Complicity

Jeff over at Preaching Peace is saying some important things about New Orleans and what is revealed ‘in the poisoned mirror of the waters covering the city’.

‘We are complicitous. We elected people because they promised to keep our taxes low. They kept our taxes low at the expense of the levees. We elected people who promised to keep America safe, forgetting that the greatest single threat to American life in the history of the country would come from the heavens, not from Al Qua’eda. We spent billions in the Middle East when 250 million could have saved New Orleans.

‘But it goes well beyond this, our complicity. We are complicitous because we are not surrendered to God and to one another. We are complicitous because the very things we complain about in “them” are just as present in “us” and we won’t acknowledge it. If blame were of the Gospel (which it most assuredly is not) then we would all have our share, if not because of what we have done, then surely because of the things we could have done and did not.’

He’s talking about Hurricane Katrina as a sign, a call to conversion, but not ‘their’ conversion–ours:

‘We can turn, and seek a whole new way of being in the world, a way patterned after that of Jesus, who stills storm and wave, but does not destroy them, who casts out demons, but grants them a place to go, who heals with a touch, not a knife.’