It’s surprisingly hard to write about my work here in St Thomas.  Quite simply, in a two week span last September, the world ended in St Thomas.  The above two pictures really don’t begin to capture the devastation though they give a small sense.  All that blue in the bottom picture is what we learned to call FEMA blue in Fort Lauderdale–the blue of tarps FEMA hands out to people whose roofs have been very seriously damaged. This is 5 months later and the tarps are still there and will be for months to come. Not everyone has power yet. There is no ‘landline’ phone service. All the drinking water comes in plastic bottles.  There are two enormous mountains of debris laced with all kinds of toxic materials that sit on either side of Charlotte Amelie, and no one knows what to do with them.

You can see all that but it’s the toll on people’s souls. I only get tiny glimpses of the anguish and devastation this really left behind when I listen to the individual stories that are excruciatingly personal and desolating, and not mine to tell but which are part of the gift I have been given by this generous community.

Since the end of September of last year, bits and pieces have come back together and a new world emerges.  Cruise ships were back within weeks of the hurricanes–not even 2 massive hurricanes could begin to erase the beauty of this island nor keep the luxury jewelry stores shut down.  I watch thousands of people debark from 3-7 ships a day, come scurrying into town to make their purchases and then leave again, and I wonder if they have any notion at all of the hardship all around them while they are here.

People are making sad peace with the fact that many of their own no longer have a way to survive on this island. They are rebuilding. A member of the vestry at All Saints Cathedral Church is helping to rebuild the sewage system that was basically decimated.  A lot of the every day work of living carries on. And always, all around me, laughter.

There are two other women from Alabama sharing the diocesan visitor quarters with me while they work with the Cathedral School this week.  At lunch we walk from the cathedral campus down to an area where we can pick up a bite to eat before getting back to work.  We walk past a corner shop where there is usually a group of guys hanging out, friendly, more than a little high on pot, with astoundingly long dreadlocks.  They’ve taken to greeting us like this: “Good day, Charlie’s Angels.”  Since the three of us are in our middle years, we delight in our moniker and wish we could whoosh back our hair a la Farah Fawcett.

Each night, we are invited out by parishioners, vestry members or members of All Saints Cathedral School board.  We are entertained lavishly and graciously and there has not been a single night where at some point we haven’t found ourselves laughing so hard the tears were streaming down our faces and our bellies were aching.  That hospitality, that laughter, that willingness to allow three people to parachute in from a very distant world, with good intentions and no real knowledge of this beautiful place, is at the heart of the courage of a community that would have every right to husband every last one of their resources for the work of rebuilding.  Would perhaps be wiser asking us to stay home.

I hope the retreat I will lead starting tonight, the preaching I’ve done, the services I’ve led will make some tiny kind of difference. Yesterday morning, I did the blessing of a civil marriage for two folks from New York who got married on the beach by a justice of the peace on Wednesday evening. They were kind and generous and I wonder if their monetary gift and the monetary gift I will be able to give the Cathedral’s senior warden on Sunday morning, thanks to the generosity of my church back home and several other friends who invested in this trip, will be the real difference I can make.  I know this for sure: it is the new friendships and the time of companionship with brothers and sisters I didn’t even know I had, that seem to me to be where the real holiness resides, where the Spirit has been at work on all of us.

Grace and joy ebb and flow when it comes to my beloved girl, Luz María. Right now, she takes my breath away often. Her residential program has recently hired a pair of behavior specialists who are doing magnificent work with her. With any number of cautions, with enormous reserve, they and we have allowed ourselves to begin to consider the possibility that one day, María will function well enough to move to a less restrictive environment. That’s all “institutional-eze” for the hope Maria will be able to live in a group home setting. If that is the case, she will be able to move much closer to us—maybe even as close as Montgomery. My mind immediately goes, “whoa, Rosa, manage expectations.” I take nothing for granted and make absolutely no assumptions, given the path we have made over these 17 years. But what an astounding gift hope can be.

A couple of weeks ago, Luz María called to report she’d had a meeting with her behavior team and she was doing great. She explained her behavior statistics were on the up and up. Then she said, “I’m going to get to move to Alabama soon and that’s good because you and my dad are getting old and I can help you shower, and make you food, and take care of you.”

There it was: the same kind of generosity that has been at the core of my girl’s being from the beginning. We are a couple of weeks away from celebrating her ‘Gotcha Day’—March 4, which was a sunny Sunday in Mexico City in 2001. Each year, I allow myself to go back to the day after she was entrusted to our care, to the morning we went to the Museo del Papalote, a lovely children’s park and how María pulled her daddy to an infinity fountain at the entrance as soon as we arrived. How, there, she put his hands in the water and gently washed them for him. How she did the same for me. One who had been so neglected, so rejected, so utterly valueless, was so willing to be the exact opposite, treat those around her with reverence. The absolute miracle of our daughter.

A few days after she and we had the conversation about coming to Alabama, she sent us a letter with her own gorgeous vocabulary:

Proment=improvement
Bark = BARC (where she lives)
Persenoess= percentages and refers to the percentage of time she engaged in appropriate behavior
Behaver=behavior

It pierces my heart to read the last line because all these years later, I still miss her as much as on the day she was removed from our home by the police for her own safety and ours, and after a brief stay in the psych unit, moved into BARC. Maybe, just maybe, all her tears and ours, her laughter and ours, her doggedness and our refusal to give up are enough to nurture that tiniest speck of a seed of hope so that one day, we won’t have to miss each other quite so much.

Parishioners of HCSC Including Reggie Cathey

Thirty years ago this July, Sherod and I were married at Holy Cross-St Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Huntsville. Sherod was rector there so this was kind of a big deal. Shawntae and Jennifer were our flower girls. The ladies of the church put on a spread. And as hot as that afternoon in July was, our party was such fun. One of the ladies gave us a fancy set of satin YSL sheets and made Sherod blush furiously when she made some kind of comment about him sliiiiiiiiid-ing into bed on those smooth, silky sheets.

The Senior Warden when we were married was a wonderful guy named Reg Cathey, who taught at Alabama A&M. Reg had a son, Reggie, who was trying to break into the movie scene in Hollywood and happened to be home the weekend of our wedding. We had invited the whole parish to the service and Reggie came with his dad. Whenever he was home, he always came to church and he was beloved. Reggie was gracious and charismatic, a lovely person all the way around. We’ve been thrilled through the years watching Reggie make his way—we whooped the first time we were watching The Wire on HBO and recognized him.

And then this weekend, we got the very sad news that Reggie had died.. How wonderful it was to watch someone we knew and knew to be such a lovely person make it and make it big. How sad that he has left too soon. Rest in peace…

July 9, 1988, with Shawntae and Jennifer

The camellia bush has begun to bloom–spring is heading our way.  More and more, my Scandinavian heritage asserts itself and I look towards just a few weeks from now with dread and resignation, to the heat of an Alabama summer. Already, I also dream of the cold months that will surely follow.

Be that as it may, the camellia bush is blooming. That is all.