“Lights, camera, action!” takes on new meaning after a week in the dark. Like half a million St. Louis area homes, we lost power in the wee hours of the morning last Friday. When the lights came back on yesterday evening (Wednesday), there was dancing in my house even as we cleaned out the rancid refrigerator.
There may not be much action in the dark, but there is plenty of space for reflection. As a pastor I was aware of, and thus spent much of the week fretting for, many vulnerable elders in our community. I began to chase shadows in the dark, frantic when downed lines prevented instant communication. Although there have already been 18 deaths in Missouri and Illinois caused by this storm and electrical outage, none of my phantom fears came to life.
The shadows also offered sweet blessings, like the friends that called not once or twice but six times trying to coax me and mine to warmer environs. The incredible privilege of internet knowledge and access, credit cards, and good red wine are too often as rare as they are precious. As we spent our family evening hours in my office at the church, I also realized that a work place which extends to family space is also rare and precious.
As my children vacillated between the wonder of exploration and the exasperation of life unplugged, the shadows drew me to a childhood memory of a (theoretically) similar powerless plunge. We lived in the swampy forest of southern Michigan, too remote in those days for cable television, city water, and natural gas lines. Electricity powered not only the oil furnace and the stove, but also the well that brought water into our home. I remember the wonder and horror of what we knew from then on as “The Ice Storm” and the buckets of water beside the toilet (rationed) for ‘flushing’. (The privilege of ‘city water’ is one I will never take for granted!)
Immersed in the memory and comforted that such plunges into darkness are to be expected, I chatted with my mother (now in sunny New Mexico!) on my cell phone (that had been charged at church). I asked how long that childhood outage had been, my memory having stretched it beyond my current eternity. “Oh, it was a long time. I think it was three days,” she mused. Three days? In the back woods of southern Michigan thirty some years ago, an unimaginably severe storm left us without power for just three days. How then is it that three decades later, in a metropolitan area of America’s heartland, we have had not one but two power outages that have plunged half a million people into darkness not for days and even weeks?
Searching the shadows for clues I remember seemingly disparate pieces; hope placed in the then new Medicare program and the ‘war on poverty’, the acceptance of a graduated income tax system where the wealthiest earners were expected to carry the heavier load, and something called ‘regulation’. In the Cold War years we understood that our security depended upon reliable access to utilities and we were willing both to regulate the industries and to pay the resulting price. As the lights come back on the real cost of deregulation is glaring.
The shadows revealed much about our communal ethic and the places where it has frayed. But the lights are now on and the piles of laundry obscure the clarity of the shadows. I feel compelled to ask the questions that loomed in the darkness before they (and I) get lost in the holiday madness. As another Advent season reveals us lighting candles for peace and yet making war, I wonder what makes for peace? We live in a time of great fear, but what makes for security? Is our security rooted in the offense of military might or the defense of an updated and secure infrastructure? The questions, now in the glaring light, are increasing difficult to hold.