ALL SOULS DAY HOMILY
UUCF REVIVAL COMMUNION SERVICE
West Shore UU Church, Rocky River, Ohio
The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
Friday, November 2, 2007
Scripture Readings: Ezekial 18:4, Psalm 145:10-11, Hebrews 12:1
“All souls are mine” says the Lord to Ezekiel, and in the Crescent City we’re glad to know God’s looking out for us, ‘cause it sure feels like no one else in authority is. We’ve fallen off the national radar, and must fend for ourselves, relying on the kindness of strangers.
Yesterday, as my plane circled over New Orleans for the first leg of my journey here, I could see spread out below me in the morning light a sea of tarp stretched over roofs, in the color known around town as FEMA blue. And I thought of what all those blue roofs mean to the people down there in my city – the losses of homes and belongings and precious keepsakes, the deaths of loved ones, the destruction of neighborhoods, the long diaspora and forced exile, the loss of jobs, the breakdown of the services and re-sources that ordinary Americans expect from their local, state and federal governments, the right to feel secure in your home. In some cases, the blue tarp was the last work done, and in the 2 years since the storm, the tarps have shredded and the tatters blow forlornly in the wind.
Another quote from scripture comes to me, from Zechariah, a vision of restoration to another devastated city:
Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in Jerusalem, each with staff in hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. Thus says the Lord of hosts: If it is marvelous in the sight of the remnant of this people in these days, should it also be marvelous in my sight? says the Lord of hosts. (Zechariah 8:4-6)
The Postal Service reported recently in the media that the greater New Orleans area is now back up to over 80% of its pre-Katrina population, but judging from comments on the street and in letters to the editor, most of the remnant of this people does not believe it. Still, while the city does seem exceedingly empty in some quarters, it is true that old men and old women again sit on their stoops and comment on neighborhood doings, and certain streets are at times full of boys and girls at play. A musician friend of mine said to the crowd at a recent outdoor concert, “Idn’it great to see kids again? Remember how after the storm when there were no children in the city and how awful that was?” Children are back in the city, and it is indeed marvel-ous in our eyes; surely it is also marvelous in the eyes of God.
I am grateful for this opportunity to preach to you and bring you dis-patches form a drowned city, news from a wounded but still great city. I bring you greetings from a place where some values have been turned up-side-down. For example, how would you react to a giant pile of trash and debris outside a house or building in your neighborhood? I mean really big, spilling over the curb and into the street, huge. You’d be upset, right? You’d think, “What’s wrong with those people; somebody should do some-thing.”
In New Orleans, a gigantic pile of destroyed belongings and building debris is a sign of HOPE. New Orleanians drive by and grin, giving the workers there a thumbs-up. We think to ourselves, “Another house being worked on! Another family or business coming back!” and we’re giddy with happiness and optimism. A local candy maker has even memorialized these symbols of renewal with a special confection of pretzel sticks, coconut, raisins, and marshmallows drizzled over with chocolate, called “trash piles.” (They’re delicious – you can order them online at BlueFrog.com. We need the money.)
Yes, the New Orleans sense of humor is still evident since Katrina; it seems sometimes that a healthy sense of irony is one of the things keeping people afloat. But the biggest and best things keeping us sane and together are our music and culture. Jazz has always been the heartbeat of New Orleans, but since Katrina, it’s also our CPR, our nourishment, our true mir-ror. We need its reminder of the uses of many voices, the urgency of the hu-man heartbeat, the deliciousness of diversity, the necessity for improv and creativity.
It may be hard to believe, but in a diminished New Orleans, there is more music, and more free music, than ever before. If music is our medi-cine, then we’ve been prescribed regular doses. At every outdoor festival and concert, the crowd is white and black and Latino and Asian, young and old and middle-aged, middle-class and working class, little kids running around, dancing. We smile and greet each other, no longer strangers, but brothers and sisters in a shared adventure, fellow travelers. We share reno-vation stories, ask about each other’s Road Home money, curse our insur-ance companies, and shake our booties to the music, dancing with each other. We eat red beans’n’rice and jambalaya. All souls love jazz, and we thrive on that beat, we draw our sustenance from it. It is our communion.
As my son’s parain (godfather) says on his answering machine, “We’re just struggling to get back to abnormal.” Jazz helps, so do our fes-tivals, and our food. We keep up our cultural traditions, like going to the cemeteries on All Saints to leave chrysanthemums for our beloved dead, trying to ignore the destruction wreaked in our historic cities of the dead by the floodwaters. We secondline every chance we get to whatever brass band is out parading the streets. (Second-lining means following alongside and behind a brass band, dancing and waving handkerchiefs; the band is the “first line.”) We do our best to get back to abnormal.
This is not the first time that New Orleans has come close to total destruction; both the tides of history and tides of water have threatened us before. Back in 1870, New Orleans writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about the conditions after the Civil War to a friend in Cincinnati. With apologies to our host congregation, I share with you a part of that epistle:
Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladmin-istrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.
So that’s how things are with us. We may be crazy, and we probably are, but we’d rather live in a drowned city we love with a thousand chal-lenges, than live somewhere clean and pristine and efficient. We are wounded but game, down but not out. We are held together by love – love for each other and our families and our ancestors and our neighborhoods and religious communities and our traditions and culture, and our music. We depend more than ever on the kindness of strangers. We are committed and determined about the rebirth and restoration of our beloved, messed-up city. We know that only those who have experienced death can experience resur-rection. We know that recovery is not a sprint, but a marathon. We are New Orleans and we believe, with all our hearts, in the powers of resurrection, communion, and connection.
Let us join our voices as one in our unison reading.
