At First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Since Katrina, a lot of reactive bumper stickers have appeared in New Orleans. “Proud to swim home” is one; another spells out FEMA in a way I can’t say in church. On Thursday, on the North Shore, I spotted one I hadn’t seen before – the cartoon character Calvin of “Calvin & Hobbes” urinating on a hurricane symbol marked “Katrina.” But the one relevant today is the bumper sticker seen on all kinds of vehicles all over the city. It says simply, “Thanks, Houston” and that is the message I bring you from my hometown and from the 3 UU churches of metro New Orleans: “Thanks, Houston.” It’s not over yet, and we still need lots of support, but we are truly grateful for all you did for New Orleans, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to speak with you this morning.
According to my unscientific survey in the French Market, masks are the #1 souvenir purchased by tourists in the Crescent City. Some are elegant, some are artistic, and some, admittedly, are cheesy rip-offs made in Taiwan. Masks and New Orleans are essentially linked in the public mind, what with Carnival and Mardi Gras, Halloween, and the Day of Decadence. We New Orleanians seemingly wear masks at the drop of a hat. The association between the city and masks goes back centuries, as when Louisiana was under the control of Spain in the late 1700s, and authorities tried to ban the wearing of masks – and it didn’t work.
The Spanish governor had a point – masks act as a disguise, hiding what lies behind. It’s easier to get away with something when you are wearing a mask; it’s easier to conceal what’s really going on. To discover someone’s identity, to learn the truth, you have to go behind the mask. This principle applies not only to people in costume – but also to other situations, and most especially in social justice work.
What you think you know about New Orleans can function as a kind of mask. Example: I read this week that New Orleans was the fastest growing city in the United States in 2008. That sounds great, doesn’t it? But the title of “fastest growing city in the United States” is a mask: look behind it and you see a city where a significant part of the original population has still not been able to return after the forced evacuation 4 years ago. In reality, ours is a depleted city, some of whose native citizens are prevented from coming back home, even as more affluent outsiders stream in.
Another mask New Orleans wears is her old nickname of The City That Care Forgot – the party town, Sin City. Sure, we’re comfortable wearing that mask; we’ve worn it for generations. We still have our celebrations and our festivals; we still eat the best and most diverse local food in the country. We still know how to laissez les bon temps roulez, cher. If you visit the French Quarter or ride the St. Charles streetcar, you might believe the mask is our real face. We are still an incredibly beautiful and culturally rich city. But go behind the mask, go to the 7th Ward or the Lower 9th Ward or Gentilly or Lakeview (where Community Church UU is located), and you’ll see that even now, 4 years after the Storm, vast areas of the city remain vacant, lost, destroyed. Neighborhoods that never had a vacant lot before Katrina show empty acres; some formerly prosperous middle-class neighborhoods exhibit only “jack o’lantern” progress, with a few renovated houses on blocks of devastated homes.
Even some of those abandoned homes are masks – some of them are actually occupied. With housing projects being torn down, the term “affordable housing” itself a mask for what the city no longer has, and with many low-income home owners unable to access programs that rehab houses, some New Orleanians have come home only to have no homes. According to Mike Miller of UNITY (a nonprofit organization working on post-Katrina homelessness), some people – numbering perhaps in the thousands – are squatting in their own destroyed house, or one that belongs to someone else. Some are squeezed into the homes of friends or relatives as they struggle to rebuild or find a new home. They are, in affect, homeless in their own home.
Even the quiet, well-kept 19th century residential neighborhoods Uptown (affected only by wind and rain during Katrina, not flooding) wear masks over hopelessness. On October 30th a man on Upperline Street fired shots into the street and threatened to kill himself after receiving an eviction notice. He told a reporter who reached him while he was barricaded inside his home, “I’m too old and too crippled to live on the street.” He was eventually talked out by a police negotiator, who told the Times-Picayune that the man expressed the characteristics of post-Katrina traumatic stress: “loneliness, despair, feeling abandoned, and paranoid about the government.” What New Orleanian does not feel those things, to some degree, at one time or another?
