WHY ME/US?

Over the years my suspicion is that we all ask the question, when something completely unexpected and traumatic happens to us, “Why me? What have I done to deserve this?” The answer, more often than not, is “nothing”. And that is true. We did nothing that merited or caused what happened. It simply did and now we have to deal with it. That same question arises not only individually but collectively, as a community, small or large, from a family to a city to a state – and sometimes to the entire world.

Not very long after I arrived in Cedar Rapids in 2003 living next door to the church in the rectory while Arlena was still in Spokane trying to sell our home, my dog, Albert, and I went to bed. During the night a tornado tore through Cedar Rapids and the surrounding area. When Albert and I woke up, the power was off. When we went outside to take our morning walk through the large cemetery behind the church, we discovered branches and leaves in the front yard, a tree next to the rectory torn from its roots, wires attached to the garage pulled from their steel frame, and in the cemetery at least sixteen uprooted trees. Devastation everywhere but no one really asked, “Why me? Why us?” When you live where tornadoes are a fact of life, sometimes life bites you.

But then, five years later in 2008 a massive storm arose and flooded the downtown and surrounding areas. A parishioner a mile from the river had six feet of water in her basement. Much of the community was in shambles. Many probably wondered why this tragedy happened so soon after the tornado. What was worse was that the country was in the midst of a recession. People were already hurting. The flood was adding insult to injury. But as in the aftermath of the tornado, after the flood, the community rose up and worked together to heal and rebuild.

And then came the derecho, a massive windstorm that damaged a third of the corn crop, tore trees from their roots and collapsed structures that had withstood the tornado and the flood. My guess is that citizenry again wondered why this happened. Wasn’t a tornado and a flood enough for one community in a relatively short period of time? Now this! Yet no one who asked “why?” would be taken to task. And the old and honest response “Why not us?” doesn’t hold.

So what are the people of Cedar Rapids doing? They are doing what they did after the tornado and after the flood, shaking their heads, rolling up their sleeves and working together to find and make resurrection, new life. And they will just as they did before, just as they always will. God bless them. They are an example the rest of us seem to need while in the midst of this pandemic. They are putting aside political differences, religious difference, all differences and working together. That is the only way. In any tragedy there are not two sides to recovery but one.

They are teaching us a lesson we should have learned long ago. I, for one, thank them.