c. 1998 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ A major hurricane is howling toward New Orleans on the worst possible path. Catastrophe seems imminent; loss of life may be heavy. At the last moment, it wobbles onto a new course and slams into the Mississippi Gulf Coast, causing extensive property damage, but apparently killing no one.

Divine providence or mere meteorology? If mystery is at work, is it the power of prayer or just ordinary hurricane behavior made to seem mysterious by our ignorance?

The question is so sharp here because New Orleans is the most vulnerable city in America. Sunken in a bowl and nearly surrounded by water, the entire city would be flooded for days by a major storm tracking past the city on a particular path. But it is a question victims _ and survivors _ of the ravages of weather and its sometimes quirky way might ask around the globe.

Thus, for many people here, Hurricane Georges’ sideswipe of New Orleans earlier this month made starkly personal one of life’s most basic questions: How does the world work? “Isn’t it arrogant to think we got spared by a God who for some reason chose to bury people under mud in the Dominican Republic?”asked Sally Mooney, an atheist and community college English teacher in New Orleans.”And why would God spare Sin City, New Orleans, and let those people in Biloxi have it? It’s just so contradictory.” But if, to Mooney, Georges’ late course-change was founded only in the laws of nature, Lelah Henderson disagrees. “Prayer changes things. This we know,”Henderson said this week on the sidewalk outside St. James A.M.E. church, where she runs programs for the elderly.

On the day before Georges’ struck, Henderson and her 9- and 17-year-old daughters had come to morning services at St. James with the storm building outside. Such was their faith _ and their uncertainty _ that they brought several days of clothing with them, unsure that they’d be able to make it back home after services.

They prayed for deliverance from the worst of the storm, and they certainly got it, Henderson said, although she regarded it as a deep question why God would spare so sinful a city as New Orleans.

The Rev. Dwight Webster of Christian Unity Baptist Church recalled the Genesis story in which Abraham pleaded to God to spare Sodom for the sake of a mere 10 righteous souls in an otherwise corrupt city. “I think it is plausible to believe that the presence of righteous folk in this city had the same effect,”Webster said.

In fact, conversations with members of several Christian denominations disclosed a clear consensus: that Georges’ change of course is evidence of a benevolent, divine protection.

That said, however, most struggled to explain why an even-handed God could be persuaded to prefer New Orleans over Georges’ eventual target, Pascagoula, Miss. _ or to make such a dramatic show of validating the power of prayer by steering misery from one community into another.

To be sure, believers in providence took heart that Georges’ plunge into Mississippi cost no lives while many might have been lost in New Orleans. That best-of-both-worlds outcome seemed to make the dilemma a little less sharp, Henderson, Webster and others said. “I have come to believe that in this world, there is no such thing as an accident, that everything that happens is God’s will,”said Monsignor Robert Guste, a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans. He is one of those who believes the city was explicitly spared by God.

In Catholic belief, particularly, New Orleans is thought to be under the protection of Our Lady of Prompt Succor. Woven deep in the lore of the city is the all-night vigil on the eve of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, in which New Orleans’ Ursuline nuns asked the mother of Jesus to intercede with her son for the city’s protection. Gen. Andrew Jackson won a bloody, lopsided victory the next day.

Almost 200 years later, a prayer asking Our Lady of Prompt Succor to protect the city from hurricanes is a fixed part of many Catholic Sunday Masses.

But what of the damage to Pascagoula? And the logic that, barring the storm’s making a U-turn, New Orleans’ benefit would almost surely have to be someone else’s loss?

That poses an irreconcilable problem to Rabbi David Goldstein of Touro Synagogue. “It leads immediately to the idea that God is capricious, that God plays favorites, and this to me is antithetical to the very idea of religion,”Goldstein said.

And apart from the preferential conduct it seems to expect of God, Goldstein said, such a belief seems to validate a human selfishness _ a metaphorical cutting into the front of the line, a case of special pleading in the face of a common crisis.

Still, Goldstein opened his synagogue’s Yom Kippur services Tuesday night with a prayer of gratitude for”God’s sheltering love.”And he said his storm prayer was a plea for courage, perspective and compassion for the storm’s worst victims.

But beyond that,”I think it is a very problematic thing to pray for one’s welfare when it comes at the expense of another,”he said. Indeed,”it would be a diminution of God’s real power in the world (for God) to take cognizance of individuals”in circumstances in which one benefited by another’s loss.

Ultimately, believers in providence concede they are thrown back on a mystery.

Guste, while believing Our Lady of Prompt Succor was at work again Sunday, said he did not know the answer to the basic question: Why Pascagoula and not New Orleans? “I don’t think one person’s protection necessarily means another person’s misery,”said Sister Esther Redmann, prioress of New Orleans’ band of 17 Ursuline nuns, the same community that prayed on the eve of battle. “I think the two need not be linked, and here we enter the mystery of providence.”

DEA END NOLAN