In the cluster of UU churches that make up Greater New Orleans UUs, the mask might be how well we seem to outsiders – we hold worship, we teach our children and youth, we gather for fellowship events and we work on social justice projects. We’re even jointly teaching an intern. We host volunteers from around the country, and we do our best to show them both sides, the good and the bad, the fun and the devastated. But despite the new members and our active ministries and our visibility in the wider community, it is still a struggle. Some parishioners in all 3 churches are still without a proper home of their own; people of all ages cope with nightmares and anxiety, symptoms of continuing PTSD. The North Shore church, struggling under a too-high mortgage, gets professional ministry only with a little help from their friends at the other 2 churches, as Reverend Jim Vanderweele and I devote some time with that congregation. Community Church struggles to rebuild from scratch, and First Church struggles to get basics like floors and electricity and a church kitchen. We tell each other with grim smiles, “Recovery is a marathon, not a sprint” – but if we’re expected to do it entirely on our own, it won’t happen. We are grateful to the UU churches that have agreed to partner with us, pledging certain amounts of money per year, holding fundraisers for us, dedicating offerings to us, and walking with us until this long journey is done.
A mask that is often hard to shake off in doing justice work is our own sense that we know what’s best for someone else. When Katrina happened, I was astounded at the number of people outside of New Orleans – even UUs! – who told me that the city should not be rebuilt, or if it were, to be rebuilt “somewhere else.” (They never did say where exactly.) After Katrina, lots of good-hearted volunteers from around the country insisted they knew best where to direct their labor. Some UU volunteers refused to work on First Church’s devastated building, saying they preferred to work with people “who really needed help.” (It was news to us that we didn’t.) Other volunteers turned their noses up at mowing lawns – until it was patiently explained to them that exiled homeowners could lose their houses to seizure by the city if the grass went uncut for too long.
In doing social justice work as a UU congregation, it is necessary to go behind all kinds of masks, masks that keep us from seeing the true depth of a situation, masks that prevent us from realizing root causes in the issues we face, masks that hamper our effectiveness. One mask is the so-called conventional wisdom; another is assuming we already know what ought to be done. While even the lowest level of charity is preferable to doing nothing at all, UU churches that want to have the greatest impact should go be-hind the mask and employ a clear-headed analysis in order to make true and lasting positive change, and in order to build right relations in the wider community. Social analysis requires going back to basics, looking behind the received wisdom about a situation, asking hard questions of ourselves and others to learn what we don’t already know about a given issue.
For example, giving even used books or computers to a public school in an impoverished neighborhood is a good thing. But an even better thing would be to dig deeper as a congregation and ask questions, to learn why such a school does not receive funding to have a library and computers, and to lobby elected officials with the power to effect change, not just for one school, but for all schools in the Houston system.
Another, related, example might be housing. Where do poor and working class folks live hereabouts? Are those neighborhoods near to jobs that pay a living wage? What kinds of schools are in those neighborhoods? Is there public transportation to help people get to jobs and schools if they don’t have a car? What are the streets like in those neighborhoods – are they smooth or are they potholed? If folks in those neighborhoods want to move to other neighborhoods, is that possible? Is affordable housing available all over the metro area, or only in designated areas? What do our principles call us to do? What might your congregation – especially if united with other Houston-area congregations – do to change the overall situation for the greatest number of people?
We UUs often say in our stewardship campaigns that folks should give to their church “till it feels good” and we often promote doing social justice work in our communities by saying how good it makes you feel. Donating money and time and effort to our congregations and to causes we believe in does feel good, and that is a valid reason for doing them. But an even better reason is because we are all in this together. People who be-long to a Unitarian Universalist church need to stand together with other folks in UU churches because we are all sisters and brothers in faith. We stand together with people in need in our local communities because we are all Houstonians or New Orleanians or New Yorkers. We stand with people who have survived hardship or disaster in our country because we are all Americans. We stand with those reaching out to us around the world because we are all human beings. When we take off our masks of difference, we find we are all the same. As hymn #134 proclaims, “Our world is one world/what touches one affects us all.”
Some years ago, an Australian Aboriginal woman named Lila Watson and her collective confronted a group of First World missionaries who had arrived to “help” their community. The Collective had worked hard on what they wanted to say, and while Lila Watson is often credited, she has made it clear it is not hers alone, but a group statement. You may have heard it before, it’s all over the Internet; we have it posted on a doorway of the New Orleans Rebirth Volunteer Center, housed at First Church New Orleans. It goes like this:
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation
is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
When we go behind the mask and discern what is really going on in our communities and in our world, we are better able to make common cause with justice-loving peoples everywhere, and make lasting contributions to the spread of freedom. So might this be for all of us! AMEN – ASHÉ – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTÉ – BLESSED BE!
