fell into an embrace of tears that transcended words.
It was the grace of the Red Cross volunteer who delivered a hot meal every Saturday and Sunday. On the Saturday I left on an errand, I returned to find a meal at the edge of the garage with a note taped to it. For the life of me I can’t remember how it read, but the utter kindness of the act still fills me with such gratitude that it feels like an inner ache.
It was the grace of a friend, who answered the afternoon call as I evacuated a few weeks after Katrina in anticipation of Hurricane Rita. “Do you think it’s okay if a grown man sits on the side of the road and cries?” I asked. In a hundred lifetimes, I could not recall her exact reply. Whatever it was, it said to me, “Go ahead. I’ll cry with you.”
It made a difference that afternoon, and makes a difference still — because not only did darkness not win five years ago, but it lost all power in the face of simple humans being humans in the only simple and utterly beautiful way they know how.
I woke recently in the early morning hours to find the electricity out. I stepped outside, where the air was fresh with the smell of rain yet to come. To the east, everything was as dark as it had been years earlier. To the west, across the river, glowed the same lights that had offered a once-mocking presence.
I felt a flicker of the isolation and despair of those Katrina days, but a car soon passed. Its headlights’ glare bounced across the yard, and the thought came — I am not alone.
This affirmation came as well: Whatever Katrina took, however much she destroyed, dismantled and altered pales in comparison to the lesson delivered through the kindness of others in those aftermath days.
We are never alone — even in the darkness. God’s face is never hidden — even when we cannot see it. The truth is we always can see it, because his face is in every other face we see — if we look close enough. And when we do, the absolute love shining in each of those faces is a reminder that something as simple and human as each of us, as well as greater and more than all of us, is at work.
And all the darkness in the world cannot hold it at bay.