It was a loud, pre-dawn pounding on the front door of a high-school classmate’s home that interrupted several of my friends and me who were just moving into sound sleep after pulling an all-nighter called a “slumber party” and all its shenanigans. A loud voice shouted, “Diane! Get up! This is your father. Come with me. The hurricane is coming ashore. We’ve packed the car and are going inland.”
I grew up on the gulf coast of Texas. In my senior year Hurricane Carla roared through my hometown of Corpus Christi. By the time I got home from the disrupted party my parents were taping and boarding every window of our house. My family chose to “ride out” the storm. In my mind’s eye I can still see through a small untaped space the treetops bent to the ground, and in my mind’s ear I can still hear the howl of the winds and the battering of the house with broken tree limbs.
And in the midst of the fierceness of the gale, a strange thing happened. The eye of the storm passed directly over us. With it came an eerie calm. My parents used it as an occasion to catch their breath and to go out to gather the fallen branches and make minor repairs so that our house could endure the onslaught of the backside of the storm when it swung around to once again batter us with a slightly weakened but nevertheless wild abandon.
“Hurricane-force winds” feels to me like an apt description of what I’m experiencing as I watch the dismantling of our democracy as we have known it. While I’m clear a storm eye does not eliminate or even lessen a storm’s impact, I know it gives a breather, a place of observation and perspective, a way of both seeing the storm’s contours and clarifying meaningful engagement with the wild winds. It gives us a vista for understanding that fortifies and creates resilience. A centering point. It gives us a means to transcend the circumstances around us and a pathway to belonging to that which is larger than ourselves.
How do I cultivate within me the calm I experienced in the eye of Hurricane Carla? How might I might ride out and engage responsibly our current political hurricane centered in the calm of the storm’s eye?
My personal quirks are guiding me to intensify my contemplative practice and my practice of Ignatius Loyola’s daily examen as well as strengthen my connections with friends and family. You have and will discover your own strategies.
I continue to observe, experiment, discern, and define my way of riding out our current storm so that I might “renounce and resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.” * This is the way in which my parents promised at my baptism to form me. I trust a path forward will reveal itself…from a center of cultivated calm.
*From The United Methodist covenant of baptism
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