The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina continues to amaze and confuse me. The stories I've been seeing show such a polarity within the human heart. My wife and I watched a special on-the-scene version of the Oprah show, which showed people at their very best, and unfortunately also at their very worst. They went inside what used to be the New Orleans airport, but had become a hospital. The workers there will never be recognized for the many days in a row they worked with little or no sleep, trying desperately to save as many as possible.   Sadly, in a triage situation, some are deemed to be beyond the help currently available . . . but they’re not dead yet, so they get taken to the make-shift morgue to die in peace (relative peace, that is).  What must that do to an emergency responder?  They’ve been employed in hospitals where all of the best medical technology was at their fingertips, but here they are deciding that people are beyond help – knowing full well that in a very slightly different time and place, they would be saved.  I wonder about the collective Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that may face us.

The show also went inside and interviewed several people that spent time at the Superdome shelter, which quickly deteriorated into mayhem central. The stench of human waste, stories of rape and shootings, people who fled the shelter because the flooded streets were safer. I had the same thoughts watching that as I did when I heard about the Abu Ghraib prison abuse stuff - sick to my stomach that supposedly enlightened Americans would do that kind of thing.

But then there's Oprah throwing down the love.  She may well be the most powerful person in America right now.  And while she has pursued her power in a primarily economic sense, she’s been rewarded because of her openness to doing so within a distinct mindset of morality.  Occasionally I still remember the Oprah of old – you remember the one – who joined in with the media craze of the day, the afternoon television freak show.  But she had an epiphany (or perhaps a series of them), and decided that she either had to quit altogether and go out on top, or change her game plan – because she knew she was selling out her own soul.  Now, let’s be honest and admit that Oprah still has a lot of hype – really, a lot of hype.  But she has found a way to mix in enough spirituality, enough intellectual enlightenment, entertaining frivolity, enough pop-psychology, and most importantly enough storytelling to come up with a winner.  Oprah represents hope to millions – it may be misguided and consumeristic hope, but Katrina survivors (they include all of us in one way or another) ache for whatever hope they can get...

After having recently worked with this population, the thought occurred to me, "What about the drug addicts?" I wonder how many heroin junkies experienced all of the hardship of Katrina at the same time they were detoxing because they had no place to go to score a hit. I wonder how many cigarette smokers have given up the habit without even realizing it...

The hurricane survivors are being relocated literally all over the country. Seattle is almost as far away from the Gulf Coast as you can get in the continental U.S., but a few hundred people are headed our way. Some permanently. Through this process, the stories will penetrate our communities and shape our collective identity...

How many baby girls born in Gulf Coast hospitals were named Katrina just days before the storm hit?  How many will be named that now?...

In the middle of the outrage that is rightly being raised over the slow federal response to the disaster, I feel badly for the countless members of the beauracracy that have performed in a heroic way. Hospitals don't just randomly organize at airports - it took years of planning and training for that to happen. But even the middle level managers that planned well, and executed the plan flawlessly, essentially disregarding their own homes and families and well-being to do so, will get lumped in with the incompetents. And even the incompetent ones... I don't want to defend the indefensible here, but are we really so arrogant as to think that we could have thought of everything, and then responded to all the variables perfectly? I'm glad I don't have those kinds of expectations at my job (I know, I know, that's why they get the big bucks)...

Some supposedly wise and insightful religious leaders have made statements to the effect that the hurricane was God’s judgment on New Orleans for all of its loose-living kind of ways.  On the face it, it’s a ridiculous enough thing to say.  But then there’s the evidence to prove it.  I got an e-mail message during the immediate aftermath that said that over 350 church buildings in my denomination had been destroyed or significantly damaged, and that one of our seminaries was under three feet of water.  Meanwhile, because the French Quarter – that’s right, the place all the loose living stuff happens – sits on relatively high ground in the city, it was mostly spared the devastation.  So if this is God’s judgment, either a) God is judging the church more than the loose living, or b) God has bad aim...

Finally, and this is probably about the only thing worth dwelling on, I’ve wondered about the Church of the Gulf Coast.  If hundreds of church buildings have been destroyed, and thus the congregational lives of the churches that use them have been disrupted, how many house churches could/should emerge from the draining floodwaters?  Perhaps this situation presents an opportunity to do things differently – not only on a governmental level, but also within the church.  This is not to say that the hurricane was a good thing, but the way that the local people who call themselves by Jesus’ name respond with care and creativity in carrying on their own life together could go a long way toward healing.

The amount of aid the Gulf Coast survivors receive from the rest of the world (yes the world – the Mexican army was on the scene, Canadian troops were there before our own National Guard, nations devastated by the tsunami sent money) will certainly help.  Christian organizations can do a lot of the Jesus stuff, and they have.  But the church that was there before Katrina has been given an opportunity to reevaluate and reshape life as things settle down again.  They’re the ones with the relationships and the community presence and the biggest potential impact.  They’re the ones who can demonstrate to others what deep faith looks like when bad things happen.

Will this change the church?  9/11 did very little.  I pray this will do more.