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Searching for Meaning in the LA Fires

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As I begin this article, I am feeling extremely surreal.  After an absence of over a month, I am back in my Austrian apartment, with everything about me as normal as it can be for an expatriate.  But just a few short days ago I was in Southern California, where I have lived most of my life, with two of my favourite areas engulfed in flames. A few days before that, I was engaged in celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas as I have done for many a year, until COVID kept me from coming back from Austria in 2020.  A little while before that, I was enjoying the Advent Markets that mark the season in Central Europe, and half-wishing I could stay and celebrate the Christmas festivities as I have grown accustomed to doing in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.  And here we are, on Inauguration Day, 2025, as I write these words down.

It is a most peculiar thing, time.  The Christmas holidays, with the Advent buildup, the great feast itself, New Year’s with its simultaneous looking backwards and forwards, and the Epiphany with its ongoing revelation of Christ to the Gentiles are a forest of liturgical and popular customs.  Varying as they do from rite to rite, place to place, and country to country, they are truly a light shining in the darkness, and just as truly uncomprehended by that darkness.  Never did the denizens of Los Angeles need that ongoing light more than they do now.  In one night, Tuesday, January 7, 2025, another light transformed the mellow afterglow of Christmas to a horrible inferno which killed at least 27, and possibly 31 more. Thousands of homes were destroyed, as well as a number of irreplaceable historic buildings – and two weeks ago, as I write, none of this had happened.

Almost immediately the finger-pointing began: the Mayor had been informed of the fire danger due to unprecedented weather conditions a week before, but chose to go to Ghana anyway; Democrat policies in Sacramento had hindered water storage; the Palisades reservoir was mysteriously empty; and on and on.  Certainly, the Mayor had trimmed 17 million off the Fire Department’s budget and planned to take out 40 more.  In the name of diversity, the black female deputy fire chief declared that if she were unable to lift a man to safety, it was his fault for being at the fire.  But while there is certainly some validity to various of these charges, and while their immediate appearances (and the public squabbling between the mayor and the fire chief) betrayed a basic lack of trust in local and state leadership, they do not really help in the immediate.

Some will note that the rection of FEMA and the Federal government to the horror has been far swifter and more thorough than that of the same players toward the damage done by the storms two months ago in North Carolina.  One of my nephews volunteered to help out in that debacle; apart from hair-raising stories of corpses animal and human in odd places, he also told of only a light Federal presence in the afflicted area and its hostility toward other aid partners.  One might conclude that this was the Biden administration’s reaction to an area that would not vote for him in the upcoming election anyway.  Los Angeles, on the other hand, being safe Democratic Party territory, would according to this reading, get every help Washington could proffer.  Again, there may be truth to this narrative – but it does not help in the immediate.

A third consideration – based upon both the area’s politics and assumed and real lifestyles – is that Los Angeles basically deserved it – the City of Angels “had it coming.”  According to this view, the burnt areas were simply reliving the punishment meted out to Lost Atlantis, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Babylon the Great.  Of course, this question comes up with every natural disaster, and the desire to answer back “it was not a punishment from God for sin” is somewhat restrained by the fact it could not possibly be a blessing from the Almighty in reward for our virtue.  But while this consideration ought to make us look at our lives more carefully, it should not give rise to Schadenfreude – “ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

Regardless of the reason for the conflagration, it has in fact occurred, and its casualties – the dead and the homeless – are real people.  A friend of mine was astonished to find that his was the only house left intact on his street.  One family I know returned to their completely vanished home, and sang the Regina Coeli on its ashes.  Another also lost their home and everything in it – but as a result reconnected with friends unseen in 30 years who are currently putting them up.  Heroes and heroines emerged, as they do in every crisis.  That aspect of things offsets to a degree the pain of loss.  But it is a great pain, indeed.

It is not merely personal loss, but also cultural loss, as it were.  With every lost house and public building goes a history of one sort or another – and in this case, quite a few were remarkable.  Of the two areas most heavily damaged, Altadena is the one I know best.  One of the few areas in California that never had racially-restrictive property covenants, it was one of the earliest areas inhabited by the region’s Black Middle Class, predating the better known Baldwin Hills.  The resulting nickname of “Negrodena” concealed a dynamic and creative community who managed to prosper under Jim Crow, and an ambience that attracted artistic folk of all sorts.  There were several concrete results of this – not least being the design of many Arts-and-Crafts houses by both Black and White architects.  Among these were Scripps Hall and the Justin McNally Estate – two of the 5000 structures lost to the flames, as was much of the downtown area.  Thankfully, Sacred Heart Catholic Church was spared.

