Louisiana 1927

Katie's post is part of our Lenten Water Project. Throughout this Lenten season our writers will be focusing on the subject of water and what that means to them. Please donate to our well-building efforts, and if you have something YOU would like to say about water, let us know and we'll post it here!

“Louisiana, Louisiana. They're trying to wash us away, they're trying to wash us away.”

In Randy Newman’s famous song, Louisiana 1927 he sings - laments even - the power of water, rivers, and rain. He captures in this simple but powerful song the damage that the Great Mississippi River flood of 1927 did to the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, leaving 700,00 people homeless. This song has most recently been identified with Hurricane Katrina in the public consciousness since Aaron Neville sang it on a televised hurricane relief show a few years ago.

This song always makes me stop and think about water. Water’s many and varied uses are quite remarkable when you think about it. We drink it, bath with it, cook with it, clean with it, swim in it, extinguish fires with it, and water our lawns with it. During my tenure as a volunteer organizer with the RHINO program at Saint Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, I was struck by the many ways that water is also destructive and harmful. It can smudge and stain your 50 year old wedding album, it can pick up your bed and move it in to your kitchen, it can turn the walls of your living room fuzzy and black, it can drown the family dog, it can crack your grandmother’s china, it can push a barge on top of your house, it can fill your refrigerator with an indescribable smell, it can completely rearrange and destroy your life.

For me, much of Lent is about considering those things in my life that have been damaged and hurt and are in need of redemption and healing, and making the journey towards that healing. In the broadest level, New Orleans is certainly one of those things in my life that I lift up in need of healing. How do New Orleanians, or any one for that matter, come to terms with the things that have destroyed, changed, or hurt their lives? How do we make peace with the things that have harmed us, be that water, people, racism or sexism, governments, schools, etc? As Christians we seek redemption in and through the Holy One who claims us and washes us with the waters of baptism. In knowing whose we are and trusting this claim on our lives we can travel to Jerusalem, confident that the joy of Easter Sunday will be waiting for us at the end. We will move through the waters, and rather than be washed away, as Randy Newman and Aaron Neville sang, we will be held and saved.

A pilgrimage to New Orleans every Lent has been a spiritual practice of mine ever since leaving my job there. In a few weeks I will make that pilgrimage with a group of volunteers from the church I am currently serving in Annapolis, MD. In the meantime, I leave my apartment every morning and look at the water stained postcard that was salvaged from one of the flooded homes I worked in and that now hangs near my front door. I read these words written on it:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
when there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

It is my hope that my mission group will be an instrument of peace, that we will help a city that has been damaged and washed away move towards redemption and healing, and perhaps find grace in our own lives in so doing. Let us all make this Lenten season a time when we will all be able to reclaim our lives and find grace in those things that have hurt us or those around us. Let us make the journey towards Jerusalem, remembering the One who goes ahead of us, and make peace with the water.

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Katie Cashwell served as the Field Coordinator for the RHINO program (Rebuilding Hope In New Orleans) of Saint Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church from 2006-2007. She's now the seminary student intern at First Presbyterian Church in Annapolis, MD. She has one year remaining in the MDiv program at Union-PSCE in Richmond, VA.