(RNS3-JAN21) New Orleans Episcopal Bishop Charles Jenkins, left, and neighborhood activist Jerome Smith tour Smith’s New Orleans neighborhood. Smith has served as Jenkins’ unofficial tour guide to the city’s black neighborhoods in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For use with RNS-NOLA-BISHOP, transmitted Jan. 21, 2009. Religion News Service photo by G. Andrew Boyd/The Times-Picayune.

NEW ORLEANS-They are an unlikely pair, chatting up people on porch stoops in this city’s poorer neighborhoods: Bishop Charles Jenkins, 57, the son of white, rural north Louisiana and pastor to 8,000 south Louisiana Episcopalians, and Jerome Smith, 69, black and rumpled, son of the city’s black neighborhoods, a former Freedom Rider from the civil rights movement.

Before Hurricane Katrina, in the days when Jenkins says he was focused more on the well-being of his predominantly white church than his predominantly black city, they might never have crossed paths.

But since Katrina, they have forged a relationship in which Jenkins, now deep into a profound personal and spiritual transformation, said he has come to love and rely on Smith.

Smith, a sometimes fiery activist in whom Jenkins sees a gentle soul, has become one of the bishop’s principal guides into New Orleans’ poor African-American culture, a landscape Jenkins said he previously glimpsed but did not understand.

“He’s my mentor, you know,” Jenkins said recently. “It is a good day whenever Jerome Smith comes by.”

But Smith is only one symbol of the journey of Charles Jenkins-and by extension, his diocese-since Katrina.

Three years after the storm flooded Jenkins’ home and nearly destroyed his city and diocese, the bishop is both damaged and transformed.

He is damaged in that he lives, medicated, with a formal diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. He said the condition is worsening, so much so that after nine years in office he has announced he will retire as Episcopal bishop of Louisiana by year’s end.

And he is transformed in that he is no longer entirely the man, priest or bishop he was before the storm.

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Jenkins is exploring a new dimension to his Christian vocation. Its shape is still evolving. And Jenkins acknowledges his journey of discovery might be halting, occasionally off course.

“I don’t know if I’m on the right road, but I think I am,” he said. “I know that God is with me on that road. And I hope than in trying to please him, I do. I’m searching for God. And also searching for myself.”

Fundamentally, Jenkins has embarked on a personal re-education in which he seeks to see the city through the eyes of the poor. And that education inevitably yields a new personal mission: to work for citywide racial reconciliation and for purging the social injustices Katrina laid bare.

Before the storm, “I thought Christianity and priesthood were primarily about the cult,” Jenkins said. “And doing the actions correctly-holding my fingers correctly at Mass, not wearing brown shoes when celebrating the Mass. That it was getting all those right.

“And I was missing the larger picture of the dignity of humanity and the world for whom Christ died.”

In the spring of 2007, with that personal transformation well under way, Jenkins preached that imperative to his recovering church.

He said he feared less what might happen to his damaged diocese than what might not happen-that his community of 54 congregations might shirk the need to confront the social evils Katrina had exposed.

The Episcopal church’s new mission, he told them, would be not merely to dispense charity, like the Good Samaritan on the road to Jericho,but to remake the road itself and fashion a just civil society.

“Let me be clear,” he told a meeting of Episcopal clergy last fall. “I do not want much-just a revolution. A revolution of values.”

The diocese has committed itself to the well-being of two neighborhoods: the Lower 9th Ward and especially Central City, the poor, predominantly black neighborhood that abuts the back door of Jenkins’ own Christ Church Cathedral, whose front door opens to the oak-lined prosperity of St. Charles Avenue.

Overall, “we have a wider vision of ourselves than we ever had before,” said the Rev. Henry Hudson, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church.

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Jenkins’ transformation began two or three days after the storm as New Orleans filled with water and the plight of tens of thousands of stranded residents horrified the world.

Having evacuated from New Orleans, he was alone at a friend’s house in Baton Rouge when the televised images of exhausted evacuees begging for help torched his soul and drove him to his knees in prayer.

What he saw, he says now, was not merely suffering blooming from decades of social and economic inequality. He saw sin itself: malignant, writhing evil, freshly troweled up from the soil of his very city; social sin, which, for all of his theological sensitivity, he had only dimly sensed.

It nearly broke him.

In the language of the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross, he entered his “dark night of the soul.”

“I was overwhelmedâÂ?¦. I knew that I did not have the mind or heart or spiritual depth to make an adequate response to what I saw happening to us,” he said. “I began to weep. I moved toward despair.”

After that trauma, Jenkins set out on what he and those close to him describe as a spiritual journey. As many do, it began with personal contrition.

When Katrina struck in 2005, Jenkins and his wife, Louise, lost their new home in Slidell, after having slept there only four days. They are back in the house, but in the storm’s aftermath, Jenkins became an evacuee, a FEMA number, an applicant to the state’s Road Home rebuilding program.

For months, Jenkins, who possesses a dry, devastating wit, has been open with his flock about his struggle with post-traumatic stress.

As he told a gathering of his diocese nearly two years ago: “I am under the care of a specialist and I am on medication. Perhaps you had not noticed. Live long and prosper, dude.”

But he said the damage is soberingly real. It even has a shape and a texture. There are times when depression manifests itself as a heavy, hollow, leaden ball in his head or chest, he said.

There is forgetfulness, weeping, fatigue. At times he lingers in bed. He fights a general disinterest.

“Another difficulty for my clergy has been that I am allergic to having to make a painful decision,” he said. “I just have enough pain for right now. … So I don’t make hard decisions. I put them off. And the bishop can’t do that.”

Jenkins’ encounter with the near-miss of Hurricane Gustav last September pushed him too far. He said he has been directed to double up on his medication and add a drug to control panic. He has been referred to a specialist in Houston.

The decision to retire followed a few weeks later.

At several levels, Katrina was “a near-death experience,” Jenkins said.

“Certainly it was the death of a lot of things that I took for granted. A lot of us are in that situation. I pray that I’m changed. I don’t intend to back away from the issues that seem important to me now, from the people who seem important to me.”

(Bruce Nolan writes for The Times Picayune in New Orleans.)

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