Natural disasters bring with them a certain mysterious power to recalibrate a person’s understanding of what humans are and what they are for. Values seem to get knocked down, thrown off balance, and tossed in a whirlwind like the trees and powerlines in a hurricane, and in the aftermath, inexplicably, they just fall back into right order within the soul. Parents, brothers, and sisters matter like never before. Neighbors matter like never before. The parish matters like never before. Giving thanks matters like never before.
As I have personally witnessed in the region surrounding my home in western North Carolina following the devastation of Hurricane Helene, the need to perform the works of mercy has, so far, outpaced the need to “return to normal.” There is a sense, albeit a quiet one, that somehow, if the destroyed towns and neighborhoods were to simply return to the previous way of life, it would lack something essential that has been embraced in this hour of catastrophe, something inescapably human. It prompts the constant question of why God permits evil, and one answer that the experience of charity after the hurricane offers is so that humans can once again understand that they are good, that they were made to be good and do good to others, because others need the good that is me.
The human vocation is difficult in every age, but technological habits have heightened the challenge to untold degrees in the contemporary era. The conditioned reliance on digital devices, the internet, social media, and screened entertainment, constantly galvanized by economic and political powers, inoculates people against authentic Christian modes of life. As the Catholic Worker Colin Miller explains, “The ubiquity of such tools makes Christianity unattractive and increasingly difficult to practice by cultivating moral and intellectual habits directly opposed to the Gospel. Technology makes us different people—people who are less inclined to be Catholic.” Our general use of newer technologies, which possess incredible power to achieve good things, nevertheless exemplifies excess, immoderation, and other vices that carve into our hearts an attitude that we are self-sufficient, that we do not need to rely on a community or friends or neighbors to be happy. It divorces body from soul, matter from form. This is a more catastrophic event than any disastrous storm, because it directly contradicts the vision of life based on the Gospels and the Church, which is a real, flesh-and-blood, material, communal, and thus sacramental existence. Against the will of most, Hurricane Helene foisted this understanding of the world and our nature once again onto those affected, especially when cell service went down.
Do we need a hurricane every weekend to remind us of the good that we are called to be and do in ordinary existence?
And this predicament proves exactly why the Gospels and an apostolic sense of mission are actually more important than ever before. “Love your neighbor,” for example, is the most timely injunction despite the manifold misinterpretations of it that roam around the Church. The second greatest commandment is one of the most down-to-earth commands Jesus ever gave. “Neighbor” does not mean everybody in an abstract sense; it only loosely means people on the other side of the world. What it really means is the people nearest to you, in your neighborhood, in your apartment complex, and on your block. Those people, regardless of income bracket, are the ones that most need your hospitality, your gifts, your meals, your listening heart. There is no need to worry if there isn’t a nearby pregnancy center for you to support; there is probably a single mom or a couple expecting a baby living near you who needs your help. And “help” does not mean merely buying toys and books for the baby; it can mean your handiness with projects or free time to run errands for them. It can also go as far as holding their baby during Mass so that they can have time to concentrate their hearts on liturgical action as well. The sky is the limit—all that is required to begin is to knock on your neighbor’s door.
Because humans are embodied creatures, we have physical homes. We are rooted in a specific place in a specific community by nature. The Church, consequently, emphasizes the primacy of small, local communities and entities, because without them, the Christian cannot live authentically.
The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which ‘a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.’ . . . God has not willed to reserve to himself all exercise of power. He entrusts to every creature the functions it is capable of performing, according to the capacities of its own nature. This mode of governance ought to be followed in social life. (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1883–1884)
Larger institutions and corporations can be very helpful for smaller local communities to thrive, but they must never hinder what the local communities can achieve on their own. “In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, neither the state nor any larger society should substitute itself for the initiative and responsibility of individuals and intermediary bodies” (CCC 1894). Events like hurricanes make this reality abundantly clear; if you are in danger or in immediate need, you would much rather have the people who live right beside you have the means to take care of you, because they can actually reach you in time, instead of waiting for emissaries from a larger institution who might take hours to get there. We exist in place and time; we ought to live in them too. And not just after a hurricane hits.
The apostolic Church understood this tremendously well. What Luke describes in Acts 4, about a concrete community in a concrete area, is not just a lofty ideal; it is the clearest instantiation of what it means to be the Church on a material level: “The whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need” (Acts 4:32–35). If there is a neighbor or parishioner who is in need in any way, you ought to know about it and know how to get them help, or at least refer them to someone who can. Obviously, we must take responsibility for ourselves too. But we also need to let our neighbors and fellow parishioners take care of us, even if we think we don’t need their care. If you and your parish have not cultivated this degree of awareness and depth of relationship within your own community, you are not living up to the demands of the Gospel. Period.
Catholic social teaching has codified this paradigm in the papal Magisterium. Pope Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum, “No one is commanded to distribute to others that which is required for his own needs and those of his household; nor even to give away what is reasonably required to keep up becomingly his condition in life. . . . But, when what necessity demands has been supplied, and one’s standing fairly taken thought for, it becomes a duty to give to the indigent out of what remains over” (Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum 22, emphasis added). By necessity, whatever you don’t need belongs to the poor.
Catholics also have to understand that poverty and need should not be reduced conceptually to lacking the bare essentials. “Feed the hungry” means feeding the physically hungry, but it also means feeding those who are hungry for presence, for hospitality, for conversation, for relationship, for the knowledge that someone in their midst cares for them and knows them. There is plenty of that kind of hunger to go around; the loneliness epidemic in younger generations is a very well-known phenomenon.
We are, metaphysically, always engaged in disaster relief . . .
Frankly, the task at a certain level isn’t really that hard. Get to know the people who sit close to you in the pews. Invite them over to your house for dinner. Take interest in their stories and tell them your own. Be with them. Offer their intentions up with the prayers of the priest at the Mass. Hold a feast on a feast day (what a strange and elusive idea this often seems to be!). All of this constitutes the fundamental idea of belonging to the Mystical Body of Christ.
It seems that Hurricane Helene has activated this all-encompassing sense of charity and communion in the hearts of many. The attendant danger, as much a risk for me as for anyone else, will be to fall again into a complacent, isolated, “safe” Catholicism and the consequent attitude that such abundant works of love are only demanded of the Christian after a disaster. It recalls the words of the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” who, after having shot the grandmother, remarked, “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Do we need a hurricane every weekend to remind us of the good that we are called to be and do in ordinary existence?
Also, the entire movement of Catholicism revolves around permanent disasters that cannot be remedied through enough material supplies or escaped through distraction. The fall in the Garden of Eden is a disaster with unending consequences for human nature that are experienced every day. We are, metaphysically, always engaged in disaster relief, and Christ, through his own disaster of suffering on the cross, has achieved the one possible total solution. In him and through his Sacred Heart, which ever burns to save and heal the human race and all of creation, we can adopt a perpetual yet ordinary disposition toward achieving the salvation of others and ourselves through the mundane works of charity. The separation of the sheep and goats described in Matthew 25 concerns itself not with a few extraordinary, occasional acts of fallen people but with daily, commonplace acts of the redeemed. The question is not whether you managed to feed the hungry every once in a while but whether you took on the mode of life conditioned by feeding the hungry.
“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom. 5:20). May we all pray desperately for the overflowing abundance of grace, inculcated in our devotion, relationships, and actions, that overwhelms the divisions and barriers of sin and produces authentic communities of Christian charity and belonging.