Not so fortunate was Corpus Christi Catholic Church in the Palisades; but despite burning to the ground, the Tabernacle survived, with the Blessed Sacrament safely inside it.  If anything, though, the Palisades were worse off than Altadena.  The historic Will Rogers Estate with its Monterey Colonial Revival furnishing was quickly reduced to a pile of ash, as were several schools and libraries and thousands of homes.  The fire was even quicker than in Altadena, and evacuations in both places were sudden.

The refugees sought shelter at centres set up in schools and other civic buildings, hotels, and with friends and family.  In some cases cars had to be abandoned when their numbers blocked the roads out and the flames outraced them.  Drivers often forgot to leave their keys so that the vehicles could be moved, and they were bulldozed as a result.  All things considered, it is a miracle that the loss of life in the Palisades was not much greater.

Several other fires broke out, but they were snuffed out before they could destroy much more.  But as of this writing the flames still roar, albeit out toward unsettled areas.  The displaced will remain so for an unknown time: burned-out neighbourhoods are very different from scorched chaparral.  A great deal of toxicity from the innumerable chemicals underlying modern habitations must be removed; that accomplished in however long it takes (some rumours claim up to a year), what then?  Shall FEMA money or insurance make rebuilding possible?  How many of those who have lost all shall want to return?  What will the rebuilding look like?  Whatever may result, it shall not be what it was.

When I was a boy in the mid-60s, financial misfortune drove my father to move us from New York to Hollywood, California.  Most of our things had to be left behind; I was broken-hearted, to put it mildly.  But my father, that good and wise man, stopped my tears by reminding me that we still had God and the four members of our immediate family – these were mere things we could get more of in California.  So it proved.  The pain was real, and recovery hard; yet we managed.  But it is true to say that without our Catholic Faith, it would have been much harder, even if possible.  Ironically, when my faith and that of my brother woud shortly be tested by the events of the post-Vatican II era, it was precisely my father’s World War II combat-tested and matter of fact adherence to the Church that helped us keep the Faith when most of our classmates abandoned it.

I mention this because on the one hand it is precisely horrible events such as these fires that test and can either break or strengthen our own Faith.  On the other, without such Faith these events are simply miserable exercises in futility, with literally nothing to redeem them.  In such times, those who believe have an obligation to reach out in kindness and charity toward those who do not.  There is no better way to evangelise as we are all called upon to do, and just perhaps, in the faces of those helping them who possess the Faith, those without it may just discern the face of the Christ Whom they either do not know or refuse to.  “God brings good out of evil.”  This maxim is incontrovertible.  In disaster after disaster, for all the wreckage of earthly hopes and dreams, conversions nevertheless result.  Such are always worth all the earthly possessions imaginable.

In such times, the afflicted are especially grateful to the first responders – the firemen, policemen, medics, and other such, who immediately try their best to rescue the situation.  But there is a second line of assistance in emergencies – the hotel, restaurant, café, bar, and pub staff who do their best to maintain a feeling of normality in the worst of circumstances.  It was thus in both Berlin and London during Second World War bombings; it has been so in the earthquakes I have lived through; so it was in the various places around the afflicted area that I visited.  Thronged as they were by teary people who had lost everything, I admired the way the staffs of the various establishments I dropped into maintained an air of genial normality for their bereft clientele.  The interaction was truly one of the finest things I saw.

This offset driving around the burned-out district of Altadena in a fruitless attempt to check out certain houses for friends.  While I was reminded of the bombed-out areas I had seen in Ukraine back in 2022, that devastation had left many standing walls, albeit burned out and roofless.  But the Altadena fire’s damage was worse in the residential areas, with only chimneys standing.  The greatest resemblance was in the business section on Lake Avenue; but even there, Mother Nature seemed a more powerful adversary.

For many, this debacle occurring so soon after Christmas seemed especially nasty.  The northern section of Pasadena’s Hastings Ranch district, renowned for its neighbourhood Christmas lights displays, featured a great many scorched Christmas decorations and lights.  But miraculously, most of the huge deodar cedars on Santa Rosa Avenue dating from the 1880s – Christmas Tree Lane – as well as their accompanying houses were spared.  Lit every year and attracting visitors from all over the area during the Christmas season, their survival has given a great deal of hope to many locals.

Indeed, the only real hope we can have on this Earth where – no matter how solid they appear – no city can abide forever, is to be found in the Incarnation which the Christmas season continues to celebrate until Candlemas.  That hope extends through all the havoc man and nature together or separately can fling at hapless humanity.  In this world, the afflicted, despite all that has been lost, shall rebuild what they can; in time they may build things more beautiful than what was lost.  But better still, for those who are faithful to Him Who came to us at that first Christmas and to His Church, shall be that promised City that flame cannot damage, and whose splendour and glory are never tiresome.

Photo credit.

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