Convention center service features hymns, jazz
Some 25,000 people were stranded at the convention center in the days after Hurricane Katrina hit the city in late August 2005. They had no food or water. The people who died there were left unattended. Their plight outraged many Americans who watched the scenes on live television. It took National Guard troops, which arrived four days after the first people camped out at the center, to restore order and evacuate the complex.
Jenkins described the service's leaders representing people "who in the past had little time for each other" but now have become partners in the city's recovery.
The service, he said, was a "symbol of the good that can come from utter destruction."
In June, Jefferts Schori asked the bishops to be in consultation with their dioceses about contributing to a purse for hurricane relief. Each donor diocese was asked to consider contributing $10,000, and during the service the bishops presented the gifts, which will be divided between the two dioceses of Louisiana and Mississipi.
Williams said the choices now facing New Orleans represent the time in every community's life when it has to ask itself what its citizens owe one another.
"The bottom line is that what we owe to one another most deeply of all is gratitude -- not even respect, not even the recognition of dignity so much as gratitude," he said. "We are indebted to one another. I am indebted to your existence because I would not be myself without you. A community -- a society -- that can get to that level of recognition is one that lives from a deeper place."
When a community lives with this attitude, Williams said, it will value the young and the old who round out the life of the community, but who are "not part of the system of profit."
One of the gifts of the old and the young is that they show us that the leisure of "enjoying who we are and who each other is in the presence of God is, all being well, what we should be spending eternity doing," he said.
This sense of indebtedness and gratitude towards one another is exactly the attitude with which people ought to relate to Christ because of all he has given to the world, Williams said.
"We owe Christ big time, as they say," Williams said.
The evening prayer service took a distinct New Orleanian flavor when jazz trumpeter Irvin Mayfield and the three other members of his quartet played a melody of songs typically used in the city's signature jazz funeral processions. Members of the evening's congregation danced along the hall's aisles, waving handkerchiefs and orders of service as the four played and improvised around "Just a Closer Walk With Thee," "I'll Fly Away," and "When the Saint Go Marching In."
As the jazz died away and Jenkins turned to Williams for the blessing, he said, "I told the archbishop that the only thing Elizabethan about this service tonight would be him."
