Lent comes again to still-damaged Haiti
Episcopal News Service – Port-au-Prince, Haiti. March 10, 2011 [031011-01]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
Saying that the people of Haiti know about ashes and dust, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori joined Haitian Episcopalians March 9 to begin the season of Lent in a place where she found signs of resurrection.
"People here are reminded of grief wherever we turn, grief that still sits heavy alongside the piles of ashes and dust," she said. "When those piles really begin to disappear, hope emerges in their place."
The ashes and dust at the start of Lent can serve as a reminder that God can create a new thing out of destruction, she said, preaching in French during an Ash Wednesday morning service under a wall-less shelter adjacent to the diocese's Holy Trinity Cathedral. The cathedral was destroyed Jan. 12, 2010 by the magnitude-7 earthquake that devastated large parts of Haiti.
"Last year, we encouraged you to understand that Lent had already come" in the weeks just after the earthquake, Jefferts Schori said, "and that the task was to look for resurrection everywhere." This year, she acknowledged, life in Haiti is still difficult and uncertain but, she said, there are signs of resurrection in the work that Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin and others have begun in the diocese. The body of Christ, Jefferts Schori said, has come together in solidarity for the work of reconstruction.
"This cathedral will stand again," she said. "Its art will once again feed the hearts and spirits of this nation -- and of the world." [The full text of the sermon is available here.]
Duracin had said during a gathering at his home earlier in the week that "it is very symbolic" for Jefferts Schori to be with Haitian Episcopalians at the start of Lent this year. Duracin said that the presiding bishop had "walked with us" through the death-filled days after the earthquake, and had now returned to be with the diocese to begin a journey that ends with Easter and the promise of new life.
Praising the diocese's nascent effort to rebuild, Jefferts Schori urged the congregation to become healers of the broken body of Haiti. "These buildings are precious, but the body of Christ is even more precious as it seeks healing for itself and for the world around it," she said.
The presiding bishop asked the congregation to remember the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, who have experienced a series of earthquakes since September, including a devastating temblor on Feb. 22 that partially destroyed the Anglican cathedral in the center of that city. She noted that after the September quake, which was the same magnitude as the one that struck Port-au-Prince, Christchurch Anglicans raised more than $100,000 in aid money for the victims of the Haitian quake.
Such disasters and their aftermath, Jefferts Schori said, are a reminder that all people are connected in the body of Christ and all people are connected to God's entire always-changing creation. Humans build in the dust, she said, while seeking shelter in the palm of God's hand where all are well-loved.
The presiding bishop said she hoped that the sign of the ash cross would remind the faithful of the cross that was traced on their foreheads at baptism to symbolize that they are meant to be a light to the world.
"May those crosses shine with hope for rebuilding and repair, hope for love to heal this world, to heal this world," she concluded.
Jefferts Schori and Duracin then traced the sign of the cross on each other's foreheads and then imposed ashes on some of the diocesan priests who in turn anointed the congregation. As they made the sign of the cross in ash on people's foreheads, they repeated Mercredi des Cendres' (Ash Wednesday's) age-old admonition: "Souviens-toi que tu es poussière et que tu retourneras dans la poussière" ("Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return").
The shelter under which the service took place was built shortly after the quake in what was the courtyard between the cathedral and Holy Trinity School. On most weekdays the courtyard and the shelter echo with the students of Holy Trinity Music School taking lessons and practicing.
All 254 schools that the diocese ran before the earthquake have been open since April 2010, many in the open air or temporary structures including tents and corrugated vinyl huts supplied by Save the Children, according to the Rev. Oge Beauvoir and the Rev. Jean Joel Racine, the executive director and program director, respectively, of the diocese's Bureau Anglican de l'Education en Haiti. The first school to reopen in hard-hit Leogane after the earthquake was the diocese's school at St. Matthieu, they said. Racine added that the diocese was using prefabricated structures to bring classrooms to very rural communities.
Prior to the 2010 quake, the diocese taught more than 80,000 Haitians ranging from preschool to university level. Other institutions included a residential school for handicapped children, a two-year business school, a nursing school that granted the first baccalaureate degrees in the country in January 2009, a seminary and a university.
The cathedral complex once contained the music school, Holy Trinity Professional School, primary and secondary schools, and St. Margaret's Convent, a convent of the Sisters of St. Margaret, as well as the church with its world-renowned murals, which were crafted by some of the best-known Haitian painters of the 20th century. A children's choir and Haiti's only philharmonic orchestra were based at the cathedral. Both are still performing and many of the musicians played and sang during the Ash Wednesday service.
As plans for rebuilding the cathedral are being developed and the financing gathered, Haitian artists and apprentices have been working with art conservators from the United States in a Smithsonian-run project to conserve the three murals that remained of a world-famous collection of 14 that filled the cathedral's interior with depictions of Haitian religious life and the life of Christ in Haitian motifs.
One of the U.S.-based Episcopal Church's 12 overseas dioceses, Haiti is numerically the largest diocese in the church with more than 100,000 Episcopalians in 169 congregations who before the quake were served by just 32 active priests, nine retired priests, six deacons, three nuns and 17 seminarians.
The diocese also runs medical clinics, development projects and micro-financing efforts.
The quake destroyed 71 percent of the diocese's churches, 50 percent of its primary schools and 80 percent of its secondary schools, according to details of an initial reconstruction plan that was released in early November. Seventy-five percent of its higher-educational facilities must be demolished and 33 percent of the rectories, convents and guesthouses are seriously damaged and also must be destroyed. Also lost were the bishop's house and the diocese's income-producing condominium building.
The reconstruction plan predicted that the first phase of post-earthquake reconstruction and development would cost close to $197 million. The report estimated it would take $34.7 million to rebuild the cathedral and another $49.9 million to rebuild its adjacent complex of schools and the convent.
At Duracin's request, rebuilding the cathedral will be the diocese's first reconstruction project. To mark the first year since the quake, the Episcopal Church in January launched the Rebuild the Church in Haiti fundraising campaign to support the initial phase of the cathedral project.
Donations already received have ranged from a $500,000 challenge grant from Trinity Wall Street in New York and Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis, Indiana, to individuals purchasing "bricks" to symbolize the cathedral's eventual new walls.
One of the recent brick purchases was made by the Diocese of West Missouri as a way to thank dignitaries who participated in the March 5 ordination and consecration of Martin S. Field as the diocese's eighth bishop. Jefferts Schori, who arrived in Haiti on March 7 after serving as the chief consecrator for Field, told Episcopal News Service that she hoped other Episcopal Church members and organizations would follow West Missouri's lead.
While in Haiti, the presiding bishop toured the cathedral ruins, the damaged Episcopal University campus and College St. Pierre, a diocesan secondary school. She spent all day March 8 meeting with Duracin and others about the reconstruction and redevelopment plans. She was joined in those meetings by the Rev. Joseph Constant and the Rev. Rosemari Sullivan, whom she appointed as co-coordinators of the church's Haiti Long-Term Recovery Project.
Ash Wednesday in Haiti this year comes 11 days before the March 20 presidential run-off election between constitutional scholar and former first lady Mirlande Manigat and well-known Haitian konpa or compas musician Michel "Sweet Micky'' Martelly. The election process, which began in the fall, has been marred by violence and accusations of fraud. Parts of the diocese's reconstruction plans, like those for the entire country, hinge on stable government participation and leadership.