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Greenblading

Seeking a Saint

A project that began with the ravages of Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of the Superdome and Convention Center just has to honor the Super Bowl win of the New Orleans Saints. I know all the arguments against pro football (although my favorite is George Will who said football represents the worst American qualities – periods of violence punctuated by committee meetings) and I hear the kvetchers who say, it’s just a game and has nothing to do with the Real World, and I think back to my second Greenblade post, August 28, 2005:

"CNN shows people trudging toward the Superdome, the “refuge of last resort,” a grim description, filled with foreboding. Reporters speak to people who are still fortifying their homes or businesses. If they can’t stay where they are, they say, they will go to the Superdome."

Looking at that post makes me all nostalgic (yes, it is possible to be nostalgic for a time of crisis) and I wander through the early posts in the Greenblade blog that record our journey, our coming to grips as a community with how our hearts and minds would engage with what was happening. I find a quote from the end of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed:

"It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition – austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they? … What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress…And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans–as a state of emergency."

This is the kind of question that has woven through our journey: how do we open our hearts to others who are living in a state of emergency while also living the lives to which each of us is called? Should we drop everything and go work directly on whatever problem we can get to, knowing there are so many others in so many other places? Should we work where we are to build a world in which poverty does not happen to begin with? This is much the same question LiZ asked in A Question of Scale. And, as there, we know there is no answer. Or the answer is “both.”

So it is not possible to remember those days four and a half years ago and begrudge anything that lifts spirits, makes people happy, gives them joy in being together in their city. “Being together.” The images from Katrina are of abandonment. Reporters were there to shine a light on poverty, suffering, and loss. Now it’s a party. The problems are still there. There are still houses to build, businesses to restore, an economy to strengthen but for now – good Lord in heaven – the problems can wait.

On September 23, 2005 I was looking for a patron for our effort:

"So I seek a saint, beloved of the poor. There are many choices but I am drawn to St. Julien, who gave his life to the poor after he unwittingly killed his own parents. He is the patron saint of a whole host of things: boatmen, carnival workers, childless people, circus workers, clowns, ferrymen, fiddlers, fiddle players, hospitallers, hotel-keepers, innkeepers, jugglers, knights, murderers, pilgrims, shepherds, to obtain lodging while travelling, travellers, wandering musicians."

How could he mind if football players were added to that list?

Celebrating on Bourbon Street, New Orleans Times-Picayune

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