June 28, 2010

A month ago, Nashville was under water. Torrential rains came on Saturday and Sunday – the 1st and 2nd of May. Up to 17” in some places, more than the earth could hold, more than the creek banks and riverbeds could contain. It came pouring forth, a wall of water from the sky at times, flooding the churches and homes and finally downtown and all of Opryland. To watch one’s home fill up with water is shocking – not my literal home, it stayed mercifully dry -- but this city I call home. There was water where I’d been to see the Titans play. There was water in the symphony hall where I heard Dvorak’s New World Symphony, enraptured. There was water in the Opry, where I saw Garrison Keillor and heard Old Crow Medicine Show stomp out their music. The fields where my children played soccer, the playground where they climbed and played on swings, Shelby Bottoms Greenway where I have walked many a mile: all of it under water.

Nashville is often called a small town within a big city and it does have that quality. “Do you know so-and-so? His mama is so-and-so.” “Oh, sure, I know who that is now.” Because I know his mama. We all, this small town/big city, watched as the waters crept up and covered the places where we eat, sleep, shop, play and worship. And then we set about cleaning it up. We went to our neighbors and sorted sodden, smelly clothing. Then we took it to the dry cleaner and did the laundry because our house was dry and theirs was not. We carried artwork and doll babies and board games and futons out of basements. We sorted china and someone’s grandmother’s silver so it could be washed and stored. We sifted through the personal lives of our neighbors, all the while trying to help those neighbors maintain some sort of dignity while we did it.

We, Nashville, carried children through the rising waters and got out our boats to rescue others from their roofs and lead horses out of swamped fields to higher ground.

And then we were the city of the unwashed masses and dirty dishes because, ironically, after having too much water, we had a water shortage. So, while we began recovery and rebuilding, we also conserved, another step to meeting the disaster with dignity and respect for each other. We watched as the waters rose and it grieved us to see our city, our home flooded. We were grieved, too, by our neighbors bearing their loss as we came to their aid. And as we grieved, it became clear that we intend to recover.

And now I look at water in a different way. All those soothing platitudes about the renewing properties for water seem frivolous. The waters of early May were a power beyond “living waters.” They were overwhelming, terrifying and expansively sweeping. They were full of garbage, heavy objects, toxins: they were poisonous and deadly. Now when I ponder the waters of baptism, I’m not thinking of a handful of warmed water, gently dribbled over a head. Baptism is a DYING and a RISING to new life, and that flood is what I think of now. Baptism is that radical, that raging, that spiritually life-changing, because it takes that kind of grace in this world to live into the beauty beyond the pain.

Picture the torrents of raging water we saw tearing through Nashville and then picture the mountains of possessions and water-logged debris piled everywhere outside of flooded homes. Now picture the armies of volunteers that poured forth from this city in response, doing for those who lost everything what they could not do for themselves. Now that, my friends, is baptism: a dying and a rising. And it is what Nashville is living and we are witness to. In May we were baptized. And now we live in grace, bringing new life to the city we call home.