When is God?

Charles and Winnie Wilmore had moved to a house in East New Orleans in August, 2005, just three weeks before Hurricane Katrina. They had been able to locate a home where Winnie’s ailing mother could come to live with them. In order to do so, they had to leave their old neighborhood in the Lower 9th Ward where generations of both their families had raised their children and where many of their cousins, aunts, uncles and lifelong friends still lived.

Two years later, they were in a toxic fume-filled FEMA trailer parked in their front yard, looking at the ruin of their dream. Winnie’s mother had gone to Baton Rouge for the duration.  And, given the shenanigans of post-Katrina bureaucracy, it was no surprise that, when they checked with their company about the flood insurance they had purchased when they moved in, the agent told them that the paperwork had been “lost in the aftermath of the storm.”

With no flood insurance, no home, no community, and living in a poisonous environment, one would also expect that there was no hope. Winnie was partially disabled with a bad hip, Charles had retired from the postal service. Yet every day, without fail, Charles offered the same prayer, “Thank you, God, for this day which we have never seen before.” And then he followed it with giving thanks for the “angels” who had been sent to help. They, apparently, were us, women and men from two Massachusetts churches who had traveled to New Orleans to help rebuild their home.

Previously, in this blog, I have explored the questions, “Where is God?” and “Who is God?” Today the question is “When is God?”  I know that even an attempt to answer these questions is foolhardy;   there are, finally, no answers that can capture the “infinite variety” that is Deity.  Sometimes, though, stories can help. And so this story of what happened in New Orleans is one time when a holy presence felt very close.

We set to work, angels in muddy boots. Working under the guidance of Hosanna Industries from Pittsburgh, with a high school group from Tulsa, we cut and hauled big pieces of sheetrock and put them up, nailed floorboards, framed windows and caulked seams.

Then came the roof day. Although it was April, New Orleans was a steam bath, sweat pouring off us in rivers. I’m a creature who’s happiest when it is forty to sixty degrees, dry and briskly sunny outdoors, and there was no way I was going to go up there, possibly pass out and fall off. So my friend Priscilla and I decided to remain earthbound.  Soon enough, we wandered back behind the house where, for some reason, none of us had ever been. We saw there the ruins of what looked to have been a small private garden with some tumbled-down patio furniture, upended stone pavers, broken flowerpots, dirt and debris everywhere. We took one look and simply knew what we were going to do.

After clearing away some of the debris and righting the furniture, we scrounged some rusty garden tools from the shed and began to dig along the back fence.  As earthworms began to wriggle up from the mud, mud that had been buried under Mississippi flood waters and was now rich with nutrients, I recognized that, down there on my knees in the dirt, as crazy as it sounds, I was getting a message from God. Please don’t misunderstand; no angels appeared, no harps or trumpets sounded, and certainly there was no voice. It was more like, “Oh yeah, that’s why I came on this trip!” Then I looked up to see a butterfly flit by and a bird land on a nearby branch.  I know that this sounds ridiculous, like some scene from a Disney movie, yet it was true. There was life here, where there had been only death and destruction. And I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to rebuild gardens in New Orleans so that people, when they came home would have not only a house for their bodies but also a place of beauty for their spirits. I wanted to plant some seeds of hope in the city.

Our week with Charles and Winnie ended, but not before we had led them back behind their house, where they hadn’t been since the destruction. Over the course of the previous days, we had cleared away the debris, gone to Home Depot (one of the few places that had opened back up by that time) to buy plants which we put in the ground. A volunteer in our group, although suffering from the flu, repaired the walkway and the group from Tulsa went out and bought brightly colored cushions for the furniture. Everyone had pitched in to construct a few side tables from cinder blocks and build a small wall, replant the flowerpots and sweep the place clean. When Winnie and Charles saw the garden, they were beyond surprised and clearly overcome. A woman in our group had recorded some great New Orleans jazz on her iPhone, at which point Winnie tossed aside her cane and joined us as we all danced. There, in the backyard of a ruined house, deep in the Mississippi mud and alive with earthworms, butterflies and birds, hope smiled and danced with us.

This story is my partial answer to the question, “When is God?”:  it’s when there is an inkling of   something present beyond what you or I can explain with our inadequate words and limited expectations. For I had no idea that, when I signed on for a trip to rebuild a house, I would end up going to New Orleans for the next seven years with groups of youth and adults to plant gardens.

Was it God?  I will never know for sure; but because Charles had seen us as angels and because Winnie danced with us; because a community emerged to provide cushions and patch concrete and an empty ruined garden began to bloom, it’s close enough for me.