Faithful Try to Find Meaning in the Wake of Disaster

The multitudes whose lives were shattered by Hurricane Katrina gathered in religious services Sunday wherever the winds had tossed them, giving thanks for their survival and praying for the loved ones who are still missing.

They cried, they embraced, they sought answers, they shouted hallelujahs, and some made somber, solemn announcements.

In Biloxi, a couple dozen worshippers met on the steps of Our Mother of Sorrows, a ravaged Catholic church. The 92-year-old, white-brick building is boarded up, and its walkway is nearly blocked by downed trees. A sign with vivid red Xs gives grim, good news to those versed in disaster shorthand: This place has been searched and no bodies were found.

At Our Mother of Sorrows, the windows were smashed and the roof was virtually gone. Inside, the pews have been tossed around like children’s toys. But at least the structure -- the city’s first predominantly black Catholic church -- still stood and its Virgin Mary statue, while toppled, was unbroken.

“You have to have faith that this was all for a reason,” said Bernadette Warick, 54, a finance manager who weathered the storm in a rapidly flooding house with eight female relatives and a baby. “We are not supposed to understand. We are just supposed to believe.”

Unable to enter the building, a priest at Our Mother of Sorrows grabbed a board from a pile of debris, set it across the arms of a lawn chair and gingerly draped it with a white silk altar cloth.

“A sense of hope, that’s all we have to give each other right now,” Father Gregory Baras said. “Some of us don’t have homes; some of us don’t have water, electricity or food. But all of us have a sense of God inside us to help us keep hope alive.”

Many of his parishioners could not put words to their dilemmas. At one point in the service, a man walked around the corner of the building, leaned against the mud-encrusted bricks and sobbed.

Others could barely stop telling the harrowing stories of their ordeals.

A 56-year-old woman named Johnnie Smith said she and her husband stacked their living-room furniture, climbed on top and ended up pressing themselves into a skylight alcove as the water surged upward.

Clinging to the frame, Smith looked at her husband and said, “I think we’re dead.”

As he grabbed a floating stick, he told her that they would make it -- and they did.

Throughout the ravaged Gulf Coast, the faithful tried to find meaning in the mountains of mud and debris that suddenly had replaced their homes, their schools, their workplaces and their churches.

In Pascagoula, Miss., some 80 worshippers belted out: “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing” in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church, whose steeple had crashed to the ground in Katrina’s furious winds.

In the dimness of a church with a leaky roof and no lights, Pastor Rex Yancy exhorted his flock to take heart, echoing a message that resounded at churches throughout the South.

“We have been hit hard -- everybody has been hit hard -- but we are going to make it,” Yancy said. “We are going to survive.”

The pastor, whose own home and those of his three staff members were soggy ruins, said he had bathed that morning by dousing himself with a gallon of cold water. As the water poured down, he exclaimed: “Thank you Jesus!”

That jolt of jubilation resonated with Yancy’s pared-down congregation. Hundreds had left the area, but those who showed up uttered soft “amens” and offered warm hugs on finding that old friends were still alive.

When gratitude will give way to grinding despair is something no one can say.

“People are resilient immediately after a disaster,” said Yancy, who has been a minister for 40 years. “But eventually, little things -- like not having toilets that flush -- wear many people down.”

At a Roman Catholic Mass in the corner of a cavernous shelter in San Antonio, Wayne Eddington, 43, told the makeshift congregation: “I want to pray for the soul of my mother who, I found out just this morning, was drowned.” He said a close family friend had seen the body of 61-year-old Patricia Eddington on a flooded New Orleans street.

As the group bowed their heads in prayer, National Guard troops hauled pallets of food past their folding chairs and deep into the 7,000-bed shelter. Two children walked by with signs taped to their backs to lure less fortunate kids: “Follow us to the Jolly Jump!” The gospel music from a Pentecostal service in the next room wafted over.

In another service, worshippers at Building 1538 -- a huge warehouse converted into a shelter in a San Antonio industrial park -- Texas National Guard chaplain Richard Smith greeted newcomers with irresistible sunniness, wading through a sea of cots in his standard-issue khakis like a comic working a friendly room. Some hugged him, some wept, some tried to stare right through him.

“Why, thank you for that lovely smile,” he told a sullen young girl, who suddenly beamed. “And welcome to the great state of Texas!”

Smith, 66, is a retired optical engineer who preaches at Higher Praise, a nondenominational Corpus Christi church. To folks who had lost everything, he reminded them that they had their lives. To folks seeking their loved ones, he offered reassurance.

“The proof of God is that you are here and not back there,” he told a knot of teenagers. “And you are with people who love you, who will go to whatever lengths they have to go to help you get your lives back together.”

Life will be better, he promised, and most believed him.

“I lost everything,” said Chris McNair, a lanky construction worker. “But I didn’t lose my soul.”

Later, he preached, strutting with a microphone and shouting with a voice unmuted by an old bout with lung cancer and thyroid surgeries. Every so often he’d interrupt himself, as he does in ordinary conversation, with a rhetorical cry of “Is God good?”

And dozens of people who no longer had homes or jobs, or even papers to prove who they are, would answer as one: “Yeah! Amen!”

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Huffstutter reported from Biloxi, Dahlburg from Pascagoula and Chawkins from San Antonio.