A Pastor’s Perspective
By Sharon Latour
This is the fourth installment in defining “fair” so we can rethink the old truism that life isn’t fair. We settled on Webster’s fifth entry to find: “Marked by impartiality and honesty,” as the best definition for “fair” we were likely going to find in a reference book.
Because dictionaries have limitations, I decided to offer an acronym. So, here’s what we’re working with: Fully Alive In Reality. Fair. Because if we get this defining business right, we might be able to imagine that life can be fair. It’s a perspective thing.
We decided in the first week that “Fully,” for the “F,” takes a belief that we each have the ability and right to positively impact our circumstances. Last week we added “Alive” for the “A.” And by putting the two in order, we had “Fully Alive.” Fully alive has to do with being fully awake to a life worth living, so that being fully alive is worth the undertaking.
So today, let’s look at “In.” What does “in” mean? Well, technically it means “inclusion, location,
Let’s spend some time with the second and third words in the definition: “location, or position within limits.” Because seeing life as fair, as being Fully Alive In Reality, must involve our actual location. Let me illustrate.
It is one thing to care about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, even to be moved to tears, to write a letter, or to send money. For many of us, that is what we can reasonably do to help. But I saw a small article in the paper recently. It was very cool.
”Students spend break working” the headline said, quietly introducing the three sentence, short report in the bottom corner of the Eureka morning paper. The location was in all caps: NEW ORLEANS - then, “Hundreds of students from across the nation are streaming into New Orleans this spring break to lend their time and an air of hope to a city where years of work remain.” Streaming into New Orleans. These young people are physically going to New Orleans for their week off from academic study.
These are bright young people who know by now that their efforts won’t really make a big dent in the destruction. They know by now that it takes weeks of training before someone is really prepared to do a good job with sheetrock and roofing materials. They certainly know how inefficient it will be for the first few days to get into any sort of a work rhythm, even if they are sent to a site to begin work right away.
But you know what’s really great about all this? It’s what that opening line contained: “lend an air of hope” when many years’ worth of work will remain after they leave. They certainly got the main thing: it’s about bringing hope by being the hope. Maybe we have to experience that sort of thing for ourselves to really understand. As Gandhi said, “To be the change we want to see in the world.”
In January 2006, when I was in my first year at seminary, four of us went to support the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance camp set up an hour from New Orleans next to Biloxi, Mississippi. Keesler Air Force Base was leveled, there. You might remember seeing pictures of barges, the “floating casinos,” having been tossed like bath toys across the once picturesque waterfront highway. And Ante-Bellum mansions were flattened with demolished hotel debris littering any trees still upright in expansive yards. It all had an eerie, deathly, grey pallor.
We camped in plasticized cardboard tents in a totally wiped out neighborhood called D’Iberville. It was wet and cold, but we were lucky to work “indoors.” (There was an intact roof over our heads.) The first day we were assigned by an elderly neighborhood couple to tear down rotten sheet rock and remove the hardware in a bathroom. The next day we put up sheet rock in a different location, under the guidance of someone who had already been there a week.
Personally, I redid only one closet. All the way from San Francisco to Mississippi to fix one closet in one home one hour from New Orleans. What is the sense in that? Well, just by showing up, by going into the place ourselves, we were hope. The passersby told us so. They stopped and asked if they could pray for us. They wanted to thank God we had come. They had lost everything, and still they were grateful for us who would do so little in six days.
A very good friend of mine was the Roman Catholic priest stationed at Keesler AFB, and had not stopped tending to people and pets since the hurricane had hit in August. Tim was exhausted; his demeanor worried me. So, I asked my team if I could spend our last night in D’Iberville with him. We needed to do something “normal” together.
He knew one casino, with its buffet, had reopened. The one that had all-you-can-eat crab. Tim’s from Boston so off we went. When we got back to his apartment, that had miraculously survived the hurricane, he asked if I would like to see his printing process. I didn’t understand why he wanted to do that. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t tease him; I just waited on a stool in the corner.
As he put his press together, inked the roller and chose a glass plate he had previously etched, he explained his hobby and how much he loved it. And that he hadn’t touched it for 6 months. He hadn’t experienced his regular life for 180 days. If he hadn’t stopped for crab and to be a good host, who knows how much longer he could have withstood the strain?
By the next morning, I knew he’d be ok. He was making jokes and whistling, again. He knew he belonged in a place that really needed him. And he realized he needed to rest, too.
In our get-it-all-done world, especially in a culture where we race through more mindless activity in retirement than we ever did when we worked fulltime, do we remember that we are actually living life in our own lives?
And how come it takes a natural disaster for most of us to stop and remember the point of being alive is to be awake in our life and connected to other lives? To be “in love.” To be “in” our play. In our work. In our relationships. In our own dreams.
Katrina continues to teach valuable lessons because there was no quick fix to the havoc she wrought on her delicate landscape. It will take many people many years, on location, to restore and rebuild.
And our lives can be like that. Life, when we stand a “safe” distance away from it, can look, well, unfair. But we have a completely different perspective if we decide to be on the inside of difficulty and challenge. They say it is strangely calm in the eye of the storm.
Believe me, I need constant reminding of the richer possibilities when I choose to be aware and am truly alive in my own life. We see things so very differently from the fully “in” location. Like my friend Tim, by holding nothing back, we are “all in.” “In all the way.” Fully Alive In.
Shalom!
Sharon is pastor of the Garberville Community Presbyterian Church. Services are open to all on Sundays at 11 am. Comments or questions should be addressed to: Dr. Sharon Latour, c/o A Pastor’s Perspective, P.O. Box 65, Garberville, CA 95542.
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