
On the morning of Tuesday, January 7th, as my flight descended into LAX, I could tell something wasn't right. Instead of the typical flight path from the east, the plane had arced over the ocean and approached from the west. Whitecaps scarred the water below, and the plane jounced up and down, evidence of the hot easterly wind howling down the slopes of the San Gabriel mountains, across the L.A. basin, and out to sea. We were landing in a Santa Ana.
As I worked through the afternoon from my home office in Pasadena, micro-tornados scoured the neighborhood, rattling our old wooden windows, churning up dust, and spraying it across the streets and yards. I heard reports of the Palisades Fire burning on L.A.'s west side, and then of the Eaton Fire burning in the hills directly above me—the hills in which many of my friends and fellow members of Knox Presbyterian Church live.
Afternoon shaded to evening, and I watched evacuation zones multiply across the northern San Gabriel Valley. We packed photo albums and escape bags, set them in the car or beside the front door, and tried to breathe. Our phones lit up with text messages, half of them checking on our welfare, the other half from evacuated friends fearing for their homes. Out our north-facing windows, the once-visible flames on the hillside were now obscured by thick smoke, glowing orange, as if the fire were a thief preferring the cover of darkness.
I spent the night dozing on top of my bed covers, fully clothed, cell phone on my chest, waking at every buzzing alert, waiting for the message that an evacuation zone had finally captured our home. I listened to wind gusts ravage our backyard, praying that our fifty-foot magnolia wouldn't crash through the ceiling.
Disaster Prayer
For the past couple of years, it has been my practice to pray the hours, a traditional pattern of praying throughout each day. The guidebook I use draws the majority of these prayers from the Psalms in the Hebrew Bible. Many of them are prayers in the face of disaster: pleas for help, gratitude for help received, and laments at God's failure to help.
More often than not, I have a hard time relating to these disaster prayers. As a middle-class American with a good job, I don't generally worry about the famines or foreign armies that might have concerned an ancient Israelite worshiper. Even California droughts generally seem more of a technical problem than a genuine existential crisis—something to be solved by implementing public education and the right water rates. More tellingly, I often lack gratitude for this comfortable circumstance. I have what I need, and I take it for granted.
But last week, with ash snowing in my front yard, empty garbage cans overturned in the street, and the neighborhood soaked in apocalypse-yellow light, I prayed the disaster prayers with new feeling, finally relating to the ancient authors who penned them. All week I longed to pray them. They put words to my anxiety and gratitude.
The houses of two dear friends living in Altadena and northern Pasadena survived the fire despite the complete destruction of houses nearby. At our house, the magnolia didn't fall, and the evacuation order didn't come. I've never been more grateful for the hulking concrete freeway three blocks from our house, a sturdy firebreak that marked the edge of the evacuation zones. The ugly sound of speeding cars and motorcycles was, this week, a song of salvation.
But even in my gratitude, I'm acutely aware that some prayers for help went unanswered. Nine families in my church community lost their homes, including our senior pastor. While my dear friend's house was spared, his writing studio and mementos of twenty-five years of creative work were not. These examples are but a drop in the Los Angeles ocean of losses wrought by the fires. Inarticulate prayers of lament sit uncomfortably beside my prayers of gratitude.
I suspect I'm not alone. This past week, throughout our city, I imagine even people not ordinarily given to prayer are praying disaster prayers, the most primal kind a human can pray—"help," "thank you," and "why?" Some of these are audible; others are silent. Some are answered; others are not—why the difference, I could not say. Nevertheless, I'm praying them as well, alongside my fellow Angelenos, with great discomfort and rare authenticity.
Thanks for capturing the experience many of us have had here and the new application of prayers that have such a long history of lament and comfort.