Floods in Holy Places

When sacred landscapes become places of tragedy

In the past year, two spots of land that I consider my most sacred pilgrimage sites have experienced catastrophic flooding and significant loss of life, and I have been surprised at the level of grief I feel, even though I currently live at a distance from these places. I want to acknowledge right up front that my grief is entirely second hand as someone whose family and home are safe from these particular disasters. Though my own house hasn’t flooded and my own family hasn’t drowned, it feels like that, especially when all I can do is watch the news and check on friends on Facebook and wait with knots in my stomach, first when Hurricane Helene flooded Western North Carolina and now as news emerges from Kerr County in the Texas Hill Country.

In the closing days of September last year, Hurricane Helene made its way up from Florida and dumped an unprecedented amount of rain on Western North Carolina, resulting in over a hundred deaths and the destruction of thousands of homes. In Swannanoa, where I went to college, whole neighborhoods were swept away. And up the road at Montreat, streams turned into raging rivers and ripped through a place that has been sacred to many folks for a very long time. In addition to being a town with year-round residents, Montreat is also a Presbyterian conference center and a special place of retreat for me and many others. We had been planning a visit for the very next month after several years away, and it felt gut-wrenching to be so far and not be able to help except by giving money and praying. I checked the missing persons page that Warren Wilson College alumni set up daily, as people worked to locate their friends and family in inaccessible places.

And now that time has passed, things are better there. The roads have been rebuilt. The Lake Susan dam has been repaired along with buildings. Montreat is likely full of excited young people having their own sacred experiences even as we speak. There is clean water again and houses are being rebuilt. But this sense of disruption remains in the background, even more so for those who lost loved ones. There is a feeling that it’s not quite safe anymore. I haven’t been able to return yet and see these things for myself. Perhaps there will be some comfort in standing on that particular patch of holy ground and breathing in the rich scent of Rhododendron leaves and listening to the gentle gurgle of the stream returned to its normal flow.

Four days ago, in the early hours of July 4^th, the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, Texas flooded 26 feet in less than an hour. This is a stretch of river my family and I drove along every year for the first 25 years of my life to get to Mo Ranch, another Presbyterian sacred site. A friend on Facebook said the river is “like a vein in my heart,” and I feel that completely (thanks Elaine Gantz Wright for that beautiful phrase). It is a holy landscape, a place I have spent some of the best and hardest moments of my life. Most recently I was there two years ago for a spring family reunion, where I got to share this beloved place with my partner and my brother’s kids for the very first time, another pilgrimage to the holy land of Presbyterians. I have swum in those life-giving waters, sat in the rapids under the heat of a Texas summer sun, paddled with friends while we shared secrets and peered down on the turtles gliding through the clear water. At summer youth retreats, we worshipped on the lawn, looking out onto the cliffs opposite the river, at a time when the world felt too full of possibilities.

And so my dismay was almost too much to hold when I saw those holy waters raging out of control, sweeping away sleeping campers and others in low-lying homes. Over a hundred people are dead in this holy place. I am beyond grateful that attentive people at Mo Ranch were able to evacuate campers from a riverfront dorm in time to avoid the flood, and that because of this quick thinking there was no loss of life at Mo itself. But my heart breaks for all of the families who will never get to see their children again, who sent them off to camp for a safe week of fun and community. It’s almost too horrible to even imagine.

And so I’ve been left with the lingering question, what happens when it feels like no place is safe? What do we do in the midst of this changing climate, as rivers rage out of control and wildfires devour everything in their path? The words of the prophet Jeremiah come to mind, both his predictions of doom and his later words of hope to those in exile. In Jeremiah 4:23-26, the prophet recounts a vision of the future unmaking of creation:

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;

and to the heavens, and they had no light.

I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,

and all the hills moved to and fro.

I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,

and all the birds of the air had fled.

I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,

and all its cities were laid in ruins.

Jeremiah is foreshadowing the coming exile and attempting to get the Israelites to acknowledge the error of their ways—injustice, wealth inequality, and failure to live up to the covenant they made with God. It is the creation account in Genesis only in reverse. When the land we love is subject to catastrophe, it feels like an undoing of creation. This feels especially so now that we are aware that these super storms are one of the effects of human-caused climate change. Our own collective failure to take action is manifesting in ever-deadlier floods and droughts and wildfires, the destruction of people and places we love.

And when destruction does come to Israel in the form of the invading Babylonian army at their doorstep, Jeremiah is there to give hope to the people. He buys a field even as Jerusalem is under siege, as a sign that in the future, “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” (Jeremiah 32:15). He urges the people even in exile to “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce” and to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you” (Jeremiah 29:5-7). A few verses later he utters the words that have adorned countless inspirational signs, embroidered towels, and Sunday school posters: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says YHWH, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11).

Things don’t feel that hopeful right now in the Hill Country along that particular stretch of the Gaudalupe River, a pilgrimage route for all those generations of families who have attended the many summer camps that dot this sacred landscape. But I am heartened by our magnificent power to come together in love when something like this happens. Beneath the official disaster response and the bleating of politicians and the blaming that is already happening, there is a whole community of people donating money and material goods and time. There are search and rescue responders seeking survivors, churches giving out food and clothing, volunteers working to reunite families, and many many more of us who watch, and wait, and pray from a distance as we look toward a future of hope in the midst of our shared grief.