c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Hurricane Katrina has been compared with Sept. 11 as a sudden unexpected disaster. It resembles the latter, all right, but for deeper reasons than the surface ones cited by reporters, pundits and the politicians who circled and cawed as wildly as birds of prey over the wasted city.

While people debated whether to shoot looters, they might have done better to go after a few of these politicians who looted the shattered human experience of the thousands of sorrowing and dispossessed in order to gain points for themselves and demerits for their opponents.

Some preachers quickly spoke of Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina as events of biblical proportions. They quoted the creation story from Genesis in which “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” and then quickly turn the pages to the story of the flood and God’s deal to spare Noah and his just followers. It is not only bad theology, but also a sacrilege to imagine Katrina as a modern instrument of God’s wrath against a wayward people.

The hurricane is an aspect of the overall mystery of existence, with a revelation as simple and pure as most of its victims. Search their hearts and you won’t find much sin. There is no room for it amid the woe packed so tightly there by life itself.

The central revelation of Katrina is exactly that of Sept. 11: It allows us to see what is obscured by the fluttering pennants of PEOPLE magazine covers. The latter give us peeks at celebrities but never at real persons. Katrina allows us to see the goodness of non-celebrities _ the real people all around us whom we mistakenly describe as ordinary.

Against the background images of celebrities such as Sean Penn baling out his sinking relief boat with a red plastic cup, we saw the thousands of men and women patiently bearing the deluge, saving their families and what they could of their possessions. Most of them did not feel sorry for themselves or try to make themselves out to be heroes.

In short, we witnessed the way good people take on each day, with life’s uncertain mixture of suffering and surprise, of sadness and love.

We also witnessed good being done by “ordinary” people, much of it through the churches that do not need permission or bureaucratic forms before they feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Now we can all answer that Last Judgment question _ “When did you see me thirsty and give me to drink, when did you see me hungry and give me to eat?” We saw it in New Orleans by people too busy giving their attention to others to strike poses in search of any for themselves.

The waters of Katrina washed through all our neighborhoods because water is a fundamental sacramental symbol. We are all born in a burst of water and those of us who are Christians are made members of the faith by the waters of baptism. Water is the great symbol of our inner lives, of our true depths, of the unconscious reservoir of human experience.

So water is found in the Hebrew Scriptures, as Joseph Campbell has pointed out, as the means by which the Jewish people entered into and escaped their sojourn in Egypt. They entered Egypt with Joseph in a well that _ although dry _ is a water source. They left Egypt by passing through the waters of the Red Sea. In the New Testament, we find themes of baptism and of the fish symbol of the followers of Jesus.

Campbell asks a question that after Katrina we may put to ourselves: “Who comes out of the water? And who went into the water?” He tells us that the patriarchs went into the water _ but the people came out. Moses is not the hero; the people are.

We went into the water the same way we entered the dust clouds of Sept. 11: as individuals focused on our daily cares and sometimes even distracted by the questions about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie asked by silly magazines.

Now, however, we are coming out of these waters as a people, not as individuals. We are aware that our neighbors are more like us than unlike us, no matter the sound of their voices or the color of their skin. The destructive waters bear the simplest but dearest of human possessions, but we recognize that even the simplest possession _ a picture of parents and children, perhaps _ breaks our hearts because they speak of that unmistakable human resemblance of members of the same family.

The waters of Katrina are filled with mud, as Egypt was thought to be by the Jews. But out of that mud emerged a new people. Those who understand the revelation of the event know that we are called to leave them behind and emerge from these waters as a new people.

KRE/JL END KENNEDY

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

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