Tuesday, September 06, 2005

New Orleans Baptized?

Water symbolizes so many things to many cultures: cleanliness, tears, redemption, power, instability, destruction. Watching New Orleans up to her elbows in water brought all these symbolic questions to the fore.
  • Is the hurricane a symbol of power as God's punishment?
  • Is God using water to "baptize" the city and warning it to "clean up"?
  • Is Katrina a force for destroying the old to make way for the new?
  • Is Katrina a continuation of a lesson unlearned after 9/11?
One surviving Christian man (a black man with his children and wife, incidentally) said, "New Orleans is being punished. We are a very bad city, very wicked. God is letting us know..." he trailed off before continuing, "I love my city, but we are very bad and we need to clean up."

Like many others, I bristle at the idea that an Islamofascist wielding a jumbojet is somehow God's hammer. If you believe the Bible and many historical accounts, lots of civilizations were on the receiving end of "barbarians" who meted out God's wrath, though. This is uncomfortable. God has used floods, blood, hell fire and brimstone, pestilence, war and all sorts of other calamaties to get His people's attention.

This begs the question, are we God's people? This one is easy. All people in the world are God's people. It seems to me that basics of God's law are genetically encoded--biologists would say that certain socialized behaviors are conducive to survival. Either way, all the way from Adam and Eve, we know when we are doing wrong. (Even psychopaths know they are doing wrong--if they didn't they would do their heinous crimes in the light of day but their crime scenes are inevitably dark and hidden.)

No one wants to ponder these ideas--certainly not the secularized MSM. But those of us who believe in God wonder and worry, because our country seems damnedly committed to defending perversity over purity, sensuality over restraint, abuse over lovingkindness and worse.

What if our decadence, debauchery, self-deception and many other diseases of the heart (so many American's hearts are literally hardened), what if it has caught up to us? I'm not the only one asking these questions. Read more here and here..
More blogs about the woodlands rita.