I read William Makepeace Thackeray’s Victorian classic Vanity Fair for the first time last fall. In one portion of the novel, which I don’t have in front of me, the lying, cheating opportunist heroine, Becky Sharp, ruminates on what her life would be like had she been born into wealth. Her conclusion, in a moment of narrative candor on Thackeray’s part, is that she would have been as respectable and honest as any Victorian lady, given their means. The passage stuck with me.

This week we’ve been hearing horror stories of what is going on in New Orleans. I have to admit that some accounts sound downright apocalyptic—looters running around shooting at rescue workers, angry mobs going for days without food, people writing “Help” from almost-submerged rooftops, destitute refugees camped out throughout the South. We are almost deadened to such scenes on the news from other countries, whether drug lords in Colombia assassinate Colombian Presbyterian ministers or Sudanese refugees in Egypt and Kenya plead for help as they starve to death.

Perhaps what shocks us so much about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina is that such horrible things aren’t supposed to happen in the richest nation on earth. Because money not only provides power, but also protects. We get the best technology we can buy so that our buildings won’t fall in earthquakes, our levees won’t break in floods, our homes won’t burn to the ground in fires. We buy expensive houses in the ‘burbs so that we won’t have to worry about crime in the city. We lock down our borders with high-tech gadgets so that terrorists can’t get in.

My family, like most Americans, spent years trying to shut the bad out. My mom wouldn’t even let my sister and me ride bikes down to the store in rural Eastern Washington, for fear we’d be kidnapped. But you know what? Six years ago this Sunday, after all the money and time and worry we’d spent trying to protect ourselves, my dad still collapsed of a heart attack on the softball mound and died at 39 years old, hours after being inducted into the regional men’s fastpitch hall of fame.

And so we find that our meager attempts to buy our way out of human suffering are futile. Whether in the Gulf Coast or in the hospital bed of a cancer patient, we cannot escape the evils that come from living in a fallen creation. Instead, we find that the only difference between ourselves and the Becky Sharps of the world is our wealth, and the illusion of security it brings. Strip that away, and we become the clawing desperation that is New Orleans today.

I believe that the light of God is there. I know that God is here now, with us in our suffering. I know that God loves us. But like Job, on some days it can be hard to feel it.

“Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all. For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.” --Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

Kelsey

PS—To donate to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, go to www.pcusa.org/pda/. Our goal is to raise $10 million in disaster relief.