We were lucky

The Public Garden, still intact after the storm

I keep hearing the same phrase, in conversations on the street, on Facebook, in text message exchanges with friends. I used it myself, to reassure my parents and my sister, my aunts and my grandmother, about the minimal fallout we experienced last week from Hurricane Sandy. We never lost power, I explained over and over. We lost some leaves, but no tree branches. J even worked a half day on Monday. They reopened the subway on Tuesday morning. We were lucky.

I know, as most of you do, people who were not so lucky. One friend went to work west of Boston on Tuesday, but was stuck at the office until nearly 8 p.m. because of flooded roads. Co-workers lost power, as did friends both nearby and in Maryland. And my friends in New York have had their lives totally disrupted, though some neighborhoods are already recovering.

When I was a child, my family’s relationship with the word “luck” was uneasy, ambivalent. We called my sister “lucky” when she won repeatedly at Yahtzee, when she turned up just the right card in a poker match, when she beat all of us at Monopoly (again). We used it to refer to sporting events, weather conditions, narrow escapes of various kinds. But when it came to bigger things, to health issues and job worries and college acceptances, we used the word “fortunate” instead, or named it a “blessing.” I know plenty of people who would have said God spared us this week, instead of praising our luck.

But I can’t think of it quite that way in this case. If we were spared, then God must have seen fit not to spare other people whose homes and lives were devastated. If we were blessed, did he choose not to bless others, or to visit a curse on them in the form of this storm? (Hurricanes and other disasters, oddly, are still called “acts of God,” even by secular insurance companies.)

But the God I believe in, the God whose essence is love, is not so capricious, so arbitrary. He did not pick out certain houses to lose their power while others kept it. He is not laughing at the destruction of Breezy Point or the frustrations of lower Manhattan. He is hurting with all the victims and survivors. He may seem far away, but he is there.

I have been frazzled this week, my mind taken up with the usual worries: what to make for dinner, the state of my kitchen floor, which book to read next. But I am still lucky. I get to worry about domestic details and work obligations, instead of how to recover my possessions or where I’m going to live. I get to worry about church events and how much I miss my family in Texas, instead of staring down injury or death. I get to continue my normal routine, while thousands of people just a few hours away are dealing with huge, life-altering problems.

Despite my belief that God noticed, and cared about, all the destruction we’ve seen this week (and all the pain we never see), I don’t quite know how he is involved here. I can’t explain why I escaped disaster when so many did not. I know it was not because of my strength or intelligence or wisdom; such decisions are beyond my power.

Maybe one day I will understand more about how this works, how God is tied up with the winds and waves, what factors influence the number of griefs and disasters in a person’s life. I doubt I’ll ever understand fully; this tapestry is too large for me to see the whole pattern.

For now, I will send money to those who need it, and I will breathe a prayer of thanks and relief. And almost in the same breath, I’ll continue to admit:

We were lucky.

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